Pliny the Elder, Natural History 12-37

Pliny the Elder, The Natural History (Books 12-37), translated by Henry T. Riley (1816-1878) and John Bostock (1773-1846), first published 1855, text from the Perseus Project, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 3.0 U.S. License. This text has 3664 tagged references to 727 ancient places.
CTS URN: urn:cts:latinLit:phi0978.phi001; Wikidata ID: Q442; Trismegistos: authorwork/286     [Open Latin text in new tab]

§ 12.1.1  SUCH are the generic and specific characteristics of all the animals about which it has been possible to obtain information. It remains to describe the things produced by the earth or dug up from it — these also not being devoid of vital spirit, since nothing lives without it — and not to pass over in silence any of the works of nature.

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§ 12.1.2  The riches of earth's bounty were for a long time hidden, and the trees and forests were supposed to be the supreme gift bestowed by her on man. These first provided him with food, their foliage carpeted his cave and their bark served him for raiment; there are still races which practise this mode of life. This inspires us with ever greater and greater wonder that starting from these beginnings man has come to quarry the mountains for marbles, to go as far as China for raiment, and to explore the depths of the Red Sea for the pearl and the bowels of the earth for the emerald. For this purpose has been devised the fashion of making wounds in the ears, because forsooth it was not enough for jewels to be worn on the hands and neck and hair without making them even pierce through the body. Consequently it will be well to follow the biological order and to speak of trees before earth's other products, and to bring forward origins for our customs.

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§ 12.2.1  Once upon a time trees were the temples of the deities, and in conformity with primitive ritual simple country places even now dedicate a tree of exceptional height to a god; nor do we pay greater worship to images shining with gold and ivory than to the forests and to the very silences that they contain. The different kinds of trees are kept perpetually dedicated to their own divinities, for instance, the winter-oak to Jove, the bay to Apollo, the olive to Minerva, the myrtle to Venus, the poplar to Hercules; nay, more, we also believe that the Silvani and Fauns and various kinds of goddesses are as it were assigned to the forests from heaven and as their own special divinities. Subsequently it was the trees with juices more succulent than corn that gave mellowness to man; for from frees are obtained olive oil to refresh the limbs and draughts of wine to restore the strength, and in fine all the savours that come by the spontaneous generosity of the year, and the fruits that are even now served as a second course, in spite of the fact that battle must be waged with the wild beasts to obtain them and that fishes fattened on the corpses of shipwrecked mariners are in demand. Moreover, there are a thousand other uses for those trees which are indispensable for carrying on life. We use a tree to furrow the seas and to bring the lands nearer together, we use a tree for building houses; even the images of the deities were made from trees, before men had yet thought of paying a price for the corpses of huge animals, or arranged that inasmuch as the privilege of luxury had originated from the gods, we should behold the countenances of the deities and the legs of our tables made of the same ivory. It is stated that the Gauls, imprisoned as they were by the Alps as by a then insuperable bulwark, first found a motive for overflowing into Italy from the circumstance that a Gallic citizen from Switzerland named Helico, who had sojourned at Rome on account of his skill as an artificer, had brought with him when he came back some dried figs and grapes and some samples of oil and wine; and consequently we may pardon them for having sought to obtain these things even by means of war.

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§ 12.3.1  But who would not be justifiably surprised to hear that a tree has been procured from another clime merely for the sake of shade? This tree is the plane, which was first imported into the Ionian Sea as far as the island of San Domenico to plant over the tomb of Diomede, and which crossed from there to Sicily and was one of the first trees bestowed on Italy, and which has now travelled as far as Belgium and actually occupies soil that pays tribute to Rome, so that the tribes have to pay rent even for shade. The elder Dionysius, the tyrant of Sicily, imported plane-trees to the city of Rcggio as a marvel to adorn his palace, on the site where afterwards a gymnasium was built; and it is found in the authorities that these trees were not able to grow to full size, and that in all Italy there were no others except the 'Spania.'

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§ 12.4.1  This took place at about the period of the capture of Rome; and so much honour has since accrued to plane-trees that their growth is encouraged by having wine poured on them, as it has been found that this is of the greatest benefit to the roots, and we have taught even trees to be wine-bibbers!

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§ 12.5.1  Famous plane-frees are: (1) one that grew in the walks of the Academy at Athens, the roots of which were 50 feet long and spread wider than the branches; (2) at the present day there is a celebrated plane in Lycia, allied with the amenity of a cool spring; it stands by the roadside like a dwelling-house with a hollow cavity inside it 81 feet across, forming with its summit a shady grove, and shielding itself with vast branches as big as trees and covering the fields with its long shadows, and so as to complete its resemblance to a grotto, embracing inside it mossy pumice-stones in a circular rim of rock — a tree so worthy to be deemed a marvel that Licinius Mucianus, who was three times consul and recently lieutenant-governor of the province, thought it worth handing down to posterity also that he had held a banquet with eighteen members of his retinue inside the tree, which itself provided couches of leafage on a bounteous scale, and that he had then gone to bed in the same tree, shielded from every breath of wind, and receiving more delight from the agreeable sound of the rain dropping through the foliage than gleaming marble, painted decorations or gilded panelling could have afforded. (3) Another instance is connected with the Emperor Caligula, who on an estate at Velletri was impressed by the flooring of a single plane-tree, and benches laid loosely on beams consisting of its branches, and held a banquet in the tree — himself constituting a considerable portion of the shadow than a dining-room large enough to hold fifteen guests and the servants: this dining-room the emperor called his 'nest.' (4) There is a single plane-free at the side of a spring at Gortyn in the island of Crete which is celebrated in records written both in Greek and Latin, as never shedding its leaves; and a typical Greek story about it has come down from early times, to the effect that underneath it Jupiter lay with Europa — just as if really there were not another tree of the same species in the island of Cyprus! Slips from this tree, however, planted first in Crete itself — so eager is human nature for a novelty — reproduced the defect: for defect it was, because the plane has no greater recommendation than its property of warding off the sun in summer and admitting it in winter. During the principate of Claudius an extremely wealthy Thessalian eunuch, who was a freedman of Marcellus Aeserninus but had for the sake of obtaining power got himself enrolled among the freedmen of the emperor, imported this variety of plane-tree from Crete into Italy and introduced it at his country estate near Rome — so that he deserves to be called another Dionysius! And these monstrosities from abroad still last on in Italy also, in addition, that is, to those which Italy has devised for herself.

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§ 12.6.1  For there is also the variety called the ground-plane, stunted in height — since we have discovered the art of producing abortions even in trees, and consequently even in the tree class we shall have to speak of the unhappy subject of dwarfs. The ground-plane is produced by a method of planting and of lopping. Clipped arbours were invented within the last 80 years by a member of the Equestrian order named Gaius Matius, a friend of his late Majesty Augustus.

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§ 12.7.1  The cherry and the peach and all the trees with Greek or foreign names are also exotic; but those among them which have been naturalized here will be specified among the fruit-trees. For the present we will go through the real exotics, beginning with the one most valuable for health.

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§ 12.7.2  The citron or Assyrian apple, called by others the Median apple, is an antidote against poisons. It has the leaves of the strawberry-tree, but with prickles running among them. For the rest, the actual fruit is not eaten, but it has an exceptionally strong scent, which belongs also to the leaves, and which penetrates garments stored with them and keeps off injurious insects. The tree itself bears fruit at all seasons, some of the apples falling while others are ripening and others just forming. Because of its great medicinal value various nations have tried to acclimatize it in their own countries, importing it in earthenware pots provided with breathing holes for the roots (and similarly, as it will be convenient to record here so that each of my points may be mentioned only once, all plants that are to travel a specially long distance are planted as tightly as possible for transport); but it has refused to grow except in Media and Persia. It is this fruit the pips of which, as we have mentioned, the Parthian grandees have cooked with their viands for the sake of sweetening their breath. And among the Medes no other tree is highly commended.

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§ 12.8.1  We have already described the wool-bearing trees of the Chinese in making mention of that race, and we have spoken of the large size of the trees in India. One of those peculiar to India, the ebony, is spoken of in glowing terms by Virgil, who states that it does not grow in any other country. Herodotus, however, prefers it to be ascribed to Ethiopia, stating that the Ethiopians used to pay as tribute to the Kings of Persia every three years a hundred logs of ebony, together with gold and ivory. Nor also should we omit the fact, since that author indicates it, that the Ethiopians used to pay twenty large elephant tusks on the same account. So high was the esteem in which ivory was held in the 310th year of our city, the date at which that author composed his history at Thurii in Italy; which makes all the more surprising the statement which we accept on his authority, that nobody of Asia or Greece had hitherto been seen who had ever seen the river Po. The exploration of the geography of Ethiopia, which as we have said had lately been reported to the Emperor Nero, showed that over a space of 1,996 miles from Syene on the frontier of the empire to Meroe trees are rare, and there are none except of the palm species. That is possibly the reason why ebony was the third most important item in the tribute paid.

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§ 12.9.1  Ebony was exhibited at Rome by Pompey the Great on the occasion of his triumph over Mithridates. According to Fabius ebony does not give out a flame, yet burns with an agreeable scent. It is of two kinds: the better one, which grows as a tree, is rare — it is of a smooth substance and free from knots, and of a shiny black colour that is pleasing to the eye even in the natural state without the aid of art; whereas the other grows as a shrub like the cytisus, and is spread over the whole of India.

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§ 12.10.1  In India there is also a thorn the wood of which resembles ebony, but can be detected even by the flame of a lantern, as the light at once shines through people. The tree is called the pala, and the fruit ariena. It is most frequent in the territory of the Sydraci, which was the farthest point reached by the expeditions of Alexander. There is also another tree resembling this one, the fruit of which is sweeter, but causes derangement of the bowels. Alexander issued an order in advance forbidding any member of his expedition to touch it.

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§ 12.13.1  The Macedonians have given accounts of kinds of trees that for the most part have no names. There is also one that resembles the terebinth in every other respect but the fruit of which is like an almond, though smaller, and is remarkably sweet, at all events when grown in Bactria. This tree has been considered by some persons to be a special kind of terebinth rather than another plant resembling it. The tree from which they make linen for clothing resembles a mulberry by its leaves, but the calyx of the fruit is like that of a dog-rose. It is grown in the plains, and no other plantations add more to the beauty of the landscape.

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§ 12.14.1  The olive-tree of India is barren, except for the fruit of the wild olive. But trees resembling our junipers that bear pepper occur everywhere, although some writers have reported that they only grow on the southern face of the Caucasus. The seeds differ from those of the juniper by being in small pods, like those which we see in the case of the kidney-bean; these pods when plucked before they open and dried in the sun produce what is called long pepper, but if left to open gradually, when ripe they disclose white pepper, which if afterwards dried in the sun changes colour and wrinkles up. Even these products, however, have their own special infirmity, and inclement weather shrivels them up and turns the seeds into barren husks, called bregma, which is an Indian word meaning 'dead.' Of all kinds of pepper this is the most pungent and the lightest, and it is pale in colour. Black pepper is more agreeable, but white pepper is of a milder flavour than either the black or the 'long' pepper.

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§ 12.14.2  The root of the pepper-tree is not, as some people have thought, the same as the substance called ginger, or by others zinpiberi, although it has a similar flavour. Ginger is grown on farms in Arabia and Cave-dweller Country it is a small plant with a white root. The plant is liable to decay very quickly, in spite of its extreme pungency. Its price is six denarii a pound. It is easy to adulterate long pepper with Alexandrian mustard. Long pepper is sold at 15 denarii a pound, white pepper at 7, and black at 4. It is remarkable that the use of pepper has come so much into favour, as in the case of some commodities their sweet taste has been an attraction, and in Others their appearance, but pepper has nothing to recommend it in either fruit or berry. To think that its only pleasing quality is pungency and that we go all the way to India to get this! Who was the first person who was willing to try it on his viands, or in his greed for an appetite was not content merely to be hungry? Both pepper and ginger grow wild in their own countries, and nevertheless they are bought by weight like gold or silver. Italy also now possesses a pepper-tree that grows larger than a myrtle, which it somewhat resembles. Its grains have the same pungency as that believed to belong to myrtle-pepper, but when dried it lacks the ripeness that the other has, and consequently has not the same wrinkles and colouring either. Pepper is adulterated with juniper berries, which absorb its pungency in a remarkable manner, and in the matter of weight there are several ways of adulterating it.

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§ 12.15.1  There is also in India a grain resembling that of pepper, but larger and more brittle, called the carvophyllon, which is reported to grow on the Indian lotus-tree; it is imported here for the sake of its scent. There is also a thorn-bush bearing an extremely bitter fruit that has a resemblance to pepper; this shrub has small thickly clustering leaves like the cyprus; the branches are 4 1/2 feet long, the bark of a pale colour, and the root wide-spreading and woody, of the colour of box. This root boiled in water with the seed in a copper vessel produces the medicine called lycion. The thorn in question also grows on Mount Pelion, where it is used for mixing with a drug, as also are the root of the asphodel, ox-gall, wormwood, sumach and the lees of olive oil. The best lycion for medicinal purposes is the kind that makes a froth; this is imported from India in leather bottles made of camel skin or rhinoceros hide. The shrub itself is sometimes known in Greece under the name of Chiron's buckthorn.

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§ 12.16.1  Another substance imported from India is macir, the red bark of the large root of a tree of the same name, which I have been unable to identify. This bark boiled with honey is considered in medicine to be a valuable specific for dysentery.

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§ 12.17.1  Arabia also produces cane-sugar, but that grown in India is more esteemed. It is a kind of honey that collects in reeds, white like gum, and brittle to the teeth; the largest pieces are the size of a filbert. It is only employed as a medicine.

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§ 12.18.1  On the frontier of India is a race called the Arian, which has a thorn-bush that is valuable for the juice that it distils, resembling myrrh. It is difficult to get at this bush because it is hedged with thorns. In the same district there is also a poisonous bush-radish, with the leaf of a bay-tree, the smell of which attracts horses, and nearly robbed Alexander of his cavalry when he first entered the region. This also happened in Gedrosia as well, on account of the foliage of the bay-trees; and in the same district a thorn was reported the juice of which sprinkled on the eyes caused blindness in all animals. There was also a plant with a very strong scent, that was full of tiny snakes whose bite was instantly fatal. Onesicritus reports that in the valleys of Hyrcania there are trees resembling the fig, named occhus-trees, which for two hours every morning drip honey.

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§ 12.19.1  Adjoining India is the Bactrian country, in which is produced the highly esteemed bdellium. The tree is black in colour, and the size of the olive; its leaf resembles that of the oak and its fruit that of the wild fig. The subsistence of the fruit is like gum; one name for it is brochos, another malacha, and another maldaeos, while a black variety which is rolled up into cakes has the name of hadrobolos. It ought to be transparent like wax, to have a scent, to exude grease when crumbled, and to have a bitter taste, though without acidity. When used in religions ritual it is steeped in wine, which makes its scent more powerful. This tree is native to Arabia and India, and also to Media and Babylon. Some people give to the bdellium imported from Media the name of peraticum; this kind is more brittle and also harder and more bitter than the others, whereas the Indian sort is moister, and gummy. Almonds are used to adulterate Indian bdellium, but all the other sorts are adulterated also with the bark of scordastum, that being the name of a tree that resembles the gum. But these adulterations can be detected — and it must be enough to state this once for all, to apply to all other perfumes as well — by smell, colour, weight, taste and the action of fire. The Bactrian bdellium is shiny and dry, and has a number of white spots like fingernails; and also it has a specific weight of its own and ought not to be heavier or lighter than this. The price of pure bdellium is 3 denarii a pound.

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§ 12.20.1  Adjoining the races above mentioned is Persia. On the Red Sea, which at this point we have called the Persian Gulf, the tides of which are carried a long way inland, the trees are of a remarkable nature; for they are to be seen on the coast when the tide is out, embracing the barren sands with their naked roots like polypuses, eaten away by the salt and looking like trunks that have been washed ashore and left high and dry. Also these trees when the tide rises remain motionless although beaten by the waves; indeed at high water they are completely covered, and the evidence of the facts clearly proves that this species of tree is nourished by the brackish water. They are of marvellous size, and in appearance they resemble the strawberry-tree, but their fruit is like almonds outside and contains a spiral kernel.

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§ 12.21.1  In the same gulf is the island of Tyros, which is covered with forests in the part facing east, where it also is flooded by the sea at high tide. Each of the trees is the size of a fig-tree; they have a flower with an indescribably sweet scent and the fruit resembles a lupine, and is so prickly that no animal can touch it. On a more elevated plateau in the same island there are trees that bear wool, but in a different manner to those of the Chinese as the leaves of these trees have no growth on them, and might be thought to be vine-leaves were it not that they are smaller; but they bear gourds of the size of a quince, which when they ripen burst open and disclose balls of down from which an expensive linen for clothing is made.

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§ 12.22.1  Their name for this tree is the gossypinus; it also grows in greater abundance on the smaller island of Tyros, which is ten miles distant from the other. Juba says that this shrub has a woolly down poring round it, the fabric made from which is superior to the linen of India. He also says that there is an Arabian tree called the cynas from which cloth is made, which has foliage resembling a palm-leaf. Similarly the natives of India are provided with clothes by their own trees. But in the Tyros islands there is also another tree with a blossom like a white violet but four times as large; it has no scent, which may well surprise us in that region of the world.

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§ 12.23.1  There is also another tree which resembles this one but has more foliage and a rose-coloured blossom, which it closes at nightfall and begins to open at sunrise, unfolding it fully at noon: the natives speak of it as going to sleep. The same island also produces palm-trees and vines, as well as figs and all the other kinds of fruit-trees. None of the trees there sheds its leaves; and the island is watered by cold springs, and has a considerable rainfall.

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§ 12.24.1  The country neighbouring on these islands, Arabia, calls for some detailed account of its products — inasmuch as the parts of trees that are utilized include the root, the trunk, the bark, the juice, the gum, the wood, the shoots, the blossom, the leaves and the fruit.

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§ 12.25.1  In India a root and a leaf are held in the highest value. The root is that of the costus, which has a burning taste and an exquisite scent, though in other respects the plant is of no use. In the island of Patale just in the mouth of the river Indus, there are two kinds of costus plant, the black and the white; the latter is the better; it sells at denarii a pound.

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§ 12.26.1  About the leaf, which is that of the nard, it is proper to speak at greater length, as it holds a foremost place among perfumes. The nard is a shrub, the root of which is heavy and thick but short and black, and although oily, brittle; it has a musty smell like the gladius, and an acrid taste; the leaves are small, and grow in clusters. The shoots of the nard sprout into ears, and consequently both the spikes and the leaves of the nard are famous — a two-fold product. Another kind of nard growing by the Ganges is entirely ruled out by its name, 'putrid nard,' having a poisonous smell. Nard is also adulterated with a plant called bastard nard, which grows everywhere, and has a thicker and broader leaf and a sickly colour inclining to white; and also by being mixed with its own root to increase the weight, and with gum and silver-spume or antimony and gladiolus or husk of gladiolus. Unadulterated nard can be detected by its light weight and its ruddy colour and sweet scent and particularly by its taste, which dries up the mouth and leaves a pleasant flavour.

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§ 12.26.2  The price of nard is 100 denarii a pound. The nard-leaf market is graded according to the size of the leaf: the kind called hadrosphaerum in larger pills costs 40 denarii; the smaller-leaved sort called mesosphaerum sells at 60 denarii; and the most highly spoken of, microsphaerum, is made of the smallest leaves and its price is 75 denarii. All the kinds have an agreeable scent, stronger when they are fresh. The better nard has a blacker colour, if it is old when gathered. In our part of the world the next most highly praised kind is the Syrian, then that from Gaul, and in the third place is the Cretan, which some call agrion and others phun; it has a leaf like that of alexanders, a stalk 18 inches long, knotted and coloured whitish purple, and a crooked hairy root resembling birds' claws. Wild nard is called valerian; we shall speak about it among flowers. All of these kinds of nard, however, are herbs except the Indian. Among them the Gallic kind is plucked with the root as well, and washed in wine, dried in a shady place, and done up with paper in small parcels; it does not differ much from the Indian nard, but it is lighter in weight than the Syrian. Its price is 3 denarii. In the case of these varieties the only way to test them is that the leaves must not be brittle and parched instead of merely dry. With Gallic nard there always grows the herb called little goat because of its offensive smell, like the smell of a goat; it is very much employed to adulterate nard, from which it is distinguished by having no stem and smaller leaves, and by its root, which is not bitter and also has no smell.

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§ 12.27.1  Hazelwort also has the property of nard, indeed some people actually call it 'wild nard.' It has the leaves of the ivy, only rounder and softer, a purple flower, the root of Gallic nard, and seed like grape-stones, which has a warm taste with a flavour of wine. On shady mountains it flowers twice a year. The best variety grows in Pontus, the next best in Phrygia and the third in Illyricum. When it begins to shed its leaves it is dug up and dried in the sun, as it quickly becomes mouldy and loses its strength. A plant has also lately been found in Thrace the leaves of which do not differ at all from the Indian nard.

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§ 12.28.1  The clustered arnomum is much in use; it is obtained from the Indian wild-vine, or as other people have supposed from a twisted shrub a hand high, and it is plucked with its root and then gently pressed together into bundles, as it is liable to break at once. The kind most highly spoken of is the one with leaves like those of the pomegranate and devoid of wrinkles, coloured red. The second best kind is of a pale colour; the grass-coloured one is not so good, and the white kind is the worst; it also goes white with age. The price of clustered amomum is 60 denarii a pound, but as dust it fetches only 48 denarii. It grows in the part of Armenia called Otene, and also in Media and in Pontus. It is adulterated with the leaves of the pomegranate and with liquid gum to make the leaves stick together and form a cluster like a bunch of grapes.

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§ 12.28.2  There is also another substance called amomis, which is not so full of veins and is harder and has less scent, showing that it is either a different plant or amomum that has been gathered unripe.

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§ 12.29.1  Resembling these substances both in name and in the shrub that produces it is cardamomum, the seeds of which are oblong in shape. It is gathered in Arabia, in the same manner as amomum. It has four varieties: one very green and oily, with sharp corners and awkward to crumble — this is the kind most highly spoken of — the next sort a whitish red, the third shorter and of a colour nearer black, while an inferior kind is mottled and easily friable, and has little scent — in the true kind the scent ought to be near to that of costus. Cardamomum also grows in the country of the Medes. The price of the best sort is 3 denarii a pound.

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§ 12.30.1  Next in affinity to cardamomum would have come cinnamomum, were it not convenient first to catalogue the riches of Arabia and the reasons that have given it the names of Happy and Blessed. The chief products of Arabia then are frankincense and myrrh; the latter it shares also with the Cave-dweller Country, but no country beside Arabia produces frankincense, and not even the whole of Arabia. About in the middle of that country are the Astramitae, a district of the Sabaei, the capital of their realm being Sabota, situated on a lofty mountain; and eight days' journey from Sabota is a frankincense-producing district belonging to the Sabaei called Sariba — according to the Greeks the name means 'secret mystery.' The region faces north-east, and is surrounded by impenetrable rocks, and on the right hand side bordered by a seacoast with inaccessible cliffs. The soil is reported to be of a milky white colour with a tinge of red. The forests measure 20 schoeni in length and half that distance in breadth — by the calculation of Eratosthenes a schoenus measures 40 furlongs, that is five miles, but some authorities have made the schoenus 32 furlongs. There are hills rising to a great height, with natural forests on them running right down to the level ground. It is generally agreed that the soil is clay, and that there are few springs and these charged with alkali. Adjacent to the Astramitae is another district, the Minaei, through whose territory the transit for the export of the frankincense is along one narrow track. It was these people who originated the trade and who chiefly practise it, and from them the perfume takes the name of Minaean; none of the Arabs beside these have ever seen an incense-tree, and not even all of these, and it is said that there are not more than 3000 families who retain the right of trading in it as a hereditary property, and that consequently the members of these families are called sacred, and are not allowed to be polluted by ever meeting women or funeral processions when they are engaged in making incisions in the trees in order to obtain the frankincense, and that in this way the price of the commodity is increased owing to scruples of religion. Some persons report that the frankincense in the forests belongs to all these peoples in common, but others state that it is shared out among them in yearly turns.

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§ 12.31.1  Nor is there agreement in regard to the appearance of the incense-tree itself. We have carried on operations in Arabia, and the arms of Rome have penetrated into a large part of it; indeed, Gaius Caesar, son of Augustus, won great renown from the country; yet no Latin writer, so far as I know, has described the appearance of this tree. The descriptions given by the Greeks vary: some have stated that it has the leaf of a pear-tree, only smaller and of a grass-green colour; others that it resembles the mastich and has a reddish leaf; some that it is a kind of terebinth, and that this was the view of King Antigonus, to whom a plant was brought. King Juba in his volumes dedicated to Gaius Caesar, son of Augustus, whose imagination was fired by the fame of Arabia, states that the tree has a twisted stem and branches closely resembling those of the Pontic maple and that it gives a juice like that of the almond; he says that trees of this description are to be seen in Carmania and in Egypt, where they were introduced under the influence of the Ptolemies when they reigned there. It is well known that it has the bark of a bay-tree, and some have said that the leaf is also like that of the bay; at all events that was the case with the tree when it was grown at Sardis — for the Kings of Asia also interested themselves in planting it. The ambassadors who have come to Rome from Arabia in my time have made all these matters still more uncertain, which may well surprise us, seeing that even some sprigs of the incense-tree find their way to Rome, on the evidence of which we may believe that the parent tree also is smooth and tapering and that it puts out its shoots from a trunk that is free from knots.

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§ 12.32.1  It used to be the custom, when there were fewer opportunities of selling frankincense, to gather it only once a year, but at the present day trade introduces a second harvesting. The earlier and natural gathering takes place at about the rising of the Dog-star, when the summer heat is most intense. They make an incision where the bark appears to be fullest of juice and distended to its thinnest; and the bark is loosened with a blow, but not removed. From the incision a greasy foam spurts out, which coagulates and thickens, being received on a mat of palm-leaves where the nature of the ground requires this, but in other places on a space round the tree that has been rammed hard. The frankincense collected in the latter way is in a purer state, but the former method produces a heavier weight; while the residue adhering to the tree is scraped off with an iron tool, and consequently contains fragments of bark. The forest is divided up into definite portions, and owing to the mutual honesty of the owners is free from trespassing, and though nobody keeps guard over the trees after an incision has been made, nobody steals from his neighbour. At Alexandria, on the other hand, where the frankincense is worked up for sale, good heavens! no vigilance is sufficient to guard the factories. A seal is put upon the workmen's aprons, they have to wear a mask or a net with a close mesh on their heads, and before they are allowed to leave the premises they have to take off all their clothes: so much less honesty is displayed with regard to the produce with them than as to the forests with the growers. The frankincense from the summer crop is collected in autumn; this is the purest kind, bright white in colour. The second crop is harvested in the spring, cuts having been made in the bark during the winter in preparation for it; the juice that comes out on this occasion is reddish, and not to be compared with the former taking, the name for which is carflathum, the other being called dathiathum. Also the juice produced by a sapling is believed to be whiter, but that from an older tree has more scent. Some people also think that a better kind is produced on islands, but Juba says that no incense grows on islands at all.

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§ 12.32.2  Frankincense that hangs suspended in a globular drop we call male frankincense, although in other connexions the term 'male' is not usually employed where there is no female; but it is said to have been due to religious scruple that the name of the other sex was not employed in this case. Some people think that male frankincense is so called from its resemblance to the testes. The frankincense most esteemed, however, is the breast-shaped, formed when, while a previous drop is still hanging suspended, another one following unites with it. I find it recorded that one of these lumps used to be a whole handful, in the days when men's eagerness to pluck them was less greedy and they were allowed to form more slowly. The Greek name for frankincense formed in this manner is 'drop-incense' or 'solid incense,' and for the smaller kind 'chick-pea incense'; the fragments knocked off by striking the tree we call manna. Even at the present day, however, drops are found that weigh as much as a third of a mina, that is 28 denarii. Alexander the Great in his boyhood was heaping frankincense on the altars in lavish fashion, when his tutor Leonides told him that he might worship the gods in that manner when he had conquered the frankincense-producing races; but when Alexander had won Arabia he sent Leonides a ship with a cargo of frankincense, with a message charging him to worship the gods without any stint.

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§ 12.32.3  Frankincense after being collected is conveyed to Sabota on camels, one of the gates of the city being opened for its admission; the kings have made it a capital offence for camels so laden to turn aside from the high road. At Sahota a tithe estimated by measure and not by weight is taken by the priests for the god they call Sabis, and the incense is not allowed to be put on the market until this has been done; this tithe is drawn on to defray what is a public expenditure, for actually on a fixed number of days the god graciously entertains guests at a banquet. It can only be exported through the country of the Gebbanitae, and accordingly a tax is paid on it to the king of that people as well. Their capital is Thomna, which is 1487 1/2 miles distant from the town of Gaza in Judea on the Mediterranean coast; the journey is divided into 65 stages with halts for camels. Fixed portions of the frankincense are also given to the priests and the king's secretaries, but beside these the guards and their attendants and the gate-keepers and servants also have their pickings: indeed all along the route they keep on paying, at one place for water, at another for fodder, or the charges for lodging at the halts, and the various octrois; so that expenses mount up to 688 denarii per camel before the Mediterranean coast is reached; and then again payment is made to the customs officers of our empire. Consequently the price of the best frankincense is 6, of the second best 5, and the third best 3 denarii a pound. It is tested by its whiteness and stickiness, its fragility and its readiness to catch fire from a hot coal; and also it should not give to pressure of the teeth, and should rather crumble into grains. Among us it is adulterated with drops of white resin, which closely resemble it, but the fraud can be detected by the means specified.

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§ 12.33.1  Some authorities have stated that myrrh is the product of a tree growing in the same forests among the frankincense-trees, but the majority say that it grows separately; and in fact it occurs in many places in Arabia, as will appear when we deal with its varieties. A kind highly spoken of is also imported from islands, and the Sabaei even cross the sea to the Cave-dwellers' Country to procure it. Also a cultivated variety is produced which is much preferred to the wild kind. The plant enjoys being raked and having the soil round it loosened, as it is the better for having its roots cool.

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§ 12.34.1  The tree grows to a height of nearly eight feet; it has thorns on it, and the trunk is hard and twisted, and thicker than that of the frankincense-tree, and even thicker at the root than in the remaining part of it. Authorities state that the bark is smooth and resembles that of the strawberry-tree, and others that it is rough and prickly; and they say that the leaf is that of the olive, but more wrinkled and with sharp points — though Juba says it is like that of the alexanders. Some say that it resembles the juniper, only that it is rougher and bristling with thorns, and that the leaf is rounder but tastes like juniper. Also there have been writers who have falsely asserted that the frankincense-tree produces myrrh as well as frankincense.

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§ 12.35.1  The myrrh-producing tree also is tapped twice a year at the same seasons as the frankincense-tree, but in its case the incisions are made all the way up from the root to those of the branches that are strong enough to bear it. But before it is tapped the tree exudes of its own accord a juice called staete, which is the most highly valued of all myrrh. Next after this comes the cultivated kind, and also the better variety of the wild kind, the one tapped in summer. No tithes are given to a god from myrrh, as it also grows in other countries; however, the growers have to pay a quarter of the yield to the king of the Gebbanitae. For the rest it is bought up all over the district from the common people and packed into leather bags; and our perfumiers have no difficulty in distinguishing the different sorts by the evidence of the scent and consistency. There are a great many varieties, the first among the wild kinds being the Cave-dweller myrrh, next the Minaean, which includes the Astramitic, Gebbanitic and Ausaritic from the kingdom of the Gebbanitae; the third quality is the Dianite, the fourth a mixture from various sources, the fifth the Sambracene from a seaboard state in the kingdom of the Sabaei, and the sixth the one called Dusirite. There is also a white kind found in one place only, which is brought into the town of Mesalum for sale. The Cave-dweller kind is distinguished by its thickness and because it is rather dry and dusty and foreign in appearance, but has a stronger scent than the other sorts. The Sambracene variety is advertised as surpassing other kinds in its agreeable quality, but it has not a strong scent. Broadly speaking, however, the proof of goodness is given by its being in small pieces of irregular shape, forming in the solidifying of the juice as it turns white and dries up, and in its showing white marks like fingernails when it is broken, and having a slightly bitter taste. The second best kind is mottled inside, and the worst is the one that is black inside; and if it is black outside as well it is of a still inferior quality.

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§ 12.35.2  The prices vary with the supply of buyers; that of staete ranges from 3 to 50 denarii a pound, whereas the top price for cultivated myrrh is 11 denarii and for Erythrean 16 — this kind is passed off as Arabian — and for the kernel of Cave-dweller 16 1/2, but for the variety called scented myrrh 12. Myrrh is adulterated with lumps of lentisk and with gum, and also with cucumber juice to give it a bitter taste, as it is with litharge of silver to increase its weight. The rest of the impurities can be detected by taste, and gum by its sticking to the teeth. But the adulteration most difficult to detect is that practised in the case of Indian myrrh, which is collected in India from a certain thorn-bush; this is the only commodity imported from India that is of worse quality than that of other countries — indeed it is easily distinguished because it is so very inferior.

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§ 12.36.1  Consequently Indian myrrh passes over into mastich, which is also obtained from a thorn in India, and in Arabia as well; it is called laina. Of mastich also there are two kinds, since in Asia and Greece there is also found a plant sending out from its root leaves and a prickly head like an apple, full of seed and of juice which spurts out when an incision is made in the top, so that it can scarcely be distinguished from true mastich. Moreover, there is also a third kind in Pontus which is more like bitumen; but the kind most highly praised is the white mastich of Chios, which fetches a price of 10 denarii a pound, while the black kind costs 2 denarii. It is said that the Chian mastich exudes from the lentisk like a kind of gum. Like frankincense it is adulterated with resin.

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§ 12.37.1  Arabia also still boasts of her ladanum. A considerable number of writers have stated that this becomes aromatic entirely by accident and owing to an injury; goats, they say, an animal very destructive of foliage in general, but especially fond of scented shrubs, as if understanding the prices they fetch crop the stalks of the shoots, which swell with an extremely sweet fluid, and wipe off with the nasty shaggy hair of their beards the juice dropping from the stalks in a random mixture, and this forms lumps in the dust and is baked by the sun; and that is the reason why goats' hairs are found in ladanum; though they say that this does not take place anywhere else but in the territory of the Nabataei, a people from Arabia who border on Syria. The more recent of the authorities call this substance 'storbon,' and say that the trees in the Arabs' forests are broken by the goats when browsing, and so the juice sticks to their hairs; but that the true ladanum belongs to the island of Cyprus — to mention the various kinds of scents incidentally even though not in the order of their localities of provenance. It is reported that the same thing takes place there too, and that there is a substance called oesypum which sticks to the beards and shaggy knees of the goats, but that it is produced by their nibbling down the flower of the ivy while they are browsing in the morning, when Cyprus is wet with dew; and that subsequently when the sun has driven away the mist the dust clings to their damp fleeces and thus ladanum can be combed out of them.

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§ 12.37.2  Some people call the plant in Cyprus from which ladanum is produced 'leda,' as in fact these call the scent 'ledanum'; they say that its fat juices sweat out, and consequently the plant is rolled up in bundles by tying strings round it, and so made into cakes. Therefore there are two varieties in each kind, the natural sort mingled with earth and the artificial; the earthy sort is friable, whereas the artificial sort is tough.

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§ 12.37.3  It is also stated that there is a ladanum shrub in Garmania and beyond Egypt, where plants of it were introduced through the agency of the Ptolemies, or, as others say, it is a throwback from the incense-tree; and that it is collected like gum by making a cut in the bark and received in goatskin sacks. The most highly approved kind is sold at a price of 40 asses a pound. It is adulterated with myrtle berries and with filth from the fleeces of other animals beside the goat. When genuine it ought to have a fierce scent, somehow suggesting the smell of the desert, and though looking dried up it should soften immediately to the touch, and when set light to flare up with an agreeable scent; but when adulterated with myrtle-berries it can be detected by its unpleasant smell, and it crackles in the fire. Moreover, the genuine ladanum has dust or rather bits of stone from the rocks clinging to it.

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§ 12.38.1  In Arabia there is also an olive endowed with a sort of tear out of which a medicine is made, called in Greek enhaemon, because of its remarkable effect in closing the scars of wounds. These trees grow on the coast and are covered by the waves at high tide without this doing any harm to the berry, although accounts agree that salt is left on the leaves.

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§ 12.38.2  These trees are peculiar to Arabia, and it also has a few in common with other countries, which we must mention elsewhere because in their ease it does not hold the first place. Also in Arabia there is a surprising demand for foreign scents, which are imported from abroad: so tired do mortals get of things that are their own, and so covetous are they of what belongs to other people.

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§ 12.39.1  Consequently they send to the Elymaei for the wood of the bratum, a tree resembling a spreading cypress, with very white branches, and giving an agreeable scent when burnt. It is praised in the Histories of Claudius Caesar as having a marvellous property: he states that the Parthians sprinkle its leaves into their drinks, and that it has a scent very like cedar, and its smoke is an antidote against the effects of other woods. It grows beyond the River Karun on Mount Scanchrus in the territory of the city of Sostrata.

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§ 12.40.1  They also import from Carmania the stobrus tree, to use for the purpose of fumigation; it is soaked in palm wine and then set alight. The vapour is thrown back from the ceiling to the floor; it has an agreeable scent, but it causes headache, which is not however severe enough to be painful: it is used as a soporific for invalids. For these trades they have opened up the city of Carrhae, which is the market town of these parts. From Carrhae everybody used formerly to go on to Gabba, a journey of twenty days, and to Palestine in Syria; but afterwards, according to Juba, they began to make for Charax and the Parthian kingdom for the sake of the perfume trade. But my own view is that they used to convey those commodities to the Persians even before they took them to Syria or Egypt, this being attested by Herodotus, who records that the Arabs used regularly to pay a yearly tribute of a thousand talents of incense to the kings of the Persians. From Syria they bring back styrax, which they burn on their hearths, for its powerful scent to dispel their dislike for their own scents. For the rest, no other kinds of wood are in use among them except those that are scented; and the Sabaei even cook their food with incense-wood, and other tribes with that of the myrrh-tree, so that the smoke and vapour of their towns and districts is just like that which rises from altars. In order therefore to remedy this smell they obtain styrax in goatskins and fumigate their houses with it: so true it is that there is no pleasure the continued enjoyment of which does not engender disgust. They also burn styrax to drive away the snakes which abound in the forests of perfume-producing trees.

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§ 12.41.1  These people have not got cinnamon or casia, and nevertheless Arabia is styled 'Happy' — a country with a false and ungrateful appellation, as she puts her happiness to the credit of the powers above, although she owes more of it to the power below. Her good fortune has been caused by the luxury of mankind even in the hour of death, when they burn over the departed the products which they had originally understood to have been created for the gods. Good authorities declare that Arabia does not produce so large a quantity of perfume in a year's output as was burned by the Emperor Nero in a day at the obsequies of his consort Poppaea. Then reckon up the vast number of funerals celebrated yearly throughout the entire world, and the perfumes such as are given to the gods a grain at a time, that are piled up in heaps to the honour of dead bodies. Yet the gods used not to regard with less favour the worshippers who petitioned them with salted spelt, but rather, as the facts show, they were more benevolent in those days. But the title 'happy' belongs still more to the Arabian Sea, for from it come the pearls which that country sends us. And by the lowest reckoning India, China and the Arabian peninsula take from our empire 100 million sesterces every year — that is the sum which our luxuries and our women cost us; for what fraction of these imports, I ask you, now goes to the gods or to the powers of the lower world?

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§ 12.42.1  In regard to cinnamomum and casia a fabulous story has been related by antiquity, and first of all by Herodotus, that they are obtained from birds' nests, and particularly from that of the phoenix, in the region where Father Liber was brought up, and that they are knocked down from inaccessible rocks and trees by the weight of the flesh brought there by the birds themselves, or by means of arrows loaded with lead; and similarly there is a tale of casia growing round marshes under the protection of a terrible kind of bats that guard it with their claws, and of winged serpents — these tales having been invented by the natives to raise the price of their commodities. However, there goes with them a story that under the reflected rays of the sun at midday an indescribable sort of collective odour is given off from the whole of the peninsula, which is due to the harmoniously blended exhalation of so many kinds of vapour, and that the first news of Arabia received by the fleets of Alexander the Great was carried by these odours far out to sea — all these stories being false, inasmuch as cinnamomum, which is the same thing as cinnamon, grows in Ethiopia, which is linked by intermarriage with the Cave-dwellers. The latter buy it from their neighbours and convey it over the wide seas in ships that are neither steered by rudders nor propelled by oars or drawn by sails, nor assisted by any device of art: in those regions only man and man's boldness stands in place of all these things. Moreover they choose the winter sea about the time of the shortest day, as an east wind is then chiefly blowing. This carries them on a straight course through the bays, and after rounding a cape a west-north-west wind brings them to the harbour of the Gebbanitae called Ocilia. On this account that is the port most resorted to by these people, and they say that it is almost five years before the traders return home and that many perish on the voyage. In return for their wares they bring back articles of glass and copper, clothing, and buckles, bracelets and necklaces; consequently that traffic depends principally on having the confidence of the women.

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§ 12.42.2  The actual shrub of the cinnamon is only about three feet high at the most, the smallest being only a span high, and four inches thick, and it throws out shoots as low as six inches from the ground; it has a dried up appearance, and while it is green has no scent; the leaf is like that of the wild marjoram; it likes a dry soil and is less fertile in wet weather; and it stands constant clipping. Though it grows on level ground, it flourishes among the thickest bushes and brambles, and is difficult to gather. It can only be cut 'with the leave of the god' — which some understand to mean Jove, but the Ethiopian name for him is Assabinus. They sacrifice 44 oxen, goats and rams to obtain leave to cut it, though this does not include permission to do so before sunrise or after sunset. A priest divides the twigs with a spear, and sets aside a portion for the god, while the rest is packed up in clumps by the dealer. Another account is also given, that a share is assigned to the sun, and that the wood is divided into three portions, and then lots are cast twice to assign the shares, and the share that falls to the sun is left, and bursts out in flames of its own accord.

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§ 12.42.3  The finest quality with cinnamon belongs to the thinnest parts of the boughs, for about a span's length; the second best to the next pieces for a shorter length, and so on in order; the worst in quality is the part nearest to the roots, because it has the least amount of bark, which is the part most favoured, and consequently preference is given to the tops of the plants, where there is most bark. The actual wood, however, is held in no esteem, because it has the bitter taste of wild marjoram: it is called wood-cinnamon; it fetches 10 denarii a pound. Some writers mention two kinds of cinnamon, one lighter and the other darker in colour; and in former days the light kind was preferred, but now on the other hand the dark is praised, and even a mottled kind is preferred to the pure white. Still, the most certain test of value is that it must not be rough, and that when rubbed together it must crumble slowly. The lowest value is attached to it when it is soft or when the bark is falling of.

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§ 12.42.4  The right of controlling the sale of cinnamon is vested solely in the king of the Gebbanitae, who opens the market by public proclamation. The prices formerly were 1000 denarii a pound, but this was raised to half as much again after the forests had been burnt, so it is said, by infuriated barbarians; but it is not absolutely certain whether this was incendiarism provoked by injustice on the part of those in power or was due to accident, as we find it stated in the authorities that the south winds that blow there are so hot that they set lire to the forests in summer. His Majesty the emperor Vespasian was the first person to dedicate in the Temples of the Capitol and of Peace chaplets of cinnamon surrounded with embossed gold. We once saw in the Temple of the Palatine erected in honour of his late Majesty Augustus by his consort Augusta a very heavy cinnamon-root placed in a golden bowl, out of which drops used to distil every year which hardened into grains; this went on until the shrine in question was destroyed by fire.

