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On the Sacred Disease 71and who are to be worshipped in temples by means of prayer and sacrifice.The text is silent on the author’s conception of the nature of these gods, butthere is, at least, no textual evidence that he rejected the notion of ‘personal’or even ‘anthropomorphic’ gods. 61 He has explicit opinions on how (andin what circumstances) these gods should be approached, and he definitelythinks it blasphemous to hold that these holy beings send diseases to men aspollutions. Diseases are not the effects of divine dispensation; neverthelessthey have a divine aspect in that they show a constant and regular pattern oforigin and development. How this ‘being divine’ is related to ‘the divine’ (or,the gods) which cleanses men from moral transgressions is not explained.The idea of divine dispensation as such is nowhere questioned in the textof On the Sacred Disease. Gods are ruled out as causes of diseases; whetherthey are ruled out as healers as well is not certain, since the text is silent onthis subject. As I remarked earlier, the author does not believe that epilepsycan be cured by natural means in all cases: on two occasions (2.3, 6.364 L.;11.6, 6.382 L.) he recognises that in some cases the disease can no longer becured. Of course we can only speculate what he would do in such cases, butit does not seem alien to Hippocratic medicine to make an appeal to thegods in such hopeless cases. 62 We have seen that the borderlines betweensecular medicine and temple medicine were vague and that the relationshipbetween these was seldom hostile or antagonistic (see n. 47 above).Nor is the combination of ‘natural’ therapeutic measures with prayers andsacrifices unattested in the Hippocratic collection. Thus the writer of OnRegimen explicitly recommends this combination, and among his therapeuticremarks dietetic precepts and instructions concerning the gods towhom one should pray are found side by side. 63 Of course, we should bewareof generalisation and not try to harmonise divergent doctrines, for OnRegimen has been claimed to reflect a religiosity which is rather exceptionalin the Hippocratic corpus and which is, according to one critic, ‘completelydifferent’ from that of On the Sacred Disease. 64 Now the ‘theology’ of On61 Contra Nörenberg (1968) 78, whose claim is probably prompted by the idea that this would beincompatible with the ‘enlightening intention’ (‘aufklärerische Absicht’) of the author of On theSacred Disease.62 This is speculative, since it is nowhere stated explicitly that in these cases the patient should makean appeal to divine healing, though the case of Prognostic 1 (see n. 30 above) seems to imply this.But the recognition that in some cases medicine fails to help is frequently attested (see On the Artof Medicine 8). On hopeless cases see Edelstein (1967a) 243–5; Krug(1985) 120–1; Thivel (1975) 60.63 On Regimen 4.87 (6.642 L.): ‘prayer is a good thing, but while calling on the gods one should alsoput in effort oneself’ ( ); cf. 89.14 (6.652 L.), 90.7 (6.656 L.) and 93.6 (6.662 L.) (references are to the editionof R. Joly and S. Byl (1984)). [For a fuller discussion see van der Eijk (2004a).]64 Kudlien (1977) 274; cf.Nörenberg (1968) 77–8.