I

The forty-one lectures that make up Maximus of Tyre’s Orations (Dialexeis) are an important yet little-studied source for the cultural ambience of late second-century Rome.Footnote ¹ With their informal and accessible character, extensive inspiration from classical themes and ideas,Footnote ² and tendency to address chiefly ethical topics,Footnote ³ the Orations offer a fascinating window into the dynamics of philosophical rhetoric as a pedagogical practice in this age. They also cast light on Maximus’ role as a philosophising orator and especially on his moral-didactic approach, given that the professed aim of his Orations is to ‘rouse young men’s souls and guide their ambitions’,Footnote ⁴ as the programmatic first lecture makes clear.Footnote ⁵

A powerful tool that Maximus deploys to that end is imagery in the broadest of senses: namely, not just the more familiar figures of speech, such as metaphors or similes, but also looser mechanisms of comparison, such as allegories, prosopopoeiae (personifications) and even fables.Footnote ⁶ An examination of the complete range of forms and functions of imagery in Maximus awaits a comprehensive study.Footnote ⁷ This paper provides a starting point by focusing exclusively on medical imagery, one of the most pervasive and instrumental types of imagery in Maximus’ workFootnote ⁸ that has gone entirely unnoticed in the literature to date. This paper will show that Maximus uses medicine, the physician, the body and notions of health and disease with considerable diversity and creativity, in ways that make his examples stand out in relation to earlier or contemporary applications of the medical parallel. By the end of this discussion, I hope that the resulting demonstration of Maximus’ resourceful engagement with medical imagery will substantiate his role as an effective and inspiring communicator and, to some extent, also help further refute modern accusations that he was a second-rate thinker (Halbphilosoph)Footnote ⁹ by foregrounding the idiosyncratic poetics of his orations. On another level, one of the most important contributions of this paper is that it illustrates medicine’s impact on those who were not stricto sensu medical writers or medical experts. Thus, it tackles the wider role of ancient medicine beyond the more usual territories explored by the majority of modern scholars. Medicine in the Roman Imperial period (roughly the first three centuries AD) was not just a technical field, but also a vibrant area of study and intellectual engagement, which attracted the attention not just of medical authors and practising physicians but also of other educated elite men, such as sophists and philosophers. This study stresses precisely this less-explored area in the dynamics of ancient medicine as an intellectual field. What is extremely interesting in Maximus’ case is that medicine seems to have interested him a lot as an educational tool, a vehicle for his self-promotion and an innovative means of advertising his public role as a professional orator. This is an aspect of ancient medicine that deserves further exploration, attesting, as it does, to the social role of medicine in Graeco-Roman antiquity.

Before embarking on the main part of the analysis, it seems relevant to mention that Maximus stresses many times throughout the Orations, almost in a formulaic fashion, that his use of imagery specifically serves the purpose of clarification and illumination,Footnote ¹⁰ just as his use of analogy or mythological and historical parallelism does on other occasionsFootnote ¹¹: for example: ‘If an image is needed to illustrate the point’Footnote ¹² (εἰ δέ τοι δεῖ καὶ εἰκόνος τῷ λόγῳ); ‘Or if you need a still clearer image, you could imagine God as a general’Footnote ¹³ (εἰ δέ σοι καὶ σαφεστέρας εἰκόνος δεῖ, νόει μοι στρατηγὸν μὲν τὸν θεόν); ‘Perhaps I need to summon up some other images to illustrate my present theme’Footnote ¹⁴ (Εἰ δὲ δεῖ καὶ ἄλλας παρακαλέσαι εἰκόνας τῷ παρόντι λόγῳ); ‘for I realize I am drawing a subtle distinction here and need to give you an illustration’Footnote ¹⁵ (αἰσθ<άν>ομαι γάρ τοι ἐμαυτοῦ γλίσχρως τὸ πρᾶγμα διελομένου καὶ δεομένου εἰκόνος) and ‘If you need a still clearer image, this defective state of the soul can be compared to a species of mob rule’Footnote ¹⁶ (Εἰ δέ σοι καὶ σαφεστέρας εἰκόνος δεῖ, ὀχλοκρατίᾳ τινὶ εἰκαστέον τὴν τῆς ψυχῆς πονηρίαν).Footnote ¹⁷

