[The image of Byzantine medicine in the satire "Timarion"]

Byzantine medicine is usually regarded as a static and non-creative descendant of classical Greek medicine, a point of view confirmed by the Byzantine medical texts. In this essay, the anonymous satire "Timarion" is analyzed in respect to its image of contemporary medical theory. Timarion, the fictive narrator, falls ill with a fever and is brought to Hades by two conductors of souls. They assert that he cannot survive, because he has secreted all his elementary bile. According to a decree by Asclepios and Hippocrates posted in Hades, any person that has lost one of his four elements may not live longer. In Hades Timarion sues to the court of judges of the dead. His lawyer, the sophist Theodore of Smyrna, persuades the judges that the bile excreted by Timarion has not been elementary in the sense of humoral pathology. So Timarion is allowed to return to life. The author of the satire ridicules the fundamental axiom of the four humours. Asclepios, Hippocrates and Erasistratos, who are attached to the infernal court as experts, cannot defend their theory against the convincing arguments of a sophist. The "divine" Galen, who probably would have been able to, is absent in order to complete a book of his. The "Timarion" with its harsh critique of medical theory is very amusing and a rare example of "actuality" in Byzantine literature.