a cough mixture about the streets; and Cicero, in his Oratia pro Cluentio, suggests that the travelling pharmacopolists who attended the markets of country towns were not unwilling to sell poisons as well as medicines when they were wanted. One of these is specifically named, Lucius Clodius, and the orator suggests that he was bribed to supply medicines to a certain lady which were to have a fatal effect.
The designation Periodeutes meant originally, and always in strict legal terminology, physicians who visited their patients. The term was also used among the Christians to describe the ministers charged to visit the sick and poor in their dioceses.
The tramp doctor in time gets tired of his vagabond life, and, it may be, a little weary of hearing his own voice. If he has saved a little money, therefore, the attractions of a shop in the city, where he can exercise his healing on people who seek him, appeal strongly to him. So in Greece and in the Roman Empire the charlatans settled in little shops and were called iatroi epidiphrioi or sellularii medici, meaning sedentary doctors. But all these were pharmacopoloi.
Peculiarly interesting is the suggestion made by Epicurus and intended as a sneer, that Aristotle was one of these pharmacopoloi in his younger days. According to Epicurus the philosopher having first wasted his patrimony in riotous living and then served as a soldier, afterwards sold antidotes in the markets up to the time when he joined Plato's classes.
Seplasia was the ordinary name in Rome for a druggist's shop, and those who kept them were designated Seplasiarii or Pigmentarii. These names appear to have been used without much recognition of their original meanings. Strictly the Seplasiarii were ointment
