Chapter 6 centres on Galen’s longest moral work, the Affections and Errors of the Soul, and explores the features of Galenic practical philosophy from a number of angles. The first section provides an analysis of the work’s programmatic preface and shows that Galen exploits the dynamics of polemic, self-promotion and self-effacement to cast himself as a prominent contributor in this intellectual area. The next section discusses Galen’s emphasis on self-knowledge, which is often blocked by self-love. It claims that in order to generate feelings of revulsion with regard to the latter, Galen works on ‘class fraction’ as a tactic with moralising intent. Another strand of special importance in the essay is the figure of the moral adviser, which Galen elaborates on so as to highlight the need for welcoming and indeed enduring moral criticism. Even though the moral adviser features in other authors of the Second Sophistic, in Galen it points to the applicability of ethics to a broad range of social contexts, thus credentialing his situational ethics. A separate section of Chapter 6 focuses on the concept of free speech (parrhēsia). While Galen debates the challenges of social and political interaction, he advises frankness at all costs. A genuine friend should never be reluctant to express the truth of someone’s moral situation and this makes him strikingly different from the flatterer, a disgusting stock figure in Imperial works on moralia, particularly in Plutarch, whom Galen seems to follow here. Another shrewd device that Galen uses to good effect to achieve the moral rectification of readers is the description of the pathology of anger (its origins and results), particularly in the episode featuring Galen’s Cretan friend, which is framed, I suggest, as an ‘ethical case history’, sharing characteristics with Galen’s medical case histories.

This Chapter explains in detail how Galen endows medical science with moral probity. In broad outline, he extrapolates moral principles from his ethical programme to feed into his medical accounts and thus reveal his personal responses to what he represents as the immorality of other doctors. Assigning praise and blame or stressing social shame and fear are central moral-didactic devices here, as is reproach with a view to moral amendment or Galen’s attempts at self-deprecation in order to affect his readers’ moral activity.

The Introduction familiarises the reader with Galen, his life and work, and offers essential information on his engagement with ethical philosophical writings. It also provides a brief introduction to practical ethics in antiquity, and foregrounds the contribution of the present study and the methodology through which the study will explore the topic under investigation. Finally, the Introduction gives an overview of the main chapters of the book.

This Chapter discusses some of Galen’s technical works, especially those dealing with physiological psychology to show that Galen’s resourceful combination of popular philosophy and medicine is intended to promote mental alertness in his readers in various aspects of their personal and social lives, such as the symposium or the area of maintaining good health (hygiene). The control of emotions and the social embeddedness of ethics that Galen emphasises in these passages while at the same time describing the physical basis of character formation, make him stand out from other medical authors inasmuch as they reveal his proposed vision of a moral form of medicine.

Chapter 1 provides a systematic account of the main moral themes and types of moralism in Galen. Among these, the most general level is represented by an unparticularised moralism, in which the author pronounces ethical verdicts with universal application. Galen’s aim here is not to override moral relativism (in the modern sense of the term) nor restrain moral freedom. Rather, he seeks to delimit what he wishes to stigmatise as deviant behaviour as lucidly as possible, so as to be able to offer rudimentary directives for goodness effectively. In this model of basic moralism, even though there are instances where the author’s moral viewpoint features in a commanding fashion, reference is made to an astute reader who either embraces, upon reflection, Galen’s viewpoint or judiciously considers what is at stake when the former goes astray.