Selling Pharmaka, Buying Health in Ancient Greece and Rome : Retail Therapy

In antiquity, selling pharmacological preparations and recipes could mean very big business indeed. The import and trade of exotic pharmacological ingredients, in particular those coming from India, has received some scholarly attention but the process whereby these ingredients were combined into desirable concoctions, advertised and sold has been more neglected. This monograph attempts to bridge the gap between ancient medical and socio-economic history, addressing an academic audience of both social and economic historians as well as historians of medicine and technology. It examines material from the fifth century BCE (the date of the first medical treatises included in the Hippocratic Corpus) to the seventh century (the century in which Paul of Aegina, the last of the early Byzantine medical authors, composed his work) with a particular focus on the period from the first century BCE to the third century CE.