Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Diocles of Carystus on the method of dietetics 97Hippocratic writings as On Fleshes or On Regimen for that matter. 50 Norare the words ‘a certain Diocles’ (Diocli cuidam) in Pliny’s paraphrase ofthis Theophrastean testimony (fr. 239b) to be interpreted as evidence thatTheophrastus referred to another Diocles: 51 they indicate that Pliny was(just as we are, and perhaps for similar reasons) in doubt whether the Dioclesmentioned by his source Theophrastus was identical with the Diocles ofCarystus known to him from other sources. 52 If Pliny knew for certainthat another Diocles was meant – and how could he do so otherwise thanbecause of autopsy of the text of this other Diocles or because he knew fromother sources that Theophrastus referred to a text by another Diocles – hewould never have expressed himself in this way. Of course we cannot provethat the Diocles mentioned by Theophrastus is the Carystian physician;but then there are a great number of other testimonies about a Diocleswhere this proof cannot be given.What we can say, I think, is that Diocles marks a methodological awarenessof the limits of causal explanation that was not anticipated in theHippocratic Corpus and that showed several significant resemblances toremarks found in Aristotle and Theophrastus. These resemblances mayhave been the result of intellectual exchange and discussion between them(the existence of which is likely), but this cannot be proved, and we are inno position to decide who was ‘influenced’ by whom.Finally, it seems that any association of Diocles with Empiricism orScepticism should be abandoned once and for all. Those who have readthe fragment in this way not only seem to have extrapolated Diocles’ remarksabout dietetics to all other branches of medicine (on the questionwhether this is justified, see above), but also, as far as dietetics itself is concerned,to have been guided by Galen’s presentation of it, that is, as propagandafor an exclusively empirical approach to the search for the powers of50 It has been argued by von Staden (1992, 253) that there is no independent evidence of mineralogistinterest by Diocles. But in fr. 22 Diocles displays a detailed interest in the cohesion between varioussorts of objects, including wood and stones. The fragment is quoted by Galen in the contextof embryology, but there is no evidence that in its original context it just served the purpose ofanalogy (as it does for Galen). Moreover, as von Staden concedes, in the immediate context of theDiocles fragment in On Stones, Theophrastus mentions dietetic and physiological factors affectingthe magnetic force of the lyngourion – although I agree that this does not prove that the Dioclesmentioned was Diocles of Carystus.51 Pliny, Natural History 27.53: ‘what Theophrastus attributed to a certain Diocles’ (quod Diocli cuidamTheophrastus quoque credidit).52 Contra Kudlien (1963, 462–3), who infers from this that the Theophrastus testimony ‘mit allerWahrscheinlichkeit’ and ‘offenbar’ refers to another Diocles; and von Staden (1992, 253), who saysthat Pliny’s wording implies ‘that the two [i.e. the Diocles mentioned by Theophrastus and theDiocles of Carystus known to Pliny from other sources] are not identical’.