Taken together, these examples point to the overarching features of Maximus’ image-making in general. First, they show that the employment of imagery is a necessary precondition for driving home any given point Maximus is making in his argument (note the use of the verb δεῖ [dei, ‘need’] in almost all cases), and hence an essential factor for his performative and communicative success when addressing young upper-class listeners who sought to be acculturated as much as entertained by his rhetorical skill.Footnote ¹⁸ Secondly, the examples also show that the imagery is expected to facilitate concept formation and production of meaning in the young audience, given that an ‘image/illustration’ (εἰκών, eikon) is always connected either with the effectiveness of Maximus’ educative discourse or with the specific cognitive abilities that it is expected to foster in them, notably that of imagination (νόει, noei, ‘imagine’) and comparison (εἰκαστέον, eikasteon, ‘can be compared’).Footnote ¹⁹ All the above suggests that Maximus’ employment of imagery is both conscious and tailored to the efficient teacher-pupil interaction that he sets up as a vehicle to enable their attainment of philosophical virtue and successful induction into elite paideia (the ideal of intellectual achievement and excellence). In that sense, imagery may be seen as an authority-conferring move on Maximus’ part, especially considering that his notion of the function of the εἰκών as argued above is a modification of the way it is used in his favourite philosopher Plato,Footnote ²⁰ one of the most influential voices in the philosophical landscape of the Roman Imperial period, particularly in the context of Middle Platonism in which Maximus lived and operated.Footnote ²¹ These points will crop up again as the discussion of medical imagery proceeds.

II

A ubiquitous theme in the ethical writings of the Hellenistic and Roman periods is the theorisation of moral passions as diseases of the soul (νοσήματα τῆς ψυχῆς, nosemata tes psyches), and hence the symbolic representation of philosophy as psychic therapy (θεραπεία τῆς ψυχῆς, therapeia tes psyches) targeted at the extirpation of false beliefs and the control of violent emotions through the mediation of philosophical arguments and training.Footnote ²² This therapeutic analogy is evident especially in the Stoic philosophers Epictetus (1st and early 2nd century AD),Footnote ²³ Musonius Rufus (1st century AD), Footnote ²⁴ and Seneca (5 BC–65 AD),Footnote ²⁵ but also beyond strictly Stoic territory, in thinkers such as the middle Platonist Plutarch (circa 45–circa 120 AD),Footnote ²⁶ the Epicurean Philodemus (circa 110–circa 30 BCE)Footnote ²⁷ and others. As a scholar conversant with the philosophical currents of the Second Sophistic (the renaissance of Greek letters from roughly the first to the third century AD), Maximus is aware of the traditional parallelism between medicine and philosophy, which he is already using in his first oration, in the context of a discussion which argues that, unlike the instability of fate, philosophical reason (λόγος, logos) is the only steady aspect in human life:

The point Maximus wishes to get across here is that philosophy shares with medicine two positive elements: a) its adaptability to individual circumstances, picking up on the preceding mention of καιρός (kairos, ‘intervention at the right moment’)Footnote ²⁹ which is central to ancient medicine,Footnote ³⁰ and b) the preservation of harmony as a guarantor of health. It is interesting that in the quoted passage Maximus does not speak of sickness (νόσος, nosos) as per the conventional analogy but instead stresses the lack of equilibrium in an unstable body (σώματι οὐχ ἑστῶτι)Footnote ³¹ that constantly veers between extremes (fullness and emptiness), so as to highlight, by implication, that, in the case of the soul, philosophy is the only possible source of equilibrium.Footnote ³² On the one hand, this choice of presentation serves Maximus’ perennial emphasis throughout his discourses on the notion of symmetry (συμμετρία, symmetria), or internal economy, which he considers the ultimate goal of philosophy.Footnote ³³ On the other hand, speaking specifically of inconstancy (rather than directly of sickness) may also be explained by the strategic objectives of Maximus’ philosophical display: wishing to imprint the concept even more firmly on his listeners’ minds, the Tyrian associates bodily imbalance with another graphic image, that of rivers, which also represent the fluctuating and the variable. In fact, the dynamic nexus of the unsettled body and the volatile river appears two more times in similar protreptic contexts, suggesting that it was a set formula in the extempore toolkit Maximus deployed to effect his philosophical didacticism.Footnote ³⁴ In adjusting the well-known medical analogy, therefore, Maximus departs from its typical focus on a painful illness that needs to be cured through equally painful meansFootnote ³⁵ and recasts it as a positive experience for philosophical beginners by filtering it through an optimistic lens: the type of philosophy opened up to them does not seek to heal a negative aspect of someone in a one-off critical situation but to bring about their emotional well-being in the long run.Footnote ³⁶ This conclusion is arrived at by also considering Maximus’ specific wording in the passage under analysis, where he opts for oikonomia (οἰκονομία) rather than of therapeia (θεραπεία), so as to advertise the more reassuring aspects of philosophy, that is a provision for maintaining internal balance at all times and not simply restoring it when things go wrong.Footnote ³⁷

