Against the Author’s Will: An Inquiry into the Pseudo-Galenic Corpus

I arrived at the CHS shortly after joining, in January 2026, the ERC-funded project COLLAPSE – Collaboration and Pseudepigraphy: Facing the Anonymous in Imperial Greek Literature, based at the University of Zurich and coordinated by PI Markus Hafner. COLLAPSE investigates anonymous and pseudepigraphical texts as an integral part of ancient literary culture, asking how they reshape our understanding of authorship and literary history. Rather than treating pseudepigraphy simply as forgery, the project views it as a creative mode of engaging with earlier authors and texts that further influences their reception. Within this framework, I decided to focus on the corpus of works falsely attributed to Galen (129-ca. 199/216 CE).

Among ancient writers, no one tried harder than Galen to protect his corpus from manipulations: he wrote lists of his writings, a treatise on their reading order and one on his views concerning the most fundamental questions. He justifies this effort with the need to prevent misattributions: at the beginning of On my Own Books, he famously recounts seeing a text entitled The Doctor and falsely attributed to him for sale in Rome. [1] Besides demonstrating the extent of his fame during his own lifetime, the anecdote further suggests that his name could be effectively used to sell books and that – as the end of the episode shows – a learned reader could easily recognize such forgeries.

Two other Galenic anecdotes, however, offer deeper and more nuanced insights. The first comes from the proem of On my Own Opinions and concerns the poet Parthenius. Having encountered two grammarians disputing over the interpretation of his verses, Parthenius had to rely on his slaves to prove his identity before declaring the correct interpretation – a situation Galen hopes to avoid by writing this work. [2] It is clear, then, that pseudo-Galenic opinions and, by extension, texts could also arise from readers’ (mis)interpretations of the authentic corpus. Indeed, pseudo-Galenic literature likely varied according to its intended readership. A final anecdote, preserved only in the Arabic tradition, depicts an impostor deceiving an uneducated crowd with an allegedly Galenic remedy. [3] From the imperial court to the street, there was no shortage of either demand for or supply of (pseudo-)Galenica.

The corpus kept growing for centuries until well into the Renaissance. Determining how many pseudo-Galenic texts exist, however, is difficult. The most comprehensive list of works attributed to Galen, the Fichtner/CMG bibliography, generally distinguishes between authentic and spurious texts. Yet a list of pseudo-Galenic titles extracted from this bibliography would be only partially informative and, in many cases, even misleading. First, there is not a one-to-one correspondence between the listed titles and the actual works. Second, not every work is an original, autonomous text: many are excerpts or compilation of excerpts from one or more extant works by Galen and other authors. This is due to the sources on which the bibliography is based, most notably Diels’ catalogue of medical manuscripts, which is the only source of information for many entries.

Compiling a list of Pseudo-Galenic works is the first task of my project and the one to which I devoted most of my time at the CHS. Taking the Fichtner/CMG bibliography as a starting point, I returned to its sources and compared their information with the most recent scholarship on Galenic manuscripts, editions, and texts. I frequently examined digital reproductions of manuscripts, distinguishing individual texts and searching for correspondences through the TLG. The goal is to eliminate the ambiguities of the existing list and, most importantly, to identify the autonomous pseudo-Galenic texts. To give an example, entry 245, De hominis natura, in the Fichtner/CMG bibliography is based on Diels’ catalogue, which records three Greek manuscripts under that title, each containing a different text. Monac. 39 (f. 80v) contains an anonymous excerpt tentatively attributed to Meletius. [4] The text in Vat. gr. 695 (f. 226v) is presented as a Galenic compilation («From Galen’s medical books. On the nature of man»), although its content closely resembles another pseudo-Galenic work. [5] Finally, the manuscript referred to by Diels as ‘Vatic. apud Monfauc. p. 28’ and identified by Touwaide as Reg. gr. 173 is one of the witnesses to Galen’s commentary on Hippocrates’ On the Nature of Man. [6]

A reliable list will provide the foundation for the core of the project, namely the analysis of the texts – most likely, a selected group of them. I will examine the function of the pseudepigraphical attribution, the relationship of these texts to the rest of the corpus, and their influence on its reception. The principal strategy will be an analysis of the authorial personas constructed within the texts. If, for instance, the author of a text presents themselves as Galen, for instance, the pseudepigraphical attribution likely originated with the text itself (primary pseudepigraphy): this would mean that the author deliberately chose to engage with the (pseudo-)Galenic corpus, attempting to complete it, correct it, or to make it more accessible – efforts that may be understood as instances of ‘collaborative authorship’.

This analysis also makes it possible to trace the ways in which Galen’s image was received and further developed over time. While preparing my talk at the CHS, I gathered information on two of the best-known features of the evolution of Galen’s image. The first is the notion that Galen was a direct pupil of Hippocrates. This idea has its roots in the authentic corpus, especially in Galen’s commentaries. It is noteworthy, however, that some of the earliest pseudo-Galenic writings display a strong Hippocratic allegiance or even consist of summaries of Hippocratic medicine. One pseudo-Hippocratic text is described as «Words of Hippocrates to his pupil Galen», and it seems likely that similar material will emerge from the pseudo-Galenic corpus. The second feature is the Christianization of Galen, who is sometimes portrayed in both Greek and Arabic sources as a converted Christian and is said to have met Mary Magdalene or Saint Peter. If such traditions can be traced to texts attributed to Galen, they will no doubt be found among the pseudo-Galenic writings.

In his seminal work on Galenism, Owsei Temkin argued that, in order to understand ‘why Galen’ – that is, ‘why Galenism’ – one must begin with Galen himself, with the way he constructs his own image and corpus. As he puts it, «What we have to do, then, is to present those aspects of Galen that will make the reactions of later centuries understandable». [7] In this, Temkin rightly identifies an essential starting point. And yet, pseudo-Galenic writings may have begun shaping Galen’s image almost immediately, becoming an equally important part of the story – one that has so far received far less attention. I hope that this project will help shed some light on it.