Pearcy, 'Power and Knowledge: Astrology, Physiognomics, and Medicine under the Roman Empire', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9508
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9508-pearcy-power

@@@@95.9.3, Barton, Power and Knowledge

Tamsyn S. Barton, <i>Power and Knowledge: Astrology,
Physiognomics, and Medicine under the Roman Empire.</i> Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Pp. xiv, 254. $44.50.
ISBN 0-472-10425-X.  
  Reviewed by Lee T. Pearcy -- The Episcopal Academy
     LTPearcy@aol.com

  Tamsyn Barton has written a book worthy of her mentor,
Geoffrey Lloyd, although its title evokes an association of ideas
central to the work of Michel Foucault.  By examining the ways in
which knowledge and power constructed and reinforced one another
in the astrology, physiognomics, and medicine of the high empire,
Barton intends to cast doubt on what she calls "the rationalizing
program," which draws a firm, definitive line between science and
pseudo-science and appraises ancient thought according to how
consistently it stays on the scientific side of the line.  That
program is less entrenched than she thinks, at least among
American and British historians of ancient medicine, but it is
good to have this cogent, clearly written illustration of its
short-comings. 

  For each of the three modes of inquiry into nature that she
has chosen, Barton explores a different aspect of the
intersection of knowledge and power.  In each case she is
concerned to show that knowledge took as its goal not the
creation of valid theories about the world, but the development
of productive rhetorical strategies of persuasion and domination. 
The votaries of astrology, physiognomics, and medicine were not
seeking truth.  They were seeking power, and they sought it
through the ancient world's only genuine intellectual technology: 
rhetoric. 

  Through this insight Barton is able to account for features of
ancient technical literature that are difficult to understand for
a reader working on the rationalist assumption that a handbook or
protreptic treatise ought to make the knowledge in question
accessible to inquirers by providing a clear explanation of its
principles, methods, and techniques.  Yet many ancient manuals
refuse to do this.  Instead they mount a defense of the art in
question, attack rival practitioners, or declare that mastery of
the art depends on devotion to radical discipline and practice,
as well as on acceptance of their author's authority.  (There are
certainly implications here for didactic literature in general,
although Barton does not explore them.) 

  Astrology presents the clearest example of this nexus of
power, knowledge, and rhetorical intent.  Its practitioners
enjoyed a close relationship with imperial power, and its
doctrines and imagery, as Barton demonstrates in her pages on the
significance of capricorn in imperial iconography, became part of
the symbolic currency of empire.  (In this connection she might
have cited Zanker's <i>The Power of Images in the Age of
Augustus</i>.)  The fact that casting the emperor's nativity was
a capital offense merely confirms this intimacy between
perceptions of the stars and perceptions of power.  In these
conditions, Barton demonstrates, astrological writers preened and
strutted in agonistic competition for pupils, influence, and
credibility.  Clarity was not a goal; intellectual power attached
itself to those who could demonstrate that a rival's system was
too simple or too clear before capping it with a more complex,
more difficult system of their own. 

  Clarity may not have been a desideratum of ancient
astrologers, but it is a great merit of Barton's presentation of
their work.  In particular, pages 71-79 deserve praise; they are
the clearest explanation that I have ever seen of what it means
to cast a nativity and how a horoscope works.  Astrologers behave
like sophists.  Physiognomists sometimes were, as the case of
Antonius Polemo shows.  Physiognomy, in fact, has affinities with
rhetorical theory, and in particular the doctrine of ethos or
presentation of character.  Physical description, whether in
praise or blame, formed part of the sophist's stock-in-trade. 
Barton's chief contribution, and it is an exciting one, is to
show that both the rhetorician's ethos and the physiognomist's
dogma depended upon using antiquity's fundamental cultural
categories and oppositions:  male, not female; citizen, not
stranger; man, not animal.  The woman, the foreigner, and the
beast are, as Levi-Strauss put it, "bonnes a penser," good to
think with (p. 115).  Against them rhetoricians could define
themselves and their largely male, citizen audience, and in their
undesirable image they could shape their enemies.  Medicine,
finally, presents the most complex example, both conceptually and
in richness of documentation.  (Browsing in the TLG Canon and
pondering the hundreds of medical writers set against mere dozens
of poets will cure anyone of the naive belief that the
intellectual landscape of the ancient world was dominated by
imaginative literature.)  Barton chooses to concentrate on Galen,
who more than any other ancient physician gives us an explicit
account of his epistemological and rhetorical program.  The
best-known physician of the empire, however, may embarrass with
an over-richness of evidence; in making any judgement about
Galen, a scholar inevitably searches for ways to limit inquiry to
known and knowable texts chosen from Galenic abundance.  Wisely,
Barton confines her analysis to Galen's treatment of two
prognostic signs, the pulse and the urine. 

  Galen, as Barton observes, often resembles Sherlock Holmes in
his arrogant delight in mystifying observers through his
interpretations of pulses and urines; indeed, the Case of the
Sicilian Physician at <i>On the Affected Parts</i> 5.8 = Kuhn
8.361 (pp. 140-143), which turns on Galen's chance observation of
a chamber-pot, would not be out of place in Baker Street.  In the
game of boundary-drawing that physicians played with one another
in their striving for status, prognosis was an important move. 
The successful physician confounded his rivals by offering a
prognosis that was not only more accurate than theirs, but also
more impressively stated, more subtle in its differentiation of
similar symptoms, and more persuasive.  Like astrology and
physiognomics, medical knowledge drew power from its promise to
explain and control a process that to the uninitiated might seem
like magic.  

  Galen's Watsons do not often represent either the
intellectually naive or the politically powerful.  Like the
audiences for many of Galen's famous demonstrations, Glaucon at
<i>On the Affected Parts</i> 5.8 was a philosopher, a man
qualified to judge the physician's claims to knowledge on their
own terms.  Galen supports his claims to superior knowledge by
presenting himself as practicing before an audience that will
confirm his distance from a society which he sees as
intellectually and morally corrupt and from the physicians who
pandered to its tastes.  No less than their counterparts in
astrology and physiognomics, physicians under the high empire had
access to political and social power through their claims to
knowledge.  Galen does not, however, choose to emphasize this
access.  Following his lead, Barton does not spend much time on
the connections between medicine and the external power of
empire.  Instead she focuses on the ways in which physicians
staked out and defended their claims against those of other
physicians.  This focus has been to some extent determined by the
necessary limitations she imposes on her inquiry when she turns
from astrology and physiognomics to the more abundantly
documented field of medicine.  If Galen is taken to represent
ancient physicians and prognosis to stand for medicine, then the
internal politics of knowledge will take precedence, as they do
in Barton's inquiry, over the external power relations of
physicians.  Barton's insights are not, however, weakened by the
inevitable restrictions of her inquiry.  Her readings of ancient
technical literature have a clarity and rightness that invite
further inquiry into the Foucauldian nexus of knowledge and
power; in particular, the way she situates physiognomy amid
rhetoric, medicine, and divination promises to change forever the
way we look at this neglected aspect of the ancient inquiry into
nature.

Postscript:  misprints are few in this well-produced volume, but
for "Pearce" on p. 218 n. 17 and p. 240 read "Pearcy."