Parmenide “naturalista risanatore”

A centuries-old tradition attributes competence in medicine to Parmenides. Archaeological discoveries following excavations in the area of Elea, Parmenides’ hometown, have offered a previously unseen image of the philosopher. Between the 1950s and the 1960s, archaeologists unearthed, among other finds, three stelae and a statue from the so-called insula II of Elea- Velia. The four artefacts date to the first century A.D. and three of them represent men who probably lived between the third and first centuries B.C. The inscriptions at the base of the statues would indicate that they were both physicians and pholarchoi, a mysterious title which may have meant they performed cultic functions related to incubatorial medical practices. The fourth find is the portrait of Parmenides, a bust atop an inscribed stele, which bears, next to his name, the words Ouliades physikos, meaning “healing naturalist”. Ouliades, like the name Oulis borne by the three physicians pholarchoi, probably alludes to Apollo Oulios, “healer”. This archaeological evidence suggests that during the age of Claudius, Velia wanted to celebrate an ancient consortium of physicians that derived intellectual authority from Parmenides. This link between the philosopher and medicine is also echoed in certain fragments of his poem On Nature, as well as in various indirect testimonies to Parmenides’ thought. Authors such as Aetius, Censorinus, Caelius Aurelianus, but also Aristotle, Theophrastus and Galen, attribute to him various theories on topics related to human physiology. Indeed, many sources report his reflections on the processes that determine the sex of the foetus or the similarities with the parents. Though often difficult to reconcile with each other, these testimonies indicated that Parmenides was interested in the investigation of topics of medical relevance. A similar view recurs in several texts by Arabic authors who dealt with the history of medicine between the ninth and eleventh centuries. In these works, Parmenides is recognized as one of the eight most important physicians of antiquity, a distinction also bestowed by Al-Mubaššir, whose work was reprised by John of Procida. The latter, a physician of the Salerno school, in his Liber philosophorum moralium, repeats the passage on the eight physicians, bringing back to the Campania region the tradition linking Parmenides to medicine.