Collyrium names attested on stone tablets: the example of the Helvetian corpus.

Abstract

Collyrium-stamps are usually parallelepipedic stones that might have been used in the Roman world, between the second part of the first century and the fourth century A.D., to stamp eye medicine. On their four narrow sides, those seals contain instructions engraved in retrograde characters, of varying drawing quality, sometimes in Greek, mostly in Latin and in an abbreviated form. These markings represent some sort of medical prescriptions since they contain one or more of the following information: a personal name in the genitive case, a collyrium name, therapeutic instructions, and a method of administration. Like personal names and therapeutic instructions, collyrium names suggest that Roman eye medicine was inscribed in the Greek medical tradition. A comparison between the collyrium names engraved on the seals unearthed in Switzerland and the collyrium names known through our reading the Greek medical texts allows for an estimation of the influence of Greek ophthalmology on Roman eye medicine.