Arabic Galenism from Antioch to Byzantium: Ibn Buṭlān and Symeon Seth

Abstract

This paper investigates how Symeon Seth (second half of the eleventh century) introduced some Arabic medical heritage, especially Galenic, to Byzantium, which probably originated from his training in Antioch around 1060 with the famous Baghdadi physician Ibn Buṭlān. After providing new data on Seth’s biography, our analysis focuses on his three main medical works, whose nature and reception were very different but which are all extensively based on Arabic science: the Refutation of Galen, the On Foodstuffs and the On the Handbook of Health (the latter being, as we show, a partial translation of Ibn Buṭlān’s Taqwīm al-Ṣiḥḥa). We analyse the context of production of each of these three works, the way Seth uses and quotes (or does not quote) his Arabic sources, and their Byzantine reception.