2. LIGORIO, MERCURIALE AND THE SCHOLA MEDICORUM

The term schola medicorum does not appear in any classical author or epigraphic document that can definitively be attributed to antiquity. Since it refers to a place, one would expect to find it in the regional catalogues (the Curiosum Urbis Romae Regionum XIV and the Notitia Urbis Romae), inventories made in the fourth century AD that include a catalogue of the main buildings and monuments in Rome at that time.Footnote ¹² However, this source does not record a schola medicorum.Footnote ¹³ The first mentions of such a place do not appear until the mid-sixteenth century.

The schola medicorum is first mentioned in book 39 of the Antichità romane by Pirro Ligorio,Footnote ¹⁴ which was written between 1550 and 1555 and is now kept at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli (Cod. Neap. XIII B 8).Footnote ¹⁵ In folio 328 of the manuscript (c. 225v in the modern page numbering), Ligorio copies the supposed epitaph, inscribed on a plaque in the form of a tabula ansata, of the tabularius of a schola medicorum (Fig. 1).Footnote ¹⁶

Fig. 1. Cod. Neap. XIII B 8, detail of fol. 328, with the inscription of the tabularius scholae medicorum at the bottom right. (By the kind permission of the Ministero della cultura © Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli.)

On the right of the drawing of the inscription, Ligorio wrote ‘schola pro scholae’ and below, at the foot of the page: ‘Archiatro significa principe, overo primo, di medici; tabulario era colui che teniva conto della schola di medici, la quale era in Roma. Si notti scritto schola per scholae.’

The illegitimacy of the epigraph is unquestionable,Footnote ¹⁷ as was established in 1885 when it was included among the falsae Ligorianae in the fifth fascicle of Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum VI (CIL VI 978*). Indeed, some elements in the text display incoherencies that demonstrate the falsification. For example, it is an anachronism for the same text to contain the gentilicium Livius, characteristic of urban epigraphy in the late first century BC and first half of the first century AD, and the term archiater, which was not used in Rome before the second century AD.Footnote ¹⁸ Similarly, the formulae oll(as) d(edit) and in fr(onte) ped(es) never appear together in inscriptions (see below in Section 3). In any case, rather than prove the falsity of the inscription, it is more interesting to consider the expression in the second line and the origin of that term, which in its time did not raise the suspicions of any scholar.

Among the many artistic and intellectual activities carried out by Pirro Ligorio in Renaissance Rome, the creation of false inscriptions may be the one that has given him greatest notoriety. He has been called the ‘prince of forgers’, ‘sovrano creatore dei falsi epigrafici’ and ‘principe tra i falsificatori del ’500’,Footnote ¹⁹ and Vagenheim (Reference Vagenheim, Carbonell Manils, Gimeno Pascual and Moralejo Álvarez2011: 219) has even affirmed that ‘parlare di falsificazione epigrafica nell'Italia della seconda metà del Cinquecento significa parlare di Ligorio e della sua famosa opera rimasta manoscritta, intitolata Le Antichità romane’. It is difficult to know how and why the text of the inscription and the idea of the schola medicorum originated, because ‘the motives that led Pirro Ligorio to create forgeries are complex and defy precise definition’ (Orlandi, Caldelli and Gregori, Reference Orlandi, Caldelli, Gregori, Bruun and Edmondson2014: 50). Since it is a forgery on paper that probably was never inscribed on stone,Footnote ²⁰ a purely erudite reason might be considered.Footnote ²¹ Ligorio is known to have created his forgeries based on true sources and he aimed to compose credible texts;Footnote ²² indeed, the inscription of the schola medicorum contains several plausible elements. For example, the names of both people are reminiscent of other physicians mentioned in inscriptions or literary sources: the nomen gentilicium is shared with some members of the domestic medical service of Livia Augusta (Alonso Alonso, Reference Alonso Alonso2018: 216, nos. 29–31); the cognomen Eutychus is seen in other physicians;Footnote ²³ Celsus suggests A. Cornelius Celsus, the author of the influential De medicina in the first century AD (PIR ² C 1335). Similarly, the term archiater is specific to health workers in antiquity and is widely documented in inscriptions,Footnote ²⁴ whilst the term schola together with the plural genitive of the name of a profession is equally common;Footnote ²⁵ and the presence of a subaltern (in this case a tabularius) was frequent in the headquarters of a professional college (Diosono, Reference Diosono2007: 69). All of these details demonstrate notions of epigraphy and Roman medicine that Ligorio might have acquired not only by observing inscriptions in Rome but also through his colleagues in the Accademia degli Sdegnati (Vagenheim, Reference Vagenheim2006, Reference Vagenheim, Deramaix, Galand-Hallyn, Vagenheim and Vignes2008a, Reference Vagenheim, Gallo and Sartori2018). This was the circle of erudite scholars in which Ligorio, whose poor knowledge of Latin is well known,Footnote ²⁶ received information and learnt about classical authors and epigraphic texts (Vagenheim, Reference Vagenheim, Carbonell Manils, Gimeno Pascual and Moralejo Álvarez2011: 223). In this regard, it is interesting to remember a passage in the Antichità romane in which Ligorio himself describes his methods in the reconstruction of Roman antiquities. He explains that, during a meeting of academics, he drew pictures of false inscriptions as a way to reconstruct the funerary stelae of soldiers mentioned in a text by Polybius that the attendees had read together.Footnote ²⁷ This detail suggests that the inscription of the tabularius might have arisen as part of a lusus epigraphicus in the course of a meeting of that type. In the same way, the originality of the expression schola medicorum raises the suspicion that Ligorio (with the help of the erudite of the Farnese circle) might have been inspired by a book current at that time. The volume Medicorum schola, Hoc est Claudii Galeni Isagoge, sive Medicus. Eiusdem definitionum medicinalium liber had been in circulation since 1537; published in Basel by the doctor Sebastian Singkeler, it included the Greek text and Latin translation of two books by Pseudo Galen.Footnote ²⁸ We do not know whether Ligorio saw this volume or knew of the title, but a connection is possible bearing in mind the coincidence in time.

