MEDICAL POEMS—FISH APHRODISIACS = 283 
Cursory skipping of these fragments compels, even if one’s 
acquaintance with ancient medical writers be slight, 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—from the works of Galen and others. 
The first exception, the medical oath (épyo¢ iarpixdc) 
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.2 
1 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.” 
2 ray mdvrwy ihuar’ Exe diats ovdé Tt vobown 
puyedavay ar€yove: Bporo) xparouhi’ €xovres 
ef GAds, ex yalns Te kal Hépos eUpumdporo. 
