Extension of the various Milesian projects in investigation or historia, which favored the collection of information over theoretical speculation, and of the Pythagorean project in discovering the numerical bases for things, continued also in the fifth century. Hekataios’ ethnography and rationalized genealogy gave direction to the historian of the Persian Wars, Herodotos of Halikarnassos, mature in the mid-440s, when he is said to have performed readings from his work in Athens and, like Empedokles and others, to have participated in the foundation of Thourioi. Hero-dotos mentions Hekataios polemically and in dissent, but he probably owed to him the starting points in skepticism toward tradition and source, rationalization of myth, correction of Homer, and reliance on autopsy that characterize his historical method. But Herodotos’ work also reflects intellectual currents of the time: the discussion of the reasons for the flooding of the Nile (2.20-4), the constitutional debate set among the Persian usurpers (3.80-3), ethnographical theory similar to what appears in the medical writers (book 4 and passim; Thomas 2000), and, most relevantly for the outstanding new debate of the mid-fifth century, the dominance of nomos or custom over physis or nature (3.38; Thomas 2000). This polarity, together with the insight that the human mind can in at least some sense create its own ‘‘reality’’ and/or ‘‘truth,’’ is the major marker of the so-called ‘‘Sophistic’’ movement, to which Herodotos is a witness if not also a participant.
Thucydides of Athens (c. 460-c. 400), historian of the Peloponnesian Wars who was inspired in turn by Herodotos, extends in some ways Herodotos’ skepticism about evidence and reports (famously scorning the mythodes or ‘‘myth-like’’ at 1.22 and omitting all appeals to divine causation), but also, in reducing historical explanation from the multiple options often offered by Herodotos to a single, clear view of human nature organized by his dominating intellect, makes the study of history less an investigation and more a lesson. Thucydides’ text reflects sophistic culture in Athens more specifically than Herodotos’ does: the debate between Kleon and Diodotos over the fate of the Mytileneans at 3.37-48, with its charge by Kleon that the Athenians are spectators of words, and the dialogue between the empowered Athenians and the powerless Melians at 5.84-114, with its claim by the Athenians that ‘‘it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can’’ (5.84), are clear references to sophistic controversy of the late fifth century.
Hippocratic medicine
The field of medicine, the most obvious case of knowledge that developed outside of Athens, came of age in the middle-to-late fifth century by differentiating itself on the one hand from traditional, often supernatural, modes of cure and on the other hand from natural philosophy. Hippokrates of Kos (probably contemporary with Sokrates) was recognized by the ancients as the founder of rationalist medicine: correspondingly, a collection of over sixty medical treatises in Ionian prose was attributed by the ancients to Hippokrates. We know now that this picture is simplistic in many respects. First, there is good evidence that figures predating Hippokrates, especially Alkmaion of Kroton, probably working in a Pythagorean tradition, also made starts in rationalist medicine (Longrigg 1993). Second, the so-called Hippocratic corpus is too heterogeneous in both outlook and date to have been composed by one thinker: every text in the corpus is subject to well-founded doubts about Hippocratic authorship, though most scholars agree that some part of our corpus was probably written by Hippokrates. Third, a formerly prevailing view that medicine on Kos was practiced under the guidance of the god of healing, Asklepios, until Hippokrates forged the path away from deference to the divine has been undermined by archaeological evidence that the major temple of Asklepios on Kos was not constructed until the fourth century: thus it seems that rationalist medicine may have contributed to divine modes of healing, at least on Kos, rather than effacing them.
Although the connection of the Greek medical tradition to the ancient legend of Hippokrates is problematic, the Hippocratic corpus itself shows that this tradition was working between the last third of the fifth century and the first third of the fourth to become a distinct field of knowledge. Fifth-century treatises are highly polemical in their insistence that medicine is not natural philosophy ( On Ancient Medicine, esp. 1.15.20) and is not a divine method of ‘‘purifications and incantations’’ (On the Sacred Disease 1). Although the writer of On Ancient Medicine states that those who try to use philosophical ‘‘hypotheses’’ are following a new method (13), and implies that the empirical approach he endorses is the older way, it is clear that the main trend is separation from philosophy. Biological thought was prominent in early, Milesian natural philosophy but was being eliminated from natural philosophy as a consequence of the fifth century’s preference for cosmology and logic. Empedokles, the main counter-example to this trend, is indeed named by the Hippocratic writer as the natural philosopher whose main concern, the origin of humans, is really another subject (20). Thus the writer may be defending empirical medicine against new-fangled theories, but the separation from natural philosophy is still in progress: despite the claims of this and other texts, the approach of the Hippocratic doctors was not exactly empirical by modern standards (Lloyd 1979: 126-225). The writer of On the Sacred Disease is concerned throughout to show that epilepsy has natural causes (heredity and blockages of air in the veins, 5-10) and must be treated with natural remedies (21).
The body of knowledge controlled by the Hippocratic doctors seems to have been primarily a prognostic knowledge of the progress of diseases, assembled through observation. Although the sixty-odd Hippocratic treatises taken together are sometimes thought to constitute a doctor’s library, and in their variety to contain the many things a doctor needs to ‘‘know’’ (including how to defend the profession), most scholars understand the clinical histories collected in the seven books of Epidemics (not held to be a unified composition) to be typical of the knowledge that defined the Hippocratic doctor. These histories merely record what happened in the course of various ailments, even when the outcome is death. Although the goal of medicine in some treatises is cure and treatment (often entailing ‘‘regimen,’’ i. e., diet and exercise), and other texts discuss anatomy with the implication that this knowledge is useful for treatment (On Fractures and On Joints, where bandaging and anatomical manipulation are recommended), it seems that the authority of the doctor derived principally from his ability to predict accurately the course of disease.
World History