Ligorio gave more details about the schola medicorum several years after composing the Antichità romane. In his Enciclopedia del mondo antico, a manuscript he wrote in Ferrara between 1569 and 1583,Footnote ²⁹ he dedicated two entries to that place. The first is in vol. 10, book XI (letter L), immediately after a page devoted to the ‘Templum Minervae Medicae’ and which includes a pianta dimostrativa of it:Footnote ³⁰

The second entry is in vol. 16 book XVIII, which covers the letter S:Footnote ³¹

Ligorio also refers to the schola medicorum when describing the Temple of Minerva Medica in vol. 17 of the Enciclopedia (letter T), under the entry ‘Tempii’:Footnote ³²

None of these texts makes any mention of the inscription of the tabularius, but it is included in the Enciclopedia's vol. 15, book XVII (letter R), in the entry devoted to Rome. In a two-page section entitled ‘Delli medici’,Footnote ³³ Ligorio transcribes a group of 33 physicians’ epitaphs in which forgeries and genuine inscriptions are blended. Among these epitaphs we find the inscription of the schola medicorum:Footnote ³⁴

On this occasion, the text is slightly different from its first presentation: in the Naples manuscript Ligorio interpreted schola medicor. in l. 2 (it should be recalled that at that time Ligorio noted that the correct spelling would be scholae instead of schola) and peded. in l. 5. Likewise, between lines 3 and 4, above the o of archiatros, Ligorio remarked ‘sic’.

The number of details that Ligorio provides about the schola medicorum in these manuscripts is surprising, bearing in mind that it was over ten years since he had composed the inscription and, in the meantime, no further information had been given about it. In the Turin Enciclopedia, Ligorio puts the scuola di Medici in the context of its time and place: according to the humanist, it was founded by Antoninus Pius, who built it next to a temple dedicated to Minerva Medica on the Esquiline. He also describes some of the activities that took place there (teaching gymnastic exercises, debates about medicine) and maintains that it was built in Rome because of its size and the large number of physicians in the city.

The Turin manuscripts associate the schola medicorum with a temple dedicated to Minerva Medica. One of Pirro Ligorio's great contributions was the identification of different buildings and ruins in Rome, as well as the design of three plans in which he drew imaginative reconstructions of the ancient city. In the first of these, published in 1552 and titled Urbis Romae situs,Footnote ³⁵ Ligorio interpreted some ruins on the Esquiline as a temple of Minerva Medica which the regional catalogues located in that regio.Footnote ³⁶ These ruins can still be seen: a structure near the railway lines at Termini Station, on the junction of Vie Giovanni Giolitti and Pietro Micca, which is now thought to be a late antique pavilion belonging to the horti Liciniani (Carlucci, Reference Carlucci and Steinby1996: 255–6).Footnote ³⁷ The Turin texts do not explicitly define the position of the schola as regards the temple (‘attorno’, ‘allato’, ‘accanto’, ‘davante, … anzi attorno’). However, thanks to the pianta dimostrativa with which Ligorio illustrates them, it is clear that he is alluding to the two semicircles surrounding a central decagonal structure, which were connected with it by open niches (Fig. 2).Footnote ³⁸ Therefore, these exedrae would have been the location of the schola medicorum. Ligorio cites two documents as proof of the foundation of the schola in the time of Antoninus Pius: a medal and the biography of the emperor. Both forms of evidence are only known through Ligorio himself, however, which means that they cannot be taken into account. In fact, the medal is only documented by his drawing, and Ligorio is known to have invented evidence to support his arguments.Footnote ³⁹ Equally, the biography of Antoninus Pius that he cites formed part of a series of lives of famous people that he wrote in Ferrara and illustrated with images of coins and medals that he drew himself.Footnote ⁴⁰

Fig. 2. Cod. J.a.III.12.16,10, fol. 136v, plan of the Temple of Minerva Medica. (By the kind permission of the Archivio di Stato di Torino. Reproduction prohibited.)

Thus, during his stay in Ferrara, Ligorio developed a more sophisticated discourse on a building that nobody had mentioned before him and set its construction in a particular place and time. The whole account is clearly the result of various imaginings that are plausible to a certain extent, but lack valid documentary foundations, as is usually the case with Ligorio. However, proving that this is fantasy should not cause us to underestimate the discourse, as certain intellectual strategies, derived from a particular cultural atmosphere, doubtless underlie it. It may consequently be asked: (a) why did Ligorio relate the construction of the schola medicorum to Antoninus Pius? and (b) why did he locate the schola medicorum next to that temple? To answer the first question, we must refer to Ligorio's biography of the emperor, but it provides no explanation. In one of his Naples manuscripts (Cod. Neap. XIII B 6 fol. 166v) there is a reproduction of the reverse of a coin with a representation of Minerva Medica, next to which Ligorio wrote that the temple of this goddess was on the Esquiline and may have been built by Antoninus Pius.Footnote ⁴¹ The reason why he associated this emperor with the construction of the schola medicorum is simply because he had previously attributed the building of the supposed temple of Minerva Medica to him.

