Background

The late fourth and early fifth centuries CE were a remarkable period in the history of Roman North Africa. On the one hand there was the Vandal invasion of North Africa and the fall of Carthage in 439, with all that this disaster entailed on the social, economic and agricultural levels. On the other hand, in this very same period, we find an amazing productivity of medical texts, for which Vindicianus, proconsul and physician, his student Theodorus Priscianus, Caelius Aurelianus, the physician Cassius Felix and, somewhat later, Muscio were responsible.

If one were to look for an explanation for this interesting phenomenon, a few reasons come to mind. Rome was, in the first instance, no longer the official capital of the western Roman Empire (since 402 it was Ravenna), nor was it the intellectual and cultural centre that it had been in earlier times. The centre had gradually shifted south to Carthage, which had not been ravished by long drawn-out civil wars and invasions by barbarians during the previous two centuries. North Africa was peaceful and prosperous, at least until the Vandal invasion in 429. The social stability of the country meant that scholars had the opportunity to devote themselves to the study of the ancient Greek manuscripts, and the money to acquire the manuscripts. Travel was also still possible, retaining the possibility of contact with the medical school in Alexandria, which was still flourishing in the third and fourth centuries. A more immediate reason was the fact that, thanks to the good schooling that children received in North Africa, there were still scholars who understood Greek in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, something that was becoming an exception in the rest of the western Roman Empire.

The question arises whether the four medical writers mentioned above had anything in common, anything specifically ‘African’? Was there, for instance, something ‘African’ in the drugs they recommended that caused them to be different from those in the Greek East? That does not seem to be the case. Sabbah points out that the plants from which the materia medica (drug ingredients) recommended by the North African authors derived are basically the same as those in the Mediterranean basin.