Scribonius Largus

Scribonius Largus was a Roman physician of the empirical-skeptical school in the 1st century AD at the time of Emperor Claudius .

Life

There is no reliable information about the origin of the Scribonius. His Latin, which, according to older research, seemed awkward, had at times suggested that it was a Greek slave who first wrote Greek and only then translated into Latin. However, the negative linguistic assessment has recently been increasingly revised.

He claims that he used Apuleius Celsus as a source, and that he is his pupil. He was related to the court of Claudius, whom he called deus noster Caesar several times , and whom he accompanied on his campaign to Britain (43 AD) (comp. 163). His relationship with Gaius Iulius Callistus , to whom he dedicated his Compositiones medicamentorum , is also certain . It has also been assumed that he was also the personal physician of Claudius or Valeria Messalina .

plant

Of his works, only the compositions have survived, a compilation of 271 recipes, the content of which was arranged according to the a capite ad calcem (from head to toe) scheme known since Aristotle and which was created between 44 and 48 AD, the is called in the time between the return of Claudius from Britain and the death of Messalina (comp. 60), who was still mentioned as living. The book, which was used by the younger Andromachos and the pharmacologist Asklepiades, but especially by Marcellus Empiricus , is based on Greek sources: Herakleides of Taranto and his school.

Until recently, the text of the compositions was only known through the Editio princeps by Jean Ruel (1528) based on a manuscript that has since disappeared and through secondary tradition (via Pseudo-Apuleius ), especially from Marcellus Empiricus, who wrote around 400 AD around 90 Chapter copied. In 1983 Innocenzo Mazzini published the discovery of a medieval epitome of chapters 97-107 and 214 in a manuscript from the 9th century (Bodmerianus 84 C, formerly Phillipps 386), and in 1974 Sergio Sconocchia succeeded in writing a manuscript from the beginning of the 16th century Century (Toletanus Capit. 98,2) the discovery of a Scribonius text, which is close to that of the Editio princeps. Today the critical edition of Sconocchia 1983 is decisive, but there are still some uncertainties in the preparation of the text, especially in the assessment of the tradition of Marcellus.

In the Prologue of the Composition, Scribonius Largus offers the oldest evidence in the tradition of the Hippocratic oath .

output

• Sergio Sconocchia (Ed.): Scribonii Largi Compositiones . Teubner, Leipzig 1983
• Kai Brodersen : Scribonius Largus, The Good Doctor / Compositiones . Latin and German. Marix, Wiesbaden 2016. ISBN 978-3-7374-1017-5

translation

• Jutta Kollesch , Diethard Nickel : Ancient healing art - selected texts. Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart 1994, ISBN 978-3-15-009305-4 (only selection: Scribonius Largus to his friend Callistus in the foreword to the recipe compilations).

literature

Overview representations

• Véronique Boudon-Millot : Scribonius Largus. In: Richard Goulet (ed.): Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques. Volume 6, CNRS Éditions, Paris 2016, ISBN 978-2-271-08989-2 , pp. 161-163.
• Burkhart Cardauns : Scribonius Largus. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 1312.

Investigations

• Innocenzo Mazzini: Due testimoniane altomedievali inedite di Scribonio Largo. In: Rivista di filologia e di istruzione classica 111, 1983, pp. 158-170
• Sergio Sconocchia: Le fonti e la fortuna di Scribonio Largo. In: Innocenzo Mazzini, Franca Fusco (ed.): I testi di medicina latini antichi: problemi filologici e storici (= Università di Macerata, Pubblicazioni della Facoltà di lettere e filosofia , 28). Bretschneider, Rome 1985, ISBN 88-7689-003-3 , pp. 151-213

concordance

• Sergio Sconocchia (Ed.): Concordantiae Scribonianae . Olms-Weidmann, Hildesheim [u. a.] 1988 (= Alpha - Omega, Series A, 92), ISBN 3-487-09116-X

Web links

• Literature by and about Scribonius Largus in the catalog of the German National Library
• De compositione medicamentorum liber unus, antehac nusquam excusus. Paris: Simon Silvius (Jean de la Haye), October 1528 : Digitized version of the Editio Princeps on Google Books
• The recipes of Scribonius Largus : Online version of the German translation by Wilhelm Schonack (Fischer, Jena 1912) in the Braunschweig digital library
• Latin text of the compositions (incomplete) based on the edition by Georg Helmreich (Teubner, Leipzig 1887)
• Scribonii Largi de compositione medicamentorum liber / iampridem Io. Ruellii opera e tenebris erutus & a situ vindicatus , Basel 1529 (digitized version of the University and State Library Düsseldorf )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Scrib. Larg. 94; 171. Sa https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/RE:Appuleius_20 .
2. ↑ Ortrun Riha : The structure principle "a capite ad calcem" and the localism in the surgical understanding of disease. The diagnosis key of the Surgical University Clinic Göttingen 1912–1958. In: Würzburger medical history reports 12, 1994, pp. 299-313.
3. ↑ Christina Becela-Deller: Ruta graveolens L. A medicinal plant in terms of art and cultural history. (Mathematical and natural scientific dissertation Würzburg 1994) Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1998 (= Würzburg medical-historical research. Volume 65), ISBN 3-8260-1667-X , p. 235.