Roman Eye Salves and the Oculist Stamp

Marcus Valerius

You step out of your room on the third floor of the insula, and before you even reach the street, your eyes are already watering. It is, it is just the reality of Rome. Every room in the tenement has an oil lamp with no chimney, a charcoal brazier smoking up the plaster, and down on the street, fine dust from marble sawing floating in the sunbeams. By midmorning, half the people in the Subura are rubbing their eyelids, cursing the burning sensation.

Marcus Valerius

We call the weeping, bloodshot misery lippitudo. And if you are truly unlucky, you get aspritudines, that awful, gritty feeling like someone rubbed coarse sand under your eyelids, turning the inner skin into raw granulations. My neighbor Lucius, who sits at a bench three doors down from my door, is a joiner. He works with fine cedar and oak. Yesterday morning, I found him leaning against his doorpost with his eyes squeezed shut, tears streaming down his beard, unable to look at the sky.

Marcus Valerius

If a carpenter cannot see his grain, he does not eat. It is that simple. So I took him by the elbow and we walked down toward the small stalls near the edge of the Forum, where the medic setting up his table sells eye salves. You might picture a doctor handing you a glass bottle of liquid drops, but that is, uh, that is not how it works here at all.

Marcus Valerius

What the medic holds up is a hard, dark green stick. It looks almost like a small stick of sealing wax or a piece of dry slate. In Rome, eye medicine is never sold as a liquid. It comes in these solid cakes or sticks of medicament, which we call collyria. They are manufactured hard so they do not spoil in the heat, completely dry, intended for subsequent infusion or dilution when you are actually ready to apply them.

Marcus Valerius

I watched the physician take a small bronze blade and scrape a tiny pile of powder off the end of the stick onto a smooth marble slab. Then he cracked an egg, separated the yellow from the clear, and mixed the powder directly ex ovo, with raw egg white. Sometimes they use wine or milk, but egg white sticks to the eyeball and cushions the sting. He whisked it into a smooth paste right before our eyes.

Marcus Valerius

Before he shaved the stick, though, he turned it in his fingers to show us the mark. On the side of the paste was a raised pattern of letters. And on his workbench sat the tool that made it, a small, oblong piece of greenish slate, no bigger than the palm of your hand, carved with backward text cut into all four edges. An oculist stamp.

Marcus Valerius

That stone block is the doctor's entire reputation. While the salve paste is still soft and fresh from the mixing mortar, before it dries into those solid cakes or sticks of medicament, the practitioner presses the sharp stone edges into all four sides. When the stick hardens, the reversed letters come out as raised, perfectly readable words on the paste itself.

Marcus Valerius

Lucius leaned in close, squinting through his tears, trying to read what was cut into the slate. The stamp said, Titus Junianus crocodes for raw eyes, and on the other edge, Titus Junianus dialepidos for granulations. You see, every recipe has a name. Crocodes is rich with expensive saffron, meant to soothe that terrible stinging inflammation when the smoke gets too thick in the insula.

Marcus Valerius

Dialepidos, on the other hand, is not gentle at all. It is made with scraped copper scales, the metallic flakes that fall off hot bronze in the smithy. It sounds harsh, and Jupiter knows it burns like fire, but when you have those rough granulations scrape against your cornea, you need something aggressive to scrape the eyelid clean, or you end up completely blind.

Marcus Valerius

And in a city as huge as Rome, where every third street vendor claims to have a miracle cure, you, you really have to guard against fraud. Unscrupulous peddlers in the Subura will take plain river clay, color it with red ochre or yellow dirt, dry it into a stick, and sell it to desperate people who are going blind. But river clay will not hold the crisp, raised impression of a master stone cutter's seal.

Marcus Valerius

Lucius watched the doctor closely, making sure the raised letters on the stick matched the carved stone on the table before he handed over his money. Two bronze asses for a single shaving of saffron salve, stirred into egg white and painted across his red eyelids with a soft feather. It is a steep price for a working man who makes his living with his hands.

Marcus Valerius

We walked back up the hill together, Lucius keeping his head down against the brightness of noon, his eyes shining with egg white and yellow saffron. It made me think about how strange this city truly is. We build monuments of white marble that will stand for a thousand years, yet the people who build them rely on street side alchemy and carved stones just to keep their eyes open for another day.