Regarding the second question, Campbell (Reference Campbell2011: 321, n. 74) has suggested that the shape of the structures next to the supposed temple may have influenced Ligorio, as in the entry ‘Cyclei’ of his Enciclopedia he associated round buildings with good health and claimed that physicians chose to meet there.Footnote ⁴² The medical character of the deity to which the temple was dedicated may also have contributed to this relation between the temple and the schola, as well as the fact (according to Ligorio) that a number of statues connected with medicine and wisdom had been found in the area (see above, n. 36). It may even be possible that he was influenced by the fact that the owner of the land where those statues were found, Cosimo Giacomelli, was a doctor.Footnote ⁴³ In this regard, it should be recalled that Ligorio established a similar metonymical analogy between the medical profession and the surname of the Medici family when he was responsible for the decorative design and the complex iconography of the exterior stucco decoration of the casino of Pope Pius IV (Giovanni Angelo de’ Medici, known as the Medichini, pope from 1559 to 1565), in the Vatican (Coffin, Reference Coffin2004: 41).Footnote ⁴⁴ All of these points provide an explanation for placing the schola medicorum next to the temple and may have influenced Ligorio. However, another factor may have been more decisive in establishing the connection between the schola medicorum and the temple: Pirro Ligorio's friendship in Rome with Mercuriale, the most famous Renaissance physician.

Girolamo Mercuriale was a prestigious doctor and true humanist who laid the foundations for modern gymnastics. He came to Rome in 1562 on the occasion of an embassy to Pope Pius IV at the request of his home town, Forlì (Piernavieja del Pozo, Reference Piernavieja del Pozo and Mercurial1973: XV). Once he was there, he obtained the protection of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, the great patron and protector of artists and humanists at that time as well as an important collector of antiques, who persuaded him to stay in the city. His stay lasted seven years, until 1569,Footnote ⁴⁵ which allowed Mercuriale to come into contact with the active circle of erudite scholars and antiquarians who surrounded the cardinal,Footnote ⁴⁶ and also to access and compile information about ancient medicine in different libraries. In 1569 he published in Venice his magnum opus De arte gymnastica, which he dedicated to the cardinal. This is an essential book in the history of medicine, and also a perfect example of humanistic erudition in which the use of a large number of sources is combined with a critical view that questions the authority of established authors.Footnote ⁴⁷ This book is the first systematic study of physical education as a way to prevent illness and conserve good health and is consequently valuable as a source for studying the conception of medicine and gymnastics in the Renaissance. For the present case, the information that Mercuriale gives in chapter 7 of book I, summarizing the history of gymnastics, is of particular interest:

According to Mercuriale, one of the places where literary exercises were performed in ancient Rome was the schola medicorum, which was located on the Esquiline and whose ruins were still visible in his time. Mercuriale's methodology can be appreciated in the text, in the way he refers to ancient authors and the material remains that anyone could see.Footnote ⁴⁹ In this way, the physician begins with a statement by Galen, according to which there were three places in Rome where literary exercises were carried out, and immediately afterwards he associates such places — somewhat arbitrarily — with the schola medicorum on the Esquiline, as he believes that this was one of those centres. The ruins were material proof of its existence, although Mercuriale admits that he had not read anything about what took place there or how the schola functioned. In any case, he considers (existimo) that explanations and exercises of medical studies were held there, and that it possessed its own archive, of which the evidence is an inscription, namely the epitaph of the tabularius. The text that Mercuriale presents is the same as the one copied by Ligorio in Ferrara (Turin, Archivio di Stato, MS J.a.II.2, fol. 93r). Regarding the place of provenance of the inscribed marble, Mercuriale says ad D. Sebastiani repertum, in a reference to the Porta di San Sebastiano, near where Ligorio locates the place of discovery in book 39 of the Antichità romane.Footnote ⁵⁰

Mercuriale's source of information is clearly Ligorio, whom he cites in the text and would have met in the cardinal's residence. The two must have become friends and maintained an intellectual connection which endured, as shown by the fact that Ligorio was responsible for the drawings that illustrated the second edition of De arte gymnastica, published when neither Ligorio nor Mercuriale was in Rome (Siraisi, Reference Siraisi2003: 240; Vagenheim, Reference Vagenheim2010–12: 185–95). Mercuriale's influence is undoubtedly behind Ligorio's description of the gymnastic exercises that would have taken place in the schola medicorum and the citation of famous doctors in antiquity that Ligorio includes in the Turin Enciclopedia.Footnote ⁵¹ When both first met (c. 1562), Ligorio had already identified the Esquiline ruins with the Temple of Minerva Medica (c. 1552) and composed the epitaph that mentions the schola medicorum (c. 1550–5), but the relation between the temple and the schola medicorum does not appear until the Ferrara manuscripts (after c. 1569). In turn, Mercuriale does not explicitly associate the schola with the Temple of Minerva Medica, but those are definitely the Esquiline ruins that he alludes to, as he adds the inscription to his exposition. In short, it is legitimate to think that the relation between the temple and the schola, i.e. the identification of the hemicycles as the schola medicorum, was born out of the collaboration between the two authors. However, why was a temple associated with a place where physicians met? Mercuriale begins the text copied above by alluding to a passage in which Galen refers to the places in which literary exercises were performed in Rome. This passage is in the second chapter of Galen's book De libris propriis and states:

