It is an established Hellenistic topos that philosophy is the ‘medicine’ of the soul,Footnote ¹ in charge of ‘healing’ the soul in the same way as medicine is in charge of healing the body. The ‘diseases’ of the soul deemed to be in need of healing are its passions, that is, its fears and desires, and the moral ‘health’ that philosophers pledge to grant their followers is freedom from passions and hence peace of mind.

This description provides a clear-cut delimitation of competence between philosophy and medicine, with moral health being an object of philosophical, and bodily health of medical diagnosis and treatment. However, it leaves the question open of how to map diseases such as mania and phrenitis, which are not ‘diseases of the soul’ in the same way as passions are, yet have an impact on behaviour. I shall refer to these diseases as ‘mental’ for the sake of simplicity. However, the very fact that the ancients did not coin a term for them indicates that the concept was an elusive one in ancient thought.

In this paper I propose to examine the relevant discussion found in Caelius Aurelianus, a Latin doctor who lived in the fifth century a.d.,Footnote ² whose treatise on acute and chronic diseases was based on the work bearing the same title by Soranus of Ephesus, an influential doctor who lived between the first and the second century a.d. Footnote ³

Caelius’ dependance on Soranus enables us not only to place his discussion of mental diseases in the correct historical context, but also to assess its intrinsic value. For Soranus’ interest in psychological matters was so profound that he composed a treatise, now lost, On the Soul, in four books.Footnote ⁴

Caelius’ thesis is that mental diseases, as distinct from moral passions, are diseases of the body, thus pertaining to the medical domain. I shall suggest that: (1) his argument is to be read against the background of a controversy as to whether mental diseases pertain to the medical or to the philosophical domain, in which at least some doctors and philosophers had engaged themselves; (2) both camps made use of Stoic premises in their arguments; (3) Caelius makes a deliberately inappropriate use of these premises, isolating them from their context, for dialectical purposes; (4) by contrast, the defenders of the view opposite to his are loyal to Stoic doctrine, and give us insight into yet another application of the Stoic principle that whatever pertains to moral health falls inside the scope of philosophical therapy, and whatever falls outside it is morally worthless and thereby ‘indifferent’.Footnote ⁵

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Caelius does not address in a systematic way the question of whether mental diseases pertain to the medical or to the philosophical domain. However, he touches on it more than once when discussing individual diseases, thus enabling us to arrive at a fairly clear picture of his argument.

At Acute Diseases 3.109-11 Caelius refers to a distinction between two types of diseases affecting the soul. One is that of ‘diseases of the body, which also take a hold on the way of being of the soul’ (corporis passio[nes] [quae] etiam animae occup[ant] qualitatem). This, he argues, is the case of hydrophobia. Mania and melancholia—he adds—belong to the same class. The other type is that of the ‘diseases of the soul in the meaning of philosophers’ (animae passiones, ut philosophi uolunt), that is, moral passions, which are said to pertain to judgement (passiones … nostri iudicii).

There is no reason why a disease that originates from the body could not simultaneously be said to ‘pertain to judgement’ in the sense of affecting our decision-making process. However, Caelius treats the two descriptions as mutually exclusive. Thus we must understand the reference to judgement (iudicium) as indicating not just the subject of the disease but also, and primarily, its origin: one type of diseases affecting the soul has a bodily origin, the other a ‘judgemental’ one, whatever that means exactly.

This is not the only place where he mentions this standard for distinguishing between two types of diseases affecting the soul. In his discussion of mania at Chronic Diseases 1.144 he writes that Plato, the Stoics and some followers of Empedocles made a distinction between a type of mania that originates from the body (ex corporis causa uel origine; ex […] corporis compassione; ex corporis causa siue iniquitate) and another type which is described in varying terms and which I shall refer to as ‘intellectual’ mania. Plato is said to have described it as divinely inspired (furor diuinus siue immissus), providing the person suffering from mania with special skills beyond the ordinary; the Stoics are said to have identified it with lack of wisdom, because of which all unwise men are shown to be ‘mad’ (insipientiae genus, Footnote ⁶ quo omnem imprudentem insanire probant); the followers of Empedocles are said to have identified it with the state that follows from purifying the soul (ex animi purgamento). For my purpose it is enough to note that all of them, as Caelius reports their positions, agree on contrasting intellectual mania with another type said to have a bodily origin.

