Except for Panaratus and Prosdocia: Workplace Law in the Funerary Inscription of Scribonia Attike and Ulpius Amerimnus

Except for Panaratus and Prosdocia: Workplace Law in the Funerary Inscription of Scribonia Attike and Ulpius Amerimnus

Molly Jones-Lewis (University of Maryland, Baltimore County)

Tomb 100 at Isola Sacra, Ostia contains the memorial of a family business co-owned by Scribonia Attike, an obstetrician, and her husband Ulpius Amerimnus, a surgeon. Scribonia included in her inscription information about her household and freedpeople, naming two freed members who are explicitly banned for burial in this monument: Panaratus and Prosdocia. While scholarly attention has been given to Scribonia and her funerary portrait as a representative of women medical professionals in the Roman empire (Upson-Saia, Marx-Wolf, and Secord 2023, 288; Kampen 1994; Israelowich 2015, 79), less has been said about the other members of this household outside of public-facing blogs (eg. Wyndham 2019). Who were Panaratus and Prosdocia, and why did Scribonia specifically exclude them from burial with the rest of the household? I argue that this tomb preserves an act of professional violence against Panaratus and Prosdocia performed using the public-facing space of the funerary inscription.

In this paper, I will contextualize Scribonia’s household in the legal norms of medical workplaces and workers during the 2nd century CE. The deep enmeshment between Roman family legal structures, slaving, and medical training manifests in a number of passages preserved in the Digest compiled by Trebonian under Justinian, especially D. 38.1.26. In this passage taken from the Republican jurist Alfenus Verus discusses a case brought by a group of freedman physicians against their enslaver-turned-patron (himself also of freed status) accusing their patron of using his ongoing legal rights to interfere with their ability to build their own medical practices. This case revolves around a dispute about the terms of manumission and whether the former enslaver could use the stipulated days to sabotage his freed former students independent medical practices. The balance of power in the case is overwhelmingly weighted toward the patron-enslaver for a number of reasons. Professionally, the freed clients’ professional credibility is derived from the professional reputation of the enslaver-patron. Legally, the enslaver-patron is the default legal advocate for the freed clients, and so these plaintiffs had to formally accuse their patron of bad faith in a legal structure that allowed “ungrateful” clients to risk re-enslavement (du Plessis and Borkowski 2020, 104–6). Financially, too, the freed client continued to depend on their patron for business, while the enslaver-patron’s ongoing financial responsibilities to freed colleagues were limited to those from which the patron and their family benefitted (Digest 33.3.1.10.3).

For all these reasons, the freed plaintiffs in D.31.1.26 were unusually brave in approaching the Roman civil system with their complaints, and the substance of those complaints is revealing of the ongoing scope for exploitation present for Rome’s population of enslaved and formerly enslaved physicians. In households like Scribonia and Ulpian’s, led by physicians who likely descended from freed immigrants, it is likely that members of the household were trained to participate in the family medical practice. Indeed, Scribonia’s iconic funerary art includes an unnamed assistant standing behind the laboring patient’s chair. If, like the physicians of D.38.1.26, Prosdocia found herself agreeing to a manumission contract with terms incompatible with sustaining her own practice, the law would only go so far as to support her right to refuse work that violated her honestas and to take breaks to eat and use the toilet. Her ability to negotiate for fewer days or protest when Scribonia kept her from being available on short notice when a patient went into labor would be limited, and she might have decided to take the steps that led to her banishment from the family tomb. How damaging would it be to have your name preserved in an inscription like Tomb 100? The medical marketplace of the second century was one that traded heavily on pedigree and reputation, as Dolganov argues (Dolganov 2023). To be named on a public-facing inscription and excluded from an honor like inclusion in a family tomb effectively confers on Prosdocia and Panaratus infamia, the kind of disavowal that would have spelled the end of one’s ability to practice medicine in Ostia and, perhaps, even farther afield.

When speaking of medical qualifications in the Roman world, modern scholars are quick to point out that the Roman world had no qualifying processes like those of modern medical boards and credentialing institutions. However, Roman legal norms and the social environment of imperial physicians makes it clear that social vetting and qualification by association was a real and important dynamic in selecting and rejecting physicians. Isola Sacra 100 likely preserves evidence of this power in action, with Panaratus and Prosdocia the neglected victims of their enslaver-teacher’s social violence.

Dolganov, Anna. 2023. “Law as Competitive Performance : Performative Aspects of the Legal Process in Roman Imperial Courts.” In Medicine and the Law Under the Roman Empire, edited by Claire Bubb and Michael Peachin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192898616.003.0003.

Israelowich, Ido. 2015. Patients and Healers in the High Roman Empire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.

Kampen, Natalie Boymel. 1994. “Material Girl: Feminist Confrontations with Roman Art.” Arethusa 27 (1): 111–37.

Plessis, Paul du, and J. A. Borkowski. 2020. Borkowski’s Textbook on Roman Law. Sixth edition. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press Oxford, United Kingdom.

Upson-Saia, Kristi, Heidi Marx-Wolf, and Jared Secord. 2023. Medicine, Health, and Healing in the Ancient Mediterranean (500 BCE-600 CE) : A Sourcebook. Oakland, California: University of California Press Oakland, California.

Wyndham, Aradia. 2019. “Scribonia Attice, Ancient Roman Midwife.” The Baby Historian (blog). October 2, 2019. https://thebabyhistorian.com/2019/10/02/scribonia-attice-ancient-roman-midwife/.