A Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology

1. One of the most eminent of the followers of Herophilus (Galen, De Differ. Puls. 4.8, vol. viii. p. 736), whom Galen calls " no ordinary man " ( Comment. in Hippocr. " Epid. III." 2.4, vol. xvii. pt. i. p. 600), and who is said by Diogenes Laertius (7.1.35) to have been better able to think than to write. He lived probably at the end of

the third and beginning of the second centuries B. C., as he was a contemporary of Apollonius Empiricus [APOLLONIUS, p. 245], with whom he carried on a controversy respecting the meaning of certain marks (χαρακτῆρες) that are found at the end of some of the chapters of the third book of the Epidemics of Hippocrates. (Galen, ibid. 2.5. p. 618.) He gave particular attention to materia medica (Cels. De Medic. v. praef. p. 81.), and is perhaps the physician whose medical formulae are quoted by Galen (De Antid. 2.10, 11, vol. xiv. pp. 163, 171), in which case he must have been a native of Laodiceia. He is mentioned in several other passages by Galen, and also by Erotianus (Gloss. Hippocr. pp. 86, 216, ed. Franz.); perhaps also by Pliny (Plin. Nat. 22.44), Caelius Aurelianus (De Morb. Chron. 4.7. p. 530), Alexander Aphrodisiensis (De Febr. 100.2. p. 82, ed. Ideler), and Rufus Ephesius (De Appell. Part. Corp. Hum. 1.36. p. 44.), but this is uncertain. (See Littré's Oeuvres d'Hippocr. vol. i. p. 91, and Sprengel's Gesch. der Arzneikunde, vol. i. ed. 1846.)