It is only fair to note that, even though our author does not refer to an afflicted body in the medical component of his analogy (at least not in any direct sense), when it comes to the philosophical component of the analogy at the end of the quoted section, he gives a more balanced presentation of the conditions liable to affect his pupils in real life by referring to both sadness and happiness. This is no concession, however, because the typical analogy would have dwelt to a greater extent (if not exclusively) on the former (see the examples in note 35). So it is clear that Maximus strives to mitigate the negativity of the stereotypical therapeutic imagery. This is attuned to the kind of philosophy that is on offer here: this is no ‘hardcore’, that is doctrinal or scholastic, philosophy of the sort pursued by Plutarch, Numenius (mid 2nd century AD) or Alcinous (2nd century AD), but a ‘soft’,Footnote ³⁸ ‘undemanding’Footnote ³⁹ variety that imparted philosophical lessons in an encouraging and far from off-putting fashion.Footnote ⁴⁰ This proposition is supported also by the fact that the adjustment of the imagery to some extent involves shifting the traditional focus from the diseased soul to life itself, with Maximus emphasising the benefits of being able to access the appropriate philosophical discourse in a whole range of life situations (‘sad times … times of joy’) and bringing out the need to have appropriately versatile philosophical discoursers (like him) on tap to produce the right instruction for the right circumstances. The simile, therefore, enables Maximus to present more inspiringly not just philosophy’s status as medicine for the soul but also the performativity of philosophy.

The popularising character of Maximus’ philosophyFootnote ⁴¹ is even more evident at the level of language. The medical vocabulary used in the formation of medical imagery is never technical or highly specialised,Footnote ⁴² while some main tenets regarding the workings of the human body and the physician’s contributions are treated as terra cognita for Maximus’ audience, as they would have been acquainted with the basics of medicine from their so-called ‘circular’ or general studies (ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία, enkyklios paideia) and wider cultural background.Footnote ⁴³ A case in point is found in Oration 27.3, which provides a definition of physical health as the state in which the blendings of the body’s constituents are harmonised to produce the proportions conducive to health (τὸ δὲ σῶμα ἁρμονίαις καὶ κράσεσιν εἰς ὑγιείας μέτρον).Footnote ⁴⁴ Ancient scientific thought in Maximus’ day, especially Galenic medicine, which dominated medical theory at the time, referred to health as εὐκρασία (eukrasia), a state of good mixture predicated on balancing the four elementary qualities of hot, cold, dry and wet.Footnote ⁴⁵ As we have just seen, however, Maximus simply describes physical health in general terms, as a harmonious blending, without any specific reference to qualities (ποιότηται, poiotetai), which are indeed never mentioned as such in the Orations (of which more below), even though the author seems aware of them.Footnote ⁴⁶ The only detail that Maximus concedes as regards the definition of the body’s constitution is that it consists of cosmic elements (fire, earth, air, water),Footnote ⁴⁷ a thesis that goes back to Presocratic metaphysics and early Greek medico-philosophical thought including Plato and which was widespread in Maximus’ time (I shall return to this too below).Footnote ⁴⁸ Leaving that aside, in Oration 27.3, too, the use of the medical analogy is straightforward and positive through an emphasis on the bodily and psychic symmetry that Maximus’ philosophy can achieve for his audience.Footnote ⁴⁹ Hence, the simplification of medical knowledge once more fits in with Maximus’ simple and supportive philosophy.Footnote ⁵⁰

