526 



His master answered by a trivial quotation, to which Dio- 

 genes replied : ' If you, being sick, were buying a physician, 

 Avoiild you have so answered ?' — ' A physician, although a 

 slave, certainly ought to be obeyed.' Of the words made use 

 of, MTpog and ^ovXog, applied to the same individual, there 

 can be no misconception. Paulus Orosius has been quoted to 

 prove that all physicians at Rome were slaves ; but without 

 reason, for he evidently copied from Suetonius, and by his 

 collocation of the words has perverted the sense. Orosius, 

 therefore, is not an authority. 



" Thus in Greece and Rome, for at least fom" centuries, it 

 is a well-attested fact, that slave physicians were maintained 

 in families. The greatest confidence was sometimes reposed 

 in them, even by crowned heads. The Emperor Augustus 

 had a physician named Antonius Musa, who had been his 

 slave, and to his care he intrusted himself when, as Suetonius 

 informs us, he was ' distillationibus jocinere vitiato ad despe- 

 rationem redactus ;' which probably means that his disease 

 was a vitiated secretion of the liver, although Pliny says it 

 was inflammation of the bowels. Musa, finding that warm 

 fomentations did not succeed, tried cold baths, and gave him 

 cold water draughts, aU of which, we learn from Suetonius 

 and Celsus, was considered a dangerous experiment. He also 

 ordered his royal patient to eat lettuces. Augustus sub- 

 mitted, such was his confidence in his former slave's skill, and 

 he recovered. Musa was rewarded with much wealth ; was 

 honoured by the Senate with a brazen statue placed near that 

 of Esculapius ; was permitted to Avear a gold ring, which 

 none were hitherto entitled to the use of but magisti-ates and 

 those persons called ' ingenui ;' and for his sake the same 

 permission was granted to all persons exercising the medical 

 art in the city. Such were his rewards for a prescription of 

 lettuces and cold water. He practised the same treatment on 

 Horace, who survived; but another patient, Marcellus, was 



