[Aretaeus of Cappadocia's reading of the Hippocratic Corpus]

Aretaeus' debt to Hippocrates, evident in his adoption of the Ionic dialect and of a syntax closely imitative of that of the Hippocratic treatises, goes deeper still. In the wake of the work of K. Deichgräber, this paper analyses echoes of Hippocrates in the eight books On Acute and Chronic Diseases in an attempt to show the frequency of the quotations and their argumentative function. The study shows clearly that Aretaeus gives special weight to those treatises of the Hippocratic Corpus which had been the subject of commentaries, and that he assumes that his readers are sufficiently familiar with those treatises to be able to identify references not explicitly indicated in the text. These Hippocratic treatises supply Aretaeus with his starting point for a definition of ethics and medical etiquette.