Galen and his Environment

Abstract

Galen was born at Pergamum in a.d. 130 or, more likely, 129. His father Nicon, a man of means, was well educated and kindly, but his mother ‘was most irascible, so much so that she would sometimes bite her servants, and was always shouting and always battling with my father, even more so than Xanthippe with Socrates’ (5 K. 40). This was a difficult home, particularly for an only son, as we must suppose Galen to have been. But his father attended carefully to his upbringing. At 14 he began to study logic, and a little later the philosophy of all the chief sects. His choice of a profession he also owed to his father, who was prompted by a dream to let him study medicine. There were dangers, as Galen later saw (19 K. 59), in studying medicine and philosophy together, as he now at 17 proceeded to do. But he did not succumb, and the following hypothetical description may be taken as true of himself at this time (De nat. fac. III. x. 179, Loeb Classical Library, ed. A. J. Brock, 2 K 179): ‘A man who wishes to gain more than ordinary knowledge of his subject must at the outset be exceptional both in his natural gifts and in his early training. And when he reaches adolescence, he must have a frenzied enthusiasm for the truth, like one possessed; neither by day nor by night must he cease straining and striving to master all that has been said by the most famous of the ancients.’ His first medical instructor was Satyrus, with whom he studied for four years.