Marcellus Empiricus - Life and Political Career

Life and Political Career

Little is known of the life of Marcellus. The primary sources are:

• Marcellus’s own preface to the De medicamentis;
• the Codex Theodosianus (probably referring to this Marcellus);
• a letter written in 399 by Symmachus to a Marcellus who is likely to have been the medical writer;
• a letter written by the Antiochan scholar Libanius that mentions a Marcellus;
• an inscription in Narbonne (his association with which would require that he not be from Bordeaux; see below);
• an anecdote in Orosius about an unnamed Gaul (also a highly conjectural link).

The Gallic origin of Marcellus is rarely disputed, and he is traditionally identified with the toponym Burdigalensis; that is, from Bordeaux (Latin Burdigala), within the Roman province of Aquitania. In his prefatory epistle, he refers to three Bordelaise praetorian prefects as his countrymen: Siburius, Eutropius, and Julius Ausonius, the father of the poet Decimus Magnus Ausonius. He is sometimes thought to have come from Narbonne rather than Bordeaux. There has been an attempt to make a Spanish senator of him on the basis of Symmachus’s reference to property he owned in Spain; but this inference ignores that Marcellus is said explicitly to have left Spain to return to living in avitis penatibus, or among the household spirits of his grandfathers — that is, at home as distinguished from Spain. He probably wrote the De medicamentis liber during his retirement there.

The author of the De medicamentis is most likely the Marcellus who was appointed magister officiorum by Theodosius I. The heading of the prefatory epistle identifies him as a vir inlustris, translatable as “a distinguished man,” but a more formal designation of rank that indicates he had held imperial office. Marcellus’s 16th-century editor Janus Cornarius gives the unhelpful phrase ex magno officio (something like “from high office”); coupled with two references in the Theodosian Code to a Marcellus as magister officiorum, Cornarius’s phrase has been taken as a mistaken expansion of the standard abbreviation mag. off. The magister officiorum was a sort of Minister of the Interior and the identification is consistent with what is known of the author’s life and with the politics of the time. His stated connection to the Ausonii makes it likely that he was among the several aristocratic Gauls who benefitted politically when the emperor Gratian appointed his Bordelaise tutor Ausonius to high office and from Theodosius’s extended residence in the western empire during the latter years of his reign.

Marcellus would have entered his office sometime after April 394 A.D., when his predecessor is last attested, and before the emperor’s death on January 17, 395. He was replaced in late November or December of 395, as determined by the last reference to a Marcellus holding office that is dated November 24 and by the dating of a successor. The timing of his departure suggests that he had been a supporter of Rufinus, the calculating politician of Gallic origin who was assassinated November 27 of that year, having failed to resist if not facilitating the advance of Alaric and the Visigoths. Marcellus’s support may have been pragmatic or superficial; a source that condemns Rufinus heartily praises Marcellus as “the very soul of excellence.”

Given Rufinus’s dealings with the Visigoths, however, it is conceivable that Marcellus should be identified with “a certain former high-ranking official from Narbonne” mentioned by Orosius as present in Bethlehem in 415 A.D. While visiting Jerome, Orosius says he heard this Gaul relate the declaration made by Athaulf, king of the Visigoths, at Narbonne regarding his intentions toward the Roman empire. John Matthews argued that Marcellus, who would have been about 60 at the time, is “clearly the most eligible candidate.” Since Orosius identifies the Gaul only as having served under Theodosius, and as a “devout, cautious, and serious” person, other figures have been put forth as the likely bearer of the Athaulf declaration.