Die römische Gesellschaft bei Galen

Reviewed by: Die römische Gesellschaft bei Galen: Biographie und Sozialgeschichte David Slider, Professor and John Scarborough Heinrich Schlange-Schöningen . Die römische Gesellschaft bei Galen: Biographie und Sozialgeschichte. Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte, 65. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003. Pp. xx, 373. €98.00. ISBN 3-11-017850-8. Publishers are invited to submit new books to be reviewed to Professor David Sider, Department of Classics, New York University, 25 Waverly Place, New York, NY 10003; e-mail: [email protected]. Unverdaut, roh, grob, unerfahren, and for an academic, frisch gebacken. Long has there been a need for a solid, well-written "life and times" of Galen of Pergamon (A.D. 129–after 210), a book that incorporates the essential findings of modern scholarship. Even though Schlange-Schöningen successfully includes the opinions of almost everyone who has published on Galen since about 1950 (and many who date from the turn of the twentieth century to World War II), this Biographie is an unhappy example of a collection of scholarly views that becomes a lengthy catalogue, rather than a good synopsis of how those opinions and interpretations might enable us to discern Galen the physician, the philosopher, the court doctor, the traveler, the student, the anatomist, and especially the writer. Die römische Gesellschaft bei Galen, for all of its meticulous detail (some of the "footnotes" consume a full page), does not provide a sense of who Galen was, why he did what he did, and most importantly, why he put down the enormous bulk of writings that are left. A glance at a set of the C. G. Kühn, ed., Galeni Opera omnia in its twenty volumes in twenty-two parts, as it consumes four linear feet on a shelf, suggests the huge number of words in Greek occupying the top half of each page, with Renaissance Latin translations at the bottom. And the Kühn does not include a number of treatises, either discovered in manuscripts since the 1830s, or preserved in Arabic and Latin translations, for which the original Greek has been lost. Owsei Temkin (who died in 2002 just short of his hundredth birthday) was the only scholar of our time who had actually read the entire Kühn, and he began as a young physician in his twenties (if it takes 80 years to finish merely the Kühn edition, it is little wonder that most of us might claim to have read—maybe—a third to a half). The massive reality of Galen's production has given rise to epitomes, digests, synopses, and extracts ever since the fourth century, when Oribasius of Pergamon (c. A.D. 325–400) did his own redactions and selections at the behest of his royal patron and patient, Julian the Apostate (reigned 361–363). Clearly, Schlange-Schöningen has perused much of Galen's output, but he, too, has been directed by previous efforts, ranging from medieval extractions to more modern choices by scholars in efforts to elucidate particular aspects of Galen's very broad and unusually deep expertise in dozens of disparate subjects. Not surprisingly, a majority of the biographical detail emerges from the significant philological astuteness in the work of Vivian Nutton, whose edited volumes of Galen in the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum (1979 and 1999) are examples of the best reediting and translation of Galen in the twentieth century. In fact, Nutton's commentaries to these two works (On Prognosis and On My Own Opinions) are finely polished, and always carefully researched and prepared for intellectual absorption, certainly not undigested before they appear before a reading public. One facet of Galen's "life and times" stands out in the well-grounded publications on Galen by Nutton, Temkin, and others who have pondered the Greek of the Roman Second Sophistic with patience and care: what we [End Page 63] know about Galen emerges from Galen himself, so that all biographical items are actually autobiographical, with the probable exceptions of some data in later Arabic texts (but these carry the odor of pseudo-facts, a kind of mythography familiar to students of the Hippocratic Letters). Schlange-Schöningen recognizes this basic factor, so that

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