Caelius goes on to write that he will consider only the latter type of mania (de quo [sc. de furore qui fiat alienatione mentis ex corporis causa siue iniquitate] nunc scripturi sumus).Footnote ⁷ By doing so, not only does he advocate the distinction between two types of diseases affecting the soul, which is based on their supposed origin, but he also makes the additional move of claiming competence for himself, that is, for doctors, over those diseases whose origin is in the body.

However, this characterization of mental diseases was a matter of controversy. In his discussion of hydrophobia, to which I have already referred, Caelius also mentions the view, held by some unnamed authors and opposite to his, that hydrophobia is a disease of the soul. Their argument, as Caelius reports it, is that the disease is characterized by a desire to drink, and that desires, whatever their object, are moral passions. Greed and the pursuit of military glory or political honour are given as examples. As these people claim, the hydrophobic's desire to drink is similar in kind.Footnote ⁸ They are reported to be making the same point concerning another mental symptom of hydrophobia, that is, fear of water, after which the disease is named. As they argue, fear, whatever its object, pertains to the soul, not to the body.

Caelius does not tell us what point these authors wanted to make, but we can make a plausible conjecture. ‘Diseases of the soul’ for them were not only mental diseases, such as hydrophobia, but also, and primarily, moral passions. Indeed, their ground for classifying the former as ‘diseases of the soul’ is precisely their supposed similarity to the latter. Now if they believed that mental diseases and moral passions are similar in kind, they also presumably believed that the method of treatment is the same for both, that is, a philosophical one.Footnote ⁹

Support for this interpretation comes from another passage, Chronic Diseases 1.154, in which Caelius mentions a comparable conflict of classification. As he reports, some people claimed that mania pertains primarily to the soul. In response to them Caelius raises two objections. The second is that mania manifestly affects the body in the first instance, and only at a second stage the soul. The first is that no philosopher has ever handed down a treatment for it (neque quisquam philosophorum eius tradiderit curationem). The latter objection clearly addresses the question of competence, and the line of argument that Caelius adopts, that no philosopher has ever handed down a treatment for mania, makes best sense on the hypothesis that his opponents claimed that such treatment both existed and was the correct one. If the treatment they had in mind amounted to moral persuasion based on rational arguments, as philosophical treatments for moral passions typically do, it is not surprising if it fails to qualify as a treatment of the disease in the view of a doctor.

That just this kind of treatment was available on the market is borne out by Caelius’ subsequent discussion of what therapy to apply to mania (Chronic Diseases 1.167). Here he considers the case of patients of mania ‘wishing to hear the arguments of philosophers’ (philosophorum disputationes audire).

There is no need to think of these patients attending public lectures in which two or more philosophers argue against each other. The verb audire, which typically refers to a pupil-teacher relation, may well indicate a direct and personal relation, and the plural philosophorum is perhaps being used because the reference is not to a specific patient listening to a specific philosopher, but to the general case. Disputationes can be taken in the generic sense of ‘discussions’ or ‘arguments’ (cf. ThLL s.v. 5.1.1440.4–32). Thus the entire expression philosophorum disputationes audire may well refer to just one philosopher visiting the person suffering from mania at home and giving him personal advice. It is also possible, however, that the reference is simply to the patient of mania having his slaves reading philosophical treatises to him.

As to the content of this philosophical advice, this presumably comprised arguments to the effect that it is irrational to yield to anger, fear and sorrow, as is suggested by Caelius’ subsequent specification that philosophical treatments target these three states of the soul (timorem uel mansuetudinem aut iracundiam).

Interestingly, Caelius himself does not object to the patient receiving this kind of treatment, thus raising a question of consistency with the last passage we have reviewed (Chronic Diseases 1.154), in two different respects. One concerns whether or not a philosophical treatment exists according to Caelius. The other concerns his attitude towards it: does he reject it altogether, or is he willing to admit not only that it exists, but also that it is useful (ex quibus [sc. dictis philosophorum] non paruus profectus corpori commodatur)? And if the latter, what is the matter of disagreement with his opponents?

