- Source: Peri Alypias
Peri Alypias (Ancient Greek: Περὶ Ἀλυπίας, lit. 'On Consolation from Grief'), also known as De indolentia, is the name of a number of treatises, the best known of which was composed by Galen after a massive fire in the centre of Rome in 192 AD. Galen's original Greek text was considered lost until it was discovered in 2005 in the library of the Vlatadon Monastery in Thessaloniki by then-PhD student Antoine Pietrobelli.
Prior to its rediscovery, Galen's Peri Alypias was only known from fragmentary references and quotes in Arabic and Hebrew, and the title was mentioned in Galen's On My Own Books (De Libris Propiis).
History
Although the inspiration for Galen's Peri Alypias was the fire of Rome in 192 and the loss of many of Galen's books, the genre of writing on the prevention and cures of grief date back to 5th century BC Greece with Antiphon the Sophist's Peri Alypias.
= Sophistic writings
=The genre of philosophical writing that discuss the avoidance of grief or dispelling of sorrow dates back to the 5th century BC with Antiphon the Sophist, as described by Plutarch. Other treatises under the same name or genre include those (now lost) by Eratosthenes of Cyrene and another by Diogenes of Babylon, a preserved Greek text by Maximus of Tyre, the third book of Cicero's Tusculanae Disputationes, and Plutarch's On Tranquility of Mind.
= Galen
=Galen's Peri Alypias was written as a letter to an anonymous friend in Galen's hometown of Pergamon describing the destruction of his books and surgical tools in the fire of 192 and how he endured their losses. It accounts for Galen's losses as a practicing physician and offers remedies rooted in Stoicism, including a frugal life, disdain for human affairs, preparation for loss, rejection of politics, and an insistence of logic and proof over subjective opinion. Galen provides a list of where his books were located, their fate in the fire, and an account the books owned by others that were also destroyed which Galen had re-edited and commented upon. Books destroyed included those by Aristotle, Anaxagoras, Andromachus, and Theophrastus. Most distressingly, he reported the loss of his pharmakon (recipes for drugs, remedies, and prescriptions).
Galen's work was likely written in the early months of AD 193, after the death of the emperor Commodus, as Peri Alypias includes critical remarks around his reign. Letter writing was a conventional form in antiquity for works that addressed the "therapy of emotions", as followed by Plutarch and Seneca.
Galen recorded the treatise in his De Libris Propiis among his other ethical treatises. Parts of it survived in translation into Arabic, from Syriac, and into Hebrew in the 12 and 13th centuries.
= Later works
=The 7th century Christian philosopher John Climacus published a work On Tranquilitiy of the Soul, or Rather on Avoiding Distress (Περί Απροσπαθείας ήγουν Αλυπίας), subsuming Stoic moral ideas into Christian ethics.
= Arabic translations
=There is evidence that Galen's Peri Alypias was read by Arab and Iranian philosophers, including Al-Kindi, Hunayn ibn Ishaq, and Abu Bakr al-Razi, in the 9th and 10th centuries. A letter of Al-Kindi's, On Dispelling Sorrow, survives from the 9th century and a chapter of Razi's Spiritual Medicine is devoted to the topic. The last evidence of Galen's work, prior to its rediscovery, was in the 13th century by a physician named Joseph ben Judah ibn Aknin. None of the translations of Galen's work into Syriac and Arabic survive today.
Discovery
In 2005, Antoine Pietrobelli discovered a Galenic manuscript in the library of Vlatadon Monastery that contained four Galenic items, one of which was the entire text of Peri Alypias. As of 2022, at least seven editions or translation of Peri Alypias have been published in English, French, Greek, and Italian since Galen's manuscript was rediscovered. The Greek text had been copied from an unknown original in the decade prior to the fall of Constantinople by Andreiôménos, a student of John Argyropoulos at the Xenon of the Kral, a hospital in Constantinople.
Vivian Nutton started that the discovery of the manuscript in Thessaloniki "must rank with one of the most spectacular finds ever of ancient literature".
References
= Bibliography
=Polemis, Ioannis; Xenophontos, Sophia, eds. (2023-09-05). 'On Avoiding Distress' and 'On My Own Opinions'. De Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-132081-6.
Further reading
Rothschild, Clare K. (2014). Galen's De indolentia: Essays on a Newly Discovered Letter. Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum / Studies and Texts in Antiquity and Christianity. Trevor W. Thompson. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. ISBN 978-3-16-153215-3.