Galen, In Hippocratis Aphorismos I · lemma 1 · Kühn XVIIb 345–346
Aphorisms i.1, in two witnesses
The Aphorisms is among the most heavily transmitted works in the Hippocratic corpus, and Galen's commentary survives entire. The Greek below is Kühn's direct tradition; the Arabic is attributed to Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq. This page was first published claiming that the two agree independently on the ambiguous third clause. That was an error of ours, corrected below and left visible rather than quietly amended, because the mistake is more instructive than the passage.
Historical text only. This translation is scholarly material, not medical advice.
The witnesses
Greek
Direct tradition; Kühn XVIIb 345, after the medieval Greek 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, s. IX. Route not established here; see the note below
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…
Translation
“Life is short, the art long, the moment fleeting, experience treacherous, judgement hard. And one must be ready not only to do what is needful oneself, but to bring the patient, the attendants, and the outward circumstances to do the same.”
The sentence is unproblematic but for its third member, ὁ καιρὸς ὀξύς. In a clinical register kairos is the fit or critical time for intervention, oxys “swift, acute”; the phrase will bear either “the decisive moment is acute” or “the time is short.” The Arabic does not hesitate: الوقت ضيّق, al-waqt ḍayyiq, “the time is narrow.” Ḥunayn — himself a physician — took oxys temporally, of scarcity.
Galen, expounding his own lemma, does the same. The kairos for almost every operation of the art, he writes, is ὀλιγοχρόνιον — “of brief duration” — and “therefore hard to seize”; it is called “sharp” only in consequence of the flux of the material the art must work upon (τὸ τῆς ὕλης ῥευστόν). The translator's choice thus reproduces what the author's own gloss requires — and, as the retraction below sets out, follows from it, since Ḥunayn was rendering the very exposition that contains it. The temporal reading is also that of the standard versions; Jones gives “opportunity fleeting.” What this page can honestly claim is a record of how the passage was construed in ninth-century Baghdad, in agreement with the received English.
The verse entire
Notes
- τέχνη / ṣināʿa. Both witnesses use their ordinary word for a systematic craft. “Art” is kept by convention — it is the word of Seneca's Latin inversion, vita brevis, ars longa (De brevitate vitae 1.1), through which the sentence is best known in the West — but Galen means a discipline learned by long practice, not a fine art.
- πεῖρα / tajriba. Both carry the double sense of accumulated experience and the single hazardous trial; σφαλερή (“apt to trip one up”) attaches to the risk of the trial made upon a patient. Rendered “treacherous.”
- A construal, not a variant. Worth stating precisely, since the distinction is easy to blur. Nothing here suggests that Ḥunayn read a Greek word other than ὀξύς; ضيّق is his rendering of that word, not evidence of a different one. What the Arabic supplies is therefore evidence about meaning — how a learned ninth-century reader took an ambiguous adjective — and not about the constitution of the text. That is the more useful kind of evidence for a translator and the less weighty kind for an editor, and it should not be dressed up as the latter.
- Retraction: the two readings are not independent. This page first presented Ḥunayn's ضيّق and Galen's ὀλιγοχρόνιον as separate witnesses arriving at the same construal. They are one witness. What Ḥunayn translated was the commentary: in our own copy of his Arabic the lemma is followed immediately by قال جالينوس, and within the exposition he renders Galen's gloss as يسير ضيّق and explains that the time became narrow on account of the material the art works upon. He chose ضيّق in the lemma because he had Galen's explanation of the word in front of him. The convergence we published was a translator being consistent with himself.
- What the passage does show. That Ḥunayn read ὀξύς temporally and rendered it so throughout — evidence about ninth-century construal and about his technique, which is worth having and is all it is. It bears on the Greek text not at all.
- Provenance, corrected. We had described the Arabic as made from an exemplar antedating the surviving Greek. Ḥunayn's own Risāla, which this project holds and had not read, describes the transmission of this commentary as multi-hand and Syriac-mediated, with the Hippocratic lemmata separately supplied. Until that entry is checked against the Arabic and cited properly, no claim about the date of his exemplar belongs on this page.
- A third witness. An independent third line — the Latin of the Articella, or a Syriac intermediary behind the Arabic — would let a variant be adjudicated rather than argued. Neither is yet in the corpus. The Arabic reception of the Aphorisms has lately been edited in depth (Pormann and the Manchester project); those editions are the natural next collation.
Loci: Hippocrates, Aph. i.1 (Littré IV 458; Jones, Loeb IV 98–99); Galen, In Hipp. Aph. comm. I (Kühn XVIIb 345–346). Greek from First1KGreek (tlg0057.tlg092); Arabic from the DCGAS TEI file, both CC BY-SA. Translation amateur and AI-assisted; its evidence and rationale are published for checking.