Chapter IV: Celsus: Mela: Miscellaneous Learning

Cornelius Celsus—Contents of his encyclopaedia—The eight
books, _De Medicina_—Sources—Relation to his times—Common
Sense—Curiosities of Celsian medicine—Style.

The first Roman Geography—Pomponius Mela—The coasting
method—Some aspects of his treatment—Faults and
merits—Sources—Enlivening touches—Description of customs
and marvels—Mela on tides—Rhetorical elements and his
rhythm—Miscellaneous learning of the age.

CELSUS

The biography of A. Cornelius Celsus,[328] the encyclopaedist, is a blank; and, in the absence of details, inquiry must rest satisfied with the guarantee of his gentile name through its occurrence in Columella and the elder Pliny.[329] Celsus was a senior contemporary[330] frequently mentioned by Columella, who belongs to the time of Claudius. Pliny’s statement that Julius Graecinus made use of the agricultural work of Celsus suggests that at least the books on farming were written before the close of Tiberius’s reign; for Graecinus was executed under Caligula about A.D. 39.[331] The subsequent books on medicine may be presumed to precede A.D. 47, when Scribonius Largus published among his prescriptions a cure for quinsy which Celsus declares he has not found in medical treatises.[332]

The encyclopaedic habit of Cato and Varro[333] descended to Celsus. His labours included agriculture, medicine, military tactics, rhetoric, jurisprudence and philosophy—all subjects of traditional importance in the higher education of a Roman. To each he devoted several books;[334] but the one surviving portion is the _De Medicina_ in eight books. His military writings, whether in the encyclopaedia or in separate pamphlets composed as late as Nero’s reign, were consulted by Vegetius and Lydus.[335] The books on philosophic systems, in which (Augustine informs us) the aim was rather exposition than refutation, may have been included in the encyclopaedia; but he evidently wrote other treatises on philosophy.[336] Quintilian, who bestows modified praise upon Celsus’s style in discussing philosophy, cites his opinions on rhetoric, frequently to disagree with them.[337] This is not unnatural when it is remembered that Celsus’s cursory treatment of rhetoric would not be calculated to satisfy a specialist like Quintilian; and it may be guessed that Celsus’s rhetorical portion was in fact eclipsed by the fuller treatment of the great professional authority and so sank into oblivion.

Regarding the order of parts in this encyclopaedia, we can be certain that the five books _De Agricultura_ opened the work, and that the _De Medicina_ followed, forming Books VI to XIII[338] of the whole _corpus_. Detached from the encyclopaedia, they possess the unique importance of representing the healing art in classical Rome. At the close of an introduction, which is an epitome and criticism of prevailing tendencies in medical science, Celsus summarizes his own position and announces his plan of handling first rules of health and next phenomena and cures of disease. To this end Book I is largely of diet; II of symptoms and therapeutics; III of fevers; IV of internal diseases, considered in order from the head to the joints of the feet; V and VI of drugs and ailments for which they are specifics (with numerous prescriptions); VII and VIII of surgical operations.

His sources are mainly, but not entirely, Greek; and among those the influence of Hippocrates and Asclepiades is pre-eminent. The authority of the former is recognized in the preface to Book II; his teaching on massage, Celsus notes, was in nowise superseded by the more diffuse Asclepiades; and again his magnanimous avowal of a professional mistake is admired, but without any such encomiastic fanfaronade as to justify the nickname “Hippocrates’s ape” sometimes given to Celsus.[339] Asclepiades is also in high favour: his books on preservation of health and on general remedies are cited; his cure for a tertian fever is approved for its rejection of the faulty method of Cleophantus; he is quoted in contrast with Erasistratus to show that doctors differ about the treatment of hemorrhage or about the stress to be laid on diet.[340] Erasistratus is another medical authority often mentioned.[341] Prescriptions are ascribed to an imposing array of practitioners—especially in the pharmacy of the fifth book.[342] Further, the punctiliousness with which Celsus introduces Greek synonyms indicates the origin of much of his reading.[343] Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that he confined himself to the older Hellenic sources. He had the work of recent practitioners, both native and foreign, like Cassius or Themison, to draw from; he had his own observation, though this plays no great part; so he introduces, sometimes with emphasis, his individual views and criticisms, and throughout displays a practical common sense which is typically Roman.

