Franco Giorgianni (ed.), Hippokrates, über die Natur des Kindes (De genitura und De natura pueri), ins Deutsche und Italienische übersetzt und textkritisch kommentiert, Serta Graeca, Band 23, Wiesbaden, Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2006 pp. xiii, 363, €110.00 (hardback 978-3-89500-493-3).

Abstract

Franco Giorgianni's new edition with translation and commentary of these two Hippocratic treatises appears thirty-six years after Robert Joly edited both texts for the Collection des Universites de France (Bude) and twenty-five after Iain Lonie published an exhaustive commentary on them that continues to be a reference and inspiration for scholars working on Hippocratic texts. Both writings, though transmitted separately in the manuscript tradition under the titles of On generation and Nature of the child, have unanimously been considered a single work on embryology since Emile Littre's edition of Hippocrates’ Complete works. The text covers the human reproductive process, beginning with male and female seed and ending with birth. Giorgianni's book is based on the reworking of his 2003 Hamburg doctoral thesis. It contains a general introduction, a German translation facing the Greek text, a thirty-page commentary dealing exclusively with textual matters, an Italian translation, and three indexes (Greek words, general index, and index locorum). The book is completed by a bibliography and the reproduction of some pages of the Greek manuscripts used for the edition. Though this is mainly a philological work, besides the chapters on composition, authorship, tradition and reception, the introduction also provides an overview of the medical ideas used by the author regarding physiology and embryology. The author of On generation / Nature of the child represents an exceptional case in the context of the Hippocratic Collection, as he also wrote other works that are today extant, namely the book Diseases IV and some parts of the gynaecological treatises—the ones identified by H Grensemann (Knidische Medizin, Berlin, 1975) as the so-called C-level. This information provides an unusual tool for the Hippocratic editor, who is in a position to argue in terms of the author's style. Giorgianni makes good use of this, as he has used for the first time the parallel passages in the gynaecological treatises to support a particular manuscript reading. Moreover, his codicological description of the five main Greek manuscripts transmitting the text is very accurate and will serve as a reference for future editors, as will the results of his study of the direct and indirect tradition. Several of the changes in the text with regard to Joly's edition are simply the result of maintaining the readings of the manuscripts instead of trying to reconstruct a more coherent Hippocratic dialect. In this sense Giorgianni dissociates himself from the trend followed by most of the recent editors of Hippocratic texts, whose work on the manuscript tradition of different texts has undoubtedly contributed to an overview of the Ionic dialect used by the Hippocratic authors. We are far from being certain when dealing with this issue, but printing a text that lacks coherence regarding orthography and morphology does not seem to be a better solution. Other changes originate from a detailed assessment of the textual tradition and a careful reading of the Greek text (for instance at 148,6, 152,24 or 162,19) confronting it with parallels in other Hippocratic writings and showing to what extent the Index Hippocraticus is an indispensable reference tool for scholars working on Hippocratic texts. Other authors’ conjectures find a place in the critical apparatus and many textual decisions are thoroughly justified in the commentary and confronted with the alternatives. Giorgianni is to be congratulated for his accurate philological work. His book well deserves to be placed on our shelves beside Lonie's commentary.