On Ancient Medicine, On the Art, On Breaths, On the Nature of Human Beings and On the Sacred Disease are among the most well-known and sophisticated works of the Hippocratic Collection. The authors of these treatises were seeking to find means to express their arguments that built on authoritative models of their predecessors. By examining the range of expressive resources used in their expository prose, James Cross demonstrates how oral tradition and written techniques, such as sound patterning, sign-posting and antithetical formulae, were deployed to help the writers develop a case. The book demonstrates that there were various layers of meaning and manners of communicating ideas which can be found in Hippocratic expository prose, and offers fresh insights into the oral debating culture and experiments in persuasion which characterise the ancient Greek world of the late fifth-century BCE.

On Ancient Medicine, On the Art, On Breaths, On the Nature of Human Beings and On the Sacred Disease are among the most well-known and sophisticated works of the Hippocratic Collection. The authors of these treatises were seeking to find means to express their arguments that built on authoritative models of their predecessors. By examining the range of expressive resources used in their expository prose, James Cross demonstrates how oral tradition and written techniques were deployed to help the writers develop a case. The book offers fresh insights into the oral debating culture and experiments in persuasion which characterise the ancient Greek world of the late fifth-century BCE.

Comprehensive study of the social and medical history of dissection in classical antiquity and the parallel development of anatomical texts.

O trabalho de reconstituição da história da filosofia na Antiguidade se confunde com aquele da investigação sobre os processos de transmissão, de recepção e de discussão dos textos. E, no caso dos Pré-Socráticos, isso se traduz no exame crítico dos testemunhos e comentários gerados no contexto da discussão de suas teses e dos fragmentos de obras originalmente elaboradas nos duzentos anos da primeira idade da filosofia grega, e citados ao longo de pelo menos um milênio por diversas gerações de autores antigos que se debruçaram sobre o seu pensamento. Estas são as nossas principais fontes para o estudo deste período da história do pensamento antigo: graças a esses autores dispomos de um material literário responsável por consolidar um rico e complexo fenómeno de recepção que permitiu, historicamente, a efetiva constituição de um legado dessas obras perdidas em sua original integridade. Nesse processo de transmissão, pelo menos duas perspectivas se distinguem e se complementam: aquela da historiografia filosófica e aquela da doxografia. Diante delas, uma habilidade se delineia e se impõe ao estudioso dos primeiros tempos da filosofia: é preciso saber ler os textos. Isso pressupõe, entre outras coisas, que se dê a devida atenção ao contexto em que cada fragmento de pensamento foi transmitido (quando isso é possível) e à discussão suscitada pelas teses nele expostas, à intertextualidade de cada uma das fontes de que dispomos para abordar um determinado pensador e suas ideias, além de um cuidadoso manuseio das ferramentas da paleografia e da filologia. Uma obra em particular foi responsável, no início do século XX, por atrair a atenção dos estudiosos para esse período da Filosofia Antiga. Trata-se dos Fragmente der Vorsokratiker,de Hermann Diels, coletânea posteriormente revista e incrementada com as contribuições de Walther Kranz. A coletânea por eles estabelecida se tornou uma primeira referência para os estudos que se seguiram sobre um ou outro autor, sobre uma ou outra tradição do que se convencionou denominar de "filosofia pré-socrática". Com efeito, para além do terreno das traduções e do estabelecimento de texto das coletâneas dos Pré-Socráticos, o âmbito dos estudos consagrados aos primeiros pensadores da tradição filosófica vem assistindo nos últimos anos a um crescimento significativo do número de pesquisadores, estudantes e professores que passaram a se interessar e se ocupar, de maneira mais direta e duradora, do pensamento filosófico desse período da Antiguidade Grega, que se inicia na transição do século VII para o VI a.C. e se estende até o século V a.C. Em toda a América Latina dissertações e teses, artigos, livros e capítulos de livros vêm sendo dedicados aos principais representantes deste período, abordando uma grande variedade de temas e problemas, e adotando diferentes perspectivas metodológicas, contribuindo para fomentar uma comunidade de estudiosos votados a este campo de estudo e pesquisa, que vem se consolidando nos últimos anos e se encontra em franco movimento de expansão. Os textos são apresentados na língua original e traduzidos para o inglês.

