On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, Vol. I

hi ambitu nimis longo esse iis videbantur2. It was the case that, in addition to the books of others, the works of Galen also had begun to be weighed down by "an unformed site and deserted antiquity," until, in the tenth century after the birth of Christ, the studies of Greek writers and physicians among the Byzantines began to revive in a certain way. For although they still preferred to track the streamlets rather than drink from the fountains themselves—as evidenced by the ἐπιτομὴ τῆς ἰατρικῆς ἁπάσης τέχνης Epitome of the entire medical art created by Theophanes Nonnus at the command of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, which contains almost nothing that does not appear to have been transcribed from Aëtius, Paul, and others, who themselves possessed only what was collected from the ancients3—nevertheless, it was from that period in particular that the codices of Galen, like those of other writers, which had been hiding in monasteries or elsewhere, seem to have been brought back into the light and copied by scribes. However, these were not so much those containing books concerning philosophy as those concerning medicine. I believe this certainly occurred from the end of the eleventh century, after a certain Synesius had translated into Greek the Viaticum Travel Guide of the Arab physician Abu-Dschafer Ahmed, in which work he fully supported the doctrines of Galen, and had excited physicians to the study of Galen himself4. That this survived even the atrocities of the following age under the rule of the Latin emperors, and that the writings of Galen were in the hands of the learned and of physicians, is testified to by Joannes Actuarius, the chief physician of Andronicus Palaeologus, who followed as his guide not only the Arabs, whose literature had already invaded the Byzantine kingdom, but Galen himself, upon whom they depend. It is testified to in a certain way by Emperor Andronicus himself, from whom Robert of Anjou, King of Sicily, received as a gift a codex in which many works of Galen were contained5. But after

2) Cf. Paul of Aegina, Epitome of Medicine, Introduction.
3) Haeser, op. cit., § 153.
4) Haeser, op. cit., § 155.
5) Cf. Salvatore de Renzi’s Collection of Salerno, Vol. I, p. 338 (Naples, 1852). Robert commanded Nicolaus Rheginus, a Calabrian physician highly skilled in both languages, to translate the books of Galen from that codex into Latin, which he did. Cf. Coll. Sal. ibid. and Vol. III, p. 335; Freind, History of Medicine (Venice, 1725), p. 174; Bonnet, Dissertation on the Empirical Subfiguration of Cl. Galen (Bonn, 1872), p. 4.