authorship and pseudepigraphy in early christian literature 31
for it is uncontested that the great hippocrates had two sons, dracon and
thessalus, who both had a son with the name hippocrates. It is superfluous
to investigate whether the book was written by one of them or by someone
else or whether the writer died before he published it for the greek. What I
have said so far about this is enough.
Galen of Pergamum, de libris propriis pr.
In the introduction to his small treatise On My Own Books, galen related a
telling experience that concerned his own books and the question of their
literary attribution.37
the validity of your advice regarding the cataloguing of my extant books,
Bassus, has been proved by the events. I was recently in the sandalarium,
the area of rome with the largest concentration of booksellers, where I wit-
nessed a dispute as to whether a certain book for sale was by me or someone
else. the book bore the title: “galen the doctor.” someone had bought the
book under the impression that it was one of mine; someone else—a man
of letters—struck by the odd form of the title, desired to know the book’s
subject. on reading the first two lines he immediately tore up the inscrip-
tion, saying simply: “this is not galen’s language—the title is false.” now,
the man in question had been schooled in the fundamental early education
which greek children always used to be given by teachers of grammar and
rhetoric. Many of those who embark on a career in medicine or philoso-
phy these days cannot even read properly, yet they frequent lectures on the
greatest and most beautiful field of human endeavor, that is, the knowledge
provided by philosophy and medicine.
this kind of laziness existed many years ago too, when I was a young man,
but it had not yet reached the extreme state it has now. for this reason—
and also because my books have been subjected to all sorts of mutilations,
whereby people in different countries publish different texts under their own
names, with all sorts of cuts, additions, and alterations—I decided it would
be best, first to give an account of the content of my books being published
by many people under their own names, my dearest Bassus, you know the
reason for yourself: it is that they were given without inscription to friends or
pupils, having been written with no thought for publication, but simply at the
request of those individuals, who had desired a written record of lectures they
had attended. When in the course of time some of these individuals died,
their successors came into possession of the writings, like them, and began to
pass them off as their own... taking them from their owners, they returned
to their own countries, and after a short space of time began to perform the
demonstrations in them, each in some different way. all these were eventually
caught, and many of those who then recovered the works affixed my name to
37 trans. by P. n. singer, Galen: Selected Works (oxford: oxford university Press, 1997),
3–4.