Serenus Sammonicus

Quintus Serenus Sammonicus (died 212) was a Roman savant and tutor to Geta and Caracalla who became fatally involved in politics; he was also author of a didactic medical poem, Liber Medicinalis ("The Medical Book"; also known as De medicina praecepta saluberrima),[1] probably incomplete in the extant form, as well as many lost works.

Serenus was "a typical man of letters in an Age of Archaism[2] and a worthy successor to Marcus Cornelius Fronto and Aulus Gellius, one whose social rank and position is intimately bound up with the prevailing passion for grammar and a mastery of ancient lore".

[7] His most quoted work was Res reconditae, in at least five books, of which fragments only are preserved in quotations.

The surviving work, De medicina praecepta, in 1115 hexameters, contains a number of popular remedies, borrowed from Pliny the Elder and Pedanius Dioscorides, and various magic formulae, amongst others the famous abracadabra, as a cure for fever and ague.

According to the unreliable Augustan History[8] he was a famous physician and polymath, who was put to death with other friends of Geta in December 212, at a banquet to which he had been invited by Caracalla shortly after the assassination of his brother.