Galen says that the Templum Pacis was one of the places where those involved in intellectual activities, including physicians, met. Ligorio might have learnt of this passage through Mercuriale and then established a similar connection between the temple he had identified on the Esquiline, which was even dedicated to a deity with the epithet of Medica, and the schola medicorum that he had conceived in the inscription. As noted above, many of Ligorio's ideas arose in the meetings with scholars and humanists, and that would have occurred in the present case. He later added further details when composing a second version of his Antichità romane in Ferrara. This is another example of his procedure, associating different bits of information, ruins and evidence to fabricate a coherent and justified reconstruction of the past.

In sum, the expression schola medicorum is first documented in the mid-sixteenth century and therefore originated in a cultural context long after antiquity, characterized by an erudite and imaginative reconstruction of the past. It is no more than the result of a fabrication of a humanist who, in a ‘reasoned’ way, gave meaning to textual and archaeological evidence, and constructed a narrative that made those different pieces fit together. However, as stated at the beginning of this paper, recent research supports the existence of a schola medicorum in ancient Rome (but without using CIL VI 978* as a source) and has even located it in a particular part of the city (but not on the Esquiline). This shows the reputation that this place continues to have, which has been possible because the idea of a schola medicorum had been sustained after the sixteenth century and transmitted over time. This was enabled by finding new sources of study and documents that seemed to confirm its existence.

3. THE TRANSMISSION OF THE IDEA OF THE SCHOLA MEDICORUM

To assess the spread and reach of the schola medicorum in historiography, the influence of De arte gymnastica in Europe for over three centuries should be considered in the first place. This book made Mercuriale a point of reference for the most important medical authorities and one of the most cited Italian Renaissance authors (Torrebadella-Flix, Reference Torrebadella-Flix2014: 25–9).Footnote ⁵³ Numerous editions of the book, some of which were reprinted several times, contributed to this (McIntosh, Reference McIntosh1984: 73; Torrebadella-Flix, Reference Torrebadella-Flix2014: 26). The first edition was followed by others in 1573 (the first one illustrated by drawings, most of which were by Pirro Ligorio), 1587, 1601 and 1644, all from the Venetian printers Giunti. The Paris and Amsterdam editions were published in 1577 and 1672, respectively, and the text was re-edited again in Venice in 1737. The first translations appeared in the nineteenth century: the Spanish translation in 1845 and the Italian one in 1856.Footnote ⁵⁴ Mercuriale's reference to the schola medicorum and the inscription that mentions it, with the support of a highly prestigious doctor, was fundamental for the idea to become ‘fixed’ and for its recrudescence in other authors.

The impact of the epitaph of the tabularius scholae medicorum before it was said to be false must also be considered. First, the text was widely disseminated among the small circle of erudite scholars with which Ligorio was in contact in Rome,Footnote ⁵⁵ especially those who surrounded Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. Thus, the inscription can be found in manuscripts by Onofrio Panvinio and Fulvio Orsini, the librarians in Palazzo Farnese who persuaded the cardinal to buy the ten tomes of the Antichità romane in 1567 (Vagenheim, Reference Vagenheim1987: 250; Reference Vagenheim, Arcangeli and Nutton2008b: 136–7). The first of these, a notorious plagiarist of Ligorio's works,Footnote ⁵⁶ copied the inscription in a collection of inscriptions that is now kept in the Vatican Library.Footnote ⁵⁷ The second copied it in his book Imagines et elogia virorum illustrium et eruditorum, published in Rome in 1570 (Orsini, Reference Orsini1570: 98). Aldo Manuzio the Younger, who was also close to Cardinal Farnese's circle,Footnote ⁵⁸ also copied the inscription, and, although he was not directly linked to this sphere, Jean-Jacques Boissard included the inscription in his Antiquitates Romanae.Footnote ⁵⁹ The inscription was published later in the large epigraphic corpora of Jan Gruter, Ludovico Muratori, and Johann Gaspar Orelli.Footnote ⁶⁰ It was also reproduced in medical dictionaries and encyclopaedias, such as the Dictionnaire historique de la médecine by Nicolas Éloy, published in 1755,Footnote ⁶¹ and the Encyclopédie méthodique. Médecine, published in Paris between 1787 and 1830 ‘par une Société de Médecins’.Footnote ⁶²

Therefore, in the eighteenth century, the existence of a schola medicorum in ancient Rome was not in doubt, as it was supported by the authority of Mercuriale and transmitted in the main epigraphic catalogues. In consequence, new archaeological discoveries were associated with the place. A good example is found in the book by the famous archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Monumenti antichi inediti, dedicated to Cardinal Alessandro Albani and published in Rome in 1767. In chapter V of the parte quarta (Riti, costumi ed arti), titled ‘Scuola de’ Filosofi’, he refers to a mosaic conserved in the Villa Albani:Footnote ⁶³

It is striking that Winckelmann does not mention Ligorio, Mercuriale, the inscription of the tabularius or the ruins on the Esquiline, but refers to the schola medicorum, which he can only have known of by means of some of those references. It is therefore clear that Winckelmann, like scholars of the ancient city in general, had accepted the existence of the schola medicorum. However, he introduces two new elements in the story: a mosaic and an inscription.

