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In another chapter on “chaplet flowers”— flowers used for garlands and wreaths— Pliny
explicitly states that such flowers are merely decorative, created by Nature to delight people
or perhaps to warn them of the transience of life:Cato bade us include among our garden plants chaplet flowers, especially because of
the indescribable delicacy of their blossoms, for nobody can find it easier to tell of
them than Nature does to give them colors, as here she is in her most sportive mood,
playful in her great joy at her varied fertility. To all other things in fact she gave birth
because of their usefulness, and to serve as food, and so has assigned them their ages
and years; but blossoms and their perfumes she brings forth only for a day— an obvi-
ous warning to men that the bloom that pleases the eye most is the soonest to fade.^28Pliny’s anthropocentric view of the “purpose” of garden flowers was assimilated into the
literary traditions in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and it proved to be very durable.
In the mid- nineteenth century, Darwin himself complained in Origin of Species about the
persistence of the idea that attractive flowers were “created for the sake of beauty, to delight
man or the Creator.” Thus Pliny’s interpretation of the “purpose” of ornamental flowers
prevailed throughout much of the Christian era until it was finally deposed by the new
paradigm of Darwinian natural selection.Nicolaus of Damascus and De Plantis
In addition to Pliny’s Natural History, the only other work on plants derived from Greek
philosophical writings that survived into the Middle Ages was De Plantis— a brief treatise
on plants that was originally attributed to Aristotle. Thought to be Aristotle’s lost trea-
tise on plants, this work was greatly revered as the definitive text on plants—a disaster for
botany since it was actually either a truncated, bowdlerized version of Aristotle’s writings or
a crude summary of fragments taken from Aristotle and earlier writers.
Not only was De Plantis greatly inferior to the authentic works of Aristotle and
Theophrastus, it had also become garbled and incomprehensible in many places in
the course of repeated copying and sequential translations (Greek → Syriac → Arabic →
(Hebrew, Latin, Greek) → English).^29 Thus, the authority of Aristotle came to be affixed
to a totally inadequate and muddled version of Greek botany, which retarded the progress
of botanical science for hundreds of years. The actual author of De Plantis is now known
to be Nicolaus of Damascus, who probably intended it as a brief summary of Aristotle’s
ideas about plants.^30 He appears to have had little or no familiarity with Theophrastus’s
botanical writings.
According to his biographer, B. Z. Wacholder, the little we know about Nicolaus
of Damascus is derived from “remnants of his autobiography, the account of Herod in
Josephus, and scattered references in secondary sources.”^31 Nicolaus states that he was
born into a prominent family in Damascus in 63 bce.^32 Nicolaus’s parents were pagans,
but whether they were Greeks or Syrians in origin is unknown. Trained in rhetoric by
his father, Nicolaus belonged to a new school of Peripatetic scholars whose intellectual
horizon encompassed both East and West. Anticipating the attitudes of medieval schol-
ars, these self- described “Aristotelians” believed that Aristotle had acquired a god- like,