Ancient Medicine: Selected Papers of Ludwig Edelstein (review)

206 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY of rhetoric, that Onkos style appears as "early" as the Phaedo, and many others. He fails to convince me that historical and rhetorical style are separable in Plato (especially given his sample texts). One peculiar point relevant to any philological study of Plato is worthy of mention, namely, the silence of antiquity. Plato is absolute master of the uses of prose, yet no ancient scholar (e.g., Demetrius, Longinus, Ps.-Dionysius of Halicarnassus) wrote in depth about Plato's style.Cicero is silent.Even Aristotle is silent. But Cicero and Aristotle were vying with Plato. Ancient scholars were presumably in awe of their philosophical shortcomings; they confined themselves to judgments of taste (use of particles, length of periods, rhythm in clausulae). The first eight words of the Republic are an example. Rewritten many times, they are rhythmically, perfect (cf. Denniston, Greek Prose Style, p. 41) yet they are an element of a sentence whose parts "are flung on one another so that when we reach the end we hardly realize that the words formed a period" (Demetrius, De eloc. 21). Ancient scholars called Plato's style "lax" for good reason; it follows no large scale formal rules of syntactic coordination or subordination. Plato's charms contain a certain perversity from the "aesthetic" point of view. "To Plato, writing was play" as Thesleff says (173), but in more ways than one, Plato disdains the formal devices of Gorgias and Prodicus and all clichts of "art." If "every language is by nature more or less conservative," Plato's art is fundamentally conservative or natural; he entertains aberrations from naturalness in speech as playful hypotheses. Play at this level defeats aestheticist criteria, since it is philosophic or theoretical in nature. It has only recently become evident that Plato's art extends to choice at the level of individual words, as Benardete has shown in an article noted by Thesleff: Stylistic criteria cannot savor the whole significance of the first eight words of the Republic, which hint at the mythic frame in which Plato sets the dramatic play.' Thesleff's references to isolated passages of the Phaedrus (7: 277br 33: 264c) barely alludes to Plato's own view of the character of these "plays."' In the absence of a philosophically adequate interpretation of the Phaedrus, the fundamental governing principles behind Plato's uses of language must remain hidden from us. This is not to deny that Thesleff's analyses are useful. They should be consulted by every competent student of Plato. An excellent bibliography is appended to the text. R. F. HATHAWAY University o[ Cali[ornia, Santa Barbara Ancient Medicine: Selected Papers o[ Ludwig Edelstein. Ed. Owsei Temkin and C. Lilian Temkin. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967) Much of a lifetime's work is brought together in Ancient Medicine, the work of a careful and consummate scholar whose knowledge of his field must command respect and whose rellections on this knowledge deserve closest attention. Philosophers will find that some of the essays are rather technical and only indirectly related to their primary interests but others bear directly on the interpretation of ancient philosophy. "ZP~ and ~s~.in Plato and others," Glotta, XLIII (1965), 285-298. 6 Eva Brann, "The Music of the Republic," AGON, I: I (1967), 2-3. Miss Brann is surely correct in locating this mythic framework, though she spells out every hint in such a way that they lose the character of hints; at this level Plato is not "obvious." r Thesleff notes the recent work of Klein, but does not mention any of Klein's detailed considerations. BOOK REVIEWS 207 It is not possible to review in detail such a compendium of varied materials (monographs , reviews, articles, and addresses) which comprise about five hundred pages of scholarly argument. My attention shall be directed to those essays which seem particularly important and significant for philosophy. Ludwig Edelstein enunciated a theme in the "Hippocratic Physician" (1931) that became recurrent in his interpretations of ancient medicine: "... ancient and modern medicine are far removed from one another. And the difference is one not only of detail, but of fundamental outlook" (110). He frequently observes that interpreters view ancient medicine through...