Alexander Philalethes

Alexander Philalethes (Gr. Ἀλέξανδρος Φιλαλήθης) was an ancient Greek physician,[1] whom Priscian called Alexander Amator Veri (Alexander Truth-Lover),[2] and who was probably the same person quoted by Caelius Aurelianus under the name of Alexander Laodicensis.[3] He lived probably towards the end of the 1st century BC, as Strabo speaks of him as a contemporary.[4] He was a pupil of Asclepiades,[2] succeeded an otherwise unknown Zeuxis as head of a celebrated Herophilean school of medicine, established in Phrygia between Laodicea and Carura,[4] and was tutor to Aristoxenus and Demosthenes Philalethes.[5] He is several times mentioned by Galen and also by Soranus,[6] and appears to have written some medical works, which are no longer extant. The view, once current, that Alexander's Areskonta served as a doxographical basis for such authors as Anonymus Londinensis, Aetius the doxographer, Soranus of Ephesus, and Anonymus Bruxellensis is an inference on the basis of flimsy evidence.[7]

References

  1. ↑ Greenhill, William Alexander (1867). "Alexander Philalethes". In William Smith. Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. 1. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. p. 125.
  2. 1 2 Priscian, iv. p. 102, d.
  3. ↑ Caelius Aurelianus, On Acute and Chronic Diseases ii. i, p. 74
  4. 1 2 Strabo, xii. p. 580
  5. ↑ Galen, De Differentiis Pulsuum iv. 4, 10, vol. viii. pp. 727, 746
  6. ↑ Soranus, Gynaecology c. 93, p. 210
  7. ↑ Heinrich von Staden, "Rupture and continuity: Hellenistic reflections on the history of medicine," in Philip J. Van Der Eijk (ed.), Ancient histories of medicine: essays in medical doxography and historiography in classical antiquity, Leiden: Brill, 1999, p. 164

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Greenhill, William Alexander (1870). "Alexánder Philalethes". In Smith, William. Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. 1. p. 125.

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