Galen and Stoic rhetoric.

T SOPHISTS are at dinner, and among them Athenaeus places Galen as well as the less identifiable physicians 'Daphnus of Ephesus' and 'Rufinus of Nicaea'.l The connection between rhetoric and medicine is in fact an old one, going back to the beginnings of both in the first sophistic period.2 We might expect, however, that the connection would be especially well marked in the second century A. D. No one can think of Fronto and Aelius Aristides without remarking the obsession with health, healing, and medicine that dominates their works; for E. R. Dodds, in fact, the hypochondria of Fronto and Aristides was one symptom of an age of anxiety.3 On the other hand, Galen, the greatest physician of the age, for all that he was a master of argument and persuasion, rejected rhetoric and expresses nothing but contempt for those who were deluded by it or devoted to it. Perhaps it is Galen's emphatic scorn for rhetoric or his failure to provide us with a systematic exposition of his ideas on it that accounts for the lack of scholarly attention to his views on the subject.4