(University of the Free State, 2006) Cilliers, Louise
English: In this article the corpus of eight letters serving as a preface to the pharmaceutical
recipe collection which constitutes Marcellus’s De medicamentis is examined from a
literary point of view. The classification of the various letters in the epistolographic
genre is discussed; the identities of the writers and the addressees are investigated, and
in cases where the names are fictitious or incorrect, an attempt is made to determine the
reason. Finally, the question is posed: why do all these apparently unrelated letters form
part of this collection?