Complete Works of Celsus, Vitruvius, Censorinus, and Frontinus

Macedonian, there had been a long succession of kings equally jealous of ensuring the scepter of intelligence to the capital of their empire. With them had thus begun a new era, where the inexhaustible activity of the spirit knew neither bound nor respite. Books, until then so rare, so difficult to know, and so easy to corrupt, multiplied everywhere and took on a certain and definitive form. Thanks to the protection of these kings, medicine, among other things, no longer had to fear the prejudices of the vulgar and could substitute the dissection of human bodies for that of animals. We know the discoveries of Herophilus and Erasistratus, those two creators of anatomy; and we also know that the purely empirical research of the adversaries of dogmatism served at least to establish the properties of an infinite number of medicinal substances. The misfortune was that medicine, then led astray by the taste for controversy and theoretical subtleties, did not know how to connect new facts to ancient truths, nor reconcile the contradictory doctrines that, while moving away from the precepts laid down by Hippocrates, nevertheless did not fail to claim for themselves, each to the exclusion of the others, the authority of that great name. Be that as it may, all the writings of that epoch, wrapped in common disasters, have disappeared for centuries; and one saw a host of sects born, and the first to bear witness to us, as Celsus, Aurelianus, and Galen did later, of the scientific movement that animated the school of Alexandria.

These books that we no longer have, they read and meditated upon; but, for Celsus, one can affirm in advance that it is not toward the dialecticians and controversialists of this famous school that he is drawn by his natural inclination and the rectitude of his spirit. One soon feels that the genius of Hippocrates attracts him, and that he will recognize the power of that profound wisdom. If we pass to Rome, it is from the Latin writer that we also collect our first notions of the celebrated doctrines of Asclepiades and Themison, whose works were early destroyed in the Greek, so that, taking science from the cradle, he led it to Methodism, the last system he could have known, and he could have known its splendor when he composed his treatise on medicine. It is, moreover, from the Latin writer that we serve the doubts regarding the name, in the country as well as among historians. Of the three names—Aurelius, Cornelius, Celsus—that the manuscripts and printed editions, that of Aldus Manutius (1528) being the first, present, it is not useless to rectify. Daniel Leclerc and Bianconi observe on this subject that scholars must be shocked to see the family name Aurelius transformed into a simple first name, against all the rules of Roman antiquity. In support of the reasons they put forward, it must be said that the oldest manuscript (Codex Vaticanus VIII), in disagreement on this point with

all the others, indeed bears, in very well-formed letters, Aulus Cornelius Celsus. Among the printed editions, that of Aldus Manutius (1528) also presents (but it is the only one) the word Aulus written in the same way, but that is an unknown fact.

Cornelius is without doubt the true name; but it does not follow that one is in a position to prove that Celsus actually belonged to the Cornelia family. History leaves us in complete ignorance in this regard; and to devote oneself to such research, one would first have to forget with what strange prodigality this illustrious family itself bestowed its name on all those it wished to count among its clients or its freedmen. The dictator Sulla offers us a curious example of this, since ten thousand men obtained from him the favor of being called Cornelius. Thus the name, taken in isolation, does not have in itself the power to attest to the high origin of the writer who occupies us; but it can help, if necessary, to verify his identity.

Daniel Leclerc, and the Historical Dictionary of Medicine by Éloy, place in effect toward the same period another Celsus, Apuleius Celsus, a famous physician, in great esteem under Tiberius. Bonius Largus says he studied under him at the same time as Vettius Valens; he also acquired celebrity as a physician and made himself known further through his dealings with Messalina. Now, the Celsus in question here had likewise left writings on medicine, and—what is more worthy of remark—one attributes to him, as to the former, a work on agriculture; finally, to complete the resemblance, the time when he lived corresponds exactly to that which authors assign to the epoch of the Latin writer.

If the opinion of the greatest number is well-founded, there are therefore two writers living in the same epoch, bearing the same name, composing works on the same subjects, and both cultivating the art of healing; for we will see later that Celsus was a physician. It is true that the surname they have in common is preceded in one by the name Apuleius, and in the other: it is appropriate to have this Apuleius born in conjecturing that Cornelius was from Rome; but the relationships we have just signaled between them nonetheless remain; and these relationships are so close that they awaken suspicion of a mistake—a way of admitting that there would be less motive to confuse them if one could hold the conjectures of Bianconi to be real, because the concordance of the times would no longer be the same. In his Latin dissertation on the epoch when Celsus lived, this scholar wanted to prove, contrary to the opinion admitted by the best critics, that the treatise on medicine, instead of belonging to the reign of Tiberius, saw the light of day at the very beginning of the century of Augustus. Almost victorious on this point, he starts from there to give himself car-