13 Collyrium Names Attested on Stone Tablets: The Example of the Helvetian Corpus

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. Their four narrow faces hold engraved information in retrograde characters, with a varying drawing quality, more often in Latin, in an abbreviated form. Such inscriptions present medical specifications. They include one piece of information or more, interpreted as follows: a personal name in the genitive case, a medicine's name, a therapeutic indication, and a method of administration. When abbreviations are intelligible, a comparative analysis of the medicines' names and therapeutic indications shows that, in the ancient Roman world, those stone tablets were most likely used to stamp the medicines meant to treat ocular ailments. The two exceptional cases, Postum and Hermes , show that ancient Helvetian ocular medicine is a medical speciality at the crossroads of Greek and Roman cultures. Keywords: ancient Roman world; collyrium-stamps; eye medicine; Greek culture; Helvetian corpus; stone tablets