In this special use, then, prophasi

In this special use, then, prophasis does not mean basic cause. It means a physical state which is in some way the forerunner or indicator of the disease or condition under consideration, the “physical antecedent of a physical state, sometimes even opposed to the basic cause. Transferred into historical matter it would be of the nature of an incident that touches off a war (e. g. the siege of Potidaea) rather than the underlying cause of the war. This use has been imitated very accurately by Thucydides, in the likeliest possible place, the description of the plague (II, 49). Between this use and that of prophasis in reference to the causes of the war there is no connection at all. It should be noticed, further, that the Hippocratic corpus does not show complete uniformity even in this technical usage.