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 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

1. 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.
2. Priscian, iv. p. 102, d.
3. Caelius Aurelianus, On Acute and Chronic Diseases ii. i, p. 74
4. 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 (ed.). Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Vol. 1. p. 125.