Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) - Volume 2.djvu/501

Rh the first three sections agrees almost word for word with passages to be found in his acknowledged works ; while in the remaining sections we find sentences fciken apparently from spurious or doubt- ful treatises ; thus adding greatly to our difficulties, inasmuch as they sometimes contain doctrines and theories opposed to those which we find in the works acknowledged to be genuine. And these facts are (in the opinion of the critics alluded to) to be accounted for in one of two ways : either Hippocrates himself in his old age (for the Apho- risms have always been attributed to this period of his life) put together certain extracts from his own works, to which were afterwards added other sen- tences taken from later authors ; or else the col- lection was not formed by Hippocrates himself, but by some person or persons after his death, who made aphoristical extracts from his works, and from those of other writers of a later date, and the whole was then attributed to Hippocrates, because he was the author of the sentences that were most valuable, and came first in order. This account of the formation of the Aphorisms appears extremely plausible, nor does it seem to be any decisive ob- jection to say, that we find among them sentences which are not to be met with elsewhere ; for, when we recollect how many works of the old medical writers, and perhaps of Hippocrates himself, are lost, it is easy to conceive that these sentences may have been extracted from some treatise that is no longer in existence. It must however be con- fessed that this conjecture, however plausible and probable, requires further proof and examination before it can be received as true.

The second class is one of the most unsatisfac- tory in the writers own opinion, and affords at the same time a curious instance of the impossibility of satisfying even those few persons in Europe whose opinion on such a matter is really worth asking ; fi)r, upon submitting the classification to two friends, one of whom is decidedly the most learned phy- sician in Great Britain, and the other one of the best medical critics on the continent, he was ad- vised by the one to call this class "Works probably written by Hippocrates," and by the other to trans- fer them (with one exception) to the class of The amount of probability in favour of the genuine- ness of all these works is certainly by no means equal ; e. g. the two little pieces called the " Oath," and thS " Law," though commonly considered to be the work of the same author, and to be in- timately connected with each other, seem rather to belong to different periods, the former having all the simplicity, honesty, and religious feeling of an- tiquity, the latter somewhat of the affectation and declamatory grandiloquence of a sophist. How- ever, as all of these books have been considered to be genuine by some critics of more or less note, it seemed better to defer to their authority at least 80 far as to allow that they might perhaps have been written by Hippocrates himself.
 * ' Works certainly not written by Hippocrates."

The two works which constitute the third class, and which are probably the oldest medical writings that exist, have been supposed with some proba- bility to consist, at least in part, of the inscriptions on the votive tablets placed in the temple of Aescu- lapius by those who had recovered their health, which certJiinly constituted one of the sources from which the medical knowledge of Hippocrates was derived. In the fourth class are placed those works which were certainly not written by Hippocrates himself, which were probably either contemporary or but little posterior to him, and whose authors have been, with more or less degree of certainty, dis- covered. The works De Natura Hoini/ns, and I)e Salubri Victus Ratmie^ are supposed by M. Littre to have been written by the same author, because it is said by Galen that in many old editions these two treatises formed but one ; and this author he concludes to have been Polybus, the son-in-law of Hippocrates (vol. i. pp. 46, 316, &c.), because a passage is quoted by Aristotle {Hist. Aiiiin. .iii ?>), and attributed to Polybus, which is found word for word in the work De Natura Iluminis (vol. i. p. 364). For somewhat similar reasons, Euryphon has been supposed to be the author of the second and third books De Morbis, and the work De Natura Muliebri [Euryphon] ; and also (though with much less show of reason) a certain Leo- phanes, or Cleophanes (of whom nothing whatever is known), to have written the treatise De Sujxrr- foetatione (Littr^, vol. i p. 380).

In the fifth class there is one treatise {De Di- aeta) in which an astronomical, coincidence with the calendar of Eudoxus has been pointed to the writer by a friend, which (as far as he is aware) has never been noticed by any commentator on Hippocrates, and which seems in some degree to fix the date of the work in question. If the ca- lendar of Eudoxus, as preserved in the Ajyparentiae of Ptolemy and the calendar of Geminus (see Petav. Uranol. pp. 64, 71), be compared with part of the third book De Diaeta (vol. i. pp. 7 1 1 —7 1 5 ), it will be found that the periods correspond so exactly, that (there being no other solar calendar of antiquity in which these intervals coincide so closely,and all through,but that of Eudoxus), it seems a reasonable inference that the writer of the work De Diaeta took them from the calendar in ques- tion. If this be granted, it will follow that the author must have written this work after the year B. c. 381, which is the date of the calendar of Eu- doxus ; and, as Hippocrates must have been at least eighty years old at that time, this conclusion will agree quite well with the general opinion of ancient and modern critics, that the treatise in question was probably written by one of his im- mediate followers.

The sixth class agrees with the sixth class of M. Littr^, who, with great appearance of proba- bility, supposes it to form a connected series of works written by the same author, whose name is quite unknown, and of whose date it can only be determined from internal evidence that he must have lived later than Hippocrates, and before the time of Aristotle.

The works contained in this and the seventh class have for many centuries formed part of the Hippocratic Collection without having any right to such an honour, and therefore are not genuine ; but, as it does not appear that their authors were guilty of assuming the name of Hippocrates, or that they have represented the state of medical science as in any respect different from what it really was in the times in which they wrote, there is no reason for denying their authenticity. And in this respect they are to be regarded with a very different eye from the pieces which form the last class, which are neither genuine nor authentic, but mere forgeries ; which display indeed here and