Complete Works of Celsus, Vitruvius, Censorinus, and Frontinus

philosophical doubt of an enlightened man who has the right to doubt, because he knows much, and because he pursues with no less ardor the search for truth.

The principal object of this rapid sketch is no doubt to signal the historical and medical importance of the treatise on medicine; but it results no less for the translator in the special obligation to appreciate as a writer the author he has translated. This obligation, moreover, would become easy to fulfill if it sufficed for that to associate oneself with the praises that the ancients and the moderns have lavished in turn upon the Latin encyclopedist. But it must be admitted, he has passionate admirers who are by that very fact suspect of exaggeration. His editor Targa does not fear to place him well above Hippocrates, with this restriction however that he understands by that only his superiority in the art of writing. Boerhaave, judging at the same time the writer and the physician, begins by establishing that one gives each day as new a quantity of things that are in the works of Celsus; then he calls him the first of all the ancients and even of the moderns in matters of surgery. Here is what Fabricius of Acquapendente says of him in the first part of his surgical works: Admirabilis Celsus in omnibus, quem nocturna versare manu, versare diurna consulo "Celsus is admirable in all things; I advise turning his pages night and day." The learned Casaubon makes a god of him, medicum deus "a god of physicians"; and other scholars finally nickname him with less emphasis the Cicero of physicians. Since Columella and Quintilian until us, the votes have not been lacking; and although for the most part they address the substance no less than the form, and do not separate the scientific value of the book from its literary value, one could always, while occupying oneself only with this latter appreciation, summarize all these praises in three words: conciseness, clarity, elegance. These expressions, consecrated so to speak to the work of Celsus, have truth however only insofar as the subjects that he treats do not exceed the power of the Latin language; for wherever the necessity of a technical language is felt, the absolute insufficiency of Latin, however great it may be, cannot fight against this inaptitude of the author, if it is often difficult to understand, and even more difficult to translate.

By putting the writer thus out of the question to accuse only the instrument he used, it must be said why medicine, or, which is equally true, why the sciences, the arts, and philosophy encountered in Rome only an inhospitable language. One finds the supreme reason for it in the profound ignorance in which the Romans lived for six hundred years. Devoted solely to the trade of arms, they had for all the rest a savage contempt; and the art of building military machines is the only one that one can reclaim for the people-king. Thus, when the conquerors of the wonders of Greece for the eternal city, the conquerors obeyed their instincts of rapine rather than their admiration for masterpieces whose price they did not know. And

yet these depredations had the happy effect of attracting to Rome the philosophers, the scholars, the men of letters, the most celebrated artists of that beautiful country, who, as Cato says, could no longer find except in the capital of the world the objects necessary for the culture of their mind and dear still to their imagination. The vanquished became their preceptors, their masters; and the Romans, struck finally by these new lights, delivered themselves with ardor to the study of Greek. Before the advent of Augustus, this study was already so familiar to the republic that Lucullus drew lots to know in what language he would write the war of the Marsi, and that Cicero made in Greek a history of his consulship. By teaching us elsewhere that his fellow citizens had until him despised philosophy, he boasts of having been able to transport into Latin the terms of the Greek language itself, implacable enemy as a censor of the sciences and letters, which he cultivated with passion in private life, Cato learned Greek at eighty years old (1).

In favor of the arts and philosophy, which had acquired the right of citizenship, medicine saw itself in its turn relieved of the interdiction that weighed upon it. Six centuries had elapsed, according to Pliny, before it was permitted to physicians to establish themselves in Rome; but from the day when the barriers that closed the entry of the sovereign city to them lowered before them, they rushed in crowds, all proud of their Greek origin, and all jealous of conserving this beautiful medical language to which Hippocrates had given so much power. Things, moreover, had come to this point, that in the eyes of the Romans themselves, consenting to speak Latin was the surest way of taking from their art its prestige, and of making the physician lose all consideration with the sick. This passage of Pliny is proof of it: Solam hanc artium Romanam gravitas in odium attigere, et ipsi animo vero auctoritas interdicta sunt, etiam apud imperitos expertesque linguæ non est "The gravity of this art alone brought the Romans to hatred, and for them true authority of mind was forbidden; even among the unskilled and those lacking the language, it is not [found]." (XXIX, 8.)

To the honor of Celsus, it must be said that he is the only writer of Italic origin who undertook to shape his mother tongue to the yoke of medical science (2). But also what efforts! How he feels its impotence, and what humiliating confessions...

(1) This very short fragment of a letter addressed by Cato to his son, who was studying then in Athens, will be able to give an idea of the savage hatred that this violent and narrow mind bore to all the Greeks, and notably to those who exercised medicine: Nequissimum et indocile putat valetn dixisse : Quandocumque dabii, omnia corrumpet : tum etiam huc mittet. Jurarunt inter se barbaros necare omnes medicos, et hoc ipsum mercede faciunt, et fœcile dispendant. Nos quoque dicitar nos quam alios opicos appellatione de medicis "He thinks the most wicked and unteachable have said: whenever I give, he will corrupt everything; then he will also send here. They have sworn among themselves to kill all barbarian physicians, and they do this very thing for a fee, and they easily expend [them]. We also are said to be more [than others] 'Opican' [a derogatory term for unrefined or barbaric] by the appellation concerning physicians" (See Pliny, XXIX, 7.)

(2) It cannot be a question here of the African Latin of Caelius Aurelianus, who is, as is known, only the translator of the Greek Soranus.