[406a]
inflammatory ingredients of a surety, nor did they censure Patroclus, who
was in charge of the case.” “It was indeed,”
said he, “a strange potion for a man in that condition.”
“Not strange,” said I, “if you reflect that
the former Asclepiads made no use of our modern coddling1 medication of
diseases before the time of Herodicus. But Herodicus2 was a
trainer and became a valetudinarian, and blended
[406b]
gymnastics and medicine, for the torment first and
chiefly of himself and then of many successors.” “How
so?” he said. “By lingering out his death,”
said I; “for living in perpetual observance of his malady, which
was incurable, he was not able to effect a cure, but lived through his days
unfit for the business of life, suffering the tortures of the damned if he
departed a whit from his fixed regimen, and struggling against death by
reason of his science he won the prize of a doting old age.3” “A noble prize4 indeed for his
science,” he said.
[406c]
“The appropriate one,” said I, “for a man
who did not know that it was not from ignorance or inacquaintance with this
type of medicine that Aesculapius did not discover it to his descendants,
but because he knew that for all well-governed peoples there is a work
assigned to each man in the city which he must perform, and no one has
leisure to be sick5 and doctor himself all his days. And this we
absurdly enough perceive in the case of a craftsman, but don't see in the
case of the rich and so-called fortunate.” “How
so?” he said.
[406d]
“A carpenter,” said I,
“when he is sick expects his physician to give him a drug which
will operate as an emetic on the disease, or to get rid of it by
purging6 or the use of cautery or the knife.
But if anyone prescribes for him a long course of treatment with
swathings7 about the head and their
accompaniments, he hastily says that he has no leisure to be sick and that
such a life of preoccupation with his illess and neglect of the work that
lies before him isn't worth living. And thereupon he bids farewell to that
kind of physician,
[406e]
enters upon his
customary way of life, regains his health, and lives attending to his
affairs—or, if his body is not equal to strain, he dies and is
freed from all his troubles.8” “For such a man,” he said,
“that appears to be the right use of medicine.”
“And is not the reason,” I said,
1 This coddling treatment of disease, which Plato affects to reprobate here, he recommends from the point of view of science in the Timaeus(89 C):διὸ παιδαγωγεῖν δεῖ διαίταις, etc. Cf. Euripides Orestes 883; and even in the Republic 459 C.
2 Cf. Protagoras 316 E, Phaedrus 227 D. To be distinguished from his namesake, the brother of Gorgias in Gorgias 448 B. Cf. Cope on Aristotle Rhet. i. 5, Wilamowitz-Kiessling, Phil. Unt. xv. p. 220, Juthner, Philostratus uber Gymnastik, p. 10.
3 Cf. Macaulay on Mitford's History of Greece: “It (oligarchical government) has a sort of valetudinarian longevity; it lives in the balance of Sanctorius; it takes no exercise; it exposes itself to no accident; it is seized with a hypochondriac alarm at every new sensation; it trembles at every breath; it lets blood for every inflammation; and this, without ever enjoying a day of health or pleasure, drags out its existence to a doting and debilitated old age.” That Macaulay here is consciously paraphrasing Plato is apparent from his unfair use of the Platonic passage in his essay on Bacon. Cf. further Euripides Supp. 1109-1113; Seneca on early medicine, Epistles xv. 3 (95) 14 ff., overdoes both Spencer and Macaulay. Cf. Rousseau, Emile, Book I.: “Je ne sais point apprendre a vivre a qui ne songe qu'a s'empecher de mourir;” La Rochefoucauld (Max. 282): “C'est une ennuyeuse maladie que de conserver sa sante par un trop grand regime.”
4 The pun γήρας and γέρας is hardly translatable. Cf. Pherecydes apudDiogenes Laertius i. 119χθονίῃ δὲ ὄνομα ἐγένετο Γῆ, ἐπειδὴ αὐτῇ Ζὰς γῆν γέρας διδοῖ(vol. i. p. 124 L.C.L.). For the ironical use of καλόν cf. Euripides Cyclops 551, Sappho, fr. 53 (58).
5 Cf. Plutarch, De sanitate tuenda 23, Sophocles, fr. 88. 11 (?), Lucian, Nigrinus 22, differently; Hotspur's, “Zounds! how has he the leisure to be sick?”
6 For ἢ κάτω cf. Chaucer, “Ne upward purgative ne downward laxative.”
7 Cf. Blaydes on Aristophanes Acharnians 439.
8 This alone marks the humor of the whole passage, which Macaulay's Essay on Bacon seems to miss. Cf. Aristophanes Acharnians 757;Apology 41 D.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
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