Fabulla

Fabulla or Fabylla was a medical writer of the Roman Empire, whose work survives only as two quotations in Galen.

Identity

Galen calls Fabulla a Libyan, but her name identifies her as Roman. She uses a Roman weight system to measure her ingredients, and this suggests that her work may have been written originally in Latin, and translated into Greek by Galen or a lost intermediary source. She was probably a medica.

Works

Galen references two medicines from Fabulla, 'for those with disease of the spleen, dropsy, sciatica, gout', and shortly thereafter reproduces a Greek text of the recipes. Fabulla herself attributes the first of these medicines to an earlier medica, Antiochis of Tlos.