On Medical Matters

and of the Thusci or Etruscans, whom Aeschylus had already called a pharmakopoion ethnos medicine-making nation, into whose discipline the Romans were accustomed to hand over the sons of their princes to learn augury, haruspicy, magical arts, and medicine itself. Livy had sources stating that Roman boys were formerly accustomed to be educated in Etruscan letters, just as they were later in Greek. There remains the Dardanian race, mentioned in a few places, which, inhabiting Upper Moesia, often infested Macedonia. In a few places, the vernacular names of plants among that nation occur. Dioscorides therefore knowingly collected the names of plants common among those nations. However, it is greatly to be lamented that those names have come down to us very corrupted, both because they were falsely pronounced by the author himself and because, being misunderstood by the scribes, they were written erroneously.

VIII.

Concerning the manuscripts.

The most celebrated are the Vindobonenses Vienna Manuscripts, from which Weigelius, a physician of Dresden, an excellent man and most learned in Greek letters, skillfully transcribed various readings, and often even entire chapters, while he was living in Vienna in 1798 and 1799. He provided me with the copy of the supplies he himself had gathered, when I was attempting this edition, with that rare kindness which he possesses and his singular benevolence toward me...

36) Pliny 30, 2.
37) Theophrastus, History of Plants 9, 15.
38) Cicero, On Divination 1, 41.
39) Livy 9, 36.
40) Pliny 3, 29; Ptolemy 3, 9.
41) Pliny 4, 17.