But both his opposition

appeared till after the year 400 B.C. to Herodotus and his general attitude, which owing to many years' residence in Persia was not affected by the revolution of taste at Athens, bring him together logically with the earlier prose of Asia Minor.

We know that he was the son of Ktesiochus of Knidos, and Galen describes him as a relative of Hippocrates the physician; so that he may have been an eminent practitioner attracted by high pay to the court of Ochus, where he remained fourteen years (415-1 B.C.), as well as the first three of Artaxerxes' reign. He described himself as a person of great importance at that court, and as an envoy, not only to the Greeks after the battle of Cunaxa, but to Evagoras, prince of Cyprus, and afterwards to Sparta. His two principal works, the Persica, which included Assyrian and Median histories leading on to the Persian, and his Indica, or description of the wonders of India, were composed after his return home. A Periplus and a tract on Mountains and Rivers are also quoted. We do not possess a single direct quotation from these works, our knowledge of him being derived from copious paraphrases in Photius, who gives the facts in his own language. Hence we can only take on trust the statement of ancient grammarians that he wrote in good Ionic, and with elegance, but without the simplicity of Herodotus, for he was always seeking for sudden and striking effects and pathetic contrasts.1 But he set himself deliberately to overthrow the authority of Herodotus on Eastern history by asserting that he himself had access to the royal records, the Baσiλikai dip0épai, in the archives of Artaxerxes; and he remodels all the Median history, changes the names of the personages allied with and opposed to Darius, and in every point makes it his duty to show Herodotus a liar. Though successful for a time, and perhaps to some extent causing Herodotus to be neglected, he did not satisfy critics like Aristotle, or even Plutarch, who in the Life of

His fragments 23-8 contain what appears to be the earliest prose narrative of a romantic love-story, that of the Median Stryangeus and the queen of the Sakæ, Zarinæa. Cf. Rohde, der griech. Roman, p. 39.

Artaxerxes throws doubts on his authority. But the pseudoPlutarch follows him in his tract On the Spitefulness of Herodotus, so does Diodorus.1

His fragments were first edited and his credibility upheld by Stephanus in 1566, and this is the attitude of the two learned editions of Dindorf (Didot's Herodotus) and Bähr, both of which were published just before the newly deciphered cuneiform inscriptions were brought to bear upon the question. The learned arguments and the judicial attitude of these critics, who insist upon the better sources of information of Ktesias, and the impossibility of his being quite incredible where he insists upon a distinct version, have been rendered amusing by the reading of the inscriptions, which prove that Herodotus was nearly always right, and that the colossal errors of Ktesias must have arisen from a deliberate attempt to deceive. From this point of view the work is a literary curiosity, and it is to be hoped that some learned German will think it worth his while to re-edit the fragments, with all the monumental evidence appended, in order that we may know what residuum of truth is left in them, and whether it is worth while discussing their authority where they contradict Herodotus only, and are not themselves contradicted by monumental evidence. For my own part, I do not believe it is possible to lie consistently, and think there must be some elements of real history in every such fabrication.

325. It is, however, very remarkable that while the Ionic dialect found little favour in history or in any kind of poetry during this epoch, and the resuscitation of its old epic form was not more successful than its very perfect narrative style in the hands of Herodotus, still in the department of pure science this dialect was dominant, and maintained itself far into the next century. The earlier Ionic philosophers and their

1 The latter tells us (xiv. 16) that Ktesias brought down his Persian history to the year of the Sicilian Dionysius' declaration of war against the Carthaginians (398 B.C.) For adverse judgments cf. Clinton's Fasti, sub an. 398 B.C. There is now a good ed. of the remains of Ktesias (except the Indica) by Mr. Gilmore (Macmillan, 1889).

2 Cf. Rawlinson's Herodotus (i. 77). Mr. Sayce has since endeavoured in his Herod. (books i-iii., Macmillan, 1884), to reverse this decision, but not, I think, with success, in spite of his great special learning and acute

ness,

Eleatic offshoot had used epic hexameters to convey their speculations. From the time of the profound Heracleitus, Ionic prose, and probably the dialect of Miletus, came into use; and we find in the latter half of the fifth century, not only the Samian Melissus,' and the Clazomenian Anaxagoras, but the Thracian Democritus, the Cretan Apollonius, and the cosmopolitan Protagoras 2 writing in this accepted philosophic tongue. It is remarkable, too, how the many actual quotations from these men show that terseness and vigour were perfectly attained in the language which strikes us as so diffuse and easy in Herodotus. Perhaps the most splendid specimen of this incisive and almost more than Thucydidean force and brevity is found in the genuine works of Hippocrates, who, though he may have taken that historian for his model, writes in pure Ionic, and approaches the style of Heracleitus far more than he does that of the Attic politician. The many treatises by later hands, which are transmitted to us under the name of Hippocrates, are composed in the same dialect, which had evidently become the established language of the school or medical guild of Kos. Such guilds are very tenacious of language, and Latin is not more universal in the medical prescriptions of the present day than Doric became at Athens in the next century, when Doric schools of medicine were highly esteemed.