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§ 12.43.1  Casia also is a shrub, and it grows close to the plains of cinnamon, but on the mountains; it has thicker stalks, and a thin skin rather than bark, which, in the opposite way to what we said in the case of cinnamon gains value when it falls off and thins away. This shrub grows to a height of 4 1/2 feet and it has three colours: when it first sprouts up, to the length of a foot it is white, then for the next six inches it is reddish, and beyond that point it is black. The black part is most highly esteemed, and next the part nearest to it, but the white part has no value at all. They cut the shoots to the length of two inches, and then sew them up in newly flayed hides of animals slaughtered for the purpose, so that as they rot maggots may gnaw away the wood and hollow out the whole of the bark, which is protected from them by its bitter taste. The bark is valued most highly when fresh, when it has a very pleasant smell and is hardly at all hot to the taste, and rather gives a slight nip with its moderate warmth; it must be of a purple colour, and though bulky weigh very little, and the pores of the outer coats should be short and not liable to break. This kind of casia is called by a foreign name, lada. Another kind is near-balsam, so called because it has a scent like that of balsam, but it has a bitter taste and consequently is more useful for medicinal purposes. just as the black kind is more employed for unguents. No substance has a wider range of price — the best qualities sell at 50 denarii a pound and the others at 5. To these varieties the dealers have added one which they call Daphnis's casia, with the further designation of near-cinnamon, and they price it at 300 denarii. It is adulterated with styrax, and with very small sprigs of bay because of the similarity of the barks. It is also grown in our part of the world, and I have seen it on the extreme edge of our empire, where the Rhine washes our frontier, planted among beehives; but there it has not the scorched colour produced by the sun, and for the same reason also it has not the same scent as the southern product.

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§ 12.44.1  From the border of the casia and cinnamon district gum-resin and aloe-wood are also imported, but they come by way of the Nabataean Cave-dwellers, who are a colony from the Nabataei.

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§ 12.45.1  The same place is also a centre for the collection of serichatum and gabalium, the supply of which is used up by the Arabs in their own country, so that they are only known by name to our part of the world, although growing in the same country as cinnamon and casia. However, serichatum does occasionally get through to us, and is employed by some persons as an ingredient in unguents. It fetches up to 6 denarii a pound.

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§ 12.46.1  The Cave-dweller Country and the Thebaid and Arabia where it separates Judea from Egypt all alike have the myrobalanum, which is grown for scent, as is shown by its name itself, which also indicates in addition that it is a nut; it is a tree with a leaf that resembles that of the heliotrope, which we shall describe among the herbaceous plants, and a fruit the size of a hazel-nut. The variety growing in Arabia is called the Syrian nut, and is white in colour, whereas the Thebaid kind is black; the former is preferred for the excellent quality of the oil extracted from it, but the Thebaic for its large yield. The Cave-dweller kind is the worst among the varieties. Some persons prefer to these the Ethiopian behen, which has a black oily nut and a slender kernel, but the liquid squeezed out of it has a stronger scent; it grows in level districts. It is said that the Egyptian nut is even more oleaginons and has a thicker shell of a reddish colour, and that though it grows on marshy ground the plant is shorter and drier, whereas the Arabian variety, on the contrary, is green in colour and also smaller in size and more compact in shape because it likes mountain regions; but the Petraean kind, coming from the town mentioned above, is a long way the best — it has a black rind and a white kernel. Perfumiers, however, only extract the juice from the shells, but medical men also crush the kernels, gradually pouring warm water on them while pounding them.

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§ 12.47.1  The palm-tree growing in Egypt called the adipsos is used in a similar way to the behen-nut in perfumery, and is almost as much in request; it is green in colour, with the scent of a quince, and has no kernel inside it. It is gathered in autumn, a little before it begins to ripen. If left on the tree longer, it is called the palm-nut, and it turns black and has the property of making people who eat it intoxicated. The behen-nut is priced at two denarii a pound. The retailers also give the name of behen to the dregs of the unguent made from it.

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§ 12.48.1  The scented reed which also grows in Arabia is shared with the Indies and Syria, the one growing in the latter country being superior to all the other kinds. About 17 miles from the Mediterranean, between Mount Lebanon and another range of no importance — not Counter- Lebanon as some have supposed — there is a moderately wide valley near a lake the shallow parts of which dry up in summer, where 3 1/2 miles from the lake the scented reed and scented rush grow. For clearly we may speak about the rush also, although I have devoted another volume to herbaceous plants, as here we are only dealing with plants that supply material for unguents. These plants then do not differ at all in appearance from the rest of their class, but the reed has a specially fine scent which attracts people even from a long way off, and is softer to the touch; the better variety is the one that is less brittle and that breaks in splinters rather than like a radish. Inside the tube there is a sort of cobweb which is called the flower; the plant containing most of this is the best. The remaining tests of its goodness are that it should be black — white varieties are thought inferior — that it is better the shorter and thicker it is and if it is pliant in breaking. The price of the reed is one denarius and that of the rush 5 denarii a pound. It is reported that scented rush is also found in Campania.

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§ 12.48.2  We have now left the countries looking on the ocean to come to those that converge towards our seas.

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§ 12.49.1  Well, Africa, which lies below Ethiopia, in its sandy deserts distils tear-like drops of a substance called hammoniacum; this is also the origin of the name of the Oracle of Hammon, near to which this substance is produced from a tree called metopon, after the manner of resin or gum. There are two kinds of hammoniacum: one called thrauston (friable), which is like male frankincense and is the kind most approved, and the other, greasy and resinous, which they call phyrama (paste). It is adulterated with sand, which looks as if it has stuck to it while growing; consequently it is preferred in extremely small lumps and these as pure as possible. The price of the best hammoniacum is 40 asses a pound.

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§ 12.50.1  The sphagnos valued most highly is found in the province of Cyrenaica, south of these regions: others call it bryon. The second place is held by the Cyprian kind, and the third by the Phoenician. It is also said to grow in Egypt, and indeed in Gaul as well, and I am not prepared to doubt this; for there are grey tufts that bear this name growing on trees, resembling the growths that we principally see on the oak, but having a superior scent. The most highly esteemed are the whitest and most widely spreading mosses, and the bright red ones are in the second class, but no value at all is attached to the black variety; moreover, the mosses that grow on islands and on rocks are not esteemed, nor are all those that have the scent of palm-trees and not that of their own kind.

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§ 12.51.1  A tree found in Egypt is the cypros, which has the leaves of the jujube-tree and the white, scented seed of the coriander. Cypros-seed is boiled in olive oil and afterwards crushed, producing the cypros of commerce, which sells at 5 denarii a pound. The best is made from the tree grown at Canopus on the banks of the Nile, the second best at Ascalon in Judea, and the third quality on the island of Cyprus, which has a sort of sweet scent. The cypros is said to be the same as the thorn called privet in Italy.

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§ 12.52.1  In the same region grows the aspalathus, a white thorn of the size of a moderate-sized tree, with the flower of a rose; the root is in request for unguents. People say that any shrub over which a rainbow forms its arch gives out a scent as sweet as that of the aspalathus, but that if this happens in the case of an aspalathus a scent rises that is indescribably sweet. Some call this shrub red sceptre and others sceptre. The test of its genuineness lies in its fiery red colour, firmness to the touch and scent like that of beaver-oil. It is sold for 5 denarii a pound.

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§ 12.53.1  Cat-thyme also grows in Egypt, though not so good a kind as the Lydian variety, its leaves being larger and variegated; those of the Lydian are short and very small, and have a strong scent.

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§ 12.54.1  But every other scent ranks below balsam. The only country to which this plant has been vouchsafed is Judea. where formerly it grew in only two gardens, both belonging to the king; one of them was of not more than twenty biugera in extent and the other less. This variety of shrub was exhibited to the capital by the emperors Vespasian and Titus; and it is a remarkable fact that ever since the time of Pompey the Great even trees have figured among the captives in our triumphal processions. The balsam-tree is now a subject of Rome, and pays tribute together with the race to which it belongs; it differs entirely in character from the accounts that had been given of it by Roman and foreign writers, being more like a vine than a myrtle: it has quite recently been taught to grow from mallet-shoots tied up on trellises like a vine, and it covers whole hillsides as vineyards do. A balsam unsupported by a trellis and carrying its own weight is pruned in a similar manner when it puts oat shoots; the use of the rake makes it thrive and sprout rapidly, bearing in its third year. Its leaf is very near that of the tuber-apple, and it is an evergreen. The Jews vented their wrath upon this plant as they also did upon their own lives, but the Romans protected it against them, and there have been pitched battles in defence of a shrub. It is now cultivated by the treasury authorities, and was never before more plentiful; but its height has not advanced beyond three feet.

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§ 12.54.2  There are three varieties of balsam-tree: one with thin foliage like hair, called easy-to-gather; another with a rugged appearance, curving over, of a bushy growth and with a stronger scent — they call this rough balsam, and the third tall balsam because it grows higher than the rest; this has a smooth bark. This last is the second best in quality, and the easy-to-gather kind is the lowest grade. Balsam-seed tastes very like wine, and has a red colour and a rather greasy consistency; that contained in a husk, which is lighter in weight and greener in colour, is inferior. The branch is thicker than of that of a myrtle; incision is made in it with a piece of glass or a stone, or with knives made of bone — it strongly dislikes having its vital parts wounded with steel, and dies off at once, though it can stand having superfluous branches pruned with a steel knife. The hand of the operator making the incision has to be poised under skilful control, to avoid inflicting a wound going below the bark. The juice that oozes out of the incision is called opobalsamum; it is extremely sweet in taste, but exudes in tiny drops, the trickle being collected by means of tufts of wool in small horns and poured out of them into a new earthenware vessel to store; it is like rather thick olive-oil and in the unfermented state is white in colour; later on it turns red and at the same time hardens, having previously been transparent. When Alexander the Great was campaigning in that country, it was considered a fair whole day's work in summer to fill a single shell, and for the entire produce of a rather large garden to be six congii and of a smaller one congius, at a time moreover when its price was twice its weight in silver: whereas at the present day even a single tree produces a larger flow. The incision is made three times in every summer, and afterwards the tree is lopped. There is a market even for the twigs too; within five years of the conquest of Judea the actual loppings and the shoots fetched 800,000 sesterces. These trimmings are called wood of balsam; they are boiled down in perfumes, and in manufacture they have taken the place of the actual juice of the shrub. Even the bark fetches a price for drugs; but the tears are valued most, the seed coming second, the bark third and the wood lowest. Of the wood the sort resembling boxwood is the best, and also has the strongest scent; the best seed is that which is largest in size and heaviest in weight, which has a biting taste and is hot in the mouth. Balsam is adulterated with the ground-pine of Petra, which can be detected by its size, hollowness and long shape and by its weak scent and its taste like pepper. The test of tear of balsam is that it should be thinning out in consistency, and slightly reddish, and give a strong scent when rubbed. The second quality is white in colour, the next inferior is green and thick, and the worst kind black, inasmuch as like olive oil it deteriorates with age. Out of all the incisions the oil that has flowed out before the formation of the seed is considered the best. Also another mode of adulteration is by using the juice of the seed, and the fraud can be with difficulty detected by the greater bitterness of the taste; for the proper taste is smooth, without a trace of acidity, the only pungency being in the smell. It is also adulterated with oil of roses, of cyprus, of mastich, of behen-nut, of the turpentine-tree and of myrtle, and with resin, galbanum and wax of Cyprus, just as occasion serves; but the worst adulteration is with gum, since this dries up on the back of the hand and sinks in water, which is a double test of the genuine article — pure tear of balsam ought to dry up likewise, but the sort with gum added to it turns brittle and forms a skin. It can also be detected by the taste; or when adulterated with wax or resin, by means of a hot coal, as it bums with a blacker flame. When mixed with honey, its quality alters immediately, as it attracts flies even when held in the hand. Moreover a drop of pure balsam thickens in warm water, settling to the bottom of the vessel, whereas when adulterated it floats on the top like oil, and if it has been tampered with by using almond-oil, a white ring forms round it. The best test of all is that it will cause milk to curdle and will not leave stains on cloth. In no other case is more obvious fraud practised, inasmuch as every pint bought at a sale of. confiscated property for 300 denarii when it is sold again makes 1000 denarii: so much does it pay to increase the quantity by adulteration. The price of wood-balsam is six denarii a pound.

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§ 12.55.1  The region of Syria beyond Phoenicia nearest to Judea produces styrax in the part round Gabala and Marathus and Mount Casius in Seleucia. The tree has the same name; it is similar to a quince. Its tears have a pleasant, almost pungent scent, and inside it resembles a reed, and is full of juice. About the rising of the Dog-star certain little maggots with wings flutter about this tree, gnawing away the wood, and consequently it is fouled with their scrapings. The styrax esteemed next to the above-named growths comes from Pisidia, Side, Cyprus and Cilicia, and that from Crete is rated lowest; that from Mount Amanus in Syria is valued by the medical profession, but even more by perfumiers. In every nation a red colour and a sticky consistency are preferred, and styrax that is brown and covered with white mould is considered inferior. It is adulterated with cedar resin or gum, and another way employs honey or bitter almonds; all these adulterations can be detected by their taste. The price of the best styrax is 17 denarii. It is also produced in Pamphylia, but this is a drier and less juicy kind.

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§ 12.56.1  Syria also supplies galbanum, which also grows on Mount Amanus; it comes from a kind of fennel which they call stagonitis, like the resin of the same name. The kind of galbanum most esteemed is cartilaginous, clear like hammonia-cuxa and free from all woody substance. Even so it is adulterated with beans or with sacopenium. Pure galbanum, if burnt, drives away snakes with its smell. It is sold at 5 denarii a pound.

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§ 12.57.1  Pure galbanum is only useful for medicinal purposes; but Syria produces all-heal which is used for unguents as well. It also grows at Psophis in Arcadia and round the spring of Erymanthus, and in Africa and in Macedonia also. It has a peculiar stalk 7 1/2 feet long; this throws out first four leaves and then six lying on the ground, which are very large and of a round shape, but the leaves on the top of the plant are like those of the olive; the seed hangs in tufts like that of the fennel. The juice is got by means of incisions made in the stalk at harvest time and at the root in autumn. It is valued for whiteness when it coagulates, the next grade being assigned to juice of a pale colour, while the black is held of no value. The price of the best quality is two denarii a pound.

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§ 12.58.1  From this fennel the one called bear's-wort fennel differs only in the leaf, which is smaller, and has divisions like a plane-leaf. It only grows in shady places. Its seed, bearing the same name, resembles that of hart-wort; it is only useful for medicine.

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§ 12.59.1  Syria also supplies the malobathrum, a tree with a folded leaf, the colour of a leaf that has dried up; from it oil is pressed to use for unguents, Egypt also producing it in still greater quantity. But the kind that comes from India is valued more highly; it is said to grow there in marshes, like the lentil, with a scent stronger than that of saffron, a darkish rough appearance, and a sort of salt taste. The white variety is less highly spoken of; it very quickly acquires a musty smell with age. Malobathrum when placed under the tongue ought to taste like nard; but its scent when it is put in slightly warmed wine surpasses any others. In point of price at all events it approaches the marvellous, the pound ranging from one denarius to four hundred, while the leaf itself reaches 60 denarii a pound.

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§ 12.60.1  There is also the oil of unripe berries, which is made in two varieties and by two processes, one kind being made from the olive and one from the vine. The olive is pressed while still white, or an inferior oil is obtained from the druppa — which is the name given to an olive not yet ripe enough to eat but already beginning to change colour — the difference being that the inferior kind is green and the other white. It is made either from the psithian vine or from the vine of Aminaea. The vine is plucked when the grapes are the size of a chick-pea, before the rising of the Dog-star, when the first bloom is on them, and the unripe juice is obtained; after which the, remaining pulp is left to dry in the sun — precaution being taken against nocturnal dews, by storing the grapes in an earthenware vessel — while the unripe juice is collected and at once also put to keep in a Cyprian bronze jar. The best kind is that which is red in colour and rather bitter and dry to the taste. Omphaeium sells at 6 denarii a pound. There is also another way of making it, by pounding up unripe grapes in mortars; the grapes are afterwards dried in the sun and divided up into lozenges.

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§ 12.61.1  To the same family also belongs bryon, obtained from the catkins of the white poplar. The best kind grows in the neighbourhood of Cnidus or Caria, in waterless districts or on dry rough ground, and a second best quality grows on the cedar in Lycia. To the same group also belongs oenanthe, obtained from the cluster of the wild vine. It is picked when it flowers, which is the time when it has the best scent, and it is dried in the shade on a linen sheet spread out for the purpose, and then put into casks to store. The best kind comes from Parapotamia, the second best from Antiochia and Laodicea in Syria, and the third best from the mountains in Media; the last kind is more useful for medicines. Some people prefer the kind that grows in the island of Cyprus to all of these. As for the oenanthe produced in Africa it is only used by the doctors, and is called massaris. But all the oenanthe obtained from the white wild vine is superior to that from the black.

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§ 12.62.1  There is also another tree that likewise serves for producing unguents, which is called by some people an elate — the Latin for which is 'fir' — and by others a palm and by others again a spatula. That of Hammonium is most highly spoken of, next the Egyptian variety, and then the Scythian. It only has a scent if it grows in regions devoid of water; it has tears of a greasy consistency, which are added to unguents to overcome the hardness of the oil.

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§ 12.63.1  Syria also produces the kind of cinnamon called comacum; this is a juice squeezed out of a nut, and is quite different from the juice of the true cinnamon, although it is almost equally agreeable. Its price is 40 asses a pound.

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§ 13.1.1  THIS is the degree to which the forests are valuable in the matter of scents; and their various products were not sufficiently remarkable by themselves, and luxury took pleasure in mixing them all up together and making a single scent out of the combination: thus perfumes were invented. It is not recorded who first discovered them. In the days of the Trojan War they did not exist, and incense was not used when prayers were made to the gods: even in the rites of religion people only knew the scent of cedar and citrus wood, trees of their own country, or more truly the reek, as it rose in wreaths of smoke, though attar of roses had already been discovered, for it also is specified as an ingredient in commending olive oil. Perfume ought by right to be accredited to the Persian race: they soak themselves in it, and quench the odour produced from dirt by its adventitious attraction. The first case that I am able to discover was when a chest of perfumes was captured by Alexander among the rest of the property of King Darius when his camp was taken. Afterwards the pleasure of perfume was also admitted by our fellow-countrymen as well among the most elegant and also most honourable enjoyments of life, and even began to be an appropriate tribute to the dead; and consequently we will enlarge on the subject. Those among perfumes which are not the product of shrubs will for the present only be indicated by their names; however, an account will be given of their nature in their proper places.

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§ 13.1.2  Perfumes have received their names in some cases from their countries of origin, in others from the juices of which they are made, in others from trees, and in others front other causes; and the first thing proper to know about them is that their importance changes, quite often their fame having passed away. The perfume most highly praised in the old days was made on the island of Delos, but later that from the Egyptian town of Mendes ranked the highest. Nor was this only the result of the blending and combination of several scents, but the same juices gained supremacy or degenerated in various ways in different places. The sword-lily perfume of Corinth was extremely popular for a long time, but afterwards that of Cyzicus, and similarly the attar of roses made at Phaselis, but this distinction was later taken from it by Naples, Capua and Praeneste. Oil of saffron from Soli in Cilicia was for a long time praised most highly, but subsequently that of Rhodes; vine-flower scent made in Cyprus was preferred, but afterwards that from Adramytteum, and scent of marjoram made in Cos, but afterwards quince-blossom unguent from the same place, and cyprus-scent made in Cyprus, but subsequently that made in Egypt; at this point scent from Mendes and almond-oil suddenly became more popular, but later on Phoenicia appropriated these two scents and left the credit for cyprus-scent to Egypt. Athens has persistently maintained the credit of her 'all-Athenian' perfume. There was also once an unguent called panther-scent at Tarsus, even the recipe for compounding which has disappeared; narcissus-scent has also ceased to be made from the narcissus flower.

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§ 13.2.1  The recipe for making unguents contains two ingredients, the juice and the solid part, the former which usually consists of various sorts of oil and the latter of scented substances, the oils being called 'astringents' and the scents 'sweetenings.' Together with these there is a third factor that many people neglect — that of colour, for the sake of which cinnabar and alkanet should be added. A sprinkle of salt serves to preserve the properties of the oil, but to scents containing an admixture of alkanet salt is not added. Resin or gum are added to retain the scent in the solid part, as it evaporates and disappears very quickly if these are not added.

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§ 13.2.2  The unguent most quickly made and probably the first invented was made of bryon and behen-oil, of which we have spoken above. Later the Mendes scent came in, made of behen-oil, resin and myrrh, and at the present day metopium is even more popular; this is an oil made in Egypt, pressed out of bitter almonds, with the addition of omphacium, cardamom, rush, reed, honey, wine, myrrh, seed of balsam, galbanum and terebinth-resin. One of the commonest unguents indeed — and at the present day it is consequently believed also to be one of the oldest — is one made of myrtle-oil, reed, cypress, cyprus, mastic-oil and pomegranate rind. But I am inclined to believe that the scents most widely used are those made from the rose, which grows in great abundance everywhere; and so the simplest compound was for a long time that of oil of roses, though additional ingredients used are omphacium, rose and saffron blossoms, cinnabar, reed, honey, rush, flower of salt or else alkanet, and wine. A similar method also is used in the case of oil of saffron with the addition of cinnabar, alkanet and wine, and also a similar method in the case of oil of marjoram, by mixing in omphacium and reed; this is best in Cyprus and at Mitylene, where marjoram is very plentiful. Also cheaper kinds of oil are compounded out of myrtle and laurel with the addition of marjoram, lilies, fenugreek, myrrh, casia, nard, rush and cinnamon. There is also an oil made from the common quince and the sparrow-quince, as we shall say later; it is called melinum, and is used as an ingredient in unguents with a mixture of omphacium, oil of cyprus, oil of sesame, balsam, rush, casia and southernwood. The most fluid of them all is susinum, made of lilies, oil of behen-nut, reed, honey, cinnamon, saffron and myrrh; and next is oil of cyprus, made of cyprus, omphacium, cardamom, reed, rosewood and southernwood; some people also add oil of cyprus and myrrh and all-heal; the best is that made at Sidon and the next best in Egypt. But if oil of sesame is added, the mixture will last as long as four years; and its scent is brought out by the addition of cinnamon.

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§ 13.2.3  Unguent of fenugreek is made of fresh olive-oil, cyprus, reed, melilot, fenugreek, honey, cat-thyme and scent of marjoram. This was much the most celebrated unguent in the time of Menander, the author of comedies; but afterwards its place was taken by megalium, so called because of its celebrity as this was made of behen-nut oil, balsam, reed, rush, wood-balsam, casia and resin. A peculiarity of this unguent is that it must be constantly stirred while boiling until it ceases to have any odour, and when it becomes cold it recovers its scent.

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§ 13.2.4  There are also some juices which separately produce famous perfumes — in the first place cinnamon-leaf, then the Illyrian iris and the sweet marjoram of Cyzicus, both of the herb class. Some few other ingredients are united with these, different ones by different makers, those who use the most mixing with one or the other honey, flower of salt, omphacium, leaves of the agnus castus, all-heal, and all sorts of foreign substances. Also unguent of cinnamon fetches enormous prices; to cinnamon is added behen-nut oil, wood-balsam, reed, seeds of rush and balsam, myrrh and scented honey. This is the thickest in consistency of all the unguents; its prices range from 35 to 300 denarii. Spikenard or leaf-unguent is made of omphacium or else behen-nut oil, rush, costus, nard, amomum, myrrh and balsam.

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§ 13.2.5  Under this heading it will be suitable to recall that we mentioned nine species of plants that resemble the Indian nard: such a large supply of material is available for purposes of adulteration. They can all be rendered more pungent by the addition of costus and amomum, which have an extremely powerful scent, and thicker in consistency and sweeter by means of myrrh, while their utility for medicine is increased by adding saffron; but they will be rendered extremely penetrating in themselves by means of amomum — this actually causes headache. Some people hold it enough to add a sprinkle of the most expensive ingredients to the others after boiling them down, as an economy, but the mixture has not the same strength unless they are all boiled down together. Myrrh even when used by itself without oil makes an unguent, provided that the staete kind is used — otherwise it produces too bitter a flavour. Unguent of cyprus produces a green colour, lily unguent gives a greasy consistency, oil of Mendes makes the mixture black, attar of roses white, and myrrh gives a pale hue.

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§ 13.2.6  These are the kinds of perfumes invented in early times, and the subsequent pilferings of the factories. We will now speak of what is the very climax of luxury and the most important example of this commodity.

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§ 13.2.7  What then is called the 'royal' unguent, because it is a blend prepared for the kings of Parthia, is made of behen-nut juice, costus, amomum, Syrian cinnamon, cardamom, spikenard, cat-thyme, myrrh, cinnamon-bark, styrax-tree gum, ladanum, balm, Syrian reed and Syrian rush, wild grape, cinnamon- -, serichatum, cyprus, rosewood, all-heal, saffron, gladiolus, marjoram, lotus, honey and wine. And none of the components of this scent is grown in Italy, the conqueror of the world, and indeed none in the whole of Europe excepting The iris in Illyria and nard in Gaul — for as to wine and roses and myrtle leaves and olive oil, they may be taken as belonging to pretty well all countries in common.

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§ 13.3.1  What are called sprinkling powders are made of dried scents, the dregs of unguents being termed 'magma.' Among all the scents employed the one added last is the most powerful. Unguents keep best in alabaster boxes, scents when mixed with oil, and the fatter it is, as for instance oil of almonds, the better it helps to preserve them for a long time; and the unguents themselves improve with age. Sunshine is detrimental to them, and therefore they are stored in the shade, in vessels made of lead. When being tested they are put on the back of the hand, to avoid their being damaged by the warmth of the fleshy part.

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§ 13.4.1  Perfumes serve the purpose of the most superfluous of all forms of luxury; for pearls and jewels do nevertheless pass to the wearer's heir, and clothes last for some time, but unguents lose their scent at once, and die in the very hour when they are used. Their highest recommendation is that when a woman passes by her scent may attract the attention even of persons occupied in something else — and their cost is more than 400 denarii per pound! All that money is paid for a pleasure enjoyed by somebody else, for a person carrying scent about him does not smell it himself. Still, if even these matters deserve to be graded after a fashion, we find in the works left by Marcus Cicero that unguents that have an earthy scent are more agreeable than those smelling of saffron, inasmuch as even in a class of things where corruption is most rife, nevertheless some degree of strictness in vice itself gives more enjoyment. But there are people who get most pleasure from unguent of a dense consistency, which they call thick essence, and who enjoy smearing themselves with perfume and not merely pouring it over them. We have even seen people put scent on the soles of their feet, a practice said to have been taught to the emperor Nero by Marcus Otho; pray, how could it be noticed or give any pleasure from that part of the body? Moreover, we have heard that somebody of private station gave orders for the walls of his bathroom to be sprinkled with scent, and that the Emperor Caligula had the bathtubs scented, and so also later did one of the slaves of Nero — so that this must not be considered a privilege of princes! Yet what is most surprising is that this indulgence has found its way even into the camp: at all events the eagles and the standards, dusty as they are and bristling with sharp points, are anointed on holidays — and I only wish we were able to say who first introduced this custom! No doubt the fact is that our eagles were bribed by this reward to conquer the world! We look to their patronage forsooth to sanction our vices, so as to have this legitimation for using hair-oil under a helmet!

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§ 13.5.1  I could not readily say when the use of unguents first made its way to Rome. It is certain that in 189 BC the censors Publius Licinius Crassus and Lucius Julius Caesar issued a proclamation forbidding any sale of 'foreign essences' — that being the regular name for them. But, good heavens! nowadays some people actually put scent in their drinks, and it is worth the bitter flavour for their body to enjoy the lavish scent both inside and outside. It is a well-known fact that Lucius Plotius, the brother of Lucius Plancus who was twice consul and censor, when proscribed by the Triumvirs was given away in his hiding-place at Salerno by the scent of the unguent he had been using — a disgrace that acquitted the entire proscription of guilt, for who would not consider that people of that sort deserved to die?

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§ 13.6.1  In other respects Egypt is of all the countries in the world the best adapted for the production of unguents, but Campania with its abundance of roses runs it close. But Judea is even more famous for its palm-trees, the nature of which will now be described. It is true that there are also palms in Europe, and they are common in Italy, but these are barren. In the coastal regions of Spain they do bear fruit, but it does not ripen, and in Africa the fruit is sweet but will not keep for any time. On the other hand in the east the palm supplies the native races with wine, and some of them with bread, while a very large number rely on it also for cattle fodder. For this reason, therefore, we shall be justified in describing the palms of foreign countries; there are none in Italy not grown under cultivation, nor are there in any other part of the earth except where there is a warm climate, while only in really hot countries does the palm bear fruit.

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§ 13.7.1  It grows in a light sandy soil and for the most part in one containing nitrates. It likes running water, and to drink all the year round, though it loves dry places. Some people think that dung actually does it harm, while a section of the Assyrians think that this happens if they do not mix the dung with water from a stream. There are several kinds of palm, beginning with kinds not larger than a shrub — a shrub that in some cases is barren, though in other districts it too bears fruit — and having a short branch. In number of places this shrub-palm with its dome of leaves serves instead of plaster for the walls of a house, to prevent their sweating. Also the taller palms make a regular forest, their pointed foliage shooting out from the actual tree all round them like a comb — these it must be understood are wild palms, though they also have a wayward fancy for mingling among the cultivated varieties. The other kinds are rounded and tall, and have compact rows of knobs or circles in their bark which render them easy for the eastern races to climb; they put a plaited noose round themselves and round the tree, and the noose goes up with the man at an astonishingly rapid speed. All the foliage is at the top of the tree, and so is the fruit, which is not among the leaves as in all other trees, but hanging in bunches from shoots of its own between the branches, and which has the nature of both a cluster and a single fruit. The leaves have a knife-like edge at the sides and are divided into two flanges that fold together; they first suggested folding tablets for writing, but at the present day they are split up to make ropes and plaited wickerwork and parasols.

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§ 13.7.2  The most devoted students of nature report that trees, indeed all the products of the earth and even grasses, are of both sexes, a fact which it may at this place be sufficient to state in general terms although in no trees is it more manifest than in the palm. A male palm forms a blossom on the shoot, whereas a female merely forms a bud like an ear of corn, without going on to blossom. In both male and female, however, the flesh of the fruit forms first and the woody core afterwards; this is the seed of the tree — which is proved by the fact that small fruits without any core are found on the same shoot. The seed is oblong in shape and not rounded like an olive-stone, and also it is split at the back by a bulging cleft, and in most cases shaped like a navel at the middle of the bulge: it is from here that the root first spreads out. In planting the seed is laid front-side downward, and a pair of seeds are placed close together with two more above them, since a single seed produces a weak plant, but the four shoots unite in one strong growth. This woody core is divided from the fleshy parts by a number of white coats, others clinging closely to its body; and it is loose and separate, only attached by a thread at its top end. The flesh takes a year to ripen, though in some places, for instance, Cyprus, it has a pleasant sweet flavour even though it does not reach maturity. In Cyprus the leaf is broader and the fruit rounder than it is elsewhere, though people there do not eat the body of the fruit, but spit it out after merely squeezing out the juice. Also in Arabia the palm is said to have a sickly sweet taste, although Juba states that he prefers the palm that grows in the territory of the Tent-dweller Arabs, which they call the dablas, to all other kinds for flavour. For the rest, it is stated that in a palm-grove of natural growth the female trees do not produce if there are no males, and that each male tree is surrounded by several females with more attractive foliage that bend and bow towards him; while the male bristling with leaves erected impregnates the rest of them by his exhalation and by the mere sight of him, and also by his pollen; and that when the male tree is felled the females afterwards in their widowhood become barren. And so fully is their sexual union understood that mankind has actually devised a method of impregnating them by means of the flower and down collected from the males, and indeed sometimes by merely sprinkling their pollen on the females.

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§ 13.8.1  Palms are also propagated by layering, the trunk for a length of three feet from the actual brain of the tree being divided by incisions and dug into the ground. Also a slip torn off from the root makes a hardy growth when planted, and so does one from the youngest of the branches. In Assyria the tree itself, too, is laid in a moist soil and throws out roots along its whole length, but these grow into shrubs and not into a tree; consequently the growers plant cuttings, and transplant the young trees when a year old and again when two years old, for they like a change of position — this is done in the spring in other countries, but in Assyria about the rising of the Dog-star. Also there they do not touch the young trees with a knife, but tie back the leafy shoots to make them grow upward to a considerable height. When the trees are strong they prune them down so as to make them grow thicker, leaving the stumps of the branches six inches long; to lop them at any other point kills the mother tree. We have said above that palms like a salt soil; consequently in places where the ground is not of that nature they sprinkle salt on it, not at the roots of the trees but a little farther off. Some palms in Syria and Egypt divide into two trunks, and in Crete even into three, and some even into five. These begin to bear in three years, but the palms in Cyprus, Syria and Egypt bear when four years old, and others when five, the tree being then the height of a man; as long as the trees are young the fruit has no woody part inside, and consequently they are called 'eunuchs.'

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§ 13.9.1  Palm-trees are of many varieties. The barren kinds are used in Assyria and throughout the whole of palm. Persia for building timber and for the more luxurious articles of manufacture. Also there are forests of palms grown for timber which when felled send out shoots again from the root; the pith of these at the top, which is called their 'brain,' has a sweet taste, and after it has been removed the trees continue to live, which is not the case with other sorts of palm. The name of this tree is the chamaerops, and it has an exceptionally broad soft leaf which is extremely useful for wickerwork; it grows in large numbers in Crete, but even more in Sicily. Palm-wood makes charcoal that lasts a long time and burns slowly. In the palms that bear fruit the core of the fruit is shorter in some cases than in others and also softer; in some cases it is of a bony substance, and when polished with the edge of a file is used by superstition as a charm against witchcraft. The core is wrapped in several coats which in some cases vary in number and in others in thickness. Consequently there are forty-nine kinds of palm, if one cared to go through the names of them all, including those that have foreign names, and the varieties of wine that are extracted from them. The most famous of all is honoured by the name of the royal palm, because it used to be reserved for the kings of Persia alone; it grew only at Babylon in the Garden of Bagous — the Persian word for a eunuch, some of these having actually been kings in Persia. This garden was always kept within the precincts of the ruler's court.

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§ 13.9.2  In the southern part of the world the kind called in Greek the wild-boar date is held in the highest repute, and next to it ranks the Maldive nut date. The latter is a short, rounded fruit of a white colour, more like a grape than a Phoenician date, for which reason it has also received the name of pearl-date. It is said that only one palm-tree of this kind exists, at Chora, and the same is the case with the wild-boar date; and a remarkable story has come to us about this tree, to the effect that it dies off and then comes to life again of itself — a peculiarity which it shares with the phoenix, which is thought to have taken its name from the suggestion of this palm-tree: the tree was bearing fruit at the time when this book was published. The actual fruit is large, hard and prickly, and differs from all the other kinds by having a gamey sort of smell that is most noticed in wild boars, which is the reason for its name. The sandalis date, so called from its resemblance to a sandal, ranks fourth; of this kind again there are said to be at the most five trees in existence, on the border of Ethiopia, and they are as remarkable for the sweetness of their fruit as they are for their rarity. Next to these the most famous are the caryotae, which supply a great deal of food but also of juice, and from which the principal wines of the East are made; these strongly affect the head, to which the date owes its name. But not only are these trees abundant and bear largely in Judea, but also the most famous are found there, and not in the whole of that country but specially in Jericho, although those growing in the valleys of Archelais and Phasaelis and Livias in the same country are also highly spoken of. Their outstanding property is the unctuous juice which they exude and an extremely sweet sort of wine-flavour like that of honey. The Nicholas date belonging to this class is not so juicy but exceptionally large in size, four put end to end making a length of eighteen inches. The date that comes next in sweetness is less attractive to look at, but in flavour is the sister of the caryotae and consequently is called in Greek the sister-dates The third class among these, the pateta, has too copious a supply of juice, and the excess of liquor of the fruit itself bursts open even while on the parent tree, looking like dates that have been trodden on.

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§ 13.9.3  Of the many drier dates the finger-date forms a class of its own: it is a very long slender date, sometimes of a curved shape. The variety of this class which we offer to the honour of the gods is called chydaeus by the Jews, a race remarkable for their contempt for the divine powers. All over the Thebaid and Arabia the dates are dry and small, with a shrivelled body, and as they are scorched by the continual heat their covering is more truly a rind than a skin. Indeed in Ethiopia itself the climate is so dry that the skin of these dates is rubbed into powder and kneaded to make loaves of bread like flour. This date grows on a shrub, with branches eighteen inches long, a rather broad leaf, and fruit of a round shape, but larger than the size of an apple. The Greek name for this date is koix; it comes to maturity in three years, and the shrub always has fruit on it. another date sprouting in place of one picked. The date of the Thebaid is packed into casks at once, before it has lost the aroma of its natural heat; if this is not done, it quickly loses its freshness and dries up unless it is warmed up again in an oven.

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§ 13.9.4  Of the rest of the date kind the Syrian variety, called sweetmeats, seem to be a low-class fruit; for those in the other part of Phoenicia and Cilicia have the local name of acorn-dates, also used by us. These too are of several kinds, differing in shape, some rounder and others longer, and also in colour, some being blacker and others reddish; indeed, they are reported to have as many varieties of colour as the fig! though the white ones are the most in favour. They also differ in size, many having reached half a yard in length while some are no larger than a bean. The best kinds for keeping are those that grow in salt and sandy soils, for instance in Judea and the Cyrenaic district of Africa; the dates in Egypt, Cyprus, Syria and Seleucia in Assyria do not keep, and consequently are used for fattening swine and other stock. It is a sign that the fruit is spoilt or old if the white excrescence by which the dates are attached to the cluster has fallen off. Soldiers of Alexander were choked by eating green dates; this effect was produced in the Gedrosi country by the quality of the fruit, and occurs elsewhere from eating it to excess, for fresh dates are so sweet that people will not stop eating them except because of the danger.

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§ 13.10.1  Syria has several trees that are peculiar to it beside this date; in the class of nuts the pistachio is well-known: it is reported that taken either in food or in drink it is a remedy for snakebite. In the fig class Syria has the Carians and smaller figs of the same class called cottana, also the plum that grows on Mount Damascus and the myxa, both now acclimated in Italy. In Egypt the myxa is also used for making wine.

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§ 13.11.1  Phoenicia has a small variety of cedar that resembles a juniper. It is of two kinds, the Lycian and the Phoenician, which have different leaves; the one with a hard, prickly, pointed leaf is called the oxycedros, while the other is a branchy tree and the wood is full of knots and has a better scent. They bear fruit the size of a myrtle-berry, with a sweet taste. The larger cedar also has two kinds, of which the flowering one bears no fruit, while the one that bears fruit does not flower, and in its case the previous fruit is replaced by a new one. Its seed is like that of the cypress. Some people call this tree the cedar-pine. From it is obtained the resin held in the highest favour, while its actual timber lasts for ever, and consequently it has been the regular practice to use it even for making statues of the gods — the Apollo Sosianus in a shrine at Rome, which was brought from Seleucia, is made of cedar-wood. There is a tree resembling the cedar in Arcadia, and a shrub in Phrygia is called the cedrys.

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§ 13.12.1  Syria also has the turpentine-tree. Of this the male variety has no fruit, but the female has two kinds of fruit, one of them ruddy and the size of a lentil, while the other is pale, and ripens at the same time as the grape; it is no larger in size than a bean, has a rather agreeable scent, and is sticky to the touch. Round Mount Ida in the Troad and in Macedonia this is a low-growing shrub-like tree, but at Damascus in Syria it is big. Its wood is fairly flexible and remains sound to a great age; it is of a shiny black colour. The flower grows in clusters like the olive, but is crimson in colour, and the foliage is thick. It also bears follicles out of which come insects resembling gnats, and which produce a sticky resinous fluid which also bursts out from its bark.

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§ 13.13.1  Also the male sumach-tree of Syria is productive, the female being barren; the leaf is that of an elm only a little longer, covered with down, and the footstalks of the leaves always lying alternately in opposite directions; the branches are slender and short. The sumach is used for bleaching leather. The seed, which resembles a lentil, turns red at the same time as the grapes; it is called rhus and is required for certain drugs.

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§ 13.14.1  Egypt also has many kinds of trees not found anywhere else, before all a fig, which is consequently called the Egyptian fig. The tree resembles a mulberry in foliage, size and appearance; it bears its fruit not on the branches but on the trunk itself, and this is an exceedingly sweet fig without seeds inside it. There is an extremely prolific yield, but only if incisions are made in the fruit with iron hooks, otherwise it does not ripen; but when this is done, it can be plucked three days later, another fig forming in its place, the tree thus scoring seven crops of extremely juicy figs in a summer. Even if the incisions are not made new fruit forms under the old and drives out its predecessor before it is ripe four times in a summer. The wood of this fig is of a peculiar kind, and is one of the most useful there is. As soon as it is cut it is plunged into a marsh, and at first sinks to the bottom, but afterwards begins to float, and it is clear that moisture not belonging to it, which soaks into all other timber, drains the sap out of this. When it begins to float on the surface, this is its sign that the timber is ready for use.

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§ 13.15.1  A tree to some extent resembling the Egyptian fig is one in Crete called the Cyprian fig, as it also bears fruit on its actual trunk and on its branches when they have grown to thickness. But the Cyprian fig puts out a bud without any leaves, resembling a root. The trunk of the tree is like a poplar, and the leaf like an elm. It bears fruit four times a year, and also buds the same number of times, but its unripe figs will not ripen unless an incision is made in them to let out the juice. They have the sweet taste and the inside of the common fig, and are the size of a service-tree berry.

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§ 13.16.1  Another similar tree is the one called by the Ionians the ceronia, which also buds from the trunk, the fruit being a pod, which has consequently been called by some the Egyptian fig. But this is clearly a mistake, as it does not grow in Egypt but in Syria and Ionia, and also in the neighbourhood of Cnidus and on the island of Rhodes. It is always in full foliage, and it has a white flower with a powerful scent. It sends out shoots at the lower parts, and consequently is of a yellow colour above ground, as the suckers drain away the sap. If the fruit of the preceding year is picked about the rising of the Dog-star, it at once grows a second crop, after which it blossoms through the period of the Bear-ward, and the winter nourishes its fruit.

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§ 13.17.1  Egypt also possesses a tree of a peculiar kind called the persea which resembles a pear but is an evergreen. It bears fruit without intermission, as when it is plucked a fresh crop sprouts the next day, but its season for ripening is when the midsummer winds are blowing. The fruit is longer than a pear, and is enclosed in a shell like an almond and a rind the colour of grass, but where the almond has a kernel this has a plum, which differs from an almond kernel in being short and soft, and although temptingly sweet and luscious, is quite wholesome. The wood is just like that of the lotus for goodness and soundness and, also in its black colour, and it too has habitually been used for making statues. The timber of the tree we have mentioned called the acorn-date, although reliable, is not so highly valued, as a large proportion of it has a twisted grain, so it is only used for shipbuilding.

