Who was Akilaos? A Problem in Medical Historiography

In the years before the conquest of Alexandria by the Arabs in 642, Alexandrian scholars produced compendia, summaries, and commentaries on Galen's writings and other works in the Hippocratic medical tradition. This paper concerns the identities of those Alexandrian commentators—two in particular, whose names are reported in Arabic texts, but about whom little else is known—and the routes by which Galenic medicine was transmitted to other parts of the Mediterranean world after Alexandria's fall. We review debates over the identity of "Akilaos" and "Anqilaos," and argue that "Akilaos" is not merely a scribal duplication, as some have supposed. Instead, we suggest a connection with the city of Aquileia in northern Italy, as a source for the name "Akilaos" and as a route by which Alexandrian medical texts reached northern Italy (where their Latin versions subsequently were associated with a "Ravenna school" of medicine).