A biography of Galen (a.d. 129–c. 216) was a desideratum for a long time; two appeared within a year, one in French, one in English, providing scholars and students with welcome new tools to navigate Galen's long, eventful life as well as his multifaceted works. Both are reviewed here in a comparative way. A brief survey of the question before those two publications is in order. Although Galen was long associated with early forms of autobiography (Misch, Reardon, Bompaire, Nutton) due to the numerous personal details and stories scattered among his enormous oeuvre, studies about his life often remained devoted to details of his biography, such as ‘the chronology of [his] early career’ (Nutton, 1973) or his trips to (for example) Egypt. The reference work about the chronology of Galen's works (a collection filling twenty thousand pages in the standard edition of C. G. Kühn, 1821–33) is still the series of articles published by J. Ilberg in the late nineteenth century. A more recent, concise and convenient survey of Galen's works was published by V. Boudon-Millot in the Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques (R. Goulet (ed.), 2000), but subsequent discoveries of new texts, including the now famous De indolentia (περὶ ἀλυπίας, available in two editions and several modern translations), quickly invited a new study. In fact, as new evidence comes up every year or so, and new interpretations of the data keep arising (such as the importance to be given to sources in Arabic), it has become difficult to keep up to date with the state of research.

External sources about Galen's life are notoriously late (such as the Byzantine Souda lexicon) and difficult to use. The Arabic tradition, in particular, has seen fantastical stories flourish about Galen's life, making him a contemporary of Christ and of Cleopatra (Swain, 2006). In recent decades, however, a shift can be observed in scholarly approaches, and balancing Greek (especially Byzantine) evidence with the Arabic material has taken a new turn. Galen is now thought to have been active as a writer for seventy years, which pushes the date of his death to around 216 instead of 199 as previously thought. Other interpretative factors come into play, notably with problems of authenticity casting a shadow over some of the later works ascribed to Galen, especially the Theriac to Piso (of which a new edition is in preparation by V. Boudon-Millot). How far into the third century did Galen in fact live? This is still a difficult question to answer, just as several obscure circumstances of Galen's life keep eluding scholars.

A specialist on Galen for over twenty years and the author of several volumes in the Galen collection of the Budé series, Boudon-Millot was more than aware of this state of affairs when she set out to write the first scholarly biography of Galen for Les Belles Lettres. The book follows the expected plan of a biography (chronological, from birth to death), which is helpful for non-initiates, and also allows B.-M. to stick to the periods of Galen's life that have become familiar to, and through, specialists (dividing Galen's life according to the places where he stayed, notably Pergamum, Alexandria, Rome …). Each chapter includes a thoughtful discussion of the evidence and follows a clear narrative, broken into several subchapters. We thus follow Galen from his father's home in Pergamum to the many places he travelled to as a youth during his crucial, formative years, and then to Rome, where his career as a physician took off. With due attention to context and welcome descriptive pauses, B.-M. convincingly outlines Galen's personality and achievements throughout his medical career. One of the key strengths of B.-M.'s book, in my view, is the sheer number of quotations taken from Galen's own works: many a crucial Galenic story is thus woven into the narrative, and often from works that are difficult or impossible to find in translation, such as On Simple Drugs. Similarly, the chapter on Galen's diseases and death (ch. 9) helpfully summarizes material and discussions once published by M. D. Grmek and D. Gourevitch in an article that few have been able to read, published in Études de lettres (1986). B.-M. then makes a plausible case for locating Galen's death in 216, towards the end of the reign of Caracalla, bringing together Arabic and Byzantine sources, but playing down the importance of the Souda. In the tenth and last chapter, Galen's key doctrinal points and achievements are described under several thematic headings, but since this amounts to just over twenty pages, this was difficult to achieve in depth: thus the section on ‘Galen as a witness of the society of his time’ (278–80) will appear frustrating to those who have not got at hand H. Schlange-Schöningen's study, Die römische Gesellschaft bei Galen (2003), though it is no doubt aimed at those who know little or nothing about Galen.

In sum, this is the first biography of Galen to succeed in bringing out Galen's exceptional stature as one of the most accomplished polymaths of antiquity. It is based on extensive research and the best available sources. Only a few regrets will cast a shadow over this handsome, convenient and reliable book. It seems that targeting the right audience presents B.-M. with dilemma, for the book seems to aim at both the general public and specialists: additional tools are kept to a minimum (an index of names, a bibliography and a survey of Galen's works, which would have worked better — especially for international readers — if she had used the standard Latin titles of Galen's works rather than French ones). Specialists would certainly have welcomed more maps (for example showing Galen's travel itineraries), and additional indices, but the ‘repères chronologiques’ are certainly useful.

In her book about Galen, Susan Mattern has clearly made different choices to those of B.-M. Rather than attempting to follow Galen's own path in detail, she has selected highlights of his career, especially in Rome — for example, the chapter ‘Anatomy and Boethus’ describes Galen's anatomical demonstrations. But while B.-M. carefully traces the steps of Galen's ascension in Rome (ch. 6: ‘Rome! A nous deux, maintenant!’) and analyses the rôle played by Galen's public demonstrations in his success, M. uses the same anatomical demonstrations to illustrate the gorier aspects of vivisection and the anatomist's lack of empathy with the animals he cuts open (154). Similarly, the first chapter strangely emphasizes the uncleanliness of Roman baths (quoting Galen on the temperature of ‘piss’) and the fact that they were ‘common sites of violence, theft and illicit sex’ (20). M. thus adopts a different approach, and that is to provide a graphic impression of the world of Galen. In fact, Galen is almost instrumental here in illustrating the more sensationalist aspects of the Roman Empire. It is significant that Galen's biography finishes with ‘the fire’ of 192 and its devastating consequences for Galen's library and medical collection, rather than dwelling on scholarly issues around the last years of Galen's life. The striking scenes highlighted in this book serve several purposes: they certainly illustrate Galen's personality (boldly characterized as ‘type A’ in the preface (4)); to an extent, they are also designed to attract a different kind of reader, through emphasizing pathos and drama. In so doing, M. certainly succeeds in giving her audience an entertaining read, and this book will no doubt be a favourite among some students who might easily get bored with more standard academic accounts of Galen's life. References to scholarly studies are indeed marginal here. But those looking for adequate evidence for the topics highlighted at the beginning of this review, such as the time and place of Galen's death, will find nothing of the sort and would be well-advised to turn towards B.-M. instead. The choice of illustrations in the middle of the book confirms this impressionistic approach: the book simply recycles some of the most famous medical illustrations around (pictures of the Asclepieion of Pergamum, of an Arabic medical manuscript …). Finally, the epilogue on ‘two disciples’ of Galen, namely the medieval translator Hunayn and the Renaissance anatomist Vesalius, cannot avoid the same pitfall — illustrating the posterity of Galen through a couple of arbitrary examples. What is suitable for a non-academic audience will definitely not satisfy more alert readers.

To sum up then, both biographies will serve well the general audience, especially students. They are both written in a clear, accessible style and offer helpful chronological tools — B.-M.'s strict chronological approach and self-explanatory titles are particularly clear. Both are also inexpensive books, and this should help Galen become more popular among the public. Both attempt, and succeed, to make Galen more likeable. But only B.-M. will also serve the purposes of the specialist audience: based on extensive research and her life-long reading of Galen, supplying the reader with numerous, well-translated passages from Galen's own works, she gives a more authentic taste of Galen's life and work as a physician and a man, and proper answers to many of the questions that specialists of the Roman Empire may have about Galen's biography.