Maybe someone who can read the French introductions could say more about what they are and when they date from. I have no idea. It’s probably just my taste in junk, but the first few letters, at least, are tremendous fun. The pleading, Hippocrates’ brusk refusal to help enemies of Hellas, and his declaration that money is not something that moves him, strongly reminded me of Sherlock Holmes or Nero Wolfe.
I came across these a few days ago, by way #17, Ἱπποκράτης Δαμαγήτῳ, about Δημόκριτος, quoted in the Anatomy of Melancholy.
Did you mean Hippocrates? I imagine Paul D can weigh in on this, but it appears there is some uncertainty as to whether Hippocrates is the author of these documents. Their style, sense, irony and pratical usefulness all argue for Hippocrates being the author, against which Erotien (I don’t know who this is) and Galen insist he is not the author. So there’s a mystery for you!
Ha, yes! Thank you. I’ll fix the title and body – though it’s funny enough that I’m tempted to leave it. I’m afraid that they needed the services of the physician, not the historian.
(Fixed now. Though I seem to have had it right down in the body paragraph, at least. Perhaps my mind is going early.)
I would have a great deal of trouble imagining that the introductory letters from Artaxerxes and so on had any reality at all to them. The one concerning Democritus is clearly a figment. It’s all fun, but they are fantasy.
Here’s a rough translation of the “argument” on the previous page:
Having dealt with the sections where the letters are found, he examined in greater detail, noted the variances, corrected the text and made his translation. The result of these successive operations was that the pieces merit no trust, they’re inauthentic, and the work of forgers. He goes on to say (this is not a word for word translation):
That said, these pieces present some differences which should be noted. The letters between Democritus and Hippocrates, except for the last one (Nr. 23), which due to its style, one could believe the author has copied or imitated passages from some book of Democritus, are devoid of any kind of interest. The sames goes for H’s letter to his son and the letter to King Demetrius. The rest can be divided into three groups:
Those where Hippocrates saves Athens from a plague, not necessarily the great plague, those where he is credited with saving Athens from the great plague, and those relating to the alleged madness of Democritus.
It’s quite possible to believe that the pieces of the first and second type are quite ancient, and that early on, the name of Hippocrates was sufficiently illustrious to stir the creation of a type of legend, but that proves nothing. From these three stories, no one can draw the conclusion that there is therein the slightest bit of truth. They do not contain any kernel of reality, or if there is, critical analysis has no means of extracting it. In the Hippocratic works, neither H nor his students practise in Athens. They do not say a word about the great plague. The only great personnages mentioned are the lords of Thessaly and the great kind (Artaxerxes) is not named. The only philosophers cited are Empdocles and Melissus; Democritus plays no role. Thucycides informs us that nothing was able to diminish the violence of the plague which desolated Athens; that’s history. Our pieces say Hippocrates saved Athens and Greece from the plague; that’s legend.
Yes, the above sounds correct, at least for the letters that I’ve read through so far. They are fantasy. I found them more charming then he did, I think. (And so, evidently, did Robert Burton.) I would be interested in knowing when the fabulator actually did live.
After a little digging, I learned that Erotian (Ἐρωτιανός)lived in the 1st century A.D. and wrote a glossary based on the Hippocratic corpus, as of course did Galen, so based on the fact that no mention of the letters can be found in either glossary as well as other factors, Mr. Littré concludes that they couldn’t have been written by Hippocrates or Democritus.
I don’t think that there ever could have been serious consideration that these were works of the real historical figures. They don’t even seem to be a serious attempt at forgery. More like historical fiction.
For example, the first letter is Artaxerxes to Paetus, complaining about the disease enervating his soldiers, and the second letter is Paetus responding “Hippocrates!”, and then breaking into a divine genealogy for him, and then we have Artaxerxes’ letter his man in charge of Greece, money is then offered, and refused, and so on.
