The Legacy of Greece: Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield
Philosophy
The Legacy of Greece: Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield
Greece -- Civilization
Translated into nearly every language from Anglo-Saxon and Bohemian to
Arabic 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,[39] thought worthy to form a wedding
gift for a lady who was the daughter of one Roman emperor and the
betrothed of a second.[40] 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[41] (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 contemporary with Cassiodorus himself.[42] 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.
[Illustration: Fig. 9
ΣΟΓΚΟΣ ΤΡΥΦΕΡΟΣ {SOGKOS TRYPHEROS} = _Crepis paludosa_, _Mœn._]
[Illustration: Fig. 10
ΓΕΡΑΝΙΟΝ {GERANION} = _Geranium pyrenaicum_, _L._
Fifth-century drawings from JULIANA ANICIA M.S., copied from originals
of first century B. C. (?)]
[39] 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.
[40] 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.
[41] 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.
[42] This manuscript is at the University Library at Leyden, where
it is numbered Voss Q 9.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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