Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-j7cmm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-09T04:18:38.072Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

NICANDER'S JAUNDICE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 December 2020

Phillip Bone
Phillip Bone*
Affiliation:
Exeter College, Oxford
*
phillip.bone@classics.ox.ac.uk
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

At Alexipharmaca 472–5, Nicander compares the sea hare to the cuttlefish and describes the latter's defensive mechanism of ink emission before turning to a symptom of sea hare poisoning, a change of skin colour:

      οἷά τε σηπιάδος φυξήλιδος ἥ τε μελαίνει
      οἶδμα χολῇ δολόεντα μαθοῦσ’ ἀγρώστορος ὁρμήν.
      τῶν ἤτοι ζοφόεις μὲν ἐπὶ χλόος ἔδραμε γυίοις
      ἰκτερόεις […]

[the sea hare also resembles] the cowardly cuttlefish, which blackens the swell with its bile upon learning of the fisherman's crafty attack. A dark green, indeed, runs over the limbs of [those who ingest sea hare], similar to that of jaundice.

Information

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 70 , Issue 2 , December 2020 , pp. 898 - 901
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association.

At Alexipharmaca 472–5, Nicander compares the sea hare to the cuttlefish and describes the latter's defensive mechanism of ink emission before turning to a symptom of sea hare poisoning, a change of skin colour:Footnote 1

οἷά τε σηπιάδος φυξήλιδος ἥ τε μελαίνει
οἶδμα χολῇ δολόεντα μαθοῦσ’ ἀγρώστορος ὁρμήν.
τῶν ἤτοι ζοφόεις μὲν ἐπὶ χλόος ἔδραμε γυίοις
ἰκτερόεις […]

[the sea hare also resembles] the cowardly cuttlefish, which blackens the swell with its bile upon learning of the fisherman's crafty attack. A dark green, indeed, runs over the limbs of [those who ingest sea hare], similar to that of jaundice.Footnote 2

Greek medical literature recognizes multiple types of jaundice, usually two.Footnote 3 In addition to the expected range of light colours characterizing one type,Footnote 4 there are also references to a darker form, often related to problems of the spleen.Footnote 5 This second type of jaundice is associated with black bile, for example by GalenFootnote 6 and Aretaeus.Footnote 7 The connection is never expressed explicitly in the extant Hippocratic corpus, but a testimonium for such a passage allows for the possibility that it was known to medical authorities of Nicander's day (Codex Parisinus Supplementum Graecum 636, 33.1.4 Garofalo):Footnote 8

Ἱπποκράτης δὲ δισσὸν οἴεται εἶναι τὸν ἴκτερον, ὅτι καὶ δισσὴν τὴν χολήν, καὶ τὸν μὲν ἐπὶ ἥπατος φλεγμονῇ γίνεσθαι, ὃν καὶ χρυσοειδῆ ὀνομάζει, τὸν δὲ σπληνός, ὅν περ ὠχρομέλανα καὶ ἰοειδῆ κέκληκεν⋅ ἄμφω δὲ κατὰ ἀνάχυσιν τῶν χολῶν σὺν τῷ αἵματί φησι γίνεσθαι.

Since descriptions of the darker form of jaundice are consistent with Nicander's colour––compare especially ζοφόεις χλόος to Aretaeus’ μελάγχλωρος (n. 7)––it is remarkable that ‘black bile’ makes an appearance in lines 472–3. The poet's choice of χολή (dependent on μελαίνω) to describe the ink of the cuttlefish elicits the comment in Eutecnius’ paraphrase that χολὴ μέντοι παρ’ ἐνίων ὁ ἐξ αὐτῶν ὠνόμασται γιγνόμενος θολός (17). The absence of such a use of χολή elsewhereFootnote 9 suggests that those who called ink bile were few, and it is possible that Eutecnius is simply making an inference from Nicander's text. The poet was presumably aware of Aristotle's account of the cuttlefish's ink secretion at Hist. an. 524b,Footnote 10 and his decision to refer to the ink as bile in place of the metrically possible dative form of θολός, the mot juste, may be designed to engineer a connection between the ink of the cuttlefish and the colour change caused by sea hare poisoning.Footnote 11 Knowledgeable readers of Nicander's day could have seen the ‘black bile’ and the dark jaundice in close proximity as a sort of learned joke.Footnote 12 For us, the connection can demonstrate the extent of Nicander's medical knowledge beyond the strict requirements of his material.Footnote 13

