Agathinus ( grc, Ἀγαθῖνος) was an eminent
ancient Greek
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic peri ...
physician
A physician (American English), medical practitioner (Commonwealth English), medical doctor, or simply doctor, is a health professional who practices medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring health through th ...
, the founder of a new medical sect, to which he gave the name of
Episynthetici.
Agathinus was born at
Sparta
Sparta ( Doric Greek: Σπάρτα, ''Spártā''; Attic Greek: Σπάρτη, ''Spártē'') was a prominent city-state in Laconia, in ancient Greece. In antiquity, the city-state was known as Lacedaemon (, ), while the name Sparta referre ...
and must have lived in the 1st century AD, as he was the pupil of
Athenaeus
Athenaeus of Naucratis (; grc, Ἀθήναιος ὁ Nαυκρατίτης or Nαυκράτιος, ''Athēnaios Naukratitēs'' or ''Naukratios''; la, Athenaeus Naucratita) was a Greek rhetorician and grammarian, flourishing about the end of th ...
, and the tutor of
Archigenes
Archigenes ( gr, Αρχιγένης), an ancient Greco-Syrian physician, who lived in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD.
Archigenes was the most celebrated of the sect of the Eclectici, and was a native of Apamea in Syria; he practiced at Rome in the ...
. He is said to have been once seized with an attack of delirium, brought on by want of sleep, from which he was delivered by his pupil Archigenes, who ordered his head to be fomented with a great quantity of warm oil.
Agathinus is frequently quoted by Galen, who mentions him among the
Pneumatici.
[Galen, ''De Dignosc. Puls.'' i. 3. vol. viii. p. 787.] None of his writings are now extant. The precise opinions of his sect are not known, but they were probably nearly the same as those of the
Eclectici
References
Sources
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Further reading
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1st-century Greek physicians
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