Galen was born into the intellectual and social elite of the culturally Greek city of Pergamon, near the northwest coast of Roman Asia, in present-day Turkey, in 129 CE, the son of an architect. (Further on his biography and intellectual background see Nutton 1973; Gill et al. 2009; Boudon-Millot 2013; Mattern 2013; Singer 2019a.) He lays great stress on his own early education in mathematics and geometry, and on his passion for logic (Lib. Prop. 14/11; Aff. Pecc. Dig. I.8), seeing these disciplines as providing a model of secure proof lacking from the philosophical debates of the post-Hellenistic schools which were dominant in his day, as well as an antidote to the lures of Skepticism. From the age of fourteen he embarked on his formal education in philosophy. This involved attendance at the closely text-based lecture courses of professors of one or more of the four established philosophical schools: Platonist, Aristotelian, Stoic, Epicurean: Galen mentions an adherent of each as part of his early education. (On Galen’s philosophical eclecticism see Donini 1992; Hankinson 1992.) From the age of sixteen he also commenced his medical studies, although study of philosophy continued concurrently. After his father’s death in 149 he undertook an educational journey of several years, involving periods in Smyrna, Corinth and Alexandria, to study with the foremost medical teachers of the time. This study also involved a strong textual element. Alexandria retained its status as a centre for anatomical research and teaching (although dissection at this period was restricted to non-human animals), but also for scholarship on “classical” texts. It seems likely that it was here that Galen acquired his in-depth training both in anatomy (von Staden 1992; Grmek and Gourevitch 1994) and in the tradition and practice of commentary on texts of his predecessors, those of the “Hippocratic” corpus in particular, which became a central element in his writing and in his intellectual self-positioning (Lloyd 1993; von Staden 1997, 2009; Manetti and Roselli 1994; Singer 1996, 2021a; Vegetti 1999).