[2473] R. Heim, Incantamenta magica graeca latina, in Jahrb. f. class. Philologie, Suppl. Bd. 19, Leipzig, 1893, pp. 463-576, drew from the Geoponica 13 out of his total of 245 instances of incantations from Greek and Latin literature.
[2474] VII, 14.
[2475] XIII, 15.
[2476] The first two volumes, published at Berlin in 1907, 1906, covered the first four of the five genuine books. A previous attempt was K. Sprengel’s edition in vols. 25-26 of C. J. Kühn’s Medici Graeci, Leipzig, 1829. On the textual history and problems see further Wellman’s articles: “Dioskurides” in Pauly-Wissowa, and in Hermes, XXXIII, (1898) 360ff.
[2477] Περὶ βοτανῶν, περὶ ζῴων παντοίων, περὶ παντοίων ἐλαίων, περὶ ὕλης δένδρων, περὶ οἴνων καὶ λίθων, is another order suggested.
[2478] The MS is said by Singer (1921) 60, to have now been removed from Vienna to St. Mark’s Library at Venice; it was procured from Constantinople in 1555 for the future Emperor Maximilian II (1564-1576). A photographic copy was published in 1906 in the Leiden Collection, Codices Graeci et Latini, by A. W. Sijthoff, with an introduction by A. von Premerstein, C. Wessely, and J. Mantuani (C. Wessely, Codex Anciae Iulianae, etc., 1906). See also A. v. Premerstein in the Austrian Jahrbuch (1903) XXIV, 105ff.
I have examined the facsimile of this MS and found the large but faded and partially obliterated illuminations which precede the text rather disappointing after having read the description of them in Dalton’s Byzantine Art, (1911) 460-61, which, however, I presume is accurate and so reproduce here. These large illuminations include a portrait of Juliana Anicia, an ornamental peacock with tail spread, groups of doctors engaged in medical discussions, and Dioscorides himself seated writing, and again seated on a folding stool receiving the herb mandragora (which, of course, was a medieval favorite) from a female figure personifying Discovery (Εὕρησις), “while in the foreground a dog dies in agony,” presumably from the fatal effects of the herb. There are rough reproductions of this last picture in Woltmann and Woermann, History of Painting, I, 192-3, and Singer (1921) 62. When the text proper begins the illuminations are confined to medicinal plants.
Other early Greek manuscripts are the Codex Neapolitanus, formerly at Vienna, now at St. Mark’s, Venice, an eighth century palimpsest from Bobbio, and a Paris codex, (BN Greek 2179) of the ninth century. An Arabic translation from the Greek seems to have been made about 850; a century later the Byzantine emperor sent a Greek manuscript of Dioscorides to the caliph in Spain.
For the full text of the De materia medica we are dependent on MSS of the 11th, 12th, 13th and later centuries.
[2479] Περὶ δηλητηρίων φαρμάκων and περὶ ἰοβόλων, edited by Sprengel in Kühn (1830), XXVI, as was the Περὶ εὐπορίστων ἁπλῶν τε καὶ συνθέτων φαρμάκων. The Περὶ φαρμάκων ἐμπειρίας, (“Experimental Pharmacy”), of which a Latin version, Alphabetum empiricum, sive Dioscoridis et Stephani Atheniensis ... de remediis expertis, was edited by C. Wolf, Zürich, 1581, is an alphabetical arrangement by diseases ascribed to Dioscorides and Stephen of Athens (and other writers).