The mosaic in the Villa Albani (now the Villa Torlonia) represents seven figures, or ‘sette filosofi’ in Winckelmann's words (Fig. 3). The author relates it to a famous image in the Vienna Dioscurides, the illustrated manuscript of De materia medica, written in the early sixth century, which shows a group of seven famous physicians who are identified by their names (Fig. 4).Footnote ⁶⁴ Because of the similarities between the two images (the same number of individuals dressed in the Greek style) and despite the cultural distance between them, Winckelmann claimed that the mosaic might also represent a group of doctors: to be exact, an academy of physicians or ‘ciò che i romani dicevano schola medicorum’. Thus, he considered that medicine is symbolized by the serpent that the figure on the left of the mosaic is holding (which he thinks is a portrait of the physician Nicander, who is represented holding a serpent in the image in the Vienna Dioscurides) and by the four containers represented above the portico, which would symbolize containers of spices used in medicine. He adds that the figure touching the sphere with a stick must be a geometrician or astronomer, which he also relates to medicine because astronomic knowledge allowed the influence of the heavens in the course of illnesses to be consulted.Footnote ⁶⁵ However, for us, there is nothing in the mosaic that necessarily suggests that the figures are doctors. They all wear the distinctive Greek pallium, most of them without anything under it and with a bare chest. This clothing is compatible with the representations of physicians or any other man of wisdom. The interpretation that the figure on the left is holding a serpent is questionable; and the recipients might symbolize any other thing. Moreover, the similarities with a mosaic from Pompeii now kept in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, known as ‘Plato's Academy’ (Fig. 5),Footnote ⁶⁶ suggest the reproduction of a Late Hellenistic model which probably aimed to represent seven fields of knowledge or sciences,Footnote ⁶⁷ one of which would undoubtedly have been medicine. The mosaic described by Winckelmann clearly represents a meeting of sages, but not necessarily physicians, and much less the supposed schola medicorum.

Fig. 3. Mosaic of the Villa Torlonia representing seven sages (© Fondazione Torlonia).

Fig. 4. The Vienna Dioscurides. Codex medicus Graecus 1 fol. 3v, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Creative Commons CC0).

Fig. 5. Plato's Academy mosaic from Pompeii, Museo Archaeologico Nazionale di Napoli, inv. 124545 (Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal).

The second document that Winckelmann mentions as evidence is an inscription that was unknown until then, inscribed on the base of a statue that he claimed had decorated the building. The statue is known as the Mattei Amazon, a second-century AD copy of a Greek original now kept at the Vatican Museums.Footnote ⁶⁸ The text translata de schola medicorum is engraved on its base, meaning ‘transferred from the school of physicians’ (Fig. 6). This would therefore be the first evidence in stone of the existence of the schola, an exceptional document that would also represent one of the sculptures that decorated its interior.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, the doubts about its chronology invalidate it as a legitimate document. Even though the text was published in the CIL as genuine (CIL VI 29805 = ILS 5481 = EDR115591), and it has been interpreted by several authors in that way,Footnote ⁷⁰ Spinola (Reference Spinola1999: 48) considers that the inscription ‘potrebbe invece essere moderna’: the text might refer to a place in the property that Cardinal Alessandro de Medici (Pope Leo XI for 26 days in 1605) owned between S. Maria Nova (now the Basilica of Santa Francesca Romana) and the Coliseum, in the Quartiere Alessandrino, so that the inscription would indicate that the Amazon was moved in more modern times, and medicorum would refer to the family surname and not to a group of physicians. Other sculptures from the collection of the same cardinal, which are now exhibited together with the Amazon, entered the Mattei collection through the collection of Cassiano dal Pozzo, a scholar and patron in the first half of the seventeenth century, who Spinola suspects was the author of the inscription.Footnote ⁷¹ It should be recalled that as ‘maestro di camera’ of Cardinal Francesco Barberini, Cassiano dal Pozzo was very interested in Ligorio's manuscripts and had copies made of the Ligorian inscriptions in the library of the Palazzo Farnese (Vagenheim, Reference Vagenheim1987: 250).Footnote ⁷² This raises the possibility that Cassiano knew about the schola medicorum through those manuscripts, which might have inspired him when he engraved the text on the base of the Amazon. In addition, when assessing the validity of the inscription on the statue of the Amazon, another inscription on the base of a statue should be taken into account. This base, of which only a foot remains, is in the Villa Wolkonsky in Rome, and its inscription also says ‘transiata de schola medicorum’ (Fig. 7).Footnote ⁷³ At first, Palombi (Reference Palombi, Brandenburg, Heid and Markschies2007: 73) thought that this was further evidence of the schola medicorum, but he later concluded (Reference Palombi, Meneghini and Rea2014: 340) that this inscription was modern, as did Spinola (Reference Spinola and Steinby2000: 287–8). It is reasonable to suppose that two inscriptions with similar text and palaeography, engraved on similar objects, also share the same age. In conclusion, the doubts about the chronology of the inscription on the base of the Amazon statue do not make it a legitimate source for the study of the schola medicorum or evidence of its existence.

