Diocles of Carystus: A Collection of the Fragments, vol. 2: Commentary

531 Pages·2000·10.032 MB·English

by  Philip J. Eijk

DIOCLES OF CARYSTUS
ef
A Collection the Fragments with Translation
and Commentary
VOLUME TWO
COMMENTARY
BY
PHILIP J. VAN DER EIJK
BRILL
LEIDEN · BOSTON· KOLN
2001
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Diodes of Carystus : a collection of the fragments with translation
J.
and commentary / by Philip van der Eijk.
p. cm. - (Studies in ancient medicine, ISSN 0925-1421 ;
v. 22)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 9004102655 (cloth : alk. paper)
I. Diodes, of Carystus. 2. Medicine, Greek and Roman.
I. Eijk, Ph. J. van der (Philip J.) II. Series.
RI 26.D45 D56 2000
610'.938 -dc21 00-064168
CIP
Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme
Diodes of Carystus : a collection of the fragments with translation
J.
and commentary / by Philip van der Eijk. - Leiden ; Boston ;
Kain: Brill
Vol. 2. -(2001)
(Studies in ancient medicine ; Vol. 23)
ISBN 90-04-12012-2
ISSN 0925-1421
ISBN 90 04 12012 2
© Copyright 2001 by Koninklijke Brill .Nv, Lei.den, The Netherlands
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION TO THE COMMENTARY
Sources ................................................................................................... viii
The availability of Diodes' works ......................................................... ix
Galen .................................................................................................... xiv
The Anonymous of Paris ....................................................................... xv
Caelius Aurelianus ............................................................................. xviii
Soranu s ................................................................................................. xix
Other sources (Aetius, Pliny, Athenaeus, Oribasius) ............................ xx
The reconstruction of Diocles' ideas and their intellectual context ...... xxii
Diodes as a writer and communicator ............................................... xxiii
Method and content: the verbatim fragments .. .. . . .. . . .. . . . ... . .. . .. . . . .. . . .. . .. . xxv
The indirect evidence ........................................................................ xx vii
The problem of Diodes' date and intellectual context . .. . . . .. . .. . ... .. . .. . ... xxxi
Advice to the user of the commentary ............................................. xxxviii
Acknowledgements ................................................................................. xii
COMMENTARY
Life, chronology, reputation (frs. 1-12) .................................................... 1
General approach to medicine, methodology (frs. 13-16) ....................... 18
Anatomy (frs. 17-24) ............................................................................... 29
Physiology (frs. 25-39) ........................................................................... 46
Theory of reproduction, embryology (frs. 40-48) .................................. 79
Diseases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
General pathology, diagnosis and prognosis (frs. 49-71) ................... 109
Specific pathology, symptomatology and treatment
of diseases (frs. 72-144) ..................................................................... 144
Specific therapeutic measures (frs. 145-167) ....................................... 279
Gynaecology (frs. 168-175) .................................................................. 307
Dietetics and regimen in health (frs. 176-186) ...................................... 321
Foods, drinks and herbs (frs. 187-238) ................................................. 369
Various topics (frs. 239-241) ................................................................ 416
Appendix: Some texts attributed to Diodes but not included
in this collection .................................................................................. 425
Abbreviations ........................................................................................ 427
Bibliography .......................................................................................... 429
General index to introduction and commentary .................................... 453
Index of passages cited .......................................................................... 459
Addenda et corrigenda to Volume One ................................................. 487
INTRODUCTION TO THE COMMENTARY
The pieces of evidence for Diocles' work and impact presented and com-
mented upon in these two volumes are meant to be a new starting point
and an encouragement to reconstruct his scientific ideas and the connec-
tions between them, to assess his contribution to Greek medical science
and practice, and to determine the extent to which he was an original and
innovative thinker. I have made a number of suggestions in this direction
in the commentary, and will summarize these in this introduction. It is not
my intention here to undertake such a reconstruction on an exhaustive
scale, since further work, both on the fragments themselves and on their
relationship with earlier and contemporary thought, is required. Yet some
provisional remarks may be in order.
In any such undertaking, we are faced with the problem of the
fragmentary nature of the evidence and the selectivity of our sources. As
outlined in vol. 1 (p. vii-viii, xvii), our information on Diocles is not only
incomplete and lacunose, but also at best second-hand; and this has
important implications for an assessment of the surviving evidence. For
this evidence derives from source-authors who may have had very
different reasons or opportunities for mentioning or quoting Diocles
and/or characterizing his views, and who provide us with information
which is in many cases of questionable reliability. Whether such
unreliability is caused by lack of understanding, by a rhetorical strategy or
by downright malice on the part of the reporting source-author, or due to
the fact that he did not possess correct information on Diocles' views, e.g.
because he was dependent on intermediary written or oral sources, is not
always easy to say. It is difficult to estimate with any degree of certainty
the possible extent of misrepresentation of Diocles' views by our sources;
but a comparison with reports by the same source-author (e.g. Galen or
Caelius Aurelianus) on writers whose works have been preserved, such as
Plato, Aristotle and 'Hippocrates', may well fill one with scepticism as to
the possibility of ever obtaining a reasonably faithful report of his views -
and indeed of being sure that we have got such a report.
