An increased interest in ancient medicine is a welcome, relatively recent, development in classical scholarship. It is now recognised that medical texts impinge on many areas of Greek society, thought and literature; and it is observed that comparative study can lead to new insights. A close linguistic study of Hippocratic texts, most of which are contemporaneous with the writings of the leading authors of the classical period, has particular potential to illuminate the objectives pursued and the methodology employed in works that are overtly, but not exclusively, medical in subject matter and tenor.

C. analyses the techniques used by several medical writers to communicate and persuade, in relation to the techniques apparent in the work of their predecessors and contemporaries; this is well presented as an aspect of a pervasive agonistic culture. The number of medical texts chosen for analysis is restricted to five: On Ancient Medicine, On the Art, On Breaths, On the Nature of Human Beings and On the Sacred Disease. (The titles are listed as translated by C.; however, it may be noted that the traditional title, Nature of Man, has not been superseded in favour of the fashionable but rather cumbersome alternative, On the Nature of Human Beings: see the Appendix to the authoritative Cambridge Companion to Hippocrates, ed. P.E. Pormann [2018].) While the exclusion of aphoristic and other disjointed collections, as well as of documents such as The Oath, allowing concentration rather on works that are manifestly single-authored, is understandable, it is regrettable that the selection of treatises is so severely limited. The desired ‘manageable focus’ (p. 2) could have been maintained with the inclusion of a few more treatises; the familiar On Airs, Waters and Places or the somewhat less familiar On Flesh are particularly salient and regrettable omissions. As it is, the book (of which a Ph.D. thesis is the evident origin) is very short, and the pace of argument quite leisurely.

The title and subtitle aptly indicate the content of the work, and C. sets out his stall clearly at the start of the introduction. Throughout, questions of ‘orality’ and ‘persuasion’ are recurrent. The suggestion that the treatises were written but intended for oral dissemination (p. 52) perhaps makes insufficient allowance for writers’ continuing unthinking use of old oral techniques; similarly the change from verse to prose form was perhaps less conscious than here supposed (p. 30). In the development of rhetoric – as of medicine – Italy and Sicily are much more important than Athens (stressed p. 7; but see also p. 9). A major strength of the book is the close analysis of linguistic expression and stylistic elaboration. In this respect, Chapter 4 on the persuasive intent of sound patterns and Chapter 5 on antithesis are more original than Chapters 2 and 3, which are more introductory in exploring the usefulness and relevance of the terms logos and epideixis to Hippocratic narrative texts.

There is a full bibliography (but it does to some extent replicate information given at the end of each chapter in lists of references) and a short appendix summarising the five works considered (but this is somewhat otiose). Overall, the style of writing is lucid, accessible and engagingly jargon-free. The book is a useful contribution to ongoing scholarly debate on the meshing of literary and oral composition in the late fifth century bc.