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By means whereof he learned in a little time all the passages competent for this that were to be found in Pliny, Athenaeus, Dioscorides, Julius Pollux, Galen, Porphyry, Oppian, Polybius, Heliodore, Aristotle, Aelian, and others.
One is the sign of Athenades, son of Dioscorides, professor of Latin grammar, probably set up two thousand years ago over his door; another is a notice of a young lad, Cleudemos, son of Dionysius, having gained a prize.
Is it not amazing that, notwithstanding the enterprise of modern science, the ancients were better acquainted with the properties, and even the dimensions of the Lake Asphaltites, than the most learned nations of Europe in our own times? It is described by Aristotle, Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Pliny, Tacitus, Solinus, Josephus, Galen, and Dioscorides.
This edition of 1633 is the final development of what had been a slow growth. The sixteenth century witnessed a great revival, almost a creation of the science of botany. People began to translate the great Materia Medica of the Greek physician, Dioscorides of Anazarba, and to comment upon it.
"For all that," answered Don Quixote, "I would rather have just now a quarter of bread, or a loaf and a couple of pilchards' heads, than all the herbs described by Dioscorides, even with Doctor Laguna's notes. "Your worship would make a better preacher than knight-errant," said Sancho.
The importance of this manuscript as well as the position of Dioscorides as medical botanist is discussed by Charles Singer in an article 'Greek Biology and the Rise of Modern Biology', Studies in the History and Method of Science, vol. ii, Oxford, 1921. This manuscript is at the University Library at Leyden, where it is numbered Voss Q 9.
Dioscorides mentions mandragorus, or antimelon, or dircaea, or Circaea, and says the Egyptians call it apemoum, and Pythagoras 'anthropomorphon. In digging the root, Pliny says, 'there are some ceremonies observed, first they that goe about this worke, look especially to this that the wind be not in their face, but blow upon their backs.
Erasistratus of Cos had the credit of having once cured Antiochus, afterwards King of Syria. He was the grandson of Aristotle, and may be called the father of the science of anatomy: his writings are often quoted by Dioscorides. Antiochus in his youth had fallen deeply in love with his young stepmother, and was pining away in silence and despair.
Among the rest was Democritus, who made the world a chance, and Diogenes, and Heraclitus, &c. and Dioscorides, the good gatherer of simples. Orpheus also he saw, and Cicero, and the moral Seneca, and Euclid, and Hippocrates, and Avicen, and Averroes, who wrote the great commentary, and others too numerous to mention.
There is no handsomer book to be found, none more stately or imposing, than this magnificent folio of sixteen hundred pages, with its close, elaborate letterpress, its innumerable plates, and John Payne's fine frontispiece in compartments, with Theophrastus and Dioscorides facing one another, and the author below them, holding in his right hand the new-found treasure of the potato plant.
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