Papyri.info

Introduction

Medical prescription. The convex side of the ostracon (8.6 x 12 cm) preserves a prescription for calming a distressed mind: the victim is to drink before dinner, then eat eggs with dinner, vomit up most of what he has eaten, and on the next day carry out an ἐκσειασμός. The text has no good parallel: medical prescriptions usually concern only with physical maladies, not mental or spiritual, but the text is in no way magical or religious. The concave side contains an account of money, written with another hand, and it has apparently no connection to the convex side: the writer of the prescription has continued his text with a remark below the account. The writing is Ptolemaic and evidently dated to the 2nd cent. B.C.

Notes

• 6.

  It is not specified what one is to drink. One would naturally assume wine.

• 9.

  Eggs appear very commonly in medical contexts, especially for maladies of the eyes, and internally for those of the liver; see

  Gazza 1956
  , 110. Pliny, N.H. 29.11, gives an extensive catalogue of medicinal uses of eggs, none similar to our text. We cannot find evidence of their use as suggested here, where they seem to precede (and help?) vomiting.

• 11.

  As ἀπεράω is cited only in the active by LSJ for the active meaning. It might seem preferable to assume that we have here an infinitive used imperativally rather than a middle imperative; but the series of other imperatives leads us to think the imperative is intended.

• 12-3.

  ἐκσειασμός would logically seem to be formed from ἐκσειάζω, but this verb is also unattested. ἐκσείω, which means “to shake out”, is cited by Lampe from Johannes Moschus, Pratum spirituale 46 (Migne, PG 87.2901B) with the meaning “examine one’s conscience”. There is perhaps a sense of purgation, psychological in this case, which may like καταστορέννυμι and ἀπεράω point to a medical origin for the term.