Fig. 6. Inscription on the base of the Mattei Amazon (© Governorato SCV — Direzione dei Musei).

Fig. 7. Base of a lost statue in Villa Wolkonsky (Behrens, Neg. D-DAI-ROM WOL-2016.0161).

The first doubts about the authenticity of the inscription of the tabularius scholae medicorum arose in the eighteenth century. It is not surprising that the first to be suspicious was Scipione Maffei, a pioneer in the development of an analytical method to detect false inscriptions (Calvelli, Reference Calvelli and Calvelli2019b: 88–90). In his Ars critica lapidaria, he refers to the inscription copied by Ligorio and states, ‘Nomen Celsi, Schola Medicorum & Ollae cum statis illis In Fronte, cum quibus coniungi non solent, in aliquam me dubitationem adducunt’ (Maffei, Reference Maffei1765, III: 356).Footnote ⁷⁴ It should be stressed that Maffei suspected not only aspects related to epigraphic habit, such as the incoherence in the formulae connected with the position of the olla and the size of the tomb in the same text, but also of the expression schola medicorum. In 1873, Wilmanns copied Gruter's text and wondered ‘num genuina?’, but without any further comment (Wilmanns, Reference Wilmanns1873: 166, no. 2494). Finally, as mentioned above, in 1885 the text was included in the fascicle of the CIL VI dedicated to the inscriptiones falsae in Rome, when it was definitively acknowledged to be a forgery, even though some authors continued to cite it as authentic until the early twentieth century.

4. THE SCHOLA MEDICORUM IN SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES

In the second half of the nineteenth century, in the framework of French historical positivism, some publications aimed to construct a more scientific and detailed narrative about medicine and physicians in the Roman age. The analysis of ancient sources was fundamental in this. In this regard, the doctor and librarian in the Académie de Médecine, René Briau, published three books about medicine in ancient Rome between 1866 and 1877 (Briau, Reference Briau1866, Reference Briau1874, Reference Briau1877). As he stated in the second of these (Briau, Reference Briau1874: 121–3), his aim was not to add anything to the history of medicine as regards the knowledge of the different doctrines, which had been studied fully, but to explore the history of the medical profession and concentrate on such aspects as the position of physicians within Roman society, the role played by the profession, and the relationships that were established with both the administration and private individuals. The study of Roman medicine was thus linked with the social history of Rome.

Briau first briefly alludes to the schola medicorum in Reference Briau1874,Footnote ⁷⁵ but makes a more complete study of the place in L'archiatrie romaine ou la médecine officielle dans l'Empire romain (1877), with particular interest in the figure of the archiater and his role in what the author calls ‘official medicine’. In chapter 5, devoted to the ‘archiâtres scholaires’, Briau discusses the teaching of medicine in Rome and the places where it was taught. He thought that the places where physicians met for their discussions and lectures were the same places where Greek and Latin letters were taught (the Temple of Peace, gymnasiums, the Palatine library, and porticos), but when these were insufficient because of the development of medicine, the physicians founded a college and built a centre for their meetings. In this way, he dated the foundation of the schola medicorum in Augustus’ time or the beginnings of Tiberius’ reign (without giving any reason) and interpreted it as a place used for scientific meetings and for courses and lectures that focused on the teaching of theoretical medicine. He also added that it was the home of a well-organized society, with a chairman or archiater and an archivist or secretary (Briau, Reference Briau1877: 98–109). Moreover, he stated that the regional catalogues did not mention it, but that ‘son existence ne peut en aucune manière être mise en doute’, mainly because sixteenth-century writers had been definite about the existence of the place (Briau, Reference Briau1877: 99).

According to Briau (Reference Briau1877: 105), ‘it should first be recalled that Mercuriale, who was the first to publish this document, was a serious, honest and wise scholar, who was conversant in the study of Antiquity and of unimpeachable good faith. It is impossible to imagine that he wished to deceive his readers.’Footnote ⁷⁶ This statement shows the enormous weight of the authority of past scholars, in this case Mercuriale, who were not to be questioned. The sources that Briau puts forward in his reasoning are Ligorio's false inscription, which he regards as authentic, the inscription on the statue of the Amazon, which he considers to be ancient and also associates with the mosaic in Villa Albani, and a third text that until then had not been connected with the schola medicorum. This is an inscription from Rome which is now in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli and is dated between the reign of Antoninus Pius and the early third century AD. The interpretation of the text is clear and unmistakable: D(is) T(itus) Aurelius M(anibus) / Telesp«h»orus, scriba / medicorum (Fig. 8).Footnote ⁷⁷ According to Briau, it is evident that medicorum refers to a meeting, college or society of physicians, of which the deceased was the secretary or scribe, and the only society of physicians that was known was the schola medicorum. For this author, it also made sense that the schola would have hired employees responsible for writing, bearing in mind that an archivist of the schola was already attested (Briau, Reference Briau1877: 109–10).

Fig. 8. Epitaph of the scriba medicorum T. Aurelius Telesphorus (© EDCS).

Telesphorus’ epitaph undoubtedly refers to the scribe of a number of doctors, and figures like the scribe are known to have been common in Roman professional colleges. However, the brevity of the text does not allow the nature of this group of physicians to be understood. To interpret this text correctly, it must be put into context. One should consider not only the provenance of the monument and the exact information it provides (in this regard the onomastic of the man is of great interest) but also the different forms of managing and organizing medical activity in ancient Rome.

