Pliny Natural History, Vol. VI (Loeb Latin-English)

B.C., a famous herbalist (original: "ῥιζοτόμος", or root-cutter) mentioned by both Pliny and Dioscorides. There is an interesting (and genuine) fragment of Crateuas that can fortunately be compared with Dioscorides II. 176 and Pliny XXI. § 164.See the German translation of Dioscorides by J. Berendes (Stuttgart, 1902), p. 8. See also Wellmann, Dioscorides Vol. III. pp. 144–148, especially fr. 4 of Crateuas on p. 144. Several phrases in Crateuas are exactly, or almost exactly, the same as the corresponding phrases in Dioscorides, so that it is certain that the latter made full use of the material collected by the former. It may be that Pliny, too, read Crateuas, but he is not as close to Crateuas as is Dioscorides in the passage under consideration, so that some hold that Pliny got most of his information from one Sextius Niger, who, as Pliny tells us, wrote in Greek. A yet earlier physician and herbalist, Diocles of Carystos, may be the original source of all the later writers on materia medica. Speculation on such a point is useless, but our knowledge is sufficient to show that Pliny had access to writings so similar to the work of Dioscorides that the resemblances between the two authors can be explained without supposing that Pliny was a deceitful plagiarist.

NOTE ON THE MAGI.

The early history of the Magi is obscure, although modern researchSee e.g. the article in Pauly s.v. magoi, and that in Hastings' Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. See also the admirable summary in How and Wells' Commentary on Herodotus Vol. I. Appendix viii, pp. 407–410, and a most interesting note by A. D. Nock in The Beginnings of Christianity, Part I, by Foakes Jackson and Kirsopp Lake, pp. 164–188. The writer considers Apion to be Pliny's authority. has done much to put the main