Sluiter, 'Sluiter on Slater on Sluiter et al.', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9510
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9510-sluiter-sluiter

@@@@95.10.12, Sluiter on Slater on Sluiter et al.


	Ineke Sluiter -- Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam -- 
		sluiteri@jet.let.vu.nl

For all the obvious reasons, I read Professor Slater's review of the
"Festschrift" for Dirk Schenkeveld (BMCR 95.10.1) with great interest. I
appreciate the attention he paid to all the individual contributions in
the book, even though I do not always agree with his judgement of their
relative value.  Although as co-editor I feel a proprietary interest in
the work as a whole, I will restrict this reaction to Slater's evaluation
of my own article, because I think there is a misunderstanding about its
aim. 

	The article is <i>not</i> about Galen's literary theories (which,
I agree, are fairly commonplace), but about his rhetorical use of literary
and poetical concepts. He uses them for two purposes: to put Hippocrates
on the literary map among the acknowledged literary classics, and to
conquer a place as a literary genre for what he calls the <i>epistemonike
didaskalia</i>.

	Galen very much constructs his own "Hippocrates", as a combination
of the greatest medical authority ever and the best Greek prose-writer. He
uses two traditional genres as a foil: poetry and historiography. In both
cases, he differentiates between these genres and that of Hippocrates'
<i>epistemonike didaskalia</i> by referring to the traditional distinction
between truth and fiction. In the case of historiography, this means Galen
had to downplay its traditional element of "truthfulness and instruction"
and to stress that of "fiction and entertainment": only in this way can he
uphold his claim that the genre of scientific instruction is uniquely
distinguished by its insistence on imparting truthful information. In my
view, the two pages I devote to this matter (205-6) do not constitute
getting "lost in the wilderness of historiographical theory". I use
Lucian's <i>On How to Write History"</i> as a representative of
historiographical theory, because his work is the only complete one on
this issue that has come down to us -- this does not mean I claim his work
is original. Nor does my paraphrase of Lucian's allegation that many
contemporary historians confuse writing history (= writing the truth for
purposes of instruction) with engaging in encomiastic literature imply
that I believe him. The point is that his views (i.e. the traditional
ones) on the relevance of truth (instruction) and fiction (entertainment)
for the genre of historiography differ radically from those of Galen --
and this can be explained by Galen's rhetorical purpose.