Complete Works of Celsus, Vitruvius, Censorinus, and Frontinus

We have gathered in this volume four authors who treat either the same subjects or analogous ones: Celsus, Vitruvius, Frontinus, and Censorinus.

The importance of Celsus's work, as a scientific monument, is appreciated by all those who have studied the history of medicine. If he is not the god of physicians, medicorum deus god of physicians, as Casaubon calls him, he can be proposed to physicians as an excellent model of that practical common sense, that exactitude of analysis, and that reasoned and philosophical doubt which must be the rule of conduct for the physician, and which make medicine the noblest of the arts. Read too little as a writer because one fears the technicality, there is more than one place in Celsus's treatise where beautiful thoughts and traits of moral observation are expressed with the clarity and color of the philosophical writings of Cicero, which no doubt earned Celsus the qualification of Cicero of physicians. Born, in all likelihood, at the beginning of the century of Augustus, Celsus is a disciple of the profound wisdom of Hippocrates, treating his art in the language that was spoken and written in the time of Virgil and Horace.

The translation we provide of this author is at once a work of criticism and a study of language. To determine the meaning according to compared and discussed readings; to appreciate, in an extensive introduction, the method and turn of mind of Celsus; to resolve, in a selection of notes, the principal difficulties of the text or the meaning; finally, to make one recognize, in the elegant simplicity of the version, a writer contemporary to Augustus: such has been the task of the translator. We trust it has been well fulfilled.

The text of Celsus is that provided in 1769 by the man who studied this author most deeply, the scholar Leonardo Targa. Forty years later, Targa, then an octogenarian, reviewed his work and published a new edition. Our text is formed by the comparison of the two Targa editions.

For the Architecture of Vitruvius, what could we do better than to