The new taxis of Dioscorides' De materia medica: between scientific accuracy and popular knowledge
Abstract
Dioscorides’ De materia medica aims at giving a new order to pharmacology, unlike the collector Crateuas, the physician Andreas, and other Dioscorides’ contemporaries. As it emerges in the preface, all these authors have dealt with things that everyone knew: they did not rely on their own experience and, in some cases, preferred an alphabetical order for the substances. According to Dioscorides, their organization would not have allowed to understand the δυνάμεις (‘properties’), on which are instead based the five books of De materia medica. As already noted by Riddle, Dioscorides tends to follow the same order when describing a plant: in particular, he deals with issues ranging from physical description to habitat, from medical to magical uses, from preparation to conservation. On the contrary, for the animals in the second book or the minerals in the fifth one we find several internal classifications. Nevertheless, the accuracy of this structure contrasts with two methodological problems: the fact that Dioscorides does not distinguish internal sections and tends not to cite his sources, with some exceptions. This paper intends to examine the concept of τάξις in Dioscorides’ De materia medica, showing the contrast between an ordered structure on the one hand and a scientific and popular knowledge on the other.
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