Galen, divination, and the status of medicine

Galen's stories about his successes in predicting the development of an illness belong to the best-known anecdotes drawn from his writings. Brilliant pieces of self-presentation, they set Galen apart from his peers, who tried to cover up their ignorance by levelling accusations of magic and divination against their superior colleague. These accusations are usually interpreted as very real threats, as Roman law punished illicit magic and divination. Pointing out that Galen sometimes likes to present himself as a mantis and a prophet, others have suggested that the accusations against Galen and his own self-presentation indicate that the border line between medicine and religion was still fluid. Both approaches correctly draw attention to the social reality that the accusations betray: they suggest that Galen belongs to a group of healers of dubious standing that populated the empire and thus show that medicine did not have a monopoly on healing. Yet such a socio-historical approach may not be sufficient. For one thing, both explanations have their limitations. Regarding the former, it can be said that Augustus' prohibition of divination aimed at controlling prediction about the emperor and one can doubt that a widespread clampdown of all forms of divination ever was intended. A possible objection to the second view is that throughout his oeuvre Galen emphasizes his medicine as a rational undertaking, even as a science (episteme). If one takes his self-presentation as a mantis to be more than metaphorical and to indicate the not yet fully crystallized identity of medicine as a separate scientific discipline, then Galen's usual way of understanding his own craft as a science' is in need of explanation. Besides such possible objections, a different set of questions still needs to be asked: why precisely were accusations of practising magic and divination levelled against Galen and why do they recur so frequently in his writings? Why divination and not, say, poisoning

The noise-lovers: cultures of speech and sound in second-century Rome

This chapter provides an examination of an ideal of the ‘deliberate speaker’, who aims to reflect time, thought, and study in his speech. In the Roman Empire, words became a vital tool for creating and defending in-groups, and orators and authors in both Latin and Greek alleged, by contrast, that their enemies produced babbling noise rather than articulate speech. In this chapter, the ideal of the deliberate speaker is explored through the works of two very different contemporaries: the African-born Roman orator Fronto and the Syrian Christian apologist Tatian. Despite moving in very different circles, Fronto and Tatian both express their identity and authority through an expertise in words, in strikingly similar ways. The chapter ends with a call for scholars of the Roman Empire to create categories of analysis that move across different cultural and linguistic groups. If we do not, we risk merely replicating the parochialism and insularity of our sources.Accepted manuscrip

Herophilus and Erasistratus on the hēgemonikon

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Cambridge University Press via the DOI in this record.In Alexandria at some point in the early third century bc, Herophilus of Chalcedon identified the nerves as a distinct system within the body, traced their origins to the brain, and recognised their role in transmitting sensation and voluntary motion. His discovery was based on dissection and vivisection, not only of animals, but also of human beings. Herophilus’ younger contemporary Erasistratus also integrated these findings into his rather bolder physiology. The implications of this discovery were of course wide-ranging. From a modern perspective, it is now widely celebrated as having established, for the first time on something like a scientific basis, that the brain has more or less the functions that we now ascribe to it. Likewise, in antiquity, Galen relied heavily on Herophilus’ discovery in his proof that the rational soul is located in the brain. As we shall see, it also had an impact on Stoic psychology. What exactly Herophilus and Erasistratus saw as its implications, however, is a different question, and the difficulties in answering it are considerable given the state of the evidence

Harpocration of Argos: Etymology and Metaphysics in the Platonist Revival

AbstractThis paper shows that our principal ancient source for the metaphysical views of the second-century Platonist Harpocration of Argos drew on his interpretation of Plato's Cratylus. This is important because there is no other evidence of the Cratylus being read for its metaphysical content until Proclus, 300 years later. It also changes our understanding of Harpocration: he is generally supposed to share the metaphysical views of Numenius, but his exegesis of the Cratylus reveals him to be a faithful student of Atticus.</jats:p

Phaedo of Elis and Plato on the Soul

Phaedo of Elis was well-known as a writer of Socratic dialogues, and it seems inconceivable that Plato could have been innocent of intertextuality when, excusing himself on the grounds of illness, he made him the narrator of one of his own: the Phaedo. In fact the psychological model outlined by Socrates in this dialogue converges with the evidence we have (especially from fragments of the Zopyrus) for Phaedo's own beliefs about the soul. Specifically, Phaedo seems to have thought that non-rational desires were ineliminable epiphenomena of the body, that reason was something distinct, and that the purpose of philosophy was its 'cure' and 'purification'. If Plato's intention with the Phaedo is to assert the separability and immortality of reason (whatever one might think about desire and pleasure), then Phaedo provides a useful standpoint for him. In particular, Phaedo has arguments that are useful against the 'harmony-theorists' (and are the more useful rhetorically speaking since it is only over the independence of reason that Phaedo disagrees with them). At the same time as allying himself with Phaedo, however, Plato is able to improve on him by adding to the demonstration that reason is independent a proof that it is actually immortal