80

André Dacier (1651-722), translator of Horace, Plutarch, Plato, and Aristotle, was also the author of a translation of the principal treatises by Hippocrates in 1697. With this book, he wanted to show that the Ancients, of whom he was one of the great partisans, had been the clear precursors of the Moderns. Determining to what extent modern science broke with the science of antiquity or, on the contrary, was its continuation, was one of the great questions that troubled the various actors of the quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns. Dacier’s translation and the accompanying comments leave no doubt about his great understanding of the methods and pitfalls of the history of literary and scientific ideas.