• Galen’s De Indolentia and The Fire of 192 CE: Through the Eyes of Book History¹
• Germaine Warkentin (bio)

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;so many things seem filled with the intentto be lost that their loss is no disaster.

—Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art.”*

Sometime in the spring of the year 192 CE,² a fire–all too frequent in the jerry-built Rome of the time–raged through the Temple of Peace in the Forum, the centre of official Rome. Like several other monumental buildings on the nearby Palatine Hill, the temple possessed a library, where intellectuals often met for discussion.³ A cluster of other buildings on the nearby Via Sacra included two high-status warehouses for rare spices and valuable merchandise, the Horrea Piperateria and the Horrea Vespasiani. They also stored the valuables of wealthy Romans and others who were temporarily absent from the city. Pier Luigi Tucci imagines the situation as a north wind blew flames from the burning roofs of houses in the near-by Subura towards the temple, the warehouses, and onward south-west,⁴ but we need only recall the fire at Notre Dame on April 15, 2019, with heavy wooden roof-beams crashing down onto the cathedral’s vaulted ceiling, to reconstruct it for ourselves.

The “fire of Commodus” swept away not only the temple, the libraries, and the warehouses, but almost all the personal possessions of one of the empire’s notables: Claudius Galenus, (129-ca. 200/16?), the most famous physician of his time.⁵ Among his losses were the rare medicaments he needed for clinical work, the unique bronze surgical instruments he had designed, and the bookrolls constituting most of his personal library: not [End Page 1] only those Galen had written himself but also the exceptional collection of books by earlier authors he had copied and carefully corrected against better manuscripts.

Galen, despite his renowned practice in Rome, wrote in Greek and seems never to have mentioned a Latin author.⁶ When the fire broke out he had been 220 km to the south, visiting his country property in Campania, then an area of strong Hellenistic cultural influence. He had had his fill of the cruelty of the emperor Commodus, whom he had known as a patient since the emperor’s childhood. Depositing in one of the warehouses on the Palatine the more valuable of his possessions,⁷ Galen planned to spend some time in the south, possibly to move there for good. He relates that he had arranged for two copies of his books to be made, one for his friends in Rome who wished to deposit them in public libraries, the other for his own use in Campania (De Ind. §21–23), but the task was unfinished when in the spring of 192 fire raged through the warehouses. The losses Galen suffered were a terrible blow, but philosophically he was a stoic, and writing to a friend in Pergamon who had asked how he was responding, his repeated leitmotif was a variation on “But none of this distressed me,” (De Ind. §30).⁸ Galen mentions the fire without much detail in a few of his later works, but scholars have known little about his ordeal because the letter, known as Περὶ ὰλυπίας (Peri Aloupias) or by its Latin title De Indolentia (“Avoiding Distress”), had been lost for eighteen centuries. However, in 2005 a copy was discovered by Antoine Pietrobelli, then a graduate student doing research in Greece, and it proved to be a rich source of information on Galen’s writing, his life in books, and the libraries of Rome in the late second century. The rediscovery of De Indolentia has led to a multinational cascade of editions, translations, and articles. Its recovery, however, has been little noted by professed book historians outside the field of classics, at least those writing in English.

After several centuries of near-dormancy, Galen studies is flourishing, as scholars scour his medical works for information on cultural, social and intellectual history. There have been at least seven editions and or translations of De Indolentia in French, Italian, Greek and English in the interval since the discovery...

• 盖伦的 De Indolentia 和公元 192 年的大火：从书史的角度看¹
• Germaine Warkentin（生物）

失去的艺术并不难掌握；如此多的东西似乎充满了失去的意图，以至于它们的失去并不是灾难。

——伊丽莎白·毕晓普，“一种艺术”*

公元 192 年春天的某个时候，²一场大火——在当时人为建造的罗马太频繁了——席卷了罗马官方中心论坛的和平神殿。与附近帕拉蒂尼山上的其他几座纪念性建筑一样，这座寺庙拥有一个图书馆，知识分子经常在这里聚会讨论。³附近 Via Sacra 上的其他建筑群包括两个用于珍稀香料和贵重商品的高级仓库，即Horrea Piperateria和Horrea Vespasiani. 他们还存放了富有的罗马人和其他暂时离开城市的人的贵重物品。Pier Luigi Tucci 想象当时的情形是北风将火焰从附近 Subura 的房屋燃烧屋顶吹向寺庙、仓库，然后向西南方向⁴ ，但我们只需要回忆一下 4 月巴黎圣母院的火灾2019 年 1 月 15 日，沉重的木制屋顶横梁撞到大教堂的拱形天花板上，为我们自己重建。

“康茂德之火”不仅席卷了神殿、图书馆和仓库，还席卷了帝国一位著名人物的几乎所有个人财产：克劳迪乌斯·加勒努斯（Claudius Galenus，129-ca. 200/16？），最著名的他那个时代的医生。⁵他的损失包括临床工作所需的稀有药物、他设计的独特的青铜手术器械，以及构成他个人图书馆大部分的书卷：不仅[End Page 1]那些盖伦自己写的，还有非凡的收藏他复制了早期作者的书籍，并根据更好的手稿仔细更正。

盖伦尽管在罗马享有盛誉，但他用希腊语写作，而且似乎从未提到过一位拉丁作家。⁶火灾发生时，他已经向南 220 公里，参观了他在坎帕尼亚的乡村财产，该地区当时具有强烈的希腊文化影响。他已经厌倦了康茂德皇帝的残忍，他从小皇帝就知道他是个病人。⁷ Galen将他更有价值的财产存放在帕拉蒂尼的一个仓库中，计划在南方度过一段时间，可能会永远搬到那里。他说他已经安排了两本他的书，一本给他在罗马的朋友，他们希望将它们存放在公共图书馆，另一本供他在坎帕尼亚自己使用（De Ind. §21–23），但在 192 年春天，仓库大火肆虐时，这项任务还没有完成。盖伦遭受的损失是一个可怕的打击，但从哲学上讲，他是一个坚忍的人，写信给佩加蒙的一位朋友，询问他的反应如何，他反复强调的主题是“但这一切都没有让我感到痛苦”的变体，（De Ind .§30)。⁸盖伦在他后来的几部作品中没有详细地提到火灾，但学者们对他的磨难知之甚少，因为这封信被称为 Περὶ ὰλυπίας ( Peri Aloupias ) 或其拉丁标题De Indolentia（“避免痛苦”），已经丢失了十八个世纪。然而，2005 年，当时在希腊做研究的研究生 Antoine Pietrobelli 发现了一本副本，这被证明是盖伦的写作、他的书本生活以及二世纪后期罗马图书馆的丰富信息来源. De Indolentia的重新发现导致了多国的版本、翻译和文章。然而，在经典领域之外的自称书史学家，至少是那些用英语写作的人，很少注意到它的恢复。

经过几个世纪的蛰伏，盖伦的研究正在蓬勃发展，因为学者们在他的医学著作中搜寻有关文化、社会和思想史的信息。自发现以来， De Indolentia至少有七个版本或翻译成法语、意大利语、希腊语和英语……