Another issue meriting attention in this connection is that, in talking about elements in the body, Maximus seems to be drawing specifically on Plato (e.g. Timaeus 81e–82a)Footnote ⁵¹ rather than being influenced by other classical sources or Imperial-period medical discourse. This is a standard attribute of his deployment of medical imagery, namely, to tap into Platonic references to or invocations of medicine and adjust them to the specific goals and preoccupations of his philosophical orations. In a section that negotiates the topic of learning and recollection with an eye to Plato’s conceptualisation of the phenomenon (viz. knowledge is inherent in us), Maximus relates the following:

That Maximus had taken his inspiration from Plato’s Republic 518d for the imagery relating to the eye could scarcely have been missed by his audience, who were well versed in the Platonic tradition. Plato’s point is merely that there is an art (philosophy) which effectively reawakens the soul so as to enable it to ‘see’ (conceive, understand), but it does not produce sight in the eye as if the capacity for vision was not inherent in it already. Maximus’ reworking of the eye imagery is both clearer and more developed: a) it overtly introduces medicine (absent from Plato) as a parallel system to philosophy, b) it elaborates on the blocking of vision through ‘mist’ (ἀχλύν, achlyn), eliciting an imaginative involvement on the part of the audience, as this would have been an uncomfortable eye condition that they would have experienced either in themselves or vicariouslyFootnote ⁵³ and c) it corroborates the idea that the soul has innate knowledge by combining the borrowing from Plato’s Republic 518d, as seen above, with another medically related imagery, that of the art of midwifery derived from Theaetetus 149a–151d (cf. Phaedrus 276b–277a) which is instrumental in showing that ‘reason plays midwife to the pregnant soul’ (Oration 10.4),Footnote ⁵⁴ exactly in line with what is suggested in the passage quoted above. Of course, a further attraction of the parallel with midwifery is that it turns the spotlight onto Socrates and his salient role in philosophical education, as advocated by Maximus.

Indeed, Maximus is very keen on employing medical imagery when he wants to reinforce Socrates’ (circa 470–399 BC) philosophical authority and thereby capitalise on the principles from Socratic/Platonic philosophy that he expects his auditors to assimilate. For example, in Oration 3.1, in order to underline how paradoxical the denigration of Socrates has been on the part of successive generations of his detractors up to Maximus’ own day, the latter presents Socrates as an expert in matters philosophical, who nevertheless did not enjoy the same respect as other specialists, one of whom is the physician:

The superior wisdom and expertise of the physician as well as that of the steersman and of other professionals (the painter and the sculptor are also brought into the discussion later on) are enough to shield them from the criticism of laymen and ensure them general approbation. So why is it not counterintuitive when Socrates, whose proficiency was not some manual skill, but something more elevated involving the symmetry of life (ἀλλὰ τὸν αὑτοῦ βίον συμμέτρως), is not appreciated? This is the question that Maximus problematises for his audience and which he accentuates through the additional emphasis on Socrates’ virtues, notably his simple lifestyle (εὐτελείᾳ), perseverance (καρτερίᾳ) and self-control (σωφροσύνῃ), encouraging his listeners to be inspired by Socrates’ moral grandeur.

Examples such as this could be multiplied (e.g. Oration 8.3), and the use of medical analogies for didactic purposes becomes even more intriguing. The following case study shows that, in order to highlight Socrates’ powers of persuasion, Maximus includes examples from other authorities who have, in fact, been eclipsed by Socrates’ persuasive talents:

Unlike the image of the hedonist and the money-grubber, the one with the doctor involves an audience to whom the latter directs his persuasive competence, making it a better match to Socrates’ relationship with his accusers. The image of the unpersuasive doctor (like that of the money-grubber) originates in the Gorgias. However, in Maximus’ hands, it is transformed on two levels. First, Maximus is inspired by the famous section 456b ff., where Gorgias explains how he, as an orator, was able to persuade the patients of his brother, the physician Herodicus, to accept drugs, surgical operations or cauterisation in instances where the latter was unable to do so. Maximus supplements the element of persuasion that dominates this section from the Gorgias with references to food and drink that occur in another famous passage from this dialogue,Footnote ⁵⁷ the one staging the confrontation between a doctor and a cook, resulting in the former’s crude victimisation by the latter. Thus, in constructing his own medical imagery, Maximus makes an ingenious fusion of two Platonic parallels, as already seen in the case of the eye imagery above. Second, he simultaneously adds his individual ingredients, in this case, the fact that the patients refusing food and drink suffer from fever, an image used in exactly the same notional and linguistic form in Oration 25.5. This suggests that this was a set image, easily retrieved in an oral delivery; while focusing specifically on ‘feverish’ patients could spark some recognition in his audience (just like the mist obscuring the eye cited above) and thereby help Maximus cement the image’s impact on them, making its message even more perceptible.Footnote ⁵⁸