Some of these points demand attention, as illustrations of the author’s relation to his times. Indeed, it is not surprising that Celsus, who in another field incurred the disapproval of Quintilian because of an “excessive passion for novelty,”[344] should have in medicine shown himself abreast of the latest tendencies and discoveries. Thus, though he does not always agree, he takes pains to record Themison’s advice as something modern;[345] and in his preface remarks on the attitude of his followers (_Themisonis aemuli_) to the vexed question of theory _versus_ practice. Cassius, again, is singled out for characterization as “the most talented leech of our age,” and is elsewhere mentioned as the proud discoverer of a remedy for disease of the larger intestine.[346] The opening remarks by Celsus upon the diverse views of contemporary schools, and subsequent comparisons between medical practices of his own day and those of predecessors, prove that he was alive to advances or at least changes in the healing art.[347] Sometimes he inserts original examples, such as the method of inducing perspiration pursued near Baiae.[348] At other times his personal opinions or results of his observation are stated with a dogmatism that would do credit to wide practical experience.[349] Scaliger, indeed, believed that Celsus practised; but this has been stoutly denied, and one notices nothing in him that a vigilant eye and a perusal of medical books might not have yielded. It is difficult to credit that, if he had been a practising physician or surgeon, he would have refrained from quoting cases which he had attended. Undoubtedly, however, he gains in interest by combining an individual note with a continual suggestion of his environment. It is Celsus himself who speaks when the increased recourse to bleeding is noted as a novelty, and especially when he proceeds with his cautionary remarks on its unsuitability in certain cases and its murderous results in others.[350] Like most contemporary writers, he feels impelled to stigmatize the two great moral and hygienic perils of the Empire—idleness and luxury.[351] As a whole, his background forms for modern readers an attractive index to other days and other lands. The risks to health in autumn are naturally important to one writing in Rome: the mention of a siesta at midday comes from a southern clime: the careful description of the way to extract an arrow revives pictures of antiquated warfare: and the stress laid upon reading aloud as an exercise beneficial or injurious in certain bodily affections takes the reader back to the declamatory _recitatio_ which once played its great part in the Roman social and educational system.[352]

The common sense noticeable in Celsus is in part an inheritance from earlier medical systems and ancient human experience; but in part an individual trait of tone and attitude. The wisdom evident in the preface must be credited to the author himself; for there, after an able statement of the issue between empirics and theorists in medicine, he holds the balance fairly, and votes for a combination of experience (_usus, experimenta_) with science (_rationalis ars_). Proposing, therefore, a _uia media_ as likeliest to lead to truth, he sagely argues that the great doctors of the past were not made doctors by scientific investigation independently of practice, but were by the fusion made greater doctors still.[353] Among enlightened points in the same introduction are his freedom from the superstitious notion that diseases originate in divine wrath (a supposition logically denounced as a barrier to medical research and progress); his insistence upon the quest for true causes; and the emphasis laid upon anatomy and dissection. Celsus is indeed scientific enough to state principles which were ultimately to antiquate and supersede him: thus, under the head of dissection, he advocated the acquisition of a knowledge destined in due time to convict him of errors; for his anatomy, when he comes to it, is not beyond reproach. His remarks on vivisection are interesting. While he states the argument for experimenting upon condemned criminals, he also states with sympathy, and even some tenderness, the contrary argument on behalf of those surgeons who aim at “cure, not kill” (_prudentem medicum non caedem sed sanitatem molientem_), who recognize that the chances of the arena or war or an affray often provide a view of internal organs during life without dependence upon the scalpel of some “ruffian bandit of a doctor,”[354] and who are content “to learn through pity what others have come to know by fiendish cruelty” (_idque per misericordiam discere quod alii dira crudelitate cognouerint_). His final verdict is that vivisection is superfluous, but dissection imperative.[355] On many matters his counsels may involve no more than an ability to profit by ordinary human experience and medical tradition; yet, they are counsels which require continual restatement and are violated in all ages. Instances may be found in his rules for preservation of health, in the limits assigned to bodily exercise, in the reduction of food after hard work, in the advantages of a rest cure,[356] or in the physiological restrictions incumbent upon the scholar’s burning of the midnight oil—restrictions, more salutary,[357] if less romantic, than the enthusiasm of the student in Bailey’s _Festus_,

When night hath set her silver lamp on high,
Then is the time for study.