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§ 13.18.1  But on the contrary the wood of the cucus is in great esteem; this tree resembles a palm in that its leaves are also used for textiles, but it differs because it spreads out into branches like arms. The fruit is of a size that fills the hand; its colour is yellow and its juice has an attractive sweet taste, with a touch of astringency. It has a large and very hard shell inside, which is used by turners for making curtain-rings, and inside the shell is a kernel which has a sweet taste while fresh, but which when dried goes on getting continually harder and harder, so that it can only be eaten after being soaked in water for several days. The wood has a rather uneven grain that is most attractive, and it is consequently very much admired by the Persians.

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§ 13.19.1  Also thorn-wood is equally esteemed in the same country, that is, the wood of a black thorn, as it lasts without decaying even in water, and is consequently extremely serviceable for the ribs of ships; timbers made of a white thorn rot easily. It has sharp thorns even on the leaves, and seed in pods that is used instead of oak-galls in dressing leather. The blossom has a pleasing effect in garlands and also makes a valuable medicine; also the tree distils gum. But its most valuable property is that when cut down it shoots up again two years later. This thorn grows in the neighbourhood of Thebes, where oak, persea and olive are also found, in a forest region nearly 40 miles from the Nile, watered by springs that rise in it. This region also contains the Egyptian plum-tree, which is not unlike the thorn last mentioned; its fruit resembles a medlar, and ripens in the winter, and the tree is an evergreen. The fruit contains a large stone, but the fleshy part, owing to its nature and to the abundance in which it grows, provides the natives with quite a harvest, as after cleaning it they crush it and make it into cakes for storage. There was also once a forest region round Memphis with such huge trees that three men could not join hands round The trunks; and one of them was particularly remarkable, not because of its fruit or its utility for some purpose, but on account of the circumstance that it has the appearance of a thorn, but leaves resembling wings, which when somebody touches the branches at once fall off and afterwards sprout again.

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§ 13.20.1  It is agreed that the Egyptian thorn supplies the best kind of gum; it is of a streaked appearance, grey in colour, clean and free from bark, and it sticks to the teeth; its price is 3 denarii per pound. The gum produced from the bitter almond and the cherry is inferior, and that from plum-trees is the worst kind of all. A gum also forms in the vine which is extremely valuable for children's sores, and the gum sometimes found in the olive-tree is good for toothache; but the gun's also found in the elm on Mount Corycus in Cilicia and in the juniper are of no use for anything, indeed elm-tree gum there even breeds gnats. Also a gum exudes from the sarcocolla that is the name of the tree and also of the gum — which is extremely useful both to painters and to medical men; it resembles incense dust, and for the purposes mentioned the white kind is better than the red; its price is the one mentioned above.

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§ 13.21.1  We have not yet touched on the marsh-plants nor the shrubs that grow by rivers. But before we leave Egypt we shall also describe the nature of papyrus, since our civilization or at all events our records depend very largely on the employment of paper. According to Marcus Varro we owe even the discovery of paper to the victory of Alexander the Great, when he founded Alexandria in Egypt, before which time paper was not used. First of all people used to write on palm-leaves and then on the bark of certain trees, and afterwards folding sheets of lead began to be employed for official muniments, and then also sheets of linen or tablets of wax for private documents; for we find in Homer that the use of writing-tablets existed even before the Trojan period, but when he was writing even the land itself which is now thought of as Egypt did not exist as such, while now paper grows in the Sebennytic and Saitic nomes of Egypt, the land having been subsequently heaped up by the Nile, inasmuch as Homer wrote that the island of Pharos, which is now joined to Alexandria by a bridge, was twenty-four hours' distance by sailing-ship from the land. Subsequently, also according to Varro, when owing to the rivalry between King Ptolemy and King Eumenes about their libraries Ptolemy suppressed the export of paper, parchment was invented at Pergamum; and afterwards the employment of the material on which the immortality of human beings depends spread indiscriminately.

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§ 13.22.1  Papyrus then grows in the swamps of Egypt or else in the sluggish waters of the Nile where they have overflowed and lie stagnant in pools not more than about three feet in depth; it has a sloping root as thick as a man's arm, and tapers gracefully up with triangular sides to a length of not more than about 15 feet, ending in a head like a thyrsus; it has no seed, and is of no use except that the flowers are made into wreaths for statues of the gods. The roots are employed by the natives for timber, and not only to serve as firewood but also for making various utensils and vessels; indeed the papyrus itself is plaited to make boats, and the inner bark is woven into sail-cloth and matting, and also cloth, as well as blankets and ropes. It is also used as chewing-gum, both in the raw state and when boiled, though only the juice is swallowed.

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§ 13.22.2  Papyrus also grows in Syria on the borders of the lake round which grows the scented reed already mentioned, and King Antiochus would only allow ropes made from this Syrian papyrus to be used in his navy, the employment of esparto not yet having become general. It has recently been realized that papyrus growing in the Euphrates near Babylon can also be used in the same way for paper; nevertheless up to the present the Parthians prefer to embroider letters upon cloths.

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§ 13.23.1  The process of making paper from papyrus is to split it with a needle into very thin strips made as broad as possible, the best quality being in the centre of the plant, and so on in the order of its splitting up. The first quality used to be called 'hieratic paper' and was in early times devoted solely to books connected with religion, but in a spirit of flattery it was given the name of Augustus, just as the second best was called 'Livia paper' after his consort, and thus the name 'hieratic' came down to the third class. The next quality had been given the name of 'amphitheatre' paper, from the place of its manufacture. This paper was taken over by the clever workshop of Fannius at Rome, and its texture was made finer by a careful process of insertion, so that it was changed from common paper into one of first-class quality, and received the name of the maker; but the paper of this kind that did not have this additional treatment remained in its own class as amphitheatre paper. Next to this is the Saitic paper named from the town where it is produced in the greatest abundance, being made from shavings of inferior quality, and the Taeneotic, from a neighbouring place, made from material still nearer the outside skin, in the case of which we reach a variety that is sold by mere weight and not for its quality. As for what is called 'emporitic' paper, it is no good for writing but serves to provide covers for documents and wrappers for merchandise, and consequently takes its name from the Greek word for a merchant. After this comes the actual papyrus, and its outermost layer, which resembles a rush and is of no use even for making ropes except those used in water.

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§ 13.23.2  Paper of all kinds is 'woven' on a board moistened with water from the Nile, muddy liquid supplying the effect of glue. First an upright layer is smeared on to the table, using the full length of papyrus available after the trimmings have been cut off at both ends, and afterwards cross strips complete the lattice-work. The next step is to press it in presses, and the sheets are dried in the sun and then joined together, the next strip used always diminishing in quality down to the worst of all. There are never more than twenty sheets to a roll.

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§ 13.24.1  There is a great difference in the breadth of the various kinds of paper: the best is thirteen inches wide, the hieratic two inches less, the Fannian measures ten inches and the amphitheatre paper one less, while the Saitic is still fewer inches across and is not as wide as the mallet used in making it, as the emporitic kind is so narrow that it does not exceed six inches. Other points looked at in paper are fineness, stoutness, whiteness and smoothness. The status of best quality was altered by the emperor Claudius. The reason was that the thin paper of the period of Augustus was not strong enough to stand the friction of the pen, and moreover as it let the writing show through there was a fear of a smudge being caused by what was written on the back, and the great transparency of the paper had an unattractive look in other respects. Consequently the foundation was made of leaves of second quality and the woof or cross layer of leaves of the first quality. Claudius also increased the width of the sheet, making it a foot across. There were also eighteen-inch sheets called 'maerocola,' but examination detected a defect in them, as tearing off a single strip damaged several pages. On this account Claudius paper has come to be preferred to all other kinds, although the Augustus kind still holds the field for correspondence; but Livia paper, having no quality of a first-class kind, but being entirely second class, has retained its position.

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§ 13.25.1  Roughness is smoothed out with a piece of ivory or a shell, but this makes the lettering apt to fade, as owing to the polish so given the paper does not take the ink so well, but has a shinier surface. The damping process if carelessly applied often causes difficulty in writing at first, and it can be detected by a blow with the mallet, or even by the musty smell if the process has been rather carelessly carried out. Spottiness also may be detected by the eye, but a bad porous strip found inserted in the middle of the pasted joins, owing to the sponginess of the papyrus, sucks up the ink and so can scarcely be detected except when the ink of a letter runs: so much opportunity is there for cheating. The consequence is that another task is added to the process of paper-weaving.

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§ 13.26.1  The common kind of paste for paper is made fine flour of the best quality mixed with boiling water, with a very small sprinkle of vinegar; for carpenter's paste and gum make too brittle a compound. But a more careful process is to strain the crumb of leavened bread in boiling water; this method requires the smallest amount of paste at the seams, and produces a paper softer than even linen. But all the paste used ought to be exactly a day old — not more nor yet less. Afterwards the paper is beaten thin with a mallet and run over with a layer of paste, and then again has its creases removed by pressure and is flattened out with the mallet. This process may enable records to last a long time; at the house of the poet and most distinguished citizen Pomponius Secundus I have seen documents in the hand of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus written nearly two hundred years ago; while as for autographs of Cicero, of his late Majesty Augustus, and of Virgil, we see them constantly.

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§ 13.27.1  There are important instances forthcoming that make against the opinion of Marcus Varro in regard to the history of paper. Cassius Hemina, a historian of great antiquity, has stated in his Annals, Book 4, that the secretary Gnaeus Terentius, when digging over his land on the Janiculan, turned up a coffer that had contained the body of Numa, who was king at Rome, and that in the same coffer were found some books of his — this was in the consulship of Publius 181 BC. Cornelius Cethegus, son of Lucius, and of Marcus Baebius Tamphilus, son of Quintus, dating 535 years after the accession of Numa; and the historian says that the books were made of paper, which makes the matter still more remarkable, because of their having lasted in a hole in the ground, and consequently on a point of such importance I will quote the words of Hemina himself: 'Other people wondered how those books could have lasted so long, but Terentius's explanation was that about in the middle of the coffer there had been a square stone tied all round with waxed cords, and that the three books had been placed on the top of this stone; and he thought this position was the reason why they had not decayed; and that the books had been soaked in citrus-oil, and he thought that this was why they were not moth-eaten. These books contained the philosophical doctrines of Pythagoras' — and Hemina said that the books had been burnt by the praetor Quintus Petilius because they were writings of philosophy [prob. an interpolation]. The same story is recorded by Piso the former Censor in his Commentaries, Book I, but he says that there were seven volumes of pontifical law and the same number of Pythagorean philosophy; while Tuditanus in Book X3 says that there were twelve volumes of the Decrees of Numa; Varro himself says that there were seven volumes of Antiquities of Man, and Antias in his Second Book speaks of there having been twelve volumes On Matters Pontifical written in Latin and the same number in Greek containing Doctrines of Philosophy; Antias also quotes in Book 3 a Resolution of the Senate deciding that these volumes were to be burnt. It is however universally agreed that the Sibyl brought three volumes to Tarquin the Proud, of which two were burnt by herself while the third was destroyed in the burning of the Capitol in the Sulla crisis. Moreover the Mucianus who was three times consul has stated that recently, when governor of Lycia, he had read in a certain temple a letter of Sarpedon written on paper at Troy — which seems to me even more remarkable if even when Homer was writing, Egypt did not yet exist: otherwise why, if paper was already in use, is it known to have been the custom to write on folding tablets made of lead or sheets of linen, or why has Homer stated that even in Lycia itself wooden tablets, and not letters, were given to Bellerophon? This commodity also is liable to dearth, and as early as the principate of Tiberius a shortage of paper led to the appointment from the senate of umpires to supervise its distribution, as otherwise life was completely upset.

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§ 13.28.1  Ethiopia, which is on the borders of Egypt, has virtually no remarkable trees except the wool-tree, like the one described among the trees of India and Arabia. However, the Ethiopian variety has a much woollier consistency, and a larger pod, like that of a pomegranate, and also the trees themselves resemble each other. Beside the wool-tree there are also palms of the kind which we have described. The trees and the scented forests of the islands round the coast of Ethiopia have been spoken of when those islands were mentioned.

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§ 13.29.1  Mount Atlas is said to possess a forest of a remarkable character, about which we have spoken. Adjoining Mount Atlas is Mauretania, which produces a great many citrus-trees — and the tablemania which the ladies use as a retort to the men against the charge of extravagance in pearls. There still exists a table that belonged to Marcus Cicero for which with his slender resources and, what is more surprising, at that date, he paid half-a-million sesterces; and also one is recorded as belonging to Gallus Asinius that cost a million. Also two hanging tables were sold at auction by King Juba, of which one fetched 1,200,000 sesterces and the other a little less. A table that was lately destroyed in a fire came down from the Cethegi and had changed hands at 1,300,000 sesterces — the price of a large estate, supposing somebody preferred to devote so large a sum to the purchase of landed property. The size of the largest tables hitherto has been: one made by Ptolemy, king of Mauretania, out of two semicircular slabs of wood joined together, 4 1/2 ft. in diameter and 3 in. thick — and the invisibility of the join makes the table more marvellous as a work of art than it could possibly have been if a product of nature — and a single slab bearing the name of Nomius a freedman of the Emperor which is 3 ft. 11 1/4 in. across and 11 1/4 in. thick. Under this head it seems proper to include a table that belonged to the Emperor Tiberius which was 4 ft. 2 1/4 in. across, and 1 1/2 in. thick all over, but was only covered with a veneer of citrus-wood, although the one belonging to his freedman Nomius was so sumptuous. The material is an excrescence of the root, and is very greatly admired when it grows entirely underground, and so is more uncommon than the knobs that grow above ground, on the branches as well as on the trunk; and the timber bought at so high a price is in reality a disease of the trees, the size and the roots of which can be judged from the circular tabletops. In foliage, scent and the appearance of the trunk these trees resemble the female cyprus, which is also a forest tree. A mountain called Ancorarius in Hither Mauretania provided the most celebrated citrus-wood, but the supply is now exhausted.

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§ 13.30.1  The outstanding merit of citrus-wood tables is to have wavy marks forming a vein or else little spirals. The former marking produces a longish pattern and is consequently called tiger-wood, while the latter gives a twisted pattern and consequently slabs of that sort are called panther-tables. Also some have wavy crinkled markings, which are more esteemed if they resemble the eyes in a peacock's tail. Besides the kinds previously mentioned, great esteem, though coming after these, belongs to those veined with a thick cluster of what look like grains, these slabs being consequently called parsley-wood, from the resemblance. But the highest value of all resides in the colour of the wood, the colour of meed being the most favoured, shining with the wine that is proper to it. The next point is size: nowadays tables made of whole trunks are admired, or several trunks mortised together in one table.

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§ 13.30.2  The faults in a table are woodiness — that is the name given to a dull patternless uniformity in the timber, or uniformity arranged like the leaves of a plane-tree, and also to a grain resembling the veining or colouring of the holm-oak — and to flaws or hairy lines resembling flaws, a fault to which heat and wind have rendered the timber particularly liable; next comes a colour running across the wood in a black streak like a lamprey and marked with irregular raven-scratchings as on a poppy and in general rather approaching black, or blotches of various colours. The natives bury the timber in the ground while still green, giving it a coat of wax; but carpenters lay it in heaps of corn for periods of a week with intervals of a week between, and it is surprising how much its weight is reduced by this process. Also wreckage from ships has recently shown that this timber is dried by the action of sea water, and solidified with a hardness that resists decay, no other method producing this result more powerfully. Citrus-wood tables are best kept and polished by rubbing with the dry hand, especially just after a bath; and they are not damaged by spilt wine, as having been created for the purpose of wine-tables.

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§ 13.30.3  Few things that supply the apparatus of a more luxurious life rank with this tree, and consequently it seems desirable to dwell on it for a little as well. It was known even to Homer — the Greek name for it being thyon, otherwise thya. Well, Homer has recorded its being burut among unguents as one of the luxuries of Circe, whom he meant to be understood as a goddess — those who take the word thyon to mean perfumes being greatly in error, especially as in the same verse he says that cedar and larch were burnt at the same time, which shows that he was only speaking of trees. Already Theophrastus, who wrote immediately after the period of Alexander the Great, about 314 B.C., assigns a high rank to this tree, stating that it was recorded that the flooring of the old temples used to be made of it and that its timber when used in roofed buildings is virtually everlasting, being proof against all causes of decay; and he says that no wood is more marked with veins than the root, and that no products made of any other material are more valuable. The finest citrus, he says, is round the Temple of Hammon, but it also grows in the interior of Cyrenaica. He makes no mention, however, of tables made of citrus-wood, and indeed there is no older record of one before that of the time of Cicero, which proves their novelty.

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§ 13.31.1  There is another tree with the same name, bearing fruit which some people abhor for its scent and bitter taste while other people are fond of it; this wood is also used for decorating houses, but it does not need further description.

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§ 13.32.1  Africa also, where it faces in our direction, produces a remarkable tree, the lotus, called in the vernacular celthis, which also has been naturalized in Italy, though it has been altered by the change of soil. The finest lotus is found round the Syrtes and the district of the Nasamones. It is the size of a pear, although Cornelius Nepos states that it is a short fruit. The incisions in the leaf resemble those in the holm-oak, except that they are more numerous. There are several varieties of lotus, differing chiefly in their fruits. This one is the size of a bean and saffron-coloured, but it changes colour several times before it is ripe, like grapes. It grows in thick clusters on the branches like myrtle-berries and not like cherries as it does in Italy; in its own country it is so sweet to eat that it has even given its name to a race of people and to a land which is too hospitable to strangers who come there, making them forget their native land. It is reported that chewing this lotus prevents gastric diseases. The better kind has no stone inside it, those of the other variety having a kernel of a bony appearance. Also a wine is pressed from this fruit that resembles mead, which again according to Nepos will not keep for more than ten days; he states that the berries are chopped up with spelt and stored in casks for food. Indeed we are told that armies have been fed on this while marching to and fro through Africa. The wood is of a black colour, and is in demand for making melodious flutes, while out of the root are devised knife-handles and other short implements.

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§ 13.32.2  This is the nature of the lotus-tree in Africa. But the same name also belongs to a herbaceous plant, as well as to a colewort in Egypt belonging to the class of marsh-plants. This springs up when the flood waters of the Nile retire; it resembles a bean in its stalk and in its leaves, which grow in large, thick clusters, although they are shorter and more slender than the leaves of a bean. The fruit grows in the head of the plant and resembles the fruit of the poppy in its indentations and in every other way; it contains grains like millet-seeds. The natives pile these heads in heaps to rot, and then separate the seeds by washing and dry them and crush them, and use them to make bread. There is a further remarkable fact reported, that when the sun sets these poppies shut up and fold their leaves round them, and at sunrise open again, this going on till they ripen and the flower, which is white, falls off. A further point reported is that in the Euphrates both the head itself and the flower at the evening go on submerging till midnight, and disappear entirely into the depth so that they cannot be found even by plunging the hand in, and then return and by degrees straighten up again, and at sunrise come out of the water and open their flower, and still go on rising so that the flower is raised up quite a long way above the water. The lotus has a root of the size of a quince, enclosed in a black skin like the shell of a chestnut; inside it has a white body, agreeable to eat raw but still more agreeable when boiled in water or roasted in the ashes. Its peelings are more useful than any other fodder for fattening pigs.

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§ 13.33.1  The region of the Cyrenaica ranks the lotus below its own Christ's-thorn. This is more in the nature of a shrub, and its fruit is redder, and contains a kernel that is eaten by itself, as it is agreeable alone; it is improved by being dipped in wine, and moreover its juice improves wine. The interior of Africa as far as the Garamantes and the desert is covered with palms remarkable for their size and their luscious fruit, the most celebrated being in the neighbourhood of the temple of Ammon.

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§ 13.34.1  But the country in the neighbourhood of Carthage claims by the name of Punic apple what some call the pomegranate; this it has also split up into classes, by giving the name of apyrenum to the variety that lacks a woody kernel: the consistency of this is whiter than that of the others, and its pips have a more agreeable taste and the membranes enclosing them are not so bitter; but in other respects these apples have a special structure resembling the cells in a honeycomb, which is common to all that have a kernel. Of these there are five kinds, the sweet, the sour, the mixed, the acid and the vinous; those of Samos and of Egypt are divided into the red-leaved and the white-leaved varieties. The skin of the unripe fruit is specially used for dressing leather. The flower is called balaustium, and is serviceable for doctors and also for dyeing cloth; it has given its name to a special colour.

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§ 13.35.1  Shrubs growing in Asia and Greece are the epicactis, which others call emboline, with small leaves which taken in drink are an antidote against poisons, as those of the heath are against snakes, and the shrub that produces the grain of Cnidus, which some call flax, the name of the shrub itself being thymelaea, which others call chamelaea, others pyros achne, some cnestor, others cneorum. It resembles the oleaster, but has narrower leaves, which when chewed have a gummy consistency; it is the size of a myrtle, and has a seed of the colour and shape of spelt, which is only used for medicinal purposes.

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§ 13.36.1  The goat-shrub only grows in the island of Crete; it resembles the terebinth in seed as well as in other respects; the seed is reported to be very efficacious against arrow wounds. The same island also produces a goat-thorn, which has the root of the white thorn, and is much preferred to the goat-thorn growing in the country of the Medes or in Achaia; its price is 3 denarii per pound.

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§ 13.37.1  Asia also produces the goat-plant or scorpio, a thorn without leaves and with reddish branches, used for medicinal purposes: Italy also has the myrica, which is there called the tamarisk, and Achaia the wild brya; a remarkable property of the brya is that only the cultivated kind bears fruit; this resembles a gall-nut. In Syria and Egypt this shrub is abundant, and we give the name of unlucky wood to its timber; yet some of the timbers of Greece are unluckier, for Greece grows a tree named the ostrys, another form of the name being ostrya, which grows by itself round rocks washed by water; it is like an ash in its bark and branches, and a pear in its leaf, though the leaves are a little longer and thicker and wrinkled with indentations running all across them; the seed resembles barley in colour as well as shape. The wood is hard and solid, and it is said that if it is brought into a house it causes difficulty in childbirth and painful deaths.

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§ 13.38.1  Equally unlucky is the tree on the island of Lesbos called the euonymus, which is not unlike the pomegranate tree — its leaves are between pomegranate and bay-leaves in size, but have the shape and soft texture of the leaf of the pomegranate — and which by the scent of its white blossom gives prompt warning of its pestilential qualities. It bears a pod like that of the sesame, with a coarse square-shaped grain inside it which is deadly for animals; and the leaf also has the same property, although sometimes an immediate evacuation of the bowels gives relief.

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§ 13.39.1  Cornelius Alexander mentions a tree called the hon-tree, the timber of which he says was used to build the Argo, which bears mistletoe resembling that on the oak, and which cannot be rotted by water or destroyed by fire, the same being the case with its mistletoe. This tree is, so far as I am aware, unknown to anyone else.

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§ 13.40.1  Andrachle is almost always rendered into Latin for the Greeks by the word 'purslain,' although purslain is a herbaceous plant and its Greek name is one letter different, andrachne: for the rest the andrachle is a forest tree, nor does it grow in level country. It resembles the arbutus, only it has a smaller leaf and is an evergreen; the bark, though not rough, might be supposed to have frozen round the tree, it has such a wretched appearance.

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§ 13.41.1  The sumach has a similar leaf, but is smaller in size. It has the peculiarity of clothing its fruit (which is called pappus) with downy fluff, a thing that occurs with no other tree. The apharce also resembles the andrachle, and like it bears twice a year; they produce a first crop of fruit just at the time when the grapes are beginning to ripen, and a second at the beginning of winter. What sort of fruit is produced on these two occasions is not reported.

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§ 13.42.1  It may be suitable to have the fennel giant mentioned among the exotics and assigned to the genus 'tree,' inasmuch as the structure of some plants, in the classification that we shall adopt, has the whole of the wood outside in place of bark and inside, in place of wood, a fungous pith like that of the elder, though some have an empty hollow inside like reeds. This fennel grows in hot countries over sea; its stalk is divided by knotted joints. It has two varieties, one called in Greek narthex, which rises to some height, the other narthecia, which always grows low. From the joints shoot out very large leaves, the larger the nearer to the ground; but in other respects it has the same nature as the anise, and the fruit is similar. No shrub supplies a wood of lighter weight, and consequently it is easy to carry, and supplies walking-sticks to be used by old gentlemen.

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§ 13.43.1  The seed of the fennel giant has been called by some thapsia, but these people are mistaken, since the thapsia, though no doubt it is a giant fennel, is one of a peculiar kind, having the leaves of a fennel and a hollow stalk not exceeding the length of a walking-stick; the seed is like that of the giant fennel, but the root is white. When an incision is made in the thapsia milk oozes out, and when pounded it emits a sweet juice; even the bark is not thrown away. All these parts of the tree are poisons; in fact it is injurious even to those engaged in digging it up if the slightest current of air blows from the shrub in their direction: their bodies swell up, and their face is attacked by erysipelas — for which reason before beginning they grease it with a solution of wax. The doctors however say that mixed with other ingredients the shrub is of use in treating certain diseases, and also for fox-mange, bruises and spottiness — as if there really were any lack of remedies, forcing them to take in hand new enormities! But they cloak their noisome expedient with excuses of that sort, and such is their impudence that they ask us to believe that poison is among the resources of science!

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§ 13.43.2  The thapsia of Africa is the most violent of all. Some people make an incision in the stalk during harvest-time and make a hollow in the root itself for the juice to collect in, and when it has dried take it away; others pound the leaves and stalk and root in a mortar and after drying the juice hard in the sun cut it up into lozenges. The emperor Nero at the beginning of his reign gave this juice a famous advertisement, as when during his nocturnal escapades his face had sustained a number of bruises he smeared it with a mixture of thapsia, frankincense and wax and on the following day gave the lie to rumour by going about with a whole skin. It is a well-known fact that fire can be best kept alight in a fennel stalk, and that the fennels in Egypt are the best.

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§ 13.44.1  In Egypt also grows the caper-tree, a shrub with a rather hard wood; also its seed is well known as an article of food, and is usually gathered together with the stalk. Its foreign varieties should be avoided, inasmuch as the Arabian kind is poisonous and the African injures the gums, and that from Marmarica, is injurious to the womb. Also the Apulian caper-tree produces vomiting and diarrhoea by causing flatulence in all the organs. Some persons call this shrub 'dog-brier,' others 'snake-vine'.

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§ 13.45.1  The saripha growing on the banks of the Nile also belongs to the shrub class. It is about 3 ft. high and the thickness of a man's thumb; its foliage is that of the papyrus, and it is chewed in a similar manner. The root is highly rated in workshops for use as fuel, because of its hardness.

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§ 13.46.1  Also we must not leave out a plant that at Babylon is grown on thorn-bushes, because it will not live anywhere else — just as mistletoe grows on trees, but the plant in question will only grow on what is called the 'royal thorn.' It is a remarkable fact that it buds on the same day as it has been planted — this is done just at the rising of the Dog-star — and it very quickly takes possession of the whole of the tree. It is used in making spiced wine, and is cultivated for that purpose. This thorn also grows on the Long Walls at Athens.

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§ 13.47.1  There is also a shrub called cytisus, which has been remarkably praised by Amphilochus of Athens as a fodder for all kinds of cattle, and when dried for swine as well, and he guarantees a yearly return of 2,000 sesterces for an ingerum of it, even on only moderate soil. It serves the same purpose as vetch, but produces satiety more quickly, an animal being fattened by quite a moderate amount — so much so that beasts of burden fed on it refuse barley. No other fodder produces a larger quantity or a better quality of milk, and above everything as a medicine for cattle it renders them immune from all diseases. He also recommends a potion made of cytisus dried and boiled in water to be given with wine to nursing women when their milk fails, and he says this will make the infants stronger and taller; also he advises giving it while in the green state to fowls, or if it has dried, after being steeped. Moreover, Democritus and Aristomachus promise that bees will never fail if there is cytisus available for them to feed on. No other fodder is less expensive. It is sown when barley is, or in the spring, like leek, if the seed is used; or else the stalk is planted in autumn before the winter solstice. If sown the seed is soaked, or, if there is a shortage of rain, it is watered after sowing. When the plants are 18 inches high they are replanted in a trench a foot deep. This planting is done through the equinoxes, while the shrub is still tender; it takes three years to mature, and it is cut at the spring equinox, when it has done flowering — a job that can be done very cheaply even by a boy or an old woman. It is of a whitish colour to look at, and its appearance may be briefly described by saying that it looks like a trifoliated plant with a rather narrow leaf. It is always fed to stock only once in two days, but in winter as it has got dry it is moistened first; ten pounds make a sufficient feed for a horse, and for smaller animals in proportion. Incidentally, good results are got by sowing garlic and onions as catch-crops between the rows of cytisus.

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§ 13.47.2  The cytisus shrub was discovered in the island of Cythnos, and from there was transplanted to all the Cyclades and later to the Greek cities, greatly increasing the supply of cheese. Moreover — a fact that makes me very much surprised that it is rare in Italy — it is not afraid of damage from heat and cold and hail and snow, and, as Hyginus adds, not even from wood-grubs, as its wood has no attraction for them.

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§ 13.48.1  Shrubs and trees also grow at the bottom of the sea — those in the Mediterranean being of smaller size, for the Red Sea and the whole of the Eastern Ocean are filled with forests. The Latin language has no name for what the Greeks call phycos, as our word alga denotes a herbaceous sea-plant, whereas the phycos is a shrub. It has a broad leaf and is coloured green; and it produces a growth one of the Greek names for which means 'leek-weed' and the other 'bind-weed.' Another variety of the same shrub has a hair-like leaf resembling fennel, and grows on rocks, while the one above grows in shallow water near the coast; both kinds shoot in springtime and die off in autumn. The phycos growing on rocks round the island of Crete is also used for a purple dye; the most approved kind being that growing on the northern side of the island, as is the case in regard to sponges. A third variety resembles a grass; its root is knotted, and so is its stalk, like the stalk of a reed.

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§ 13.49.1  Another group of shrubs is called bryon, which has the leaf of a lettuce only more wrinkled. This grows lower down than the one last mentioned; but in deep water grow a pine and an oak, each 18 inches high; they have shells clinging to their branches. The oak is reported to provide a dye for woollen fabrics, and some in deep water are actually said to bear acorns, these facts having been ascertained by shipwrecked persons and by divers. Also other very large marine trees are reported in the neighbourhood of Sikyon — for the sea-vine grows everywhere, but there is a sea-fig, which has no leaves and a red bark, and also the class of marine shrubs includes a sea-palm. Outside the Straits of Gibraltar grows a marine shrub with the leaf of a leek, and another with the foliage of a bay-tree and of thyme; both of these when thrown up ashore by the waves turn into pumice.

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§ 13.50.1  But in the East it is a remarkable fact that as soon as we leave Keft, passing through the desert we find nothing growing except the thorn called 'dry-thorn,' and this quite seldom; whereas in the Red Sea there are flourishing forests, mostly of bay and olive, both bearing berries and in the rainy season funguses, which when the sun strikes them change into pumice. The bushes themselves grow to the height of a yard and a half. The seas are full of sea-dogs, so much so that it is scarcely safe for a sailor to keep a lookout from the bows — in fact they frequently go for the actual oars.

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§ 13.51.1  The soldiers of Alexander who sailed from India gave an account of some marine trees the foliage of which was green while in the water but dried up in the sun as soon as it was taken out and turned into salt; they also reported that along the coasts there were bulrushes of stone which exactly resembled real ones, and out in deep water certain shrubs of the colour of cow-horn where they branched out and turning red at the top; they were brittle, like glass when handled, but turned red-hot in fire like iron, their proper colour coming back again when they had cooled off. In the same part of the earth also the rising tide submerges forests, although the trees are higher than the loftiest planes and poplars. Theft foliage is that of the bay-tree, and their blossom has the scent and colour of violets; the berries resemble olives, and these also have an agreeable scent; they form in the autumn and fall off in spring, whereas the leaves are never shed. The smaller of these trees are entirely covered by the tide, but the tops of the largest stand out and ships are moored to them, as well as to their roots when the tide goes out. We have been informed from the same sources that other trees also have been observed in the same sea which always keep their leaves and have a fruit resembling a lupine.

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§ 13.51.2  Juba relates that in the neighbourhood of the Cave-dwellers' Islands a bush grows at the bottom of the sea called 'hair of Isis,' which has no leaves and resembles coral, and that when it is lopped it changes its colour to black and turns hard, and when it falls it breaks; and so does another marine bush the Greek name for which means 'the Graces' eyelid,' which is a potent love-charm; he says women make bracelets and necklaces of it. He declares that when being taken the bush is aware of it and turns as hard as horn, blunting the edge of the knife, but that if it is cut before it is aware of the danger that threatens it, it turns into stone.

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§ 14.1.1  SO far we have been dealing mostly with foreign trees that cannot be trained to grow elsewhere than in their place of origin and that refuse to be naturalized in strange countries. We may now speak of those common to various countries, of all of which Italy can be thought to be the special parent. Only it must be remembered by the student that for the present we are specifying their natures and not their modes of cultivation, although actually a very large factor in the nature of a tree is due to its cultivation. There is one thing at which I cannot sufficiently wonder — that of some trees the very memory has perished, and even the names recorded by authors have passed out of knowledge. For who would not admit that now that intercommunication has been established throughout the world by the majesty of the Roman Empire, life has been advanced by the interchange of commodities and by partnership in the blessings of peace, and that even things that had previously lain concealed have all now been established in general use? Still, it must be asserted, we do not find people acquainted with much that has been handed down by the writers of former days: so much more productive was the research of the men of old, or else so much more successful was their industry, when a thousand years ago at the dawn of literature Hesiod began putting forth rules for agriculture, and not a few writers followed him in these researches — which has been a source of more toil to us, inasmuch as nowadays it is necessary to investigate not only subsequent discoveries but also those that had already been made by the men of old, because general slackness has decreed an utter destruction of records.

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§ 14.1.2  And for this fault who can discover other causes than the general movement of affairs in the world? The fact is that other customs have come into vogue, and the minds of men are occupied about other matters: the only arts cultivated are the arts of avarice. Previously a nation's sovereignty was self-contained, and consequently the people's genius was also circumscribed; and so a certain barrenness of fortune made it a necessity to exercise the gifts of the mind, and kings innumerable received the homage of the arts, and put these riches in the front place when displaying their resources, believing that by the arts they could prolong their immortality. This was the reason why the rewards of life and also its achievements were then so abundant. But later generations have been positively handicapped by the expansion of the world and by our multiplicity of resources. After senators began to be selected and judges appointed on the score of wealth, and wealth became the sole adornment of magistrate and military commander, after lack of children to succeed one began to occupy the place of highest influence and power, and legacy-hunting ranked as the most profitable profession, and the only delights consisted in ownership, the true prizes of life went to ruin, and all the arts that derived their name 'liberal' from liberty, the supreme good, fell into the opposite class, and servility began to be the sole means of advancement. This deity was worshipped by different men in different manners and in different matters, although every man's prayer was directed to the same end and to hopes of possessing; indeed even men of high character everywhere preferred to cultivate the vices of others rather than the good gifts that were their own. The consequence is, I protest, that pleasure has begun to live and life itself has ceased. We, however, will carry our researches even into matters that have passed out of notice, and will not be daunted by the lowliness of certain objects, any more than we were when dealing with the animals, although we see that Virgil, the prince of poets, was led by this consideration to make omissions among the resources of the garden and in those which he has recorded has only culled out the flower of his subject, happy and gracious as he is: he has only named fifteen kinds of grapes in all and three of olives and as many pears, and of apples only the Assyrian citron, neglecting all the rest.

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§ 14.2.1  But where can we better make a beginning than with the vine? Supremacy in respect of the vine is to such a degree the special distinction of Italy that even with this one possession she can be thought to have vanquished all the good things of the world, even in the department of scents, inasmuch as when the vine is in blossom all over the country it gives a scent that surpasses any other in fragrance.

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§ 14.2.2  Even on account of its size the vine used in early days rightly to be reckoned as belonging to the class of trees. In the city of Piombino is to be seen a statue of Jupiter made of a single vine-stalk that has resisted decay for many ages; and similarly a bowl at Marseilles; the temple of Juno at Metapontum has stood supported by pillars of vine-wood; and even at the present day we ascend to the roof of the temple of Diana at Ephesus by a staircase made from a single vine, grown it is said at Cyprus, inasmuch as vines grow to an exceptional height in that island. And no other timber lasts for longer ages.

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§ 14.2.3  But I am inclined to believe that the things mentioned were made of the wood of the wild vine. Our own vines are kept down by yearly pruning, and all their strength is drawn out into shoots, or else thrown downward into layers, and the only benefit these supply is that of their juice, obtained by means of a variety of methods adapted to the peculiarities of the climate and the qualities of the soil. In Campania the vines espouse the poplars, and embracing their brides and climbing with wanton arms in a series of knots among their branches, rise level with their tops, soaring aloft to such a height that a hired vintager expressly stipulates in his contract for the cost of a funeral and a grave! In fact they never stop growing; and I have before now seen entire country houses and mansions encircled by the shoots and clinging tendrils of a single vine. And a thing that was considered in the first degree worthy of record also by Valerianus Cornelius is that a single vine in the colonnades of Livia at Rome protects the open walks with its shady trellises, while at the same time it produces 12 amphorae of juice yearly.

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§ 14.2.4  Elms indeed are everywhere overtopped by vines, and there is a story that Cineas, the ambassador of King Pyrrhus, was surprised at the height to which the vines grew at Aricia and made an amusing joke about the rather rough flavour of the wine, to the effect that the parent of it thoroughly deserved being hung on such a lofty gibbet! There is an Italian tree on the other side of the Po called the rumpotinus, or by another name the opulus, the broad circular stories of which are covered by vines which spread out with their bare snaky growth to where the tree forks and then throw out their tendrils along the upraised fingers of the branches. Also vines when propped up with stakes about as tall as a man of middle height make a shaggy growth and form a whole vineyard from a cutting, by the unconscionable creeping of their rods and the rambling of their tendrils over all the empty gaps, completely filling the middle of a courtyard. So many are the different varieties that even Italy alone harbours.

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§ 14.3.1  In some of the provinces the vine stands by itself without any prop, gathering its limbs together inward and providing nutriment for thick growth by means of their shortness. In other places this is prohibited by the wind, for instance, in Africa and in parts of the province of Narbonne, where vines are prevented from growing beyond their pruned stumps and always resemble plants that are hoed, straying across the fields like herbaceous plants and drinking up the juice of the soil with their grapes as they go; and consequently in the interior of Africa the clusters exceed the body of an infant child in size. In no other country are the vines harsher, but nowhere else have the grapes a more agreeable firmness, which is very possibly the source of the name 'hard grape.' As to varieties in respect of size, colour and flavours of the berry they are innumerable and they are actually multiplied by the varieties of wine: in one district they have a brilliant purple colour, in another a rosy glow or a glossy green tint; for grapes that are merely white and black are the common sorts. But the large-cluster grapes swell out like a breast and the finger-grapes have an exceptionally long berry. Also such is the sportiveness of nature that very large grapes have small grapes clinging to them as companions which rival them in sweetness: these are called in Greek 'small-berry' vines. Some grapes will last all through the winter if the clusters are hung by a string from the ceiling, and others will keep merely in their own natural vigour by being stood in earthenware jars with casks put over them, and packed round with fermenting grape-skins; others can be given a flavour by smoke, which also adds flavour to wines, and the authority of Tiberius Caesar has caused particular glory in regard to the efficiency of smoke in this respect to attach to the forges of Africa; before his time priority at the table belonged to the Ilaetic grapes from the territory of Verona. Moreover, raisins are called 'passi' from having 'endured' the sun. Grapes are also preserved in must, and so made drunk with their own wine, and some are made sweeter by being placed in must that has been boiled down; but others remain on the parent vine to await the coming of a new generation, acquiring a glassy transparency, and the astringency of pitch poured on the footstalk gives them the same durable hardness that it gives to wine in casks or jars. A vine has now been discovered that of itself produces a flavour of pitch in the wine: this vine gives celebrity to the territory of Vienne by the varieties of Monte Taburno and of the Sotani and Helvii; it has become famous only recently and was unknown in the period of the poet Virgil, who died 90 years ago. Add that the vine has been introduced into the camp, and in the hand of the centurions is the mainstay of supreme authority and command and with its rich reward it lures on the laggard ranks to the tardy eaglest and even in offences it confers honour on punishment itself. Moreover it was vineyards that suggested a method for siege-trains. As for medicines, grapes hold such an important place among them that they act as remedies in themselves, merely by supplying wine.

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§ 14.4.1  Democritus, who professed to know all the different kinds of vines in Greece, was alone in thinking it possible for them to be counted, but all other writers have stated that there is a countless and infinite number of varieties; and the truth of this will appear more clearly if we consider the various kinds of wines. We shall not mention all of them, but the most famous, inasmuch as there are almost as many wines as there are districts, so that it will be enough to have pointed out the most celebrated kinds of wine or the ones remarkable for some special property.

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§ 14.4.2  The highest rank is given to the vines of Aminaea, account of the body of that wine and its life, which undoubtedly improves with age. There are five varieties of these vines; of these the 'younger sister' with a smaller berry sheds its blossom better! and can stand rain and stormy weather, which is not the case with the 'elder sister,' though this is less liable to damage when trained on a tree than when on a frame. The 'twin sisters,' which have got this name because the bunches always grow in pairs, give a wine with a very rough flavour but of exceptional strength; the smaller of these 'twins' is damaged by a south wind, but the other winds give it nutriment, for instance on Mount Vesuvius and the hills of Sorrento, but in all other parts of Italy it only flourishes when trained on trees. The fifth kind is the 'woolly' grape — for, to prevent our being very much surprised at the Chinese or the Indians, it is covered with a coat of down. It ripens first of the Aminaean grapes, and decays the most quickly.

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§ 14.4.3  The next rank belongs to the vines of Mentana, the wood of which is red, in consequence of which some people have called them the 'ruddy vines.' These produce less wine, as they have too much husk and lees, but they are very strong in resisting frost, and they suffer worse from drought than rain and from heat than cold, and consequently they hold the first place in cold and damp localities. The variety with a smaller berry is more productive, and the one with a cleft leafless.

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§ 14.4.4  The 'bee-vine' is so called because bees are specially fond of it. It has two varieties, which also are covered with down in the young state; the difference between them is that one ripens more quickly than the other, although the latter also ripens fast. These vines do not object to cold situations, and nevertheless no others rot more quickly from rain. The wines made from them are sweet at first but acquire roughness in the course of years. In Etruria this vine flourishes more than any other.

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§ 14.4.5  So far we assign the chief distinction to the vines peculiar and indigenous to Italy. The remaining kinds have come from abroad. From Chios or Thasos is imported a Greek light wine not inferior in quality to the Aminaean vintages; the vine has a very tender grape, and such small clusters that it does not pay to grow it except in a very rich soil. The eugenia, with its name denoting high quality, has been imported from the hills of Taormina to be grown only in the territory of Alba, as if transplanted elsewhere it at once degenerates: for in fact some vines have so strong an affection for certain localities that they leave all their reputation behind there and cannot be transplanted elsewhere in their full vigour. This occurs also with the Rhaetian and Allobrogian grapes — the latter the grape with the flavour of pitch which we mentioned above — which are famous at home but not worth recognition elsewhere. All the same, being good bearers they make up in quantity what they lack in quality, the eugenia grape in warm localities, the Raetic in those with a moderate climate and the Allobrogian in cold districts, as it ripens in frost and has a black colour. The wines made from the grapes so far mentioned, even from the black ones, turn to a white colour with age. The remaining vines are of no quality, although occasionally owing to the agency of climate or soil they are not disappointing when old, as in the case of the Faecenian vine, and that of which blossoms at the same time but has fewer grapes; their blossom is never liable to injury, as they do not come before the west wind of early spring and can withstand wind and rain, although they do better in cold places than in warm ones and in damp situations than in dry. The visulla bears clusters of large size rather than closely packed; it cannot stand changes of weather, but lasts well against a continuous spell of cold or heat. The smaller variety of this kind is the better one. It is difficult to please in choice of soil, as in a rich soil it decays and in a thin soil it does not come on at all; its fastidiousness requires an intermediate blend of soil, and that is why it is common in the Sabine hill country. Its grapes are not attractive to look at, but have an agreeable flavour; if they are not gathered as soon as they are ripe, they will fall off even before they decay. Its hardiness and the size of the leaves protect the grapes against hailstorms.