The aspect of pleasure that normally differentiates the cook from the doctor in Platonic settings is another fundamental aspect in Maximus’ shaping of the medical illustration, which is used so as to make or clinch a point in his demonstration. For instance, in order to undermine pleasure as a criterion for defining the good friend (given that the friend’s constructive criticism can be painful), Maximus mentions that ‘it is the benevolent doctor who causes the greatest pain, and the most scrupulous general, and the most reliable helmsman’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Nonetheless, on another occasion, Maximus refashions this Platonic intertext by assigning the ability to please to the doctor too (i.e. not just the cook) but only when it benefits the patient’s health: in arguing that the use of myth has helped make philosophy more amusing to its audiences, Maximus compares the situation with physicians who, when ‘faced with patients who make problems about taking their medicine, immerse their bitter drugs in pleasant food and thus conceal the unpleasantness of the cure’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Ways of making his philosophy entertaining and approachable are what concerns Maximus on a metanarrative level, too, with his employment of imagery potentially functioning as a ‘pleasant food’ in which the hard stuff of philosophy is integrated.

The functional adjustment of philosophyFootnote ⁶¹ is a major concern for Maximus, and so, in legitimising the use of lies when advantageous to the moral agent, our author again borrows the medical model from PlatoFootnote ⁶² when he says that ‘doctors deceive their patients…and there is nothing very terrible in that. Quite the reverse, indeed: lies have often helped people and the truth has often harmed them’.Footnote ⁶³ Remarkably, when it comes to poetic falsehood and the indulgence that poetry engenders, Maximus is reluctant to take a flexible stance or yield to adjustment. Rather, he vindicates Plato’s decision to expel Homeric poetry from his ideal city on the grounds that the special character of Plato’s state rendered poetry’s utility and entertainment redundant. He does so in medical terms by emphasising that in the framework of Platonic idealism – where everything is well thought out and harmonious – medicine, too, would be unnecessary:

Even though this section is heavily informed by Plato’s Republic, both in terms of quotation and allusion,Footnote ⁶⁵ the final product is a creative synthesis that is Maximus’ own. The presentation of the unified, harmonious body consisting of proportionate elements and the mention of drugs, remedies and medical regimens being unnecessary interventions in a well-balanced body are used elsewhere by MaximusFootnote ⁶⁶ to underpin his idea of physical and (by comparison) mental harmony. In addition, the device that has the addressee confront the provocative scenario in which medicine is dismissed as an impractical science but with good reason is a decisive move towards reinforcing the independence of Plato’s theoretical construct from any human art, including medicine. Interestingly, in the last sentence of the quoted section, alongside presenting medicine as a hands-on science (a common attribute of the medical art), Maximus also portrays it as a source of pleasure. What exactly our author has in mind is hard to tell,Footnote ⁶⁷ but what matters for our purposes is that the pleasurable component of medicine is a variable that Maximus shifts depending on the nature and needs of his exposition in any given instance. Here, it makes sense to assert the pleasurable aspect of medicine (despite the attribute’s conflicting connotations) in conjunction with its practicability to make it precisely analogous to poetry’s own practicability-cum-pleasure. That said, in the majority of occurrences, Maximus is intent on portraying pleasure as inimical to medicine, drawing on the Platonic antithesis between medicine and cookery:

The juxtaposition of medicine and cookery in Plato is a motif which Maximus frequently deploys to develop with more clarity the archetypal distinction between crafts (τέχναι, technai) and ‘knacks’ (ἐμπειρίαι, empeiriai): crafts, based on accurate knowledge of a subject, benefit the soul or body, like medicine which cares for the body in a genuine sense. Knacks, by contrast, based on mere imitation of crafts, seek to flatter the audience regardless of their well-being. The knack that imitates medicine is cookery, targeted at pleasing the body, thereby engendering its destruction. Maximus seems well acquainted with these and other related insights.Footnote ⁶⁹ This is attested, for example, by his treatment of the story of Mithaecus, a celebrated chef who was expelled from Sparta accused of overfeeding the ‘unpampered and pure’ bodies of the Spartans and thus going against their simple, nourishing diet.Footnote ⁷⁰ The fine line between medicine and cookery is clearer in the following comparison, which is employed by Maximus to explain that sophistry is the flattering variety of philosophy:

The reference to Asclepius and the AsclepiadaeFootnote ⁷² is Maximus’ own addition to Gorgias 464d, which seems to be distantly informing the above passage, and it is there to achieve a two-fold aim. First of all, it ensures that the comparison makes a greater impression on Maximus’ listeners by spelling out the name of the healing god and his priests. At the same time, it renders the contrast between real crafts and their imitative versions more successful by emphasising that medicine had been brought down to the level of cookery through the relinquishing of the therapeutic practices of Asclepius himself, who is portrayed as the exponent par excellence of the summit of medicine throughout Maximus’ Orations. Footnote ⁷³ That Asclepius is so dear to Maximus’ heart that he uses him at strategic points in his demonstration may be explained partly by his reliance on PlatoFootnote ⁷⁴ and partly by the fact that in the Imperial era, Asclepius as a god was held in widespread affection.Footnote ⁷⁵

Turning now in more detail to the image of the body and its diseases, it could be said that Maximus makes use of it chiefly in order to clarify the meaning of abstract and complex philosophical notions. To better explain that pleasure has its basis in the enjoyment of the experiencing subject, not in its own nature, he compares it with the nourishment of the body, which works exactly the other way around.Footnote ⁷⁶ The reference here to the operation of the digestive system, which again does not involve anything beyond the commonsensical,Footnote ⁷⁷ is effectively used as a form of argumentative elucidation. Elsewhere, in order to show that love needs reason (rather than emotion) to be rendered a virtue and not a sickness, Maximus employs a parallel from health, which likewise comes about not through emotion but through nature or human artifice:

The comparison between bodily health and love that Maximus proposes here is most probably influenced by the connection between bodily health and justice in the soul from Republic 444c–d. Nevertheless, nowhere in this passage does Plato advance the definition of somatic health as a non-rational condition (πάθος, pathos) of the forces (δυνάμεις, dynameis) of hot, cold, dry and wet, blended by means of the medical art and harmonised by nature; Plato simply speaks of bodily balance in a general sense. What is more, even though Maximus refers here to hot, cold, dry and wet, he does not label them as ‘qualities’ but simply as ‘forces’, a concept that would have made perfect sense to his recipients. By the same token, in other cases, nouns referring to the constitution of the body remain unqualified by Maximus, notably through his use of substantive adjectives accompanied by the definite article: for example, τἀναντία for ‘opposing elements’.Footnote ⁷⁹ This shows that in the framework of his unchallenging philosophy, Maximus gives little – if any – attention to the niceties of scientific theory, paying more heed to make his phrasing readily intelligible to his young audience. Baffling the latter with a scientific articulation of medical terms and ideas at any point in the lecture would have meant Maximus’ outright failure, putting at risk the entire enterprise of his pedagogical project. The same can be said of Maximus’ flexible use of terminology that would have otherwise been used in a very specialised sense in the context of technical treatises of the time. For example, κρᾶσις (krasis) in Maximus never denotes ‘mixture of elements’ but rather points more generally to the body’s constitution, attesting to an intuitive appreciation of the body’s organic unity on the audience’s part, just like δύναμις (dynamis) above could hardly have been construed in its specialised meaning of ‘capacity’, but rather as referring more generally to ‘power’, as noted. Maximus could simply not afford to be obscure in oral performance, and hence any jargon had to be strictly avoided.