Yet the situation is not completely hopeless. Careful analysis of the
method, purpose and intellectual background of these source-authors and
the nature and structure of their writings may provide us with a clearer
insight into the perspective from which they viewed Diocles: we try to re-
viii
DIOCLES OF CARYSTUS
construct, so to speak, the spectacles through which they looked at
Diocles, the reasons why they were interested in him and the scope of
their reports on his views, in the hope of arriving at a more nuanced pic-
ture of the kind of information we can expect them to provide.1 This is
why in Vol. 1 the fragments are explicitly presented in the context of the
author transmitting them; it is also why, in the present volume, the com-
mentary on each fragment contains a brief discussion of the context in
which a fragment is embedded; and thirdly, it is the reason why in this in-
troductory chapter some more general remarks will be made on the most
important source-authors. For any attempt to reconstruct Diocles' ideas
has to weigh carefully the various and heterogeneous pieces of evidence
available and to consider their origin, status, value and reliability; and this
means that due consideration should be given to the method and intellec-
tual background of the source-authors in question.
Sources
The most important sources for Diocles' views are Galen, Oribasius, the
Anonymous of Paris, Caelius Aurelianus, Athenaeus of Naucratis,
Soranus, and Pliny the Elder; in addition, there are authors such as Aetius
(the doxographer), Celsus and Erotian, who occasionally mention Diocles,
and a number of minor sources that mention him only once or twice.2
These source-authors have their own peculiarities, and in some cases also
their biases and preoccupations, which are reflected not only in the man-
ner in which they inform us about what Diocles thought on a particular
subject, but also in the selection of topics on which they provide informa-
tion. The results of this selection were further filtered by the hazards of
textual transmission in late antiquity and the middle ages. This means that
although the corpus of fragments that has resulted from this process gives
us an impression of the wide range of subjects Diocles dealt with, it need
not, and presumably does not, give a faithful picture of the relative impor-
tance of these various domains of Diocles' thought. Indeed, it is very
likely that some subjects are, so to say, over-represented at the expense of
others, but this need not reflect the priorities of Diocles' own concerns but
1 See the points for consideration listed in Vol. 1, p. xvii. For a collection of studies in
the main sources for Diodes and their doxographical and historiographical practices
see van der Eijk (ed.) (1999).
2 For a full survey of the sources for Diocles see Vol. 1, pp. 395-408.
INTRODUCTION TO THE COMMENTARY ix
may simply be a result of the particular interests of the source-authors and
their reasons for referring to Diocles' work.
For example, Galen tells us that Diocles was the first to write a sys-
tematical handbook on anatomy (fr. 17), which would be a remarkable
step in the history of medicine. But apart from some fragments on the
anatomy of the female reproductive organs, which the same Galen criti-
cizes for being inaccurate (fr. 18; cf. also frs. 19, 23), we know extremely
little of the contents of this work and of Diocles' merits in the area of
anatomy. Whether the silence of our sources in this field is due to the fact
that Diocles' anatomical investigations were soon superseded by later
developments in Alexandria, or to other circumstances, we do not know .3
On the other hand, the fact that relatively much is known of Diocles'
dietetic views is partly due to the circumstance that nearly thirty
fragments survive in Athenaeus' Sophists at Dinner, among whose many
sources of learned table-talk Diocles' Matters of Health, or at least Book
One of it, appears to have occupied a very prominent place (e.g., Diocles
is often mentioned there as the first authority on the subject of fish).
Furthermore, most of what we know about Diocles through Oribasius is
concerned with dietetics, which could be a sign of Diocles' lasting impact
in this area, but again the picture may be distorted by the fact that
substantial sections of Oribasius' work on other subjects (i.a. pathology)
are lost.
The availability of Diodes' works
It would seem a plausible assumption that these source-authors were in a
better position to quote, summarize, paraphrase or otherwise characterize
Diocles' views than we are today. Yet the extent to which they were fa-
miliar with his ideas and had access to his writings should probably not be
exaggerated. The channels and mechanisms by which Diocles' intellectual
heritage was passed on to later generations remain largely obscure.
