INTRODUCTION

From the earliest surviving Greek literary texts – the Iliad and Odyssey – moral value terms appear in characterizations of physicians, of their activities, of their relations to patients, and of their attitudes. As in many spheres of Greek culture, so too in the ancient Greeks’ uses of these value terms a considerable heterogeneity of rival views becomes visible. The absence of centralized control over physicians in Greece, the lack of any licensing and of formal professional sanctions, and the aggressive competitiveness and adversariality that marked much of ancient Greek culture all contributed to the diversity of views held not only by, but also about physicians. Whereas some Greeks, for example, agreed with the Homeric hero Idomeneus that “a healer (iatrós) is a man worth many men, [since he knows how] to cut out arrows and to sprinkle gentle drugs on [wounds]” (Iliad 11. 514–15), others depicted physicians as greedy, unscrupulous charlatans who collected fees by impressing patients and onlookers with ostentatious displays that merely veiled their ignorance and incompetence. It is impossible to do justice to this diversity of ancient views within the scope of this chapter; the reader therefore would be well advised to keep in mind that only a few conspicuous strands in Greek medical ethics are singled out for consideration here.