Since the time of the Republic, in the richest senatorial houses of Rome, it was usual for physicians and midwives to form part of the domestic service, and they sometimes formed authentic health teams with their own organization and hierarchy (Alonso Alonso, Reference Alonso Alonso2018: 182–91). The same system existed in the imperial palace, where from Augustus’ time medical teams were organized in decuriae (Alonso Alonso, Reference Alonso Alonso2018: 139–53). For instance, a supra medicos and a decuria medicorum are known among the people buried in the monumentum Liviae.Footnote ⁷⁸ Similar terminology is seen amongst the cubicularii, a group of domestic employees linked to the large senatorial families from the Republican period, and later also to the imperial family, who were in charge of everything connected with the cubiculum (Rostovtzeff, Reference Rostovtzeff1901: 1734–7; De Ruggiero, Reference De Ruggiero1910). Thus, inscriptions have identified the supra cubicularius,Footnote ⁷⁹ the decurio cubiculariorum Footnote ⁸⁰ and another professional figure who was at the service of those employees: the scriba cubiculariorum.Footnote ⁸¹ The scriba cubiculariorum is documented especially in the context of the imperial house, and in fact nearly all those that are known (four out of five) were imperial freedmen. Bearing this in mind, it might be suggested that T. Aurelius Telesphorus was the secretary of the physicians working in the imperial palace and not of a supposed schola medicorum. The onomastics support this. The combination of the tria nomina with a Greek cognomen is compatible with the status of freedman (Solin, Reference Solin1971: 121–38; Reference Solin2003: 363–6), which must have been Telesphorus’ legal position when he died. In addition, the praenomen and nomen of the scribe are like those of the Emperor Antoninus Pius before he was adopted by Hadrian in AD 138, when his name was T. Aurelius Fulvus Boionius Arrius Antoninus (PIR ² A 1513). This suggests that this scribe was a freedman of the emperor, and therefore part of the familia Caesaris and secretary of the physicians who worked in the imperial household, which are fully documented, as indicated above. Consequently, the real nature of the group of physicians mentioned in the concise text can be interpreted in that way, and not necessarily as the members of a schola medicorum.

Shortly after Briau's book appeared, the expert in French literature Maurice Albert published Les médecins grecs à Rome, in which he defined the schola medicorum as a ‘jeune rivale de la grande école, toujours florissante, d'Alexandrie’ (Albert, Reference Albert1894: 136–8). According to Albert, the concession of citizenship to Greek physicians granted by Julius Caesar led those doctors to form an organization and work together,Footnote ⁸² which in turn led to the foundation of a centre with archives, offices and employees where the physicians met to discuss, explain, experiment and read their studies. Albert similarly based his narrative on the inscription of the tabularius, the epigraph of T. Aurelius Telesphorus, and the mosaic in Villa Albani, where he even recognizes the representation of Augustus’ physician, Antonius Musa.Footnote ⁸³ Although Albert does not cite Briau, several details show that his account was based on him, such as the reference to sixteenth-century travellers and the fact that he dated in 1874 (the year when R. Briau first mentions the schola medicorum) the time when ‘on a retrouvé sur l'Esquilin un de ces Auditoria’.

Both scholars contextualize and include the schola medicorum in the social history of Rome. They also relate it to the phenomenon of associationism, which in the late nineteenth century began to be a specific field of study, first with T. Mommsen's dissertation De collegiis et sodaliciis Romanorum, accedit inscriptio Lanuvina (1843; Kiel), and especially after the publication of J.P. Waltzing's book, which studied the topic through epigraphic documentation. In it, the schola medicorum became the official association of the physicians in ancient Rome.Footnote ⁸⁴

In the first half of the twentieth century, the schola medicorum continued to appear in studies on medicine and doctors in the Roman age. In I medici ed il diritto romano, Bozzoni (Reference Bozzoni1904: 180) claimed that the schola medicorum owned a building on the Esquiline where the physicians met, but was not used for medical instruction.Footnote ⁸⁵ In the same year, in the entry ‘Medicus’ in the Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines, Reinach associated the place with the education and training of doctors, while accepting that it might also have been simply a meeting place.Footnote ⁸⁶ In 1907, Theodor Meyer-Steineg proposed that the schola was built in the reign of Trajan and that it was used for teaching although, since it had an archivist, it must also have possessed a large library.Footnote ⁸⁷ In turn, Gummerus (Reference Gummerus1932: 30, no. 68; 38, no. 121) included the inscriptions on the Mattei Amazon and of the scribe in his corpus of inscriptions of physicians in the Roman Empire and, while he did not go into the topic in detail, he stated that a collegium medicorum and a meeting place for physicians existed in Rome.

