The Veterinary Medicine of Chiron (Mulomedicina Chironis)

[They] imagined that it was written "by the teacher Apuleius" original: "magistro Apulei" — a reference to a pseudo-epigraphical attribution., but Vegetius also praises Chiron the veterinarian as a true writer of either his own or not-so-remote an age. Even to a casual examiner, the character of the Mulomedicina veterinary medicine reveals that we are not dealing with some forger, but with a veterinarian highly skilled in his discipline. Moreover, it does not seem entirely probable that some unknown substituted book was artfully coupled with the books of Apsyrtus and others and translated into the Latin language. Indeed, even in the headings of § 146 and 148, Chiron appears in such a way that in the same chapter others, whom I noted above, are introduced as authors speaking about the same disease. This is, moreover, that part of the Mulomedicina which I have already said has survived better than the rest. No one will be surprised that Chiron is everywhere called the Centaur when they consider the incredible ignorance of that man, or of those little men of the Middle Ages, who almost entirely and most impudently interpolated and revised the Mulomedicina, which was even then buried under the foulest filth. Since they did not know—

1) Cf. Rose, Anecdota Graeca et Graecolatina II 122.
2) We certainly read in Vegetius, ed. Schneider I 17, 16 (cf. below § 199), "Chiron the Centaur, among other compositions," etc. But Ernest Lommatzsch taught me that in the better manuscripts of Vegetius, "Centaur" is not added. It was, therefore, interpolated in the Middle Ages.
3) In which part I judge it worthy of note that Chiron has been plundered less than the other writers. This is recognized primarily in II 1 (§ 115–146), where nearly half of the chapter (96 lines) is owed to Sotion; nearly a fifth to Apsyrtus (54 lines; for his name must be supplied in § 115–120 and § 123); about a sixth to Polycletus (40 lines); and truly an eighteenth part to Chiron (14 lines). He is surpassed only by Farnax, who contributes a twenty-fifth part (10 lines). Cf. also § 266–306, where Sotion, Polycletus, and Farnax stand in the front line. Thus, if one may conclude anything about the sources of the other parts of the genuine Mulomedicina, those three writers were used much more than we can understand today, since elsewhere we usually hear the opinion of one anonymous writer put forward, not the precepts of five writers, which are sometimes highly contradictory and sometimes the same, yet all woven with one thread.