With equal plausibility he advocates the benefits of change: it is good for a cough, while the climate that made one ill is the very worst for the invalid:[358] similarly a voyage is recommended for consumption. Noteworthy acumen, too, marks his insistence on the fundamental position that strong probability is enough to justify a belief in the power of medicine.[359] There is, however, no attempt to overestimate the value of drugs; for he bears in mind the curative efficacy of nature,[360] and in another connexion declares the best medicine to be diet seasonably given.[361] Other illustrations of sound sense are his reminder of the tact requisite in a physician about to take an invalid’s pulse, his admission that the confident quack may succeed with another’s patients better than with his own (_quos ratio non restituit temeritas adiuuat_), and his suspicion of too rigid a theory concerning “critical days” during an illness as being apparently due to the misleading influences of Pythagorean numbers upon medical calculations.[362] Throughout his work he gives the impression that he set himself in a business-like manner to illustrate the aims which Asclepiades ascribed to a capable physician and which Celsus approves as an ideal _uotum_, namely, “to effect a cure with safety, despatch, and pleasantness” (_ut tuto, ut celeriter, ut iucunde curet_).[363]

The person likely to reap the maximum of enjoyment from Celsus would be a medical man with historic instincts and a liking for straightforward Latin. A perusal will not recompense the seeker after either elaborate style or unquestionably sound advice; but to any reader passably acquainted with modern medical theory and practice his pages offer much in the way of interest, and occasionally of entertainment. Celsus represents the stage of medical knowledge attained in the early Empire, and the regimen and prescriptions found in his work indicate the method of treating or maltreating Roman citizens unlucky enough to need professional attendance. In a system so many centuries prior to the germ-theory of disease or to antiseptic and anaesthetic surgery, all sorts of quaint precautions and quaint remedies are advocated. There is a difference of atmosphere which, once felt, exerts a fascination, partly in spite of and partly in virtue of its errors. It is true that his teaching on anatomy leaves much to be desired; but the lay reader soon forgives mistakes such as those regarding the spleen.[364] His surgery takes one back to a period ages before chloroform or ether, when one essential merit of the operator was intrepidity sufficient “to resist being influenced by the patient’s shrieks into hurrying more than the case demanded or cutting less than was needful,”[365] and when, in an operation for cataract, the head had to be held fast to prevent a movement which might be permanently fatal to the eyesight.[366] Among curiosities of Celsian medicine may be cited blood-letting for the spitting of blood,[367] and a queer precaution against headache, to wit, the avoidance of moonlight particularly before the conjunction of sun and moon.[368] Some pronouncements on diet are extraordinary—pork is the lightest and beef the heaviest of foods (_leuissima suilla est, grauissima bubula_).[369] His recipe for quinsy is to eat a young swallow salted, burned, and administered as a powder in hydromel; and his comment here implies by contrast that, as a rule, book-knowledge rather than practice is the basis of his pharmacy—“although I have not read this in medical treatises, still I believe it ought to be included in this work of mine.”[370] The powdered liver of a fox[371] for asthmatic troubles is comparable to the roast mouse still recommended in parts of Norfolk for whooping-cough. Not the least interesting are those prescriptions which, like so many survivals from primitive magic-healing, belong to what may be called excremental medicine. Prominent ingredients in his pharmacopoeia are not only such as deer’s marrow, bull’s suet, hog’s lard, but also the ordure of various animals. Lizard’s dung and pigeon’s blood are among the purgatives; and the dung of lizard, pigeon, ring-dove, swallow and sheep among caustics.[372] As an encyclopaedic summarizer of previous and current medicine, Celsus could not be expected to go beyond his own age; but at least this may be urged that his emancipation from a number of earlier superstitions and his sensible attitude on the combined merits of theory and practice were far-off presages of a time when medicine should abandon the copious blood-letting and clysterizing of coprophagous patients. An illustration of the mark left by Celsus upon medicine was the implicit claim to have eclipsed him which was made in the name “Paracelsus” assumed some four centuries ago by the clever Swiss alchemist and quack Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim. If in the twentieth century Celsian medicine lies under a cloud, it is mainly because, notwithstanding his professed anxiety to give fair-play to both theory and experiment, he does not convince practising doctors that he founded his work sufficiently upon observation. Book-learning and the experience of others do not, from the standpoint of science, counterbalance this absence of a commanding personal authority.