Whether Diocles had a "school" of followers, and if so, whether this pro-
vided some kind of "institutional" context in which his ideas and works
were transmitted, studied, and put into practice, we do not know. There
are some references to "the followers of Diocles" in the fragments,4 but
most of these are of the type oi. nept AioKt..fo (lit. "those around
3 At any rate, Kudlien's statement that "Diokles wird die Anatomie kaum schopferisch
bereichert haben" (1963, 463) seems to ignore the possibility of bias in the sources. For
a brief discussion of Diocles' contribution to anatomy see Kollesch (1997) 369-371;
see also Lloyd (1975a) 143 n. 101.
4 Frs. 39b, 54, 66, 67, 69, 70, 88, 158.
X DIOCLES OF CARYSTUS
Diodes"); and the expression "those around X" is often afa9on de parler
for "X", or at best "X and his followers", and it is certainly not intended
to distinguish his followers as a separate group.5
The evidence for the availability of Diodes' writings in antiquity is
slightly less scanty - although even in cases where an author quotes
Diodes in direct speech, one always has to consider the possibility that he
has found this quotation in an intermediate source or that he has fabricated
the quotation on the basis of indirect reports.6 Apart from the disputed
reference to Diodes in Theophrastus' work On Stones (fr. 239a), the
earliest explicit7 signs of writers taking account of Diodes' views date
from the first century BCE writers Apollonius of Citium (fr. 163),
Heraclides of Tarentum (fr. 164), Heliodorus the Surgeon (fr. 166), and
Athenaeus of Attalia (fr. 44). Whether these authors had direct access to
Diodes' works cannot be said with certainty, although the lengthy quota-
tion from Diodes' surgical work preserved by Apollonius strongly sug-
gests such acquaintance.s Moving on to the beginnings of the common
era, none of Celsus' or Pliny the Elder' s references to Diodes indicate
unequivocally that they knew his works from autopsy.9 Whether the
Anonymous of Paris (whose date is uncertain, but who may have worked
in the late first century CE) had direct access to Diodes' writings is diffi-
cult to say. On one occasion he mentions a title of a Diodean work (fr.
34 ), and in another passage he seems to be refe rring to different sections
of Diodes' work Affection, Cause, Treatment (fr. 98), but again there is
the possibility that the Anonymous was relying on an intermediate
source. Diodes occupies a relatively prominent place in the Tenets on
IO
natural philosophy by the doxographer Aetius (probably first century CE),
who even quotes him verbatim on two occasions (frs. 24a-b, 56a-b) . Yet
5 On this see Dubuisson (1976/1977).
6 On the extent to which ancient writers on the history of medicine were dependent on
intermediary material see van der Eijk (1999c) 8-9.
7 I.e. as distinct from material that may reflect Dioclean "influence" without mention-
ing his name, such as some books of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata physica.
8 But see comments on fr. 163 for the problems of transmission here.
9 Celsus' relatively sparse references to Diocles may at first sight seem somewhat sur-
prising; but Celsus displays a similar pattern when it comes to other fourth century au-
thors such as Praxagoras, Philotimus, Pleistonicus, Mnesitheus, or Dieuches. This may
be related to the vexed question of Celsus' sources, but it may at least equally well be
related to Celsus' own medical outlook and rhetorical agenda; see von Staden (1994)
and (1999b). Pliny mentions Diocles in his list of authorities in book 1 (20c, 21c, 23c,
24c, 25c, 26c, 27c), and this corresponds to his references to Diodes in the relevant
books, but it cannot be concluded from this that he had direct access to Diodes' works;
cf. von Staden (1989) 87-88.
10 See van der Eijk (1999a).
INTRODUCTION TO THE COMMENT ARY xi
the authenticity of these quotations is not beyond suspicion, and Aetius
almost certainly did not consult Diocles' works directly, the information
he provides on Diocles being handed down through a tradition that may
go back as far as Aristotle and the early Peripatos in the late fourth cen-
tury BCE.11 This would be confirmed by the fact that the presence of
Diocles and other medical writers in what is fundamentally a doxography
on natural philosophy (or physics) is in keeping with the Aristotelian view
on the relationship between these two disciplines12 - although of course
Aetius' work, as far as it can be reconstructed, reflects a much later stage
of this process of transmission, substantially modified and updated in the
light of later developments and incorporating also other traditions.13
Only when we get to the late first and second century CE with au-
thors such as Soran us, Galen and Athenaeus of N aucratis do we get more
certainty as to the spread of Diocles' work. Soranus, the main representa-
tive of the Methodist school of medicine, refers frequently to Diocles'
work On Matters Related to Women, and on one occasion he distinguishes
11 On Aetius as a source, and on the reconstruction of his work, see Mansfeld and
Runia (1996). On the references to medical writers in Aetius see Runia (1999b).
