JONATHAN C EDMONDSON (York University, Toronto)
Of all the cities of Roman Hispania, the colony of Augusta Emerita (Mérida) has provided one of the richest collections of evidence for doctors and the practice of medicine in Rome’s western provinces (Bejarano 2015). Various collections of medical instruments have been discovered in burials in the colony’s suburbium, while six inscriptions apparently attest medical practitioners, as well as a seventh from Emerita’s large territory (Rémy & Faure 2010, Catalogue: Lusitanie, nº 2-6, 8 and AE 2009, 518). It has frequently been noted that one of these doctors was a woman, Iulia Saturnina, and ever since Emil Hübner included an edition of her tombstone in CIL II, published in 1869 (CIL II 497; cf. ILS 7802), she has regularly featured in discussions of female doctors in the Roman West (e.g., Gummerus 1932, 84, nº 323; Flemming 2000, 16; Buonopane 2003, 130, nº 17; Flemming 2013, 293-294).
Work on the epigraphy of Mérida for CIL II2/3 has confirmed that the surface of this funerary altar is now so worn that the reading of the deceased’s cognomen and her profession as a medica are far from certain. Given the importance of this inscription for our understanding of female medical practitioners in Rome’s western provinces, a thorough re-examination of this epitaph’s text is badly needed. This paper employs two complementary approaches to arrive at a more authoritative reading.
It is clear that Hübner had not studied the altar directly, but relied on the reading made in the 1750s by the titular doctor of Mérida, José Alsinet, who sent copies of many texts from Mérida to the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid to aid its ongoing project to collect as much evidence as possible about Spain’s Roman past. However, a careful review of other readings of the text prior to Hübner preserved in epigraphic manuscripts and printed works reveals that while all seven other editions, produced between 1632 and 1857, read medica, only one (by Francisco Pérez Bayer) concurs with Alsinet’s reading of the deceased’s cognomen. This calls Hübner’s reliance on Alsinet’s text seriously into question.
In order to determine the best text, the CIL II2 Mérida project commissioned Dr Hugo Pires (Oporto) to produce digital images of the text using the technique of Morphological Residual Modelling (MRM). These high-quality photogrammetry images confirm that the term medica was indeed inscribed in the fifth line and that the woman’s name was not Iulia Saturnina, pace CIL II 497, but Iulia Saturnia, confirming the editio princeps of Bernabé Moreno de Vargas, published in his Historia de la Ciudad de Mérida (1633, f. 53r.).
In general, the paper argues for the methodological importance, when editing damaged texts, of reviewing all available epigraphic manuscripts produced prior to CIL II (including those not known to Hübner), since they may potentially contain more authoritative readings made when the text was better preserved, and of using the latest digital techniques for enhancing the visualization of epigraphic texts.