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§ 14.4.6  The grapes called helvolae again are remarkable for rather frequently varying in their colour, which is midway between the purple grapes and the black ones, and they have consequently been called by some people varianae. Among them the blacker kind is preferred; both kinds bear large crops every other year, though they make better wine when the crop is less abundant. Also the praecia vine has two varieties, distinguished by the size of the grape; these vines make a great deal of wood, and their bunches are most useful for storing in jars; the leaf resembles parsley. The people of Dyrrachium speak highly of the balisca vine, which the Spanish provinces call coccolobis; its grapes grow in rather scanty bunches and can stand hot weather and south winds; its wine is apt to go to the head, but the yield is abundant. The Spanish provinces distinguish two kinds of this vine, one having an oblong grape and the other a round one; they gather them last of all. The sweeter the coccolobis grape is, the better it is; but even if it has a rough taste it turns sweet with age, and one that was sweet turns rough; in the last state they are held to rival the wine of Alba. It is said that to drink the juice of this grape is very good for disorders of the bladder. The albuelis vine bears more fruit at the top of the trees that it is grown on, the visulla on the bottom branches; and consequently, when both are planted round the same trees, owing to this difference of habit they produce rich crops. One of the black grapes has been named 'the good-for-nothing,' though it might more properly be styled the sober, as the wine it produces is admirable, particularly when old, but though strong it has no ill effects: in fact this is the only vintage that does not cause intoxication. All the other kinds of vine have the recommendation of bearing freely, and chief among them the helvennaca. Of this there are two kinds, one larger, which some people call the long helvennaca, the other smaller, called emarcus; the latter is not so prolific but produces a wine of more agreeable flavour; it is distinguished by its rounded leaf, but both kinds have a slender growth. They require to he supported on forked props, otherwise they cannot support the weight of their abundant fruit. They like a sea breeze, and dislike damp dews. None of the vines love Italy less, for there it grows leafless and stunted and soon decays, and also the wine it produces will not keep beyond the summer; and no other vine is more at home in a thin soil. Graecinus, who has generally copied Cornelius Celsus, thinks that it is not the nature of this vine to which Italy is not friendly but the mode of cultivating it, as growers are too eager to make it put out shoots; the consequence of this, he says, is that it is used up by its own fertility, unless the bounty of the soil is so rich as to afford it support when it begins to droop. It is said that this vine never contracts carbuncle, which is a very valuable property, if indeed it is true that there is any vine that is exempt from the power of the climate.

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§ 14.4.7  The spionia, called by some the thorn-vine, is able to bear heat, and is ripened by rainy weather in autumn; what is more, indeed, it is the only vine that thrives from fog, on which account it is specially grown in the district of Ravenna. The venicula is one of the best vines that shed their flowers, and its grapes are particularly well suited for preserving in jars; the people of Campania prefer to call it by the name of surcula, and others by that of scapula, while the name for it at Tarracina is Numisiana; it has no strength of its own but is entirely conditioned by the strength of the soil; all the same, as far south as Vesuvius it is very potent if kept in earthenware jars from Sorrento. For at Vesuvius there is Murgentina, a very strong vine imported from Sicily, called by some Pompeiana, which only bears well in a rich soil, just as the horconia vine only flourishes in Campania. The opposite is the case with the arceraca, called in Virgil argitis, which has the property of imparting extra richness to the soil, while itself offering a very stout resistance to rain and to old age, though it will hardly produce wine every year, and its grapes are only valued for eating, but it bears exceptionally large crops. The mettica vine also stands the years, and faces all weather very strongly; it bears a black grape, and its wines acquire a reddish colour in old age.

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§ 14.4.8  The kinds of vine mentioned so far are grown everywhere, but those remaining belong to particular districts and places, or are crosses produced by grafting one of these on another: thus among the vines of Etruria that of Todi is a special variety, and also they have special names, a vine at Florentia being called sopina and some at Arezzo 'mole-vine' and 'seasonal vine' and 'crossed vine.' The mole-vine has black grapes and makes a white must; the seasonal vine is a deceptive plant, giving a more admirable wine the larger crop of grapes it bears, and, remarkable to say, coming to the end of its fertility and its good quality at the same time; the crossed vine has black grapes and makes a wine that does not keep at all long, but its grape keeps a very long time, and it is gathered a fortnight later than any other variety, bearing a large crop of grapes but only good for eating. The leaves of this vine, like those of the wild vine, turn a blood-red colour before they fall off; this also happens with some other vines, and is a sign of extremely inferior quality. The itriola is peculiar to Unibria and to the districts of Bevagna and Ancona, and the 'dwarf-vine' to that of Amiternum. The same districts have the bananica, an unreliable vine, though people become fond of it. The people of Pompei give the name of their township to a grape, although it grows in greater quantity at Clusium; the people of Tivoli also name a grape after their township, although they have lately discovered the 'olive-grape', so called from its resemblance to an olive: this is the latest grape introduced hitherto. The vinaciola grape is only known to the Sabines and the calventina to the people of Mount Gaurus. Vines transplanted from the Falernian territory are, I am aware, called 'Falernian,' but they very quickly degenerate everywhere. Some people also have made out a Sorrento variety, with a very sweet grape. The 'smoke-grape,' the 'mouthful' and the tharrupia, which grow on the hills of Thurii, are not picked before there has been a frost. Pisa rejoices in the vine of Paros, and Modena in the vine of Perugia, which has a black grape and makes a wine that within four years turns white. It is a remarkable fact that at Modena there is a grape that turns round with the sun and is consequently called in Greek the 'revolving grape'; and that in Italy a grape from Gaul is popular, but across the Alps that of Picenum. Virgil mentions a Thasian vine, a Maraeotid and a Lagean, and a number of other foreign kinds that are not found in Italy.

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§ 14.4.9  But again there are some vines which are distinguished for their grapes and not for their wine, for instance, among the hard-berry group the ambrosia grape, which needs no jars but will keep on the vine, so strong is its resistance to cold and heat and to bad weather, nor does it require a tree or stakes to support it, as it sustains its own weight, though this is not the case with the dactylis, the stalk of which is only the thickness of a finger; and among the vines with large bunches the pigeon-vine, and still more the purple 'double-bosomed' vine, so called because it does not bear clusters but only secondary bunches; and also the 'three-foot vine', named from its size, and also the 'rush vine' with its shrivelled grape and the vine called the Raetic vine in the Maritime Alps, which is quite unlike the famous vine of that name, because this is a short-stalked vine with closely packed clusters and producing a low class of wine; but it has the thinnest skin of any grape, and a single very small stone (called chium), and one or two grapes in each bunch are exceptionally large. There is also the black Aminaean grape to which they give the name of 'Syrian grape', and also the Spanish grape, which is the most highly rated of the inferior kinds.

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§ 14.4.10  The kind called 'table-grapes,' one of the hard-berry group, are grown on trellises — they are both white and black — and so are the 'cow's-udder' grapes, also of both colours, and those of Aegium and of Rhodes, not mentioned before, and the 'one-ounce' grape, apparently named from the weight of the berry, and also the 'pitch grape,' the darkest in colour of all the black grapes, and the 'garland grape', the clusters of which by a sport of nature are arranged in a wreath with leaves interspersed among the berries, and the grapes called 'market-grapes,' a very quick bearer that attracts buyers by its appearance and stands carriage well. On the other hand the ashy grape and the dusky grape and the donkey-grape are condemned even by their appearance, though this is less the case with the alopecis, which resembles a fox's brush. A grape growing in the vicinity of Phalacra is called the Alexandrian grape; it is a low-growing vine with branches only eighteen inches long and a black grape the size of a bean, with a soft and very small stone; the clusters hang aslant and are extremely sweet; the leaf is small and round, and has no clefts. Within the last seven years there has been discovered at Viviers in the province of Narbonne a vine whose blossoms wither in a day and which is consequently extremely immune to bad weather; it is called the 'charcoal-vine,' and is now grown by the whole province.

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§ 14.5.1  The elder Cato, who was exceptionally celebrated for his triumph and his censorship, though yet more for his literary distinction and for the precepts that he has given to the Roman nation upon every matter of utility, and in particular as to agriculture — a man who by the admission of his contemporaries was a supremely competent and unrivalled agriculturalist — has dealt with only a few varieties of the vine, including some even the names of which are now extinct. His opinion deserves to be set out separately and handled at full length, to make us acquainted with the varieties which were the most famous in the whole of this class in the year 154 BC., about the time of the taking of Carthage and Corinth, the period of Cato's demise — and to show us how great an advance civilization has made in the subsequent 230 years. The following therefore are the remarks that he made on the subject of vines and grapes: 'In the locality pronounced to be best for the vine and fully exposed to the sun, you should plant the small variety of Aminian and the double eugenium, and also the small helvia. In a denser soil or a locality more liable to fog you should plant the larger Aminian or the Murgentine, the Apician, and the Lucanian. All the other varieties of vine, especially hybrids, are suited to any kind of land. The small Aminian grape and the larger one and the Apician are stored unstoned in a jar; they can also be kept in new wine boiled down and must, and properly in after-wine. The larger Aminian hard-berry grapes, which one you hang up, are properly kept, for instance at a blacksmith's forge, to make raisins. Nor are there any older instructions on this subject written in Latin, so near we are to the origin of things. The Aminian grape last mentioned is called by Varro the Scantian.

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§ 14.5.2  In our own period there have been few instances of consummate skill in this field, but it is all the more proper on that account not to omit them, so as also to make known the rewards of success, which in every department attract the greatest attention. Well, the greatest distinction was achieved by Acilius Sthenelus, a plebeian, the son of a freedman, by his intensive cultivation of a vineyard of not more than 60 iugera, in the region of Mentana, which he sold for 400,000 sesterces. Also Vetulenus Aegialus, he too a freedman, gained a great reputation in the district of Liternum in Campania, and a still greater reputation in public esteem on account of his cultivating the estate which had been the place of exile of Africanus; but the greatest reputation, thanks to the activity of the same Sthenelus, attached to Remmius Palaemon, also famous for his treatise on grammar, who within the last 20 years bought a farm for 600,000 sesterces in the same region of Mentana, at the turning off the main road ten miles from Rome. The low price of property through all the districts just outside the city in every direction is notorious, but especially in the neighbourhood referred to, since Palaemon had bought farms that had also been let down by neglect and that were not above the average quality of soil even among those extremely poor estates. He undertook the cultivation of this property not from any high motive but at first out of vanity, for which he was known to be so remarkable; but he had the vineyards dug and trenched afresh under the superintendence of Sthenelus, and so, though only playing the part of a farmer, he finally got the estate into an almost incredibly wonderful condition, as within eight years, the vintage, while still hanging on the trees, was knocked down to a purchaser at a price of 400,000 sesterces; and everybody ran to see the piles of grapes in these vineyards, while the sluggish neighbourhood vindicated itself against this discredit by the excuse of his exceptionally profound studies, and recently Annaeus Seneca, the most learned person of the day, and eminent in power which ultimately grew to excess and came crashing about his ears — a man who was at all events no admirer of frivolities — was seized with such a passionate desire for this estate that he was not ashamed to concede this victory to one whom he otherwise hated and who was sure to make the most of this advertisement, by buying the vineyards in question at four times the price Palaemon had paid for it within hardly more than ten years of its being under his management. This was a method of cultivation which it would be profitable to apply to the farms of Caecubum and Setia, since even subsequently the estate has frequently produced seven sacks, that is 140 jars, of must to the iugerum. And to prevent anyone from supposing that the records of the days of old were beaten on this occasion, Cato also wrote that there were returns of 10 sacks to the iugerum, these instances conclusively proving that the merchant does not obtain more profit by rashly trespassing on the seas nor by going as far as the coast of the Red Sea or of the Indian Ocean to seek for merchandise, than is yielded by a diligently cultivated homestead.

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§ 14.6.1  The most ancient celebrity belongs to the wine of Maronea grown in the seaboard parts of Thrace, as we learn from Homer. However, we need not pursue the legendary or variously reported stories conceding its origin, except the statement that Aristaeus was the first person of all in the same nation who mixed honey with wine, because of the outstandingly agreeable quality of each of these natural products. Homer has recorded the mixing of Maronean wine with water in the proportion of 20 parts of water to one of wine. This class of wine in the same district still retains its strength and its insuperable vigour, inasmuch as one of the most recent authors, Mucianus, who was three times consul, ascertained when actually visiting that region that it is the custom to mix with one pint of this wine eight pints of water, and that it is black in colour, has a strong bouquet, and improves in substance with age.

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§ 14.6.2  The Pramnian wine as well, also celebrated by Homer, still retains its fame. It is grown in the territory of Smyrna, in the neighbourhood of the shrine of the Mother of the Gods.

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§ 14.6.3  Among the remaining wines no kind was particularly famous, but the year of the consulship of Lucius Opimius, when the tribune Gaius Gracchus was assassinated for stirring up the common people with seditions, was renowned for the excellence of its vintages of all kinds — the weather was so fine and bright (they call it the 'boiling' of the grape) thanks to the power of the sun, in the 633rd year 121 BC. from the birth of the city; and wines of that year still survive, having kept for nearly 200 years, though they have now been reduced to the consistency of honey with a rough flavour, for such in fact is the nature of wines in their old age; and it would not be possible to drink them neat or to counteract them with water, as their over-ripeness predominates even to the point of bitterness, but with a very small admixture they serve as a seasoning for improving all other wines. Assuming that by the valuation of that period their cost may be put at 100 sesterces per amphora, but that the interest on this sum has been adding up at 6 per cent. per annum, which is a legal and moderate rate, we have shown by a famous instance that in the principate of Gaius Caesar, son of Germanicus, 160 [A.D. 39] years after the consulship of Opimius, the wine cost that amount for one — twelfth of an amphora — this appears in our biography of the bard Pomponius Secundus and the banquet that he gave to the emperor mentioned: so large are the sums of money that are kept stored in our wine-cellars! Indeed there is nothing else which experiences a greater increase of value up to the twentieth year — or a greater fall in value afterwards, supposing that there is not a rise of price. Rarely indeed has it occurred hitherto and only in the case of some spendthrift's extravagance, for wine to fetch a thousand sesterces a cask. It is believed that the people of Vienne alone sell their wines flavoured with pitch, the varieties of which we have specified, for a higher price, though out of patriotism they only sell it among themselves; and this wine when drunk cold is believed to be cooler than all the other kinds.

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§ 14.7.1  Wine has the property of heating the parts of the body inside when it is drunk and of cooling them when poured on them outside. And it will not be out of place to recall here what the famous philosopher Androcydes wrote to Alexander the Great in an attempt to restrain his intemperance: 'When you are about to drink wine, O King, remember that you are drinking the earth's blood. Hemlock is poison to a human being and wine is poison to hemlock.' If Alexander had obeyed this advice, doubtless he would not have killed his friends in his drunken fits; so that in fact we are justified in saying that there is nothing else that is more useful for strengthening the body, and also nothing more detrimental to our pleasures if moderation be lacking.

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§ 14.8.1  Who can doubt, however, that some kinds of wine are more agreeable than others, or who does not know that one of two wines from the same vat can be superior to the other, surpassing its relation either owing to its cask or from some accidental circumstance? And consequently each man will appoint himself judge of the question which wine heads the list. Julia Augusta gave the credit for her eighty-six years of life to the wine of Pizzino, having never drunk any other. It is grown on a bay of the Adriatic not far from the source of the Timavus, on a rocky hill, where the breeze off the sea ripens enough grapes to make a few casks; and no other wine is considered more suitable for medicinal purposes. I am inclined to believe that this is the wine from the Adriatic Gulf which the Greeks have extolled with such marvellous encomiums under the name of Praetutian. His late Majesty Augustus preferred Setinum to all wines whatsoever, and so for the most part did the Emperors who came after him, owing to the verdict of experience that because injurious attacks of indigestion do not readily arise from this liquor. ... It grows just above Forum Appii. Previously Caecuban wine had the reputation of being the most generous of all; it was grown in some poplar woods on marshy ground on the Bay of Amyclae, but the vineyard has now disappeared owing to the neglect of the cultivator and the confined area of the ground, though in a greater degree owing to the ship canal from the lake of Baiae to Ostia that was begun by Nero.

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§ 14.8.2  The second rank belonged to the Falernian district, and in it particularly to the estate of Faustus in consequence of the care taken in its cultivation; but the reputation of this district also is passing out of vogue through the fault of paying more attention to quantity than to quality. The Falernian district begins at the Campanian bridge as you turn left to reach the Colonia Urbana of Sulla lately attached to Capua, and the Faustus estate begins about four miles from the village of Caedicium, which is about six miles from Sinuessa. No other wine has a higher rank at the present day. It is the only wine that takes light when a flame is applied to it. It has three varieties, one dry, one sweet and one a light wine. Some people distinguish three vintages as follows — Caucinian growing on the tops of the hills, Faustian half-way up them, and Falernian at the bottom. It must also not be omitted that none of the grapes that produce the celebrated vintages are agreeable to eat.

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§ 14.8.3  The third prize is attained in various degrees by the vines of Alba in the neighbourhood of the city, which are extremely sweet and occasionally dry, and also by those of Surrentum which only grow in vineyards, and which are very highly recommended for convalescents because of their thinness and health-giving qualities. The Emperor Tiberius used to say that the doctors had made a corner to puff the Sorrento vintage, but that except for that it was only a generous vinegar, and his successor the Emperor Gaius called it best quality flat wine. Its place is contested by the vineyards of Massica and the slopes of Mt. Gaurum looking towards Pozzuoli and Baiae. For the Statana vineyards adjoining the Falernian territory unquestionably once reached the first place, and established the fact that each locality has its own period and its own rise and decline of fortune. The adjacent vintages of the Calenian hills used to be preferred to them, as were those of Fundi where the vines are grown on trellises or trained up small trees, and others from the vicinity of Rome, those of Volturnus and Piperno. As for the wine produced at Signia, it counts as a medicine, being useful as a stomachic astringent owing to its excessive dryness.

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§ 14.8.4  For public banquets the fourth place in the race has been held from the time of his late Majesty Julius Caesar onward — for he was the first person to bring them into favour, as appears from his letters — to the Mamertine vintages grown in the neighbourhood of Messina in Sicily; of these the Potitian, so called after the name of its original grower, is particularly highly spoken of — it grows in the part of Sicily nearest to Italy. In Sicily also is grown the Taormina vintage, which when bottled is constantly passed off for Mamertine.

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§ 14.8.5  Among the remaining wines there are, in the vicinity of the Adriatic and Ionian Sea, the Praetutian and those grown at Ancona and the vines called sprig-vines, because they were all struck from a single chance sprig; and in the interior the wines of Cezena and those called by the name of Maecenas; also in the district of Verona the Raetian, reckoned by Virgil inferior only to Falernian; and next at the top of the Adriatic the wines of Adria, and from the Lower Sea the Latiniensian, Graviscan and Statoniensian. Luna carries off the palm of Etruria and Genoa that of Liguria. Between the Pyrenees and the Alps Marseilles has wine of two flavours, as it produces a richer variety, the local name for which is the 'juicy' brand, which is also used for seasoning other wines. The importance of the wine of Beterrae does not extend outside the Gallic provinces; and about the rest of the wines grown in the Province of Narbonne no positive statement can be made, inasmuch as the dealers have set up a regular factory for the purpose and colour them by means of smoke, and I regret to say also by employing noxious herbs and drugs — inasmuch as a dealer actually uses aloe for adulterating the flavour and the colour of his wines.

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§ 14.8.6  But also the wines of Italy grown further away from the Ausonian Sea are not without note, those of Taranto and Servitia, and those grown at Cosenza and Tempsa and Bari, and the Lucanian vintages, which hold a better place than those of Thurii. But the wines of Lagara, grown not far from Grumentum, are the most famous of them all, on the ground of their having restored the health of Messala Potitius. Campania, whether by means of careful cultivation or by accident, has lately excited consideration by some new names — boasting the Trebellian vintage four miles from Naples, the Cauline close to Capua, and the Trebulan when grown in the district of the same name (though otherwise it is always classed as a common wine), and the Trifoline. As for the wines of Pompei, their topmost improvement is a matter of ten years, and they gain nothing from age; also they are detected as unwholesome because of a headache which lasts till noon on the following day. These instances, if I am not mistaken, go to show that it is the country and the soil that matter, not the grape, and that it is superfluous to go on with a long enumeration of kinds, since the same vine has a different value in different places. In the Spanish provinces the vineyards of Lacetanum are famous for the quantity of wine they produce, while for choice quality the vineyards of Tarragon and Lauron and those of the Balearics among the islands challenge comparison with the first vintages of Italy. And I am not unaware that most people will think that many have been passed over, inasmuch as everybody has his own favourite, and wherever one may go one finds the same story current — how that one of the freedmen of his late Majesty Augustus, who was the most skilful among them for his judgement and palate, in tasting wine for the emperor's table passed this remark to the master of the house where Augustus was visiting in regard to a wine of the district: 'The flavour of this wine is new to me, and it is not of a high class, but all the same I prophesy that the emperor will not drink any other.' I would not deny that other wines also deserve a high reputation, but the ones that I have enumerated are those on which the general agreement of the ages will be found to have pronounced judgement.

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§ 14.9.1  We will now in a similar manner specify the wines of countries overseas. The wines held in highest esteem subsequent to the great vintages of the Homeric age about which we have spoken above were those of Thasos and Chios, and of the latter the wine called Ariusian. To these the authority of the eminent physician Erasistratus, about four hundred and fifty years after the foundation of Rome, added Lesbian. At the present time the most popular of all is the wine of Clazomenae, now that they have begun to flavour it more sparingly with seawater. The wine of Lesbos by dint of its own nature smacks of the sea; and that of Mount Tmolus also is not esteemed as a wine to drink neat, but because being a sweet wine an admixture of it gives sweetness to the dry quality of the remaining vintages, at the same time also giving them age, as it at once makes them seem more mature. Next after these in esteem are the wines of Sikyon, Cyprus, Telmesus, Tripoli, Beyrout, Tyre and Sebennys. This last is grown in Egypt, being made from three famous kinds of grapes that grow there, the Thasian, the soot-grape and the pine-tree grape. Ranking after these are the wines of Hippodamas, of Mystus and of the canthareos Vine, the protropum of Cnidos, and the wines of the volcanic region in Mysia, of Petra and of Myconos. As for the vintage of Mesogis, it has been found to cause headache, and that of Ephesus has also proved to be unwholesome, because seawater and boiled must are employed to season it. Apamea wine is said to be particularly suitable for making mead, and so likewise is the Praetutian in Italy — for this too is a property peculiar to certain kinds of wine: two sweet wines do not generally go well together. Protagion also has quite gone out, a wine which the medical profession had put next to those of Italy. The physician Apollodorus in his pamphlet advising King Ptolemy what wines to drink — the Italian vintages being even then unknown — praised the wine of Naspercene in Pontus, and next to it the Oretie, Oineate, Leucadian, Ambraciote and Peparethian vintages — the last he put before all the rest, but said it was less well thought of on account of its not being fit to drink before it was six years old. A sweet wine drawn off before treading the grapes.

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§ 14.10.1  Up to this point the goodness of a wine is credited to the countries of its growth. Among the Greeks, the wine they have called 'life' has justly won a very distinguished name, having been developed for the treatment of a great many maladies, as we shall show in the part of our work dealing with medicine. The process of making it is this: the grapes are picked a little before they are ripe and are dried in a fierce sun, being turned three times a day for three days, and on the fourth day they are put through the press and then left in casks to mature in the sun. The people of Cos mix in a rather large quantity of seawater — a custom arising from the peculation of a slave who used this method to fill up the due measure, and this mixture is poured into white must, producing what is called in Greek 'white Coan.' In other countries a blend made in a similar way is called 'sea-flavoured wine,' and 'sea-treated' when the vessels containing the must have been thrown into the sea; this is a kind of wine that matures young. Also with us as well Cato exhibited a method of making Coan wine out of Italian, his most important instruction being that it must be left in the sun for four years to ripen. The Rhodes vintage resembles that of Cos, but the Phorinean is salter. All the overseas wines are thought to take seven years to reach the middle stage of maturity.

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§ 14.11.1  All sweet wine has less aroma; the thinner a wine is the more aroma it has. Wines are of four colours, white, brown, blood-red and black. Psithian and black psithian are kinds of raisin-wine with a peculiar flavour which is not that of wine; Scybelites is a kind of must produced in Galatia, and Aluntium another, produced in Sicily. Siraion, by some called hepsema and in our country sapa, is a product of art, not of nature, made by boiling down must to a third of its quantity; must boiled down to only one-half is called defrutum. All these wines have been devised for adulterating with honey; but the wines previously mentioned are the product of the grape and of the soil. Next after the raisin-wine of Crete those of Cilicia and of Africa are held in esteem. Raisin-wine is known to be made in Italy and in the neighbouring provinces from the grape called by the Greeks psithia and by us 'muscatel,' and also scripula, the grapes being left on the vine longer than usual to ripen in the sun, or else being ripened in boiling oil. Some people make this wine from any sweet white grape that ripens early, drying them in the sun till little more than half their weight remains, and then they beat them and gently press out the juice. Afterwards they add to the skins the same quantity of well-water as they have pressed out juice, so as also to make raisin-wine of second quality. The more careful makers, after drying the bunches in the same manner, pick off the berries and soak them without their stalks in wine of good quality till they swell, and then press them — and this kind of wine is the most highly praised of any; and then they repeat the process, adding more water, and make a wine of second quality.

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§ 14.11.2  Between the sirops and real wine is the liquor that the Greeks call aigleucos — this is our 'permanent must.' Care is needed for its production, as it must not be allowed to 'boil' — that is the word they use to denote the passage of must into wine. Consequently, as soon as the must is taken from the vat and put into casks, they plunge the casks in water till midwinter passes and regular cold weather sets in. There is moreover another kind of raisin-wine known in the Province of Narbonne, and there particularly to the Vocontii, under the name of 'sweet wine.' For the purpose of this they keep the grape hanging on the vine for an exceptional time, with the foot-stalk twisted. Some make an incision in the actual shoot as far as the pith and others leave the grapes to dry on tiled roofs, the grapes in all cases being those from the helvennaca vine. To these some add a wine called in Greek 'strained wine,' to make which the grapes are dried in the sun for seven days raised seven feet from the ground on hurdles, in an enclosed place where at night they are protected from damp; on the eighth day they are trodden out, and this process produces a wine of extremely good bouquet and flavour. Another wine of the sweet class is called honey-wine; it differs from mead because it is made from must, in the proportion of thirty pints of must of a dry quality to six pints of honey and a cup of salt, this mixture being brought just to the boil; this produces a dry-flavoured liquor. But among these varieties ought also to be placed the liquor called in Greek protropam, the name given by some people to must that flows down of its own accord before the grapes are trodden. This as soon as it flows is put into special flagons and allowed to ferment, and afterwards left to dry for forty days of the summer that follows, just at the rise of the Dog-star.

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§ 14.12.1  The liquors made from grape-skins soaked in water, called by the Greeks seconds and by Cato and ourselves after-wine, cannot rightly be styled wines, but nevertheless are counted among the wines of the working classes. They are of three kinds: one is made by adding to the skins water to the amount of a tenth of the quantity of must that has been pressed out, and so leaving the skins to soak for twenty-four hours and then again putting them under the press; another, by a method of manufacture that has been commonly employed by the Greeks, i.e. by adding water to the amount of a third of the juice that has been pressed out, and after submitting the pulp to pressure, boiling it down to one-third of its original quantity; while the third kind is pressed out of the wine-lees — Cato's name for this is 'lees-wine.' None of these liquors is drinkable if kept more than a year.

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§ 14.13.1  Among these topics, however, it occurs to me that while there are in the whole world about eighty notable kinds of liquor that can properly be understood as coming under the term 'wine,' two-thirds of this number belong to Italy, which stands far in front of all the countries in the world on that account; and further investigation going into this subject more deeply indicates that this popularity does not date back from the earliest times, but that the importance of the Italian wines only began from the city's six hundredth year.

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§ 14.14.1  Romulus used milk and not wine for libations, as is proved by the religious rites established by him which preserve the custom at the present day. The Postumian Law of King Numa runs: Thou shalt not sprinkle the funeral pyre with wine — a law to which he gave his sanction on account of the scarcity of the commodity in question, as nobody can doubt. By the same law he made it illegal to offer libations to the gods with wine produced from a vine that had not been pruned, this being a plan devised for the purpose of compelling people who were mainly engaged in agriculture and were slack about the dangers besetting a plantation, not to neglect pinning. We learn from Marcus Varro that Mezentius, king of Etruria, gave help to the Rutuli against the Latins at the price of receiving all the wine then in the territory of Latium. At Rome women were not allowed to drink wine. Among various instances we find that the wife of Egnatius Maetennus was clubbed to death by her husband for drinking wine from the vat, and that Romulus acquitted him on the charge of murder. Fabius Pictor has written in his Annals that a matron was starved to death by her relatives for having broken open the casket containing the keys of the wine-cellar; and Cato says that the reason why women are kissed by their male relations is to know whether they smell of 'tipple' — that was then the word denoting wine, and also the word 'tipsy' comes from it. Judge Gnaeus Domitius once gave a verdict that a certain woman appeared to have drunk more wine that was required for the sake of her health without her husband's knowledge, and he fined her the amount of her dowry. And great economy in the use of this commodity prevailed for a long time. General Lucius Papirius before his decisive action against the Samnites vowed to give a small goblet of wine to Jupiter if he were victorious. Lastly among votive offerings we find mention of gifts of pints of milk but nowhere of wine. Moreover Cato, when sailing on his expedition to Spain, whence he returned with a triumph, drank no other wine than what was drunk by the crew of his galley, so little did he resemble the gentlemen who give even their guests other wines than those served to themselves, or else substitute inferior wines as the meal progresses.

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§ 14.15.1  The finest wines in early days were those spiced with scent of myrrh, as appears in the plays of Plautus, although in the one entitled The Persian he recommends the addition of sweet-reed also. Consequently some think that in old times people were extremely fond of scented wine; but Fabius Dossenuus decides the point in these verses: I sent them a fine wine, one spiced with myrrh, and in his Acharistio: Bread and pearl-barley and wine spiced with myrrh. I also observe that Scaevola and Lucius Aelius and Ateius Capito were of the same opinion, inasmuch as we find in Pseudolus:

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§ 14.15.2  But if he has to bring out a sweet wine From that same cellar, has he got one? B. Got one? Myrrh-wine and raisin-wine and boiled-down must And honey — which shows that myrrh-wine was counted not only among wines but also among sirops.

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§ 14.16.1  The existence of the Opimian wine — Italy already understanding the blessing she enjoyed affords an undoubted proof that wine-lofts existed there and it was usual for wine to be racked off in the 633rd year of the city. Nevertheless the 21 B.C. vintages referred to were not yet celebrated; and accordingly all the wines grown in that year bear the name of the consul only. Similarly also afterwards wines imported from overseas held the field for a long time and right down to our grandfathers' day, indeed even after Falernian had already been discovered, as appears from the line of the comedy playwright: I'll broach five casks of Thasian, two of Falernian.

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§ 14.16.2  In the year 665 from the foundation of the city the [89 BC] censors Publius Licinius Crassus and Lucius Julius Caesar promulgated an edict prohibiting 'the sale of Greek and Aminnian wine at a higher price than 8 asses for 6 gallons' — those being the actual words of the edict. But Greek wine was so highly esteemed that only one cup was given to each guest at a banquet.

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§ 14.17.1  Marcus Varro records in the following words the wines that ranked highest in his own younger days: 'When Lucius Lucullus was a boy he never saw a full-dress banquet in his father's house at which Greek wine was given more than once, but when he himself came back from Asia he distributed more than 100,000 jars in largess; also Gaius Sentius, who was praetor in our time, used to say that the first time that Chian wine entered his house was when the doctor had prescribed it for him for heartburn; but Hortensins left over ten thousand jars [50 B.C] to his next-of-kin. So far Varro. And besides, did not Caesar also, when dictator, at the banquet in celebration of his triumph apportion to each table a flagon of Falernian and a jar of Chian? Caesar also gave Chian and Falernian at his triumph over Spain, [60 BC] but at a banquet during his third consulship he [46 BC] provided Falernian, Chian, Lesbian and Mamertine: this is known to be the first occasion on which four kinds of wine were served. It follows that all the rest of the vintages came into fame afterwards, and about 54 BC.

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§ 14.18.1  I am not surprised therefore that many centuries ago almost innumerable kinds of artificial wine have been invented, which we will now specify, all of them being used for medicinal purposes. In an earlier volume we stated the method of making omphacium, which is used for unguents. What is called vine-flower wine is made from the claret vine, that is the wild vine, by steeping two pounds of the flowers of this plant in a jar of must; 30 days afterwards they are changed. Beside this the root and the grape-skins of the claret-vine are used in dressing leather. These grape-skins, a little after the blossom has gone off, provide a remarkable specific for cooling attacks of feverish heat in cases of disease, being said to be of an extremely cold nature. A portion of these grapes die off from the heat before the rest — these are called midsummer grapes; the whole of them never come to maturity, and if a bunch in an unripe state before it completely withers is fed to poultry it produces in them a distaste for stealing grapes.

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§ 14.19.1  The first of the artificial wines, which is called weak wine, is made from real wine in the following manner: ten quarts of white must and half that quantity of water are kept boiling till a considerable amount of the water is boiled away. Other people put in five quarts of seawater and the same amount of rainwater and leave the mixture in the sun for 40 days to evaporate. This drink is given to invalids for whom it is feared that wine may be harmful.

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§ 14.19.2  The next kind of artificial wine is made from ripe millet seed, by putting a pound and a quarter of the seed together with its straw to soak in 1 1/2 gallons of must and after an interval of seven months pouring off the liquor. It has already been stated where the varieties brewed from the lotus-tree, lotus-shrub and herbaceous lotus are made.

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§ 14.19.3  There are also wines, made from fruit, which we will specify, adding only the indispensable explanations: First the wine made from date-palms, which is used by the Parthians and Indians and by the whole of the East, a peck of the rather soft dates called in Greek 'common dates' being soaked in two and a quarter gallons of water and then pressed. Also fig syrup is made from figs by a similar process, other names for it being pharnuprium and trochis; or if it is not wanted to be sweet, instead of water is added the same quantity of grape-skin juice. Also excellent vinegar is made from the Cyprus fig, and an even better quality as well from that of Alexandria. Wine is also made from the Syrian carob, and from pears and all kinds of apples (one from pomegranates is called rhoites) as also from cornels, medlars, service berries, dried mulberries and fir-cones; the last are soaked in must before being pressed, but the juice of the preceding fruits is sweet of itself. We will indicate a little later instructions given by Cato as to how to make myrtle-syrup. The Greeks also employ another method: they boil tender sprigs of myrtle with the leaves on in salted must, and after pounding them boil down one pound of the mixture in 2 1/4 gallons of must until only 1 1/2 gallons are left. The beverage made by the same process from the berries of the wild myrtle is called myrtle wine; this stains the hands.

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§ 14.19.4  Among the plants grown in gardens, wine is made from the root of asparagus, and from cunila, wild-marjoram, parsley-seed, southernwood, wild mint, rue, eatmint, wild thyme and horehound; they put two handfuls of herb into a jar of must, together with a pint of boiled-down grape-juice and half a pint of seawater. A wine is made from the navew turnip by adding two drams' weight of navew to a quart of must, and in the same way from the root of the squill; and, among flowers, from pounded rose-leaves wrapped in a linen napkin and thrown into must with a small weight attached to make it sink, in the proportion of 50 drams of rose-leaves to 24 gallons of must — they say the jar must not be opened for three months — and also wine is made from Gallic nard and another from wild nard. I also find that aromatic wine is constantly made from almost exactly the same ingredients as perfumes — first from myrrh, as we have said, next also from Celtic nard, reed and aspalathus, cakes of which are thrown into must or sweet wine; and in other places, from reed, sweet rush, costus, Syrian nard, cardamom, bark and flowers of cinnamon, saffron, dates and foal-foot, similarly made up in the form of a cake; and among other people also from a mixture of half a pound of nard and cinnamon-leaf added to a gallon and a half of must; and this is also how at the present day what some people call savoury wines and others peppered wines are made by adding pepper and honey. We also find mention of nectar-wine, extracted from the plant which some call sunflower, others herb of Media, or symphyton or herb of Ida or Orestion or nectaria, the root of which is added in the proportion of 50 drams to 6 pints of must, after being similarly wrapped in a linen napkin. Of the remaining herbs, wormwood wine is made by boiling down a pound of Pontic wormwood in five gallons of must to one-third of its amount, or else by putting shoots of wormwood into wine. Similarly hyssop wine is made of Cilician hyssop by throwing three ounces of hyssop into a gallon and a half of wine, or, if the hyssop is first pounded, into three-quarters of a gallon. Each Of these wines may also be made in another way, by sowing the plant round the roots of vines. Also Cato shows how to make hellebore wine in the same way by using black hellebore; also the same method is used in making scammony wine, vines having a remarkable property of drawing into themselves the flavour of some other plant, which explains why the grapes plucked in the marshes of Padua actually have a flavour of willow. Similarly in Thasos also hellebore is planted among the vines, or else wild cucumber or scammony; the wine so obtained is called by a Greek name denoting miscarriage, because it produces abortion.

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§ 14.19.5  Wine is also made from herbs the nature of which will be described in their proper place; for instance from lavender and from gentian root and goat-marjoram and dittany, foal-foot, carrot, sage, all-heal, acorus, thyme, mandragora, and sweet rush. There is also mention of scyzinum and itaeomelis and lectisphagites, for which the recipe is now lost.

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§ 14.19.6  From the shrub and tree class, use is made of both kinds of cedar, the cypress, the laurel, the juniper, the terebinth, the reed and the mastic-tree, the berries or else the new wood being boiled down in must; and similarly is used the wood of the dwarf olive, the ground-pine, and the germander, and in the same way wine is also made from their blossom, by adding ten drams' weight of it to three quarters of a gallon of must.

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§ 14.20.1  A wine is also made of only water and honey. For this it is recommended that rainwater should be stored for five years. Some who are more expert use rain-water as soon as it has fallen, boiling it down to a third of the quantity and adding one part of old honey to three parts of water, and then keeping the mixture in the sun for 40 days after the rising of the Dog-star. Others pour it off after nine days and then cork it up. This beverage is called in Greek 'water-honey'; with age it attains the flavour of wine. It is nowhere rated more highly than in Phrygia.

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§ 14.21.1  Also honey used even to be mixed with vinegar, so exhaustive have been men's experiments in living. This mixture was called in Greek 'sour honey'; it was made with ten pounds of honey, 2 1/2 pints of old vinegar, one pound of sea salt and 5 pints of rainwater, heated to boiling ten times, after which the liquor was drawn off and so kept till it was old. All these wines are condemned by Themison, who is a very high authority; and, I vow, the employment of them does appear to be a tour de force, unless anybody believes that aromatic wine and wines pounded of perfumes are products of nature, or that nature gave birth to shrubs in order for them to be used for drink! Contrivances of this sort are amusing to learn of, owing to the ingenuity of the human mind that investigates everything. There can be no doubt that none of these wines will keep a year, except those which we have stated to be actually the products of age, and that the larger number of them will not keep even a month.

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§ 14.22.1  Even wine contains miraculous properties. One grown in Arcadia is said to produce ability to bear children in women and madness in men; whereas in Achaia, particularly in the neighbourhood of Carynia, there is a wine that is reported to prevent childbearing, and this even if women eat the grapes when they are pregnant, although these do not differ in taste from ordinary grapes. It is said that persons who drink the wine of Troezen cannot become parents. The people of Thasos are reported to make two different kinds of wine, a wine that brings sleep and another that banishes sleep. The same place has a vine called in Greek the 'wild-animal vine,' the wine made from which and also its grapes cure snakebites, and another the 'frankincense vine,' with a scent like that of incense, the wine from which is used for libations to the gods. That of the vine called 'unconsecrated,' on the contrary, is banned from the altars; also it is said that no bird will touch it. Egypt gives the name of 'wine of Thasos' to an extremely sweet native vintage which causes diarrhoea; while Lycia on the contrary has one that has an astringent effect on the bowels. Egypt also possesses a wine called in Greek 'delivery wine' which causes abortion. There are certain wines that, while stored in wine-lofts alter in quality at the rising of the Dog-star and afterwards change back again; the same is the case with wines shipped over sea, and it is observed that the effect of the motion on vintages that can stand it is merely to double their previous maturity.

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§ 14.23.1  And since life is upheld by religion it is considered sinful to pour libations to the gods, not only with wines made from a vine that has not been pruned, but from one that has been struck by lightning, or one in the neighbourhood of which a man has been hanged, or wine made from grapes that have been trodden out by someone with sore feet, or squeezed from grape-skins that have been cut round or have been soiled by something not quite clean dropping on them from above; and likewise Greek wines must not be used for libations, because they contain water. The vine itself is also eaten, the tops of the shoots being boiled; they are also pickled in vinegar and brine.

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§ 14.24.1  But it may also be proper to give an account of the method of preparing wine, as Greek authors have written special treatises on this subject and have made a scientific system for it — for instance Euphronius, Aristomachus, Commiades and Hicesius. The practice in Africa is to soften any roughness with gypsum, and also in some parts of the country with lime. In Greece, on the other hand, they enliven the smoothness of their wines with potter's earth or marble dust or salt or seawater, while in some parts of Italy they use resinous pitch for this purpose, and it is the general practice both there and in the neighbouring provinces to season must with resin; in some places they use the lees of older wine or else vinegar for seasoning. Moreover, medicaments for this purpose are also made from the must itself: it is boiled down so as to become sweeter in proportion to its strength, and it is said that must so reared does not last beyond a year's time. In some places they boil the must down into what is called sapa, and pour this into their wines to overcome their harshness. Still both in the case of this kind of wine and in all others they supply the vessels themselves with coatings of pitch, the method of making which will be described in the next volume.

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§ 14.25.1  Of the trees which distil a juice, some growing in the East and others in Europe produce pitch and resin, and the province of Asia, which lies between the two, has some of both sorts. In the East the best and finest resin is produced by the turpentine-tree, and next by the lentisk — the latter being also called gum-mastic; afterwards comes the juice of the cypress, which has a very sharp flavour — all of these trees producing a liquid juice and merely a resin, whereas the juice of the cedar is thicker and suitable for making pitch. Arabian resin is white and has a sharp scent, stifling to a person engaged in boiling it; the resin of Judea dries harder and has a stronger scent than even that from the turpentine-tree; and Syrian resin has a resemblance to Attic honey. The resin of Cyprus excels all other kinds; it likewise is the colour of honey, and has a fleshy consistency. That of Colophon is yellower than the rest, but if ground up turns white; it has a rather oppressive scent, and consequently the perfumers do not make use of it. In Asia a very white resin is made from the pitch-pine; it is called psagdas. All resin can be dissolved in oil, and some people think that potter's chalk can also be so dissolved; and I am ashamed to confess that the chief value now set on resin is for use as a depilatory for men.

