Complete Works of Celsus, Vitruvius, Censorinus, and Frontinus

for Roman pride! Always deprived of technical expression, he is obliged to define that which has no name in his language; and most often, convinced himself of the vagueness and insufficiency of his definition, he calls to his aid the quod Græci vocant "what the Greeks call", that is to say, the proper word which has no equivalent in Latin, and which alone can give the idea of what he wishes to describe. Nostris vocabulis non est "there is no word in our language", he says; and that is only too true. If, in fact, he happens to speak of the position of the organs and the relationships they have among themselves, it will happen more than once that he does no better than to say that such an organ is neighboring to the cæteræ partes "other parts", or more briefly still, et cætera "and the rest".

That is at least what the poet says; but nothing was further from the truth in the time when Celsus wrote; and it was Greek alone that then had the privilege of saying everything. Listen to him instead, excusing himself for having to speak of diseases: "The Greeks have, to treat such a subject, suitable expressions, moreover consecrated by usage; since they return incessantly in the writings and ordinary language of physicians. Latin words, on the contrary, wound us more, and they do not even have in their favor the fact of being found sometimes in the mouth of those who speak with decency: it is therefore a difficult enterprise to respect decorum, while maintaining the precepts of the art." (VI, 18.)

That Latin has left us inimitable models in eloquence, in history, in poetry, that is not in question; that later it became the universal language of public law, that is no less true; that it served to regulate by common laws the interests of so many nations quite distant from one another, that is certain; but does that prove that in the very century when it shed the brightest luster, Latin had the magic power to create spontaneously, at the will of the writer, the vocabulary of a science that the Romans did not want to know? Is it not then evident that it is only by dint of neologisms that one managed, in the sequence of time, to give a scientific value to the language of Cicero, of Livy, and of Horace?

From this indigence of Latin from the medical point of view, it further results that the translator, continually grappling with the difficulties of the subject (since, in fact, it is not easy to read into forgotten theories), is moreover obliged to wander, so to speak, through a crowd of improper words and obscure terms, typographical errors, and ambushes finally that are set for you by bad commentaries? It is with reason that Choulant points out that Celsus is of all the authors of Latin antiquity the one who has suffered the most from the negligence of the monks

and copyists. It is to be presumed that this work being less easy for them to understand, their patience was less long and the merit of its style less worthy of their attention. But what cannot leave any doubt is that the manuscripts currently known have come to us from a single source, and that they must all emanate from another much older manuscript, which would have been lost or destroyed for centuries. To be convinced of this, it suffices to note that all in effect present a similar gap in chapter XX of the fourth book. Unfortunately, independently of the imperfections of the text, one encounters there many other faults that have greatly exercised the patience and the knowledge of ancient and modern editors. Whatever the imperfections of the text may still be today, there remains little hope of making them disappear; for one seems to have exhausted all the means of revision that history, medicine, and philology can provide, coming to the aid of the most attentive collation of manuscripts and printed editions. Who would think now of redoing the immense work of Léonard Targa? Over a life of eighty-four years, this indefatigable worker of science felt the marvelous courage to devote nearly sixty to the study of Celsus; and two editions, published at forty years of distance, attest to this continuity of efforts and this constant preoccupation.

His perseverance and his erudition, appreciated in a suitable manner in a French edition very ignored by the public, but of which it will be necessary to speak in a moment. "This learned editor," says the author of the preface, "has proven that no one was more capable of fulfilling the task he had imposed upon himself. Profound knowledge of the subject and of the language; wise restraint toward the text, however little it was intelligible; exquisite sagacity to choose among the variants those that had to replace the manifestly corrupted places, or to propose suppletive corrections when they became indispensable. Exactitude and patience sustained even into the smallest details, such are the qualities that he showed in this long-winded work, and that placed him among the most estimable critics. We could not, therefore, do better than to reproduce a text purified with so much precaution and discernment."

These well-deserved praises apply, however, only to the first edition of Padua (1769, in-4°), made after the collation of fourteen manuscripts and all the best editions, from that of 1478, the first in date, to that of Vulpi in 1750. But, as has just been said, forty years later he brought out at Verona (1810) a second in-4° edition, which has become rare today, and in which the text, subjected to a severe revision, underwent still notable modifications. For this new work he had the help of a fifteenth manuscript which he made known as the oldest of all (10th century), which is the Codex VaticanUS VIII. He further corrected all the editions that had been able to help themselves from 1769 to 1810; and as a complement to the vocabulary?