Io ̄anne ̄s of Alexandria (500 – 700 CE?)
Physician (iatrosophiste ̄s) and teacher in the Alexandrian school; his name is typically Christian.
He refers vaguely to his teacher, assumed without secure evidence to have been G
P. He authored commentaries on at least two treatises of the H C:
E VI and Nature of the Child. The works are typical of the Alexandrian school in
their Gale ̄nic interpretation of Hippokratic medicine. Io ̄anne ̄s might have written other
works, lost in Greek, but preserved in Arabic, such as a commentary on G’s Theriac.
This work and other commentaries on Gale ̄nic treatises such as De pulsibus attributed in the
Arabic versions to an unspecified Io ̄anne ̄s may be best ascribed to this man (or a homo-
nym?), all the more because this man is often confused with several Arabic authors includ-
ing Io ̄anne ̄s grammatikos. It is unlikely that our Io ̄anne ̄s of Alexandria was responsible
for the manual on nosology and therapeutics contained in a unique manuscript of Paris as
by an otherwise unknown homonym.
Ed.: C.D. Pritchet, Iohannis Alexandrini Commentaria in librum de sectis Galeni (1982); J.M. Duffy, John of
Alexandria, Commentary on Hippocrates’ Epidemics VI. Fragments. Commentary of an Anonymous Author on
Hippocrates’ Epidemics VI. Fragments (1997) = CMG 11.1.4.
Diels 2 (1907) 51; RE 9.2 (1916) 1800 (#25), H. Gossen; Temkin (1932) 66–71; KP 2.1430 (#13),
F. Kudlien; Ullmann (1970) 89–91; I. Garofalo, “La tradizione araba del commento di Ioannes
grammatikos al De pulsibus di Galeno,” in A. Garzya and J. Jouanna, edd., I testi medici greci.
Tradizione e ecdotica. Atti del III Convegno Internazionale Napoli 15–18 ottobre 1997 (1999) 185–218; P.E.
Pormann, “Jean le grammarien et le De sectis dans la littérature médicale d’Alexandrie,” in I.
Garofalo, A. Roselli, Galenismo e medicina tardoantica: fonti greche, latine e arabe (2003) 233–263; BNP 6
(2005) 897, V. Nutton.
Alain Touwaide
Ioanne ̄s of Alexandria, Philoponos, Grammatikos (ca 510 – 570 CE)
Born ca 490; studied at the Academy in Alexandria under A A
(S H) and probably taught there, although he never held the chair of philo-
sophy. A Christian Neo-Platonist, his name probably indicates his association with a
group of lay Christians, the philoponoi. His earliest surviving works are Neo-Platonic com-
mentaries on A, as well as more elementary works, including a treatise on the
astrolabe and an introduction to N’ Arithmetic. Four of these commentaries
(on the Prior and Posterior Analytics, De anima and De generatione et corruptione) derive from
Ammo ̄nios’ lectures, edited and augmented by Philoponos. Commentaries on the Physics,
the Categories and the Meteorologica also survive. Starting around 529, when Justinian closed
the Athenian Academy, Philoponos wrote a series of anti-eternity polemics, including
Against Proklos on the Eternity of the World and the fragmentary Against Aristotle on the Eternity of
the World. His natural philosophical corpus culminated in De opificio mundi, written in the 540s
(although some dispute this date), an attempt to harmonize pagan natural philosophy with
the account of creation in Genesis. For the remainder of his career he focused his formidable
intellectual talents on Christian theological matters, including developing a doctrine of the
trinity based on a rigorous application of Aristotle’s definition of substance. This doctrine,
called “tritheism” by its opponents, ultimately led the Church to anathematize Philoponos
in 681.
The commentaries written with Ammo ̄nios are traditional, Neo-Platonic exercises aim-
ing to construct a harmonized and systematic philosophy from the writings of P and
IO ̄ANNE ̄S OF ALEXANDRIA