Key, I believe, is Caelius’ talk of amputare, as well as his further specification that the objects of this process of amputatio are fear, anger and sorrow. Amputare indicates the removal of a feature or a part of something, and it is not the same thing as curare. Accordingly, what is removed is said to be only the mental symptoms of mania, that is, fear, anger and sorrow, not mania as such, which, in Caelius’ view, being a disease of the body, is treatable with remedies that directly affect the body.Footnote ¹⁰

Thus Caelius may well contend that no philosopher has ever handed down a treatment for mania, while at the same time conceding that philosophical arguments are of some use within a wider-ranging therapy centred on medical remedies. However, philosophical therapy, in his view, targets only the mental symptoms of mania, without actually targeting the disease. Further, he is willing to allow it only if the patients request it (et si quidem philosophorum disputationes audire uoluerint, erunt adhibendae). If the patients do not, there is apparently no need of a philosophical therapy, not even in order to remove the mental symptoms of mania. Presumably in Caelius’ view these are merely by-products of the bodily disease and bound to vanish once this has been successfully treated by the doctor. It is tempting to speculate that philosophical arguments have for Caelius a purely placebo effect upon the patients fond of them, just like the amulets whose use his source Soranus at Gyn. 3.42 does not forbid if the patient believes in them.

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After examining the passages in which Caelius addresses the question of which classification and which treatment to apply to mental diseases, it is now time to put things together.

Caelius refers to a distinction between two types of diseases affecting the soul. One is that of mental diseases, which in his view originate from the body. The other is that of diseases of the soul that have no bodily origin, and which in one passage he describes as resulting from a misguided judgement, a description that he attributes to ‘philosophers’.

Caelius is not the only doctor to refer to a distinction of this kind. Anonymus Londinensis, a medical doxographer of the first century a.d., and hence slightly earlier in date than Caelius’ source Soranus, also does. Anonymus is a problematic source in several respects.Footnote ¹¹ For my present purpose it is enough to observe that he calls the diseases that affect the soul and yet, in his view, pertain primarily to the body—he mentions fever and mania—‘diseases of the body’,Footnote ¹² while granting the status of ‘diseases of the soul’ to moral passions alone, with explicit reference to the relevant philosophical discussion.Footnote ¹³

Although the context in Anonymus is one of definitions, the original context from which he borrowed the distinction between two types of diseases affecting the soul was arguably polemical, just as the context in Caelius. The argument for this is that Anonymus pairs fever, whose bodily nature was uncontroversial, and mania, whose classification as a bodily disease was controversial, as we learn from Caelius. This remarkable coupling is best explained on the hypothesis that it originates from an argument by analogy: if fever is a bodily affection, as everybody agrees, mania also is, on account of their similarity. Anonymus’ actual wording ‘similarly mania’ (μανία ὁμοίως) provides an echo of this analogical reasoning.

Further, Anonymus was aware that there was an issue of competence delimitation between doctors and philosophers, although he seems to believe that this question has already been settled: ‘Man is composed of soul and body. As there is no need to touch on it, I leave the discussion of the soul to others, but we must pay attention to the body, since medicine is chiefly concerned herewith.’Footnote ¹⁴

Anonymus’ testimony, condensed as it is, is important, because the doxographical nature of his work discourages the hypothesis that he would want to make controversial or idiosyncratic claims, or to address questions alien to mainstream medical agenda of the time. That the status of mental diseases indeed became the subject of a medical discussion is borne out also from the title of the treatise, now lost, of the Methodist doctor Julian, an older contemporary of Galen: On psychic and bodily diseases.Footnote ¹⁵ Whatever the reference of the expression ‘psychic diseases’ (πάθη ψυχικά), either moral passions as distinct from bodily diseases affecting the soul, or, less likely, bodily diseases affecting the soul as distinct from those that affect the body alone,Footnote ¹⁶ the treatise was clearly intended to address the question of how to classify mental diseases.

It is, then, somewhat surprising that the major medical author of the time, Galen, proves to be not interested in this question of classification, at least in the part of his output that has come down to us. However, it would be wrong to think that he was alien to the debate.

Galen, as we understand from the De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis, was very well acquainted with the view, whose prominent upholder was the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus, that moral passions are diseases of the soul and that philosophy, being in charge of healing them, is a medicine of the soul. Indeed, Galen wrote a treatise, De propriorum animi cuiuslibet affectuum dignotione et curatione, on how to treat passions by means of moral suasion, very much in the philosophical fashion.

By contrast, he discusses mental diseases with a bodily origin, as distinct from diseases of the soul, in the De locis affectis. Here he accounts for them in a way similar to Caelius’ and Anonymus’: mental diseases are bodily (brain) affections whose effects ‘sympathetically’ extend to the activities of the ruling part of the soul,Footnote ¹⁷ and treatment of this kind of diseases pertains to the domain of medicine.

