Pergamap

Much of Galen remains inaccessible in English.

Galen of Pergamon (129 – c. 216 CE) is the largest surviving author of Greco-Roman antiquity — a corpus commonly put at a tenth of all Greek literature surviving from before 350 CE. Much of it can still be read only in ancient Greek, medieval Arabic, or the Latin of an 1820s edition.

Each spine is one work.

Counted by titles the shelf looks well served; counted by words it does not. The untranslated spines include most of Galen's largest books — the seventeen books of compound-drug recipes and On Crises among them — so the missing share of the corpus is far larger than the red alone suggests.

Method

Reading the Greek against its witnesses

A great deal of Galen survives in more than one line of transmission: the Greek direct tradition, Arabic translations made from now-lost Greek exemplars, and old Latin versions. The versions are indirect tradition — evidence about the text rather than copies of it — but their exemplars may antedate the surviving Greek, so a versional reading can descend from an independent branch of the stemma. Of any divergence we ask which underlying Greek would account for it, and whether what we have is a variant in the text or a construal of it. The witnesses we hold are listed with their provenance.

At Aphorisms i.1 the Greek καιρὸς ὀξύς hangs between two senses: the critical moment is acute, or the time is short. Ḥunayn's Arabic gives الوقت ضيّق, “the time is narrow.” We first published that as a second witness converging on the temporal reading. It is nothing of the kind: Ḥunayn was translating Galen's commentary, in which the gloss ὀλιγοχρόνιον stands a few lines below the lemma, so his rendering follows from the exposition he had in hand. The verse, with the retraction →

What this site is

  1. A library. The catalogue of the surviving corpus — each work, its languages, its digitizations, and whether English exists, every claim flagged by how well it has been verified — together with the Arabic witnesses held for collation and the BBAW catalogue they are audited against. The transmission map draws each work's paths into Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, and the modern editions.
  2. A method. Texts are cut into source-pinned packets; drafts are published with citations, a written rationale for every rendering, and an explicit draft flag, so mistakes are catchable rather than buried. The procedure is in HARNESS.md.
  3. The texts themselves. A small but growing set of passages: a verse of the Aphorisms commentary collated across both traditions, and the opening of the compound-drug book on the scalp — hitherto without a published English rendering — as an unreviewed draft.

Honesty first. This is an amateur, AI-assisted project, not a critical edition. The catalogue is preliminary; “unverified” and “needs research” mean exactly that. Corrections arrive as pull requests, are checked automatically, and go live on merge — the fastest way to prove us wrong is to open one.

Historical text only. Ancient remedies may be toxic or unsafe. Pergamap is not medical advice; do not prepare or use remedies described in these texts.

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