Since the early twentieth century, hardly any of the authors who have discussed the schola medicorum have taken as authentic the inscription of the tabularius invented by Ligorio, which originated all the studies about such a place since the sixteenth century. In any case, the invalidation of that evidence was not a problem, because since the eighteenth century the topic had been enriched with new documentation that, a priori, supported the existence of the place. Moreover, since the late nineteenth century, research on associations in the Roman age provided a theoretical framework that gave meaning to the existence of a college and a meeting place for physicians. Nonetheless, within this context, one scholar examined the matter in more critical terms. Adalberto Pazzini, a doctor and lecturer in history of medicine at La Sapienza, questioned (Reference Pazzini and Paluzzi1934: 467–72) whether the place really existed, and analysed the different documents that mentioned it in order to answer that question. Beginning with Ligorio's inscription, he affirmed that everything connected with the schola medicorum was the fruit of ‘ragioni fittizie ed artefatte’ that had been repeated from one author to another over time, using vague terms and through ‘almost identical words that are repeated in each text’. He finally concluded that the schola medicorum never existed. However, in a book published in 1940, Pazzini no longer denied the existence of the place, but admitted that he did not know when it began to function and that it might have been a scholastic institution or either a community or association (Reference Pazzini1940: 13–14).Footnote ⁸⁸

In the second half of the twentieth century, the expression schola medicorum practically disappeared from specialized literature,Footnote ⁸⁹ but the idea that physicians formed colleges and had meeting places remained. The discovery in 1934 of the edict that Vespasian addressed to the city of Ephesos in AD 74 undoubtedly helped to support this idea (Herzog, Reference Herzog1935: 967–1019; FIRA ² I 73; Oliver, Reference Oliver1989: 119–23, no. 38). In this text, the emperor gave immunity and privileges to teachers and physicians, to whom he also granted permission to meet in sacred places, sanctuaries and temples.Footnote ⁹⁰ Bearing in mind that this is a rescript (Oliver, Reference Oliver1989: 121), it is likely that the measure was taken on the collective's request. According to Scarborough, thanks to this right acquired with Vespasian, ‘physicians apparently attempted to regulate themselves by formation of medical clubs which had quarters of their own as well as secretaries to record proceedings of meetings.’ Scarborough (Reference Scarborough1969: 131) also refers to the inscriptions of the Amazon and of the scriba medicorum, and to a text from Beneventum that cites a collegium medicorum in the times of Trajan.Footnote ⁹¹ Later, Jackson (Reference Jackson1988: 58–9) affirmed that ‘like other craftsmen, doctors had the right to form their own craft association or guild (collegium), and collegia of doctors are known at Turin and Beneventum in Italy,’Footnote ⁹² but he does not refer to an association of physicians in the capital city.

In his prosopography of physicians in ancient Rome, published in 1987, Korpela also considered that the colleges of physicians were created from the time of Vespasian's edict onwards, and he claimed that three documents confirmed the existence of meeting places and secretaries in the city. These documents are the inscriptions of the Mattei Amazon and of T. Aurelius Telesphorus, and a Greek inscription coming from Rome that includes a dedication to Emperor Commodus by a decurion of the physicians which mentions the restoration of a mosaic (Korpela, Reference Korpela1987: 103; 195, no. 224).

According to Moretti, the first editor of the text, Epaphroditus was the decurion of a public corporation of physicians who had carried out the restoration of a mosaic that may have been in the schola medicorum.Footnote ⁹⁴ Similarly, Palombi thought that, as the decurion in the physicians’ college, the dedicator would have been in charge of restoring the mosaic mentioned in the text in the college building, i.e. in the schola medicorum. Moreover, the date of the inscription, determined to be between AD 185 and 192, led him to suggest that the reason for the restoration was the fire that affected the area around the Temple of Peace in AD 192, after which the zone was rebuilt. In sum, the chronological coincidence between the fire and the dedication in the inscription, which mentions restoration works, together with the fact that it was a decurio medicorum who had this work done, led Palombi to locate the schola medicorum in the area of the catastrophe: to be precise, in the Temple of Peace (Palombi, Reference Palombi1997–8: 132–3; Reference Palombi, Brandenburg, Heid and Markschies2007: 73; Reference Palombi, Meneghini and Rea2014: 340), which was frequented by doctors, as mentioned above. The precise location he proposes is the southern hall of the Temple of Peace, where the Basilica of Saints Cosmas and Damian was later built and still exists (Palombi, Reference Palombi, Meneghini and Rea2014: 341). However, all these arguments are based on accepting some things as true when they may not be. First, the expression δεκαδάρχης ἰατρῶν does not necessarily refer to the decurion of a public college of physicians. In this case, considering the addressee of the dedication, it is more likely that it was the decurion of the physicians who worked in the house of the imperial family (Nutton, Reference Nutton1970b: 236). Second, the epitaph does not say which type of building the mosaic was in. It has been deduced that it was a meeting place for doctors solely because of the dedicator's profession, but it might be any other kind of building. Third, the coincidence between the times of the fire and the dedication is not so precise, as the former took place in spring and the latter must have been raised before December, the month when the emperor died (Tucci, Reference Tucci2017: 212). However, the restoration may have been due to other causes, as there is no archaeological connection between the inscription and the area affected by the fire in AD 192. In conclusion, while Palombi's hypothesis is attractive and plausible, it is not certain or provable, like all the other sources that are supposedly evidence of the existence of the schola medicorum.

After Korpela's research, apart from the aforesaid references to the LTUR and Palombi, as far as I know, no other mentions have been made of the schola medicorum in Rome in studies and books about Roman medicine.Footnote ⁹⁵ Only a brief note appeared in a 1995 paper in which Nutton studied the collegiate actions of physicians in antiquity: ‘At Rome, the schola medicorum, which had its own scriba, was housed in a building decorated with at least one large statue, of which, alas, the plinth alone remains today.’Footnote ⁹⁶