De Medicina
Rome · 50
C
Celsus
Celsus
c. 25 BCE–c. 50 CE · Rome
Aulus Cornelius Celsus was a Roman writer of the early first century CE, active under the emperor Tiberius. He composed a wide-ranging encyclopedia covering subjects such as agriculture, law, philosophy, and the art of war, but the only part to survive is "On Medicine," a clear and systematic account of ancient medical knowledge. Written in elegant Latin by an educated layman rather than a practicing physician, it is one of our most important sources for the medicine of the early Roman Empire.
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Stop 1 of 125 BCE–50Lived
RomeרומאItaly
What they did here
Roman encyclopaedist and medical writer.
Rome in this era
Under the emperors (from Augustus, 27 BCE) Rome was the capital of an empire stretching from Britain to Syria, a city of perhaps a million people. Greek-speaking philosophers, physicians, rhetoricians and historians came to teach and write there; Domitian expelled philosophers from the city around 93-95 CE, and in the 3rd century Plotinus taught in Rome (244-270).
About Rome
Rome, on the Tiber in central Italy, grew from an Iron Age settlement into the capital of the Roman Republic and then of an empire that by the 1st century CE ruled the whole Mediterranean. Its Jewish community, attested from the 2nd century BCE, is among the oldest in Europe. Christian tradition holds that the apostles Peter and Paul died there, and the city became the seat of the popes. After the Western Empire ended in 476 it passed to Gothic kings, to Byzantium and then to papal rule as capital of the Papal States, until it became the capital of unified Italy in 1871. Vatican City, independent since 1929, lies within it.
In Rome at the same time
Nepos, Cornelius, Parthenius of Nicaea, Vitruvius, Virgil, Didymus Alexandrinus, Horace
Across the traditions, in Rome at the same time
In the same place & time
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Celsus’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
Across the traditions
In the same tradition
Nepos, Cornelius, Parthenius of Nicaea, Vitruvius, Virgil, Didymus Alexandrinus, Horace, Strabo, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Tibullus, Seneca the Elder, Propertius, Sextus, Ovid, Tiberius, Valerius Maximus, Phaedrus, Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, Columella, Lucius Junius Moderatus, Curtius Rufus, Quintus
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Celsus’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.