What happens when we juxtapose medicine and law in the ancient Roman world? This innovative collection of scholarly research shows how both fields were shaped by the particular needs and desires of their practitioners and users. It approaches the study of these fields through three avenues. First, it argues that the literatures produced by elite practitioners, like Galen or Ulpian, were not merely utilitarian, but were pieces of aesthetically inflected literature and thus carried all of the disparate baggage linked to any form of literature in the Roman context. Second, it suggests that while one element of that literary luggage was the socio-political competition that these texts facilitated, high stakes agonism also uniquely marked the quotidian practice of both medicine and law, resulting in both fields coming to function as forms of popular public entertainment. Finally, it shows how the effects of rhetoric and the deeply rhetorical education of the elite made themselves constantly apparent in both the literature on and the practice of medicine and law. Through case studies in both fields and on each of these topics, together with contextualizing essays, Medicine and the Law Under the Roman Empire suggests that the blanket results of all this were profound. The introduction to the volume argues that medicine was not contrived merely to ensure healing of the infirm by doctors, and law did not single-mindedly aim to regulate society in a consistent, orderly, and binding fashion. Instead, both fields, in the full range of their manifestations, were nested in a complex matrix of social, political, and intellectual crosscurrents, all of which served to shape the very substances of these fields themselves. This poses forward-looking questions: What things might ancient Roman medicine and law have been meant or geared to accomplish in their world? And how might the very substance of Roman medicine and law have been crafted with an eye to fulfilling those peculiarly ancient needs and desires? This book suggests that both fields, in their ancient manifestations, differed fundamentally from their modern counterparts, and must be approached with this fact firmly in mind.

Why did some doctors in Classical Greece feel compelled to study the universe as a whole? How could cosmological principles be employed in clinical practice? This book explores the works of the cosmological doctors, such as On Breaths, On Flesh, and On Regimen, and argues that they form part of a much broader reorganization of medical knowledge in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. These healers used cosmological principles as a supplement to, rather than a replacement of, more traditional approaches to health and disease, creating theories about the cosmos whose obscurities can best be understood as the products of medical thinking. Through fresh readings of many ancient sources, the book revises customary views of the intersections between medicine and cosmology in Classical Greece and advances our understanding of one of the most remarkable periods in the history of ancient thought.

Dire Remedies: a Social History of Healthcare in Classical Antiquity is the first wide-ranging social history of ancient healthcare. Greek medicine is at the origin of modern medicine, but it was very often ineffective. What did people actually do when faced with pain and illness? Starting with a review of ancient health conditions and a survey of what doctors had to offer, W.V. Harris describes the multifarious practices and diverse kinds of people to whom Greeks and Romans turned for help. Topics include the possible development of analgesics, ancient ideas about contagion, the history of the god Asclepius and more generally the role of religion and magic, opinions about abortion, ancient responses to mental illness, and the invention of the hospital. Taking into account the fill range of textual sources and archaeological material, this book attempts to provide an unprecedentedly realistic – and readable – depiction of the Greek and Roman responses to ill health.

Knowledge, Nature, and the Good brings together some of John Cooper's most important works on ancient philosophy. In thirteen chapters that represent an ideal companion to the author's influential Reason and Emotion, Cooper addresses a wide range of topics and periods--from Hippocratic medical theory and Plato's epistemology and moral philosophy, to Aristotle's physics and metaphysics, academic scepticism, and the cosmology, moral psychology, and ethical theory of the ancient Stoics. Almost half of the pieces appear here for the first time or are presented in newly expanded, extensively revised versions. Many stand at the cutting edge of research into ancient ethics and moral psychology. Other chapters, dating from as far back as 1970, are classics of philosophical scholarship on antiquity that continue to play a prominent role in current teaching and scholarship in the field. All of the chapters are distinctive for the way that, whatever the particular topic being pursued, they attempt to understand the ancient philosophers' views in philosophical terms drawn from the ancient philosophical tradition itself (rather than from contemporary philosophy). Through engaging creatively and philosophically with the ancient texts, these essays aim to make ancient philosophical perspectives freshly available to contemporary philosophers and philosophy students, in all their fascinating inventiveness, originality, and deep philosophical merit. This book will be treasured by philosophers, classicists, students of philosophy and classics, those in other disciplines with an interest in ancient philosophy, and anyone who seeks to understand philosophy in philosophical terms.

In ancient Athenian courts of law, litigants presented their cases before juries of several hundred citizens. Their speeches effectively constituted performances that used the speakers’ appearances, gestures, tones of voice, and emotional appeals as much as their words to persuade the jury. Today, all that remains of Attic forensic speeches from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE are written texts, but, as Peter A. O’Connell convincingly demonstrates in this innovative book, a careful study of the speeches’ rhetoric of seeing can bring their performative aspect to life. Offering new interpretations of a wide range of Athenian forensic speeches, including detailed discussions of Demosthenes’ On the False Embassy, Aeschines’ Against Ktesiphon, and Lysias’ Against Andocides, O’Connell shows how litigants turned the jurors’ scrutiny to their advantage by manipulating their sense of sight. He analyzes how the litigants’ words work together with their movements and physical appearance, how they exploit the Athenian preference for visual evidence through the language of seeing and showing, and how they plant images in their jurors’ minds. These findings, which draw on ancient rhetorical theories about performance, seeing, and knowledge as well as modern legal discourse analysis, deepen our understanding of Athenian notions of visuality. They also uncover parallels among forensic, medical, sophistic, and historiographic discourses that reflect a shared concern with how listeners come to know what they have not seen.