And the first Democritus letter is Hippocrates summoned to Abdera to diagnose Democritus, who he begins his letter saying is wiser than all mankind. The whole town is gathered when he arrives (even the babies) in expectation of Hippocrates, who goes to meet Democritus, who is working to find the cause of madness, and does his trademark laughing before telling Hippocrates everything that is wrong with the world.
Since I happen to have Jacques Jouanna’s definitive “Hippocrates” (English translation, John Hopkins University Press, 1999), I checked it briefly:
pp. 7 - 9: “In the works collected under his name [all to be found in the complete Hippocratic Corpus published by Émile Littré], several passages provide biographical information. For the most part, especially in the case of the Letters addressed to or from Hippocrates, they are to be used with great caution. The epistolary literature dates from the Roman era, between the first century B.C. and the first century A.D. … Even so, it is not necessary to reject the epistolary literature altogether [i.e., as a source of biographical information about Hippocrates]. Certain passages may rely upon an ancient tradition, … Ever since Émile Littré’s positivist and indiscriminate rejection of the documentary aspects of the legend, an undue skepticism has surrounded everything in the work [the Hippocratic Corpus] attributed to Hippocrates that supplies information about his life or about the history of his family. While the Letters manifestly contain elements that are recent and romanticized, other works belonging to the corpus are more reliable.” Etc.
I think somewhere in the Corpus there is a passage on ingesting bleach as a cure for certain acute diseases, but I’m too busy to look for it.
Hi Randy,
I was hoping you’d weigh in on this, knowing that the Hippocratic corpus was of particular interest to you. Littré didn’t equivocate in his condemnation of the letters, so it’s good to see another viewpoint. It was from reading Jouanna’s article on the history of the word αιμαλωψ on JSTOR that I was finally able to discover who Erotian was.
Hi Randy,
Thanks for the slide! I had to get out my shovel again and look for Herophilus and Bacchius. Aldus Manutius I remember from Scribes & Scholars. I hope you are safe and well.
Well, we’re all agreed now that they are fantasy, I hope? They are fun though, if anyone has flipped through a bit. I suppose there is no English translation, though Burton seems to have had them in Latin.
The letters are quite interesting and deserve more scholarly attention than they have received. I’ve been through the Hippocratic letters once before and I’d be willing to revisit. It would be great if there was a discussion about them on Textkit. Plenty of material for anyone interested in epistolary fiction, pseudepigraphy, the figures of Hippocrates or laughing Democritus, pseudo-Ionism, pan-Hellenism, Hellenistic philosophy, etc.
There are three older editions I know of: Hercher, Littré, and Putzger, Hippocratis quae feruntur Epistulae (1914). There are also two newer editions with translations: Smith (which Aetos linked to) and (in modern Gk) Demetrios Sakalis. Since the world is shut down, I only have access to Littré (TLG) and Hercher.
I also recommend the letters of Chion. There are many epistolary collections connected to famous figures in Rudolf Hercher’s Epistolographi Graeci—many untranslated and/or in need of a new edition.
I found a copy of Sakalis’ “Ιπποκράτους Επιστολαί; έκδοση κριτική και ερμηνευτική” at the digital repository of the University of Ioannina. Here’s the link, if you’re interested: http://olympias.lib.uoi.gr/jspui/handle/123456789/6492
I’m cross-posing with Aetos’ Sakalis link, but will leave this Putzger scan up, as there are fuzzy pages on the Sakalis too (though not as bad Littré scan). The TLG text comes from Littré.
The letters are probably decent material for a read-through, if we wanted to do a series of Zoom meetups, book club style, on them. They are short (initially), not too difficult, and easy to drop in and out of.
The section on manuscript tradition has to be exhaustive! I haven’t had a chance to read much of it yet (busy listening to Act III of Les Troyens !), but I intend to.
For those who don’t read modern Greek, this book is not a translation. It contains the original Greek text of the letters from p.297 to p.342. The critical apparatus of course uses the customary Latin abbreviations.
