Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

94 Hippocratic Corpus and Diocles of Carystusagainst claims one and two sounds very Aristotelian (although he does notuse the typically Aristotelian terminology of , ,or the qualifier ). The advice not to take unknown, disputed or implausibleitems as starting-points is perfectly in keeping with the principles and thepractice of Aristotelian dialectic. 43the most imperfect embryo is of this kind, and also in all viviparous and oviparous animals thefirst embryo grows to perfection while being undifferentiated . . . in those animals that produce aliving being within themselves the embryo in some sort of way becomes egg-like after its formation;for the moisture is contained within a fine membrane, as when one takes away the shell of anegg’ ( ... ). Theophrastus, On the Causes of Plants 2.9.8–9: ‘Seeing that it is the openingof the fruit that makes it remain on the tree by producing ventilation and drainage, the process inthe Egyptian mulberry seems in some sort of way similar; but some dispute this fact of opening andsay that when the insects enter the fig they do not make it open but make it shut; and so one cangive the opposite cause for retention and assert that caprification aims at closing the fruit. For oncethe fig is closed neither dew nor drizzle can make it miscarry, and it is dew and drizzle that getwarmed and cause the drop, as with the pomegranate blossom. That these are responsible (and theyare cited by some people) is indicated by what happens: there is more dropping of the fruit whenlight rain follows its first appearance’ ( [] ; tr.Einarson and Link, slightly modified); Theophrastus, On the Causes of Plants 5.2.5: ‘What happensin plants that flower progressively from the lower parts upward closely resembles in a way whathappens here’ ( ; tr. Einarson and Link, slightly modified); Theophrastus, On theCauses of Plants 6.9.4: ‘by and large all fragrant substances are bitter. We shall deal with the reason forthis later. It seems that of the two opposites, namely sweet and bitter, the sweet is the origin (as it were)of good flavour, whereas the bitter is the origin of fragrance and in some way the bitter is to a greaterextent the origin of fragrance. For it is hard to find any fragrant thing that is not bitter, but manynon-sweet things have excellent flavour’ ( . , tr. Einarson and Link,slightly modified). I am aware that linguistic resemblances do not prove intellectual exchange or evensimilarity of doctrine (for the abuse of linguistic ‘evidence’ by Jaeger see von Staden (1992) 234–7)and that the Aristotelian corpus is so much larger than the Hippocratic that the significance of thefact that only occurrences in Aristotle and Theophrastus are found may be doubted (the computeralso found Plato, Phaedo 100 e 6–a 1: , but thispassage is not quite comparable with the Diocles fragment). It will be clear that much linguisticwork still needs to be done here. The resemblance (both linguistic and doctrinal) between Diocles,fr. 176, and a passage in ch. 9 of the Pseudo-Aristotelian text De spiritu (485 a 28ff.) was pointed outby Roselli (1992) 122.43 Cf., for instance, Aristotle’s well-known definition of the ‘common opinions’ () inTop. 100b 20ff.