We have seen that Quintilian, who would be most prone to appraise Celsus by his work on rhetoric, did not consider him an author of eminent genius. Without, however, exalted merit, Celsus had a sanity which is reflected in his style. One aspect of his good sense is that gift of straightforward expression which differentiates him from the artificiality of contemporary Latin. He states a plain fact or counsel or argument in a plain way. Some, indeed, of his readers, attracted by the elegance of his brief sentences, have declared that more store should be set by his Latinity than by his medicine. It is an elegance which consists in no literary adornment beyond what comes of lucid, facile and neat exposition in sound Latin.[373] There is almost nothing in the way of literary allusion. Quite exceptional in this respect is the passing reference to the poets’ accounts of Ajax or Orestes as illustrating the creations of a disordered imagination.[374] Apropos of swallow’s blood prescribed for an injured eye he mentions the _fabula_ which told how the old birds healed the eyes of their young with a herb, but _fabula_ here may mean popular tradition rather than the literary fable. Signs of the usages of Silver Latin occur: _igitur_ begins sentences in the manner of Sallust and Tacitus: _frequens_ is used in its later sense: and occasionally he shows the tendency to use abstracts for concretes.[375] But he keeps clear of contemporary mannerisms. When he uses balance, as in his opening words, it is not so much for ornament as for clearness;[376] and herein he presents a strong contrast to such writers as Velleius Paterculus and Valerius Maximus. A well-sustained example of his style is his introduction, where he is free to discuss general subjects at some length and to state his views. In it, the sentences are short and direct—well adapted, without artifice, to the subject in hand. He is not concerned to avoid the repetition of a word or phrase by hunting after remote equivalents. Once, indeed, he seems to hesitate on a matter affecting his choice of words: it is, however, a hesitation animated not by rhetorical motives but by those qualms of modesty in expression which led many cultured Romans to avoid the Stoic outspokenness in “calling a spade a spade” and to reject even innocent collocations of sounds capable of conveying indecent suggestion. The question from this latter standpoint is discussed in the well-known letter by Cicero where he furnishes a salutary motto in the opening phrase _amo uerecundiam_.[377] It will be readily gathered that the difficulty for Celsus arises not in collocations of sounds, but in terms which he feels he must use in certain delicate parts of his subject.[378] His quandary is to secure clearness with a due observance of the dictates of modesty and the requirements of medicine.[379] Finally he decides in the interests of health that his treatment must be open and exhaustive; and it is noteworthy that, while he regards Greek terms in such connexions as more acceptable, he prefers in fact to use Latin words.

One may conclude with a passage on the duties of a physician, where the _clausulae_ of two sentences recall the Ciceronian _esse uideatur_:

In the case of these (external injuries), it is beyond
everything imperative upon a medical man to know which are
incurable, which involve difficulty, which greater ease
in treatment. For the wise doctor’s duty is, first, to
decline handling a patient ill beyond the possibility of
recovery, and so avoid the appearance of having killed one
who was already cut off by his own fate; next, where there
is serious apprehension—falling short, however, of absolute
hopelessness—to inform the relatives of the person in danger
that the case is risky, so that, if his skill is baffled by the
malady, he may not produce the impression either of ignorance
or of deception. But, just as this is the fitting attitude for
a wise man, so on the other hand it is worthy of a charlatan to
magnify a trivial case in order to produce the impression of a
greater achievement.[380]

