e sanum,
Curas tolle graves: irasci crede profanum:
Parce mero: coenato parum; non sit tibi vanum
Surgere post epulas: somnum fuge meridianum:
Ne mictum retine, nec comprime fortiter anum:
Haec bene si serves, tu longo tempore vives."

Another collection of aphorisms, also medical and also in Latin, is that
of the Dutchman Hermann Boerhaave, published at Leiden in the year 1709;
it gives a terse summary of the medical knowledge prevailing at the
time, and is of great interest to the student of the history of
medicine.

APHRAATES (a Greek form of the Persian name Aphrahat or Pharhadh), a
Syriac writer belonging to the middle of the 4th century A.D., who
composed a series of twenty-three expositions or homilies on points of
Christian doctrine and practice. The first ten were written in 337, the
following twelve in 344, and the last in 345.[1] The author was early
known as _hakkima pharsaya_ ("the Persian sage"), was a subject of Sapor
II., and was probably of heathen parentage and himself a convert from
heathenism. He seems at some time in his life to have assumed the name
of Jacob, and is so entitled in the colophon to a MS. of A.D. 512 which
contains twelve of his homilies. Hence he was already by Gennadius of
Marseilles (before 496) confused with Jacob, bishop of Nisibis; and the
ancient Armenian version of nineteen of the homilies has been published
under this latter name. But (1) Jacob of Nisibis, who attended the
council of Nicaea, died in 338; and (2) our author, being a Persian
subject, cannot have lived at Nisibis, which became Persian only by
Jovian's treaty of 363. That his name was Aphrahat or Pharhadh we learn
from comparatively late writers--Bar Bahlul (10th century), Elias of
Nisibis (11th), Bar-Hebraeus, and 'Abhd-isho'. George, bishop of the
Arabs, writing in A.D. 714 to a friend who had sent him a series of
questions about the "Persian sage," confesses ignorance of his name,
home and rank, but infers from his homilies that he was a monk, and of
high esteem among the clergy. The fact that in 344 he was selected to
draw up a circular letter from a council of bishops and other clergy to
the churches of Seleucia and Ctesiphon and elsewhere--included in our
collection as homily 14--is held by Dr W. Wright and others to prove
that he was a bishop. According to a marginal note in a 14th-century MS.
(B.M. Orient. 1017), he was "bishop of Mar Mattai," a famous monastery
near Mosul, but it