The hallmark of anonymity. Questions of authorship in the Hippocratic Corpus, specifically regarding the so-called 'Author C'

Abstract

Since Émile Littrés’ time a particular attention has been devoted to a group of Hippocratic treatises (On Generation/On the Nature of the Child + Book IV of Diseases) showing a significant range of affinities and common elements in language, style, tenor and thought. Studies by Hermann Grensemann (in the 1980s) contributed to further philological analysis of the peculiar traits of the so-called Hippocratic ‘author C’, widening the textual basis to be involved in the investigation (including gynaecological treatises like On Diseases of Women 1-2 as well as parts of Infertile Women). Recently new light has also been shed by Elizabeth Craik (editing 2009 the treatise On Glands) on the historical and cultural setting in which the work of the anonymous physician has to be placed. Its terminological and theoretical features are almost unique in ancient medicine and still today arouse the greatest interest in scholars. This paper aims firstly to make the point on the state of the art regarding this particular figure of medical author, discussing in a detailled way the criteria which have been used by scholars in order to define and to date his work, and paying particular attention to the general question of autorship in the specific context of the Hippocratic tradition. In the second part of the essay, are presented the results of a in-depth lexicographical analysis of two terms (ἀΐϲϲω and its compounds, εὐρυχωρίη/ϲτενοχωρίη with corresponding verbal forms) which are characteristic of the author’s language and scientific discourse, and is proposed a confrontation between the author C’s nosological theory, as presented in the Book IV of Diseases, and the testimony of the doxographical tradition as surveyed in Anonymus Londinensis on the nosology of the physician Aegimius of Elis (XIII 21-47).