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The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
—Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art.”*
Sometime in the spring of the year 192 CE,2 a fire–all too frequent in the jerry-built Rome of the time–raged through the Temple of Peace in the Forum, the centre of official Rome. Like several other monumental buildings on the nearby Palatine Hill, the temple possessed a library, where intellectuals often met for discussion.3 A cluster of other buildings on the nearby Via Sacra included two high-status warehouses for rare spices and valuable merchandise, the Horrea Piperateria and the Horrea Vespasiani. They also stored the valuables of wealthy Romans and others who were temporarily absent from the city. Pier Luigi Tucci imagines the situation as a north wind blew flames from the burning roofs of houses in the near-by Subura towards the temple, the warehouses, and onward south-west,4 but we need only recall the fire at Notre Dame on April 15, 2019, with heavy wooden roof-beams crashing down onto the cathedral’s vaulted ceiling, to reconstruct it for ourselves.
The “fire of Commodus” swept away not only the temple, the libraries, and the warehouses, but almost all the personal possessions of one of the empire’s notables: Claudius Galenus, (129-ca. 200/16?), the most famous physician of his time.5 Among his losses were the rare medicaments he needed for clinical work, the unique bronze surgical instruments he had designed, and the bookrolls constituting most of his personal library: not only those Galen had written himself but also the exceptional collection of books by earlier authors he had copied and carefully corrected against better manuscripts.
Galen, despite his renowned practice in Rome, wrote in Greek and seems never to have mentioned a Latin author.6 When the fire broke out he had been 220 km to the south, visiting his country property in Campania, then an area of strong Hellenistic cultural influence. He had had his fill of the cruelty of the emperor Commodus, whom he had known as a patient since the emperor’s childhood. Depositing in one of the warehouses on the Palatine the more valuable of his possessions,7 Galen planned to...