Alexander Philalethes

1st-century BC Greek physician

Alexander Philalethes (Ancient Greek: 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 of Bithynia,^[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

^ Greenhill, William Alexander (1867). "Alexander Philalethes". In William Smith (ed.). Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Vol. 1. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. p. 125.
^ ^a ^b Octavius Horatianus, Rerum Medicarum Libri Quatuor, iiii. p. 102, d.
^ Caelius Aurelianus, On Acute and Chronic Diseases ii. i, p. 74
^ ^a ^b Strabo, xii. p. 580
^ Galen, De Differentiis Pulsuum iv. 4, 10, vol. viii. pp. 727, 746
^ Soranus, Gynaecology c. 93, p. 210
^ 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 (ed.). Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Vol. 1. p. 125.