Come si costruisce un corpus: il caso di Galeno

The paper gives a comprehensive view of the main issues concerning the complex and long-lasting process of composition of Galen’s works. Through the analysis of some passages of the so-called autobibliographical writings, and other selected texts, the author aims at showing that Galen’s project of organizing his own books in a corpus was conceived at a relatively early age, and was carried on until his last days : Galen’s main goal was to preserve the integrity and authorship of his writings and secondly, to build a cursus studiorum of medicine completely based on his own books. This forms, together with autobiography, an integral part of Galen’s strategy of self-representation, oriented to the construction of a monumentum entrusted to posterity.