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§ 14.25.2  The method of seasoning wine is to sprinkle the must with pitch during its first fermentation, which is completed in nine days at most, so that the wine may be given the scent of pitch and some touches of its piquant flavour. It is thought that a more effective way of doing this is by means of raw flower of resin, this giving briskness to the smooth quality of the wine, while on the other hand resin-juice is believed to mitigate the excessive harshness of a wine and to conquer its asperity, or in the case of a thin, smooth, flat wine to add a touch of asperity — this is especially done with the musts of Liguria and the localities on the border of the river Po. The beneficial employment of resin-juice is adjusted in this way: a larger quantity of juice is put into strong, fiery wines, and it is used more sparingly with thin, flat ones. Some people advise using both resin-juice and pitch to season must; and in fact must has a certain pitchy quality and in some districts the fault of must is that it ferments a second time of its own accord, a disaster that destroys its flavour; this liquor is given the name of vappa, which is also applied as a term of opprobrium to human beings when their spirit has deteriorated. For the tartness of vinegar possesses a valuable quality useful for important purposes, and without which it is impossible to live in comparative comfort. For the rest, so much attention is given to the treatment of wines that in some places ashes are employed, as is gypsum elsewhere, and the methods that we have specified, for the purpose of improving their condition; but preference is given to ashes obtained from vine-clippings or from oakwood. Also it is recommended that seawater should be used for this purpose that has been obtained a long way out at sea at the spring equinox and then kept in store, or at all events that it should be taken up during the night at the time of the solstice and when a north wind is blowing, or if it is obtained about vintage time it should be boiled before being used.

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§ 14.25.3  The pitch most highly esteemed in Italy for vessels intended for storing wine is that which comes from the Bruttii; it is made from the resin of the pitch-pine. But the pitch obtained from the wild pine in Spain is very little valued, as resin from that tree is bitter and dry and has a disagreeable smell. The varieties of pitch and the method of making it we shall set out in the next volume when we are dealing with forest trees. The defects in resin beside those already mentioned are acridity or else a smoky tang, while the fault of pitch is being over-burnt; but the test is if when it is broken up the pieces have a luminous appearance, and if they stick to the teeth with an agreeably tart taste. In Asia pitch from Ida is most popular, and in Greece that of Pieria, but Virgil gives the preference to the pitch of Naryse. The more careful makers mix with the wine black mastich, which is found in Pontus and which resembles bitumen, and also iris-root and oil. As for waxing the vessels it is found that this makes the wine turn sour; but it pays better to transfer the wine into vessels that have contained vinegar than into those which have contained sweet wine or mead. Cato recommends that wine should be 'adjusted' — this is the word he uses ably adding lye-ashes boiled with boiled-down must in the proportion of a fortieth part to the wine skin, or else a pound and a half of salt, also occasionally some pounded marble; he also mentions sulphur, but he only puts resin near the end of the list. When the wine is beginning to mature he advises adding on the top of all some of the must which he calls 'squeezings,' which we take to mean that which is the very last pressed out. Also we know that for the sake of colouring the wine colours are added as a sort of pigment and that this gives the wine more body. So many poisons are employed to force wine to suit our taste — and we are surprised that it is not wholesome! It is a proof that wine is beginning to go bad if a sheet of lead when dipped in it turns a different colour.

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§ 14.26.1  It is a peculiarity of wine among liquids go mouldy or else to turn into vinegar; and whole volumes of instructions how to remedy this have been published. Wine-lees when dried will catch fire, and go on burning of themselves without fuel being added; their ashes have the nature of nitre, and the same properties, with the addition that they are greasier to the touch.

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§ 14.27.1  Even in regard to wine already vintaged there is a great difference in point of climate. In the neighbourhood of the Alps they put it in wooden casks and close these round with tiles and in a cold winter also light fires to protect it from the effect of the cold. It is seldom recorded, but it has been seen occasionally, that the vessels have burst in a frost, leaving the wine standing in frozen blocks — almost a miracle, since it is not the nature of wine to freeze: usually it is only numbed by cold. Districts with a milder climate store their wine in jars and bury them in the ground entirely, or else up to a part of their position so protecting them against the atmosphere; but in other places people keep off the weather by building roofs over them. And they also give the following rules: one side of a wine-cellar or at least its windows ought to face north-east, or at all events east; dunghills and tree-roots must be a long way off, and all objects with a strong smell should be avoided, as it very easily passes into wine — particularly there must be no fig-trees or wild figs near; also spaces must be left between the jars, to prevent taints passing from one to the other, as wine is always liable to very rapid infection. Moreover (these instructions proceed) the shape of the jars is important: pot-bellied and broad ones are not so good. Immediately after the rising of the Dog-star they should be coated with pitch, and afterwards washed with seawater or water with salt in it, and then sprinkled with ashes of brushwood or else with potter's earth, and then rubbed clean and fumigated with myrrh, as should frequently be done with the wine-cellars also. Weak vintages should be kept in jars sunk in the ground, but jars containing strong wines should be exposed to the air. The jars must never be filled quite full, and the space above the surface of the wine must be smeared with raisin-wine or boiled-down must mixed with saffron or sword-lily pounded up with boiled must. The lids of the jars should be treated in the same way, with the addition of mastich or Bruttian pitch. It is laid down that jars must not be opened at mid-winter except on a fine day, and not when a south wind is blowing, or at a full moon.

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§ 14.27.2  Flower of wine forming is thought to be a good sign if it is white, but a bad sign if it is red, unless it is a red wine; similarly it is a bad sign if the jars feel warm to the touch, or if the lids sweat. Wine that quickly begins to form a flower and to develop an odour is not going to keep. Also boiled-down must and must of new wine should be boiled when there is no moon, which means at the conjunction of that planet, and not on any other day; and moreover leaden and not copper jars should be used, and some walnuts should be thrown into the liquor, for those are said to absorb the smoke. The best way of treating the finest wines of Campania seems to be to set them out in casks in the open air, exposed to the sun, moon, rain and wind.

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§ 14.28.1  And if anybody cares to consider the matter more carefully, there is no department of man's life on which more labour is spent — as if nature had not given us the most healthy of beverages to drink, which all other animals make use of, whereas we compel even our beasts of burden to drink wine! and so much toil and labour and outlay is paid as the price of a thing that perverts men's minds and produces madness, having caused the commission of thousands of crimes, and being so attractive that a large part of mankind knows of nothing else worth living for! Nay, what is more, to enable us to take more, we reduce its strength by means of a linen strainer, and other enticements are devised and even poisonous mixtures are invented to promote drinking, some men taking a dose of hemlock before they begin, in order that fear of death may compel them to drink, while others take powdered pumice and preparations which I am ashamed to teach the use of by describing them. The most cautious of these topers we see getting themselves boiled in hot baths and being carried out of the bathroom unconscious, and others actually unable to wait to get to the dinner table, no, not even to put their clothes on, but straight away on the spot, while still naked and panting, they snatch up huge vessels as if to show off their strength, and pour down the whole of the contents, so as to bring them up again at once, and then drink another draught; and they do this a second and a third time, as if they were born for the purpose of wasting wine, and as if it were impossible for the liquor to be poured away unless by using the human body as a funnel. This is the object of the exercises that have been introduced from foreign countries, and of rolling in the mud and throwing the neck back to show off the muscles of the chest. It is declared that the object of all these exercises is merely to raise a thirst! Then again, think of the drinking matches! think of the vessels engraved with scenes of adultery, as though tippling were not enough by itself to give lessons in licentiousness! Thus wine-bibbing is caused by licence, and actually a prize is offered to promote drunkenness — heaven help us, it is actually purchased. One man gets a prize for tipsiness on condition of his eating as much as he has drunk; another drinks as many cups as are demanded of him by a throw of the dice. Then it is that greedy eyes bid a price for a married woman, and their heavy glances betray it to her husband; then it is that the secrets of the heart are published abroad: some men specify the provisions of their wills, others let out facts of fatal import, and do not keep to themselves words that will come back to them through a slit in their throat — how many men having lost their lives in that way! and truth has come to be proverbially credited to wine. Meantime, even should all turn out for the best, drunkards never see the rising sun, and so shorten their lives. Tippling brings a pale face and hanging cheeks, sore eyes, shaky hands that spill the contents of vessels when they are full, and the condign punishment of haunted sleep and restless nights, and the crowning reward of drunkenness, monstrous licentiousness and delight in iniquity. Next day the breath reeks of the wine-cask, and everything is forgotten — the memory is dead. This is what they call 'snatching life as it comes!' when, whereas other men daily lose their yesterdays, these people lose tomorrow also. Forty years ago, during the rule of the Emperor Tiberius, the fashion set in of drinking on an empty stomach and preceding meals with a draught of wine — yet another result of foreign methods and of the doctors' policy of perpetually advertising themselves by some novelty. This is the kind of prowess by which the Parthians seek fame and Alcibiades won his reputation in Greece, and to which among ourselves Novellius Torquatus of Milan even owed his surname — a man who held the offices of state from praetor right up to deputy consul — by tossing off 2 1/4 gallons at one draught, which was actually the origin of his surname; this was shown off as a sort of mystery before the Emperor Tiberius in his old age, when he had become very strict and indeed cruel, though for the matter of that his own earlier years had been somewhat inclined to strong drink, and it was believed that what recommended Lucius Piso to Tiberius for selection as custodian of the city was that he had kept on carousing for two days and two nights without a break, at Tiberius's own house after he had become Emperor. And it was said that Drusus Caesar took after his father Tiberius in nothing more than in this. Torquatus had the unusual distinction — as even this science has its own code of rules — of never having stammered in his speech or relieved himself by vomiting or otherwise while he was drinking, but of having always turned up for duty with the morning guard without anything going wrong, and of having drunk the largest quantity on record at one draught and also added to the record by some more smaller draughts, of not having taken breath or spat while drinking (this on the best evidence), and of not having left any heel — taps to make a splash in the paved floor — under the elaborate code of rules to prevent cheating in drinking. Tergilla brings it up against Marcus Cicero that his son Cicero was in the habit of tossing off a gallon and a half at one draught, and that when tipsy he threw a goblet at Marcus Agrippa: these in fact are the usual results of intoxication. But no doubt young Cicero wanted to deprive his father's murderer, Mark Antony, of his fame in this department; for Antony had strained every effort to win the championship in this field before him, by actually publishing a book on the subject of his own drunken habits; and by venturing to champion his claims in this volume, to my mind he clearly proves the magnitude of the evils that he had inflicted on the world through his tippling. It was shortly before the battle of Actium that he vomited up this volume, so proving clearly that he was already drunk with the blood of his compatriots, and that that made him only the more thirsty for it. For in fact the inevitable result of this vice is that the habit of drinking increases the appetite for it, and it was a shrewd observation of the Scythian ambassador that the more the Parthians drank the thirstier they became.

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§ 14.29.1  The nations of the west also have their own intoxicant, made from grain soaked in water; there are a number of ways of making it in the various provinces of Gaul and Spain and under different names, although the principle is the same. The Spanish provinces have by this time even taught us that these liquors will bear being kept a long time. Egypt also has devised for itself similar drinks made from grain, and in no part of the world is drunkenness ever out of action, in fact they actually quaff liquors of this kind neat and do not temper their strength by diluting them, as is done with wine; yet, by Hercules, it used to be thought that the product of the earth in that country was corn. Alas, what wonderful ingenuity vice possesses! a method has actually been discovered for making even water intoxicated!

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§ 14.29.2  There are two liquids that are specially agreeable to the human body, wine inside and oil outside, both of them the most excellent of all the products of the tree class, but oil an absolute necessity, nor has man's life been slothful in expending labour upon it. How much more ingenious, however, man has been in respect of drink will be made clear by the fact that he has devised 185 kinds of beverages (or if varieties be reckoned, almost double that number), and so much less numerous kinds of oil — about which we shall speak in the following volume.

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§ 15.1.1  ONE of the most celebrated Greek authors, Theophrastus, who flourished about 314 B.C., stated that the olive only grows at places within forty miles of the sea, while Fenestella says that in 581 BC., during the reign of Tarquinius Priscus, it was not found at all in Italy and Spain or in Africa; whereas at the present day it has penetrated even across the Alps and into the middle of the Gallic and Spanish provinces. Indeed in 249 BC., the year in which Appius Claudius the grandson of Appius Claudius Caecus and Lucius Junius were the consuls, olive-oil cost 10 asses for 12 lbs. and somewhat later, in 74 BC., the curule aedile Marcus Scius, son of Lucius, throughout the whole of his year of office supplied the Roman public with oil at the rate of an as for 10 lbs. These facts will seem less surprising to a person who knows that 22 years later in the third consulship of Gnaeus Pompeius Italy exported oil to the provinces. Also Hesiod, who thought that instruction in agriculture was a prime necessity of life, declared that no one had ever gathered fruit from an olive-tree of his own planting — so slow a business it was in those days, whereas now olive-trees bear even in the nursery-gardens, and after they have been transplanted olives are picked from them the next year.

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§ 15.2.1  Fabianus says that the olive will not grow in extremely cold places nor yet in extremely hot ones. Virgil said that there are three kinds of olive, the orchites, the shuttle-olive and the posia; he also stated that the olive-tree does not require raking or pruning or any attention. There is no doubt that even in the case of olives the soil and the climate are of very great importance; but nevertheless they are also pruned at the same time as the vine, and they like the ground to be raked between them as well. Olive-picking follows the vintage, and making olive-oil requires even more science than making wine, as the same olive-tree produces a variety of oils. The first oil of all is obtained from the raw olive and when it has not yet begun to ripen — this has the best flavour; moreover its first issue from the press is the richest, and so on by diminishing stages, whether the olives are crushed in wicker sieves or by enclosing the spray in narrow-meshed strainers, a method recently invented. The riper the berry is, the greasier and less agreeable in flavour is the juice. The best age for picking olives, as between quantity and flavour, is when the berry is beginning to turn black, at the stage when they are called druppae with us and drypetides by the Greeks. For the rest, it makes a difference at that stage whether the maturing of the berry takes place in the presses or on the boughs, and whether the tree has been watered or the berry has only been moistened by its own juice and has drunk nothing else but the dews of heaven.

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§ 15.3.1  It is not the same with olive-oil as with wine — age gives it an unpleasant flavour, and at the end of a year it is already old. Herein, if one chooses to understand it, Nature shows her forethought, inasmuch as there is no necessity to use up wine, which is produced for the purpose of intoxication — rather indeed the attractive over-ripeness which it acquires with age tempts us to keep it; but she did not desire us to be sparing in the use of oil, she has made it universal even among common people because of the necessity of using it quickly. In the matter of this blessing also Italy has won the highest rank of all the world, particularly in the district of Venafrum and the part of it which produces the Licinian oil, which causes the Licinian olive to be exceptionally famous. It is unguents that have given it this eminence, because its scent is so well adapted to them, but it has also been awarded to it by the palate with its more delicate judgement. Moreover no bird will touch the berries of the Licinian olive. The remainder of the competition is maintained between the territory of Istria and that of Baetica on equal terms, while for the rest the provinces have an approximately equal rank, with the exception of Africa, whose soil is adapted for grain. This territory Nature has yielded entirely to the Corn-goddess, having all but entirely grudged it oil and wine, and having given it a sufficiency of glory in its harvests. The remaining statements prevalent concerning the olive are full of error, which shall prove to be more prevalent in no other department of life.

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§ 15.4.1  An olive consists of a stone, oil, flesh and lees; the latter constituent is a bitter fluid, which forms out of water and consequently there is very little of it in dry situations but a large amount in wet ones. The oil is indeed a juice peculiar to the olive, and this can be specially learnt from olives in an unripe state, as we have shown when treating of unripe olive-juice and grape-juice. The oil continues to increase until the rising of the Bear-ward, that is till September 16; afterwards the increase is in the sire of the stones and the flesh. At this stage if rain follows in actually large quantities, the oil is spoiled and turns into lees. The colour of these lees makes the olive-oil turn black, and consequently when there is only a tinge of black beginning it contains very little lees, and before any blackness shows none at all. People are quite mistaken in supposing what is really the near approach of decay to be the beginning of ripening, and it is also a mistake to imagine that the amount of oil is increased by the growth of the flesh of the olive, since all the juice is then going into a solid form and the woody interior is getting bigger. It is on this account that olive-trees are watered most plentifully at this period, but watering, whether done intentionally or occurring from repeated falls of rain, uses up the oil, unless fine weather follows to diminish the solid part of the berry. For, as Theophrastus holds, the cause of oil as of other things is entirely warmth, and this is why steps are taken to produce warmth even in the presses and the cellars by lighting large fires. A third mistake is in over-economy, as owing to the cost of picking people wait for the olives to fall. Those who compromise on a middle course in this matter knock the fruit down with poles, so injuring the trees and causing loss in the following year; in fact there was a very old regulation for the olive harvest: 'Neither strip nor beat an olive-tree.' Those who proceed most carefully use a reed and strike the branches with a light sideway blow; but even this method causes the tree to produce fruit only every other year, as the buds get knocked off, and this is no less the case if people quantity of lees, to discover how much larger an amount is found in the same kind of olive with every day that is added. There is an entirely unconquerable and widely prevalent mistake which supposes that the swelling of the olive increases the amount of the oil, in spite of the fact that the absence of connexion between the size of the berry and its yield of oil is proved by the olives called 'royal olives,' and by some people 'large-size olives,' and by others 'babbiae' — but anyhow a very large olive with very little juice, and also that the very fleshy olives in Egypt produce a scanty amount of oil, while the extremely small olives in the Decapolis of Syria, not larger than a caper, nevertheless have an attractive flesh. It is on this account that imported olives are preferred for the table to those grown in Italy, in spite of their being inferior for making oil, and in Italy itself the olives of Picenum and the Sidicine are preferred to all the other kinds. Those olives are kept separate and steeped in salt, as well as in lees or boiled must like the rest, and also some of them are left floating in their own oil and clean, without any adventitious attraction — the kind called in Greek 'swimmers'; these olives are also crushed and then seasoned with a flavouring of green herbs. Olives however unripe are actually made to ripen early by pouring boiling water on them; and it is surprising how olives suck up a sweet juice and take on a flavour that does not belong to them. As with grapes, so also among olives there are purple varieties, the posia almost shading off into black. Beside the kinds already mentioned there is also the 'proud olive,' as well as the very sweet variety, which is merely dried by itself and is sweeter than a raisin; this last kind of olive is rather rare, and is grown in Africa and in the vicinity of Augusta Emerita in Lusitania.

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§ 15.4.2  The actual oil can be guarded against the defect of thickening by the addition of salt. An aromatic scent can be given to the oil by making an incision in the bark of the tree; but any other mode of seasoning, like those used for wine, is no gratification to the palate. Nor are there so many varieties of olive-oil as there are of wine, there being at most three different grades of excellence. In fine oil the odour is more penetrating, though this is short-lived even in the best kind.

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§ 15.5.1  Olive-oil has the property of imparting warmth to the body and protecting it against cold, and also that of cooling the head when heated. Those parents of all the vices, the Greeks, have diverted the use of olive-oil to serve the purpose of luxury by making it a regular practice in their gymnasiums; the governors of those institutions a have been known to sell the scrapings of the oil for 80,000 sesterces. The majesty of Rome has bestowed great honour on the olive-tree by decorating our cavalry squadrons with wreaths of olive on July, and also when they are celebrating a minor triumph. Athens also crowns victorious athletes with olive wreaths, and Greece the victors at Olympia with wreaths of wild olive.

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§ 15.6.1  We will now state the rules given by Cato in respect of olives. In a warm and rich soil he recommends planting the larger radius olive, the Sallentine, the orchites, the posia, the Sergian, the Corninian and the wax-white, and he adds with remarkable wisdom that the one among these pronounced in the particular localities to be the best should be used; while he recommends planting the Licinian olive in a cold and thin soil, for the reason that rich or warm earth ruins its oil and the tree gets exhausted by its mere fertility, and moreover is attacked by moss and red rust. He advises that olive-yards should be in a position exposed to the sun and facing west, and he does not approve of any other arrangement. He says that the best way of preserving orchites and posia olives is either to put them in brine when they are green or to crush them and store them in mastic oil; the best olive-oil is made from the bitterest olive obtainable; for the rest the olives should be collected off the ground as soon as possible, and washed if they are dirty; it is enough to leave them to dry for three days, and if the weather is cold and frosty they must be pressed on the fourth day, and when pressed they should be sprinkled with salt. Olives kept on a boarded floor lose oil and it deteriorates in quality, and the same happens if the oil is left on the lees and the grounds — these are the flesh of the olive and produce the dregs; consequently it should be ladled several times a day, and moreover this must be done with a shell and into leaden caldrons, as copper spoils it. All these operations, he says, must be carried on with presses that have been heated and tightly closed, admitting as little air as possible, and therefore also no wood should be cut there (and consequently the most suitable fire is made with the stones of the olives themselves); the oil must be poured out of the caldrons into vats, so as to leave behind the grounds and the lees: for this purpose the vessels must be changed fairly frequently and the osier baskets wiped with a sponge, so that so far as possible complete cleanliness may be produced. It was a later discovery, he says, to wash the olives in absolutely boiling water, and at once put them whole into the press — for that method crushes out the lees — and then to crush them in oil-mills and put them under the press a second time. People do not approve of pressing more than a hundred pecks of olives at a time: this is called a 'batch,' and what is squeezed out first after the millstone is called the 'flower.' It is a fair amount for three batches to be pressed in twenty-four hours by gangs of four men using a double holder.

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§ 15.7.1  At that time there was no artificial oil, and that I take to be the reason why Cato says nothing about it. At the present time there are several varieties of it; and we will treat first of those kinds which are produced from trees, and among them before all from the wild olive. It is a thin oil, and has a much more bitter flavour than the oil obtained from the cultivated olive, and it is only useful for medicines. Very closely resembling this oil is the oil obtained from the ground-olive, a rock shrub not more than three inches high, with leaves and fruit like those of the wild olive. The next class of oil is that obtained from the cici, a tree growing in great abundance in Egypt — others call it the croton, others sibi, others wild sesamum — and there, as well as not long ago in Spain also, it grows wild, shooting up as high as an olive-tree, with a stalk like that of the fennel, the leaf of a vine, and a seed-pod like a slender grape of a pale colour: our countrymen call it the tick, from the resemblance of the seed-pod to that insect. It is boiled in water and the oil floating on the surface is skimmed off. But in Egypt, where it abounds, fire and water are not employed, but salt is sprinkled on the pod and the oil is pressed out; for food it is disgusting, and it is of thin quality for burning in lamps. Amygdalinum, which some people call neopum, is pressed out of bitter almonds, dried and pounded into a cake that is sprinkled with water and then pounded again. An oil is also made from the bay-tree with an admixture of the oil of over-ripe olives; some people merely press the oil out of the berries, others use only the leaves, and some the leaf and the outer skin of the berries, and also add styrax gum and other scents. The best kind of bay-tree for this is the broad-leaved wild laurel with black berries. A similar oil also comes from the black myrtle, and the broad-leaved variety of this is the best. The berries are sprinkled with hot water and pounded, and then boiled down. Other people boil down the softest of the leaves in oil and press out the liquid, and others steep them in oil and allow them to mature in the sun before putting them in the press. The same method is also used in the ease of the cultivated myrtle, but the wild variety with a smaller pod is preferred, the kind which certain people call oxymyrsine, others ground-myrsine, and some aeorum because of its resemblance to that plant, as it grows low and bushy.

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§ 15.7.2  Oil is also made from the citrus and the cypress, from walnuts — this is called caryinum, from apples and from the cedar called pisselaeon; also from grain of Cnidus by cleaning and pounding the seed, and likewise from mastich. As for the method of making cypros-oil and also oil from an Egyptian berry for the purpose of scents, we have spoken of it already. The Indians are said to make oils from chestnuts and gingelly and rice, and the Fish-eater tribes from fish. Scarcity sometimes compels people to make oil for lamps even out of the berries of the plane-tree by steeping them in water and salt. There is also an oil made from the wild vine — we have spoken about the plant itself while dealing with perfumes. For gleucinum must is boiled in oil with a slow heat, but other makers do not use fire but leave the jar packed round with grape-skins for three weeks, stirring up the mixture twice a day, and the must becomes absorbed by the oil. Some people mix in not only marjoram but also more expensive scents, just as the oil used in the gymnastic schools is also perfumed with scents, though of a very poor quality. Oil is also made from aspalathus, reed, balsam, iris, cardamomum, melilot, Gallic nard, all-heal, marjoram, helenium, and cinnamomum root, by steeping all these plants in oil and then pressing out the juices. Similarly also rose-oil is made from roses, and rush-oil, which is very similar to oil of roses, from the sweet rush, and likewise oils are extracted from henbane and from lupins and narcissus. A very large amount is obtained in Egypt from radish seed or from the blade of the grass called chortinon, and likewise from gingelly and from the nettle called cnidinum. In other places also an oil is made from lilies, which is left in the open air to steep in the sunlight and moonlight and frost. On the border of Cappadocia and Galatia they make from native herbs an oil called Selgitic oil, of considerable value for the tendons; and the same oil is made in Italy by the people of Gubbio. From pitch is made an oil called pitch-oil; while the pitch is kept on the boil, fleeces are stretched above the steam rising from it and then wrung out. The most approved kind comes from the Bruttian land; the pitch there is very rich and full of resin.

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§ 15.7.3  The colour of pitch-oil is reddish yellow. There is an oil that grows of its own accord in the coastal parts of Syria called elaeomeli. It is a rich oil that trickles from trees, of a substance thicker than honey but thinner than resin, and having a sweet flavour; this also is used by the doctors. There is also a use of old olive-oil for certain kinds of diseases, and it is also deemed to be serviceable for preserving ivory from decay: at all events, the inside of the statue of Saturn at Rome has been filled with oil.

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§ 15.8.1  But it is above all to the lees of olive-oil that Cato has devoted his praises: he tells how vats and casks to hold oil are steeped in lees to prevent their soaking up the oil; how threshing-floors are given a dressing of lees to keep away ants and to prevent cracks; and moreover how the clay of the walls and the plaster and flooring of granaries, and even cupboards for clothes, are sprinkled with lees, and how seed-corn is steeped in them, as a protection against wood-worms and injurious insects. He speaks of its use as a remedy for diseases of animals and also of trees, and also as a specific against ulceration of the mouth in human beings. He says that reins and all leather articles, and shoes and the axles of wheels are greased with boiled lees, and so are copper vessels to keep off verdigris and to give them a more attractive colour, and all wooden utensils and earthenware jars used for keeping dried figs in, or it may be sprays of myrtle with their leaves and berries on them or anything else of a similar kind. Finally he states that logs of wood steeped in olive-lees will burn without any annoying smoke.

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§ 15.8.2  According to Marcus Varro an olive-tree which has been merely licked by the tongue of a she-goat or which she has nibbled when it was first budding goes barren. So far in regard to the olive and olive-oil.

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§ 15.9.1  The rest of the fruits produced by trees can scarcely be enumerated by their appearance or shape, let alone by their flavours and juices, which have been so frequently modified by crossing and grafting.

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§ 15.9.2  The largest fruit and the one that hangs highest is that of pine-cones, which encloses inside it small kernels lying in fretted beds and clothed in another coat of rusty colour, showing the marvellous care that Nature takes to provide seeds with a soft place to lie in. A second class of pine-cones is that of the Taranto pine, which has a shell that can be broken in the fingers and which is rifled by the birds while on the tree. A third kind is that of the sappinia-cone which grows on the cultivated pitch-pine, the kernels of which have such a soft husk, or rather skin, that it is eaten with them. A fourth kind is called pityis, growing on wild pines, which provides an exceptionally good remedy against a cough when the kernels are boiled in honey; the Taurini call them raviceli. The winners in the games at the Isthmus are crowned with a wreath of pine leaves.

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§ 15.10.1  The fruit next to these in size is the one that we call the quince and the Greeks cydoneum, which was introduced from the island of Crete. This fruit drags down the boughs in a curve and checks the growth of the parent tree. There are several kinds of quinces: the 'golden apple' is cleft with incisions and has a colour verging on gold, a brighter tinge of which gives a name to our native quince, and has an exquisite scent. The Naples quince is also highly esteemed. The smaller variety of the same kind, the sparrow-apple, gives out a rather pungent smell, and ripens late, whereas the must-quince ripens very early. Grafting the ordinary quince on the sparrow-apple has produced a special kind, the Mulvian quince, which is the only one of the quinces that is eaten even raw; these at the present day are kept shut up in gentlemen's reception-rooms, and are placed on the statues that share our nights with us. There is also a small wild quince, the scent of which is the most powerful next to that of the sparrow-apple and which grows in the hedges.

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§ 15.11.1  We give the name of apples, although they really belong to a different kind, to peaches and to pomegranates, of which we have specified nine kinds among the trees of Carthage. Pomegranates contain a kernel enclosed in a skin, but peaches have a hard stone inside them. Moreover one variety of pear called the pound pear asserts by its name the largeness of its weight. But the palm among peaches belongs to the nectarine: the Gallic and the Asiatic varieties are named after their nationalities. The Asiatic peach ripens at the end of autumn, though an early variety ripens in summer — these were discovered within the last thirty years, and were at first sold for a denarius apiece. The Adriatic peach comes from Samnium, but the common peach grows everywhere. It is a harmless fruit, in demand for invalids, and peaches have before now fetched thirty sesterces each, a price exceeded by no other fruit — which may surprise us, because there is none which keeps worse: the longest time that it will last after being plucked is two days, and it compels you to put it on the market.

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§ 15.12.1  Afterwards comes a vast crowd of plums. There is the parti-coloured plum, partly black and partly white in colour, which is called the barley-plum because it ripens at barley harvest; and another plum of the same colour, which is later and is larger in size, called the donkey-plum from its inferior value. The wax-plum and the purple plum are smaller in size but more esteemed; and there is also the Armenian plum, imported from foreign parts, the only plum that recommends itself even by its scent. Plums grafted on a nut-tree show a remarkable effrontery, displaying the appearance of the parent tree and the juice of the adopted stock; they take their name from each, being called nut-plums. But both the nut-plum and the peach and the wax-plum and the wild plum, if stored in casks like grapes, will prolong their life till another crop begins to come into existence, but the remaining varieties, ripening quickly, speedily pass off. Recently in Boetica the name of apple-plum has begun to be given to plums grafted on apple-trees, and that of almond-plum to others grafted on almonds: the latter have the kernel of an almond inside their stone; and indeed no other fruit has been more ingeniously crossed. Among our foreign trees, we have already spoken of the damson, named from Damascus in Syria; it has been grown in Italy for a long time, though it has a larger stone and less flesh here than in its country of origin, and here it never dries into wrinkles, because it lacks its native sunshine. With it can be mentioned its fellow-countryman the myxa, which also has now begun to be grown at Rome by being grafted on the service-tree.

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§ 15.13.1  The Persian plum or peach, it is true, is shown by its very name to be an exotic even in Asia Minor and in Greece, and to have been introduced from Persia. But the wild plum is known to grow everywhere, which makes it more surprising that this fruit is not mentioned by Cato, especially as he pointed out the way of storing some wild fruits also. As for the peach-tree, it was only introduced lately, and that with difficulty, inasmuch as in Rhodes, which was its first place of sojourn after leaving Egypt, it does not bear at all. It is not true that the peach grown in Persia is poisonous and causes torturing pain, and that, when it had been transplanted into Egypt by the kings to use as a punishment, the nature of the soil caused it to lose its dangerous properties; for the more careful writers relate this of the persea, which is an entirely different tree, resembling the red myxa, and which has refused to grow anywhere but in the east. The sebesten also, according to the more learned authorities, was not introduced from Persia for punitive purposes, but was planted at Memphis by Perseus, and it was for that reason that Alexander, in order to do honour to his ancestor, established the custom of using wreaths of it for crowning victors in the games at Memphis. It always has leaves and fruit upon it, fresh ones sprouting immediately after the others. But it will be obvious that all our plums also have been introduced since the time of Cato.

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§ 15.14.1  Of the apple class there are a number varieties. We have spoken of citrons when describing the citron-tree; the Greeks, however, call them 'Medic apples,' after their native country. Equally foreign are the jujube-tree and the tuber-apple, which themselves also have only recently come into Italy, the former from Africa and the latter from Syria. Sextus Papinius, who was consul in our own day [AD 23], introduced each of them in the last years of the principate of his late Majesty Augustus, having grown them in his camp from slips; the fruit is more like a berry than an apple, but the trees make a particularly good decoration for terraces — as nowadays we have whole forests of vegetation growing even over the roofs of our houses. There are two kinds of tuber-apple, the white and the red Syrian, so called from its colour. The fruit called wool-fruit, growing in the district of Verona but nowhere else in Italy, is virtually an exotic; it is covered with a woolly down, which grows also in very large quantities on the sparrow-quince and the peach, but which has given its name to this fruit in particular as it has no other remarkable property to recommend it.

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§ 15.15.1  Why should I hesitate to indicate by name the remaining varieties of fruit, seeing that they have prolonged the memory of those who established them for all time, as though on account of some outstanding achievement in life? Unless I am mistaken, the recital will reveal the ingenuity exercised in grafting, and will show that nothing is so trifling as to be incapable of producing celebrity. Well then, there are kinds of fruit that have their origin from Matius and Cestius, from Mallius, and likewise from Scaudius; and on the last a member of the Claudian family named Appius grafted the quince, producing the fruit called Appian; this has the smell of a quince, the size of a Scaudian apple, and a ruddy colour. And in order that nobody may imagine that it has gained its position by influence due to distinction and family, there is also a Sceptian apple named from a freedman who discovered it, which is remarkable for its round shape. Cato also mentions a Quirinian apple, and a Scantian which he says is stored in casks. But the apple naturalized here most recently of all is a small one with a most agreeable flavour named the Petisian. The Amerian and the Little Greek apples have advertised their places of origin, but all the rest have derived their name from definite reasons — 'twin' apples from their attachment of relationship, as they never grow singly, the 'Syrian red' from its colour, the pear-apple from its affinity; the must-apple was named from its quickness in ripening, but is now called the honey-apple from its honey flavour; the round apple from its shape, which forms an exact sphere — the Greeks, who call this apple the Epirotic apple, prove that it was first produced in Epirus; the orthomastium is so called from its resemblance to a teat, and the eunuch-apple of the Belgians is named from its having no pips. The leaf-apple has a single leaf, or occasionally a pair of leaves, sprouting out from the middle of its side; the ragged-apple very quickly shrivels up into wrinkles; the lung-apple swells in a solid lump. Some apples are of the colour of blood, because they derive their origin from a graft of the mulberry; but all apples are red in the parts that have been turned towards the sun. There are also wild apples with little attraction of flavour and an even sharper scent; their special fault is that of horrible sourness, and it is so powerful that it will blunt the edge of a sword. Another apple is named 'flour-apple,' a very bad kind, although it is the earliest to come on and hastens to be picked.

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§ 15.16.1  The same charge in the case of pears is censured by the name of pride; this is a small pear, but ripens very quickly. Of all the varieties of pear, however, the Grustumian is the nicest. Next to this are Falernian pears, used for perry, as they contain such a large quantity of juice — this is called being 'milky' — and among these are some others of a very dark colour, given us by Syria. The names of the remaining varieties are designated differently in various different localities; but pears that have advertised their producers by the accepted designations of Rome are the Decimian, and the offshoot from it called the Sham Decimian, the very long-stalked one called the Dolabellian, the kind of Pomponian called breast-shaped, the Licerian, the Sevian, and the Turranian, a variety sprung from the Sevian but differing in length of stalk, the Favonian, a red pear a little larger than the 'proud' pear, the Laterian and the Anician, which comes when autumn is over and has an agreeably acid flavour. One pear is called the Tiberian, which was a special favourite of the Emperor Tiberius; it is more coloured by the sun and grows to a larger size, but otherwise would be the same as the Licerian. Pears having the name of their place of origin are the Amerian, the latest of all kinds, the Picentine, the Numantine, the Alexandrian, the Numidian, the Greek, a variety of which is the Tarentine, and the Signine, which some people call the tile-pear from its colour, like the onyx-pear and the purple pear; while named from their scent are the myrrh-pear, the bay-leaf pear and the nard-pear; named from its season the barley-pear; from its long neck, the bottle-pear; and the Coriolan and Bruttian pears are so-called because of their connexion with certain races, and the gourd-pear and the sourish pear because of their juice. Pears the reason for the names of which is uncertain are the barbarian, the variety of Venus pear called the coloured Venus, the royal pear called the squat pear because of its very short stalk, the patrician pear, and the vocimum, a green kind of an oblong shape. Virgil has also mentioned a warden pear, which he gets from Cato, who also specifies a 'seed-time pear' and a 'must-pear.'

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§ 15.17.1  This department of life has long ago arrived at its highest point, mankind having explored every possibility, inasmuch as Virgil speaks of grafting nuts on an arbutus, apples on a plane and cherries on an elm. And nothing further can be devised — at all events it is now a long time since any new kind of fruit has been discovered. Moreover, religious scruples do not permit us to cross all varieties by grafting; for instance, we must not graft upon a thorn, inasmuch as it is not easy to expiate thunderbolts when they have struck them, and it is declared that the same number of bolts will strike it in a single flash as the kinds of trees that have been grafted on it.

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§ 15.17.2  Pears have a more tapering shape than apples. The late kinds among them hang on the mother tree till winter and ripen with the frost — the Greek pear, the bottle pear, the bay-leaf pear; as also among apples do the Amerian and Scaudian varieties. Pears are put in storage like grapes, and in as many different ways, and are the only fruit kept in casks except plums. Of all the apple kind pears have the quality of wines, and like wine they are avoided by doctors in the treatment of the sick. Boiled in wine and water they make a sort of jam, as does no other fruit except the quince and the sparrow-apple.

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§ 15.18.1  In regard to keeping fruit it is universally recommended that fruit-lofts should be constructed in a cool and dry place, with boarded floors and windows facing north that are left open on a fine day, and with glazed windows to keep out south winds, the draught from a north-east wind also spoiling the appearance of the fruit by making it shrivelled; that apples should be gathered after the autumn equinox, and not before the 16th day of the moon nor later than the 28th, nor on a rainy day, nor till an hour after sunrise; that windfalls should be kept separate; that the fruit should have a bed of close-packed straw or of chaff underneath, and should be placed far apart so that the spaces between the rows may admit a uniform draught. It is said that the Ameria apple is the best keeper and the honey-apple the worst. It is recommended that quinces should be stored in a place kept shut up, from which all draughts are excluded, or else that they should be boiled or soaked in honey. Pomegranates should be hardened in boiling seawater and then dried in the sun for three days and hung up in such a way as to be protected from the dew at night, and when wanted for use they should be thoroughly washed in fresh water. Marcus Varro recommends keeping them in large jars of sand, and also while they are unripe covering them with earth in pots with the bottom broken out but with all air shut out from them and with their stalk smeared with pitch, as so kept they grow to an even larger size than they could possibly attain on the tree. He says that all other fruit of the apple kind should also be wrapped up separately in fig-leaves (but not leaves that have fallen off) and stored in wicker baskets or else smeared over with potters' earth. He says that pears should be stored in earthenware jars which should be covered with pitch and placed bottom upwards in a hole in the ground with earth heaped over them. He recommends gathering the Taranto pear very late; and keeping the Anician and also sorb-apples in raisin wine, and putting them in holes dug in the ground in a sunny place, with the lid of the jar plastered up and two feet of earth heaped on top of it, the vessels being placed bottom upward; and he also recommends hanging them together with their branches, like grapes, in large jars.

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§ 15.18.2  Some of the most recent writers examine deeper into the matter, and recommend that fruit and grapes should be picked early for the purpose of storage, when the moon is waning, after nine o'clock in the morning, in fine weather or with a dry wind blowing. Likewise they say that the fruit ought to be chosen from dry places and also before it is completely ripe, with the further condition that the moon must be below the horizon; and that the grapes with their hard hammer-shoot of stalk, after the rather rotten berries have been removed with a pair of scissors, should be hung up inside a fresh-tarred cask, with all air shut out by the lid and by plaster. They recommend the same method for storing sorb-apples and pears, the stalks of all having been smeared with pitch. They say that the casks must not be kept anywhere near water. Some people store them in this way together with the branch itself, with each of its ends stuck into a squill; others hang them in casks still containing wine, but taking care that the grapes do not touch the wine; some store apples floating in wine in earthenware dishes, by which method they think a scent is given to them by the wine. Some prefer to preserve all fruit of this kind in millet, but most people think it is best kept in a hole in the ground two feet deep with a layer of sand under the fruit and covered with an earthenware lid and then with soil. Some even smear grapes with potters' clay, dry them in the sun and hang them up, washing off the clay when they are required for use. In the case of fruits, they get rid of the clay by means of wine. By the same method they coat the finest kind of apples with plaster or wax, but if the fruit is not already ripe it breaks the coating by growing in size; but they always store the apples with their stalks downward. Other people pluck the apples together with the branches, the ends of which they thrust into elder pith and then bury, as described above. Others assign a separate clay vessel to each apple and pear, and after sealing up the opening of the vessels with pitch enclose them again in a cask; also some store the fruit, packed in flocks of wool, in cases which they smear with clay mixed with chaff; others follow the same plan using earthenware pans to put them in; and also some store them in a hole on a layer of sand, and so later cover them up with dry earth. There are some who give quinces a coat of Pontic wax and then dip them in honey. Columella recommends storing grapes in earthenware vessels that have been very carefully smeared with a coating of pitch, and sinking them into wells or cisterns. The part of seaboard Liguria nearest to the Alps dries its grapes in the sun, and wraps the raisins in bundles of rush and stores them in casks sealed np with plastered lime. The Greeks do the same, employing plane-tree leaves, the leaves of the vine itself or fig-leaves that have been dried for one day in a shady place, and putting grape-skins in the cask between the grapes; this is the method used for storing the grapes of Cos and of Beyrout, which are inferior to none in sweetness. Some people to make raisins dip the grapes in lye-ashes as soon as they have plucked them from the vines, and afterwards dry them in the sun and plunge the raisins into hot water and again dry them in the sun, and then wrap them up in leaves, making them into a tight bundle with grape-husks as described above. There are those who prefer to keep grapes in sawdust or in shavings of pine or poplar or ash wood; and there are some who advise hanging them in a granary, not near any apples, as soon as they are picked, because they say that the dust of the corn dries them best. A protection against wasps for bunches of grapes hung up is to sprinkle them with oil squirted out of the mouth. About palm-dates we have already spoken.

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§ 15.19.1  Of the rest of the apple class the fig is the largest, and some figs rival even pears in size. We have spoken about the marvels of the Egyptian and Cypriote fig among the figs of foreign countries.

