On the Unity of the Hippocratic Treaty "De Natura Hominis": a Statistical Study

Abstract

In the present article the author would like to shed new light on the controversy about the unity of the Hippocratic treatise De natura hominis. After the erudite edition of the Greek text by Jouanna (1975), scholars generally agree that the treatise De natura hominis constitutes a compositional unity which includes the chapters 16-22, also known as De diaeta salubri. Nevertheless, the author of this paper has undertaken the task of re-examining the pros and cons of the debate from a new point of view. Consequently, he has taken as a methodological starting-point the application of Statistical Linguistics through the implementation of the Student-Fisher t test and the Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. According to his research, based on the statistical study of asyndeton, conjunctions, parataxis and hypotaxis, the chapters of the so-called De diaeta salubri should be detached from the treatise De natura hominis and considered as an independent work.