POMPONIUS MELA

Pomponius Mela[381] makes at least this claim on attention that his is the first Roman geography which has come down. A study holding a central position between natural sciences such as physics, astronomy, geology, zoology on the one hand and human sciences such as history, anthropology, ethnology, sociology on the other, might reasonably have been expected through its multifarious orientation to appeal to the didactic tendencies of Roman writers. One might have expected that upon the physical, mathematical and ethnographical foundations laid by the Greeks, imposing edifices would be raised by a people whose commercial and military interests opened the world to them, and that the continuous expansion of Rome beyond Italy would stimulate geographical inquiry. No doubt Varro did contribute to the subject, and Caesar, at any rate, incidentally. But for generations systematic investigation remained in the hands of Greeks and made little advance upon the knowledge attained in the times of Alexander and Alexandria. It is significant, then, that at a date when the Romans held the greater part of Britain, they had added scarcely anything to the facts learned by the voyage in northern waters made by Pytheas of Massilia about 330 B.C. Much later, indeed, when Pompey’s operations against Mithridates opened out the lands in Asia between the Black Sea and the Caspian, the opportunity for recording fresh geographical results had been seized not by any Roman but by the general’s Hellenic comrade Theophanes from Mytilene. Later still, the newly consolidated Roman Empire of the Augustan era received a systematic description from a Greek of Pontus, the renowned Strabo, who, friendly to Rome as he was, entertained but a poor opinion of Roman geographers, remarking that they imitated Greeks without much success, and without bringing to the subject much love of inquiry.[382] These considerations render such Roman works on the subject as exist the more noteworthy; and time has left to us only two, first, the _Chorographia_ (or, as it is sometimes called, _De Situ Orbis_) by Pomponius Mela, largely an unoriginal compendium, and later, the portions in the _Natural History_ of Pliny which handle geography in no very scientific manner, though their author has too high a regard for truth to acquit Roman writers of falsification or carelessness in their investigations.[383]

Pomponius Mela was, he tells us,[384] a native of Tingentera in Spain, not far from Gibraltar. A slight balance of evidence[385] suggests that he wrote his description of the world under Claudius and that he refers to that emperor and his triumph of A.D. 44, rather than to Caligula, when he says: “About the nature of Britain and the nature of her sons it will not be long before more definite and better ascertained details are given. Closed for ages, Britain is now being opened up by the greatest of emperors,[386] victorious over tribes not only unconquered before his own day, but actually unknown. The evidence of its peculiarities which he aimed at in his campaign, he brings home to render clear by his triumph.”[387]

The method of Mela was prompted by the coasting survey of early travellers, and the tradition of such works as the partially genuine _Periplus_ or “Cruise” of Scylax[388] in the fourth century B.C. In the first two of his three books Mela follows the Mediterranean seaboard from west to east along the southern shores and then back from east to west along the northern shores: the third book is left for countries outside this scheme which, though it could not possibly be exhaustive, still with a certain appropriateness had for its hinge the Mediterranean, the ancestral home of geography. Thus, his brief introduction over, Mela deals in Book I with the main divisions of the world, and, after a summary description of Asia, Europe and Africa, turns to a particular description, starting with Morocco, and from Egypt and Arabia proceeding by the coast of the Levant, Aegean, and Black Sea round Asia Minor until in Scythia he reaches Europe. In Book II the course is in the main westwards from European Scythia by Thrace, Greece, Italy, Southern Gaul to Spain with a digression on islands of the Mediterranean suggested by the “Gades insula.” Book III is concerned with coasts and countries outside the Mediterranean. The ocean brings him to the subject of tides, and he next follows the outer seaboard of Spain, proceeds by Gaul and the Baltic (his Codanian Gulf) to Germany, Sarmatia and Northern Scythia, then notices the islands of the ocean (including Britain and Thule), India, the Persian Gulf, and by a short circuit of Africa works his way back to the part of Mauretania bordering on the Atlantic, so that he ends where he began.

The Mediterranean (_nostrum mare_) is viewed as a continuous sea contracting at the Hellespont (Dardanelles), expanding in the Propontis (Sea of Marmora), narrowing again in the Bosporus, but once more widening into the Black Sea. The method of an imaginary voyage has the disadvantage of greatly neglecting interior countries (_e.g._ in Asia, Assyria); and Mela, in the later part of his work, feels compelled to leap eastwards to seas which shall secure him contact with India and Ethiopia. Being a Spaniard, he treats Spain with comparative fulness. In some other cases he holds that the reputation of a city or region dispenses him from elaborate description: Athens, for instance, is too famous to require notice (_clariores quam ut indicari egeant Athenae_), and Italy is handled in a matter-of-fact way without bursts of enthusiasm for the land of his adoption. He will be brief, he promises, concerning a country the treatment of which is demanded rather by the claims of system than by a need for exposition, since here “all is known” (_nota sunt omnia_).

