Reading Roman knowledge

Abstract

Galen is currently being rediscovered. Under the management of Philip van der Eijk, a massive project has begun to translate into English much of the output of this hugely prolific figure, who dominated both European and Arabic medicine for over a millennium: his surviving treatises alone add up to around three million words. For many of these works, it will be the first time they have been translated into any modern language. The most recent monograph on Galen, Susan Mattern’s Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing (Johns Hopkins 2008), focuses on his narratives of particular cases and raises interesting questions about the power relationship between the physician and his elite patients, for whom he may have performed essentially servile tasks of basic bodily care. The 2008 Cambridge Companion to Galen edited by Jim Hankinson has five contributors in common with the present collection, but focuses on the philosophy of Galen. So what is new in this collection? It must be the sheer range of approaches to, and understandings of, Galen. While Galen as philosopher is not neglected, in Galen and the World of Knowledge he is presented as reader, synthesiser, lexicographer, philologist, collector, traveller, performer, commentator, critic, theorist and—rather less centrally here—as practising physician. The introduction underlines the point that Galen is both representative of the thought patterns and social life of the elite, and yet entirely unrepresentative. This is picked up by Hankinson in particular; Galen’s training was exceptional, both lengthy and expensive, and his medicine is very much for the elite, so his success ‘‘is at least as much social as it is medical— and he obviously revels in this fact’’ (p. 239). The chapters therefore locate him in the Greco-Roman intellectual world of what Vivian Nutton calls here the ‘‘Antonine man of letters’’ (p. 33), while showing his unique contributions. The project originates in a conference held at Exeter in 2005, so it can take into account the discovery in that year, in the Vlatadon monastery in Thessalonica, of Galen’s