Declamation of the Philosopher, Physician, and Orator

Callipho coupled them; the Stoic Diodorus added absence of pain, which in Greek is called analgesia painlessness, to honesty. What shall I say of natural things, and how great is the disparity and dissension among meteorologists? Concerning comets, lightning, the rainbow, and the increase of the Nile, there is no consensus. Why say more? Concerning the movement of the earth, and as the poet says: "Whence comes the tremor to the earth, and by what force do the deep seas swell, their barriers broken?" Philosophers are most discordant among themselves. And in this matter alone there is a truly wondrous inconsistency. For Anaxagoras thinks fire is the cause of motion. Anaximenes thinks the earth itself is the cause of motion to itself, and that it does not come from outside to push it, but rather it is dashed into itself from within. Some have imputed the motion to water, like Thales of Miletus. Democritus, however, argues that motion is caused sometimes by spirit, sometimes by water, sometimes by both. Aristotle, Albertus Magnus, and the whole school of Peripatetics cheerfully affirm that spirit and winds are the cause of the earth's motion. Pliny our own and Seneca subscribe to this opinion. From this multiple dissension and great discord of the philosophers, I am undoubtedly uncertain whom to believe, to whom to accede, or whose sect I should profess to follow. Whatever I choose, I see many will disapprove; whatever I approve, more will deny. Among so many ambiguities, only that Socratic saying seems certain and true to me: "This I know, that I know nothing." It follows that I do not at all disapprove of the acatalepsia incomprehensibility of the Academics, who contend that one must assent to nothing, and who for that reason are called soketoi kai matorrhtikoi considerers and rejecters. Proteus is rightly believed to hold the persona of truth, which no one can grasp, as it eludes with false images and loosens the knots of understanding. To this, add that people think philosophers are irreligious and generally believe there are no gods, while they probe only the causes and simple elements of things. Because of this inconsistency and the disagreement of the sects, I believe an old senate decree was made long ago, by which philosophers were expelled from the city of Rome as useless and unproductive. Soon after, under the Emperor Domitian, they were again driven from the city and Italy and interdicted. To finish once and for all: I marvel at my brother, who is eager for paternal goods, when a philosopher, if we believe Plato—to whom one certainly ought to be believed in philosophical matters—is by no means philochrematos money-loving. On the contrary, he is a contemner of riches. Therefore, brother, I advise you to desist from your hereditary claim, lest you seem to have deflected from the institute of your sect and to go contrary to your former life. For philosophy has nothing more excellent than that, being content with little, it does not desire greater wealth. Hence it is that founders of laws do not have philosophers in a small number of their professors, because they ought to profess first to scorn mercenary labor. This is enough for the philosopher, who seems to be too heavily pressed and moved, having been admonished by true castigation. I shall now move on to the physician, whom I understand to have descended into this cause with great confidence, trusting in medicine. His art is by no means unlike philosophy, namely: varied, inconsistent, interpolated, and not infrequently pernicious. To strike and elevate it right at the threshold of this dissertation: is there not a greater fight and contention among physicians than among philosophers, since they proceed along different ways of healing? To Hippocrates, the cause of the original disease seems to be the spiritus breath/spirit or wind, which he calls the father and grandfather of all diseases. To Herophilus, all vice seemed to be in the fluids. To Erasistratus, [it is] if blood is transfused into the arteries, that is, the veins, which are accommodated to the spirit—which later physicians call the "pulsing" ones. To Asclepiades, however, it seemed that the origin of sickness is if flowing corpuscles stop and block the path through invisible pores and close the passages. Furthermore, since health consists mostly in the digestion of food—and the stomach is deservedly called the head of the household and king of the whole body in man—in this part also they are most discordant. For Erasistratus contends that food is ground up in the belly; Plistonicus, that it putrefies; Hippocrates, that food is digested by heat, which Galen, Avicenna, and the schools of the modern physicians confirm. Asclepiades, however, argues that nothing is digested, but the raw material is distributed through the whole body just as it was consumed. Add to this that some say medicine is rational; others have placed it only in use and experiments, just as use is the most effective master in cures as it is in all other arts. Hence some are called "logicians" as if rational; some from experiments, "empiricists," like Serapion, Apollonius, and Heraclides. There are also "methodists," named after a certain way they follow. On account of this, Ausonius said in his Grypho Ternario The Ternary Riddle that medicine is triple, in that verse: "There is also a triple form of healing: what logos reason and methodos method and for everyone, empeiria experience is the name." There are also dogmatists, to whom there are their own decrees or doctrines without which no sect can consist. Galen approves of these most, by whom the empiricists are disapproved, for he says that Herophilus and Philippus were primarily empiricists, that is, followers of experience, while Hippocrates, Diocles of Carystus, and Erasistratus followed the logical heresy, that is, the rational sect. But the princes of the methodists were Archigenes and Themison. Concerning whom I think the satirist wrote: "Archigenes advises and throws about his burdensome cloaks; also, how many sick people Themison killed in one autumn." There was also a certain one born in Selymbria who instituted iatraleptice the art of healing by anointing.

Analgesia

Meteorologists

Causes of the earth's motion

Acatalepsia

Incomprehensibility.

Aporitici.

Academici

Proteus type of truth

Irreligious philosophers.

Philosophers ejected from the city

Philosopher not money-loving

Philosophy is scorned