He blunders in thinking that the Danube flows into the Adriatic and that the Alps bound Germany, and he is unscientific in blending mythology with geography; but he has the merit of knowing about the north-western sweep of the Gallic coast and about northern seas and the Orkneys (_Orcades_).

Of Mela’s sources we have scanty information. He quotes Cornelius Nepos twice,[389] and mentions a report by Hanno the Carthaginian after a voyage of discovery, for which Mela’s authority may be Nepos. The knowledge of Spain acquired by Varro, when a Pompeian officer in that country, may possibly have been accessible to the author,[390] who in turn became a source for the elder Pliny. He is cited on Ireland by the scholiast on Juvenal and on the channels of the Ganges by Servius in opposition to Seneca.[391]

With something like a grudge the author in his proem declares that his task is of a sort which does not admit eloquent treatment; as it involves an array of names, its subject-matter is tedious rather than genial (_longa est magis quam benigna materia_). At the same time, it is well worth study (_aspici cognoscique dignissimum_) and calculated to recompense attention through the very thought put into it, if not through the talents of the author.[392] Though the work be dry and little susceptible of ornament (_facundiae minime capax_), Mela does grasp opportunities of embellishing and enlivening his theme; and the alert reader may, among geographical details, discover and even welcome a rhetorical word-picture or record of wonders.

One of these purple patches is the description of the cavern of Corycus[393] in Cilicia, environed by charming greenery and entered by a narrow and difficult footpath which descends among rustling trees and dancing rivulets to a grotto within a grotto, darker and more mysterious, filled with a sound as of crashing cymbals, where a great river seems to issue forth only to vanish again: and beyond are the depths of the cavern unmeasured and inexplorable. What otherwise would be a catalogue is lighted up by passing allusions to famous battlefields, scenes with historical, poetic or legendary associations, birthplaces of celebrities, and monuments to the mighty dead; and no little entertainment may be got from his mention of customs[394] and of marvels. It is not every geography that provides readable fare like the strange fountain of the Sun in Cyrenaica which boils at midnight and is icy cold at noon (I. viii.); queerly illogical African tribes who curse the Sun both at his rising and at his setting, and who have no individual names and are a dreamless people; or cave-dwellers feeding on serpents; or headless creatures with faces in their chests; the Pyramids (I. ix.), and the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus (I. xvi.)—representative wonders of the world; birds that shoot their wing-feathers like arrows (II. vii.); the land of the midnight Sun (III. v.); the rich pastures of Ireland on which flocks might feed till they burst (III. vi.); the island of “hairy women” (presumably some species of apes, III. ix.); and the well that brings on a fatal laugh (III. x.). One may read how to defy the serpents of Colubraria (II. vii., _ad fin._); or may be half persuaded, apropos of the rocky district of the Lapideum (Le Crau) in Southern France, to believe the old fable that it once rained stones there (II. v.). The attraction of the marvellous is for Mela irresistible; Syracuse, for example, interests him not for its situation or history, but for the legend of Arethusa: and perhaps, if he could not be completely scientific, it was well that he should thus frankly display his not unengaging limitations.

Yet he can be serious and perspicacious. He notes the German love of war for little or no reason (_ex libidine_) except the desire of having a desolation round a country where might is right (_ut circa ipsos quae iacent uasta sint; ius in uiribus habent_); and he apologizes that he cannot give German geography exhaustively, because the names are too barbarous for Roman lips to pronounce (_quorum nomina uix est eloqui ore Romano_, III. iii.). His description of the Atlantic tides,[395] with his alternative theories about their cause, may be translated:

“A vast limitless sea, stirred by great tides (that is the term for its movements) at one time floods the plains, at another uncovers them widely and retreats. It does not work so on plain after plain in turn; it does not by alternate advances sweep round in full rush first on these and next on those; but after pouring out from its centre upon the shores of all countries and islands alike, however far apart, it quits them, and again massing towards its centre returns upon itself. Such is the regular force of the incoming tide that it drives back even mighty rivers, and either overtakes land animals or leaves sea-creatures high and dry. So far there is no definite decision whether this is the action of the universe through its own heaving breath, attracting and repelling the waters everywhere (on the assumption of savants that the world is a single animate being); or whether there exist some cavernous depressions for the ebb-tides to sink into, thence to well out and rise anew; or whether the moon is responsible for currents so extensive.”

