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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.
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