Working Relationships in Roman Asia Minor

Two doctors who died in the second century CE orient this chapter on professional and social solidarity in Roman Asia Minor. The physician Apollonios died at age 63 in Saittai, a small city in northeastern Lydia, a place long associated with the textile trade. A white marble stele, adorned with a sculpted wreath, was raised upon his death—around 109–110 CE—by his wife Ammion and their son Diomedes. By all accounts, it is no different than the other Greek epitaphs published in the same cohort of inscriptions, the grave markers of “common people” (kleine Leute), per the editors’ description; the stele only noted that biographical information. Meanwhile, around the same time, a chattier posthumous curriculum vitae from rugged Aperlai, some 280 miles south, in Lycia, commemorated a different sort of doctor. There, at some point in the second century, the Aperlite high priestess Erpidase Sarpedonis raised a posthumous monument in honor of her great-grandfather. Lysandros, she reported, had been among the city’s “pre-eminent men, of powerful ancestors.” He dispatched all his duties for his fatherland and served among the decemprimi, the municipal authorities of Aperlai. And, on top of that, he had been a splendid doctor.