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§ 15.19.2  That of Mount Ida is red, and is the size of an olive, only rounder in shape; it has the taste of a medlar. The local name of this tree is the Alexandrian fig; the trunk is eighteen inches thick and it spreads out in branches; it has a tough pliant wood, containing no juice, a green bark and a leaf like that of a lime but soft to the feel. Onesicritus reports that the figs in Hyrcania are much sweeter than ours and the trees more prolific, a single tree bearing 270 pecks of fruit. Figs have been introduced among us from other countries, for instance, Chalcis and Chios — of the latter there are several varieties, inasmuch as Lydian figs, which are purple, and breast-shaped figs have a resemblance to the Chian; also the 'pretty-sparrow' figs, which are superior in the flavour of their flesh and are the coolest of all figs. For in regard to the African fig, as many people prefer it to the whole of the other kinds, there is a great question, inasmuch as this kind has only quite recently crossed over into Africa. Also among black figs the Alexandrian is named from its country of origin — it has a cleft of a whitish colour, and it is called the luxury fig; among figs that ripen early those of Rhodes and of Tivoli are also black. Early figs also have the names of the persons who introduced them — Livia, Pompey: the latter is the best for a fig to be dried in the sun for use throughout the year, together with the marsh fig and the fig with marks all over it shaped like a reed leaf. There are also the Herculanean fig, the white-wax fig, and the white plough fig, with a very small stalk, a very flat-shaped kind. But the earliest fig is the purple fig, which has a very long stalk; it is accompanied by the worst of the very small kinds, called the people's fig. On the other hand the kind that ripens latest, just before winter, is the swallow fig. There are moreover figs that bear both late and early, yielding two crops, one white and one black, ripening with the harvest and with the vintage. There is also a late fig named from the hardness of its skin; some of the Chalcidic varieties of this kind bear three times a year. The extremely sweet fig called the ona grows only at Taranto. Cato makes the following remark about figs: 'Plant the marisca fig in a chalky or open place, but the African, Herculanean and Saguntine kinds, the winter fig and the black long-stalked Telanian in a richer soil or in one well manured.' Since his day so many names and varieties have arisen that a consideration of this alone is enough to show how our way of life has been transformed. Some provinces also have winter figs, for instance Moesia, but these are a product of art and not of nature. There is a small kind of fig-tree which is banked up with manure at the end of autumn and the figs on it are overtaken by winter while still unripe; and when milder weather comes the figs, together with the tree, are dug up again and restored to light; and just as if born again they greedily imbibe the warmth of the new sun, a different one from the sun through which they lived before, and begin to ripen along with the blossom of the coming crop, maturing in a year that does not belong to them; the region is an extremely cold one.

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§ 15.20.1  But the variety which even in his day Cato termed the African fig reminds us of his having employed that fruit for a remarkable demonstration. Burning with a mortal hatred of Carthage and anxious in regard to the safety of his descendants, at every meeting of the senate he used to vociferate 'Down with Carthage!' and so on a certain occasion he brought into the house an early ripe fig from that province, and displaying it to the Fathers he said, 'I put it to you, when do you think this fruit was plucked from the tree?' Everybody agreed that it was quite fresh; so he said, 'O well, it was picked the day before yesterday at Carthage — so near is the enemy to our walls!' And they promptly embarked on the third Punic war, in which Carthage was brought down, although Cato had been taken from us the year after the incident narrated. What should we chiefly wonder at in this? ingenuity or chance coincidence? rapidity of transit or manly force of character? The crowning marvel, which I for my part think wonderful beyond parallel, is that so mighty a city, which for one hundred and twenty years had competed for the sovereignty of the world, was overthrown by the evidence of a single fruit — an achievement which not Trebbia or Trasimene, not Cannae with the tomb of Rome's glory, not the Carthaginian camp pitched three miles from the city and Hannibal in person riding up to the Colline gate were able to achieve: so much nearer did Cato bring Carthage to us by means of a single fruit! A fig-tree growing in the actual forum and meeting-place of Rome is worshipped as sacred because things struck by lightning are buried there, and still more as a memorial of the fig-tree under which the nurse of Romulus and Remus first sheltered those founders of the empire on the Lupercal Hill — the tree that has been given the name of Ruminalis, because it was beneath it that the wolf was discovered giving her rumis (that was the old word for breast) to the infants — a marvellous occurrence commemorated in bronze close by, as though the wolf had of her own accord passed across the meeting-place while Attus Naevius was taking the omens. And it is also a portent of some future event when it withers away and then by the good offices of the priests is replanted. There was also a fig-tree in front of the temple of Saturn, which in 404 BC., after a sacrifice had been offered by the Vestal Virgins, was removed, because it was upsetting a statue of Silvanus. A tree of the same kind that was self-sown lives in the middle of the forum, at the spot where, when the foundations of the Empire were collapsing in portent of disaster, Curtius had filled up the gulfs with the greatest of treasures, I mean virtue and piety and a glorious death. Likewise self-sown is a vine in the same locality, and there is an olive planted by the care of the populace for the sake of the shade; an altar in the forum was removed on the occasion of the gladiatorial show given by his late Majesty Julius, the most recent one that fought in the forum.

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§ 15.21.1  A remarkable fact about the fig is that this alone among all the fruits hastens to ripen with a rapidity due to the skill of nature. There is a wild variety of fig called the goat-fig which never ripens, but bestows on another tree what it has not got itself, since it is a natural sequence of causation, just as from things that decay something is generated. Consequently this fig engenders gnats which, being cheated out of nutriment in their mother tree, fly away from its decaying rottenness to the kindred tree and by repeatedly nibbling at the figs — that is by feeding on them too greedily they open their orifices and so make a way into them, bringing with them the sun into the fruit for the first time and introducing the fertilizing air through the passages thus opened. Then they consume the milky juice — this is the symptom of the fruit's infancy — which also dries up of its own accord; and because of this in fig-orchards a goat-fig is allowed to grow on the windward side, so that when a wind blows the gnats may fly off and be carried to the fig-trees. Then a plan was discovered of also bringing branches of the wild fig from somewhere else and throwing them tied together in bundles on to the fig-orchard — a treatment which orchard figs do not require when planted in a thin soil with a northerly aspect, since they dry of their own accord owing to the situation of the place, and this cause by making them split open produces the same results as the action of the gnats; nor yet do they need screening where there is much dust, which occurs chiefly when a much frequented high road is adjacent, for dust also has the effect of drying them up and absorbing the milky juice. This method by means of the dust and the employment of the wild fig also serves the purpose of preventing the figs from falling off, by removing the juice which is soft and heavy, involving a certain liability to break. All figs are soft to the touch, and when ripe have grains inside them; also while in process of ripening they contain a milky juice, which when they are quite ripe is of the nature of honey. When left on the tree they grow old, and when quite aged they drip tears of gum. The figs that are highly approved arc given the distinction of being dried and kept in boxes, the best and largest growing in the island of Iviza and the next best in the district of Chicti; but in places where there is a very large supply of them, they are packed for storage in large jars in Asia, but in casks in the city of Ruspina in Africa, and when dry they serve the purpose of bread and other viands at the same time, inasmuch as Cato, as if laying down a law as to the proper rations for agricultural labourers, prescribes that they are to be reduced in quantity during the time when the figs are ripe. A plan has lately been devised to use a fresh fig instead of salt when eating cheese. To this class, as we have said, belong the Syrian and the Carian figs and the Caunean figs that, when Marcus Crassus was embarking to sail against the Parthians, gave him an omen by the voice of a man crying them for sale. All these varieties of fruit were imported from Syria to his country place at Alba by Lucius Vitellius, afterwards censor, when he was lieutenant-governor in that province, in the latter part of the principate of the emperor Tiberius.

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§ 15.22.1  Fruits that must be included in the class of apples and pears are the medlar and the service-berry. There are three sorts of medlar, the anthedon, the setania, and the third an inferior kind yet rather like the anthedon, which is called the Gallic medlar. The fruit of the setania is larger and of a paler colour, with a softer pip; the others have smaller fruit but with a superior scent and keeping longer. The tree itself is one of the most widely spreading; its leaves turn red before they fall off; it has a great many roots, which go deep into the ground and consequently it is impossible to grub them up. In Cato's time this tree did not exist in Italy.

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§ 15.23.1  There are four varieties of service-berry, some of them round like an apple, and others of conical shape like a pear, while others look like an egg, as do some kinds of apple. This last variety are liable to be sour, but the round ones excel in scent and sweetness, and the rest have a flavour of wine; the best varieties are those which have their stalks surrounded with tender leaves. The fourth kind is called the colic apple and is only valued as a medicine; it is a steady bearer and has a very small fruit; the tree differs in appearance from the other kind, and the leaves are almost the same as those of the plane. None of the sorbs bear before their third year. Cato records that even sorbs can be preserved in must.

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§ 15.24.1  The walnut has won from the service-berry in point of size the place that it has yielded to it in popularity, although the walnut also accompanies the Fescennine songs sung at weddings. The whole nut is considerably smaller than a pine-cone, but the kernel is larger in the same proportion. Moreover the walnut has a distinction of structure that is peculiar to it, in that it is protected by a double covering, consisting first of a cushion-shaped cup and then of a woody shell. This is the reason why walnuts have become emblems consecrated to weddings [possibly as a fertility charm; these were thrown by the bridegroom to the boys carrying the torches], because their progeny is protected in so many ways — a more likely explanation of the custom than that it is due to the rattling rebound which it makes when it falls on the floor. The Greek names for the walnut prove that it also was sent us from Persia by the kings, the best kind of walnut being called in Greek the Persian and the 'royal,' and these were their original names. It is generally agreed that the caryon walnut gets its name from the headache that it causes because of its oppressive scent. The shell of the walnut is used for dyeing wool, and the young nuts while just forming supply a red hair-dye — this was discovered from their staining the hands when handled. Age makes them oily. The only difference between the various kinds of walnuts consists in the hardness or brittleness of the shell and in its being thin or thick and full of recesses or uniform. It is the only fruit which nature has enclosed in a covering made of pieces fitted together; for the shell is divided into two boat-shaped pieces, and the kernel is further separated into four sections with a woody membrane running between them in all the other kinds of nut the whole is in one solid piece, as for instance in the hazel, itself also a sort of nut, the previous form of its name having been Abellina, after the name of its place of origin; but it came into Asia and Greece from Pontus and is consequently also called the Pontic nut. This nut also is protected by a soft beard, but the shell and the kernel are formed of one solid round piece. It also is roasted. The kernel has a navel in its centre. A third variety of the nut class is the almond, which has an outer integument like that of the walnut but thinner, and also a second covering consisting of a shell; but the kernel is unlike a walnut's in its breadth and its hard part is more bitter. It is doubtful whether this tree existed in Italy in the time of Cato, as he calls almonds 'Greek nuts,' a name which some people also retain in the class of walnuts. Beside these Cato adds a smooth, hard kind of hazel-nut, the Praeneste nut, which he praises very highly and says can be kept fresh and green by being potted and buried in the ground. At the present day the almonds of Thasos and Alba are famous, and two kinds grown at Taranto, one with a brittle shell and the other with a hard shell, which are very large in size and very little rounded in shape; also famous is the 'soft nut,' which breaks through its shell. Some interpret the word for walnut as honorific and say it means 'Jove's acorn.' I lately heard a man of consular rank declare that he owned some walnut trees that actually bore two crops a year. We have already spoken in the proper place of the pistachio, which is also a sort of nut. This also was likewise first brought into Italy by Vitellius at the same time, and it was simultaneously introduced into Spain by Pompeius Flaccus, Knight of Rome, who was serving with Vitellius.

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§ 15.25.1  We give the name of nut to the chestnut, also, although it seems to fit better into the acorn class. The chestnut has its armed rampart in its bristling shell, which in the acorn is only partly developed, and it is surprising that what nature has taken such pains to conceal should be the least valuable of things. Some chestnuts produce three nuts from one shell; and the skin is tough, but next to the body of the nut there is a membrane which both in the chestnut and the walnut spoils the taste if it is not peeled off. It is more agreeable as a food when roasted, provided it is ground up, and it supplies a sort of imitation bread for women when they are keeping a fast. They came first from Sardis, and consequently they are called nuts of Sardis among the Greeks, for the name of Zeus's nut was given them later, after they had been improved by cultivation. There are now several varieties of them. The Taranto chestnut is light and digestible to eat; it has a flat shape. The chestnut called the acorn-chestnut is rounder; it is very easy to peel, and jumps out of the shell quite clean of its own accord. The Salarian chestnut also has a flat shape, but that of Taranto is less easy to handle. The Corellian is more highly spoken of, and so is the variety produced from it by the method which we shall speak of in dealing with grafting, the Etereian, which its red skin renders more popular than the three-cornered chestnut and the common black ones called cooking chestnuts. The most highly commended chestnuts come from Taranto, and in Campania from Naples; all the other kinds are grown for pig-food; the pigs carefully chew up the shells as well, together with the kernels.

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§ 15.26.1  Also the extremely sweet carob may be thought to be not far remote from the chestnut, except that in the case of the carob the husk itself is eaten. It is not longer than a man's finger, and occasionally curved like a sickle, and it has the thickness of a man's thumb. Acorns cannot be counted among fruits, and consequently they will be dealt with among trees of their own kind.

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§ 15.27.1  The remaining fruits belong to the fleshy class, and they differ in their shape and in their flesh. Berries one kind of flesh, the mulberry another, the strawberry-tree another; and the grape, etc., have a substance between skin and juice different from that of the myxa plum and from that of berries such as the olive. The flesh of the mulberry contains a vinous juice, and the fruit has three successive colours, first white, then red, and when ripe black.

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§ 15.27.2  The mulberry is one of the latest trees to blossom, but among the first to ripen. The juice of ripe mulberries stains the hand, but the stain can be washed out with the juice of unripe ones. In the case of this tree the devices of the growers have made the least improvement of any, and the mulberry of Ostia and that of Tivoli do not differ from that of Rome by named varieties or by grafting or in any other way except in the size of the fruit. A similar but much firmer berry also grows on brambles.

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§ 15.28.1  The flesh of the ground strawberry is different from that of the strawberry-tree which is related to it, the strawberry being the only fruit that grows at the same time on a bush and on the ground. The tree itself is a sort of shrub; the fruit takes a year to mature, and the following crop flowers side by side with the earlier crop when it is ripening. Authorities disagree as to whether it is the male plant or the female that is unproductive. The fruit is held in no esteem, the reason for its name being that a person will eat only one. Nevertheless the Greeks call it by the two names of comaron and memaceylon, which shows that there are two varieties of the plant; and with ourselves it has another name, the arbutus. Juba states that in Arabia the strawberry-tree grows to a height of 75 feet.

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§ 15.29.1  There is also a great difference among the acinus class — to begin with, between grapes themselves, which vary in respect of firmness, thinness or thickness of skin and the stone inside, which in some is specially small and in others actually double, the latter producing extremely little juice. Again, the berries of the ivy and the elder are very widely different, and the pomegranate differs greatly in shape also, being the only fruit that has corners; and there is no membrane for each separate grain, but only one wrapping for them all in common, which is white in colour. And these fruits consist entirely of juice and flesh, particularly the ones which contain only a small amount of woody substance.

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§ 15.29.2  There is also a great variety among the berries of the baca kind, those of the olive and the laurel being different, and that of the lotus differing in structure from that of the come and that of the myrtle from that of the lentisk; indeed the berries of the holly and the may contain no juice; and moreover the cherry forms a class intermediate between the baca kind of berries and the acinus kind: its fruit is at first white, as is that of almost all the bacae. At a later stage with some the berry turns green, e.g. the olive and the laurel; but in the case of the mulberry, the cherry and the cornel it changes to red, and then with the mulberry, cherry and olive it turns black.

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§ 15.30.1  Before the victory of Lucius Lucullus in the war against Mithridates, that is down to 74 BC., there were no cherry-trees in Italy. Lucullus first imported them from Pontus, and in 120 years they have crossed the ocean and got as far as Britain; but all the same no attention has succeeded in getting them to grow in Egypt. Of cherries the Apronian are the reddest, and the Lutatian the blackest, while the Caecilian kind are perfectly round. The Junian cherry has an agreeable flavour but practically only if eaten under the tree on which it grows, as it is so delicate that it does not stand carriage. The highest rank, however, belongs to the bigaroon cherry called by the Campanians the Plinian cherry, but in Belgium to the Lusitanian, and so also on the banks of the Rhine. This cherry has a third kind of colour, a blend of black, bright red and green, which looks as if the fruit were always not quite ripe. It is less than five years ago that what is called the laurel-cherry was introduced, which has a not disagreeable bitter flavour, and is produced by grafting a cherry on a bay-tree. There are also Macedonian cherries, grown on a tree of small size and rarely exceeding four and half feet in height, and ground-cherries, with a still smaller bush. The cherry is one of the earliest fruits to repay its yearly gratitude to the farmer. It likes a north aspect and cold conditions; moreover it can be dried in the sun and stored in casks like olives.

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§ 15.31.1  The same amount of care is also bestowed on the cornel, and even on the lentisk. So that nothing may not appear to have come into existence for the sake of man's appetite, flavours are blended and different ones are forced to gratify different persons; indeed even the regions of the earth and of the sky are blended: in one kind of food the aid of India is invoked, in another that of Egypt, Crete, Cyrene and every land in turn. Nor does our regimen stick at poisons, if only it may devour everything. This will become clearer when we come to the nature of herbaceous plants.

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§ 15.32.1  In the meantime we find that there are ten kinds of flavours that belong in common to the fruits and to all their juices; sweet, luscious, unctuous, bitter, rough, acrid, sham, harsh, acid and salt. Beside these there are three other flavours of a particularly remarkable nature: (1) one in which several tastes are discerned simultaneously, as in wines — for they contain both a rough and a sham and a sweet and a luscious taste, all of them different from each other; (2) another kind is that which contains both the flavour of something else and one that is its own and peculiar to itself, for instance milk — inasmuch as milk contains a something which nevertheless cannot rightly be called sweet or unctuous or luscious, being possessed by a smoothness which of itself takes the place of a flavour; (3) water has no flavour at all and no flavouring constituent, yet still this very fact gives it some taste and makes it form a class of its own: at all events for water to have any perceptible taste or flavour is a defect. In all these flavours smell is of great importance and a great factor of affinity; in the case of water even smell is entirely absent, or if perceptible at all is a defect. It is a remarkable fact that the three chief natural elements, water, air and fire, have neither taste, smell, nor any flavour whatever.

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§ 15.33.1  Among juices, then, those with a vinous and flavour are the juices of the pear, the mulberry and the myrtle-berry, and surprising as it may seem, the juice of the grape least of all. The juice of the olive, laurel, walnut and almond is unctuous, that of grapes, figs and dates is sweet, and that of plums watery. There is also a great difference in the colour of juice: that of the mulberry, the cherry, the cornel and the black grape is blood-red; the juice of white grapes is of a light colour; fig juice is milky white in the part near the stalk but not in the body of the fruit; apple juice is the colour of foam; peach juice has no colour at all, in spite of the. fact that the hard peach has a large quantity of juice, but no one would say that this has any colour.

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§ 15.33.2  Smell also contains its own marvels. Apples have a pungent scent, peaches a weak one, and sweet fruits none at all; for even sweet wine has no smell, although thin wine has more aroma, and wines of that class become fit for use much sooner than those with more body. Fruits with a scent are not likewise agreeable to the palate, as scent and flavour do not go together — so that citrons have a very penetrating smell and a very rough taste, and in some degree that is the case with quinces also; and figs have no smell.

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§ 15.34.1  And so much for the various classes and kinds of fruits. Their structures call for closer examination. Some fruits are characterized by their pods, which are themselves sweet and which enclose a seed that is bitter, since whereas in fairly many plants the seeds are agreeable, seeds contained in a pod are not approved of. Others are characterized by berries which have a hard kernel inside and flesh outside, for instance olives and cherries. Some have the berries inside and a hard shell outside, as is the ease with the fruit we spoke of that grows in Egypt. Fruits of the apple kind have the same structure as the berries: some have flesh inside and a hard ease outside, as in the case of nuts; while others have flesh outside and a hard stone inside, as is the ease with peaches and plums, which thus have the refuse part wrapped round with the fruit, whereas in other eases the fruit is shielded by the refuse part. Nuts are enclosed in a shell, chestnuts in a skin; with chestnuts the skin is removed, but in the ease of medlars it is eaten. Acorns are covered with a hard shell, grapes with a skin, pomegranates with an outer skin and an inner skin. Mulberries consist of flesh and juice, cherries of skin and juice. Some fruits separate from their woody part at once, for instance nuts and dates, but some adhere to it, for instance olives and laurel-berries; and one group has both properties, for example peaches, inasmuch as in the hard peach or nectarine the flesh adheres and cannot be torn away from the stone, whereas in all the other sorts it is easily separated. Some fruits have no stone inside and no shell outside, for instance the date class. Of some kinds the hard part itself is used and serves as fruit, for instance the cuci which we spoke of as growing in Egypt. Some fruits have a double refuse-covering, as in the case of chestnuts and almonds and walnuts. Some have a threefold structure — there is flesh and then shell and then again a seed inside the shell — for instance peaches. Some fruits grow in clusters, for instance grapes and sorbs, the latter clinging all round the branches and weighing them down, like grapes; but others hang separately, as in the case of the peach. Some fruits are contained in a matrix, for instance pomegranates; some hang down from a stalk, for instance pears, others hang in bunches, for instance grapes and dates, and others hang from a stalk and form hunches as well, for instance ivy-berries and elder-berries. Others are attached to a branch, like the berry on the laurel, while certain kinds hang in both ways, for instance olives, for they have both short stalks and long ones. Some consist of capsules, for instance the pomegranate, the medlar and the lotus in Egypt and on the Euphrates. Then again fruits have a variety of attractions to recommend them. Dates please us by their flesh, but the dates of the Thebaid by their hard skin; grapes and nut-dates by their juice, pears and apples by their firm flesh, mulberries by their substance, nuts by their solid interior, certain fruits in Egypt by their pips, Carian figs by their skin this is removed from green figs as refuse, but in dried figs it is very agreeable. In the case of the papyrus, the fennel-giant and the white thorn the stalk itself is the fruit, as are the stalks of the fig-tree, and in the shrub class the caper with its stalk; but in the carob the only part that is eaten is the wood — while its seed has a property that must not be omitted: it cannot be called either flesh or wood or cartilage, and it would not be given any other name.

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§ 15.35.1  The nature of the juices produced is particularly remarkable in the case of the myrtle, because it is the only one among all the trees that gives two kinds of oil and of wine, beside the drink called myrtidanum, as we said. In former times another use was also made of the myrtle-berry, which held the place of pepper before pepper was discovered; in fact, in the case of one kind of savoury dish the name is derived from this, it being to this day called myrtle sausage. Also the flavour of wild boar is improved from the same source, as the pickle usually has myrtle-berries added to it.

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§ 15.36.1  The actual tree is recorded to have been seen for the first time on the hither side of Europe, beginning from the Ceraunian Mountains, on the grave of Elpenor at Circello, and it still keeps its Greek name, showing it to be an exotic. At the time of the foundation of Rome myrtles grew on the present site of the city, as tradition says that the Romans and Sabines, after having wanted to fight a battle because of the carrying off of the maidens, laid down their arms and purified themselves with sprigs of myrtle, at the place now occupied by the statues of Venus Cluacina, cluere being the old word meaning 'to cleanse.' And a kind of incense for fumigation is also contained in this tree, which was selected for the purpose on the occasion referred to because Venus the guardian spirit of the tree also presides over unions, and I rather think that it was actually the first of all trees to be planted in public places at Rome, fraught indeed with a prophetic and remarkable augury. For the shrine of Quirinus, that is of Romulus himself, is held to be one of the most ancient temples. In it there were two sacred myrtles, which for a long time grew in front of the actual temple, and one of them was called the patricians' myrtle and the other the common people's. For many years the patricians' tree was the more flourishing of the two, and was full of vigour and vitality; as long as the senate flourished this was a great tree, while the common people's myrtle was shrivelled and withered. But after the latter had grown strong while the patrician myrtle began to turn yellow, from the Marsian war onward [91-88 BC] the authority of the Fathers became weak, and by slow degrees its grandeur withered away into barrenness. Moreover there was also an old altar belonging to Venus Myrtea, whose modern name is Murcia.

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§ 15.37.1  Cato mentioned three kinds of myrtle, the black, the white and the 'union myrtle' — perhaps named after marriage unions — descended from the stock of the Cluacina myrtle mentioned above; but at the present day there is also another classification, which distinguishes the cultivated and the wild myrtle, and in each of these also a wide-leaved variety, while the variety called oxymyrsine occurs only in the wild kind. Varieties of the cultivated myrtle produced by landscape-gardeners are the Taranto myrtle with a very small leaf, the Roman myrtle with a broad leaf, and the 'six-row' myrtle with very thick foliage, the leaves growing in rows of six. The last is not much grown, being bushy and not lofty. I believe that the union-myrtle is now called the Roman myrtle. The myrtle with the most powerful scent belongs to Egypt. Cato taught how to make wine from the black myrtle, by drying it in the shade until no moisture remained and then putting it in must; he says that if the berries are not thoroughly dried, oil is produced. Afterwards a way was also discovered of making a white wine from the pale variety, by steeping a quart of pounded myrtle in a pint and a half of wine and then pressing out the liquor. The leaves are also dried by themselves till they go to a powder, which is used as a cure for sores on the human body, the powder being slightly corrosive and serving to cool off the perspiration. Moreover, the oil also curiously enough contains a certain flavour of wine, and at the same time has a greasy fluidity which makes it specially efficacious for improving wines if it is poured over the wine-strainers before they are used; this is because the oil retains the lees and only allows the pure liquor to pass through, and unites with the wine after it has been strained, greatly improving it. Sprigs of myrtle also merely by being carried by a traveller are beneficial when making a long journey on foot. Moreover, rings made of myrtle twigs which have never been touched by iron are a cure for swellings in the groin.

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§ 15.38.1  The myrtle has also claimed a part in matters of warfare, and Publius Postumius Tubertus, the first of all men who ever entered the city with an ovation, during his consulship celebrated a triumph [503 B.C.] over the Sabines, and because he had won the campaign easily, without bloodshed, he made his entry wearing a wreath made of the myrtle of Venus Vietrix, and so made that tree a coveted object even for our enemies. Subsequently a myrtle wreath was regularly worn by generals celebrating an ovation, with the exception of Marcus Crassus, who when celebrating his victory won from the runaway slaves and Spartacus, made his entry wearing a wreath of laurels. Masurius informs us that generals going in triumph in a chariot also used to wear a myrtle wreath. Lucius Piso records that Papirius Maso, the first general who held a triumph on the Alban Mount, in [71 B.C.] celebration of his victory over the Corsicans, was in the habit of wearing a wreath of myrtle when watching the games in the circus: he was the maternal grandfather of the second Africanus. Marcus Valerius wore two wreaths, one of laurel and one of myrtle, having made a vow to do so.

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§ 15.39.1  The laurel is especially assigned to triumphs, but it is extremely decorative for dwelling-houses, and guards the portals of the emperors and the high priests; there it hangs alone, adorning the mansions and keeping sentry-guard before the thresholds. Cato has recorded two species of laurel, the Delphic and the Cyprian. Pompeius Lenaeus added one which he called mustax, because it was placed underneath mustacean cakes: he said that this has a very large, pendulous leaf of a whitish colour, and that the Delphic laurel is a uniform greener colour, and has very large berries of a reddish green; and that this laurel is used to make wreaths for the winners at Delphi, as it is for generals going in triumph at Rome. He states that the Cyprus laurel is crinkly, with a short black leaf that curves up along the edges. Since his time varieties have been added: the tine tree — this some take to be the wild laurel, but there are people who think that it is a separate kind of tree: indeed there is a difference of colour, the berry being bright blue. Another addition is the royal laurel, which has begun to be called the Augusta laurel, a very large tree with a very large leaf and berries without any rough taste. Some say that the royal laurel and the Augusta are not the same, and make out the royal to be a special kind, with longer and broader leaves. The same persons place in another class, under the name of hacalia, the laurel which is the, commonest of all and bears the largest number of berries, but much to my surprise give the name of triumphal laurel to one that has no berries, and say that this is the one used by persons celebrating a triumph — unless the use of it began with his late Majesty Augustus, as we shall show, as sprung from the laurel which was sent down to him from heaven, which was a very low growing tree with a short, crinkled leaf, and very rarely met with. In ornamental gardening there is also the Thasos laurel, which has a tiny leafy fringe as it were growing out of the middle of the leaf, and the gelded laurel, without this fringe, which is remarkably able to stand lack of sun and which consequently fills the ground with its shoots in however shady a place. There is also the ground laurel, a shrub that grows wild, and the Alexandrine laurel, which some call the Idaean, others hypoglottion, others carpophyllon and others hypelates. This laurel spreads out branches 9 inches long from its root, and is useful for making wreaths; the leaf is more pointed than that of the myrtle, and softer, brighter in colour and larger; the seed, which lies between the leaves, is red; it grows in great abundance on Mount Ida and in the vicinity of Heraclea in Pontus, and it only occurs in mountain districts. Also the class of laurel called daphnoides is involved in a competition of nomenclature, as some call it the Pelasgian laurel, others the leafy laurel, others Alexander's crown. This also is a bushy shrub, with a thicker and softer leaf than the ordinary laurel, which leaves a burning taste in the mouth; the berries are a blackish red. The older writers noted that there was no variety of laurel that grew in Corsica; but it has now been introduced there with successful results.

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§ 15.40.1  The laurel itself is a bringer of peace, inasmuch as to hold out a branch of it even between enemy armies is a token of a cessation of hostilities. With the Romans especially it is used as a harbinger of rejoicing and of victory, accompanying despatches and decorating the spears and javelins of the soldiery and adorning the generals' rods of office. From this tree a branch is deposited in the lap of Jupiter the All-good and All-great whenever a fresh victory has brought rejoicing, and this is not because the laurel is continually green, nor yet because it is an emblem of peace, as the olive is to be preferred to it in both respects, but because it flourishes in the greatest beauty on Mount Parnassus and consequently is thought to be also dear to Apollo, to whose shrine even the kings of Rome at that early date were in the custom of sending gifts and asking for oracles in return, as is evidenced by the case of Brutus; another reason also is perhaps to supply a token, because it was there that Brutus won freedom for the people by kissing the famous plot of earth that bore the laurel, at the direction of the oracular utterance; and another possible reason is that the laurel alone of all the shrubs planted by man and received into our houses is never struck by lightning. I personally am inclined to believe that it is for these reasons that the place of honour has been assigned to it in triumphs, rather than because it was employed, as Masurius records, for the purpose of fumigation and purification from the blood of the enemy. And it is so strongly forbidden to pollute the laurel and the olive in profane uses, that they must not be employed even for kindling a fire at altars and shrines in propitiating the deities. The laurel indeed manifestly expresses objection to the application of fire by crackling and making a solemn protest, the timber actually giving a twist to the cracks in its intestines and sinews. It is stated that the emperor Tiberius used to put a wreath from this tree on his head when there was a thunder-storm as a protection against danger from lightning.

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§ 15.40.2  There are also occurrences related to the laurel that are worth recalling in connexion with his late Majesty Augustus. When Livia Drusilla, who afterwards received the name of Augusta on her marriage, had been betrothed to Caesar, while she was seated an eagle dropped into her lap from the sky a hen of remarkable whiteness, without hurting it; she regarded it with wonder, but undismayed, and there was a further miracle: it was holding in its beak a laurel branch bearing its berries. So the augurs ordered that the bird and any chickens it produced should be preserved, and that the branch should be planted in the ground and guarded with religious care. This was done at the country mansion of the Caesars standing on the banks of the river Tiber about nine miles out on the Flaminian road; the house is consequently called The Poultry, and the laurel grove so begun has thriven in a marvellous way. Afterwards the Emperor when going in a triumph held a laurel branch from the original tree in his hand and wore a wreath of its foliage on his head, and subsequently every one of the ruling Caesars did the same; and the custom was established of planting the branches which they had held, and groves of laurels distinguished by their names still survive; and it was perhaps in consequence of this that the change was made in the laurels worn in triumphs.

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§ 15.40.3  The laurel is the only tree the name of which is used in Latin as a man's name, and the only tree whose leaves have a special name applied to them — we call them bay-leaves. The name of the tree also survives as a place-name in Rome, as there is a locality on the Aventine called Loretto where there was once a laurel grove. Moreover, the laurel is employed in rituals of purification; and incidentally it should be stated that it can even be grown from a slip, as this has been doubted by Democritus and Theophrastus. We will now describe the various forest trees.

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§ 16.1.1  AMONG the trees already mentioned are included the fruit-trees and those which by their mellower juices first added the element of pleasure to food and taught us to mingle relishes with our necessary nutriment, whether they did so of their own accord or whether they learnt from mankind to acquire agreeable flavours by means of adoption and intermarriage — and this is a service which we have also rendered to beasts and birds. Next would have come an account of the acorn-bearing trees which first produced food for mortal man and were the foster-mothers of his helpless and savage lot, if we were not compelled by a sense of wonder learnt from experience to turn first to the question, what is the nature and what are the characteristics of the life of people living without any trees or any shrubs.

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§ 16.1.2  We have indeed stated that in the east, on the shores of the ocean, a number of races are in this necessitous condition; but so also are the races of people called the Greater and the Lesser Chauci, whom we have seen in the north. There twice in each period of a day and a night the ocean with its vast tide sweeps in a flood over a measureless expanse, covering up Nature's age-long controversy and the region disputed as belonging whether to the land or to the sea. There this miserable race occupy elevated patches of ground or platforms built up by hand above the level of the highest tide experienced, living in huts erected on the sites so chosen, and resembling sailors in ships when the water covers the surrounding land, but shipwrecked people when the tide has retired, and round their huts they catch the fish escaping with the receding tide. It does not fall to them to keep herds and live on milk like the neighbouring tribes, nor even to have to fight with wild animals, as all woodland growth is banished far away. They twine ropes of sedge and rushes from the marshes for the purpose of setting nets to catch the fish, and they scoop up mud in their hands and dry it by the wind more than by sunshine, and with earth as fuel warm their food and so their own bodies, frozen by the north wind. Their only drink is supplied by storing rainwater in tanks in the forecourts of their homes. And these are the races that if they are nowadays vanquished by the Roman nation say that they are reduced to slavery! That is indeed the case: Fortune oft spares men as a punishment.

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§ 16.2.1  Another marvel arising from the forests: these crowd the whole of the remainder of Germany and augment the cold with their shadow, but the loftiest grow not far from the Chauci mentioned above, especially round two lakes. The actual shores of these are occupied by oaks, which grow with extreme eagerness, and these when undermined by the waves or overthrown by blasts of wind carry away with them vast islands of soil in the embrace of their roots, and thus balanced, float along standing upright, so that our fleets have often been terrified by the wide rigging of their huge branches, when they seemed to be purposely driven by the waves against the bows of the ships at anchor for the night, which thus were unavoidably compelled to engage in a naval battle with trees.

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§ 16.2.2  In the same northern region is the vast expanse of the Hereynian oak forest, untouched by the ages and coeval with the world, which surpasses all marvels by its almost immortal destiny. To omit other facts that would lack credence, it is well known that the collision of the roots encountering each other raises up hillocks of earth, or, where the ground has not kept up to them, their arches in their struggle with one another rise as high as the branches, and curve over in the shape of open gateways, so as to afford a passage to squadrons of cavalry.

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§ 16.2.3  They are practically all of the acorn-bearing class of oak, which is ever held in honour at Rome,

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§ 16.3.1  because from it are obtained the Civic Wreaths, that glorious emblem of military valour, but now for a long time past also an emblem of the emperors clemency, ever since, owing to the impiety of the civil wars, not to kill a fellow-citizen had come to be deemed meritorious. Below these rank mural crowns and rampart-crowns and also golden crowns, although surpassing them in cost, and below them likewise are beaked crowns, albeit down to the present supremely famous in the case of two persons, Marcus Varro who was given this honour by Pompey [67 B.C.] the Great as a result of the wars against the pirates, and likewise Marcus Agrippa who was awarded it is by Augustus after the Sicilian wars, which were also waged against pirates. Previously the forum was graced by the rams of ships fastened in front of the platform, like a wreath crowning the Roman nation. But later they began to be trampled on and polluted by the seditions of the tribunes, and power began to pass from public into private ownership, and to be sought for the advancement of individual citizens, and the sacrosanct tribunes began to make all things profane; and after this the Rams passed from underneath the feet of the speakers to the heads of the citizens; this Wreath of Rams Augustus bestowed upon Agrippa, but he himself received the Civic Wreath from the whole of mankind.

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§ 16.4.1  In olden times indeed no Civic Wreath was presented save to a deity — that is why Homer assigns a wreath only to heaven and to a whole battlefield, but to no man individually even in combat — and it is said that Father Liber was the first to set a crown on his own head, a wreath of ivy. Afterwards persons performing sacrifices in honour of the gods assumed crowns, the victims being adorned with wreaths as well. Most recently of all they were also brought into use in ritual competitions, but in these and at the present day they are not bestowed on the winner, but an announcement is made that by him a wreath is conferred upon his native place; and from this has arisen the custom of also bestowing wreaths on victorious generals about to go in a triumphal procession, for them to dedicate as offerings in the temples, and also subsequently the practice of presenting wreaths at the games. To discuss who was the first Roman to receive each kind of wreath would be a lengthy matter, and not relevant to the plan of this work, and as a matter of fact the Romans were only acquainted with those given for military achievements; but it is a well-known fact that this one nation has a greater variety of wreaths than all the other nations put together.

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§ 16.5.1  Hostus Hostilius, who was the grandfather of King Tullus Hostilius, was crowned by Romulus with a garland of leaves for having been the first to enter Fidena. The elder Publius Decius, who was military tribune, received a garland of leaves from the army which he had saved from destruction in the war with the Samnites when the consul Cornelius Cossus was [343 B.C] in command of our army. The Civic Wreath was first made of the leaves of the holm-oak, but afterwards preference was given to a wreath from the winter oak, which is sacred to Jove, and also a variety was made with the common oak and the tree growing in the particular locality was given, only the honour awarded to the acorn being preserved! Strict and therefore exclusive conditions were further imposed, which may be compared with that supreme wreath of the Greeks which is bestowed beneath the tutelage of Zeus himself and for which the winner's native place in its rejoicing breaks a passage through its city walls; these conditions were — to save the life of a fellow-citizen; to kill one of the enemy; that the place where the exploit occurred must not be occupied by the enemy on the same day; that the person rescued must admit the fact — witnesses otherwise are of no value; — and that it must have been a Roman citizen: auxiliary forces, even though it is a king who is rescued, do not bestow this distinction. Nor is the same honour any greater if the rescued person is a general, because the founders of this institution wished the honour to be supreme in the case of any citizen. The receiver of the wreath may wear it for the rest of his life; when he appears at the games it is the custom for even the senate always to rise at his entrance, and he has the right to sit next to the senators; and he himself and his father and his paternal grandfather are exempt from all public duties. Siccius Dentatus, as we have mentioned at the proper place, won fourteen Civic Wreaths, and Capitolinus six, one in his case being actually for saving the life of his commanding officer Servilius. Scipio Africanus refused to accept a wreath for rescuing his father at the Trebbia. How worthy of eternity is a national character that rewarded exploits so distinguished with honour only, and whereas it enhanced the value of its other wreaths with gold, refused to allow the rescue of a citizen to be a thing of price, thus loudly proclaiming that it is wrong even to save the life of a human being for the sake of gain!

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§ 16.6.1  Acorns at this very day constitute the wealth of many races, even when they are enjoying peace. Moreover also when there is a scarcity of corn they are dried and ground into flour which is kneaded to make bread; beside this, at the present day also in the Spanish provinces a place is found for acorns in the second course at table. Acorns have a sweeter flavour when roasted in the ashes. Moreover it was provided by law in the Twelve Tables that it was permissible to gather up acorns falling on to another person's land. There are many kinds of acorns, and they differ in their fruit, habitat, sex and flavour, some having the shape of the beech-nut and others of the mast of the oak and the holm-oak, and there are also differences within each of these varieties. Moreover some grow wild in forests and others are more tame, occupying cultivated ground. Then they are different in mountain regions and in the plains, as also they differ in sex — male and female, and likewise in flavour: the sweetest of them all is beech-mast, it being recorded by Cornelius Alexander that the people in the town of Chios actually held out against a siege by using it for food. It is not possible to distinguish its kinds by their names, which are different in different places, inasmuch as we see the hard-oak and the common oak growing everywhere, but the winter oak not in every region, and the fourth species of the same class, called the Turkey oak, is not known at all even to the greater part of Italy. We will therefore distinguish the varieties by their properties and natures, also using the Greek names when necessary.

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§ 16.7.1  The acorn of the beech resembles a kernel, being enclosed in a triangular shell. The leaf, which is thin and one of the lightest that there are, resembles that of the poplar; it turns yellow very quickly, and on its upper side, usually at the middle, it grows a little green berry with a pointed end. Mice are extremely fond of the beech and consequently in places where it grows these animals abound; it also fattens dormice, and is good for thrushes, too. Almost all trees grow a good crop only every other year, but this is especially the case with the beech.

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§ 16.8.1  The trees that bear acorns in the proper sense of the term are the hard-oak, the common oak, the winter oak, the Turkey oak, the holm-oak and the cork tree. These trees carry their acorn enclosed in a bristly cup that embraces more or less of it according to their kinds. Their leaves with the exception of the holm-oak are heavy, fleshy and tapering, with wavy edges, and they do not turn yellow when they fall like beech leaves; they differ in length according to the variety of their kinds.

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§ 16.8.2  There are two classes of holm-oak. The Italian variety, called by some Greeks milax, has a leaf not very different from that of the olive, but the holm-oak in the provinces is the one with pointed leaves. The acorn of both kinds is shorter and more slender than that of other varieties; Homer calls it akylon and distinguishes it by that name from the common acorn. It is said that the male holm-oak bears no acorns.

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§ 16.8.3  The best and largest acorn grows on the common oak, and the next best on the winter oak, as that of the hard-oak is small, and that of the Turkey oak a rough, bristly thing with a prickly cup like that of the chestnut. But also in the case of the oak in general the acorn of the female tree is sweeter and softer, while that of the male tree is more compact. In the most esteemed variety called descriptively the broad-leaved oak, the acorns differ among themselves in size and in the thinness of their shell, and also in that some have under the shell a rough coat of a rusty colour, whereas in others one comes to the white flesh at once. Those acorns are also esteemed the kernel of which at each extremity taken lengthwise has a stony hardness, those having this in the husk being better than those with it in the flesh of the nut, but in either case it only occurs with a male tree. Moreover in some cases the acorn is oval, in others round, and in others of a more pointed shape, just as the colour also is blacker or lighter, the latter being preferred. The ends of acorns are bitter and the middle parts sweet; also there is a difference in the shortness or length of the stalk.

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§ 16.8.4  In respect of the trees themselves the one that bears the largest acorn is called the hemeris; this is a comparatively low-growing oak which forms a circle of bushy foliage and which is frequently hollow at the spread of the branches. The wood of the common oak is stronger and less liable to decay; this variety also has many branches, but grows higher and has a thicker trunk; but the loftiest kind is the aegilops, which likes wild uncultivated country.

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§ 16.8.5  Next to this in height is the broad-leaved oak, but it is less useful for builders' timber and for charcoal, and when hewn with the axe is liable to split, on which account it is used in the unhewn state. As charcoal it only pays to use it in a copper-smith's workshop, because as soon as the bellows stop it dies down and has to be rekindled repeatedly; but it gives out a great quantity of sparks. A better charcoal is obtained from young trees. Piles of freshly cut sticks are fitted closely together and made into an oven with clay, and the structure is set fire to, and the shell as it hardens is prodded with poles and so discharges its moisture.

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§ 16.8.6  The worst kind both for charcoal and for timber is the one called in Greek the sea-cork oak, which has a very thick bark and trunk, the latter usually hollow and spongy; and no other variety of the oak class is so liable to rot, even while it is alive. Moreover it is very frequently struck by lightning, although it is not particularly lofty; consequently it is not thought right to use its wood for sacrifices either. Also it rarely bears acorns, and when it does they are bitter, so that no animal will touch them except swine, and not even these if they can get any other fodder. An additional reason among others for its being disregarded for religious ceremonies is that its charcoal goes out during the course of a sacrifice.

