Who Was Pedanius Dioscorides?

Almost everything known about Pedanios Dioscorides comes from his own book, since no other ancient source bothers to describe the man himself. He was born sometime around 40 CE in Anazarbus, a city in Cilicia in what is now southern Turkey, likely trained in medicine at nearby Tarsus, and later describes his own life as that of a soldier — very probably a physician attached to the Roman army, a posting that took him, and his professional curiosity, across a wide stretch of the eastern Mediterranean.

That mobility shows in the book. Written in Greek sometime between 50 and 70 CE under the title Peri hylēs iatrikēs — On Medical Material, known to posterity by its Latin name, De Materia Medica — it catalogues roughly six hundred plants along with assorted minerals and animal-derived substances, describing each one’s appearance, where it grows, and, at length, what it treats. Dioscorides organized the whole thing not alphabetically, which would have been easier to compile, but by therapeutic affinity — aromatic and warming substances grouped near each other, an arrangement clearly built for a working physician reaching for the next-best option, not for a reader looking up a name.

The book’s afterlife is the more remarkable part. It stayed in continuous use, without ever needing to be rediscovered, for over a millennium and a half — copied and recopied in Greek, translated into Latin, then into Arabic where it shaped medieval Islamic pharmacology as thoroughly as it had shaped Byzantine medicine, and translated back into Latin again during the Renaissance. Its most celebrated surviving copy, made around 512 CE for the Byzantine noblewoman Juliana Anicia and now known as the Vienna Dioscurides, illustrates plant after plant in careful, life-sized color, some of the earliest botanical illustration to survive from antiquity at all.

For an incense and materia-medica-minded project like this one, Dioscorides is close to a patron figure: someone who catalogued myrrh, frankincense, labdanum, nard, and dozens of other aromatics this journal keeps returning to, not as curiosities but as working tools, in a book still being consulted, in one form or another, some two thousand years after he wrote it.