[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
What relationship did the fields of medicine and law have to each other in the Roman world? This volume, the result of a conference at New York University in 2019, sets out to investigate that question. It examines the impact of aristocratic competition and porous disciplinary boundaries on how practitioners of medicine and law operated as intellectuals and performers. The sustained exploration of the mutual affinities of these fields is a welcome scholarly innovation. By examining law and medicine as intellectual pursuits in which elite members of the Roman Empire participated, the volume also complements recent studies that have highlighted the experience of “non-experts” or “average citizens’ in the pursuit of healing methods and dispute resolution.[1] Moreover, the incorporation of a wide variety of authors who addressed questions of expertise in intellectual fields beyond medicine and law—Vitruvius, Frontinus, Quintilian, Pliny the Younger, Aulus Gellius, and Plutarch are brought in to enrich the discussion—is an added strength. For social historians or for anyone with a serious interest in Roman medicine or law, the volume will be thought-provoking and useful.
The twelve essays are organized into three sections that reflect the principal themes explored: 1) competition, 2) expertise and its construction, and 3) rhetorical education. Each of the three parts contains four chapters: an introduction, a pair of case studies covering law and medicine, and a response. Bibliographies accompany each chapter. What follows is a discussion of select contributions that caught the interest of this reviewer.
In the Introduction, the editors state their aim: to bring the fields of medicine and law into conversation with each other and “to imagine the cerebral and the more workaday facets of each discipline as integral parts of an original whole” (3–4). To juxtapose the writings of the two fields helps to illuminate “a particular set of defining characteristics” they share, including an investment in theoretical debate and an orientation toward practical, day-to-day activities that had a direct impact on people’s lives (advocating for clients, treating patients). The differences between ancient medical and legal writing are also acknowledged: in contrast to the massive corpus of the physician Galen’s writing, for example, there exists no equivalent for legal books, since most legal writing from the Empire was collected and codified in the later Digest of Justinian. Notwithstanding these differences, the editors note, the traditional scholarly approach to legal and medical texts as simply technical prose has mostly failed to consider their literary and aesthetic qualities, and several essays in the volume set out to fill this gap.
The first part of the book, “Selling the Subject-Matter,” considers how the competitive performances that were central to the practice of law and medicine served to shape these fields. Matthew Roller outlines how competition exerted a profound influence on the dynamics of aristocratic life in the Roman Empire, both in the writings of intellectuals and in their live performances in front of audiences. In her case study, Anna Dolganov offers a close reading of several transcripts of lawcourt hearings that survive on papyri from Roman Egypt, identifying how the skillful use of rhetoric allowed legal practitioners to bolster their social status as they argued in front of the adjudicating prefect—and perhaps by having a transcript of their speeches preserved as a model for future students. Dolganov argues for the institutional as well as the social importance of legal performance: even as “Roman assizes functioned as a prestigious public stage” (74) for provincial elites, the careful selection of cases and litigants at the assizes, including women seeking legal help, or villagers complaining about abuse from tax collectors, allowed provincial authorities to convey a public message about the state’s intolerance of lawbreaking.
The physician Galen may have lacked a formal institutional structure like the lawcourts in which to operate, but as Luis Alejandro Salas shows, he masterfully used live performances and texts to elicit support from audiences. In Anatomical Procedures, for example, a treatise that describes his live anatomical demonstrations, Galen includes not only medical information but also pointed references from Greek New Comedy. In one anecdote, Galen portrays the practitioners of a sect to which he is particularly hostile, the Erasistrateans, as poorly medically trained and analogizes them to bumbling stock slave characters from the plays of Menander. Such a literary moment in the text did more than call out the incompetence of rivals: it also identified Galen to his readers as an all-around learned (pepaideumenos) member of the elite. In a response essay, Kendra Eshleman highlights the importance of the live and textual audiences who had their own perspectives as they watched a doctor or lawyer perform or read medical treatises or court transcripts. Given the face-to-face dynamics that characterized intellectual competition, audience responses either in real time or imagined by a text’s author were an essential part of the effort to persuade and assert authority.
The essays in the book’s second part, “Over-shooting the Subject-Matter,” follow on this question of how jurists and physicians acquired support, examining how they shaped their “expertise” to align with the social and political norms of the ruling elite. Command of specialist knowledge was not necessarily enough to establish an individual as an expert in a field; as Alice König and Michael Peachin observe, the construction of expertise often involved “marrying high-status forms of authority (like social status, and elite education) with technical know-how” (168). In his case study, Bruce Frier investigates competition and collaboration among the jurists, asking to what extent they were socially motivated “by an ‘extra-legal’ desire to establish their individual superiority over their peers” (177). Focusing on a dispute between Julian and Celsus related to the Lex Aquilia, Frier demonstrates that the jurists’ personalities in fact recede into the background in their writings, with intellectual debate kept at the forefront and ad hominem attacks avoided.
