The huge corpus of writings of the doctor-philosopher Galen of Pergamum (129–c.216 CE) keeps expanding through new finds every five years or so, mostly translations from the original Greek into Arabic, Latin or still other languages. But in 2005 two treatises in Greek were discovered, or perhaps rather recovered: On His [or: My] Own Opinions (Περὶ τῶν ἑαυτῷ δοκούντων) and On Avoidance of Distress (Περὶ ἀλυπίας). These treatises, together with several known ones, are contained in the mid-15th century manuscript Vlatadon 14, named after the Byzantine monastery in Thessaloniki that keeps it. Antoine Pietrobelli, then a PhD student sent there by his supervisor, Véronique Boudon-Millot (CNRS, Paris) found On My Own Opinions listed in its table of contents. On Avoidance of Distress, it turned out a little later, was also contained in Vlatadon 14. In addition, Vlatadon 14 includes a full text of another treatise, On His Own Books, known until then from only one other Greek witness (apart from the Arabic tradition), viz. Ambrosianus gr. 659 (mid-XIV–XV c.), to which it is clearly related.[1] As such, it provides valuable evidence, particularly since it helps mend damaged spots and lacunas in Ambrosianus.[2]
A microfilm of Vladaton 14 was examined by Pietrobelli, Boudon-Millot and Jouanna, which in due course resulted in editions of the two tracts.[3] The editors of the new edition under review here, Ioannis Polemis and Sophia Xenophontos, have profited from being granted direct access to the manuscript—a favour which the ecclesiastic authorities had denied to the French team (see Preface, p. 5). There is a sense of the Elgin Marbles here. At any rate, the present editors justify their work by their conviction that, with due acknowledgement of the labours of their predecessors, we are still without a definitive edition (cf. p. 26). Their volume opens with a brief introduction (by Xenophontos) to Galen and his work in general and to the two treatises concerned. This is followed by an introduction (by Xenophontos and Polemis) to the critical edition. This includes a selection of about forty textual problems (a large majority of which concern Indol.) where the editors have opted for different solutions than their predecessors. Some but not all of them seriously impact interpretation. The discovery of Vlatadon 14 was a momentous event in classical scholarship, but it also marks the start of a lot of editorial and interpretive work. As it is, the MS contains many scribal errors and is here and there badly affected by moisture. In what follows I focus on the significance of the discovery of the two treatises.
Vlatadon 14 is the only manuscript to preserve a full Greek text of Galen’s On His Own Opinions (or On My Own Opinions, Περὶ τῶν ἑαυτῷ δοκούντων, De propriis placitis, standardly abbreviated Prop. Plac.). Until its discovery it was known from a Latin translation based on an Arabic intermediary and a Graeco-Latin version by Niccolò da Reggio (active 1308-1345). In addition, a few fragments in the original Greek had been identified as such, the longest of which, in the ‘twin manuscript’ (Boudon 2010), Ambrosianus gr. 659, presents the final three chapters under the misleading title On the Substance of the Natural Faculties. This is how it became known and found its way in the Opera Omnia edition of Galen by G.C. Kühn (Leipzig 1821-1833).[4] To these witnesses a few others of lesser importance from Arabic sources can be added. That these texts belonged together as deriving from Galen’s lost On His Own Opinions and permitted an almost complete reconstruction had been known for some time.[5] Due to various circumstances, however, it was not until 1999 that an edition of these fragments by Vivian Nutton appeared in the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum series.[6] Nutton’s presentation of what may be called the secondary evidence remains useful because the text presented by Vlatadon 14, as we have noticed, is affected by moisture and scarcely legible in some places.[7]
On My Own Opinions is not catalogued by Galen in his so-called ‘bio-bibliographies’, On the Order of His Own Books and On His Own Books, and so probably postdates them. Given their purpose these two other works are dated to the final part of Galen’s life and this then also applies to On His Own Opinions, which has its backward-looking quality in common with the other two. In consequence, it has been dubbed ‘Galen’s philosophical testament’ (Nutton 1987). In his On His Own Books Galen authenticates his own treatises. The On the Order of His Own Books provides guidance to students of medicine, differentiating between beginners and advanced students and between those intending become skilled practitioners and those aiming at a complete mastery of the art including its theoretical parts and philosophical foundations. On His Own Opinions is complementary to the other two treatises: it authenticates his positions on a number of traditional issues of philosophy and medicine alike: just as other people’s books may be put into circulation under Galen’s name, his true views may be distorted and misinterpreted, which calls for his own authoritative voice in order to avoid this from happening, as is illustrated by the anecdote about the poet Parthenius with which the treatise opens: the poet intervened in a debate between two grammarians about the meaning of one of his own poems he happened to overhear (Prop. Plac. ch. 1). But unlike Parthenius Galen cannot call upon actual persons to act as witnesses to his real identity. So, he refers his readers to other treatises for the evidence that his positions are as stated here and for the arguments supporting them. Galen’s reading guides can be paralleled from so-called ancient isagogic or prolegomena literature. The striking thing is that he did not leave it to others to take care of this, in his old age or after his own demise, as in the case of other authoritative corpora, but wrote them himself. (This also includes the biographical part of the prolegomena, given Galen’s autobiographical passages in these treatises and strongly autobiographical treatises such as On Prognosis and the lost, interestingly titled On Slander. But in fact autobiographical passages are scattered throughout Galen’s voluminous writings. These reflect the ideal of the agreement between life and doctrine we know from the prolegomena literature also. Galen’s healing stories are therefore success stories and, as G.E.R. Lloyd aptly observed, rather un-Hippocratic).
