Three Books on Gold

and not to the bodily temperature, which results from coarse and drossy matter. To this is added that there are many things which are said to benefit the human temperament of bodies more, and are even praised more by the more ancient physicians for refreshing life and sufficiently providing for one’s strength, of which we are made masters much more easily and at less expense. For no metals nourish, as is accepted among the older Peripatetics; for they cannot be digested so that they are turned into flesh and blood. Which has also been proven by the experiments of those who, struck by the whirlwinds of wars and the devastation of regions, hiding themselves in subterranean caves, swallowed gold coins compacted like a pill into their stomach, [and] soon found them by their own weight and their own color. And if anything by chance was lost and consumed by innate heat, it was truly little; otherwise, it would have been an excellent remedy for life for the Jews, while Jerusalem was being besieged and they were fleeing to Titus Caesar, if gold were digested so that it would nourish those swallowing it; for they would not have been cut open by the most avaricious Assyrians and Arabs, so that they might find in their viscera the gold which they had previously sent into their stomach; of whom such a vast number, that in one night the intestines of two thousand men were cut open, of which fact the author is Josephus, the confirmer Hegesippus. Therefore, in those wretches, gold coins were being stored in the ventricle, as in a chest, not