The scientific development of the Greek mind at this epoch does not belong to our subject, but I have called attention to the prevalence of Ionic prose among the most serious 1 Though it seems that the Elean Zeno, the comrade of Melissus in philosophy, agreed with him in adopting prose (instead of the epic verse of his master Parmenides) as his method of conveying his subtle dialectic, there is still no evidence that he wrote in Ionic prose. The citations from his book are in Attic, but may possibly have been all paraphrased by Aristotle, Simplicius, and Diogenes. The silence concerning his dialect is, however, good negative evidence that he wrote in old Attic. Blass (Att. Ber. i. 52) speaks of Gorgias as the first Attic orator, on somewhat similar evidence. But if the Sicilian rhetor, who only visited Athens in old age, was able to compose in Attic, Zeno, who came there in middle age, may have also done so, though he was not a professional orator. 2 Zeller, Phil. der Griechen, i. p. 1020, note.

thinkers, as well as among the most frivolous anecdctists, to show how easily we may make rash judgments about Greek dialects, and talk of the softness and weakness of the Ionic speech as an evidence of luxury and mental relaxation, whereas all the really earnest science of the day-I here waive the claims of the sophists-was expressed in this very dialect, and with a strength and compression which savours rather of harshness and obscurity than of simple and artless transparency.

§ 326. The life of HIPPOCRATES is shrouded in a strange mist, considering the extraordinary celebrity of the man. In the late biographies which remain to us the following facts seem worthy of record. A certain Soranus of Kos, otherwise unknown, is said to have made special researches among the records of the Asclepiad guild, in which Hippocrates was set down as the seventeenth in descent from the god Asclepios, and born on the 26th of the month Agrianus, in the year 460 B.C. The inhabitants were still offering him the honours of a hero. He seems to have travelled about a good deal, particularly in the countries around the northern Ægean, and to have died at an advanced age at Larissa in Thessaly, leaving two sons, Thessalus and Drakon. Many of his descendants and followers in the school of Kos were called after him-Suidas enumerates seven in all—so that this additional uncertainty of authorship attaches to his alleged writings. The many statues of him agreed in representing him with his head covered, a peculiarity which excited many baseless and some absurd conjectures. Abstracting carefully from the numerous Hippocrates mentioned in contemporary Attic literature, there are two undoubted references to the great physician of Kos in Plato,' and one in Aristophanes,2 which confirm the epoch assigned to him in the biographies. He is said to have been instructed by Herodicus of Selymbria, and Gorgias of Leontini, a legend arising merely from the confusing of this Herodicus with another physician who happened to be the brother of Gorgias. There is no vestige of either Herodicus' practice or Gorgias' rhetoric in the extant treatises; but Hippocrates assuredly, like Pericles, 2 Thesmoph. 274.

'Protagoras, 311, A; Phædrus, 270, C.

trained himself for a large knowledge of his special pursuit by a familiarity with the metaphysic of the day. His alleged study of the great plague at Athens is not corroborated by a comparison with Thucydides' account. The works pronounced genuine by Littré in the large collection of Hippocratic writings which still survive are these: the treatises on Ancient Medicine, on Prognosis (which includes our diagnosis in the largest sense), the Aphorisms, the tract on Climate (air, water, and situation), the Epidemics (i. and iii.), the Treatment of Acute Diseases, the tracts on joints, fractures, and surgical instruments applied to them, on head wounds, and the Oath and Law of the guild.

It need hardly be added that several of these are disputed by more sceptical critics; but some of them, for example, the tracts on Climate and the Epidemics, are certainly genuine, and show that Hippocrates was not only a great physician and philosopher, but a literary genius of the highest order. It is, of course, quite mistaken to say that he originated Greek medicine; a large body of recorded facts, and of contesting theories, were before him; a great deal of practical knowledge had been accumulated, and had guided the treatment of 'disease among his predecessors. In the Asclepeia or temple hospitals established at Athens, Epidauros, Knidos, Kos, Cyrene, and elsewhere, a great many cases were recorded in an empirical way. On the other hand, the physical philosophers, such as Empedocles, Democritus, and Anaxagoras, were constantly putting forth theories on the nature of man and the composition of the body. What was perhaps more important than either was the close study of physical conditions by the trainers in the palæstras. These men made hygiene and diet a matter of first-rate importance, and both they and the philosophers banished superstition from the study of health, and introduced that purely human and rational method of discussion which is so prominent in Hippocrates, and which gives his reasoning so strong a likeness to that of his contemporary Thucydides. From all these sources we can see materials

1 Here is a specimen :

(De aëre, aquis, locis. cap. 29.) Οἱ μὲν οὖν ἐπιχώριοι τὴν αἰτίην προσο τιθέασι θεῷ, καὶ σέβονται τούτους τοὺς ἀνθρώπους καὶ προσκυνέουσι, δεδοικότες