The reference to Asclepius mentioned above requires further discussion because the figure of Asclepius is a potent one in Maximus’ rhetorical apparatus. Beyond the fact that Maximus portrays Asclepius as the god of health (δαίμων, daimon), responsible for healing the sick,Footnote ⁸⁰ he also highlights his personal connection with him when he affirms that he has seen Asclepius in waking reality and not just during an incubation in his temple like most ordinary people.Footnote ⁸¹ This personal testimony of epiphany experienced by Maximus does not just consolidate the credibility of his account or make it more memorable, as has been suggested,Footnote ⁸² but notably authorises his discourse, particularly when speaking about medical issues. A central theme of his medically informed discussions in the Orations is the knowledge Maximus claims to possess about the invention and history of medicine. As far as its invention goes, Maximus gives a description of how medicine first became a science by means of the accumulated records of the sufferings of patients and the ensuing therapeutic measures that proved effective for the majority of them.Footnote ⁸³ As far as history goes, he is fond of negotiating medicine’s decline (as perceived by Imperial-period pessimistic observers) by comparing it to its earlier sublimity in the distant past. In a passage where Maximus seeks to show that philosophy is a developed form of poetry, he trades on medicine’s history to illuminate the point:

Two topics merit consideration here. First, Maximus mentions that, owing to the degeneracy of the human body, medicine became more diversified so as to be able to respond to the treatment of different bodily malfunctions. The refinement of medicine is a negative thing, according to Maximus (despite medical authors’ claims to the contrary) because it militates against its authentic form as a single, unified science.Footnote ⁸⁵ Taking his cue from Plato, Maximus is an ardent proponent of simplicity and uniformity on all fronts, as mentioned above, a tendency that also informs his conceptualisation of an archaic kind of science, which offered a holistic psychosomatic therapy,Footnote ⁸⁶ dispensing with the need for disciplinary division in treating the body separately from the soul. This ideal form of science was practised by the centaur Chiron, traditionally considered the inventor of medicine and Asclepius’ teacher in the medical art.Footnote ⁸⁷ Another reason why Maximus rejects specialisation altogether is because he believes it arises out of the need to combat disease engendered from the disruption of συμμετρία (symmetria), the optimum balance in the embodied soul.Footnote ⁸⁸ For example, in Oration 39.2 he expresses dissatisfaction with what he perceives as specialised areas of medicine arising from attempts to treat imbalance qua disease.

Secondly, the decline of medicine is a recognisable trope in Imperial-period literature, reflecting the cultural anxieties of this era, particularly the nostalgia for the great Greek past and the aspirations of Second Sophistic authors to invoke and emulate their superior Classical predecessors. Yet, Maximus (again) does not seem to have taken the theme from his contemporary intellectual trends, which, in fact, tackled the issue rather differently: Galen, for instance, also talked about the decadence of medicine in his day but presented it in terms of the failure of medical practice and the moral bankruptcy of medics.Footnote ⁸⁹ Maximus does not seem to have used PlatoFootnote ⁹⁰ as an independent support either. Rather, it appears that he, in part, invented (or at any rate massaged) the story of the modification of medicine over time to make it an illustrative, supporting parallel to how poetry of the revered past had to change into more explicitly formulated philosophy because human minds became more petty and quibbling over time. As the passage aboveFootnote ⁹¹ makes clear, through the historical development of medicine, Maximus, for his part, associates sophistication with a lack of naivety on a philosophical plane to encourage his audience to adopt simplicity of manners. The mode of presentation, in this case, that is, the prosopopoeia of Asclepius talking about the early form of medicine, makes the narrative appealing, lively and particularly influential.

The same technique features in another instance, where this time, Maximus presents God as caring for the creation as a whole and not for particular aspects, like a sensitive doctor, whose aim is similarly to preserve the entire organism and not its individual parts. The personified Asclepius, this time, castigates the limbs for acting selfishly and disregarding the organism’s status as an integral whole:

The idea of individual body parts that should operate in the best interests of the whole organism appears in other authors of this period.Footnote ⁹³ Maximus’ divergences are obvious: he both fabricates the dialogue between Asclepius and the selfish bodily limbs and unpacks the whole–part concept by intertwining it with the image of God qua doctor.Footnote ⁹⁴ Along with his generally Platonising standpoint, Maximus’ relation to Stoic accounts of the body here may be another aspect of his rehabilitation from the pejorative label of the ruminate philosopher.Footnote ⁹⁵ Moreover, unlike the way in which the treatments mentioned above are used, Maximus dwells on the whole–part concept in another set of instances which illustrate how political order and social justice are attained: for example, just like diseased bodily members have to be cured to halt the damage spreading to the rest of the body, ‘so when a first act of injustice afflicts a household or a city, the canker must be stopped if the remainder is to be saved’.Footnote ⁹⁶ In particular, Oration 15.4–5 presents close similarities with Oration 5.4 cited above in that it likens the function of political society to the function of the bodily parts and in that it frames this comparison as a fictional dialogue between the body members and a Phrygian storyteller, who plays a similar role to that of Asclepius in the passage cited above.

