He was born in Amida in Mesopotamia (what is now the city of Diyarbakir in Turkey), but at some point moved to Constantinople. His writings refer to Petrus—the personal physician to Theodoric of the Ostrogoths—as a contemporary, which would indicate that Aëtius was writing at the end of the 5th century or early in the 6th.
As a Byzantine Greek in the 5th-to-6th centuries, he was likely a Christian. His closeness to the emperor(s) of Constantinople can be discerned by the title sometimes attached to his name in records: κόμης ὀψικίου ("komés opsikiou"), the "chief officer" who is part of the emperor's retinue. He might have been given official duties outside of his medical profession, since he traveled to copper mines on Cyprus, and at Jericho and the Dead Sea.
His great work was Sixteen Books on Medicine, which later editors thought to organize into four tetralogies. He does quote the Greco-Roman Galen and Oribasius (personal physician to the Roman Emperor Julian), but adds much original information. Some of his work directly applied to pregnancy—or rather, avoiding such. He is known to have developed a concoction for causing a pregnancy to abort; the ingredients are not known. He also developed a contraception medicine consisting of aloe, pepper, saffron, and the seeds of the wallflower (a member of the cabbage family).
He described a condition of the skin, a particular kind of blemish that arises when one is in the "acme" of his or her life, during puberty. Due to a typographical error, however, when he described it as part of the acme (ἀκμή) of life, the word was written as ἀκνή, accidentally substituting the "n" sound in place of the "m" sound. The word "acne" never having been seen before, it was assumed that this was his name for the blemishing, and the scourge of adolescent complexions through the ages got its name.
About his contemporary, Petrus; or rather, about Petrus' chief patient: I've referred to Theodoric more than a few times, but haven't yet dug into the details of the man who was king of one thing or another from 471 to 526—a pretty substantial length of time. It's time we looked into his life in a little more detail, which we shall do tomorrow.