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§ 16.8.7  Beech-mast fed to pigs livens them up, and makes their flesh easy to cook and light and digestible whereas the acorns of the holm-oak make a pig thin, not a glossy, meagre. Acorns from the common oak make it heavy and lumpish, being themselves also the largest of nuts and the sweetest in flavour. According to Nigidius's account the next best to the common acorn is the acorn of the Turkey oak, and no other kind gives the pig more solid flesh, though hard. He says that holm-oak acorn is a trying feed for pigs, unless given to them in small quantities at a time; and that this is the latest acorn to fall. He adds that the acorn of the winter oak, hard-oak and cork-tree make a pig's flesh spongy.

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§ 16.9.1  All the acorn-bearing trees produce oak-apples. Oak galls as well, and acorns in alternate years, but the hemeris bears the best oak-apple and the one most suitable for dressing hides. The oak-apple of the broad-leaved oak resembles it, but is lighter in weight and much less highly approved. This tree also produces the black oak-apple — for there are two varieties, this last being more useful for dyeing wool. The oak-apple begins to grow when the sun is leaving the sign of the Twins, and always bursts forth full-size in a night. The lighter-coloured variety grows in a single day, and if it encounters a spell of heat it dries up at once and does not attain its proper growth, that is, to have a kernel the size of a bean. The black oak-apple stays fresh and goes on growing for a longer period, so as sometimes to reach the size of an apple. The best kind comes from Commagene, and the worst is that produced by the hard-oak; it can be detected by the transparent hollows in it.

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§ 16.10.1  The hard-oak supplies a number of other products in addition to acorns; it also bears both kinds of oak-apples, and berries that are like mulberries except that they are dry and hard, also usually resembling a bull's head, which contain a fruit like the stone of an olive. There also grow on it little balls not unlike nuts, having inside them soft flocks of wool suitable for lamp-wicks, since they will keep burning even without oil, as is also the case with the black oak-apples. The hard-oak also bears another sort of little ball with hairs on it, which is of no use, though in spring-time it has a juice that is like bee-glue. Also in the hollows at the junction of its boughs grow little balls adhering bodily to the bark and not attached by a stalk, the point of attachment being white but the remainder speckled with black patches; inside they have a scarlet colour, but when opened they are bitter and empty. Sometimes also the hard-oak bears growths resembling pumice-stone, as well as little balls made of the leaves rolled up, and also on the veins of the leaves watery pustules of a white colour, and as long as they remain soft permeable to light, in which gnats are born. When they ripen they form a knot like the small smooth oak-apple.

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§ 16.11.1  Hard-oaks also bear catkins: that is the name of a small round ball used in medicine for its caustic property. It also grows on the fir, the larch, the pitch-pine, the lime, nut-trees and the plane, lasting on in the winter after the leaves have fallen. It contains a kernel resembling the kernel of pine-cones; this grows in winter and opens out in spring. When the leaves have begun to grow, the whole ball falls off. Such is the multiplicity of products in addition to the acorn that are borne by hard-oaks; but they also produce edible fungi and hog-mushrooms, the most recently discovered stimulants of the appetite, which grow round their roots; those of the common oak are the most esteemed, but those of the hard-oak and cypress and pine are harmful. Hard-oaks also produce mistletoe, and honey as well according to Hesiod, and it is an accepted fact that honey-dew falling from the sky, as we said, deposits itself on the leaves of no other tree in preference to the hard-oak; and it is well known that hard-oak wood when burnt produces a nitrous ash.

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§ 16.12.1  Nevertheless the holm-oak challenges all these products of the hard-oak on the score of its scarlet alone. This is a grain, and looks at first like a roughness on a shrub, which is the small pointed-leaf holm-oak. The grain is called 'scolecium,' 'little worm'. It furnishes the poor in Spain with the means of paying one out of every two instalments of their tribute.

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§ 16.12.2  We have stated the use of this grain and the mode of preparing it when speaking of purple dye. It occurs also in Galatia, Africa, Pisidia and Cilicia, and the worst kind in Sardinia.

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§ 16.13.1  In the Gallic provinces chiefly the acorn-bearing trees produce agaric, which is a white fungus with a strong odour, and which makes a powerful antidote; it grows on the tops of trees, and is phosphorescent at night; this is its distinguishing mark, by which it can be gathered in the dark. Of the acorn-bearing tree the one called the aegilops alone carries strips of dry cloth covered with white mossy tufts; this substance not only grows on the bark but hangs down from the branches in streamers eighteen inches long, and it has a strong scent, as we miss. said when dealing with perfumes.

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§ 16.13.2  The cork is a very small tree, and its acorns are very bad in quality and few in number; its only useful product is its bark, which is extremely thick and which when cut grows again; when flattened out it has been known to form a sheet as big as 10 feet square. This bark is used chiefly for ships' anchor drag-ropes and fishermen's dragnets and for the bungs of casks, and also to make soles for women's winter shoes. Consequently the Greek name for the tree is 'bark-tree,' which is not inappropriate. Some people also call it the female holm-oak, and in places where the holm-oak does not grow, for instance in the districts of Elis and Sparta, use cork-tree timber instead of holm-oak, especially for wain-wright's carpentry. It does not grow all over Italy or anywhere in Gaul.

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§ 16.14.1  Also in the case of the beech, the lime, the fir and the pitch-pine the bark is extensively used by country people. They employ it for making panniers and baskets, and larger flat receptacles used for carrying corn at harvest-time and grapes at the vintage, and the roof-eaves of cottages. A scout writes reports to send to his officers by cutting letters on fresh bark from the sap; and also beech bark is used for ritual purposes in certain religious rites, but the tree from which it is stripped does not survive.

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§ 16.15.1  The most suitable roof-shingles are got from the hard-oak, and the next best from the other acorn-bearing trees and from the beech; those most easily obtained are cut from all the trees that produce resin, but these are the least good to last with the exception of those from the pine. Cornelius Nepos informs us that Rome was roofed with shingles right down to the war with Pyrrhus, a period of 470 years. At all events its different regions used to be denoted by designations taken from the woods — the Precinct of Jupiter of the Beech Tree (which retains the name even today) — where there was once a grove of beeches, Oak-forest Gate, Osier Hill, where people went to get osiers, and all the Groves, some even named from two sorts of trees. It was in Winter-oak Grove that Quintus Hortensius as dictator after the 287 BC. secession of the plebeians to the Janiculum Hill carried the law that an order of the plebs should be binding on all citizens.

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§ 16.16.1  The pine and the fir and all the trees that produce pitch were in those days considered exotics, because there were none in the neighbourhood of the capital. Of these trees we shall now speak, in order that the whole of the source from which flavouring for wine is produced may be known at once, after an account has been given of the trees in Asia or the East which produce pitch.

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§ 16.16.2  In Europe pitch is produced by six kinds of trees, all related to one another. Of these the pine and the wild pine have a very narrow long leaf like hair, with a sharp point at the end. The pine yields the smallest amount of resin, sometimes also produced from its nuts themselves, about which we have spoken, and scarcely enough to justify its classification as a resinous tree.

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§ 16.17.1  The pinaster is nothing else but a wild pine tree of smaller height throwing out branches from the middle as the pine does at the top. This variety gives a larger quantity of resin, in the manner which we shall describe. It grows in flat countries also. Most people think that trees called tibuli that grow along the coasts of Italy are the same tree with another name, but the tibulus is a slender tree and more compact than the pinaster, and being free from knots is used for building light gallies; it is almost devoid of resin.

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§ 16.18.1  The pitch-pine loves mountains and cold localities. It is a funereal tree, and is placed at the doors of houses as a token of bereavement and grown on graves; nevertheless nowadays it has also been admitted into our homes because of the ease with which it can be clipped into various shapes. This pine gives out a quantity of resin interspersed with white drops so closely resembling frankincense that when mixed with it they are indistinguishable to the eye; hence the adulteration is practised in the Seplasia. All these classes of trees have short leaves, but rather thick and hard like the leaf of the cypress. The branches of the pitch-pine are of moderate size and grow out almost immediately from the root of the tree, attached to its sides like arms.

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§ 16.18.2  Similarly the fir, which is in great demand for building ships, grows high up on mountains, as though it had run away from the sea; and its shape is the same as that of the pitch-pine. But it supplies excellent timber for beams and a great many of the appliances of life. Resin, which gives its value to the pitch-pine, is a defect in the fir, which occasionally exudes a small quantity when exposed to the action of the sun. The wood, on the contrary, which in the case of the fir is extremely beautiful, in the pitch-pine only serves for making split roof-shingles and tubs and a few other articles of joinery.

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§ 16.19.1  The fifth kind of resinous tree has the same habitat and the same appearance; it is called the larch. Its timber is far superior, not rotting with age and offering a stubborn resistance to damp; also it has a reddish colour and a rather penetrating scent. Resin flows from this tree in rather large quantities, of the colour and stickiness of honey, and never becoming hard.

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§ 16.19.2  The sixth kind is the torch-pine specially so called, which gives out more resin than the rest, but less, and of a more liquid kind, than the pitch-pine; and it is agree able for kindling fires and also for torch-light at religious ceremonies. These trees, at all events the male variety, also produce the extremely strong-smelling liquid called by the Greeks. It is a disease of the larch to turn into a torch-pine.

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§ 16.19.3  All these kinds of trees when set fire to make an enormous quantity of sooty smoke and suddenly with an explosive crackle send out a splutter of charcoal and shoot it to a considerable distance — excepting the larch, which does not burn nor yet make charcoal, nor waste away from the action of fire any more than do stones. All these trees are evergreen, and are not easily distinguishable in point of foliage even by experts, so closely are they interrelated; but the pitch-pine is not so tall as the larch, which has a thicker and smoother bark and more velvety and oilier and thicker foliage, the leaf bending more softly to the touch, whereas the foliage of the pitch-pine is scantier and also drier and thinner and of a colder nature, and the whole tree is rougher and is covered with resin; the wood more resembles that of the fir. When the roots of a larch have been burnt it does not throw out fresh shoots, but the pitch-pine does, as happened on the island of Lesbos after the grove of the town of Pyrrha had been burnt. Moreover there is another difference within these species themselves in the matter of sex: the male tree is shorter and has harder leaves, while the female is taller and its leaves are more unctuous and not forked and not stiff; and the wood of the male is hard, and when used in carpentry splits crooked, while that of the female is softer, the manifestation of the difference resting with the axe, which in every variety detects the male, because it meets with resistance and falls with a louder crash and is pulled out of the wood with greater difficulty. With the male trees the wood itself is parched and blacker in colour. In the neighbourhood of Mount Ida in the Troad there is also another variation among the larches, the mountain larch and the coast larch being different. As for Macedonia and Arcadia and the neighbourhood of Elis, in these places the varieties exchange names and the authorities are not agreed as to which name to give to each species, though for our part we settle that sort of question by the verdict of Rome.

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§ 16.19.4  The biggest of the entire group is the fir, the female being even taller than the male, and its timber softer and more easily worked, and the tree rounder in shape, and with dense feathery foliage, which makes it impervious to rain; and in general it has a more cheerful appearance. From the branches of these species, with the exception of the larch, there hang nut-like growths resembling catkins, packed together like scales. Those of the male fir have kernels in their tips, though this is not the case with the female fir; but the nuts of the pitch-pine have kernels filling the whole of the catkins, which are smaller and narrower, the kernels being very small and black, owing to which the Greek name for the pitch-pine is a word meaning 'louse-tree.' Also in the pitch-pine the nut-growths are more closely packed in the male trees and less moist with resin.

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§ 16.20.1  Moreover, not to pass over any variety, resembling these trees in appearance is the yew, hardly green at all in colour and slender in form, with a gloomy, terrifying appearance; it has no sap, and is the only tree of all the class that bears berries. The fruit of the male yew is harmful — in fact its berries, particularly in Spain, contain a deadly poison; even wine-flasks for travellers made of its wood in Gaul are known to have caused death. Sextius says that the Greek name for this tree is milax, and that in Arcadia its poison is so active that people who go to sleep or picnic beneath a yew-tree die. Some people also say that this is why poisons were called 'taxic,' which we now pronounce 'toxic,' meaning 'used for poisoning arrows.' I find it stated that a yew becomes harmless if a copper nail is driven into the actual tree.

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§ 16.21.1  In Europe tar is obtained from the torch-pine by heating it, and is used for coating ships' tackle and many other purposes. The wood of the tree is chopped up and put into ovens and heated by means of a fire packed all round outside. The first liquid that exudes flows like water down a pipe; in Syria this is called 'cedar-juice,' and it is so strong that in Egypt it is used for embalming the bodies of the dead.

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§ 16.22.1  The liquor that follows is thicker, and now produces pitch; this in its turn is collected in copper cauldrons and thickened by means of vinegar, as making it coagulate, and it has been given the name of Bruttian pitch; it is only useful for casks and similar receptacles, and differs from other pitch by its viscosity and also by its reddish colour and because it is greasier than all the rest. It is made from pitch-resin caused to boil by means of red-hot stones in casks made of strong oak, or, if casks are not available, by piling up a heap of billets, as in the process of making charcoal. It is this pitch which is used for seasoning wine after being beaten up into a powder like flour, when it has a rather black colour. The same resin, if rather gently boiled with water and strained off, becomes viscous and turns a reddish colour; this is called 'distilled pitch.' For making this the inferior parts of the resin and the bark of the tree are usually set aside. Another mixing process produced 'intoxication resin': raw flower of resin is picked off the tree with a quantity of thin, short chips of the wood, and broken up small in a sieve, and then steeped in water heated to boiling. The grease of this that is extracted makes the best quality of resin, and it is rarely obtainable, and only in a few districts of Italy near the Alps. It is suitable for medical use: the doctors boil ¾ of a gallon of white resin in 1 1/2 gallons of rainwater — though others think it pays better to boil it without water over a slow fire for a whole day, and to employ a vessel of white copper, or to boil resin from the turpentine-tree in a flat pan on hot ashes, as they prefer this to all the other kinds. The resin of the mastich is rated next.

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§ 16.23.1  We must not omit to state that with the name of 'live pitch' is to Greeks also the give pitch which has been scraped off the bottom of seagoing ships and mixed with wax — as life leaves nothing untried — and which is much more efficacious for all the purposes for which the pitches and resins are serviceable, this being because of the additional hardness of the sea salt.

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§ 16.23.2  An opening is made in a pitch-tree on the side towards the sun, not by means of an incision but by a wound made by removing the bark, making an aperture at most two feet long, so as to be at least eighteen inches from the ground. Also the body of the tree itself is not spared, as in other cases, because the chips of wood are valuable; but the chips from nearest the surface are most esteemed, those from deeper in giving the resin a bitter flavour. Afterwards all the moisture from the whole tree flows together into the wound; and so also in the case of the torch-tree. When the liquid stops flowing, an opening is made in a similar manner out of another part of the tree and then another. Afterwards the whole tree is felled and the pith of the timber is burnt. In the same way in Syria also they strip the bark off the turpentine-tree, there indeed stripping it from the branches and roots as well, although the resin from these parts is not valued highly. In Macedonia they burn the whole of the male larch but only the roots of the female tree. Theopompus wrote that in the territory of the Apolloniates a mineral pitch is found that is not inferior to that of Macedonia. The best pitch is everywhere obtained from trees growing in sunny places with a north-east aspect, whereas that from shady places has a rougher appearance, and presents an offensive odour; and pitch in a cold winter is inferior in quality and less plentiful in quantity, and of a bad colour. Some people think that the liquid obtained in mountain regions is superior in quantity and colour and sweeter, and also has a more agreeable smell, so long as it remains in the state of resin, but that when boiled down it yields less pitch, because it goes off into a watery residue, and that the trees themselves are thinner than those in the plains, but that both the one and the other kinds are less productive in dry weather. Some trees yield a liberal supply in the year after they are cut, whereas others do so a year later and some two years later. The wound fills up with resin, not with bark or by a scab, as in this tree an incision in the bark does not join up.

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§ 16.23.3  Among these classes of trees some people have made a special variety of the sappinus fir, because under the name of this group of trees is grown the kind which we described among the nut-bearing kinds; and the lowest parts of the same tree are called pine-torches, although the tree in question is really only a pitch-pine with its wild character a little modified by cultivation, whereas the sappinus is a timber produced by the mode of felling used, as we shall explain.

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§ 16.24.1  For it is for the sake of their timber that Nature has created the rest of the trees, and the most productive of them all, the ash. This is a lofty, shapely tree, itself also having feathery foliage, and has been rendered extremely famous by the advertisement given it by Homer as supplying the spear of Achilles. The wood of the ash is useful for a great many purposes. The kind grown on Ida in the Troad so closely resembles cedar-wood that when the bark has been removed it deceives buyers. The Greeks have distinguished two kinds of ash-tree, a tall one without knots and the other a short tree with harder and darker wood and foliage like that of the bay-tree. In Macedonia there is a very large ash making very flexible timber, which has the Greek name of 'ox-ash.' Other people have distinguished the ash-tree by locality, as they say that the ash of the plains has a crinkly grain and the mountain ash is close-grained. Greek writers have stated that the leaves of the ash are poisonous to beasts of burden, though doing no harm to all the other kinds of ruminants; but in Italy they are harmless to beasts of burden also. Indeed, they are found to be serviceable as an exceptionally effective antidote for snakebites, if the juice is squeezed out to make a potion and the leaves are applied to the wound as a poultice; and they are so potent that a snake will not come in contact with the shadow of the tree even in the morning or at sunset when it is at its longest, so wide a berth does it give to the tree itself. We can state from actual experiment that if a ring of ash-leaves is put round a fire and a snake, the snake will rather escape into the fire than into the ash-leaves. By a marvellous provision of Nature's kindness the ash flowers before the snakes come out and does not shed its leaves before they have gone into hibernation.

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§ 16.25.1  In the lime-tree the male and the female are entirely different. Not only is the wood of the male lime hard and reddish and knotted and more scented, but also the bark is thicker, and when peeled off cannot be bent; nor does the male tree produce seed or a flower as the female does, and the female is thicker in the trunk and its wood is white and of superior quality. A remarkable fact in regard to the lime is that no animal will touch its fruit, whereas the juice of the leaves and bark has a sweet taste. Between the bark and the wood there are thin coats made by a number of layers of skin, made from which are the ropes called lime-withies, and the thinnest part of them provided lime-chaplets, famous for the ribbons of wreaths of honour in old times. Lime-wood is worm-proof, and it makes useful timber although the tree is of extremely moderate height.

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§ 16.26.1  The maple, which is of about the same size as the lime, is second only to the citrus in its elegance as a material for cabinet-making and in the finish it allows of. It is of several kinds: the white maple, an exceptionally light-coloured wood, is called Gallic maple, and grows in Italy north of the Po, and on the other side of the Alps; the second kind has blotches running in wavy lines, and in its finer variety has received the name of 'peacock maple' from its resemblance to a peacock's tail, the finest sorts growing in Istria and Raetia; and an inferior variety is called the thick-veined maple. The Greeks distinguish the varieties by locality, saying that the maple of the plains is light-coloured and not wavy — this kind they call glinon — but the mountain maple has a rather wavy grain and is harder, the wood of the male tree being still wavier and suitable for making more elegant articles; while a third kind is the hornbeam, a reddish wood that splits easily, with a rough bark of a pale colour. Others prefer to class tins as belonging to a special kind of tree, and give it the Latin name of carpinus.

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§ 16.27.1  But a very beautiful feature of the maple is the growth on it called bruscum, and yet much more remarkable the molluscum, both knots, the former veined in a twistier pattern, while the latter is covered with simpler markings, and if it were large enough for tables to be made of it would undoubtedly be preferred to citrus-wood; but as it is, except for writing-tablets and veneering on couches, it is seldom seen in use. Bruscum is also used for making tables, though they have a darkish colour. A similar growth is also found on the alder, but it is as far inferior to the others as the alder itself is to the maple. The male maple flowers before the female. It must be added that maples grown in dry places are preferred to those in marshes, as is also the case with ash-trees. North of the Alps grows a tree making timber that closely resembles the white ash; its Greek name is the cluster-tree, as it bears pods containing kernels, which taste like a hazel nut.

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§ 16.28.1  But a timber rated in the first rank is that of the box, which is rarely marked with wrinkles and only at the root, the rest of it being smooth; box-wood is esteemed for a certain toughness and hardness and for its pale colour, while the tree itself is valued in ornamental gardening. There are three kinds: the Gallic box, which is trained to shoot up into conical pillars and attains a rather large height; the oleaster, which is condemned for all purposes, and which gives out an unpleasant smell; and a third kind called our native box, a cultivated variety as I believe of the wild box, which spreads more than the others and forms a thick hedge; it is an evergreen, and will stand clipping. The box abounds in the Pyrenees and the Kidros mountains and in the Berecyntus district, and it grows thickest in Corsica, where it bears an objectionable blossom, which causes the bitter taste in Corsican honey; its seed arouses the aversion of all living creatures. The box on Mount Olympus in Macedonia makes as thick a growth as the Corsican, but it is of a low height. Box loves cold and rugged places; also in a fire it is as hard as iron, and is of no use for fuel or charcoal.

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§ 16.29.1  Among these and the fruit-bearing trees a place is given to the elm, because of its timber and the friendship between it and the vine. The Greeks are acquainted with two kinds of elm: the mountain elm which makes the larger growth, and the elm of the plains which grows like a shrub. Italy gives the name of Atinian elm to a very lofty kind (and among these values highest the dry variety, which will not grow in damp places); a second kind it calls the Gallic elm, a third, which has thicker foliage and more leaves growing from the same stalk, the Italian elm, and a fourth, the wild elm. The Atinian elm does not bear samara — that is the name for elm seed — and all the elms are grown from shoots of the roots, but the other kinds also from seed.

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§ 16.30.1  The most notable trees having now been mentioned, some general facts must be pointed out concerning all trees. The cedar, the larch, the torch-pine and the rest of the trees that produce resin love mountains, and so also do the holly, box, holm-oak, juniper, turpentine-tree, poplar, mountain ash and hornbeam; on the Apennines there is also a shrub called the cotinus, famous for supplying a dye for linen cloth that resembles purple. The fir, hard-oak, chestnuts, lime, holm-oak and cornel like mountains and valleys. The maple, ash, service-tree, lime and cherry love mountains watered by springs. The plum, pomegranate, wild olive, walnut, mulberry and elder-trees are not generally found on mountains; and the cornel cherry, hazel, oak, mountain ash, maple, ash, beech, hornbeam come down from the mountains to level ground also, while the elm, apple, pear, bay, myrtle, red cornel, holm-oak and the broom, designed by Nature for dyeing cloth, spread up from the plains to mountain regions as well. The service-tree delights in cold places, but even more the birch. The latter is a Gallic tree, of a remarkable white colour and slenderness, a cause of terror as supplying the magistrates' rods of office; it is also easily bent to make hoops and likewise the ribs of small baskets, and the Gauls extract from it bitumen by boiling. These trees are accompanied into the same regions by the may also, the most auspicious tree for supplying wedding torches, because according to the account of Masurius it was used for that purpose by the shepherds who carried off the Sabine women; but at the present time the hornbeam and the hazel are most usually employed for torches.

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§ 16.31.1  The cypress, walnut, chestnut and laburnum dislike water. The last is another Alpine tree, and is not generally known; its wood is hard and white and its flower, which is half a yard long, bees will not touch. The shrub called Jupiter's beard, used in ornamental gardening and clipped into a round bushy shape, and having a silvery leaf, also dislikes water. Willows, alders, poplars, the silera and the privet, the last extremely useful for making tallies, will only grow in places where there is water, and the same is the ease with the whortleberry, grown in bird-snares in Italy, but in Gaul also to supply purple dye for slaves' clothes. All the trees that are common to the mountains and the plains grow larger and finer to look at when in flat country, but those on the mountains grow better fruit and make timber with a wavier grain, excepting the apples and pears.

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§ 16.32.1  Beside this, some trees shed their leaves but others are evergreen — although before this difference another one has to be mentioned first: some trees are entirely wild, but some being more civilized — as these are the accepted names by which they are distinguished: the latter, kindly trees which render more humane aid by their fruit or some other property and by affording shade, may not improperly be called 'civilized.'

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§ 16.33.1  The trees of the latter class that do not shed their leaves are the olive, laurel, palm, myrtle, cypress, the pines, ivy, rhododendron and savin — though the last may be called a herbaceous plant. The rhododendron, as is shown by its name, comes from the Greeks (another Greek name given it being nerion, and another 'rose-laurel') it is an evergreen that resembles a rose-tree, and throws out shoots from the stems; it is poisonous for cattle and for goats and sheep, but for man it serves as an antidote against the poisons of snakes.

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§ 16.33.2  Trees of the forest class that do not shed their leaves are the fir, larch, wild pine, juniper, cedar, turpentine, box, holm-oak, holly, cork, yew, tamarisk. Between the evergreen and the deciduous classes are the andrachle growing in Greece and the arbutus in all countries, for they shed all their leaves except those on the top of the tree. In the class of shrubs also a kind of cedar, the bramble and the cane do not shed their leaves. In the territory of Thurii, where Sybaris once stood, there was a single oak that was visible from the actual city which never shed its leaves and which did not bud before midsummer; and it is surprising that this fact having been published by Greek authors has never subsequently been mentioned among ourselves. The fact is that the influence of some localities is so great that in the neighbourhood of Memphis in Egypt and at Elephantine in the Thebaid none of the trees shed their leaves, not even the vines.

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§ 16.34.1  All the rest of the trees except those already mentioned — for it would be a lengthy business to enumerate them — shed their leaves; and it has been noticed that the leaves do not wither unless they are thin, broad and soft, whereas the leaves which do not fall off are thick and fleshy and narrow in shape. It is an erroneous classification to say that the trees which do not shed their leaves are those with a more unctuous juice; for who can detect that property in the case of the holm-oak? The mathematician Timaeus thinks that they fall when the sun is passing through Scorpio owing to the strength of that constellation and a certain poison in the air; but then we may justly wonder why the same influence is not operative against all these trees. Most trees shed their leaves in autumn, but some lose them later, and prolong the delay into the winter; and it makes no difference if they budded earlier, inasmuch as some trees are the first to bud and among the last to be stripped of their leaves, for instance almonds, ash-trees, elders, whereas the mulberry is the latest to bud and one of the first to shed its leaves. The soil also has a great influence in this matter: the leaves fall earlier on dry, thin soils, and earlier with an old tree, in many cases even before the fruit can ripen, for instance, in the case of the late fig and the winter pear and apple, and with the pomegranate the fruit is the only thing visible on the parent tree. But not even with the trees that always keep their foliage do the same leaves last on with others shooting up beneath them — when this happens the old leaves wither away, this occurring mostly about the solstices.

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§ 16.35.1  Each of the trees in its own kind has a permanent uniformity of leaf, with the exception of the poplar, the ivy and the croton (which, as we have said, is also called the cici). There are three kinds of poplars, the white, the black and the one called the leaf and which is very famous for the mushrooms Libyan poplar, which has a very small and very dark that grow on it. The white poplar has a leaf of two colours, white on the upper side and green underneath. With this tree and the black poplar and the croton the leaves are exactly circular when young but project into angles when older; whereas the leaves of the ivy are angular at first but become round. From the leaves of the white poplar springs out a quantity of shiny white down, and when the foliage is specially thick the trees are white all over like fleeces. Pomegranate and almond trees have reddish leaves.

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§ 16.36.1  An exceptionally remarkable thing occurs in the case of the elm, lime, olive, white poplar and willow: after midsummer their leaves turn right round, and no other indication shows with greater certainty that the season is finished. Also their leaves contain in themselves a variation that is common to all foliage: the under surface, towards the ground, is of a bright grass-green colour, and on the same side they are comparatively smooth, while on their upper part they have sinews and hard skin and articulations, but creases underneath like the human hand. The leaves of the olive are whiter and not so smooth on the upper side, and ivy-leaves the same. But the leaves of all trees open out every day towards the sun, as if intending their under side to be warmed. The upper side of all leaves has however small an amount of down upon it, which in some countries serves for wool.

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§ 16.37.1  We have said that in the east palm-leaves are used for making strong ropes, and that these are made specially serviceable for use in water. Indeed with us also the leaves are plucked from the palms after harvest, the better ones being those that have no divisions in them, and are put to dry indoors for a period of four days and then spread out in the sun, being left out at night as well, until they dry a bright white colour, and afterwards they are split for use in manufacture.

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§ 16.38.1  The fig, vine and plane have very broad leaves and the myrtle, pomegranate and olive narrow ones; those of the pine and cedar are like hairs, those of the holly and one kind of holm-oak prickly — indeed the juniper has a spine instead of a leaf. The leaves of the cypress and tamarisk are fleshy, those of the alder extremely thick, those of the reed and willow are long and the leaves of the palm are also double; those of the pear rounded, those of the apple pointed, those of the ivy angular, those of the plane divided, those of the pitch-pine and fir separated like the teeth of a comb, those of the hard oak crinkly all round the edge, those of the bramble have a prickly skin. In some plants the leaves sting, for instance nettles; those of the pine, pitch-pine, fir, larch, cedar and the hollies are prickly; those of the olive and holm-oak have a short stalk, those of the vine a long one, those of the poplar a stalk that quivers, and poplars are the only trees on which the leaves rustle against one another. Again, in one kind of the apple class there are small leaves even on the fruit itself, shooting out from the middle of the apples, sometimes even pairs of leaves; and moreover with some trees the leaves shoot round the boughs, but with others also at the tip of the boughs, and with the hard oak also on the trunk. Also leaves grow either dense or thinly spread, and broad leaves are always scantier. In the case of the myrtle they are arranged regularly, with the box they curve over, on fruit trees they have no arrangement, on the apple and the pear several shoot from the same stalk; the leaves of the elm and the cytisus are covered with branching veins. With these Cato includes the leaves of the poplar and oak when they have fallen, advising that they should be given to animals before they have become quite dry, and indeed that the leaves of the fig and holm-oak and also ivy-leaves should be fed to oxen; they are also given the leaves of the reed and the laurel. The service-tree sheds its leaves all at once, but all the other trees lose them gradually. — And so much on the subject of leaves.

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§ 16.39.1  The following is the order which Nature observes throughout the year. First comes fertilization, taking place when the west wind begins to blow, which is generally from February the 8th. This wind impregnates the creatures that derive life from the earth — indeed in Spain even the mares, as we have stated: this is the generating breath of the universe, its name Favonius being derived, as some have supposed, from fovere, 'to foster.' It blows from due west and marks the beginning of spring. Country people call it the cubbing season, as Nature is longing to receive the seeds; and when she brings life to all the seeds sown, they conceive in a varying number of days and each according to its nature, some immediately, as is the case with animals, while some do so more slowly and carry their progeny for a longer period of gestation, and the process is consequently called 'germination.' When a plant flowers it may be said to give birth, and the flower produced makes its appearance by bursting the capsules; the process of its upbringing takes place in the fruit stage. This and the process of budding are the trees' labour;

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§ 16.40.1  the blossom is the token of full spring and of the rebirth of the year. — The blossom is the trees' rejoicing: it is then that they show themselves new creatures and transformed from what they really are, it is then that they quite revel in rivalling each other with the varied hues of their colouring. But to many of them this is denied, for they do not all blossom, and some of them are sombre and incapable of enjoying the delights of the seasons; the holm-oak, the pitch-pine, the larch and the pine do not bedeck themselves with any blossom or announce the yearly birthdays of their fruit by a many-coloured harbinger, nor yet do the cultivated and the wild fig, for they produce their fruit straight away instead of a blossom, and in the case of the fig it is also remarkable that there are abortive fruits that never ripen. The juniper also does not blossom — though some writers record two kinds of juniper, one of which flowers but does not bear, and one which does not flower but does bear, its berries coming to birth immediately, which remain on the tree for two years; but this is a mistake, and all the junipers present the same gloomy aspect always. Similarly, the fortunes of many human beings also lack a flowering season.

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§ 16.41.1  All trees however produce buds, even those which do not blossom. There is also a great difference between localities, inasmuch as of the same kind of tree those growing in marshy places bud earlier, those on the plains next and those in woods last of all; but taking them separately the wild pear buds earlier than the rest, the cornel buds when the west wind begins to blow, next the laurel, and a little before the equinox the lime and maple — while among the earliest trees to flower are the poplar, elm, willow, alder and the nuts; the plane also buds quickly. The other trees bud when spring is about to begin, the holly, terebinth, Christ's thorn, chestnut and the acorn-bearing trees, while the apple is a late budder, and the cork buds latest of all. Some trees bud twice, owing to excessive fertility of soil or the allurement of agreeable weather, and this occurs to a greater degree with the young blades of cereals, although in trees excessive budding tends to exhaust the sap; but some trees have other buddings by nature, in addition to that which takes place in spring, these being settled by their own constellations (an account of which will be given more appropriately in the next volume but one after this) — a winter budding at the rising of Aquila, a summer one at the rising of the Dog-star and a third at the rising of Arcturus. Some people think that the two latter buddings are common to all trees, but that they are most noticeable in the fig, the vine and the pomegranate; and they explain this as due to the fact that those are the times when there is the most abundant crop of figs in Thessaly and Macedonia; although this explanation holds good most clearly in Egypt. Also whereas the rest of the trees, as soon as they have begun to bud, keep on budding continuously, the hard-oak, the fir and the larch divide the process into three parts and produce their buds in three batches; consequently they also shed scales of bark three times, a process which occurs in all trees during germination because the bark of the pregnant tree is burst open. But their first budding is at the beginning of spring and takes about a fortnight, while they bud for the second time when the sun is passing through the Twins, with the consequence that the first shoots are seen to be pushed up by those that follow, the growth being attached by a joint. The third budding period of the same trees, which starts from midsummer, is the shortest, and does not take more than a week; and on this occasion also the jointing on the tips as they grow out is clearly visible. Only the vine buds twice, first when it puts forth a cluster and then when it spreads it out. Those species which do not blossom only produce shoots and mature them. Some blossom at once during the process of budding, and are quick in the blossom but slow in ripening, for instance the vine; some blossom with a late budding and ripen quickly, for instance the mulberry, which buds the latest among cultivated trees and only when the cold weather is over, owing to which it has been called the wisest of the trees; but when its budding has begun it breaks out all over the tree so completely that it is completed in a single night with a veritable crackling.

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§ 16.42.1  Of the trees that we have spoken of as budding in winter at the rising of Aquila, the almond blossoms first of all, in the month of January, while in March it develops its fruit. The next to flower after the almond is the Armenian plum, then the jujube and the early peach — these exotic trees and forced; the first to flower in the order of nature are, of forest trees, the elder, which has a great deal of pith, and the male cornel, which has none; and of cultivated trees the apple, and a little afterwards, so that they can be seen blossoming simultaneously, the pear, the cherry and the plum. These are followed by the laurel, and that by the cypress, and then the pomegranate and the figs. When these are already flowering the vines and the olives also bud, and their sap rises at the rising of the Pleiades — that is their constellation, whereas the vine flowers at midsummer, and also the olive, which begins a little later. All begin to shed their blossom not sooner than a week after flowering, and some more slowly, but none more than a fortnight later, and all well within the 8th of July, anticipated by the trade-winds.

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§ 16.43.1  In the case of some trees the fruit does not follow immediately. The cornel produces its fruit about midsummer; it is at first white and afterwards blood-red. The female of the same kind bears its berries after autumn; they are sour and no animal will touch them; also its wood is spongy and of no use, although the timber of the male tree is one of the strongest and hardest there is, so great is the difference caused by sex in the same kind of tree. The terebinth and also the maple and the ash produce their seed at harvest time, but nut-trees, apples and pears, excepting winter or early varieties, in the autumn, and the acorn-bearing trees still later, at the setting of the Pleiades, the winter oak only in autumn, while some kinds of apple and pear and the cork-tree fruit at the beginning of winter. The fir flowers with a saffron-coloured blossom about midsummer and produces its seed after the setting of the Pleiades; but the pine and the pitch-pine come before it in budding by about a fortnight, though they themselves also drop their seed after the Pleiades.

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§ 16.44.1  Citrus-trees and the juniper and the holm-oak are classed as bearing all the year round, and on these trees the new crop of fruit hangs along with that of the previous year. The pine, however, is the most remarkable, as it carries both fruit that is beginning to ripen and that which will ripen in the following year and also in the year after next. Also no tree reproduces itself with more eagerness: within a month of a cone being plucked from it another cone is ripening in the same place, an arrangement which ensures that there are cones ripening in every single month of the year. Pine-cones that split while still on the tree are called azaniae, and if they are not removed they injure the rest of the crop.

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§ 16.45.1  The only trees that bear no fruit — I mean not even seed — are the tamarisk, which is of no use except for making brooms, the poplar, the alder, the Atinian elm and the alaternus, the leaves of which are between those of the holm-oak and the olive; but trees that never grow from seed nor bear fruit are considered to be unlucky and under a curse. Cremutius states that the tree from which Phyllis hanged herself is never green. People open gum-producing trees after they have budded, but the gum does not thicken until after the fruit has been removed.

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§ 16.46.1  Sapling trees have no fruit as long as they are growing. The trees most liable to lose their fruit before it ripens are the palm, the fig, the almond, the apple and the pear, and also the pomegranate, which excessive dew and frost cause to lose its flower as well. In consequence of this people bend down its branches, lest if they shoot straight upright they may receive and retain the moisture which is injurious to them. The pear and almond lose their blossom even if it does not rain but a south wind sets in or the sky is cloudy, and if that sort of weather has prevailed after they have shed their blossom, they lose their first fruit. But it is the willow that loses its seed most quickly, before it approaches ripeness at all. This is the reason why Homer gives it the epithet 'fruit-losing'; but succeeding ages have interpreted the meaning of the word in the light of its own wicked conduct, inasmuch as it is well known that willow seed taken as a drug produces barrenness in a woman. But Nature, showing her foresight in this matter also, has been rather careless about bestowing seed on a tree that is propagated easily even a planted sprig. It is said however that one variety of willow usually carries its seed till it ripens; this grows on the island of Crete just by the path coming down from the Cave of Jupiter; it has a hard woody seed of the size of a chick-pea.

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§ 16.47.1  Some trees are rendered barren by a fault in the locality, for instance the forest of Cende on Paros, which bears nothing; and the peach-trees on Rhodes only produce blossom. This peculiarity is also caused by sex, as in the kinds of trees of which the males do not bear; though some people reverse this and assert that it is the male trees that bear. Another cause of barrenness is thick growth of leaves.

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§ 16.48.1  Some trees producing fruit bear it both of on the sides and at the end of their branches, for instance the pear, the pomegranate, the fig and the myrtle. In other respects they have the same nature as cereal plants, for in their case also the ear grows at the tip of the stalks, whereas beans grow on the sides. The palm-tree alone, as has been stated, has its fruit, enclosed in spathes, hanging down in bunches.

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§ 16.49.1  The remaining trees have their fruit underneath their leaves for its protection, except the fig, the leaf of which is very large and gives a great deal of shade, and because of this the fruit hangs above the leaves. The fig is also the only tree whose leaf forms later than the fruit. A remarkable thing reported in the case of a certain kind of fig-tree found in Cilicia and Cyprus and on the mainland of Greece is that the figs grow underneath the leaves, but the abortive fruit that does not mature forms after the leaves have grown. The fig-tree also produces an early crop of fruit, called at Athens 'forerunners,' especially in the Spartan variety. In the same class of fruit-trees there are some that bear two crops,

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§ 16.50.1  and on the island of Cos the wild figs bear three, the first eliciting a following crop and the following crop a third one. It is this last crop that is used in the process of caprification. But in the wild fig also the fruit grows at the back of the leaves. Among the apples and the pears there are some that bear two crops a year, as also there are some early varieties. The wild apple bears twice, its second crop coming after the rising of Arcturus, especially in sunny localities. There are indeed vines that actually bear three crops, which consequently people call 'mad vines,' because on these some grapes are ripening while others are just beginning to swell and other bunches are only in flower. Marcus Varro states that there once was a vine at the temple of the Mother of the Gods in Smyrna that bore three times a year, and an apple tree in the district of Cosenza that did the same. But this regularly occurs in the district of Tacupe in Africa (about which we shall say more in another place), such is the fertility of the soil. The cypress also bears three times, for its berries are gathered in January, May and September, and those of each crop are of a different size. But also in the trees themselves, even when laden with fruit, there is a difference between different kinds: the arbutus and the oak bear more fruit in their upper part and the walnut and the marisca fig on their lower branches. All trees bear earlier the older they grow, and bear earlier in sunny places and on a thin soil; all wild trees are later, some of them never ripening their fruit at all. Similarly trees that have the earth underneath them ploughed or broken up ripen their fruit quicker than ones that are not attended to; those so treated also bear larger crops.

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§ 16.51.1  Moreover there is another difference, connected with age. Almond-trees and pears have the largest crops in their old age, as also do the acorn-bearing trees and one kind of fig, but all the other fruit-trees when young and when ripening more slowly; and this is especially noticeable in the case of vines, for the older vines make better wine and the young ones give a larger quantity. The apple however grows old very quickly and in its old age bears inferior fruit, as the apples it produces are smaller and liable to be worm-eaten, the worms being also generated on the tree itself. The fig is the only one of all the trees grown that is given a ding to assist its ripening — truly a portentous thing, that greater prices are paid for fruit out of season. But all fruit-trees that bear their fruit before the proper time grow old prematurely; indeed some die at once when the weather has lured them to surrender their whole stock of fertility, a thing that happens most of all to vines. The mulberry, on the other hand, grows old very slowly, being very little exhausted by its crop; and also the trees whose timber has wrinkled markings age slowly, for instance the palm, the maple and the poplar. Also trees grow old more quickly when the earth under them is ploughed, whereas forest trees age very slowly. Consequently trees carefully tended blossom earlier and bud earlier, and are in advance of the season generally; and in general all attention adds fertility, while fertility advances old age, because every weakness is rendered more subject to the weather.

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§ 16.52.1  Many trees grow several products, as we said in the case of acorn-bearing trees. Among them, the laurel bears its own grapes, and especially the barren laurel, which produces nothing else, and which is consequently thought by some people to be the male tree. Hazels also bear catkins of a hard, compact shape, which are of no use for any purpose; but the holm-oak produces the greatest number of things, for it grows both its own seed and the grain called crataegus, and mistletoe grows on the north side of the tree and hyphear on the south side — we shall say more about these a little later — and occasionally the trees have all four of these things together.

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§ 16.53.1  Some trees are of simple shape, having one stem rising from the root and a number of branches, as the olive, fig and vine; some belong to the bushy class, as the Christ's thorn and the myrtle, and also the hazel — in fact this bears better and more abundant nuts when it spreads out into many branches. Some trees have no branches at all, for instance the box of the cultivated variety and the foreign lotus. Some trees are forked, and even branch out into five parts, some divide the trunk but have no branches, as is the case with the elder, and some are undivided and have branches, like the pitch-pines. Some have their branches in a regular order, for instance the pitch-pine, the fir, with others their arrangement is irregular, as with the oak, apple and pear. Also in the case of the fir the branching is nearly vertical and the boughs project upward towards the sky, and do not slope down sideways. It is a remarkable thing that this tree dies if the tops of the branches are lopped, but survives if they are cut off entirely from the trunk; also should the trunk be cut off below where the branches were, what remains lives, whereas if only the top be removed the whole tree dies. Some trees branch out from the root up, like the elm, others throw out boughs only at the top, like the pine and the Greek bean-tree, which at Rome they call the lotus because of the sweetness of its fruit, which although growing wild almost resembles cherries. The exuberance of its branches makes it specially in request for houses, as they grow on a short main stem and spread out with a very wide expanse of shade, often leaping across to the neighbouring mansions. No shady foliage is more short-lived, and the branches do not take away the sun, their leaves falling in winter. No trees have bark that is more agreeable or attractive to look at, and none have branches that are longer and stouter or more numerous, so that they might be described as being themselves so many trees. Their bark serves for staining hides and their root for dyeing wool. Apple trees have branches of a peculiar kind, resembling the muzzles of wild animals, several smaller boughs being attached to one very large one.

