[457] Cap. v.
[458] Comment. in Prognos. ap. Dietz.
[459] The opinion here advanced is expressed with great precision by a French writer who has been making some figure in the political world of late. “Great men,” says Louis Blanc, “only govern society by means of a force which they themselves borrow. They enlighten the world only by a burning focus of all the scattered rays emanating from itself.”—Organization of Labor, p. 98, English edition.
[460] Ascarus, a Theban statuary for one. See Pausanias, v., 24, 1.
[461] See the Commentary of Simplicius. As I quote from memory I cannot refer to the page.
[462] Galen, in his Commentary on this clause of the sentence, acutely remarks that patients are justly disposed to form a high opinion of a physician who points out to them symptoms of their complaint which they themselves had omitted to mention to him. And Stephanus further remarks that the patient naturally estimates highly the acumen of the physician who detects any errors in regimen which he has been guilty of, such as drinking water, or eating fruit when forbidden; (Ed. Dietz, p. 54;) or when he has some disease about him, such as bubo or inflammation, which he wishes to conceal. (Ibid., p. 63.)
[463] It has puzzled all the commentators, ancient and modern, to explain satisfactorily why Hippocrates, in this place, seems to adopt the popular creed, and acknowledge that a certain class of diseases are of divine origin; whilst in his treatises “On Airs,” etc., and “On the Sacred Disease” he combats this doctrine as being utterly unfounded. Galen attempts to get over the difficulty by supposing that, in this place, by divine our author means diseases connected with the state of the atmosphere; this, however, would merely imply that, on the present occasion, he expressed himself in accordance with the popular belief. And, by the way, I would beg leave to remark that the plague which is described by Homer in the exordium to the Iliad, and is referred to the wrath of a god, that is to say, of Apollo, was at the same time held by Eustathius and other commentators to be connected with the state of the atmosphere; that is to say, agreeably to the vulgar belief, epidemical diseases were looked upon as divine. See also Stephanus, the commentator, t. i., p. 77; ed. Dietz. M. Littré has given, from a MS. in the Royal (National?) Library at Paris, a gloss never before published, which contains an interesting extract from one of the early Hippocratic commentators, Xenophon of Cos, bearing upon this passage. It is to this effect, that Bacchius, Callimachus, Philinus, and Heraclides Terentinus, supposed that by divine, in this place, was meant pestilential, because the pestilence was held to be from god; but that Xenophon, the acquaintance of Praxagoras, reckoned the nature of the critical days divine; for, as to persons in a storm, the appearance of the gods Dioscuri brings safety, so do the critical days bring life to men in disease. (Opera, tom. i., p. 76.) See some remarks on this scholium by Grote, Hist. of Greece, vol. i., p. 488. On the θεῖον of Hippocrates see further Berends, Lect. in Aphor., p. 349.
[464] It will be remarked that, in his sketch of Prognosis (πρόνοια), in this place our author uses the term with considerable latitude; in fact, it comprehends the past, the present, and the future condition of the patient. Hippocrates, in a word, appears to have desired that the physician should be in his line what his contemporary, Thucydides, describes Themistocles to have been as a statesman: “Quod de instantibus (ut ait Thucydides), verissime judicabat, et de futuris callidissime conjiciebat.”—Cornelius Nepos, in vita Themistocles. See also Thucydides, i., 138. Probably both these writers had in his mind the character of the prophet as drawn by Homer: Ὃς ᾔδη τά τ' ἕοντα τά τ' ἐσσόμενα πρό τ' ἔοντα.. (Iliad i.)
[465] The groundwork of the matters contained in this section is to be found in the Coacæ Prænotiones, 212; but it is greatly expanded and improved by our author. I need scarcely remark that the description of the features of a dying man is of classical celebrity. It is given in elegant prose by Celsus, ii., 6; and by Lucretius it is thus put into a poetical form:
“Item ad supremum denique tempus