Polisemia di nòmos e l'esordio di Hipp. de genitura

Abstract

Far from being, as has been said, “the bizarrest beginning of all the Hippocratic writings (...) deserving of therapy”, this paper aims to show that the opening words of the Hippocratic writing “On Generation” (νόμοϲ μὲν πάντα κρατύνει), in itself echoing a famous Pindaric motto, seem to be used first of all in order to evoke a cultural, intellectual and scientific world, in which the nòmos has become one of the most important keywords of the time. From this point of view, the Pindaric quotation seems to be played out on the wide semantic range of nòmos as well as on the ambiguous meaning of the verb κρατύνω, which in this embryological context denote specifically the consolidation and hardening process of the human embryo. Also, there is no need to correct, with some scholars, the Pindaric νόμοϲ of the mss. into the incoherent νομόϲ (“nutriment”).