On Medical Matters

He is the one whom Galen also calls a glossographos writer of glosses 12. I am uncertain if he is the same Dioscorides who is accused of rashness by Galen regarding a new edition of Hippocrates 13, since here he is cited without a surname. Nor would I dare to affirm or deny if he is the same author of the book on theriacs antidotes and alexipharmics counter-poisons. But more on him later.

III.

Concerning the age of Dioscorides.

Since Erotianus, a contemporary of Nero, is the first to cite our author, he cannot be a younger man of that era, or of the middle of the first century. Furthermore, he mentions in his preface Licanius (or Lecanius) Bassus, who we learn from Tacitus was consul in the year 63 14, and who died around the year 70 of our era according to Pliny 15.

There have been those who doubted this age of Dioscorides, since Pliny, who cites almost all his predecessors, makes no mention of Dioscorides. This will never cease to be surprising, given that we see two hundred passages of Pliny taken literally from Dioscorides. He seems to understand our author only once, when, after transcribing what Dioscorides had said about schistos a type of fissile stone, Pliny adds: "this is the opinion of those who have written most recently" 16. Therefore, it can hardly be doubted that Dioscorides wrote before Pliny, even if they were perhaps contemporaries in age.

The calculation of those whom Dioscorides himself cites as his elders does not disagree. Besides the more ancient figures—Cratevas, Erasistratus, and Heraclides of Tarentum—they are almost all those who lived at the beginning of our era, devoted to the sect of Asclepiades, such as Jolas the Bithynian, cited by both Galen 17 and the scholiast of Nicander 18, Bassus Tylaeus, Niceratus, Petronius, Niger, and Diodotus, who are also cited here and there by Pliny, and Philonides, whom others call the Dyrrhachian, but our author calls the Sicilian Ennaean.

12. Ibid., p. 486.
13. Commentarii in librum de natura humana Commentaries on the book On Human Nature, 1, p. 21; in book 6 of Epidemics, p. 795.
14. Annales 15, 33.
15. Book 26, c. 4.
16. Pliny 36, 37; Dioscorides 5, 144 (our edition).