Asclepius and the Founding of Medicine
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Eryximachus — πάντα τὰ τοιαῦτα· τούτοις ἐπιστηθεὶς ἔρωτα ἐμποιῆσαι καὶ ὁμόνοιαν ὁ ἡμέτερος πρόγονος Ἀσκληπιός, ὥς φασιν οἵδε οἱ ποιηταὶ καὶ ἐγὼ πείθομαι, συνέστησεν τὴν ἡμετέραν τέχνην. ἥ τε οὖν ἰατρική, ὥσπερ λέγω, πᾶσα διὰ τοῦ θεοῦ τούτου
All such things. Understanding these, how to instill love and concord, our ancestor Asclepius — as these poets say and I am persuaded — established our art. So then medicine, as I say, wholly through this god,
Having just listed the sharpest bodily opposites — cold and hot, bitter and sweet, dry and wet — that a good doctor must reconcile into friendship (186d), Eryximachus now names the mythic founder of his craft: Asclepius, 'our ancestor,' credited by the poets (and believed by Eryximachus himself) with organizing medicine by instilling love and concord among these very opposites. The sentence runs on unbroken into 187a, where Eryximachus extends the same claim to gymnastics, farming, and finally music.
Eryximachus closes the list of bodily opposites he began at 186d by naming their founder. Asclepius, he says, is ho hēméteros prógonos — 'our ancestor' — a plural that claims the doctor's guild as literal kin, the way Hippocratic physicians called themselves Asklēpiádai, sons of Asclepius, and opened their oath by his name alongside Hygieia and Panacea. What Asclepius did, on this telling, was not cure one patient but found a technique: he learned how to put érōs and homónoia into things that had been at war — hot with cold, dry with wet. Homónoia is a political word before it is a medical one; Athenian orators invoke it constantly as the cure for a city split by faction, and Eryximachus imports it wholesale into the body, treating a patient's constitution the way a statesman treats a divided assembly.
Notice what backs the claim: 'as these poets here say, and I for one am persuaded' — ὥς φασιν οἵδε οἱ ποιηταὶ καὶ ἐγὼ πείθομαι. Eryximachus has spent this whole speech translating Pausanias's ethical Eros into a technical vocabulary of opposites and craftsmen, treating medicine as a science answerable to observation rather than to inherited story. At the one point where his art needs an origin — a founder, a warrant for calling Asclepius ours — he reaches past observation for the poets, and settles for being persuaded rather than shown. Plato returns to that gap between poetic authority and demonstrated knowledge throughout the corpus, most directly in the Republic's quarrel between poetry and philosophy; here it surfaces quietly, in a doctor's aside, just before he claims gymnastics, farming, and music for the same god.
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