Galen’s (129–ca.216 CE) voluminous writings are a real mer à boire for students of many aspects of Graeco-Roman culture: in addition to medicine and philosophy, he is a rich source for linguistics and rhetoric, for religion, for social, economic and political history as well as for cultural phenomena such as the Second Sophistic. Xenophontos argues, with some justification, that one field into which Galen ventured, practical ethics, has remained understudied: in fact, Galen was an “unsuspected moralist.” A glimpse of chapter 15 of his “auto-biobibliography,” On My Own Books, shows that he authored a dozen treatises on all kinds of moral themes, reflecting personal experiences, conflicts and contemporary debates (Lib. Prop c.15, pp.169.13–170.13 Boudon = XIX. 45–46 Kühn).[1] Because later centuries were more interested in his medical works, most of these are lost—with a few exceptions: some twenty years ago a full Greek text of his Avoiding Distress (Περὶ ἀλυπίας) was recovered, an event which set salivating even scholars with an unsuspected interest in Galen.[2] Ironically, the related but fuller moral treatise The Diagnosis and Treatment of the Affections and Errors Peculiar to Each Person’s Soul had been available for centuries without attracting any attention worth mentioning. Moral treatises like these, concerned with behaviours such as flattery and slander and with particular emotions such as distress or anger, belonged in the philosophical rather than medical tradition. Medical insights are far less prominent and often almost absent; many of Galen’s arguments can be paralleled from the philosophical tradition represented by such authors as Philodemus, Seneca and Plutarch. Xenophontos takes these treatises by Galen and other later ancient moralists as representing “practical ethics,” which she subsumes under, or identifies with, “popular philosophy.” This expression renders the German Populärphilosophie. This notion has become quite popular among New Testament scholars and classicists. It emerged during the German Aufklärung in the second half of the 18th century when it was applied to treatises such as those intended by the Idealist philosopher Johann Fichte (1762–1814) for a non-academic audience.[3] G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) in his Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie (lectures published after he died) used the term cheerfully for moral treatises from classical antiquity, most notably those by Cicero. X. argues that it is apposite to speak of the moral message presented by Galen and other ancient sources as “popular philosophy” “not because it involves a lower level of sophistication, but because of its appeal to a broader category of readers/listeners, who were nevertheless educated enough to be attentive to their character development and self-management” (pp. 2–3). So what does that mean? The implied contrast is with “theoretical moral philosophy” emanating from and speaking to philosophical specialists (ibid.). This is somewhat problematic insofar as the distinction in terms of different types of intended audience is not an easy one to draw in many cases. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, a foundational work of philosophical ethics, is never subsumed under “popular philosophy,” yet it was addressed primarily to young educated persons about to enter a career in public life, not philosophical specialists reflecting on theoretical foundations. In regard to the related expression “practical ethics,” moral philosophy—often conceived as an “art of life”—was supposed to be practical. There was no “theoretical ethics” in a sense roughly equivalent to “meta-ethics” in its present-day sense. X. should have clarified her position somewhat more fully because she often appeals to the notions of popular philosophy and practical ethics. But constantly repeating the expression does not in itself make it more viable (and in her conclusion this even culminates in the assertion that Galen’s professional legitimacy hangs on the “discipline of popular philosophy,” p.237). “Popular philosophy” according to Xenophontos is not confined to a particular set of treatises meant for a broader, though educated, kind of audience. She includes a chapter on “Practical Ethics in Technical Accounts,” taking us through large selections of Galen’s work; that is to say, a work may be addressed to medical specialists but still teach them “practical ethics” alongside medical knowledge. She provides an impressive overview of the moral dimension of Galen’s work, but there seems to be little added value in her insistence on its practical or popular nature.[4] The whole notion of “popular philosophy” is dubious and needs to be reconsidered instead of being parroted among scholars. I once attended a conference where one of the speakers argued that ancient “popular philosophy” existed on the grounds it has an entry in Der neue Pauly.
In medicine Galen distinguished between books for student of medicine (i.e. the ones he calls his ἕταιροι) or books for a broader audience he calls either lovers of medicine (φιλιατροί) or “for all,” e.g. PHP and UP are intended for this broader audience.[5] But we do not have any statements by Galen illustrating a particular notion of popular philosophy as opposed to academic philosophy.[6] It is worth dwelling a bit on this issue here because it is directly related to X.’s concern with placing Galen’s contribution to ethics in the context of his role as a public intellectual. To be sure, it is rewarding to realize there was a contemporary context, not just a preceding tradition. But the matter of popularization is a different one.
Xenophontos divides her argument in two parts: Part I discusses the role played by ethics in Galen’s work in general. Part II provides in five consecutive chapters as many case-studies of Avoiding Distress, Exhortation to the Study of Medicine, Affections and Errors of the Soul, Recognition of the Best Physician and Prognosis respectively. Thanks to earlier work X. is well versed in Plutarch (at least some of whose whose work was known to Galen) and later ancient literature except Stoicism, which is essential when it comes to identifying cases where Galen gives an original twist to traditional ideas. As I have already indicated, she covers a lot of ground in Galen’s work, which is by no means limited to the individual treatises she has selected for separate study. It is also a very learned monograph in terms of the modern scholarship she engages with. Sometimes one feels she is overdoing it a bit, as when she invokes, rather eclectically, Foucault, Heidegger, Bourdieu and the sociologists Berger and Luckman (1967).
