Marcellus Empiricus

It is a significant if quirky text in the history of European medical writing, an infrequent subject of monographs, but regularly mined as a source for magic charms, Celtic herbology and lore, and the linguistic study of Gaulish and Vulgar Latin.

[1] Bonus auctor est (“he’s a good authority”) was the judgment of J.J. Scaliger,[2] while the science historian George Sarton called the De medicamentis an “extraordinary mixture of traditional knowledge, popular (Celtic) medicine, and rank superstition.”[3] Marcellus is usually identified with the magister officiorum of that name who held office during the reign of Theodosius I.

[9] His stated connection to the Ausonii makes it likely that he was among the several aristocratic Gauls who benefitted politically when the emperor Gratian appointed his Bordelaise tutor Ausonius to high office and from Theodosius's extended residence in the western empire during the latter years of his reign.

[12] The timing of his departure suggests that he had been a supporter of Rufinus, the calculating politician of Gallic origin who was assassinated November 27 of that year, having failed to resist, or even facilitated, the advance of Alaric and the Visigoths.

[15] John Matthews argued that Marcellus, who would have been about 60 at the time, is “clearly the most eligible candidate.”[16] Since Orosius identifies the Gaul only as having served under Theodosius, and as a “devout, cautious, and serious” person, other figures have been put forth as the likely bearer of the Athaulf declaration.

In his dissertation, the intellectual historian of magic and medicine Lynn Thorndike pronounced him the “court physician” of Theodosius I,[18] but the evidence is thin: Libanius, if referring to this Marcellus, praises his ability to cure a headache.

[22] Like Ausonius and later Sidonius Apollinaris, Marcellus is among those aristocratic Gauls of the 4th and 5th centuries who were nominally or even devoutly Christian but who fashioned themselves after the Republican ideal of the Roman noble: a career in politics balanced with country villas and informational or literary writing on a range of subjects, including philosophy, astronomy, agriculture, and the natural sciences.

[24] Prescriptions for veterinary treatments dispersed throughout the De medicamentis also suggest the interests and concerns of the author — the letter from Symmachus serves mainly to inquire whether Marcellus can provide thoroughbred horses for games to be sponsored by his son, who has been elected praetor — and of his intended audience, either the owners of estates or the literate workers who managed them.

In the letter to his sons, whom he addresses as dulcissimi (“my sweetest”), Marcellus expresses the hope that they and their families will, in case of sickness, find support and remedies in their father's manual, without intervention by doctors (sine medicis intercessione).

This emphasis on self-reliance, however, is not meant to exclude others, but to empower oneself to help others; appealing to divina misericordia (“godlike compassion”), Marcellus urges his sons to extend caritas (“caring” or perhaps Christian “charity”) to strangers and the poor as well as to their loved ones.

Although the contents of the recipes — their names, uses, and methods of treatment — derive from the medical texts of ancient Greece and Rome, the book also points forward to doctrines and approaches characteristic of medieval medicine.

As texts associated with Mediterranean medicine traveled west and north with the expanding borders of the Roman empire, the plants required by drug recipes were no longer familiar, and the descriptions or illustrations provided by earlier herbals failed to correspond to indigenous flora.

[57] Another medieval emphasis foreshadowed in Marcellus is a concern for locating ingredients in their native environment, replacing the exotic flora and fauna prescribed in texts from antiquity with indigenous species.

Since magic for medical purposes can be considered a form of faith healing, that is also not a distinction between the two; “rich layers of folklore and superstition,” writes Brown, “lie beneath the thin veneer of Hippocratic empiricism” in Marcellus.