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Thirty years ago, H. Flashar discussed the introduction to an anonymous commentary on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates. The text contains an interesting picture of Hippocrates as a culture hero, who saved suffering humanity by the introduction of systematic medicine. The first section of this introduction offers some complicated problems. It ends with an extremely long and difficult sentence, which, has not yet been explained quite satisfactorily, and it contains a curious use of the verb σαρκόω, combined with τν ϕύσιν, which has led Flashar to suspect Christian influence. These two points are the subject of the first part of this paper.

Two problems involving Thucydides and medicine have attracted intense treatment by classical scholars and medical men working separately or in combination. They are, first, the nature of the Athenian Plague which Thucydides describes and, second, the possibility of his having been influenced by the doctrines and outlook of Hippocrates and his followers. It is the purpose of the present paper to reconsider both these problems, to indicate some false assumptions made in the methodology of previous attempts to identify the Plague, and to suggest a somewhat radical revaluation of Thucydides' approach to medical matters compared with that of Hippocrates (if, indeed, the surviving evidence about Hippocrates' method has any validity).

This paper explores the political thought and literary devices contained in the pseudo-PlatonicEighth Letter, treating it as a later response to the political thought and literary style of Plato, particularly the exploration of the mixed constitution and the mechanisms for the restraint of monarchical power contained in theLaws. It examines the specific historical problems of this letter, and works through its supposed Sicilian context, its narrator's assessment of the situation, and the lengthy prosopopoeia of the dead Syracusan politician Dion, before concluding with a consideration of its contribution to our knowledge of Greek political thought after Plato.