First Greek edition of the Libri medicinales, books 10 and 14, of the Aëtios of Amida (6th century AD) including German translation, medical-historical-philological commentary and source analysis

Direction: PD Dr. Mathias Witt
Funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 386999510
Research associate:  Dr. Irene Cala

Within the framework of the project, a critical scientific text edition of the books 10 and 14 of the Early Byzantine medical collection (lógoi iatrikoí, Libri medicinales) of the Aëtios of Amida (6th century A.D.), which have never before been edited in Greek, is to be produced on the basis of all known manuscripts, thus closing the last major editorial gap in the literature of ancient medicine. The edition is also to be made accessible to a larger readership by means of a German translation and a philological-medical-historical commentary. In addition, a new editorial procedure will be chosen for the edition of Byzantine compilations, which will ensure the greatest possible user-friendliness for researchers: For the first time, an additional concordance volume is to be produced in addition to the actual edition part, in which the Aëtios text and the source texts excerpted by Aëtios (if transmitted) are compared synoptically in the original wording. Deviations of the texts are marked in the text synopsis by a system of graphic markings, so that the user can immediately see which passages Aëtios has shortened, modified or reformulated. In this way, the excerpt technique of Aëtios will be systematically visualized and prepared for further analysis, which will also be useful for philology and the history of ideas, so that the last unpublished early Byzantine medical texts in the Greek original can be made accessible to a broad research audience (classical philologists, medical historians, pharmacy historians, scientific historians, Byzantinists, cultural scientists) through a critical text edition.