MEDICAL POEMS— FISH APHRODISIACS 283 



Cursory skipping of these fragments compels, even if one's 

 acquaintance with ancient medical writers be shght, ready 

 assent to the opinion of the learned editor (p. 74) that originality 

 was not the dominant characteristic of their begetters. They 

 are apparently, with two exceptions, but metrical plagiarisms 

 or excerpts — not quite as bad as Tate and Brady's Translations 

 of the Psalms— irom the works of Galen and others. 



The hrst exception, the medical oath (op/uoc iurfuKoc) 

 startles our modern conceptions. The practitioner swears that 

 he will administer none of the poisons, some of the deadliest 

 of which, as we have seen, were piscine. ^ 



The second is a fragment from a medical work by Marcellus 

 Sidetes. In the days of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, despite 

 the stirring times described by historians. Life (to alter the 

 well-known verse) must verily have been a watch and a vision 

 — or rather a yawn — between a sleep and a sleep to many a 

 reader, for no less than forty-two volumes were necessary to 

 contain the hygienic hexameters of our author. But more 

 astonishing even than the leisure required for their perusal, the 

 whole forty-two (according to Suidas) were held in such high 

 esteem that by command of the Emperors they were placed in 

 all the public libraries of Rome. 



In our fragment, Remedies from Fish, Marcellus, after pre- 

 facing that by long study he has acquainted himself with their 

 medicinal effects, sets out a list of healing fish. He adds here 

 and there some leading specific. To one of these he prettily 

 makes us privy, e.g. the application of a burnt mullet, mixed 

 with honey, in cases of carbuncle. 



But our author must not be written down as a one-ideaed 

 fish-quack ; for that Nature works cures (if not miracles) by 

 the agencies of earth, and of " broad- wayed air," as well as of 

 the sea, is a firm tenet of his faith. - 



* The influence of fish, wherever important, in commerce is noteworthy. 

 They furnished, as we have seen, designs for a mint or cognomina for Roman 

 Nobles. An interesting and probably very ancient instance occurs in the oath 

 taken this very year {1920) by the Stipendiary Magistrate of Douglas, Isle 

 of Man: " I swear to do justice between party and party, as indifferently 

 as the herring's backbone doth lie in the midst of the fish." 

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