BIOGRAPHICAL FICTION IN THE LIVES OF HIPPOCRATES

Historians of ancient medicine have resisted giving up the notion of an historical Hippocrates, even after Edelstein concluded from his thorough review of the surviving Hippocratic material in 1935 that Hippocrates was a name, deprived of all tangible historical reality (RE, suppl. 6, col. 1328. 3-5). Myth-making, however, continued in connection with the idea of two rival medical schools on the islands of Cos and Cnidos, and especially in the identification of Hippocratic works as Coan or Cnidian. Smith, by clearly showing the circular reasoning in such arguments in The Hippocratic Tradition (1979), has sparked a lively re-evaluation of scholarly assumptions about Hippocrates. I share Edelstein and Smith\u27s sceptical view of the historicity of all biographical reports about Hippocrates. Yet the fact remains that a number of long-lived and widely attested legends circulated about Hippocrates in antiquity and beyond, for example, how Hippocrates cured Perdiccas, king of Macedonia, who was wasting away from lovesickness, how Hippocrates saved all Greece from a plague, and how Hippocrates refused to serve Artaxerxes, even when offered great riches. These stories have received little attention in the twentieth century, no doubt because it has long been recognized that they are worthless as historical evidence for the life of Hippocrates. I maintain, however, that these stories, although fictional, are worth studying--both in the way they were invented and in the way they were developed. They provide an excellent opportunity to examine how ancient biographers put together their reports about physicians, the uses to which these reports were put, and what in them was plausible and what incredible to their ancient audiences. Applying recent observations made about fiction in the ancient biographies of philosophers and writers (particularly, by Lefkowitz in The Lives of the Greek Poets, 1981), I analyze the process by which these stories developed and try to determine what was believed about Hippocrates at each stage of their development. All three stories, moreover, survived antiquity. By tracing the changes in the two that appear in Arabic biographical compilations, I hope to shed more light on the transmission of biographical material from late classical antiquity through the Islamic tradition.