Galen, Three Treatises

191 Pages·2014·2.53 MB·English

by  Evan Hayes

Galen
Three Treatises:
On My Own Books,
On the Order of My Own Books, &
Th at the Best Physician is also a Philosopher
An Intermediate Greek Reader
Greek text with running vocabulary and commentary
Evan Hayes
and
Stephen Nimis
Galen, Th ree Treatises: An Intermediate Greek Reader: Greek text with Running
Vocabulary and Commentary
First Edition
© 2014 by Evan Hayes and Stephen Nimis
All rights reserved. Subject to the exception immediately following, this book may
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ISBN-10: 194099702X
ISBN-13: 9781940997025
Published by Faenum Publishing, Ltd.
Cover Design: Evan Hayes
Fonts: Garamond
GFS Porson
[email protected]
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements .........................................................................................v
Introduction ..................................................................................................ix
Abbreviations .............................................................................................xiii
Text and Commentary
On My Own Books .............................................................................1-79
On the Order of My Own Books ......................................................81-109
Th at the Best Physician is also a Philosopher ....................................111-133
Grammatical Topics
Common Vocabulary ..............................................................................5
Th e Diff erent Meanings of ααῦῦττόόςς ..........................................................26
Defective Verbs .....................................................................................27
Participles: General Principles ...............................................................39
Indirect Statement ................................................................................84
General Conditions and General Clauses ..............................................86
Future Conditions ................................................................................88
Circumstantial Participles ...................................................................106
Result Clauses .....................................................................................115
Genitive Absolutes ..............................................................................121
Special Topics
Map: Th e Libraries of Ancient Rome ......................................................2
Th e Antonine Emperors ........................................................................24
Th e Fire of 192 AD...............................................................................28
List of Verbs .......................................................................................135-145
Proper Names .....................................................................................147-151
Glossary .............................................................................................153-165
iii

Acknowledgments
Th e idea for this project grew out of work that we, the authors, did with
support from Miami University’s Undergraduate Summer Scholars Program,
for which we thank Martha Weber and the Offi ce of Advanced Research and
Scholarship. Th e Miami University College of Arts and Science’s Dean’s Scholar
Program allowed us to continue work on the project and for this we are grateful
to the Offi ce of the Dean, particularly to Phyllis Callahan and Nancy Arthur
for their continued interest and words of encouragement.
Work on the series, of which this volume is a part, was generously
funded by the Joanna Jackson Goldman Memorial Prize through the Honors
Program at Miami University. We owe a great deal to Carolyn Haynes, and the
2010 Honors & Scholars Program Advisory Committee for their interest and
confi dence in the project.
Th e technical aspects of the project were made possible through the
invaluable advice and support of Bill Hayes, Christopher Kuo, and Daniel
Meyers. Th e equipment and staff of Miami University’s Interactive Language
Resource Center were a great help along the way. We are also indebted to the
Perseus Project, especially Gregory Crane and Bridget Almas, for their technical
help and resources.
We owe a great deal of thanks to Cynthia Klestinec, who fi rst sparked
our interest in the history of medicine. We also thank Susan Stephens and Julia
Nelson-Hawkins for introducing us to the larger fi eld of medical humanities.
We also profi ted greatly from advice and help on the POD process from
Geoff rey Steadman. All responsibility for errors, however, rests with the authors
themselves.
v

Mary Beth Butcher, M.D.
optimae medicae

Introduction
Th e aim of this book is to make three of Galen’s shorter works (On My Own
Books, On the Order of My Own Books, Th at the Best Physician is also a Philoso-
pher) accessible to intermediate students of Ancient Greek. Th e running vo-
cabulary and grammatical commentary are meant to provide everything neces-
sary to read each page. Although Galen can be a little diffi cult at times, he gets
easier and more predictable in time, and these three works are a great introduc-
tion to this fascinating fi gure. Th ey are not strictly speaking medical works, but
refl ections on his own work and thought that throw extraordinary light on the
relationship of the medical profession in antiquity to wider currents of thought
in the brilliant period of Greek literature known as the “second sophistic.”
Galen’s work is not well-known today, a stark contrast to his enormous im-
portance in the medical world and wide circulation all the way up to the be-
ginning of the modern period. Galen’s thought and its permutations over the
centuries after his death constituted a largely unquestioned canon of medical
practice in the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean; many of his works were
later translated into Arabic and became a powerful stimulus to medical practice
in the Islamic world; Arabic versions of Galen’s own work, along with medi-
cal texts inspired by him, such as Ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine, were system-
atically translated into Latin beginning in the 11th century and became the
basis for medical study in western Europe, where Galen’s ideas quickly took
on enormous authority. Although eventually sidelined by the modern study of
medicine based on wholly new principles, Galen’s importance for the history of
medicine is singular.
Notorious as one of the great cranks of Greek literature, Galen participated
vigorously in the scientifi c and philosophical discussions of his time, engaged
with many of the most prominent contemporary intellectual fi gures in writing
and in public debates, while mingling with the rich and the powerful, who
valued his keen skills. He writes Greek in the literary dialect of Plato and other
Attic writers of the classical period, as is the case with most prominent writers
of the imperial period, and he himself contributed to debates about proper us-
age and good education. He consistently emphasized the importance of know-
ing the full range of Greek: not just Attic, but also the Ionic dialect of the
Hippocratic corpus. However, he repudiated the “purist” tendencies of some
ix