In her introduction Xenophontos (pp. 13–25) refers to the doxographic tradition as reconstructed in our time by Mansfeld and Runia in their Aëtiana project. Apart from the very title of Galen’s treatise, there are certainly correspondences between it and the issues known from doxographic tradition, which covers natural philosophy but also includes medical issues and views represented. Overall, doxographic literature presented those issues on which different authorities were supposed to take distinctive positions. Galen was of course familiar with this tradition, on which he could draw for examples of insoluble speculative issues, but which he also used or imitated when he presented diaeretic schemas of possible or actually held options in particular debates. His sensitivity to the limits of knowledge also becomes apparent in On His Own Opinions. He is concerned to distinguish sharply between those things that can be securely known and on which Galen feels able to take a firm stance and those which lie beyond the ken of human knowledge (but are often useless for scientific or moral progress anyway). In addition, he distinguishes positions he or others take in terms of their plausibility, which reveals input from the Sceptical Academy in relation to Galen’s interest in Plato’s qualification of the physical and medical theories expounded in the Timaeus as a ‘likely’ story or account. This also enables Galen to explain some of his changes of opinion: in his youth he found the view that the heart is the first to be formed in the embryo more plausible than others but later, on the basis of his anatomical researches, he abandoned it in favour of the liver (ch. 10). But he also returns to his recurrent theme of those traditional issues where the truth cannot be established, such as the substance of the soul, and on which he duly suspends judgement (e.g. chs. 2, 7). Already in the Arabic and European world of later centuries it annoyed some readers that Galen after a long career in research felt unable to come out in favour of a particular option in debates like this but, equally annoyingly, kept returning to them. The argument of the treatise has a meandering quality, which is not conducive to attractiveness, and it stops rather abruptly. But since both qualities are also found in much earlier works, it cannot be maintained that they supply proof of old Galen’s failing mental powers, or the unfinished state of this tract. But because of its style and content, but certainly also because its place and function in the Galenic oeuvre, one may see why it has been preserved in one MS only.
Unlike On His Own Opinions, On Avoidance of Distress has long been completely lost: only its title was known because Galen lists it in On His Own books 15.2 (Kühn XIX, 45; Boudon 2007a, 169). Its discovery caused quite a stir. Academics of neighboring fields who had never shown any interest in Galen threw themselves at it as if it could shed new light on, say, the interpretation of the New Testament. Conferences were held, in due course followed by the publication of proceedings.
On Avoidance of Distress is one of Galen’s more strictly ethical treatises (and as such stands in a line of ancient On Distress tracts comparable to the On Anger literature, etc.). In it we therefore find Galen relying upon traditional arguments from cognitive therapy (e.g. about realizing the true value of things we may lose) such as deployed by Stoics and other philosophers and much less on arguments involving somatic factors. Galen covers much of the same ground, though more fully and with greater attention to the bodily condition, in his On the Diagnosis and Cure of the Soul’s Affection, which, ironically, has been known for centuries. To be sure, there are certain point in On Avoidance of Distress that are new: we get valuable glimpses about Galen’s library, since the occasion for writing this letter-treatise is the question from an old friend from Pergamum how Galen succeeded in coping with the loss of his library, drugs and medical equipment in the great fire that hit home in Rome in 192 CE. In addition, there are glimpses of Galen’s acting as a mental coach for senators living under threat under the Emperor Commodus, who had recently died at the moment of writing.