Claire Bubb then turns to the methods of constructing expertise deployed by Galen, who “leverages his superior relationship to texts as a means of dominating his professional rivals” (209). Most notably, Galen deployed his skills as a textual commentator to position himself as an unassailable medical authority. Working with texts from the Hippocratic corpus whose authorship was debated, Galen declared whether or not they were authentic, often based on whether their ideas aligned with his own humoral and anatomical models. Having the last word on authenticity allowed Galen to refer to these Hippocratic texts as proof that his own theories had historical support while the ideas of his rivals did not. James Uden, in a response, focuses on how members of the cultured elite who were “outsiders to expertise” in law and medicine viewed jurists and physicians. Uden reads passages from Pliny the Younger and Aulus Gellius, showing how their attitudes toward legal and medical expertise reveal a contest between the claims of narrowness and specialized skill characteristic of the “expert” and the broader but more socially refined education of the “intellectual.”
“Positioning the Subject-Matter,” the volume’s third section, surveys the influence of rhetoric and literary artistry on legal and medical texts. The rhetorical education in which practitioners of law and medicine participated in youth exerted a sizable effect on their professional writings. Ulrike Babusiaux concentrates on examples of ethos and pathos in texts by the Severan jurists, including Ulpian, Paul, and Papinian, that were addressed primarily to the community of jurists and officials in the emperor’s circle. She argues that rhetorical tools could be used for a variety of purposes: to establish common ground with the reader, to strengthen a technical argument, or bolster a legal concept. Caroline Petit demonstrates that medical writing, too, was strongly rhetorical and often included artistic and literary elements. Galen’s On Prognosis, for example, is not only a tour de force of self-promotion and persuasion, but also contains vividly drawn patient portraits within a carefully paced narrative, with entertainment as a partial aim. While an author such as Aretaeus of Cappadocia, a predecessor of Galen, also offers visually powerful descriptions of diseases, it was Galen, Petit notes, who achieved a “perfect ‘sophistic’ medical style, by contrast with contemporary authors” (297) such as Ptolemy and Artemidorus of Daldis, who preferred a simpler style.
In an epilogue, Michael Trapp adds philosophers to the conversation, asking how their experience in society compared to that of doctors and lawyers. As experts with training in theory and a devotion to practice, philosophers were specialists who had much in common with their legal and medical counterparts. However, philosophers confronted ambivalence, both among themselves and from the wider public, about whether it was unseemly for them to receive financial benefits or compete for public recognition. On one side were authors like Plutarch, who asserted that ambition and striving for status had no place among philosophers; on the other was the emperor Marcus Aurelius, who invited public competition among philosophers for salaried positions at Athens.
The book is a pleasure to read, and the contributors do an excellent job of engaging with each other’s arguments. This cohesiveness of the volume is one of its greatest assets, with the responses that follow the case studies helpfully synthesizing and asking further questions. While the essays are primarily suitable for advanced students and scholars, selections could be brought into an undergraduate course on Roman law or medicine. In the fascinating questions raised, and often answered, by the contributors to this collection, the reader will find new openings for future research on law and medicine and their commonalities.
Authors and Titles
I. Introduction: Setting Medicine and Law Apart, Together (Claire Bubb and Michael Peachin)
II. Selling the Subject-Matter: When Science, Competition, and Entertainment Commingle
Introduction: Competition in the Roman Empire–Structure, Characteristics, and New Arenas (Matthew Roller)
Law as Competitive Performance: Performative Aspects of the Legal Process in Roman Imperial Courts (Anna Dolganov)
Medicine as Competitive Performance: Eristic and Erudition–Galen on Erasistratus and the Arteries (Luis Alejandro Salas)
Response: Does the Performance Undercut the Substance? (Kendra Eshleman)
III. Over-shooting the Subject-Matter: When Pragmatism and Expertise Collide
Introduction: What Makes the Expert, and His Expertise? (Alice König and Michael Peachin)
Juristic Literature and the Law: Competition and Cooperation (Bruce W. Frier)
Medical Literature and Medicine: Going beyond the Practical (Claire Bubb)
Response: Expert or Intellectual? Other Views of Legal and Medical Expertise (James Uden)
IV. Positioning the Subject-Matter: When Rhetoric and Science Converge
Introduction: The Ubiquity of Rhetoric (Ulrike Babusiaux and Claire Bubb)
Rhetoric in Legal Writing: The Ethos and Pathos of Roman Jurists (Ulrike Babusiaux)
Rhetoric in Medical Writing: Artistic Prose? (Caroline Petit)
Response: Experts of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of Expertise (Claire Bubb and Joseph Howley)
V. Epilogue: How Does Philosophy Compare? (Michael Trapp)
Notes
[1] For example, Harris, W.V., ed. Popular Medicine in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2016); Bablitz, L. “Roman Courts and Private Arbitration,” 234–244 in The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society, ed. P. du Plessis et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)