Translated into nearly every language from Anglo-Saxon and Provençal to Persian and Hebrew, appearing both abstracted and in full in innumerable beautifully illuminated manuscripts, some of which are still among the fairest treasures of the great national libraries, Dioscorides, the drug-monger, appealed to scholasticized minds for centuries. The frequency with which fragments of him are encountered in papyri shows how popular his work was in Egypt in the third and fourth centuries. One of the earliest datable Greek codices in existence is a glorious volume of Dioscorides written in capitals,[85] thought worthy to form a wedding gift for a lady who was the daughter of one Roman emperor and the betrothed of a second.[86] The illustrations of this fifth century manuscript are a very valuable monument for the history of art and the chief adornment of what was once the Royal Library at Vienna[87] (figs. 9-10). Illustrated Latin translations of Dioscorides were in use in the time of Cassiodorus (490-585). A work based on it, similarly illustrated, but bearing the name of Apuleius, is among the most frequent of mediaeval botanical documents and the earliest surviving specimen is almost contemporary with Cassiodorus himself.[88] After the revival of learning Dioscorides continued to attract an immense amount of philological and botanical ability, and scores of editions of his works, many of them nobly illustrated, poured out of the presses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. [85] The manuscript in question is Med. Graec. 1 at what was the Royal Library at Vienna. It is known as the _Constantinopolitanus_. After the war it was taken to St. Mark’s at Venice, but either has been or is about to be restored to Vienna. A facsimile of this grand manuscript was published by Sijthoff, Leyden, 1906. [86] The lady in question was Juliana Anicia, daughter of Anicius Olybrius, Emperor of the West in 472, and his wife Placidia, daughter of Valentinian III. Juliana was betrothed in 479 by the Eastern Emperor Zeno to Theodoric the Ostrogoth, but was married, probably in 487 when the manuscript was presented to her, to Areobindus, a high military officer under the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius. [87] 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. [88] This manuscript is at the University Library at Leyden, where it is numbered Voss Q 9. [Illustration: Fifth century drawings from JULIANA ANICIA MS., copied from originals of first century B. C.(?) Fig. 9. ΣΟΝΚΟΣ ΤΡΥΦΕΡΟΣ = _Crepis paludosa_, _Mœn._] [Illustration: Fig. 10. ΓΕΡΑΝΙΟΝ = _Erodium malachoides_, _L._]