Even so, it is very good to have the complete Greek text in at least one MS. In their new dition Polemis and Xenophontos feel induced to diverge from the earlier ones on many occasions, as is clear from their introduction and full critical apparatus. It is however clear that many textual uncertainties and controversies remain so that one remains curious about future editions in such series as the Budé or CMG Galen editions.
Works cited
Boudon-Millot, V. and A. Pietrobelli 2005. ‘Galien ressuscité: Édition princeps du texte grec du De propriis placitis.’ Revue des études grecques 118: 168–213.
Boudon-Millot, V., ed. 2007a. Galien. Tome 1. Introduction générale, Sur l’ordre de ses propres livres, Sur ses propres livres, Que l’excellent médecin est aussi philosophe. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
Boudon-Millot, Véronique (ed. & tr.) 2007b. ‘Un traité perdu de Galien miraculeusement retrouvé, le Sur l’inutilité de se chagriner : texte grec et traduction française.’ In La science médicale antique : nouveaux regards. Etudes réunies en l’honneur de J. Jouanna, ed. Véronique Boudon-Millot, Alessia Guardasole, Caroline Magdelaine. Paris: Beauchesne. 72-123.
Boudon-Millot, Véronique; Jouanna, Jacques (eds & tr.) 2010. Galien Ne pas se chagriner. Collection des Universités de France. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
Boudon-Millot, V. 2014. ‘Vlatadon 14 and Ambrosianus Q 3: Two Twin Manuscripts’, in C.K. Rothschild and T. Thompson, eds. Galen’s De indolentia. Essays on a Newly Discovered Letter. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck: 41–56.
Garofalo, I. and A. Lami. 2012. Galeno. L’anima e il dolore. De indolentia, De propriis placitis. Milano: BUR Classici greci e latini.
Nutton, V. 1987. ‘Galen’s Philosophical Testament: “On My Own Opinions”’, in Wiesner, Jürgen, ed. Aristoteles, Werk und Wirkung. Bd. II: Kommentierung, Überlieferung, Nachleben. Berlin-New York: De Gruyter. 27–51.
Kotzia, P. and P. Sotouridis, 2010. ‘Γαληνού περὶ ἀλυπίας’, Hellenica 60: 63–148.
Nutton, V., ed. 1999. Galen, On My Own Opinions. CMG V 3,2. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Nutton, V., introd., transl. 2014, ‘Avoiding Distress’, [esp. 100-106: The text of chapters 4–5 and 16–18] in P. N. Singer, ed. Galen. Psychological Writings. Cambridge Galen Translations. Cambridge: CUP.
Wakelnig, E. 2012. ‘Fragments of the Hitherto Lost Arabic Translation of Galen’s On My Own Opinions in the Philosophy Reader MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Oriental Collections, Marsh 539’, in R. Hansberger; M. Afifi al-Akiti; C. Burnett, eds. Medieval Arabic Thought. Essays in Honour of Fritz Zimmermann. London: Warburg Institute; Turin: Nino Aragno Editore 221–238.
Notes
[1] On the relation between Ambrosianus gr. 659 (formerly Q 3 Sup.) and Vlat. 14 see Boudon 2014. Vlat. 14 was used by Boudon for her edition of On His Own Books and On the Order of his Own Books in the first volume of the Galen edition in the Budé series (2007a).
[2] On the discovery of Vlatadon 14 see further Boudon-Millot and Jouanna 2010, VII-IX; Rothschild and Thompson 2014, 3-10.
[3] Indol: The first publication of the text see Boudon 2007b (editio minor), followed by its publication in the Collection des Universités de France known as Budé (editio maior): Boudon 2010 and by the edition by Kotzia and Sotouridis 2010. For Prop. Plac. see Boudon-Pietrobelli 2005. For both treatises see also Garofalo and Lami 2012.
[4] Vol. IV, pp. 757–766 Kühn.
[5] Most of the credit goes to the German scholar Karl Kalbfleisch in a few publications from around 1900, followed much later by contributions from Benedict Einarson: see Nutton 1987, 36–37, with further references. Wakelnig 2012 has thrown some new light on the Arabic tradition.
[6] Nutton 1999.
[7] Boudon-Millot and Pietrobelli 2005, 169; cf. Polemis and Xenophontos 40.