Hippocrates Vol

THE LOEB CLASSICAL LIBRARY FOUNDED BY JAMES LOEB, LL.D. EDITED BY fT. E. PAGE, C.H., LITT.D. fK CAPPS, ph.d., ix.d. fW. H. D. ROUSE, litt.d. '-,. A. POST, l.h.d. E. H. WARMINGTON, m.a., f.r.hist.soc. HIPPOCRATES VOL. IV HERACLEITUS ON THE UNIVERSE :,£«.• ^ >, COS, THE PLANE TREE. REPRODUCED FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN BV MISS M.HENRV HIPPOCRATES WITH AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY W. H. S. JONES, Litt.D. 8T. CATHARINE'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE VOL IV HERACLEITUS ON THE UNIVERSE LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS MCMLIX TO F. M. R. First printed 1931 Reprinted 1931, 1943, 1953, 1959 Printed in Great Britain CONTENTS HIPPOCRATES PAGE the plane tree Frontispiece PREFACE Vli INTRODUCTION j x NATURE OF MAN 1 REGIMEN IN HEALTH 43 HUMOURS 61 APHORISMS 97 REGIMEN I 223 REGIMEN II 297 REGIMEN III 367 DREAMS 42] HERACLEITUS ON THE UNIVERSE 449 PREFACE This book completes the Loeb translation of Hippocrates. The work of preparing the volume has taken all my leisure for over five years, the most laborious part being the collation of the manuscripts Urb. 64, A, M, V, 6, C, Holkhamensis I all and Caius -|£. have not quoted the variants, not the number of them the perhaps greater ; rule 1 have tried to follow is to record only those readings that are intrinsically interesting and those that seriously affect the meaning. The readings recorded by my predecessors are often wrongly transcribed the risk of ; knowing by experience mistakes in collations, however carefully done, I am sure that there are some errors in the notes in this volume. The readings of Urb. 64 are here printed for the first time, as also are many from the manuscripts M, V. I wish to thank my pupil, Mr. A. W. Poole, for help in preparing the index. W. H. S. J. vn INTRODUCTION I INTENTIONAL OBSCURITY IN ANCIENT WRITINGS To a modern it appears somewhat strange that a writer should be intentionally obscure. An author wishes to be easily understood, knowing that neither critics nor readers will tolerate obscurity of any kind. But in ancient times the taste was different public ; the reader, or hearer, was not always averse to being mystified, and authors tried to satisfy this appetite for puzzles. It was probably the oracles, with their ambiguous or doubtful replies, that set the fashion, which was followed most closely by those writers who affected an oracular style. The difficulties of Pindar and of the choral odes of Aeschylus, who was imitated in this by later dramatists, were not entirely or even mainly due to the struggle of lofty thought seeking to find adequate expression in an as yet inadequate medium. They were to a great extent the result of an effort to create an atmosphere congenial to religion and religious mystery. So Plato, who can when it suits his purpose be transparently clear, affects an almost unnatural obscurity when he wishes to attune his readers' mind to truths that transcend human understanding. Much of the Phaedrus and of the Symposium, the Number in the Republic, and a great part of the Timaeus, are oracular ix INTRODUCTION utterances rather than reasoned argument, taking their colour from the difficulty of their subject. But prose remained comparatively free from intentional on the other at obscurity ; lyric poetry, hand, any rate the choral lyric, seems to have been particularly prone to it. In Alexandrine times obscure writing became one of the fads of literary pedants, and Lycophron is a warning example of its folly when carried to extremes. There must have been something in Greek mentality to account for the persistence of this curious habit, which appears all the more curious when we remember how fond the Greeks were of clear-cut outlines in all forms of art. The reason is probably to be found in the restless activity of the Greek mind, which never had enough material to occupy it fully. The modern has perhaps too much to think about, but before books and other forms of mental recreation became common men were led into all sorts of abnormalities and extravagances. The unoccupied mind broods, often becoming fanci- ful, bizarre or morbid. To quote but two instances " " out of many, the tradition condemned by Jesus in the Gospels, and the elaborate dogmas expounded at tedious length by the early Fathers, were to some extent at least caused by active brains being de- prived of suitable material. It is a tribute to the genius of the Greeks that they found so much healthy occupation in applying thought to everyday things, thus escaping to a great extent the dangers that come when the mind is insufficiently fed. A tendency to idle speculation is the only serious fault with Greek that can be found mentality ; indulgence in intentional obscurity