The traces of rhetoric are visible not only in descriptions, but also in balanced clauses and exclamatory parentheses which recall Valerius Maximus. Of the bridging of the Hellespont by the Persians he exclaims “marvellous and mighty feat!” (_mirum atque ingens facinus!_), and of the devotion of the Carthaginian brothers buried alive to settle a boundary dispute in their country’s favour, “Marvellous feat most worthy of remembrance!” (_mirum et memoria dignissimum facinus!_).[396] But he is not long-winded, and indeed has caught some of Sallust’s brevity, as where he remarks of the rivers Simois and Scamander near Troy that for them “fame has done more than nature” and so gives pithy expression to a feeling which many a traveller on the Trojan plain must have shared. Nor is Mela a mere echo of others: his prose has a rhythm of its own. Even without careful enumeration one is struck in reading his Latin by the frequency of double cretic and dactylic endings to his sentences. Closer investigation has shown that while he quite remarkably avoids the double trochee endings which are so much more common in Celsus, Curtius, the Senecas and Tacitus, he almost as markedly exhibits a preference for closing on a cretic followed by an anapaest or tribrach (–⏑–⏑⏑⏓) or on one of the favourite types of Greek _clausulae_, the double dactyl (–⏑⏑–⏑⏑).[397]

MISCELLANEOUS LEARNING

In the miscellaneous learning of the age may be included its philosophy, criticism and grammar, jurisprudence and medicine. To take the last first, one recognizes in Scribonius Largus,[398] court physician to Claudius, a sort of pendant to Celsus; for about A.D. 47 he made his collection of medical prescriptions. The jurists included Ateius Capito’s pupil, Masurius Sabinus, who gave his name to the “Sabinian” school, and influenced legal thought through his three books on the _ius ciuile_. In contrast with him M. Cocceius Nerva, the emperor’s grandfather, trained by Labeo, the great Augustan rival of Capito, was a forerunner of Proculus from whom the “Proculians” took their name.[399] Among the grammarians were Julius Modestus, Hyginus’s freedman, who followed his master’s broad conception of grammar; the strict purist Pomponius Marcellus;[400] and the successful but immoral teacher, Q. Remmius Palaemon (_flor._ A.D. 48), whose handbook (_Ars_) had a great vogue, and with whom Persius and Quintilian studied. Columella drew from Julius Atticus and Julius Graecinus, both writers on vine-culture in the time of Tiberius; and the botanists Caepio and Antonius Castor were used by the elder Pliny.

Apicius, pre-eminent as the ideal gourmet, belonged to the reign of Tiberius. His culinary lore was, as we know from Seneca and from a note on Juvenal,[401] committed to writing. The work, however, on cookery in ten books which passes under his name (_Apicius de re coquinaria_)[402] is a compilation of some centuries later, poorly and even ungrammatically written, although entertaining for its astounding variety in ingredients and modes of dressing fish, flesh and fowl, as well as for such naïve receipts as that for improving honey: “mix two parts of good honey with the bad and put on the market.”

In philosophy the austere morality of the Sextii, father and son, in the Augustan age, had been transmitted through their adherent Papirius Fabianus to the youthful Seneca. Celsus, as we have seen, also wrote on philosophy. Theoretical speculation, however, might prove politically disastrous; for the uncompromising arguments of Julius Kanus, or Canus, led to his being sentenced to death by Caligula:[403] it was a philosopher who attended him to the place of execution, Julius undertaking that, if he discovered the condition of souls in the other world, he would revisit his friends to inform them. But the Stoics in the time of Nero form a more powerful group of thinkers, and, as we shall see, left a permanent mark on literature.