If Hippocrates blamed his predecessors for their scanty use of drugs, he would scarcely, unless suddenly clothed with a shirt of credulity, have approved of the plethora of prescriptions and panaceas prevalent in later centuries. Truly applicable would then have been the inscription suggested for a pharmacy; “Hic venditur galbanum, elaterium, opium, et omne quod in _um_ desinit, nisi remedium.”[720] But credulity clogged such great minds as Hippocrates and Galen. Even they included astrology in the therapeutic art, and indict practitioners who only used that “science” despitefully, or eschewed it, as “men-killers.” Quite apart, however, from the recognised prose treatises by iatric writers such as Galen, Diphilus, and Xenocrates, there must have existed a very ample literature in Greek verse. One collection alone, _Poetæ Bucolici et Didactici_ (Didot, Paris, 1872), reveals under the heading of _Carminum Medicorum Reliquiæ_ the names of some dozen authors who deal chiefly—Marcellus Sidetes indeed exclusively—with the medicinal properties of fish. Cursory skipping of these fragments compels, even if one’s acquaintance with ancient medical writers be slight, ready assent to the opinion of the learned editor (p. 74) that originality was not the dominant characteristic of their begetters. They are apparently, with two exceptions, but metrical plagiarisms or excerpts—not quite as bad as Tate and Brady’s _Translations of the Psalms_—from the works of Galen and others. The first exception, the medical oath (ὅρμος ἰατρικός) startles our modern conceptions. The practitioner swears that he will administer none of the poisons, some of the deadliest of which, as we have seen, were piscine.[721] The second is a fragment from a medical work by Marcellus Sidetes. In the days of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, despite the stirring times described by historians, Life (to alter the well-known verse) must verily have been a watch and a vision—or rather a yawn—between a sleep and a sleep to many a reader, for no less than forty-two volumes were necessary to contain the hygienic hexameters of our author. But more astonishing even than the leisure required for their perusal, the whole forty-two (according to Suidas) were held in such high esteem that by command of the Emperors they were placed in all the public libraries of Rome. In our fragment, _Remedies from Fish_, Marcellus, after prefacing that by long study he has acquainted himself with their medicinal effects, sets out a list of healing fish. He adds here and there some leading specific. To one of these he prettily makes us privy, _e.g._ the application of a burnt mullet, mixed with honey, in cases of carbuncle. But our author must not be written down as a one-ideaed fish-quack; for that Nature works cures (if not miracles) by the agencies of earth, and of “broad-wayed air,” as well as of the sea, is a firm tenet of his faith.[722]