A more detailed discussion of Galen's psychology and the problems it raises goes beyond the scope of this paper.Footnote ¹⁸ For my present purpose it is enough to say that Galen, while not offering a systematic discussion of the difference between mental diseases with a bodily origin and diseases of the soul, is nevertheless found treating them as two distinct types of diseases, with the former being curable by means of medical and the latter by means of philosophical remedies, in a way similar to Caelius and Anonymus.Footnote ¹⁹

If this is the camp of those who wanted to distinguish between mental diseases and moral passions, in what follows I shall take a closer look at the opposite camp, that of those who rejected this distinction and claimed that mental diseases pertain to philosophy.

Regrettably, Caelius gives us very little information about their identity and intellectual credentials. He attributes to them the claim that mental diseases such as hydrophobia and mania are primarily affections of the soul, thus being similar in kind to moral passions. But is the difference between mental diseases and passions not intuitive and self-evident? Were they seriously committed to the claim that, say, the fear of water characteristic of hydrophobia does not originate from a dog's bite but from the judgement that water is dangerous, for which the hydrophobic is himself morally responsible?

But then, of course, it is Caelius’ strategy to present his opponents’ position as weak as possible. If we want to make best sense of it, we cannot just rely on his presentation of it, but should place it in its original context by taking a closer and direct look at the arguments of philosophers, who are in charge of treating mental diseases according to Caelius’ opponents. As I shall suggest, they could find in these arguments far more support than Caelius wants us to believe. Philosophy is a very broad category. Thus our first task will be to establish what Caelius’ point of reference is when he speaks of philosophi at Acute Diseases 3.109–11.

Fortunately, this task of identification is less difficult than it might seem. In his discussion of mania, Caelius mentions Plato, the Stoics and certain Empedocleans as the authors of the distinction between two different types of mania. However, when we come to his argument on hydrophobia, the philosophical credentials of the categories in use are unequivocal: the claim that passions are errors of judgement, rather than irrational impulses of a lower part or function of the soul, voices a distinctive Stoic doctrine (e.g. Diog. Laert. 7.111: δοκεῖ δ' αὐτοῖς τὰ πάθη κρίσεις εἶναι, καθά φησι Χρύσιππος ἐν τῷ Περὶ παθῶν).

Even if we leave aside Caelius’ reference to this distinctive Stoic doctrine, with which he appears to agree, but with which we cannot take it for granted that his opponents also did, the description itself of passions as ‘diseases of the soul’ is Stoic (cf. Diog. Laert. 7.115), as, for that matter, Anonymus Londiniensis explicitly declares, although tracing it farther back to unnamed precursors.Footnote ²⁰ Thus it is Stoic theory that provides the conceptual framework of the controversy in which Caelius and his opponents are engaged and at which we should look, if we want to have a clearer picture of that controversy and to fill gaps in Caelius’ presentation of it.

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According to the Stoics, passions are diseases of the soul in the sense that they undermine a person's moral ‘health’,Footnote ²¹ just as bodily diseases undermine bodily health. There is a scholarly debate on the question of how to understand their definition: is their talk purely analogical, or are we to take them literally as saying that passions are actual diseases requiring physical therapy?Footnote ²² I believe that their talk is purely analogical.Footnote ²³ Be that as it may, surely passions were not for them diseases of the soul of the same kind as mania or phrenitis. For, according to them, all unwise men, from the mere fact of being unwise, are ‘mad’,Footnote ²⁴ and, conversely, the wise man will not become mad regardless of any mental pathology he might be experiencing (melancholia and delirium are mentioned), just as he will not become drunk even if overcome with wine.Footnote ²⁵

Thus the Stoics distinguished between a type of madness qua mental disease and another type qua lack of wisdom, as for that matter Caelius himself reports at Chronic Diseases 1.144. But what did the Stoics mean by their claim, counter-intuitive as it is, that the wise man will not become mad even if mentally ill?

The Stoic fondness for paradoxes is well known: the wise man is the most handsome man even if ugly, the richest even if poor, and so on. Statements of this kind are not impossible to make sense of, once we accept their redefinition of conventional values. However, a difficulty arises when we come to mental diseases: how can the Stoics dismiss them as irrelevant to moral or intellectual health?