The Alexipharmaca is a structurally simple poem: for the most part, the symptoms of each substance or creature are described, followed by suggested remedies. Monotony is avoided by the inclusion of a number of small-scale digressions, similes, and so on. This example demonstrates the care which Nicander has the capacity to take over his deployment of such material: in the preceding lines we have moved from the sea hare to other creatures based on a similarity of appearance, and now the apparent abruptness of the return to the ‘primary’ subject is softened by a different sort of connection.Footnote 14 Another point worth noting is the key role of word choice in the creation of the connection. Readers of Nicander could be forgiven for the occasional feeling that he revels in obscurity for its own sake by the use of words other than the most obvious, but here we can see something a little more sophisticated: the connection requires χολή rather than θολός, and this can explain the poet's choice. In context, of course, χολή, which is occasionally applied to fluids other than bile elsewhere,Footnote 15 is hardly likely to have given many readers interminable difficulties. Certainly, however, the unusual word choice gives us pause, and allows for another layer of appreciation of the lines over and above their straightforward content. There is no denying that, per se, Nicander's peculiar lexicon is an important aspect of his style, but perhaps this passage, in combination with Ther. 62 (see n. 12), should encourage us to give more thought to why particular words are deployed in particular places.Footnote 16

Footnotes

My thanks go to CQ's anonymous reader for some useful suggestions, to the editor Patrick Finglass, and to the organizers of the Graduate Work in Progress seminar at Oxford where I presented an earlier version of this note.

References

1 The sea hare is normally identified with Aplysia depilans: Thompson, D.W., A Glossary of Greek Fishes (London, 1947), 142–3Google Scholar.

2 Although Eutecnius in his paraphrase seems to understand two separate colours (ἀλλ’ οὖν ζοφώδης μὲν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐπανθεῖ τοῖς μέλεσι καὶ δυσαλθὴς χροιά, ἴκτερος δὲ ἐπινέμεται παντὶ τῷ προσώπῳ [17]), we are surely dealing with one, as in the translations of Gow, A.S.F. and Scholfield, A.F., Nicander: The Poems and Poetical Fragments (Cambridge, 1953), 125Google Scholar and Jacques, J.-M., Nicandre: Œuvres, vol. 3 (Paris, 2007), 44Google Scholar.

3 The Hippocratic De internis affectionibus even describes four varieties, with colours described as ὠχρός, πελιδνός, ὠχρός and λευκός respectively (35–8).

4 E.g. ἡ χροιὴ ὅλη σιδιοειδὴς σφόδρα ἐστὶν ἢ χλωροτέρη οἵη οἱ σαῦροι οἱ χλωροί ([Hippoc.] Morb. 3.11.1); χροιῇ χλοήβαφοι⋅ ἢν δὲ κατακορέως ἔωσιν ἰκτερώδεες, τοῦ λευκοχρόου εἴδεος (Aret. 3.13.2, on the effects of liver suppuration); οἱ μὲν ἰκτεριῶντες ὠχρὰ πάντα θεᾶσθαι δοκοῦσιν […] (Gal. De symptomatum causis 1, Kühn 7.99). Note too luridus, luror and pallor in Lucr. 4.332–6.

5 E.g. ἴκτεροι οἱ ἀπὸ τοῦ ἥπατος, ἐς τὸ ὑπόλευκον, καὶ οἱ ὑδαταινόμενοι, καὶ οἱ λευκοφλέγματοι⋅ οἱ δὲ ἀπὸ σπληνός, μελάντεροι, καὶ [οἱ] ὕδρωπες, καὶ οἱ ἴκτεροι⋅ ([Hippoc.] Epid. 2.1.10).

6 καὶ οἱ ἀπὸ σπληνὸς δὲ κακοπραγοῦντος ἴκτεροι μελάντεροι […]. καθόλου γάρ, ὅταν ἐνδεέστερον ἢ προσῆκεν εἰς ἑαυτὸν ἕλκῃ τὸν μελαγχολικὸν χυμόν, ἀκάθαρτον μὲν τὸ αἷμα, κακόχρουν δὲ τὸ πᾶν γίγνεται σῶμα (Nat. Fac. 2, Kühn 2.133).

7 ἢν χολῆς ξανθῆς, λεκιθώδεος ἢ κροκοειδέος, ἢ τῆς μελαγχλώρου ἐς τὸ παντελὲς ἀνάχυσις ἀπό του σπλάγχνου γένηται, τὸ πάθος ἴκτερος κικλήσκεται (3.15.1).

