1991 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary

The Ethos in Classical Greek Society and the Corpus Hippocraticum

Research Project

Project/Area Number	02610020
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for General Scientific Research (C)
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Research Field	倫理学
Research Institution	Yamanashi university
Principal Investigator	MENJU Shin-ichiro Yamanasi University, Faculty of Education, Professor., 教育学部, 教授 (20020373)
Project Period (FY)	1990 – 1991
Keywords	Corpus hippocraticum / Hippocrates / Thucydides / Epidemia / Contagion / Immunity / Miasma / Greek tragedy
Research Abstract	The comparative study, of the work of the historian Thucydides and the Corpus Hippocraticum has been my main theme for the research on the ethos of classical Greek society. "Thucydldes and Hippocrates" - no. 5-(1990)was written for the purpose of reviewing the contemporary studies(up to 1980les)in Europe and the United States, which consern this theme, and reexaming my previous studies. The 'new trend'of classics is, so to speak, the revival of sceptism, which, as the analysis and the comparison becomes too trivialistic, sometimes lose the sight of direction and fall into the barren negation. But cultural anthropology in particular and other related historical scienses made me realize the importance of studying the spread of diseases(epidemiai), contagion, infection and immunity in a given society, on which I have not paid much attention in previous articles. The idea of 'miasma' (pollution), in particular, plays a very significant role not only in Greek religion, but also in secular world like law and popular ethics. Miasma was indeed one of the key-concepts of sin, crime and punishment in Greek society. "Thucydides and Hippokrates"-no. 6-(1992)is my latest article, in which I rereading the text on the great plague at Athens in the Book II of Thucydides and Hippocratic Corpus, I conclude that both the historian and the doctor were consciously avoiding the idea of miasma and related concepts. But in contemporary Greek tragedies, on the contrary, this idea was one of the greatest causes of evil not only for individuals and families, but for all of the polis members. Next article will be to contrast of these two different attitudes on the causality of evil as one of the fundamental problems for the study of ethos in classical Greek society.