III

All in all, this contribution has attempted to explore the multifarious ways in which Maximus of Tyre adjusts the medical imagery in his rhetorical speeches designed to familiarise his young pupils with the characteristic aspects of philosophy, especially moral philosophy. We have seen that in the pedagogical context of Maximus’ Orations, the use of the medical imagery facilitates not just clarity but also concept formation and the shaping of a moral outlook as well as the familiarisation with the ‘right’ literary references and (verbal and conceptual) clichés for admission into the club of the cultivated and the philosophically woke. We have shown that Maximus works with the typical analogy of philosophy as therapy of the soul but adjusts it to the demands of his philosophical teaching, particularly the need to be accessible as well as appealing so as not to discourage the members of the social elite who have just embarked upon their engagement with philosophy at an advanced level. We have also argued that Maximus accentuates various aspects of the medical encounter between doctor and patients (e.g. the recalcitrant patient who refuses to submit himself to the doctor, the doctor’s persuasion of the former, pleasure in medicine), the workings of the human body and the decline of the art of medicine to enable his young listeners to make sense of his argument and be persuaded by his admonitions. Moreover, we have remarked that Maximus uses the physician as an image for God and that he often connects medicine with Asclepius to stress its ideals of balance and stability but also to bestow authority on his own practice. As has been noted, Maximus’ medical imagery makes no use of medical technicalities and does not show any sharp contemporary social detail. What does emerge, however, is an important rhetorical point about what medicine as a given source domain makes available to the teacher/orator and how the skilled teacher/orator makes use of it. Medicine does not provide a fixed set of one-to-one readymade correspondences but rather a field of possibilities that is highly flexible in its application. According to need, different details from the domain can be focused on (physiology, doctor behaviour, patient behaviour, etc), and the same detail can be applied to a range of different targets. In that sense, a lot of Maximus’ skill as an orator/teacher lies in the perceptiveness with which he sees how the resources of the field can be turned to advantage differently in each new moment of need.

That Maximus’ work is full of medical references and associations reflects contemporary trends, given that health talk was part of mainstream elite culture in Maximus’ day, as can be seen from relevant discussions in Plutarch, Gellius (circa 125–after 180 AD), Aurelius’ correspondence with Fronto (circa 100–late 160s AD), and of course Aelius Aristides (117–181 AD). However, it also highlights Maximus’ own knowledge of Greek culture, and more especially, his distinctive ways of translating and appropriating that tradition. Medical imagery, therefore, valorises Maximus’ philosophical status and his claims to Second Sophistic cultural capital, functioning as a trademark for the rhetorical philosophy he wished to parade, which was, to his mind, still respectable, proper philosophy in this period, just as he was himself a major player in the contemporary philosophical tradition (albeit a self-proclaimed one).

Above all, the foregoing analysis has brought out the fact that medical imagery in Maximus does not simply reflect reality so as to make the speaker’s thought and material easier for his audience to digest, but rather it actively shapes and orients the audience’s moral decision-making and associated behaviour. The most important ethical behaviour Maximus sought to encourage in them through the analogy with the medical discipline is the cultivation of moderation, self-control and conscious deliberation. In that sense, the employment of medical imagery in Maximus can be correlated with the function of modern Concept Formation theory, which postulates that metaphor, including imagery, is not a decorative literary device in human culture but a conceptual tool to think and act with.Footnote ⁹⁷ The same can be said of Maximus’ overall approach to medicine, which despite an emphasis on its scientific basis (e.g. a focus on the prognosticating ability of the physicianFootnote ⁹⁸ or his professional judgment in diagnosis)Footnote ⁹⁹, is presented as culturally and socially informed in the Orations and is thus seen through the lens of medical anthropology which places health and disease at the forefront of human society, never at its periphery as a distant or irrelevant science. As we have seen, the medical metaphor in Maximus draws significantly on the role of medicine as experienced in the world around him and his audience, regardless of its Platonic precedents and invocations which, as we have noted, are meaningfully adjusted to Imperial-period reality. While passively reflecting what the speaker wished to say, medical images in Maximus actively affected the way his listeners thought and behaved, acting at the same time as both mirror and agent.