PLINY: NATURAL HISTORY

BOOK XXIV

The sympathies and antipathies in Nature.

I. Not even the woods and the wilder face of Nature are without medicines, for there is no place where that holy Mother of all things did not distribute remedies for the healing of mankind, so that even the very desert was made a drug store I believe medicina here refers to the shop or booth (officina) where the physician prescribed and sold his medicines. See Pliny XXIX. § 12: Cassius Hemina records that Archagathus was the first physician to come to Rome and have a shop bought for him at the Acilian crossroads. This sense occurs in Plautus, and Pliny may have used it metaphorically., at every point encountering wonderful examples of that well-known antipathy and sympathy. The oak and the olive are parted by such inveterate hatred that, if the one be planted in the hole from which the other has been dug out, they die—the oak indeed also dying if planted near the walnut. Deadly too is the hatred between the cabbage and the vine; the very vegetable that keeps the vine at a distance itself withers away when planted opposite cyclamen or wild marjoram. Moreover, trees, it is said, that are now old and being felled are more difficult to cut down, and decay more quickly, if man's hand touches them before the axe. There is a belief that beasts of burden know at once when their load consists of fruit, and unless it is first shown to them, they begin to sweat immediately, however small their load may be.