Bubb and Peachin’s edited volume Medicine and Law under the Roman Empire does many things well by choosing to be a lovingly edited conference proceeding, and just that. If you go to it looking for a manual on how to practise Roman malpractice law, you will be disappointed. However, you should push past the title to experience what this volume accomplishes with unusual grace. Not only are the papers presented in their fully fleshed-out glory, but they are thoughtfully arranged by B. and P. into surprisingly apt sections with introductory and response essays included. Reading this book is a coherent experience, much like being present at a very good discussion among gracious and collaborative colleagues, and the experience deftly introduces anyone with an interest in imperial Roman ‘technical’ literature to the greater culture that supported the similar but distinct legal and medical practices of Roman antiquity.
In ‘setting apart the law together’ B. and P. aptly describe the process by which they have brokered a conversation between two very different kinds of ancient writing, neither of them part of the ‘canon’ of texts taught in traditional Classics programmes. This ‘technical writing’ sprang from oral cultures of public professionalism. For elite Roman doctors and lawyers, public competition was the means of building a reputation and winning the trust of elite clients. A doctor, in other words, had to perform ‘being a good doctor’ in ways similar to elite political hopefuls using legal venues to demonstrate their good lawyerly talent. Therefore, juxtaposing the literature produced from these professional venues helps us better understand culture in ancient Rome.
The second section, ‘Selling the Subject Matter’, puts into conversation Roller, Dolganov, Salas and Eshleman considering the ways Roman medical and legal culture conceived of professional practice as a competitive, performative art. Roller’s introduction orients readers to the ongoing conversation among Romanists about how best to understand the role of elite competition in Rome’s cultural landscape. Dolganov in ‘Law as Competitive Performance’ unites two very different written artefacts of the Roman courtroom: Cicero’s account of the causa Curiana and Egyptian legal papyri (helpfully provided in the appendix). For medicine, Salas turns a literary eye to Galen’s technical guide to dissecting anything and everything, Anatomical Procedures, contextualising it in ancient comic and oratorical traditions. Eshleman then guides us on to the next section by asking an important question: how well did rhetorical competition serve inhabitants of the Roman world in selecting competent professional assistance?
Section three, ‘Overshooting the Subject Matter’, picks up this thread with König and Peachin framing the question of how Romans understood expertise. Frier then takes up the jurists preserved in the Digest, who were not themselves full-time experts but rather politicians and civil servants writing about legal theory as part of a larger career. Their writing is also an exception to the vicious competition seen in other kinds of legal writing; the traces of debates appear to have been minimised in juristic books. Instead of competition, jurists projected authority through collaboration, thus proving that the destructive verbal combat in Cicero and Galen is not an inevitable outcome of ancient intellectual culture. Bubb, for Medicine, presents us with Galen, a notoriously bellicose author whose prolific corpus survives in ways that illuminate how and why this sort of writing did (or did not) survive to the modern era. Bubb provides a clear and convincing breakdown of how and why Galen created an aura of unassailable medical authority, and she uses a comparison of Galen’s account of his own works to those that survive to measure which artistic strategies were the most successful for long-term survival. Udin finally pauses for a shift of perspective from author to audience and demarcating the different goals of an intellectual and professional victory in Roman antiquity.
In section four, ‘Positioning the Subject Matter’, Babusiaux and Bubb re-centre the discussion around the greater role that rhetoric played in ancient intellectual labour in comparison to the modern practice of academic medicine and (to a lesser extent) law. Babusiaux’s solo chapter ‘Rhetoric in Legal Writing’ follows, with an examination of rhetorical art (pathos and ethos) as used by the Severan jurists preserved in the Digest. These authors seldom receive attention for their art rather than their technical merits or contents, and this rhetorical lens provides a way forward for those wishing to remedy that weakness in the scholarship. Petit then discusses ‘Rhetoric in Medical Writing’, offering a new item in an ongoing conversation among those of us who read these texts with an ear for their artistic merits. Petit leans into the Hippocratic corpus to trace a longer tradition for medical writing as an ancient genre. Understanding this pre-history allows us to appreciate better the kinds of tastes that Galen was meeting when writing his various treatises. Bubb and Howley conclude the section with a meditation on the circularity of expertise and rhetoric in ancient cultures.
The volume ends with an outlier, more of a semicolon than a period: Trapp’s ‘How does Philosophy compare?’ Picking up on Babusiaux’s thread, Trapp argues that a well-considered appreciation for the art of ancient technical literature must rely as much on a knowledge of the vocabulary of philosophy as it does on the elements of rhetoric. Philosophy, unlike rhetoric, aims at unresolved dissonance and aporia; it makes a useful contrasting genre for readers of ancient technical works. Ending the volume on this note leaves the discussion open, a choice by the editors where the structure supports the substance.
This was not the book I thought it would be when I picked it up, but I have been utterly delighted by the happy surprise Bubb, Peachin and the contributors to this volume have created together. This was a conference that several colleagues were sad to have missed. I am therefore delighted to inform them that the written version delivers a stimulating addition to ongoing conversations among those of us who love the often-neglected genres of Roman medical and legal literature.
