# Aphorisms

- id: aphorisms
- original title: Ἀφορισμοί / Aphorismoi
- author: Hippocrates
- language: Greek
- composed: c. 400 BCE
- field: medicine

The most memorized text of ancient medicine, beginning with the most famous sentence in it: life is short, the art long. Medical students recited it in Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew and Latin for over two thousand years.

## The chain

- **c. 840–873** Greek -> Arabic, translation as "الفصول" [attested]
  Hunayn ibn Ishaq (translator), Baghdad
  Made from the Greek through Hunayn's own Syriac, and carried as the lemmata of his translation of Galen's commentary, which is how the freestanding Arabic text circulated.
  Evidence: Overwien 2015 (the Greek-Syriac-Arabic working method reconstructed)
  - **c. 1077–1098** Arabic -> Latin, translation [attested]
    Constantine the African (translator), Monte Cassino
    Translated with Galen's commentary during Constantine's Monte Cassino years. It displaced the late antique Latin version that had circulated since Ravenna, entered the Articella, and gave Salerno's practical school its theoretical backbone.
    Evidence: Burnett 1994

## Worth knowing

Latin Europe already had a late antique Aphorisms, translated from Greek around the 5th or 6th century. Constantine the African's new version from the Arabic, carrying Galen's commentary with it, displaced that older text and entered the Articella, the bundle of treatises on which European medical examinations were built for centuries.

## Sources

- Overwien, Oliver (2015). The Paradigmatic Translator and His Method: Hunayn ibn Ishaq's Translation of the Hippocratic Aphorisms from Greek via Syriac into Arabic. Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 3.
- Burnett, Charles and Jacquart, Danielle (eds.) (1994). Constantine the African and Ali ibn al-Abbas al-Magusi: The Pantegni and Related Texts. Brill.

Confidence grades: attested (named in the medieval record or settled in scholarship), probable (standard view with real uncertainty), disputed (scholars disagree).