Galen · Commentary on Hippocrates' Aphorisms · Book 1, lemma 1 · Kühn XVIIb 345

“Life is short, the art long” — read through two witnesses

The most quoted sentence in Greek medicine, and a small lesson in why one text isn't enough. Here the Greek is checked against an independent witness — Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq's ninth-century Arabic, translated from a Greek manuscript centuries older than any behind our printed Greek. They were copied down a thousand miles and seven hundred years apart, from different exemplars: where they agree, we can be confident; where they diverge, we learn something.

The two witnesses

Greek

Direct Byzantine tradition, as printed by Kühn (1829) from medieval manuscripts

Ὁ βίος βραχύς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρή, ὁ δὲ καιρὸς ὀξύς, ἡ δὲ πεῖρα σφαλερή, ἡ δὲ κρίσις χαλεπή. δεῖ δὲ οὐ μόνον ἑωυτὸν παρέχειν τὰ δέοντα ποιέοντα, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὸν νοσέοντα καὶ τοὺς παρεόντας καὶ τὰ ἔξωθεν.

Arabic

Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, Baghdad, 9th c. — from an older, independent Greek exemplar

قال أبقراط: العمر قصير والصناعة طويلة والوقت ضيّق والتجربة خطر والقضاء عسر، وقد ينبغي لك أن لا تقتصر على توخّي فعل ما ينبغي دون أن يكون ما يفعله المريض ومن يحضره كذلك والأشياء التي من خارج.

Qāla Abuqrāṭ: al-ʿumr qaṣīr, wa-l-ṣināʿa ṭawīla, wa-l-waqt ḍayyiq, wa-l-tajriba khaṭar, wa-l-qaḍāʾ ʿusr…

Our triangulated English

“Life is short, the art long, the moment brief, experience treacherous, judgment hard. And one must be ready not only to do what is needed oneself, but to have the patient, the attendants, and the outward circumstances do their part as well.”

The whole verse is easy except the third clause. Greek ὁ καιρὸς ὀξύς is a notorious crux: kairos means both “the fleeting opportunity” and “the critical moment,” and oxys means “sharp / acute.” Read alone, it tempts you toward “the crisis is acute.”

Two independent voices say otherwise. Ḥunayn rendered it الوقت ضيّق — “the time is narrow.” He heard it as the scarcity of time, not the sharpness of a crisis. And Galen, commenting on his own text, spells the sense out: the kairos for nearly every medical action is ὀλιγοχρόνιον — “of little duration” — and only therefore called “sharp,” because the body changes so fast that the window closes. The independent Arabic and the author's own gloss land on the same reading. So we translate for brevity of time, and record why.

The verse in full

Ὁ βίος βραχύς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρή, ὁ δὲ καιρὸς ὀξύς, ἡ δὲ πεῖρα σφαλερή, ἡ δὲ κρίσις χαλεπή.

Life is short, the art long, the moment brief, experience treacherous, judgment hard.

δεῖ δὲ οὐ μόνον ἑωυτὸν παρέχειν τὰ δέοντα ποιέοντα, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὸν νοσέοντα καὶ τοὺς παρεόντας καὶ τὰ ἔξωθεν.

And one must be ready not only to do what is needed oneself, but also [to secure the same from] the patient, the attendants, and the outward circumstances.

The working — translation trace

καιρὸς ὀξύς → “the moment brief” — the crux, resolved by triangulation. Witness 2 (Ḥunayn) reads ḍayyiq, “narrow/tight [of time].” The author (Galen) glosses kairos as oligochronion, “short-lived,” and explains oxys (“sharp”) as a consequence of that brevity, not a separate “acute crisis” sense. Both independent of each other; both against the “critical moment is acute” reading. This is exactly the modern scholarly consensus (cf. the Loeb “opportunity fleeting”) — but here it is demonstrated from the witnesses rather than asserted.
τέχνη → “art,” ṣināʿa → “craft.” Both witnesses use their ordinary word for a skilled discipline; the famous rendering “art” is retained, with the note that Galen means a systematic craft, not fine art.
πεῖρα → “experience,” tajriba → “trial/experiment.” The two witnesses agree closely; both carry the double sense of hands-on experience and the risky experiment on a patient — hence “treacherous.”
Independence check. These two witnesses do not share a source: the Greek descends through Byzantine copyists to Kühn's 1829 print; the Arabic descends through Ḥunayn's Baghdad workshop from a separate, older Greek manuscript. Their agreement on four of five clauses is meaningful; their divergence on the fifth is where the light gets in.
A third witness, wanted. A fully independent third line — the medieval Latin Articella, or the Syriac — would let a divergence be voted rather than argued. Neither is digitized in our corpus yet; when one is, it slots into the same alignment.

Greek: First1KGreek (tlg0057.tlg092, Kühn XVIIb). Arabic: Digital Corpus for Graeco-Arabic Studies, Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (CC BY-SA). Both witnesses carry the same Kühn page and lemma anchors, so they align mechanically — see the harness. Amateur, AI-assisted; the reasoning is shown so you can check it.