Prolegomena to Medicine: The Role of the Hippocratic Aphorismi

In most late antique canons of Hippocratic texts, the Aphorisms hold an introductory position. The traditional explanation is that they represent a ‘comprehensive’ or ‘universal’ work, which covers all the parts of medicine. In this respect, the first aphorism played a fundamental role in Late Antiquity. Some manuscripts preserve anonymous general introductions to the medical art, which are clearly based on re-elaborations and quotations of the Aphorisms and of the first aphorism in particular. The paper will explore these prolegomena that manuscripts hand down detached from proper commentaries, along with the introductions that late-antique scholars (such as Stephanus of Athens, in the 6th century) - used to open their own commentaries on the Aphorisms. From this analysis, it will be reasonable to argue that in the late antique reading of Hippocratic texts the Aphorisms played an introductory role, which shows many similarities to the role that Galen’s De sectis played in the Alexandrian medical curriculum.