The Winged Seed

HISTORY De MATERIA MEDICA
Evolution of The Codex Vindobonensis

Undoubtedly the most influential author in the field of herbals in classical times was Pliny's contemporary, Pedianos Dioskorides, known to us today simply as Dioscorides.

Plant historians have determined that he was born in Asia Minor; he was a medical man, most likely an army doctor. His magnum opus, Codex Vindobonensis, is known to us today as De Materia Medica. This tome of great import remains by far the most splendid and important illustrated manuscript herbal of classical times. Written in Greek, it measured 14 1/4-14 1/2 x 11 3/4 inches, consisting of 491 folios. That the influence of Dioscorides, who wrote his De Materia Medica in the reigns of Nero and Vespasian would persist until at least the beginning of the nineteenth century seems almost incredible.

This codex is invaluable for the interpretation of plant names used by Dioscorides and was infinitely more impressive than anything that was to be produced for the next thousand years. Dioscoridies was a meticulous genius, as well as an arduous researcher and healer. It appears to have been written and illustrated with nearly four hundred full page coloured paintings of plants in Constantinople in about the year 512 AD. As splendid as the figures in The Codex Vindobonensis might be, they bear little resemblance to contemporary Byzantine art. This proves that they were not drawn from nature, but were probably derived from originals of a much earlier date, perhaps as early as the second century AD. The figures vary in quality and are clearly not all the work of a single artist. There is speculation that because there is an association in the writings with Krateuas, that some of the figures are derived from Krateuas' Rhizotomikon now only known to us in fragments incorporated in the works of others.

The recipient of Dioscorides' codex was Juliana Anicia, daughter of Flavius Anicius Olybrius, Emporer of the West in 472 and the codex is sometimes referred to as The Juliana Anicia Codex. She, the Princess Juliana Anicia, earned a great reputation for piety by erecting and decorating a church in honour of the martyr Polyeuktes.

Nearly nine centuries pass before we have further knowledge of the whereabouts of the codex. We learn that in 1406 it was rebound by John Chortasmenos for Nathanael, a monk and physician in the Prodromos Monastery in Constantinople where it was seventeen years later seen by a Sicilian traveller named Aurispa. After the Muslim conquest of the city in 1453 the Codex fell into the hands of the Turks and Turkish and Arabic names were then added to the Greek. A century later it was found to be in the possession of a Jew named Hamon who was the physician to Suleiman the Magnificent, and it was then, presumably, that the Hebrew names were added.

Over the years, Dioscorides' great work was translated into a variety of languages, ranging from Anglo-Saxon and Provencal to Persian and Hebrew. In the middle of the seventeenth century, John Goodyer translated the entire works into English. In a useful appendix to Goodyer's translation, Gunther listed all of the illustrations, rating them from 'good', 'pretty good', on down to 'no resemblance' and finally 'fictitious'. Gunther was not the only one frustrated by the sad decline of artistic quality from the copying and re-copying, a process that persisted with increasingly disastrous results throughout the Dark and into the Middle Ages.

Dioscorides was not enamored with the system of classification adopted by his predecessors. However, his own was not appreciably better. Sometimes plants would be grouped according to growth habit with the result (observed by Charles Singer) that various members of certain groups now recognized as families - for example, the Labiatae, Papilonaceae, Umbelliferae, and Compositae - tend to fall together. This resulted in Dioscorides placing chamomile (a composite) among the umbellifers. Of the some five hundred plants in his codex, about 130 had already been discussed in the so-called Hippocratic Collection, a corpus of very early Greek fragments of botanical writings, thus more than a quarter of the prescriptions mentioned had by Dioscorides' time been in use for severeal centuries. In 1927, Singer lists forty-four drugs mentioned by Dioscorides that have survived in the modern official pharmacopoeias of civilised Europe, having been passed to us through the Middle Ages either continuously or in early Renaissance translations. Of these, he comments, 'only about a quarter have any definite pharmacological action. The remainder are diluents, flavouring agents, emollients and the like.'