The Stoic argument to the effect that mental diseases are not themselves diseases of the soul can be reconstructed by analogy with Seneca's account of anger in De ira. Seneca distinguishes between our pre-rational and mechanical responses to external stimuli, said to be out of our control (everybody, including the wise man, will experience boiling of blood and will feel like becoming angry under certain circumstances), and actual anger, which originates from the misguided judgement that it is right to take revenge.Footnote ²⁶ So long as, according to the Stoics, the initial mental jolt (primus ille ictus animi, as Seneca, De ira 2.2 calls it) that stirs us when we believe ourselves to have been wronged is a necessary and yet insufficient condition for becoming angry, this jolt falls short from qualifying as a disease or affection of the soul,Footnote ²⁷ and is at most an auxiliary cause of it.

By analogy with anger, the distinction that Diogenes implies for the Stoics as concerns mental diseases presumably is between abnormal states, cognitive or emotional, which are mechanically triggered by an external stimulus when we are ill and which result in, for instance, hallucinations and depression, and false or wrong judgements, for example the judgement that hallucinations are true or that it is right to yield to sorrow, which we may or may not make and for which we are responsible. Aristotle's distinction between φαίνεται and δοκεῖ at De insomn. 461b5–6 provides a parallel.

Indeed, mental diseases are neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for making false or wrong judgements, since laymen regularly make judgements of this kind regardless of any mental pathology.

Hence the Stoics arrive at their seemingly paradoxical conclusion that the wise man will not become mad even if he is mentally ill (Diog. Laert. 7.118, quoted in n. 25), thus implicitly qualifying mental diseases as morally indifferent for the Stoics, just like diseases of the body.Footnote ²⁸ The assumption is that our use of reason, though determined by our antecedent beliefs and judgements, is nevertheless free because it is not constrained by our immediate physical reactions.

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In the light of the Stoic position, as far as this can be reconstructed, the thesis Caelius’ opponents defended looks still weaker. It is not just that their blurring the distinction between moral passions and mental diseases is counter-intuitive. It is also the fact that philosophers, to whom they wanted to attribute competence over mental diseases, had themselves disavowed it. It will not help to postulate that the philosophical source of inspiration of Caelius’ opponents could be other than Stoicism. No philosopher or philosophical school is known to have made that claim of competence. Indeed, Caelius at Chronic Diseases 1.144 presents the distinction between intellectual madness pertaining to philosophy and, as it were, clinical madness pertaining to medicine as accepted by all the philosophers who had addressed the question.

However, things are not as simple as that. In what follows I shall suggest that Caelius, while borrowing from the Stoics the premises of his argument, actually makes an inappropriate use of them. Once we retrieve the correct line of the Stoic argument, it will emerge that Caelius’ opponents could legitimately base their own argument on it, and that their thesis was in fact more defensible than he wants us to believe.

Caelius detaches diseases of the soul qua moral passions from any ongoing physiological process, while positing that mental diseases pertaining to medicine can be identified by their bodily origin. He does attribute this move to the philosophi themselves. However, this cannot be correct if the reference is to the Stoics. According to them, no psychological state or event is purely psychological, and all have a physiological side.Footnote ²⁹

Take anger, a ‘disease of the soul’ that became a popular subject of philosophical disputations. According to the Stoics, anger results from the judgement that we have received an offence for which we should take revenge, and, given its judgemental origin, it qualifies as a disease or affection of the soul. However, according to the Stoics, this judgement and the subsequent outbreak of anger run in parallel with a physiological process that they identify as the boiling of blood, following Aristotle (De an. 403b1). A similar dual explanation, psychological and physiological, applies to all passions alike according to the Stoics.Footnote ³⁰

By contrast, the physiological and the judgemental provide two mutually exclusive explanatory patterns for Caelius, and, if we were to apply his argument to anger, even anger, as long as it is preceded by the blood's boiling, would not count as a disease of the soul. Thus the criterion adopted by him in order to distinguish between diseases of the soul and mental diseases, while incorporating Stoic concepts, is actually fatal to the Stoic edifice, because it would make the class of ‘diseases of the soul’ purely notional and empty, and thereby leave philosophical therapy without an object.

