Inventing Superstition from the Hippocratics to the Christians.(Book review)

doi: 10.1017/S0009640709000547

Inventing Superstition from the Hippocratics to the Christians.

By Dale B. Martin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. xii + 307 pp. $18.95 paper.

This book has many unique characteristics, from its subject matter to its style. It examines the history and development of the concept of superstition from the Hippocratics to the Christians in a comprehensive tour de force of ancient poetry, medicine, philosophy, history, and religion. The book is written in a delightful style that combines just the right amount of scholarly expertise and entertaining storytelling. It will be of interest to specialists in classics, religion, and philosophy, as well as to the general reader who is curious to have a peek into Greek and Roman daily and intellectual life.

In scholarship, the subject of superstition in classical antiquity is usually a part of larger studies of mythology, literature, science, religion, ritual, or magic. Naturally, this secondary treatment has deprived the subject of deeper understanding and more visibility. Martin's book breaks the ground of studying the concept of superstition in its own right as the forerunner of the important role the concept plays in the history of Christianity and, especially in its formative period, on the background of ancient paganism.

The book begins by introducing the concept of superstition in the context of Christian ritual practices and their misunderstanding by the officials in the Roman Empire. The second chapter discusses the difficulties of defining the meaning of "superstition" in antiquity. Unlike today, the term "superstition" with its closest Greek equivalent deisidaimonia had a conflicting spectrum of meanings, ranging from expressing piety and religiosity to expressing excessive fearfulness of the supernatural. The third chapter examines the presentation of the concept of deisidaimonia as excessive fearfulness of the supernatural in the fourth century B.C.E., in the Characters of Theophrastus, the pupil and successor of Aristotle in the Lyceum. The chapter offers an interesting glimpse of everyday life in Athens and its cultural conventions. The fourth chapter traces the origin of the concept in the Hippocratic writings and especially in the treatise On the Sacred Disease, which argues against laymen's supernatural explanation of epilepsy. The chapter also engagingly portrays the intellectual fervor with which medicine had to define itself as a separate discipline from philosophy, magic, and astrology. The fifth chapter analyzes the uses of deisidaimonia in Plato and Aristotle, with primary emphasis on the foundation of the critical assessment of myth in Plato and on the teleological systematization of the universe and human society in Aristotle. In opposition to the philosophers' rationalization of men's attitudes toward the gods, the sixth chapter reinstalls the notion of the ambivalence of the term deisidaimonia, as presented, in the first century B.C.E., in the works of Diodorus Siculus. Depending on the context, Diodorus uses deisidaimonia to mean "piety" or "superstition." He provides an overwhelming number of examples for each interpretation and, most important, leaves the question of the particular meaning of the word open to his audience to decide. This free-interpretation approach stands in stark opposition to the philosophers' attempt at rationalization of men's relations with the gods. In chapter 7, this new approach opens the possibility for Plutarch, in the first century C.E., to reintroduce the question of deisidaimonia on the philosophical stage as laymen's "ignorance about the true nature of the gods" (95). ...