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On the Sacred Disease 55its development. If this is true, it becomes difficult to read this statementas the propagation of a new theological doctrine. 25Fifthly, the remark that the climatic factors are divine is itself rather surprisingand has not been anticipated in the preceding chapters. 26 Nor doesthe divinity of ‘cold, sun and winds’ appear to be a self-evident idea whichthe author can simply take for granted. Of the three factors mentioned, thesun is least problematic, since the divinity of the celestial bodies washardly ever questioned throughout the classical period, even in intellectualcircles 27 – although the focus of the text is not on the sun as a celestial bodybut rather on the heat it produces (see 10.2, 6.378 L.). The divinity of cold( psuchos) seems completely unprecedented, and the divinity of the windscould only be explained as the persistence of a mythological idea. This is,of course, not impossible, since the author has been shown to have adoptedother ‘primitive’ notions as well. 28 Another possibility is to suppose thathe is influenced on this point by Diogenes of Apollonia or by Anaximenes(on this see n. 11 above); but neither of these explicitly deduces from thedivinity of ‘air’ (aēr) the divinity of winds, nor does the writer of On theSacred Disease say that air is divine – although he does say that air is thesource of human intelligence ( phronēsis, 16.2, 6.390 L.). 29 Nor is the divinityof climatic factors attested in other Hippocratic writings. 30 In any case25 A derogatory tone of the words ‘these things are divine’ is also recognised by Thivel (1975) 66;however, as will become clear, I do not agree with Thivel’s view that the author does not take thedivine character of the disease seriously (‘Vous cherchez du divin dans l’épilepsie, dit-il à peu près deses adversaires, mais tout ce qu’il y a de divin dans cette maladie, c’est sa cause naturelle, c’est-à-direqu’il n’y en a pas du tout’), nor with his general views on the religious belief of the author (see n. 59below).26 See H. W. Miller (1953) 6–7: ‘The basic question is why these forces or elements of Nature aredescribed as divine.’ I do not believe that the belief in the divinity of these factors can be derivedfrom 1.31 (‘for if a man by magic and sacrifices causes the moon to eclipse and the sun to disappearand storm and calm weather to occur, I would not call any of these things () divine, butrather human, if indeed the power of the divine is controlled and subdued by human reasoning’)for refers to the actions, not to the celestial and climatic factors.27 With the possible exception of Anaxagoras (DK a42, a35); on this see Guthrie (1965) vol. ii, 307–8.28 On this Lloyd (1979) 43–4; Parker (1983) 213ff.; on the divinity of winds in Greek religion see Nilsson(1955) 116–17, and D. Wachsmuth (1975) 1380–1. One objection, however, to this interpretation isthe fact that this belief in the divinity of winds was frequently connected with magical claims andpractices which the author of On the Sacred Disease explicitly rejects as blasphemous in 1.29–31(6.358–60 L.).29 Contra H. W. Miller (1953) 7–8. On Diogenes see DK a9; on Anaximenes’ views on winds see DKa5and a7. On the importance of air in On the Sacred Disease see also Miller (1948) 168–83.30 Kudlien (1977, 270) believes that in Prognostic 1 (p. 194,4 Alexanderson (2.212 L.)) the words ‘somethingdivine’ ( ) also refer to climatic factors, but this is apparently based on On the SacredDisease 18.1–2 alone (on the danger of this sort of transference see n. 19 above). Moreover I amnot sure whether the text of Prognostic can bear this interpretation. In the passage in question