Crisis of Empire. Phil Booth
procedures, and his frequent expositions on Hippocratic theory appear not disingenuous but entirely consistent with the broader integrative vision.97 Sophronius’s epithet, “the Sophist,” of course implies a degree of medical education, and such erudition is indeed evident throughout his text. Indeed, a tale contained within Moschus’s Spiritual Meadow perhaps allows us to establish a more concrete link with the Alexandrian medical establishment, for Moschus recalls how, during their first sojourn in Alexandria, he and Sophronius “went to the house of Stephanus the Sophist to study.” (Or, in the so-called F manuscript of the Meadow, “to the house of Stephanus the Philosopher.”)98 Wanda Wolska-Conus has argued that this Stephanus is identical with that celebrated medical commentator of the same name, a contemporary of Sophronius and active in late sixth-century Alexandria.99 Although that conclusion is regrettably speculative, Wolska-Conus’s general conclusions—that Sophronius was not hostile to secular medicine, and furthermore that he “knew medicine such as had been taught at Alexandria in the sixth and seventh centuries”—remain valid.100
Once this complex scheme is recognized, it allows Sophronius’s sporadic opposition to the medical profession to be appreciated more fully. As several scholars have emphasized, suspicion of, and hostility to, the medical profession is a common motif in ancient literature, unique neither to Christian hagiography nor to Christian texts.101 It is furthermore notable that nowhere in the Miracles of Cyrus and John is medicine subjected to critique as a system of knowledge (unlike, for example, astrological predestination), for natural diseases and natural cures are both recognized as elements of divine creation, and Sophronius himself employs Hippocratic reasoning.102 The criticism of secular medicine occurs only in contexts where doctors prove corrupt or attempt to overreach their own competence.103
As in earlier collections, the superior competence of Saints Cyrus and John over secular physicians is established also through assimilation.104 Thus the saints are frequently described as iatroi, their shrine is an iatreion, and sometimes the pair appears in the form of doctors.105 Indeed, in addition to the standard supernatural cures familiar from other collections (in particular the application of oil from the saints’ shrine or physical contact with the saint in a dream),106 the saints often prescribe material remedies drawn from a natural materia medica indistinguishable from that of Hippocratic medicine,107 and that induces physiological effects that Sophronius describes using the lexicon of Hippocratic humoral theory.108
Despite this recognition of Hippocratic medicine, and the frequent references to (quasi-Hippocratic) material cures (and their quasi-Hippocratic effects), Sophronius is nevertheless highly sensitive to potential accusations of the saints’ reliance upon Hippocratic method. Indeed, an entire tale is devoted to the refutation of that very charge. In Miracles 30 the iatrosophist Gesius is said to have “mocked the martyrs Cyrus and John as if they cured human disease from medical skill rather than from the highest divine power. For when he saw the remedies that they prescribed for the sick, which I have in part described, he pronounced them to be the teachings of the doctors. This aid, he said, was derived from Hippocrates, and these others too could be found in his writings; another remedy, he proclaimed, was from Galen, and lay in his corpus; another application, he said, was clearly from Democritus, and he recalled the very place where. And having heard of a plaster he immediately boasted that it was from some doctor, maintaining that everything spoken by the saints had been patched together from one doctor or another. And always he looked for the natural causes of illnesses and of the qualities of the things dispensed, [claiming] that these had been prescribed according to medical logic and [only thus] brought about the purging of the conditions.”109 Then, however, Gesius is afflicted in his upper back (“as if from some divine anger”) and “not knowing the cause of the disease, he who had cured others did not know how to cure himself.”110 “But when he had done all the things that his profession recommended, and that Galen and Hippocrates and the swarm of other doctors had taught him, the disease had still not diminished.”111
In due course Gesius is persuaded to visit Saints Cyrus and John, whose solution for his illness is somewhat ironic: “Take the packsaddle of a donkey,” they say, “and put it on, setting it around your aching shoulders, neck and arm. And during the middle of the day walk around our entire temple, and shout loudly ‘I am a moron and utterly stupid.’ And having done as we command, immediately you will obtain a cure for your body.”112 Presented with this cure, Gesius is “unable to make sense of what combination and of what natural and essential quality these things are”, but nevertheless eventually complies and is duly cured.113 Then the saints demand, “Why do you want all the remedies that we bestow upon the sick to be discoveries of long-dead doctors? Tell us, where did your Hippocrates record the aid for your disease? Where did your precious Galen speak of it? Where did Democritus pronounce these things? Where have any of the other celebrated doctors recalled it? If you can find these things being said by them, then indeed you have spoken truly about them; but if you find no proof of them speaking such things, know then that you are mistaken about them.”114 Such qualifications indeed occur throughout the collection.115
For Sophronius, then, as for other miracle authors, the desire to emphasize the superior competence of the saints over Hippocratic rivals demands a clear differentiation of their modes of healing. If a somatic disease is of natural derivation, then it is curable by both doctor and saint (although, perhaps, using different remedies); where it proves to be the product of supernatural forces, however, or where secular physicians are unable to alleviate it, the saints alone are able to cure it. The purpose, then, is not to eliminate Hippocratic medicine as a system of somatic healing but rather to establish its subordination to the superior competence of the saints.
Recent research has emphasized the coexistence of several competing epistemologies in late-antique therapeutic culture and a subsequent pluralism of therapeutic options dependent upon a “hierarchy of resort.”116 Indeed, Sophronius and other miracle writers describe a culture in which a visit to the saints was considered only where medicine had failed, even in those instances where the saints had cured a patient before.117 In various instances, patients demonstrate an ability to draw on several nonexclusive systems of etiological explanation (nature, sin, demons, magic, etc.), and where one system proved unsatisfactory, another was substituted for it without contradiction.118
In acknowledging the pluralism of therapeutic options available to late-ancient patients, and in integrating such options within his intellectual scheme, Sophronius both recognizes and legitimizes the pragmatic realities of the therapeutic process. At the same time, his careful integration of secular medicine stands in stark contrast to the tone of another contemporary collection, the Miracles of Artemius, where medical practice is repeatedly lambasted without qualification,119 and where there is a heightened desire to differentiate the saint’s mode of healing from that of Hippocratic doctors.120 Both emphases are concerned most obviously with competition, for the emphasis both upon Artemius’s specialization in diseases of the genitals, and upon his successful, sometimes painless surgeries, present incubation as a credible alternative to the painful, potentially fatal, and all-too-real operations performed under the knife.121 In an important contribution John Haldon has, however, argued that the “need to stress divine intervention and heavenly authority” within this collection (and in the seventh-century Miracles of Demetrius and eighth-century Miracles of Therapon) reflects “not just a concern to underline the effectiveness of the saint as patron, nor again a simple desire to emphasise the power of divine intervention in some general competition with Hellenistic medicine,” but rather promotes “a powerful hidden agenda . . . determined by the wider political and cultural contexts of the times.” While confessing that the precise etiology of disease is rarely discussed within the Miracles of Artemius, Haldon argues that “the impression gained . . . is that, whatever the ability or competence of doctors, maladies caused by spiritual infirmity can only be cured through recourse to the saint; maladies of uncertain origin are best dealt with by the saint, on the ground that impurity or weakness of spirit may well underlie them.” He thus observes how “explanations for sickness and its causes had a very specific political dimension, for the state or polity could also be seen metaphorically and allegorically in terms of the human