From Herbals to Walled Gardens j 253253 253
Roman physician during the time of Augustus, on which Pliny and Dioscorides (discussed
later) based much of their information.^3
Krateuas’s second work on plants was a simplified version of Rhizotomikon intended for
the lay public. Instead of a written treatise, Krateuas took the innovative step of produc-
ing a series of painted illustrations of plants, with the name and medical properties listed
below. Although artists of the region had been representing plants in paintings, frescos, and
reliefs throughout antiquity, Krateuas’s herbal is the first known scientific use of botanical
illustrations. These illustrations are termed “portraits” because they were painted from live
models. The obvious value of plant portraits, as opposed to drawing from memory, lies in
their greater accuracy, making them more useful for physicians. Although Krateuas’s origi-
nal illustrated herbal has been lost, some of the early copies of some of his portraits, possibly
dating back to the second century ad, were preserved in an early Byzantine herbal.
Prior to the advent of printing, the only means of replicating books was by copying,
often by artists with little or no understanding of plants and with minimal artistic skill.
Inevitably, errors were introduced, and the more cycles of copying a manuscript underwent
the less accurate the copies became. Even Pliny the Elder, whose writings on medicinal
plants lacked illustrations, complained about the inaccuracy of the plant portraits in his
copies of the illustrated herbals of Krateuas.^4
The physician Pedanius Dioscorides was the last of the great Greek herbalists during the
Roman period. Dioscorides’s herbal, written in Greek around 65 ce and subsequently trans-
lated into Latin as De Materia Medica, displaced Krateuas’s Rhizotomikon and remained
the standard pharmacology of the West for more than 1,500 years. Born in the Roman prov-
ince of Cilicia in Anatolia, he is thought to have been a surgeon in the Roman army who
traveled widely and studied a broad sampling of Mediterranean flora.^5 His pharmacopoeia
consisted mainly of plants from Greece, Anatolia, and the Near East, but also included
species from Italy, Sardinia, Spain, Gaul, Britain, and even India. Although he was careful
to cite the work of other herbalists, he expressed pride in “knowing most herbs with my
own eyes.”
As a physician writing for other physicians, Dioscorides restricted himself to descriptive
botany, supplying only that information helpful for field identification of medicinal plants.
Theoretical questions, such as the mechanism of plant reproduction, were of no interest to
him. On the other hand, he frequently distinguished between “male” and “female” plants
in his herbal. Dioscorides’s gender assignments were based entirely on anthropomorphic,
culturally based criteria (hardness, toughness, height, etc.), which Theophrastus had previ-
ously rejected as fanciful.^6 Yet, such was Dioscorides’s reputation that his spurious gender
assignments continued to be employed by herbalists through the sixteenth century.The Juliana Anicia Codex
Sometime during the second century ad, the plant portraits of Krateuas and other illus-
trated herbals were combined with the text of Dioscorides to produce the ancestor of
all subsequent “Dioscoridean” herbals spanning many centuries and many regions. The
magnificently illustrated Juliana Anicia Codex, completed around 512 ce, is the earliest
extant herbal of Dioscorides. It resides at the Austrian National Library in Vienna and is