Caelius does not go so far as to argue for this conclusion, but he gets close to it on at least one occasion, when he maintains that not just hydrophobic thirst, but any longing for drink and food results from an affection of the stomach (Acute Diseases 3.110). If longing for drink and food do, virtually any longing, whatever its object, could be deemed to follow the same explanatory pattern in relation to other parts of the body. Sexual desire would be an obvious example. As a result, the Stoics would have to admit their lack of competence over all or most diseases of the soul.

The Stoic edifice is, however, safe, because the distinction they made was not between desires that result from a bodily cause and desires that result from a misguided judgement. All desires, in their view, result from a judgement, regardless of the fact that they are preceded and/or accompanied by physiological processes of some sort.

Perhaps Caelius just misunderstood the Stoics. Yet at least on one occasion (Acute Diseases 3.111) he seems to be aware that their original distinction was between the initial involuntary motus animi that precedes passions and actual passions themselves, as he specifies that the psychological states associated with a mental disease come about ‘by a matter of bodily necessity’ (ex corporis necessitate).

If Caelius was aware of this distinction, it is puzzling that he thematizes the origin, bodily or otherwise, of abnormal psychological states, and uses it as a criterion for deciding whether they pertain to medicine or philosophy. If Caelius’ inaccurate use of Stoic premises is not due to a misunderstanding, it is worth exploring the possibility that it is deliberate and aimed at adapting them to his own purposes. But what exactly were his purposes and how did he adapt Stoic premises to them?

As I have shown, Caelius refers to the distinction between bodily diseases whose effects extend to the soul and diseases of the soul ‘in the meaning of philosophers’, in order to delimit the competence areas of medicine and philosophy respectively. Caelius also gives us insight into the context in which to locate this controversy, that of some authors claiming for philosophers competence not only over ‘diseases of the soul in the meaning of philosophers’, but also over the abnormal psychological states associated with a mental disease. As these authors maintain, the supposedly bodily origin of these states has no bearing on their classification, and they are genuine diseases of the soul just like moral passions.

In reply to them Caelius brings the theme of necessity into the picture, and objects that hydrophobic longing for drink is mechanically triggered by hydrophobia, and therefore not a passion of the soul ‘in the meaning of philosophers’. In doing so he picks up a genuinely Stoic theme. However, on the Stoic account, the hydrophobic's mechanical stimulus to drink is not tantamount to a desire to drink, since desire to drink presupposes the judgement that drinking is good. Presumably, in the Stoics’ view, the hydrophobic wise man will resist that stimulus in the same way as he resists pain, not because he does not experience it, but because he decides not to yield to it.Footnote ³¹

Thus, we are in a position to fill a gap in Caelius’ presentation of his opponents’ argument. Their claim that all psychological states, including those associated with a mental disease, pertain to philosophy is not a departure from Stoic doctrine. On the contrary, it rests upon the genuinely Stoic thesis that all cognitive and emotional processes in humans give rise to a judgement, and that philosophy is in charge of correcting judgemental errors, including those of the patients of hydrophobia or mania.

Does this claim of Caelius’ opponents commit them to the non-Stoic idea that mental diseases are themselves diseases of the soul? At first sight this is the idea Caelius attributes to them. On a closer analysis, however, these people's claim of competence for philosophy covers only the psychological symptoms (fear, anger, sorrow) of mental diseases, not mental diseases as such, as we have seen when reviewing the relevant texts. From Caelius’ point of view this limitation invalidates their claim of competence (‘no philosopher has ever handed down a treatment for mania’). However, if his opponents believed that philosophical therapy was the correct one in spite of this limitation, we understand that to prevent mental diseases from developing into actual passions was for them all that is needed. So long as the patient of mania or hydrophobia has been successfully taught by the philosopher to resist anger, fear and sorrow, he will be morally healthy and will need no further treatment. Thus we are back to the Stoic paradox that the wise man will not become mad even if mentally ill.

By their argument Caelius’ opponents intended to justify philosophical intrusions in an area that Caelius and other doctors considered to be a distinctively medical one. It is a matter of speculation, but it squares very well with the argument they developed, that they were sympathetic to the Stoic idea that bodily health and mental health, as distinct from moral health, are indifferent.

It is, I suggest, in order to prevent intrusions of this kind that Caelius argues against them that psychological states such as fear, sorrow and anger, if associated with a mental disease, do not result from a misguided judgement in the way they do in the healthy. Rather, they are mechanical consequences of a bodily disease, and such that neither the patient nor the philosopher can help.Footnote ³² Only the doctor can.