On Medical Matters

II.

Concerning the fatherland of Dioscorides, and authors of the same name.

Our author is everywhere called Anazarbeus of Anazarbus. Anazarbus was a town in the Cilician plain 5, about fifty miles from the metropolis of Tarsus 6. It did not receive that name—as Suidas claims—only when Nerva was emperor, for it is much more ancient 7.

Difficulty now arises because Galen cites a Dioscorides of Tarsus, who handed down a remedy to Areus the Asclepiadean against the eruption of blood 8. Yet this formula is nowhere found in our Dioscorides, even though the powers of gypsum are praised by our author in his euporista remedies easily procured 9 against hemorrhages. Therefore, I am persuaded that Galen, who was accustomed to carefully distinguishing between homonyms, meant a different physician, and that the name of Areus the Asclepiadean was attributed to this remedy either by a lapse of memory on Galen’s part or by a later scribe.

Galen himself names several medical writers of the same name. First, he names the one called Phacas, whom he terms a follower of Herophilus 10. Suidas testifies that he lived during the age of Cleopatra and left behind twenty-four books on the medical art.

Galen mentions another, a younger man, who was an Alexandrian 11. He was slightly older than Galen (whom he calls "the one of our fathers' time") and compiled an exposition of Hippocratic words from many others, having transcribed not a few things from the Anazarbean himself: for he also kept a census of medicines, and not infrequently confused them. This is the one whom Galen also calls a glossographos writer of glosses/commentary 12. I am uncertain whether this is the same Dioscorides who is accused by Galen of rashness due to a new edition of Hippocrates 13, since he is cited there without a cognomen. Nor would I dare to affirm or deny whether he is the same author of the book on theriacs antidotes against poisons and alexipharmics counter-poisons. But more on him later.

5. Veterum Romanorum itinerarium Itinerary of the ancient Romans, p. 212.
6. Strabo book 14, p. 701.
7. Hardouin on Pliny 5, 22; Wesseling on the ancient Roman itinerary, loc. cit.
8. Galen, De compositione medicamentorum per genera On the composition of medicines by types, book 5, p. 857.
9. Book 1, no. 210.
10. Galen, Expositio vocum Hippocraticarum Exposition of Hippocratic words, p. 402.
11. Ibid., p. 484.