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One of the most impressive contributions of the ancient Greeks to Western culture was their invention of rational medicine. It was the Greeks who first evolved rational systems of medicine free from magical and religious elements and based upon natural causes. Here for the first time in the history of medicine were displayed strikingly rational attitudes that resulted in a radically new conception of disease, whose causes and symptoms were now accounted for in terms of purely physical causation.

It is clear from our earliest literary sources, however, that attitudes towards sickness and disease in the heroic age of Greece were not essentially different from those of the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians, who invoked supernatural agencies to explain the causes of disease. In Egypt and Babylon diseases were held to be caused by malignant demons. Similarly, in ancient Greece sickness and disease were linked with the supernatural. As the Roman encyclopaedist Cornelius Celsus has written, 'morbos . . . ad iram deorum immortalium relatos esse' (diseases were attributed to the wrath of the gods). In ancient Greece, however, it was generally believed that the gods, for the most part, acted directly and not through the intermediary of demons or evil spirits. In the opening book of the Iliad, for example, the plague that decimates the Greek army besieging Troy is represented as supernatural in origin, sent by Apollo in punishment for Agamemnon's arrogant treatment of his priest, Chryses, who had come to the Greek camp to ransom his captured daughter. In Hesiod's Works and Days it is Zeus this time who sends famine and plague, which kill men and render women barren. On a more individual level, the arrows of Apollo and those of his sister Artemis are held to be the causes of the sudden onslaught of disease. Among their victims are numbered the six sons and the six daughters of the unfortunate Niobe, who had boasted that she was superior to their mother, Leto, who had produced only two children.

It has been claimed that Hesiod earlier in the Works and Days puts forward a different conception of disease from that found elsewhere in Greek epic and believes that diseases come upon mankind in the natural order of things and are not dispatched in accordance with divine whim. Here Hesiod describes how Zeus, angered by Prometheus' theft of fire on behalf of mortals, sought vengeance by creating the woman Pandora, so called because all the Olympians gave her a gift as a 'bane to men who eat bread'. When he had created this 'insurmountable snare', he sent her with Hermes as a gift to Epimetheus and the latter, unmindful of his brother's forewarning, accepted her. Previously the 'tribes of men' had lived on earth free from ills and grievous diseases. But Pandora took the lid from the jar that contained the gifts and scattered these evils abroad. (Only Hope remained within the jar.) Consequently 'Countless plagues wander among men; for the earth is full of evils and the sea is full. Diseases spontaneously [automatai] come upon men continually by day and by night silently bringing mischief to mortals; for wise Zeus took away speech from them.'

Upon the basis of the above it has been claimed that these diseases came upon men, not as the result of divine agency, but entirely of their own accord. It should not be overlooked, however, that, even though the diseases are described as having the power to act spontaneously, they were initially the (deadly) gifts of the gods. It should also be borne in mind that the object of the Olympians' collective wrath is mankind as a whole and not any particular group or individual. The form of the myth explains its lack of specificity here. Hesiod's conception of disease, then, is not essentially different from that found elsewhere in Greek epic. Like Homer, he remains committed to an ontological conception of disease, regarding it as an entity possessing a separate existence of its own. Even though the diseases here have the capacity to act spontaneously, Hesiod, like Homer, believes that their origin is ultimately divine. . .

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