12 On this see Runia (1999a) 53-54; van der Eijk (1995a). Diodes' absence from the
remains of the Aristotelian doxographical work on the causes of diseases, which sur-
vive in modified form in the papyrus of the so-called Anonymous of London (first cen-
tury CE), is puzzling. There are at least three possible explanations: (i) Diodes was
mentioned by Aristotle, but the Anonymous has omitted this; (ii) Diodes was men-
tioned by Aristotle and the Anonymous has included this, but the passage where he did
this is lost (there are several sizeable lacunae in the relevant section of the papyrus);
(iii) Diodes was not mentioned by Aristotle, either (a) because Aristotle felt Diodes
did not fit in well with the division between "elements of the body" and "residues"
(which may well be a correct observation in the light of the surviving evidence in frs.
72-144; but see frs. 5la-b; 52), or (b) because Diodes was unknown to Aristotle. The
latter (b) seems rather unlikely considering the various traces of Dioclean influence in
the early Peripatetic school - unless Jaeger was right in assuming that Diodes lived
later than Aristotle (see below pp. xxx ff.); but this argument would lose force if the
author of this doxography was Aristotle's pupil Meno rather than Aristotle himself ( see
below), or if the Anonymous of London, instead of slavishly following the Aristotelian
basis, incorporated other, later material as well. Whether Aristotle himself was the au-
thor of this doxography on the causes of diseases is also disputed, and many scholars
have thought the work was written by his pupil Meno. However, Gigon and Manetti
have argued - correctly, in my view - that there are no good grounds for denying
Aristotle the authorship of this work. See Gigon (1987) 511 and Manetti (1999) 98-99.
13 As Smith has pointed out (1989, 95), there is remarkably little resemblance between
the Anonymous of London (see previous note) and the Placita of Aetius. Yet rather
than explaining this by assuming that the Aristotelian doxography had little impact, one
may feel that the fundamental difference in purpose between the two works may have
been a more relevant factor here. The Aristotelian work is a medical doxography deal-
ing with topics much too specific or detailed for the doxography on physics as repre-
sented by Aetius. On the differences in subject-matter and scope between medical dox-
ography and doxography on physics see Runia (1999b) 215.
xii DIOCLES OF CARYSTUS
between what Diocles writes in books 2 and 3 of this work (fr. 171).
Moreover, if Soranus is also the main source for Caelius Aurelianus' re-
ports on - and quotation from - Diocles' pathological and therapeutic
views in his works on acute and chronic affections, 14 Caelius' references
to various book titles (frs. 73, 97, 99, 143) and indeed to different books
within one treatise (frs. 100, 125, 136), too, strongly suggest that Soranus
- and Caelius through Soranus - was familiar with at least some of
Diocles' writings on diseases, fevers, therapeutics and prognostics. This
would be plausible, for we know that the Methodist school was very
active in collecting material for the areas of medical historiography, dox-
ography, biography and lexicography.Is
Galen's knowledge of earlier medical thought was very consider-
able and he must have had a very substantial library at his disposal.16 As
for Diocles, Galen mentions that several copies of his Matters of Health
were in circulation, and he notes textual discrepancies between them (fr.
188); and this well accords with the fact that Galen's contemporary
Athenaeus of Naucratis takes account of it and quotes from its first book
so often - although in some cases it is possible that Athenaeus used in-
termediate sources such as Heraclides of Tarentum or Trypho of
Alexandria; and the accuracy of Athenaeus' (or his epitomizer's) quota-
tions is not beyond doubt.17 Galen further quotes from Diocles' works
Affection, Cause, Treatment and Archidamus in a way suggesting that he
had the works in front of him (frs. 109, 132, 185).18 Furthermore, it seems
that Diocles' work (On Things) in the Surgery was available in Galen's
days and circulated under various titles (cf. fr. 160a).
14 That Caelius Aurelianus used Soranus' works on acute and chronic diseases is uni-
versally agreed, although the extent to which his role was restricted to that of a transla-
tor or whether he substantially re-created the material into a work of its own is a matter
of debate. For a summary of the issues see van der Eijk (1999b), esp. 414-428 and
(1999d) 47-56.
15 On this see van der Eijk (1999b).
!6 See i.a. the collection of studies edited by Kollesch and Nickel (1993); see also von
Staden (1991); Tieleman (1996); Manetti and Roselli (1994a).
17 On the (in)accuracies of Athenaeus' quotes from Theophrastus see Sharples (1995)
124-125; on Athenaeus' work see Arnott (2000); on the references to doctors therein
see the contributions by Flemming, Gourevitch and Corvisier to Braund and Wilkins
(eds.) (2000).
18 Although in the case offr. 185 there is nothing to suggest that Galen's knowledge of
Diodes' Archidamus went beyond the one quotation preserved there; indeed all refer-
ences to Archidamus' views in the pages following fr. 185 can be traced to this particu-
lar fragment. Was this all Galen knew? Did he know more but did he regard it as irrele-
vant to his argumentative purpose? (see comments ad Joe.)