Serenus Sammonicus

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Quintus Sammonicus Serenus was a Roman savant, and an author of a didactic medical poem, De medicina praecepta (probably incomplete).

The work (1115 hexameters) contains a number of popular remedies, borrowed from Pliny and Dioscorides, and various magic formulae, amongst others the famous Abracadabra, as a cure for fever and ague. It concludes with a description of the famous antidote of Mithradates VI of Pontus.

It was much used in the middle ages, but is of little value except for the ancient history of popular medicine. The syntax and metre are remarkably correct. It is uncertain whether the author was the famous physician and polymath, who was put to death in AD 212 at a banquet to which he had been invited by Caracalla, or his son, the tutor of the younger Gordian.

The father, who was one of the most learned men of his age, wrote upon a variety of subjects, and possessed a library of 60,000 volumes, bequeathed to his son and handed on by the latter to Gordian.

[edit] References

• Editio princeps (ed. Sulpitius Verulanus, before 1484), very rare
• JG Ackermann (Leipzig, 1786)
• E. Behrens, Poetae Latini minores, iii..

Also

• August Baur, Quaestiones Sammoniceae (Giessen, 1886)
• Martin Schanz, Geschichte der römischen Literatur, iii. (1896)
• Teuffel, History of Roman Literature (Eng. trans., 1900), 374, 4, and 383.

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.