Sharon M. Leon, An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 240, $45.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-226-03898-8.

date by someone wishing to imitate Galen. But this is unlikely for several reasons. While such ‘reconstructions’ are known for literary themes, none involves such precise detail of past (or fictitious) events, and none of the pseudonymous medical material (excluding the Hippocratic letters) bears any resemblance to this type of pastiche. Arguments from verbal parallels with later Christian material are weak, given the relative absence of surviving non-theological texts from the century after Galen, and, as Leigh points out, the author is not always as consistent as one might have expected from the composer of a pastiche. An apparent quotation in the Cestoi of Julius Africanus (around 225 AD) could have been derived from this tract or from a shared source. Such a deliberate antique invention of a medical tract would be unique and serve no real purpose. The alternative is far more plausible. This was a treatise written in Galen’s lifetime by someone much like him, with a similar career and background, and who may even have derived some of his arguments from Galen (although the evidence is not clear cut, given Galen’s silence about those with whom he agreed). The author writes good Greek, with rather more literary flourishes and a more elegant style than Galen, and his perspective is that of a Greek long resident in Rome – his examples of Mithridates, Hannibal and Cleopatra suit a Roman readership. This is not surprising, for recent work on the other theriac tract and on the short The Properties of the Centaury has shown that they too were written by Greek doctors living in Rome at precisely the same time. Rome in 210 AD was as much a Greek as a Latin city. Leigh’s careful commentary, often pointing out differences with Galen, serves another important purpose. It allows us to compare Galen with some contemporaries and to provide him with a context in which he can be assessed. To focus on this anonymous author, his ideas and his abilities not only brings to light an author who has been almost entirely forgotten but also serves as a reminder of the intellectual world of Rome in the early third century. Paradoxically, by freeing the author from the shackles of Galen, Leigh has also shown how much the two have in common and, at the same time, he has made this Roman doctor a much more significant figure in the history of medicine.