Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Faculty of Language, Literature and Humanities - Galen's Commentary on the Hippocratic Aphorisms

The biographies of Hippocrates in the Greek, Latin and Arabic tradition

The aim of my dissertation project is to provide a comprehensive literary study of the extant biographies of the ancient physician Hippocrates of Cos in the Greek and Arabic tradition. In doing so, I will not only examine the reception and characterisation of the persona of Hippocrates but also the broader context in which the biographies were transmitted. For the Greek tradition, this applies to the so-called Literatenviten which – despite their popularity in late antique and Byzantine times – have not yet been sufficiently studied, for the Arabic tradition to major gnomological and biobibliographical writings such as the Ṣiwān al-ḥikma cycle of texts, al-Mubaššir ibn Fātik’s Muḫtār al-ḥikam or Ibn Abī Uṣaibi‘a’s ‘Uyūn al-anbā’. In addition, I will also study the interrelations of the Arabic lives of Hippocrates among each other and towards their Greek sources, by asking, i.a., which source texts the Arab biographers used and how they changed or adapted these sources for their own purposes.