Velia and the school of Salerno.

THE PROBLEM of the origins of the medical school of Salerno has exercised the talents of many distinguished medical historians, who, even if they have not reached complete agreement, have purified and tested the ancient traditions and the surviving evidence. Although Kristeller's magisterial article which imposed clarity upon much that was formerly obscure seemed to have fixed the terms of the debate,' an old and discredited theory has been resurrected in the last decade and is beginning to find its way back into general acceptance. A direct link is discovered between medieval Salerno and early Greek medicine through the existence of a medical college at Velia which was transferred with its learning and institutions intact to Salerno. The classical heritage of Salerno is thus more than vague ideas; it is the continuation of a tradition of doctrine and organization going back to the Romans and Greeks, back to the age of Hippocrates himself. The new evidence is derived from archaeology, epigraphy and numismatics, each of which has its own limitations and difficulties, and the argument gains whatever cogency it may be thought to possess from the cumulation of several minor arguments. I shall review these new discoveries in the first part of this paper and then discuss other recent developments in the history of classical medicine in Europe in the Dark Ages in an attempt to show how they may lead to a better understanding of the place of Salerno. The small town of Velia (close to the modern village of Ascea Marina) lies some eighty kilometres south along the coast from Salerno and is a palimpsest of south Italian history. On the headland dominating the bay stands a Saracenic-Norman tower whose foundations rest in part upon a Greek temple of the early fifth century B.C. beneath which have been found traces of an even earlier Greek civilization. The classical town whose walls extend into the surrounding hills lay at the foot of the headland and there, close by the Porta Marina, was uncovered a building with an underground portico, a cryptoporticus, in which were found statues, portrait busts, strigils, a few surgical (or, more likely, toilet) instruments and pieces of pottery.2 An inscription in Greek at the base of one of the male statues reads as follows: