Editing the lemmata of Galen’s Commentary on the Hippocratic Aphorisms, Book 5

Galen’s Commentary on the Hippocratic Aphorisms was at first addressed to a restricted circle of friends or pupils, and some years later probably reworked by Galen himself for publication. The aim of my contribution is to underscore the problems that a modern editor of Galen’s Commentary has to deal with when editing the Hippocratic lemmata. The first point to investigate is Galen’s philological work: often unsatisfied with the readings transmitted in the Hippocratic manuscripts, he introduced corrections into Hippocrates’ text in his commentary. I argue that the task of a modern editor of Galen is to edit the lemmata as Galen in all probability wrote them in the last version of his Commentary. In order to do that, it is important to distinguish what Galen wrote in his book from what Galen read in the copies of the Hippocratic text available to him. We wonder whether Galen merely transcribed what he read in most of the Hippocratic manuscripts or whether he wrote the lemmata according to his own understanding and corrections. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Galen could have recorded (perhaps in the margins of the text) all the variants he took into consideration. In order to better explain these kinds of problems, which the modern editor has to deal with, in this paper I present four case studies of Galen’s Commentary on Aphorisms, book 5.