ABSTRACT
The transformation of the Roman world under Augustus (ruled 31 BCE to 14 CE), the heir of Julius Caesar, was not just a political transition from Republic to Empire, from the effective rule of the Senate and people of Rome to an autocracy hiding behind traditional terminology. How the imperial connections might work in practice and how the expansion of the Roman Empire had an impact on medicine are neatly illustrated by the career and writings of a Latin writer on pharmacology, Scribonius Largus. Largus' preface is a plea for a Hippocratic ethic within medicine. It transmutes the Hippocratic Oath into Latin and sets it in a specifically Latin context. Whether his plea was ever heard we cannot tell. Apart from the citations of his recipes in Greek, only Marcellus, writing at the end of the fourth century, shows any clear acquaintance with his book, and manuscripts of it seem always to have been rare.
