Kühn's Galen Opera Omnia (Medicorum Græcorum)

[jeidsath]

This is often used in LSJ (cited as Gal. + volume and page), and if you don't have access to the TLG, it might be hard to get a hold of online. Here are the volumes that I've found on archive.org and Google books.

EDIT: I have now found them all. See especially the Hathi Trust link on volume 24 for alternate locations, if some of the links go down. Half of the surviving literature of ancient Greece represented by one man. And the closest I have ever gotten to reading any of it is Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.

Volume 1. https://archive.org/details/hapantaoperaomni01galeuoft
Volume 2. https://archive.org/details/hapantaoperaomni02galeuoft
Volume 3. https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_2EjJm7F6df0C
Volume 4. https://books.google.com/books?id=S39bAAAAQAAJ
Volume 5. https://archive.org/details/hapantaoperaomni05galeuoft
Volume 6. https://archive.org/details/hapantaoperaomni06galeuoft
Volume 7. https://archive.org/details/hapantaoperaomni07galeuoft
Volume 8. https://archive.org/details/hapantaoperaomni08galeuoft
Volume 9. http://www.biusante.parisdescartes.fr/h ... o=chapitre
Volume 10. https://archive.org/details/hapantaoperaomni10galeuoft
Volume 11. https://books.google.com/books?id=UwAUAAAAQAAJ
Volume 12. https://archive.org/details/klaudiougalenou00khgoog
Volume 13. https://archive.org/details/hapantaoperaomni13galeuoft
Volume 14. https://archive.org/details/hapantaoperaomni14galeuoft
Volume 15. https://archive.org/details/hapantaoperaomni15galeuoft
Volume 16. https://archive.org/details/hapantaoperaomni16galeuoft
Volume 17. pt. 1 https://archive.org/details/p1hapantaop ... 17galeuoft
Volume 17. pt. 2 https://archive.org/details/p2hapantaop ... 17galeuoft
Volume 18. pt. 1 https://archive.org/details/p1hapantaop ... 18galeuoft
Volume 18. pt. 2 https://archive.org/details/p2hapantaop ... 18galeuoft
Volume 19. http://www.biusante.parisdescartes.fr/h ... o=chapitre
Volume 20. https://books.google.com/books?id=MfejXlzfUuIC
Volume 21. https://archive.org/details/medicorumgraeco01hippgoog
Volume 22. https://books.google.com/books?id=UwAUAAAAQAAJ
Volume 23. https://archive.org/details/medicorumgraeco00aretgoog https://books.google.com/books?id=6xE2AQAAMAAJ
Volume 24. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009723957
Volume 25. https://books.google.com/books?id=Q39bAAAAQAAJ
Volume 26. https://archive.org/details/medicorumgraeco00hippgoog

[anphph]

Half of the surviving literature of ancient Greece represented by one man.

Is this accurate or a figure of speech? I know he wrote tremendous lots and that much of it reached us, but I actually believed that it was Philo of Alexandria who held the record for most surviving works. Is there such a list, a sort of a percentage list ranking the surviving works in mere quantity or word count levels?

PS. Maybe this is due to a Judaeo-Christian vs Pagan divide?

[MarkAntony198337]

ἀπόλλυται

[anphph]

Hello Mark Anthony

Thanks for your reply. It is very informative. I was, however, talking not about what people wrote, but about what survived to us. So much was lost. Plato is one of the very few of which we have no mention of any book that he may have written that didn't survive to us (if we exclude the speculations concerning the Philosophus).

I remember that back when I was first starting Classics I read somewhere that all the literature of Antiquity could be stored in a single bookshelf. Maybe that was overstating the case slightly, but just slightly. I'd still be curious to know a sort of percentage different authors take, from a scale of Galen (allegedly +50%) to Bolus of Mendes (0%).

Thanks again

[jeidsath]

@MarkAntony198337 It was very tough to find a copy of Rouse's recordings. In the end I had to get Linguaphone to send an email to the British Library before they would consider the recordings public domain and send me copies.

@anphph Galen is 3 million words, and his complete works take up many more volumes than Philo's do. Half of ancient Greek literature was a Wikipedia claim, and they cite two sources which I don't have access to. An internet search tells me the TLG numbers (105 million words of Greek literature). The same source gives pre-400 AD literature as 16 million words.

https://www.quora.com/How-much-writing- ... ially-read

[anphph]

Great ideas and helpful links. Thanks.

[opoudjis]

An internet search tells me the TLG numbers (105 million words of Greek literature). The same source gives pre-400 AD literature as 16 million words.

https://www.quora.com/How-much-writing- ... ially-read

I'm that source, incidentally, although I no longer work at the TLG, so I cannot provide any more up to date stats.

But the TLG numerically now is a Byzantine corpus with some ancient stuff tacked on. The pagan corpus that was preserved in manuscript simply wasn't all that sizeable; and Galen is disproportionately represented. (Same goes for John Chrysostom.)

[RandyGibbons]

Jeidsath,

Coincidentally earlier this year, and at a time when I was not using Textkit, I too bit the bullet and managed to find and download all 20 volumes. I'm pretty sure most were from Google Books. I wish I had known of your post, because it would have saved me a heckuva lot of time and tedium searching!

Let me just call to readers' attention that the final volume, volume XX (1833), has an index allowing that tells you the volume and starting page number in the Kühn collection for each work of Galen. I have found this indispensable. (For a current example, I happen to be reading some of the Hippocratic corpus and wanted to chase down Galen's commentary on the Aphorisms. I wouldn't have had the time or patience to find it without the index.)

Also, for those unfamiliar with the the Kühn collection, note that it includes Kühn's Latin translations, which for my purposes at least are very helpful.

(Also to note: The scan quality in the particular editions I downloaded is sometimes bad to impossible.)

[opoudjis]

Two addenda:

• When I calculated that there were 16 million pagan words of Greek in the TLG, I deliberately excluded technical works, so as not to inflate the word count of the classical/postclassical "canon". The main reason I did so was in fact to leave Galen out. Galen accounts for (from memory) 2.5 million words. The entire corpus of strictly classical text (up to and not including Aristotle) is 5 million words. (Yes I know Galen is much later than Aristotle.) Hence, I suppose, where someone came up with the line "half the classical corpus is Galen." It isn't, because that 5 million words excludes Galen (and Aristotle); but the strictly Classical corpus really isn't all that big to begin with.

• There has been a *lot* of activity publishing new editions of Galen since Kühn, and not all of it has made it to the TLG. The Corpus Medicorum Graecorum has put online all its publications, including its 20th century editions of Galen: http://cmg.bbaw.de/online-publications . (I'm taking a risk posting a link when I haven't hit 10 posts yet, but I'm close to it, and well, I think it's a risk worth taking.)

[RandyGibbons]

My recent experience with the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum has some good and some bad. On the plus side, It's a professional production, based on first-hand manuscript recension; it's legible; it sometimes has a (German) translation. On the negative side, it has a PDF conversion function, but it only operates on a single page at a time. I would gladly be shown otherwise. As a result, if you are looking up a citation, it is very tedious trying to find it. Again, I would gladly be shown otherwise.

[jeidsath]

I was reminded about this thread recently. It goes better in the book collection forum.