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Abbreviations 35999.indb 10 11/07/2019 14:48'Too bad Hippocrates didn't have Twitter 2,400 years ago, because he's a pretty quotable guy. ' 1 This is how a 2017 article from the Australian Fitness Network by a sports nutrition specialist, aimed at those working in the fitness industry, summarizes the current value of Hippocrates to the modern world, before exploring various things he is supposed to have said; these include 'Let food be your medicine, ' 'Walking is the best medicine' and 'The natural healing force within each of us is the greatest force in getting well. ' While he is by no means the only figure from the ancient world for whom there are lists of 'quotes' online, 2 whose 'words' are tweeted daily, who features as a common topic for secondary school projects, and for whom programmes, institutes, prizes, products and an online medical news service -the Hippocratic Post -are currently named, I believe that Hippocrates offers a particularly striking example of how the classical world is received outside the academy today. 3 Hippocrates' role in medicine remains exceptional; as Julius Rocca noted, 'Few, if any other professional bodies today either lay claim to an abiding relationship to a figure from classical antiquity or attempt to make use of one. ' 4 In the comparable case of Socrates, for whom there already exists a full study of his reception, 5 his name tends to feature in connection with various educational initiatives, such as the Aspen Institute's Socrates Program, 'a forum for emerging leaders (approximately ages 28-45) from various professions to convene and explore contemporary issues through expert-moderated dialogue' . The bilingual Socrates Academy in Matthews, North Carolina uses the Socratic method to teach the three Rs. 6 Socrates is known today for a method of 'moderated dialogue' as well as for his challenge to state religion, whereas the name of Hippocrates often carries a far more practical, material dimension: an electric juicer, a 'miraculous' face cream, a soup and a highly-controversial residential raw-food Receiving HippocratesWhen I taught at the University of Reading, we offered a third-year classical reception course called 'Uses and Abuses of Antiquity' . It raised the question of where, if anywhere, we should draw the line between a valid 'use' and an invalid 35999.indb 2 11/07/2019 14:48Hippocratic Oath, to which I shall return in Chapter 4. John Harley Warner argues that, until the last third of the nineteenth century, history rather than science was the true source of orthodox physicians' authority; the power of 'two millennia of enduring tradition' summoned by the name of Hippocrates provided them with a lineage, which in turn gave them legitimacy over the various 'irregular' practitioners. 32 In this historical rewriting, Hippocrates was 'highly malleable' . Some praised him unconditionally, and others criticized him for ignorance -for example, in confusing veins and arteries -or for holding 'absurd' views, but such criticisms could be qualified on the grounds t...

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In this fascinating study on the cognitive history of intuition in Classical antiquity, S. seeks to show how for many of the Classical philosophers, notably Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and the Neoplatonists, divination was not so much a practice to be associated with magic or other occultic practices, but rather one that helped people to make sense of unconscious knowledge. In the introduction, S. elaborates on the well-established view in the field of cognitive science that human beings are not entirely capable of developing an exhaustive account of the information that they know, what S. labels 'surplus knowledge'; thus, a central proposition of this study is that the ancient practice of divination was simply one version in a long history of human attempts to grasp this 'surplus knowledge'. In the chapters that follow, S. examines the enquiries submitted to divination in the philosophical literature of Classical antiquity, showing how divination was seen as a practice that challenged conventional epistemologies on human knowledge. The resulting picture that ultimately emerges is one of divination functioning not as some kind of obscure practice (akin, say, to palmistry or tarot card reading in the modern world), but rather as an institution that is 'analogous to the position of the modern concept of intuition' (p. 16). In Chapter 1, 'Plato on Divination and Nondiscursive Knowing', S. investigates Plato's multiple and diffuse references to the practice of divination, particularly in a section of the Timaeus that concerns the placement of the soul (71c-e). S. illustrates how the verb manteuomai was frequently used by Plato in contexts where discursive reasoning had not been applied; in this way, Plato deployed the verb metaphorically to convey the concept of intuition. In the latter part of the chapter, S. analyses a complex passage in the Timaeus, in which Plato expands on the idea of the liver (in the lower part of the soul) receiving divinatory signs at times of calmness (e.g. during sleep). As the discussion shows well, Plato believed that the appetitive soul had the ability to receive non-discursive knowledge through the medium of divination. Chapter 2, 'Aristotle on Foresight Through Dreams', the most substantial and dense section of the book, explores Aristotle's specific interest in prescient dreams, as evidenced in a triptych of treatises all concerned with divinatory behaviour during sleep (On Sleep and Waking; On Dreams; On Divination during Sleep). Here, S. argues powerfully against the scholarly consensus concerning Aristotle's approach to the divine's relationship with dreams by showing that Aristotle assigned predictive dreams to the daimonic (a term used by Aristotle to point to the 'causal function of the divine within the natural world', p. 168). As S.'s reading shows, both Plato and Aristotle conceived of discursive, reasoned knowledge and divined knowledge (or intuition) as separate poles of understanding. Given this conscious rejection of ostensibly empirical methods of divination (for insta...