Xenophontos’ reconstruction of original contexts leads to some intriguing results. She argues persuasively that the critique of athletics in Exhortation might be read as an allusive commentary on the misbehaviour of the young emperor Commodus, pointing to similarities with Cassius Dio’s portrayal of the latter (Roman History 72.7–4, pp. 119–121). She also includes a fine chapter on Galen’s Prognosis, a treatise which, despite its title, does not offer a lot on the theory of medical prognostication but records Galen’s experiences and feats as a medical practitioner and anatomist during his first stay in Rome (162–166 CE). Xenophontos usefully complements previous accounts by reading Prognosis as a consistently moralising narrative, showing that certain moral points raised by Galen, sometimes in common with other sources, are for Galen not just rhetorical tropes but central to his understanding of medicine as a deeply moral enterprise, e.g. complaints about the competitiveness of doctors or the moral decline of the profession in general. The chapter includes a section on the vice of strife or contentiousness (φιλονεικία) as illustrated in the fifth chapter of the same treatise by the story of the behaviour of the philosopher Alexander of Damascius at an anatomical demonstration of Galen’s (pp. 226–230). However, this moral flaw is in Galen’s eyes not just “pernicious to both for the body and the soul” (p.230), but, I would add, bad for scientific progress, being one of the driving forces behind the lamentable phenomenon of sectarianism. This is certainly related to the role of truth as a moral end for Galen, about which X. has some interesting things to say, although she could have done a bit more on the Socratic and Stoic background of this ideal (pp. 212–215). But as mentioned, Xenophontos is more concerned with the contemporary context, attributing to Galen the role not just of a representative of a thoroughly moral medicine but as a moral leader tout court, who, out of a deep concern with contemporary morality, self-consciously follows in the footsteps of Plutarch, as she states in the Conclusion (pp.236–245, esp. 243). Closing the book, I remained unconvinced of Plutarch’s direct influence; certain similarities may be due to their shared Platonism, for instance.
Xenophontos’ monograph is a real contribution to Galenic studies. It complements the other recent study on Galen’s ethics by Trompeter (2025), who focuses more on psychological, medical and theological aspects. One may have certain qualms about her insistence on “popular philosophy,” but there are quite a few saving graces, not least the wealth of information the learned author offers.
References
Berger, P.L. and T. Luckman 1967. Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Penguin.
Harris, W.V. 1991. Ancient Literacy. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Holzhey, H. 1989. “Populärphilosophie,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Band 7, Basel, 193-1100.
Singer, P.N. 2019. “New Light and Old Texts: Galen on His Own Books.” In C. Petit, ed. Galen’s Treatise ΠΕΡΙ ΑΛΥΠΙΑΣ (De Indolentia) In Context. A Tale of Resilience. Brill: Leiden | Boston: 91–131.
Trompeter, J. 2025. Galen on Ethics and Human Nature. Philosophia antiqua vol. 174. Brill: Leiden | Boston.
Notes
[1] It is worth noting that Galen did not have or develop a medical ethics (or “deontology”) in the present-day sense. He ignored the so-called deontological treatises from the Hippocratic Corpus, even though Hippocrates was his big hero, turning to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and others instead. This is striking, but Galen, it appears, doubted the authenticity of the Hippocratic works concerned, for good reasons in at least some cases; cf. Jouanna 2012. The fragments of an Arabic commentary on the Hippocratic Oath presented in Rosenthal (1956) are very likely pseudepigraphic.
[2] See my review on a related publication by Xenophontos, BMCR 2025.09.52.
[3] See Holzhey 1989, also cited by Xenophontos, p. 2n.8, when introducing the expression in connection with Galen. It is not clear to me why in the same footnote she also says that the terms were coined by Ziegler in 1951 with reference to Plutarch’s works on practical ethics –the subject of previous work by Xenophontos.
[4] An example is X.’s take on Affections and Errors, which she presents as “a popular philosophical treatise in the strict sense of the term” (ch. 6, p. 124). Yet it had sprung from a philosophical discussion involving technical definitions Galen found lacking in a moral treatise by one Antonius, a contemporary Epicurean (Aff. Dig. 1.1–2, p. 3.4–19 De Boer = V. 1 K.). At the end of the preface he appeals to past masters who had composed writings concerned with the therapy of emotions—a move noted by Xenophontos (p.128): Plato, Aristotle and his followers as well as the Stoic scholarch Chrysippus in his Therapeutics (Aff. Dig. 1.4.9, p.4.8–15 De Boer = V. 3 Kühn). In a familiar way, Galen says he will build on these ancients, summarizing and further developing their ideas. But clearly, he sees his contribution as going beyong merely popularizing the relevant classics.
[5] Galen’s references to “all” still presuppose a rather elitist context. This is not just because of Galen’s social frame of reference but also because of the low level of literacy; cf. Harris 1991, 227–229; cf. 126: “Any assumption that the intellectually less demanding of Hellenistic literature aimed at, or reached, a truly popular audience of readers should be resisted… Popular culture had little to do with reading.”
[6] In On My Own Opinions c. 14, p. 136.21–22, where Galen says that moral philosophy is useful and possible for all those who wish to practise it, but this does not mean that he has any particular low-threshold form of ethics in mind; cf. Singer (2019) 126–128, who is of course right to point to Affections and Errors and other works in ch. 15 of On My Own Books as standing outside the main curriculum of medical works recommended for his students (127); but this is another matter. Galen always speaks of moral philosophy (ἠθικὴ φιλοσοφία) without qualification.