SAMMONICUS

SERENUS  , Roman savant, author of a didactic medical poem, De medicina praecepta (probably incomplete) . The work (1115 hexameters) contains a number of popular remedies, borrowed from Pliny and Dioscorides, and various magic formulae, amongst others the famous Abracadabra (q.v.), as a cure for fever and ague . It concludes with a description of the famous antidote of Mithradates VI. of Pontus . It was much used in the middle ages, but is of little value except for the ancient history of popular medicine . The syntax and metre are remarkably correct . It is uncertain whether the author was the famous physician and polymath, who was put to death in A.D . 212 at a banquet to which he had been invited by Caracalla, or his son, the tutor of the younger Gordian . The father, who was one of the most learned men of his age, wrote upon a variety of subjects, and possessed a library of 6o,000 volumes, bequeathed to his son and handed on by the latter to Gordian . The editio princeps (ed . Sulpitius Verulanus, before 1484) is very rare; later ed. by J . G . Ackermann (Leipzig, 1786) and E .

Bahrens, Poetae

Latini minores, iii . ; see also A . Baur, Quaesliones Sammoniceae (Giessen, 1886) ; M . Schanz, Geschichte der rimischen Literatur, (1896); Teuffel, Hist. of Roman Literature (Eng. trans., 1900), 374, 4, and 383 .