The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic by Daniel S. Richter & William A. Johnson

Author:Daniel S. Richter & William A. Johnson [Richter, Daniel S. & Johnson, William A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

24.3 PERFORMANCE AND COMPETITION

Anatomical Demonstrations. The last story illustrates that Galen was very much a public figure and part of the culture of competition and performance so typical of the Second Sophistic and its era. His anatomical demonstrations in particular, in which he dissected or vivisected animals before an audience while lecturing on the structures he exposed, shared many of the features of sophistic performances; and he even uses the same vocabulary, calling them epideixeis, inviting problemata from the audience, and so forth. These dissections and vivisections were an important part of public life. For example, Galen won his position as physician to the gladiators of Pergamum in a public contest in which he disemboweled a live monkey—perhaps a Barbary macaque or a baboon—and challenged his competitors to replace the intestines (De opt. med. cogn. 9, 105 Iskandar). Although overtly educational, these displays were also a form of entertainment; the vivisections in particular, with their violence, blood, and demonstration of mastery over animals, recall other forms of public entertainment popular throughout the Roman Empire.

Dissection and vivisection were highly specialized skills that, as Galen emphasized many times, had to be practiced and taught exhaustively “in private” before they could be performed publicly—that is, Galen trained constantly with his circle, partly so that he could perform flawlessly in public. He is merciless in mocking other anatomists who make mistakes in their public performances, for example the Erasistratean who, challenged before a crowd to demonstrate his school’s thesis that the arteries contain air rather than blood, proves incapable of exposing an animal’s aorta without killing it (De anat. admin. 7.16, 2.641–643K).

Anatomical demonstrations required substantial organization and might be performed in large venues, although Galen does not specifically describe this. One of his best-known demonstrations, a series of vivisections illustrating the mechanisms of the voice, may have taken place in the house of his aristocratic friend Boethus, who sponsored them. Another episode Galen describes must also have been prearranged, as it involved textual props; “once when speaking publicly on the works of ancient physicians . . . the discussion of Erasistratus’s On the Bringing up of Blood was proposed to me, and a stylus [grapheion] was stuck in it, in the customary manner.” Like the practice of soliciting topics from the audience, this was a method of “randomly” choosing a topic for improvised speech, a problema (and Galen uses the passive participle problethentos, “proposed”).

Debating in Public. But Galen also describes a less formal level of public engagement; intellectuals might lecture or debate before small crowds around the Temple of Peace, the Baths of Trajan, or the bookseller’s district (the vicus Sandaliarius, what Galen calls the Sandaliarion), and Galen seems to have done this frequently, debating topics in medicine, philosophy, language, health, and probably other things. The terminology of the pulse was a particularly contentious issue; a debate on this topic at the Temple of Peace might involve eight participants and end in a fight (De puls. diff. 1.1, 8.494–495K). Audiences were very active, laughing,

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