Medical Compositions

would seem to me to be the one to be read as Scribonius, were it not for the fact that he lived in the recent past, and he calls him his fellow citizen, just as he does Ausonius and Eutropius. This cannot be understood of Scribonius, who lived under Claudius Caesar, unless we believe Marcellus to have been so inconsiderate regarding the account of times and men that he did not know the age and homeland of Scribonius, or unless Siburius is the very person who made Scribonius into Latin, and, having rejected the name of Scribonius, prefixed his own; whom, therefore, Marcellus acknowledged as the author of the book, his fellow citizen, and a man of the time immediately preceding him, when he mentions him. Whatever may be the case regarding this matter, the book of Scribonius, which is everywhere most corrupt, can certainly be corrected and restored even from Marcellus himself.

I suspect that Scribonius wrote in Greek, and that those things which still remain in the booklet were once translated a thousand years ago by someone not unlearned, but who nevertheless did not fully attain the Greek. Unless someone might prefer to impute this crime to Asclepiades, that he turned what was written in Latin by Scribonius into Greek, having poorly understood it—which I would consider a sin to believe, provided that the copy of Galen is not corrupted.

I do not believe that Scribonius wrote in Latin: so that Asclepiades, from whom Galen described these things, should be thought to have translated his words into Greek.

Scribonius did not write in Latin during the most Latin age under Tiberius and Claudius Caesars, but his Greek work was translated by someone when the Latin language was already leaning slightly toward ruin, around the age of Emperor Valentinian.