An anonymous work, preserved in a manuscript of the 1st century ce from Egypt, about several medical issues (definition of basic concepts, medical historiography on the causes of disease, physiology of digestion), Anonymus Londiniensis represents a rare example of an autograph from antiquity. An important source for peripatetic doxography and the reception of Hellenistic medicine.The papyrus P. Lit. Lond. 165, now held in the British Library as inv. 137 (P. Brit. Libr. inv. 137), was published first in 1893 by Hermann Diels, who learned of it through Fridericus G. Kenyon’s first notice.1 Diels set immediately to work, with the help of Kenyon, and produced the edition after a very short time. The papyrus, as reconstructed by Kenyon (with some later additions in 1901), is a roll around 3.5 metres long. Thirty-nine columns, almost complete, are preserved: one or two columns are missing at the beginning, as is at least one between columns IX and X. The text breaks off abruptly halfway down col. XXXIX. The handwriting suggests a date around the later part of the 1st century .
Archytas led the democratic Greek city-state of Tarentum and served as a successful general. He was a leading mathematician in the first half of the fourth century bce and a prominent Pythagorean philosopher. He famously sent a ship to save Plato from the Tyrant Dionysius I of Sicily, although his relationship to Plato was complex. Only four fragments of his genuine writings survive, but many fragments of works forged in his name are found among the Pythagorean pseudepigrapha. He solved the famous mathematical puzzle known as the duplication of the cube and gave a celebrated argument for the infinity of the universe. He was the foremost Pythagorean music theorist and devised mathematical descriptions of the musical scales of his day. He championed the four mathematical sciences that became the quadrivium of the Middle Ages. Anecdotes about him convey an ethics that values reason over pleasure and praises self-control.Archytas is most famous in the modern world for having sent a trireme to rescue .