8 The information given by Galen (n. 6) seems to be included in the material from Hippocrates and others with which Erasistratus (third century b.c.) did not find fault: ταῦτ’ οὖν ἅπαντα πρός τε τὰς διαγνώσεις τῶν νοσημάτων καὶ τὰς ἰάσεις μεγίστην παρεχόμενα χρείαν ὑπερεπήδησε τελέως ὁ Ἐρασίστρατος (Kühn 2.133–4). Galen's approach in this area of Nat. Fac. 2 has been described as ‘manipulating the treatises in the Hippocratic writings’ (Stewart, K.A., Galen's Theory of Black Bile: Hippocratic Tradition, Manipulation, Innovation [Leiden, 2019], 104–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 120) and so we should perhaps not place too much weight on this evidence for knowledge of the connection in Hellenistic medicine. Neither Galen nor Aretaeus seems to depend on the other in their discussions of black bile and the darker form of jaundice, however, and this may lead us to suspect that the association at least predates the two of them (for Aretaeus’ date, see S.M. Oberhelman, ‘On the chronology and pneumatism of Aretaios of Cappadocia’, ANRW 2.37.2 [1994], 941–66, at 941–59; the ‘safe’ dating range for the author seems to be the first and second centuries a.d., with the former more likely).

9 Noted by Gow and Scholfield (n. 2), 197.

10 Even if—as Gow and Scholfield (n. 2), 197 point out—Plin. HN 9.84 describes the ink differently, as an atramentum which cuttlefish have instead of blood (not quite just as blood, as Gow and Scholfield claim).

11 The choice of χολή allows for a verbal echo in χλόος, which may highlight the connection. It would be interesting to know whether Nicander was the first to compare the colour caused by sea hare poisoning to that of jaundice; later the same idea appears in Ael. Prom. Περὶ τῶν ἰοβόλων θηρίων καὶ δηλητηρίων φαρμάκων 79 and Aët. Amid. 13.55. Both accounts are extremely similar to the poet's, to the point of making influence by Nicander or a prose source for the Alexipharmaca likely (cf. Jacques [n. 2], LXVI). Scribonius Largus, the only other author whom I have found to describe a colour change, does not mention jaundice (186). Even if Nicander were not the first to introduce jaundice, juxtaposition of this ‘jaundice’ with a digression concerning cuttlefish ink specifically called ‘bile’ seems unlikely to have occurred in a prose toxicological treatise.

12 The creation of an additional layer of possible appreciation (requiring some external knowledge) through unusual word choice is not unparalleled in Nicander: Overduin, F., Nicander of Colophon's Theriaca: A Literary Commentary (Leiden, 2014), 211–12Google Scholar demonstrates something similar for Ther. 62. The striking collocation ἔρσεται ἀγλαύροισιν (the verb seemingly invented from ἕρση and the adjective apparently used to mean ἀγλαοῖς) in a description of mint seems to hint at the daughters of Cecrops, and Overduin has shown that we can understand a special point in the mythological reference here: ‘these two daughters are indirectly mentioned in the context of a plant that is used to ward off snakes. Whereas originally Herse and Aglauros died because of snakes, they live on in the Theriaca to prevent others from doing so’, (at 212).

13 For Nicander as a reader of at least some medical prose in addition to a potential toxicological treatise, see Oikonomakos, K., ‘Les Alexipharmaques et le corpus hippocratique: Nicandre lecteur d'Hippocrate?’, REG 112 (1999), 238–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar. He considers the reasonably large number of phraseological echoes of Hippocrates in the Alexipharmaca to be evidence of Nicander's ‘réfection’. We need not infer from such observations that Nicander was also a doctor, as has Jacques, J.-M., ‘Médecine et poésie. Nicandre de Colophon et ses poèmes iologiques’, in Leclant, J. and Jouanna, J. (edd.), La médecine grecque antique. Actes du 14e colloque de la Villa Kérylos à Beaulieu-sur-Mer les 10 & 11 octobre 2003 (Cahiers de la Villa Kérylos 15) (Paris, 2004), 109–24Google Scholar, at 112–13.

14 Cf. Overduin (n. 12), 54–7, on what he calls ‘pseudo-associative composition’ in the Theriaca, a studied version of the apparent spontaneity of archaic didactic. Perhaps our passage and the preceding lines demonstrate a play on the associative style: the initial move, based on visual similarity, has the ring of a natural progression of thought, but the intricacy of the connection back to the ‘primary’ subject betrays a deeper level of planning in the arrangement of material.

15 E.g. at Diod. Sic. 4.11.6, of the hydra's venom.

16 Papadopoulou, M., ‘Scientific knowledge and poetic skill: colour words in Nicander's Theriaca and Alexipharmaca’, in Harder, M.A., Regtuit, R.F. and Wakker, G.C. (edd.), Nature and Science in Hellenistic Poetry (Leuven, 2009), 95–119Google Scholar does not discuss this passage (or include ἰκτερόεις in her list of colour terms, 100–7), but it could be thought to support her general point that colour is an area in which Nicander treads the line between ‘science’ and ‘poetry’.