Mustio - sometimes called ‘Muscio(n)’ in the codices - is one of the last representatives of the illustrious and fruitful series of writers from Vandalic Africa whose writings study the tradition of medical literature.  It seems most likely that his activity should be placed between the end of the 5^th and the 6^th c. (c. 500 AD).

Mustio is the author of a gynecological treatise in two books; entitled Gynaecia, it was aimed at educating its reader in obstetrics.  As Mustio himself declares in his preface, the treatise functions as a commentarius that summarizes Soranus of Ephesus’ Gynaecia (a text first translated into Latin by Caelius Aurelianus); in doing so, however, he uses the system of erotapocritical exposition that Soranus employed in the Cateperotiana - an introductory manual that is no longer extant - in order to present all of that author’s ideas with great brevity, and so to avoid the need for a large volume.  In its desire to offer the most comprehensible explanations, the treatise included a diagram of the uterus and a series of illustrations of the process “fetus in utero.”

Mustio’s Latin treatise was later re-translated into Greek and circulated under the name Μοσχίων.  In one part of the work’s manuscript tradition a section of pessaria follows the main text.

Thanks to its preface, we are confident that the Gynaecia was not the only work that Mustio translated from Greek.  Indeed, in describing his manner of translation as more attentive to transmitting the actual meanings of the source text (veritas rationis) than presenting a rhetorically formalized discourse (oratio), Mustio directs the reader to his Latin versions of Soranus’ treatises Opthalmicus, Chirurgumenus, Philiatros, and Boethematicus; another passage (2.2.24) cites a Commentarius febrium that may be a translation of the De febribus by the same Soranus of Ephesus.  [D. Paniagua; tr. C. L. Caterine].