Most of Galen has never been translated into English.
Galen of Pergamon (129 – c. 216 CE) is the largest surviving author of Greco-Roman antiquity: roughly three million words, by a common scholarly estimate about a tenth of all ancient Greek literature that survives from before 350 CE. Much of it can only be read in ancient Greek, medieval Arabic, or the Latin of an 1820s edition.
The works without English are not the leftovers — they include most of Galen's largest books: the eleven-book On the Powers of Simple Drugs, the seventeen books of compound-drug recipes, the sixteen-book treatise cycle on the pulse, On Antidotes, On Crises, On the Differences of Fevers. Counted by words rather than titles, the untranslated share of Galen is far larger than the numbers above suggest.
What this site is
Three things, all in the open:
- An atlas. A tracking table of the surviving corpus: each work, the language it survives in (Greek, Arabic, Latin, fragments), where the text is digitized, and whether an English translation exists. Each entry is flagged by how well its status has been verified, because half the battle is simply knowing what's missing. Coverage today: the 97 works digitized by the First1KGreek project plus 11 added by hand; roughly two dozen more surviving works are still to be entered.
- A roadmap. A plan for translating the untranslated, starting with texts whose Greek is already digitized, and a public vote on which work gets the first full campaign.
- A working translation. Not just a plan: the first passage is already translated — the opening of On the Composition of Drugs According to Places, Galen's head-to-toe recipe collection, which begins with baldness cures and hair dyes and has waited about 1,800 years for an English version.
Honesty first. This is an amateur, AI-assisted project, not a critical edition. Translations are made from Kühn's 1826 Greek text, checked against his facing Latin, and published with the Greek alongside so anyone can catch our mistakes. Catalog entries marked “unverified” are exactly that. Corrections are welcome — that's the point of working in public.
How to help
- Vote on the first full translation campaign in the open poll.
- Verify an entry. Pick any work marked “unverified” in the corpus table, find out whether an English translation exists, and file an issue or pull request with your source.
- Translate a chunk. If you read Greek (or Arabic, or want to review AI drafts), see CONTRIBUTING.
How to contribute via pull request
The whole site is a public repository of plain HTML and one JSON file — no build step, no framework. If you can edit a text file, you can contribute:
- Fork posix4e/pergamap on GitHub and make a branch.
- Fixing the catalog? Edit
data/works.json— update the work'senglish/english_reffields, and setconfidencetocheckedonly if you cite where you checked in the pull request. - Adding a translation? Use the harness: one command generates a translation packet (the Greek with Kühn anchors, ready for your English), or grab an already-open packet from
data/chunks.json. Fill in the translation plus a trace — your working, shown LLM-style, so the reasoning can be checked and not just the result. First claim the chunk in an issue so two people don't translate the same pages. - Preview locally by opening the HTML file in your browser — what you see is what deploys.
- Open the pull request — one work or one chunk per PR, sources cited. Review happens in the open, arguing from the Greek. Merged means live.