Julie LASKARIS Divine Knowledge in On the Sacred Disease

The conception of the divine in the fifth century medical treatise On the Sacred Disease arises from its use in a rhetorical tactic typical of sophistic epideictic oratory: the demonstration of the relativity of goods. The speaker showed that opposite qualities could be predicated of the same apparent good or virtue, and that the overarching knowledge he himself possessed was needed to determine what was good or virtuous in a specific circumstance.

The conflicting senses borne by theion in On the Sacred Disease, particularly in its relation to physis and prophasis, can best be understood in this light. They are not an expression of the author's religious or philosophical beliefs, as has been the usual interpretation of them. The author, faced with the challenge of proving his ability to treat a disease traditionally the province of religious experts, but without a more effective therapy to offer, turned to sophistic rhetorical techniques to demonstrate his competitors' ignorance of the divine, and his own superior knowledge of it. Thus, it is precisely of the divine that he predicates opposite qualities, making the predication with relation to physis and prophasis, his own area of expertise.