is perhaps a fault, but only INTRODUCTION a slight and venial one. As has been said above, oracular responses seem to have started the fashion of purposely hiding thought, but it was kept up by the Greeks' love of solving puzzles, of having something really difficult with which to exercise their brains. It has already been pointed out, in the introduction to Decorum, that certain (probably late) in tracts the Corpus are intentionally difficult, but the reason for their difficulties may well be due to a desire to keep secret the ritual or liturgy of a and are in guild ; Decorum, Precepts ham a class by themselves. This explanation, however, will not apply to the obscure passages in Humours. This work has nothing to do with secret societies. It is a series of notes which, however disjointed or unconnected, are severely practical. Their obvi- ously utilitarian purpose makes their obscurity all the more difficult to understand ; a text-book, one might suppose, ought at least to be clear. Yet when we have made allowances for hasty writing and for the natural obscurity of all abbreviated notes, there remains in Humours a large residue of passages in which the difficulties appear to be 1 intentional. The fact that these passages are sometimes written in a rather lofty style seems to suggest an explanation of them. Humours is akin, though not closely so, to Nutriment ; it is aphoristic after the manner of Heracleitus " the dark." This thinker adopted the oracular style when expounding his philosophical system, and certain later thinkers 1 I seem to detect the characteristics to which I refer in chiefly Chapter I, and in the various lists of symptoms, etc. xi INTRODUCTION followed his example. Perhaps it was thought that a "dark" subject required a "dark" medium of expression. The writer of Nutriment, who was striving to wed Heracleiteanism and physiology, succeeds in producing a not altogether incongruous result. But Heracleitean obscurity is sadly out of place in a work entirely free from philosophy, whether Heracleitean or other, and the modern reader is repelled by it. The ancients, however, appear to have been attracted, for Humours is often referred to, and commentators upon it were numerous. It is interesting to note that the author, or compiler, of Aphorisms, who was a really great scientific thinker, while adopting the oracular aphorism as a medium of expression, and keeping the lofty style appropriate to it, makes no use of intentional obscurity, realising, consciously or unconsciously, how unsuitable it is in a work intended to instruct medical students and practising physicians. xil II THE FORM AND CONSTRUCTION OF CERTAIN HIPPOCRATIC WORKS Many books in the Hippocratic Collection are " " not books at all consist of strictly ; they separate pieces written continuously without any internal of bond union. Already, in Volume I, we have dis- cussed the curious features presented by Epidemics I and 1 Airs 2 III, and by Waters Places. The aphoristic works, being at best compilations, exhibit a looseness of texture which makes additions and interpolations not only easy to insert but also difficult to detect. Nature of Man and Regimen in Health appear as one work in our MSS., and the whole has been variously divided by commentators from Galen onwards. Humours has scarcely any texture at all, and the disjointed fragments of which it is composed can in not a few places be traced to other works in the Corpus. The scholars who have devoted themselves to the study of Nature of Man—Humours, probably because of its hopeless— obscurity, has been very much neglected seem to make, perhaps unconsciously, a more than doubtful assumption. They suppose the present form of the book to be due to a compiler, 1 Vol. 2 I. pp. 141, 142. Vol. I. p. 66. xiii INTRODUCTION who acted on some definite purpose. It is, however, quite possible that the "conglomerates," as they may be called, are really the result of an accident. A printed book goes through a fixed routine, which fact is apt to make us forget that a papyrus roll may well have been a chance collection of unconnected fragments. In the library of the medical school at Cos there were doubtless many rough drafts of essays, lecture notes, fragments from lost works, and quotations written out merely because a reader happened to find them interesting. Some tidy but not over-intelligent library-keeper might fasten together enough of these to make a roll of convenient size, giving it a title taken perhaps from the subject of the first, or perhaps from that of the longest fragment. Later on, scribes would copy the roll, and the high honour in which the Hippocratic school was held would give it a dignity to which it was not entitled by its intrinsic value.

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