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§ 16.54.1  Some branches are without eyes and do not form buds, this being a natural consequence of their not having fully developed, or else a penalty when a scar inflicted in pruning has blunted their powers. In a vine the eye and in a reed the joint contain the same nature that trees which spread out have in their branch. With all trees the parts nearest the pound are thicker. The fir, the larch, the palm, the cypress, the elm and all the trees with a single trunk make their growth in the direction of height. Among the branching trees the cherry is found making timbers as much as 20 yards long and a yard thick for the whole length. Some trees spread out into branches at once, for example apples.

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§ 16.55.1  The bark of some trees is thin, as in the laurel and the lime, that of others thick, as in the oak; in some it is smooth, as in the apple and the fig, but it is rough in the oak and the palm, and in all trees it becomes more wrinkled in old age. With certain trees, for instance the vine, it bursts of its own accord, while certain others actually shed their bark, for instance the apple and the arbutus. The bark of the cork-tree and the poplar is fleshy, that of the vine and the reed is like a skin; in the cherry it resembles the layers of the papyrus; the skin of the vine, the lime and the fir consists of a number of coats, but in some cases it is a single layer, for instance in the fig and the reed.

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§ 16.56.1  There is also a great difference in the roots of trees: those of the fig, the hard-oak and the plane are abundant, those of the apple short and thin, those of the fir and larch single, as these trees are supported by a single root, although it throws out small fibres laterally. The roots of the laurel are rather thick and of uneven shape, and the same with the olive, the roots of which also form branches, but those of the hard-oak are fleshy. Hard-oaks drive their roots down deep, indeed the winter oak, at all events if we believe Virgil, goes down as deep with. its root as it projects upward with its trunk. The olive and apple and cypresses spread their roots through the top layer of the turf, in some cases shooting straight out, as with the laurel and olive, and in other cases winding about, as with the fig. This tree bristles with fine filaments, as also do the fir and a number of forest trees, from which the mountain people pluck extremely thin threads and plait them into handsome flasks and other vessels. Some people have stated that the roots of trees do not go down deeper than the warmth of the sun's heat can reach, and this according to the nature of the soil, whether rather thin or heavy; but I think that this is incorrect, as it is certainly found in the authorities that when a fir-tree was transplanted it measured four yards in depth, though it had not been dug up whole but had been broken off. The root of the citrus-wood tree is the largest in extent and abundance, and next to it those of the plane, the hard-oak and the acorn-bearing trees. Some trees have a root that is more tenacious of life than the part above ground, for instance the laurel; and accordingly, when it has withered in the trunk, if it is cut back it shoots again even more vigorously. Some people think that trees grow old more quickly owing to having short roots, but this is disproved by fig-trees, which have very long roots and grow old very quickly. I also consider false a statement that has been made by some persons, to the effect that the roots of trees become smaller with age, for an aged oak when overturned by a violent storm has been seen to embrace a Roman acre of ground.

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§ 16.57.1  It is a common occurrence for fallen trees often to be replaced and to come back to life again owing to the earth forming a sort of scab over the wound. This is most common with plane trees, which hold a very large quantity of wind because of the density of their branches, which are lopped to relieve the trees of the weight and the trees are then replanted in their own hole; and this has before now also been done in the case of walnuts and olives and a number of other trees. There are also many cases of trees having fallen even without a storm or any other cause except one of a miraculous nature and having risen up again of their own accord. This portent occurred to the citizens of the Roman nation during the Cimbrian wars in the case of an elm in the grove of Juno at Nuceria, actually after its top had been lopped off because it was leaning forward right on to the altar; the tree was restored of its own accord so completely that it at once flowered, and from that date onward the majesty of the Roman people recovered, after having previously been ravaged by disasters in war. It is recorded that this also happened at Philippi with a willow that had fallen down and had been severed from its trunk, and at Stagira with a white poplar in the shrine of the Muses, all of these occurrences being of good omen. But most wonderful of all, a plane-tree at Antandros recovered of its own accord and was restored to life even after its sides had been rough-hewn all round, a tree 22 1/2 feet high and 6 feet thick.

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§ 16.58.1  Those trees which we owe to Nature grow in three ways, spontaneously or by seed or from a root. More numerous artificial methods have come into existence, about which we shall speak in the volume given to the subject; for at the present our whole discourse is about Nature, so memorable for her manifold and marvellous methods. In fact, we have shown that not all trees will grow in all places, or live if removed from one place to another; this is due in some cases to antipathy, in others to obstinacy, more frequently to the weakness of the specimens transplanted, because in some cases the climate is unfavourable and in others the soil is incompatible.

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§ 16.59.1  Balsamum disdains to grow elsewhere, and a citron grown in Assyria will not bear elsewhere; and likewise the palm also will not grow everywhere or, even if it does grow, bear fruit, or else even when it has made a promise and a show of bearing, refuses to mature the fruit, seeming to have given birth to it against its will. The cinnamon shrub has not the strength to travel to the neighbourhood of Syria. The delicate perfumes of amomum and nard cannot endure to travel out of India and be conveyed by sea even as far as Arabia — an attempt to import them was made by King Seleucus. What is most surprising is that although the trees themselves can usually be persuaded to live and to bear transplantation, and occasionally even the soil will grant the request to nourish foreigners and give food to immigrants, the climate is absolutely unrelenting. The pepper-tree will live in Italy, and the casia-plant even in a northern region, and the incense-tree has been known to live in Lydia, but where are we to get the sunshine that sucks all the juice out of these plants or ripens the drops of essence that they shed? It is nearly as surprising that Nature may alter in the same localities and yet retain a hundred percent of her vigour. She had bestowed the cedar on the regions of torrid heat, but it in the mountains of Lycia and Phrygia. She had made cold unfriendly to but no tree is more frequent on Mount Olympus. In the city of Panticapaeum in the neighbourhood of the Cimmerian Bosphorus, King Mithridates and the rest of the natives had toiled in every way to have the laurel and the myrtle, at all events for ritual purposes, but they did not succeed, although trees belonging to a mild climate abound there, pomegranates and figs, as well as apples and pears that win the highest praise. In the same region Nature has not produced the trees that belong to cold climates — pine, fir and pitch-pine. And what is the point of our going abroad to the Black Sea? In the actual neighbourhood of Rome chestnuts and cherries only grow with reluctance, and the peach-tree round Tusculum, and almonds are laboriously grown from graft, although Tarracina teems with whole woods of them.

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§ 16.60.1  The cypress is an exotic, and has been one of the most difficult trees to rear, seeing that Cato has written about it at greater length and more often than about all the other trees, as stubborn to grow, of no use for fruit, with berries that cause a wry face, a bitter leaf, and a pungent smell: not even its shade agreeable and its timber scanty, so that it almost belongs to the class of shrubs; consecrated to Dis, and consequently placed at the doors of houses as a sign of mourning. The female bears seed but the male is sterile. For a long time past merely owing to its pyramidal appearance it was not rejected just for the purpose of marking the rows in vineyards, but nowadays it is clipped and made into thick walls or evenly rounded off with trim slenderness, and it is even made to provide the representations of the landscape gardener's work, arraying hunting scenes or fleets of ships and imitations of real objects with its narrow, short, evergreen leaf. There are two kinds of cypress: the pyramid, tapering upward in a spiral, which is also called the female cypress, and the male cypress which spreads its branches outward from itself, and is pruned and used as a prop for a vine. Both the male and the female are allowed to grow up so as by having their branches lopped off to form poles or props, which after twelve years' growth sell for a denarius apiece, a grove of cypresses being a most profitable item in one's plantation account; and people in old days used commonly to call cypress nurseries a dowry for a daughter. The native country of this tree is the island of Crete, although Cato calls it Taranto cypress, no doubt because that place was where it was first imported. In the island of Ischia also, if cut down, it will shoot up again; but in Crete this tree is produced by spontaneous generation wherever anybody stirs the earth, and shoots out at once, in this case in fact even without any demand being made of the soil and of its own accord, and especially in the mountains of Ida and those called the White Mountains, and in the greatest number on the very summits of the peaks that are never free from snow, which may well surprise us, as the tree does not occur elsewhere except in a warm climate and has a great dislike for snow.

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§ 16.61.1  Nor is only the nature of the soil important in relation to these trees, or the permanent character of the weather, but also a certain temporary influence that it exerts: showers of rain usually bring with them certain seeds, and seeds of a certain kind stream down, occasionally even some of an unknown kind, which happened in the district of Cyrenaica, when laser first grew there, as we shall say in the section dealing with herbaceous plants. Also near that city a shower of thick, pitchy rain caused a wood to grow up.

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§ 16.62.1  It is said that ivy now grows in Asia Minor. Theophrastus about 314 BC. had stated that it did not grow there, nor yet in India except on Mount Meros, and indeed that Harpalus had used every effort to grow it in Media without success, while Alexander had come back victorious from India with his army wearing wreaths of ivy, because of its rarity, in imitation of Father Liber; and it is even now used at solemn festivals among the peoples of Thrace to decorate the wands of that god, and also the worshippers' helmets and shields, although it is injurious to all trees and plants and destructive to tombs and walls, and very agreeable to chilly snakes, so that it is surprising that any honour has been paid to it.

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§ 16.62.2  There are two primary kinds of ivy, as of the rest of the plants, the male and the female. The male is said to have the larger stem and leaf, which also are harder and have more sap, and so it also has a larger flower, approaching purple in colour; but the flower of both male and female resembles the wild rose, except that it has no scent. These kinds each comprise three species, for ivy is white or black and a third species is called helix. Moreover these species divide into others, since one kind only has white fruit but another has a white leaf as well; also in some of those bearing white fruit the berry is closely packed and rather large, hanging in round bunches which are called 'clusters,' and also Silenici when the berry is smaller and the bunch less compact — as similarly occurs in the black variety. Also one kind has a black seed and another a seed of the colour of saffron; the latter ivy is used by poets for their wreaths, and its leaves are not so dark in colour; some people call it Nysian ivy and others Bacchic ivy, and it has the largest clusters of all the black ivies. Some people among the Greeks also make two classes of this variety, depending on the colour of the berries — red-berry ivy and golden-fruit ivy.

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§ 16.62.3  But it is the helix which has most varieties of all, as it differs very greatly in leaf. The leaves are small and angular and of a rather elegant shape, whereas those of the remaining kinds are plain and simple. It differs also in the distance between the joints, but particularly in its infertility, as it does not bear any fruit. Some people think that this is a matter of age and not of kind, and that the plant begins as a helix and becomes an ivy when it gets old. This is seen to be a clear mistake on their part, inasmuch as we find several more kinds of helix, but three that are most noticeable — the grass-green helix which is the commonest, a second kind with a white leaf, and a third kind with a variegated leaf, which is called Thracian ivy. Moreover there is a grass-ivy with rather narrow and symmetrically arranged and rather thickly growing leaves, and in another variety all these points are different; also in the variegated ivy one variety has narrower leaves arranged in a similar way and clustering more thickly, and another variety entirely lacking these features, and also the leaves are either larger or smaller, and differ in the arrangement of their markings; and in the white ivy in some cases the leaves are whiter than in others. The grass-green ivy grows the longest shoots; but it is the white ivy that kills trees, and by taking from them all their sap grows so thick a stalk as itself to become a tree. Its characteristics are very large, very broad leaves, fat stiff buds, which in the other kinds are bent, and clusters standing up erect; and although in every kind of ivy the arms take root, yet this kind has the most spreading and powerful arms, those of the black ivy coming next. But it is a peculiarity of the white ivy that it throws out arms among the middle of its leaves, with which it always embraces things on either side, this being the case even on walls, although it is unable to go round them. Consequently even though it is cut apart at several places nevertheless it lives and lasts on, and it has as many points to strike root with as it has arms, which make it safe and solid while it sucks and strangles trees. There is also a difference in the fruit of the white and the black ivy, since in some cases it is so bitter that birds will not touch it.

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§ 16.62.4  There is also a stiff ivy, which is the only kind that will stand without a prop, and which consequently has the name in Greek of 'straight ivy'; while on the other hand the one called in Greek 'ground-ivy' is never found except creeping on the ground.

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§ 16.63.1  Resembling ivy is the plant called smilax, which first came from Cilicia, but is now more common in Greece; it has thick jointed stalks and thorny branches that make it a kind of shrub; the leaf resembles that of the ivy, but is small and has no corners, and throws out tendrils from its stalk; the flower is white and has the scent of a lily. It bears clusters of berries like those of the wild vine, not of the ivy; they are red in colour, and the larger ones enclose three hard black stones but the smaller a single stone. This plant is unlucky to use at all sacred rites and for wreaths, because it has a mournful association, a maiden named Smilax having been turned into a smilax shrub because of her love for a youth named Crocus. The common people not knowing this usually pollute their festivals with it because they think that it is ivy; just as in the case of the poets or Father Liber or Silenus, who wear wreaths made of who in the world knows what?

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§ 16.63.2  Smilax is used for making tablets; it is a peculiarity of this wood to give out a slight sound when placed to one's ear. It is said that ivy has a remarkable property for testing wines, inasmuch as a vessel made of its wood allows wine to pass through it, water that has been mixed with the wine stops in the vessel.

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§ 16.64.1  Among the plants that like cold conditions it may also be proper to have the aquatic shrubs mentioned. The primacy among these will be held by the reeds, which are indispensable for the practices of war and of peace and are also acceptable for our amusement. The northern peoples thatch their homes with reeds, and roofs of this kind last for ages, while in other parts of the world as well reeds also provide very light ceilings for rooms. And reeds serve as pens for writing on paper, especially Egyptian reeds owing to their kinship as it were with the papyrus; although the reeds of Cnidus and those that grow round the Anaetic lake in Asia are more esteemed. Those of our country have a more fungous substance underneath the surface, made of spongy cartilage which has a hollow structure inside and a thin, dry, woody surface, and easily breaks into splinters which always have an extremely sharp edge. For the rest it is of a slender appearance, jointed and divided with knots and tapering gradually off to the top with a rather thick tuft of hair, which also is not without value, as it either serves instead of feathers to stuff the beds of innkeepers, or in places where it grows very hard and woody in structure, as in Belgium, it is pounded up and inserted between the joints of ships to caulk the seams, holding better than glue and being more reliable for filling cracks than pitch.

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§ 16.65.1  The peoples of the East employ reeds in making war; by means of reeds with a feather added to them. They hasten the approach of death, and to reeds they add points which deal wounds with their barb that cannot be extracted, and if the weapon itself breaks in the wound, another weapon is made out of it. With these weapons they obscure the very rays of the sun, and this is what chiefly makes them want calm weather and hate wind and rain, which compel the combatants to keep peace between them. And if anybody should make a rather careful reckoning of the Ethiopians, Egyptians, Arabs, Indians, Scythians and Bactrians, and the numerous races of the Sarmatians and of the East, and all the realms of the Parthians, almost one-half of mankind in the whole world lives subject to the sway of the reed. It was outstanding skill in this employment of the reed in Crete that made her warriors famous; but in this also, as in all other things, Italy has won the victory, as no reed is more suitable for arrows than that which grows in the river at Bononia, the Reno, which contains the largest amount of pith and has a good flying weight and a balance that offers a sturdy resistance even to gusts of wind — an attraction which does not belong in the same degree to the shafts grown in Belgium. The reeds of Crete also have the same valuable property, although those from India are placed highest of all, some people believing that they belong to a different species, as with the addition of points they also serve the purpose of lances. The Indian bamboo indeed is of the size of a tree, as we see in the case of the specimens frequently found in our temples. The Indians say that in this plant also there is a difference between males and females, the male having a more compact body and the female a bulkier one. And a single length between knots, if we can believe it, will actually serve as a boat. The bamboo grows especially on the banks of the river Chenab.

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§ 16.65.2  Every kind of reed makes a great many stems from one root, and when it is cut down it grows again even more prolifically. The root is by nature very tenacious of life; it as well as the stem is jointed. Only the Indian bamboo has short leaves, but in all the reeds the leaves sprout from a knot and wrap the stem all round with coats of thin tissue, and at a point halfway between two knots usually cease to clothe the stems and droop forward. The reed and the cane though round have two sides, with a series of shoots thrown out above the knots alternately, so that one forms on the right side and then another at the next joint above on the left, turn and turn about. From these sometimes grow branches, which are themselves slender canes.

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§ 16.66.1  There are, however, several varieties of reed. One is rather compact and has joints closer together, with short spaces between them, while another has them farther apart with larger spaces between them, and is also thinner in itself. But another kind of cane is hollow for its whole length; its Greek name means the flute-reed, and it is very useful for making flutes because it contains no pith and no fleshy substance. The Orchomenus cane has a passage right through even the knots, and is called in Greek the pipe-reed; this is more suitable for flageolets, as the preceding kind is for flutes. There is another reed the wood of which is thicker and the passage narrow; this reed is entirely filled with spongy pith. Reeds are of various lengths and thickness. The one called the donax throws out most shoots; it only grows in watery places — inasmuch as this also constitutes a difference, a reed growing in dry places being much preferred. The reed used as an arrow is a special kind, as we have said, but the Cretan variety has the longest intervals between the knots, and when heated allows itself to be bent in any direction you please. Also differences are made by the leaves, which vary not only in number and length but also in colour. The Laconian reed has spotted leaves, and throws out a greater number at the bottom of the stalk, as is thought to be the case with reeds in general that grow round marshy pools, which are different from river reeds, being draped with long leaves climbing upward and embracing the stem for a considerable distance above the knot. There is also a slanting reed which does not shoot upward to any height but spreads itself out close to the ground like a shrub; it is very attractive to animals when young and tender, and is called by some people the cletia. Also in Italy there is a growth, found in marsh-reeds, only coming out of the outer skin just below the tuft, named adarca, which is very beneficial for the teeth, as it has the same pungency as mustard.

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§ 16.66.2  The admiration expressed in old days for the reed-beds of the Lake of Orchomenus compels me to speak about them in greater detail. The Greek name for a rather thick, stronger kind of reed used to be 'fence-reed,' and for a more slender variety 'plaiting reed,' the latter growing in islands floating on the water and the former on the banks overflowed by the lake. The third is the flageolet reed — 'pipe-reed' used to be the Greek name for it. This took eight years to grow, as the lake also regularly took that space of time in rising, it being thought to be a bad omen if ever it continued at its full height two years longer, a thing that was marked by the fatal Athenian battle at Chaeronea. Not far off is Lebadea ... is called the Cephisus flowing into it. When therefore the flooding has continued for a year, the reeds grow even to a size suitable for purposes of fowlink: these used to be called in Greek 'yoke-reeds'; on the other hand those growing when the flood goes down sooner were called 'silky reeds,' with a thin stalk, those with a broader and whiter leaf being distinguished by the name of 'female reeds,' and those with only a small amount of down or none at all being called 'eunuchs.' These supplied the instruments for glorious music, though mention must also not be omitted of the further remarkable trouble required to grow them, so that excuse may be made for the present-day preference for musical instruments of silver. Down to the time of the flautist Antigenides, when a simple style of music was still practised, the reeds used to be regarded as ready for cutting after the rising of Arcturus. When thus prepared the reeds began to be fit for use a few years later, though even then the actual flutes needed maturing with a great deal of practice, and educating to sing of themselves, with the tongues pressing themselves down, which was more serviceable for the theatrical fashions then prevailing. But after variety came into fashion, and luxury even in music, the reeds began to be cut before midsummer and made ready for use in three years, their tongues being wider open to modulate the sounds, and these continue to the present day. But at that time it was firmly believed that only a tongue cut from the same reed as the pipe in each ease would do, and that one taken from just above the root was suitable for a left-hand flute and one from just below the top for a right-hand flute; and reeds that had been washed by the waters of Cephisus itself were rated as immeasurably superior. At the present time the flutes used by the Tuscans in religious ritual are made of box-wood, but those for theatrical performances are made of lotus and asses' bones and silver. The reeds most approved for fowling come from Palermo, and those to make fishing-rods are from Abarsa in Africa.

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§ 16.67.1  In Italy the reed is chiefly employed to serve as a prop for vines. Cato recommends planting it in damp lands, after first working the soil with a double mattock, a space a yard wide being left between the shoots; and he says that at the same time also wild asparagus, from which garden asparagus is produced, associates in friendship with it, and so does willow when planted round it — the willow being the most useful of the water-plants, although vines like poplars and the Caecuban vines are trained up on them, and although alders in hedges give rather close a protection and, if planted together in water, stand sentry like banks to guard the country against the assaults of the rivers when they overflow, and when cut down they are useful because of the innumerable suckers that they produce as successors.

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§ 16.68.1  The uses made of willows are of several kinds. They send out rods of great length used for vine-trellises and at the same time provide strips of bark for withes, and some grow shoots of a yielding flexibility useful for tying, others extremely thin ones suitable for weaving into basketwork of an admirably fine texture, and other stronger ones for plaiting baskets and a great many agricultural utensils, while the whiter ones when the bark has been removed and they have been worked smooth do to make bottles more capacious than any that can be made of leather, and also are extremely suitable for luxurious easy chairs. The willow sprouts again after being lopped, and from the short stump, which is more like a fist than a branch, makes a thicker growth for cutting, the tree being in our opinion not one of the last to choose for cultivation, inasmuch as none yields a safer return or involves less outlay, and none is more indifferent to weather.

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§ 16.69.1  Cato attributes to the willow the third place in the estimation of the countryside, and puts it before the cultivation of the olive and before corn or meadowland — and this is not because other kinds of withes are lacking, inasmuch as the broom, the poplar, the elm, the blood-red cornel, the birch, the reed when split and the leaves of the reed, as in Liguria, and the vine itself and brambles after the thorns have been cut off serve as ties, and also the hazel when twisted — and it is surprising that any wood should make stronger ties after being bruised by twisting; nevertheless it is the willow that has the properties specially required for this purpose. The Greek red willow is split, while the Amerian willow, which has a lighter colour but is a little more fragile, is consequently used as a tie without having been split. Three kinds are known in Asia: the black willow, which is more useful for ties, the white willow for agricultural purposes, and a third kind, which is the shortest, called the helix. With us also many people distinguish the same number of varieties by name; they call one 'plaiting willow' and also 'purple willow,' another, which is thinner, 'dormouse willow' from its colour, and a third, the thinnest, 'Gallic willow.'

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§ 16.70.1  The rush, having a fragile stalk and being a marsh plant, is not rightly to be reckoned in the class of bushes or of brambles or plants with stalks, nor yet among herbaceous plants, or in any other class except its own; it is used for making thatch and mats, and stripped of its outer coat serves for candles and funeral torches. In some places rushes are stronger and stiffer, for they are used to carry sails not only by boatmen on the Po but also at sea by the African fisherman, who hangs his sail in a preposterous fashion, between masts, and the Moors use them for roofing their cabins; and if one looks closely into the matter, rushes may appear to occupy the place held by the papyrus in the inner region of the world.

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§ 16.71.1  Among water-plants, in a class of their own but of a bushy nature, are also brambles, and so are elders, which are of a spongy nature, though in a different way from the giant fennel, as at all events the elder has more wood; a shepherd believes that a horn or trumpet of elder wood will be louder if the wood was cut in some place where the elder bush is out of hearing of the crowing of cocks. Brambles bear blackberries, and one variety, which is called in Greek the dog-bramble, a flower like a rose. A third kind the Greeks call the Ida bramble, from the place where it grows, a more slender variety than the others, with smaller and less hooked thorns; its blossom is used to make an ointment for sore eyes, and also, dipped in honey, for St. Anthony's fire, and also soaked in water it makes a draught to cure stomach troubles. Elder-trees have small black berries with a sticky juice, chiefly med for a hair dye; these also are boiled in water and eaten.

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§ 16.72.1  There is also a juice in the body of trees, which must be looked upon as their blood. It is not the same in all trees — in figs it is a milky substance, which has the property of curdling milk so as to produce cheese, in cherries it is gummy, in elms slimy, sticky and fat, in apples, vines and pears watery. The stickier this sap is, the longer the trees live. And in general the bodies of trees, as of other living things, have in them skin, blood, flesh, sinews, veins, bones and marrow. The bark serves for a skin; it is a remarkable fact as regards the bark on a mulberry that when doctors require its juice they strike it with a stone two hours after sunrise in spring and the juice trickles out, but if a deeper wound is made the bark seems to be dry. Next to the bark most trees have layers of fatty substance, called from its white colour alburnum; this is soft and the worst part of the wood, rotting easily even in a hard oak and liable to woodworm, for which reason it will always be removed. Under this fat is the flesh of the tree and under the flesh the bones, that is the best part of the timber. Those trees which have a drier wood, for instance the olive, are more liable to bear fruit only every other year than trees whose wood is of a fleshy nature, like the cherry. And not all trees have a large amount of fat or flesh, any more than the most active among animals; there is no fat or flesh at all in the box, the cornel and the olive, nor any marrow, and only a very small quantity even of blood, just as the service-tree has no bones and the elder no flesh — though both have a great deal of marrow — nor have reeds for the greater part.

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§ 16.73.1  The flesh of some trees contains fibres and veins. It is easy to distinguish between them, the veins being broader and whiter than the fibre. Veins are found in wood that is easy to split, and consequently if you put your ear to one end of a beam of wood however great its length you can hear even taps made with a graver on the other end, the sound penetrating by passages running straight through the wood, and by this test you can detect whether the timber is twisted and interrupted by knots. In the ease of trees in which there are tuberosities resembling the glands in the flesh of an animal, these contain no vessels or fibres, but a kind of hard knot of flesh rolled up in a ball; in the citrus and the maple this is the most valuable part. The other kinds of wood employed for making tables are cut into circles by splitting the trees along the line of the fibre, as otherwise the vein cut across the round of the free would be brittle. In beech trees the grainings in the fibre run crosswise, and consequently even vessels made of beech-wood were highly valued in old days: Manius Curius declared on oath that he had touched nothing of the booty taken in a battle except a flask made of beech-wood, to use in offering sacrifices. A log of timber floats more or less horizontally, each part of it sinking deeper the nearer it was to the root. Some timbers have fibre without veins, consisting of thin filaments merely; these are the easiest to split. Others have no fibre, and break more quickly than they split, for instance olives and vines. But on the other baud in the fig-tree the body consists entirely of flesh, while the holm-oak, eornel, hard oak, cytisus, mulberry, ebony, Lotus and the trees that we have stated to be without marrow, consist entirely of bone. The timber of all of these is of a blackish colour except the cornel, hunting spears made of which are bright yellow when notched with incisions for the purpose of decoration. The cedar, the larch and the juniper are red. The female larch contains wood called in Greek aegis, of the colour of honey; this wood when made into panels for pictures has been found to last for ever without being split by any cracks; it is the part of the trunk nearest to the pith; in the fir-tree the Greeks call this 'ilusson.' The hardest part of the cedar also is the part nearest the pith — as the bones are in the body — provided the has been scraped off. It is reported that the inner part of the elder also is remarkably firm, and some people prefer hunting spears made of it to all others, as it consists entirely of skin and bones.

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§ 16.74.1  The proper time for felling trees that are to be stripped of their bark, for instance well-turned trees that are to be used for temples and other purposes requiring round pillars, is when they bud — at other times the bark is impossible to detach and decay is setting in under it and the timber is turning black; but the time for cutting beams and logs to be cleared of their bark by the axe is between midwinter and the period of westerly wind, or if we should be obliged to do it sooner, at the setting of Areturus and, before that, at the setting of the Lyre — on the earliest calculation at midsummer: the dates of these constellations will be given in the proper place. It is commonly thought sufficient to take care that no tree is felled to be rough-hewn before it has born its fruit. The hard oak if cut in spring is liable to woodworm; if cut at midwinter it neither rots nor warps, but otherwise it is even liable to twist and to split, and this happens in the case of the cork-tree even if felled at the proper time. It is also of enormous importance to take account of the moon, and people recommend that trees should be felled only between the twentieth and thirtieth days of the month. It is universally agreed, however, that the most advantageous time for felling timber is when the moon is in conjunction with the sun, the date which some call the interlunar day and others the day of the moon's silence. At all events those were the limits fixed in advance by the Emperor Tiberius for felling larches in Raetia for the reconstruction of the deck of the Naval Sham Fight when it had been burnt down. Some people say that the moon ought to be in conjunction and below the horizon, a thing that can only happen in the night.

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§ 16.74.2  If conjunctions should coincide with the shortest day of the winter solstice, the timber produced lasts for ever; and the next best is when the conjunction coincides with the constellations mentioned above. Some people add the rising of the Dog-star also, and say that this was how the timber used for the Forum of Augustus was felled. But trees that are neither quite young nor old are the most useful for timber. Another plan not without value is followed by some people, who make a cut round the trees as far as the pith and then leave them standing, so that all the moisture may drain out of them. It is a remarkable fact that in old days in the first Punic War the fleet commanded by Duilius was on the water within 60 days after the timber left the tree, while, according to the account of Lucius Piso, the 220 ships that fought against King Hiero were built in 45 days; also in the second Punic war Scipio's fleet sailed on the 40th day after the timber had been felled. So effective is prompt action even in the hurry of an emergency.

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§ 16.75.1  Cato, the leading authority on timber in all its uses, adds the following advice: 'Make a press of black fir wood for choice. With elm, pine or walnut timber, when you are going to root up these or any other tree, take them up when the moon is waning, in the afternoon, when there is not a south wind. A tree will be ready for felling when its seed is ripe. And be careful not to haul a tree or trim it with the axe when there is a dew.' And the same writer later: 'Do not touch timber except at new moon, or else at the end of the moon's second quarter; with timber which you dig up by the roots or cut off level with the ground, the seven days next after full moon are the best for removing it. Beware absolutely of rough-hewing or cutting or touching any timber unless it is dry, and when it is frozen or wet with dew. Similarly the emperor Tiberius kept to the period between two moons even in having his hair cut. Marcus Varro advises the plan of having one's hair cut just after full moon, as a precaution against going bald.

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§ 16.76.1  When the larch and still more the white fir has been felled, a liquid flows from them for a long time. These are the tallest and the straightest of all the trees. For the masts and spars of ships the fir is preferred because of its light weight. A property shared by these trees and also by the pine is that of having veins running through the wood in four or in two divisions, or else only in one line. The interior in the four-veined kind is the best timber to cut up for inlaid wood-work and that in the two-veined the worst, and softer than the other kinds; experts can tell them at once from the bark. Fir wood from the part of the tree that was near the ground is free from knots. This timber after being floated in a river in the way which we have described is cleared of bulges, and when so treated is called sappinus, while the upper part which is knotted and harder is called club-wood. Moreover in the trees themselves the parts towards the north-east are stronger; and in general trees from damp and shady places are inferior and those from sunny places are closer grained and durable; on this account at Rome fir from the Tuscan coast is preferred to that from the Adriatic.

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§ 16.76.2  In trees of this class there is also a difference corresponding to their native countries. The most highly spoken of grow on the Alps and the Apennines, on the Jura and Vosges mountains of Gaul, in Corsica, Bithynia, Pontus and Macedonia. The firs of Aenia and Arcadia are inferior, and those of Parnassus and Euboea the worst, because in those places they are branchy and twisted and the wood is apt to rot. As for the cedar, those in Crete, Africa and Syria are the most highly spoken of. Timber well smeared with cedar oil does not suffer from maggot or decay. The juniper has the same excellence as the cedar; this tree grows to a great size in Spain and especially in the territory of the Vaccaei; the heart of its timber is everywhere even more solid than that of the cedar. A general fault of all timber is what is called cross-grain, when the veins and knots have grown twisted. In some trees are found centres like those in marble, that is hard pieces like a nail, unkind to the saw; and there are some hardnesses due to accident, as when a stone, or the branch of another tree, has been caught in a hollow and taken into the body of the tree. It is said that stones found inside trees serve as a preventive against abortion. In the market-place at Megara long stood a wild olive tree on which brave warriors had hung their weapons; these in the course of time had been hidden by the bark growing round them; and on this tree depended the fate of the city, an oracle having prophesied that it would be destroyed when a tree gave birth to arms — which happened to this tree when it was cut down, greaves and helmets being found inside it.

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§ 16.76.3  What is believed to have been the largest tree ever seen at Rome down to the present time was one that Tiberius Caesar caused to be exhibited as a marvel on the deck of the Naval Sham Fight before mentioned; it had been brought to Rome with the rest of the timber used, and it lasted till the amphitheatre of the emperor Nero. It was a log of larchwood, 120 feet long and of a uniform thickness of two feet, from which could be inferred the almost incredible height of the rest of the tree by calculating its length to the top. Within our own memory there was also an equally marvellous tree left by Marcus Agrippa in the porticos of the Voting-booths, left over from the timber used for the ballot office; this was twenty feet shorter than the one previously mentioned, and 18 inches in thickness. An especially wonderful fir was seen in the ship which brought from Egypt at the order of the emperor Gaius the obelisk erected in the Vatican Circus and four shafts of the same stone to serve as its base. It is certain that nothing more wonderful than this ship has ever been seen on the sea: it carried one hundred and twenty bushels of lentils for ballast, and its length took up a large part of the left side of the harbour of Ostia, for under the emperor Claudius it was sunk there, with three moles as high as towers erected upon it that had been made of Pozzuoli cement for the purpose and conveyed to the place. It took four men to span the girth of this tree with their arms; and we commonly hear that masts for those purposes cost 80,000 sesterces and more, and that to put together the rafts usually runs to 40,000. But in Egypt and Syria for want of fir the kings are said to have used cedar wood for their fleets; the largest cedar is reported to have been grown in Cyprus and to have been felled to make a mast for a galley with rowers in teams of eleven belonging to Demetrius; it was one hundred and thirty feet long and took three men to span its girth. The pirates of Germany voyage in boats made of a single tree hollowed out, some of which carry as many as thirty people.

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§ 16.76.4  The most close-grained of all timber and consequently the heaviest is judged to be ebony and box, both trees of a slender make. Neither will float in water, nor will the cork-tree if its bark be removed, nor the larch. Of the remainder the most close-grained is the one called at Rome the lotus, and next the hard oak when the white sap-wood has been removed. The hard oak also has wood of a dark colour, and still darker is that of the cytisus, which appears to come very near to ebony, although people are to be found who assert that the turpentine-trees of Syria are darker. Indeed there is a celebrated artificer named Thericles who used to turn goblets of turpentine-tree wood, which is a highly valued material; it is the only wood that needs to be oiled, and is improved by oil. Its colour can be wonderfully counterfeited by staining walnut and wild pear wood and boiling them in a chemical preparation. All the trees that we have mentioned have hard close-grained wood. Next after them comes the cornel, though its wood cannot be given a shiny polish became of its poor surface; but cornel wood is hardly useful for anything else except the spokes of wheels or in case something has to be wedged in wood or fixed with bolts made of it, which are as hard as iron. There are also the holm-oak, the wild and cultivated olive, the chestnut, the hornbeam and the poplar. The last is also mottled like the maple — if only any timber could be any good when the branches of the tree are frequently lopped: this amounts to gelding the tree, and takes away all its strength. For the rest, most of these trees, but especially the hard oak, are so hard that it is not possible to bore a hole in the wood until it has been soaked in water, and even then when a nail has been driven right into it it cannot be pulled out. On the other hand cedar gives no hold to a nail. The softest of all woods is lime, and it is also apparently the hottest as well: it is adduced in proof of this that it turns the edge of adzes quicker than any other wood. Other hot woods are mulberry, laurel, ivy and all those used for making matches.

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§ 16.77.1  This has been discovered by experience in the camps of military scouting parties and of shepherds, because there is not always a stone at hand to strike fire with; consequently two pieces of wood are rubbed together and catch fire owing to the friction, and the fire is caught in a lump of dry tinder, fungus or dead leaves catching most readily. But there is nothing better than ivy wood for rubbing against and laurel wood for rubbing with; one of the wild vines (not the claret-vine), which climbs up a tree like ivy, is also spoken well of. The trees that have the coldest wood of all are all that grow in water; but the most flexible, and consequently the most suitable for making shields, are those in which an incision draws together at once and closes up its own wound, and which consequently is more obstinate in allowing steel to penetrate; this class contains the vine, agnus castus, willow, lime, birch, elder, and both kinds of poplar. Of these woods the lightest and consequently the most useful are the agnus castus and the willow; but they are all suited for making baskets and things consisting of flexible wicker-work. Also they are shiny and hard, and easy to use in carvings. Plane has flexibility, but of a moist kind, like alder; a drier flexibility belongs to elm, ash, mulberry, and cherry, but it is heavier. Elm retains its toughness most stoutly, and is in consequence the most useful wood for the hinges and frames of doors, because it is not liable to warp, only it should be put the other way up, so that the top of the tree is towards the lower hinge and the root above. The palm is ... and also cork-tree timber is similar; apple and pear are also close-grained, as well as maple, but maple is brittle, and so are any veined woods. In all trees the characteristics of each kind are carried further by wild specimens and by males; and barren trees have stronger wood than fertile ones, except in species where the male trees bear, for instance the cypress and the cornel.

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§ 16.78.1  The following trees do not experience decay and age — cypress, cedar, ebony, lotus, box, yew, juniper, wild olive, cultivated olive; and of the remainder the slowest to age are the larch, hard oak, cork, chestnut and walnut. The cedar, cypress, cultivated olive and box do not split or crack of their own accord.

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§ 16.79.1  It is believed that ebony lasts an extremely long time, and also cypress and cedar, a clear verdict about all timbers being given in the temple of Diana at Ephesus, inasmuch as though the whole of Asia was building it it took 120 years to complete. It is agreed that its roof is made of beams of cedar, but as to the actual statue of the goddess there is some dispute, all the other writers saying that it is made of ebony, but one of the people who have most recently seen it and written about it, Mucianus, who was three times consul, states that it is made of the wood of the vine, and has never been altered although the temple has been restored seven times; and that this material was chosen by EndoeusMucianus actually specifies the name of the artist, which for my part I think surprising, as he assigns to the statue an antiquity that makes it older than not only Father Liber but Minerva also. He adds that nard is poured into it through a number of apertures so that the chemical properties of the liquid may nourish the wood and keep the joins together — as to these indeed I am rather surprised that there should be any — and that the folding doors are made of cypress wood, and the whole of the timber looks like new wood after having lasted nearly 400 years. It is also worth noting that the doors were kept for four years in a frame of glue. Cypress was chosen for them because it is the one kind of wood which beyond all others retains its polish in the best condition for all time. Has not the statue of Vejovis in the citadel, made of cypress wood, lasted since its dedication in the year 561 [193 BC] after the foundation of Rome? Noteworthy also is the temple of Apollo at Utica, where beams of Numidian cedar have lasted for 1178 years just as they were when they were put in position at the original foundation of that city; and the temple of Diana at Saguntum in Spain, the statue of the goddess, according to the authority of Bocchus, having been brought there from Zacynthus with the founders of the city 200 years before the fall of Troy; it is kept inside the town itself — Hannibal from motives of religion spared it — and its beams, made of juniper, are still in existence even now. Memorable above all is the temple of the same goddess at Aulis, built some centuries before the Trojan War; all knowledge of what kind of timber it was built of has entirely disappeared. Broadly speaking it can at all events be said that those woods have the most outstanding durability which have the most agreeable scent. Next in esteem after the timbers mentioned stands that of the mulberry, which even darkens with age. At the same time also some woods last longer when employed in certain ways than they do otherwise: elm lasts best exposed to the air, hard oak when used under ground, and oak when submerged under water — oak when above the ground warps and makes cracks in structures. Larch and black alder do the best in damp; hard oak is rotted by sea water. Beech and walnut are also well spoken of for use in water, these timbers indeed holding quite the first place among those that are used under the ground, and likewise juniper (which is also very serviceable for structures exposed to the air), whereas beech and Turkey oak quickly decay, and the winter oak also will not stand damp. The alder on the other hand if driven into the ground in marshy places lasts for ever and stands a load of any amount. Cherry is a strong wood, elm and ash are tough but liable to warp, although they are flexible; and they are more reliable if the trees are left standing and dried by ringing round the trunk. Larch is reported to be liable to woodworm when used in seagoing vessels, and the same with all woods except the wild and the cultivated olive; in fact some woods are more liable to faults in the sea and others in the ground.

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§ 16.80.1  There are four kinds of pests that attack timbers. Borer-worms have a very large head in proportion to their size, and gnaw away wood with their teeth; these worms are observed only in the sea, and it is held that they are the only ones to which the name of borer-worm properly applies. The land variety are called moths, but the name for those resembling gnats is thrips, and there is also a fourth kind belonging to the maggot class, of which some are engendered by the wood itself when its sap becomes putrid and others are produced by the worm called horned-worm — as they are in trees — which when it has gnawed away enough to be able to turn round, gives birth to another. The birth of these insects is prevented however in some trees, for instance the cypress, by the bitter taste of the wood, and in others, for instance the box, by its hardness. It is also said that the fir will not decay in water if about the time of budding and at the lunar period we stated it is stripped of its bark. The companions of Alexander the Great stated that on the island of Tylos in the Red Sea there are trees used for building ships, the timbers of which have been found continuing free from rot for two hundred years even though they were under water. They further reported that the same island contains a shrub growing only thick enough for a walking stick, marked with stripes like a tiger skin, heavy and liable to break like glass when it falls on to things of harder substance.

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§ 16.81.1  We have in our country some timbers liable to split of their own accord, and architects consequently recommend that they should be smeared with dung and then dried, so as to make them proof against the action of the atmosphere. Fir and larch are strong weight-carriers, even when placed horizontally, and whereas hard oak and olive bend and yield to a weight, the woods named resist it and are not readily broken, and they fail owing to rot before they fail in strength. The palm tree also is strong, for it curves in a different way to other trees: all the others curve downward, but the palm curves in the opposite direction, making an arch. Pine and cypress are the strongest to resist rot and woodworms. Walnut bends easily — for this wood also is used for making beams; when it breaks it gives a warning in advance by a creaking noise, as happened for instance at Antandrus, when people in the public baths took alarm at the sound and made their escape. Pines, pitch pines and alders are hollowed to form pipes for conveying water, and when buried underground will last a number of years; but they age quickly if not covered over, the resistance they offer being remarkably increased if their outside surface also is covered with moisture.

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§ 16.82.1  Fir wood is strongest in a vertical position; it is very suitable for door panels and any kinds of inlaid work desired, whether in the Greek or the Campanian or the Sicilian style of joinery; under brisk planing it makes pretty curly shavings, always twisting in a spiral like the tendrils of a vine; moreover, of all sorts of wood it is most adapted for being glued together, so much so that it will split at a solid place before it parts at a join.

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§ 16.83.1  Gluing also is important for veneering articles with thin sections of wood or otherwise. For use as veneer a thready veining is approved of (it is called fennel-pattern grain on account of the resemblance), because in every kind of wood pieces with gaps and twists in them do not take the glue; some woods cannot be joined by gluing either with wood of the same kind or with other woods, for example hard oak, and in general materials unlike in substance do not hold together, for instance if one tried to join stone and wood. The wood of the service-tree, the hornbeam and the box have a very strong dislike for cornel wood, and so to a smaller degree has lime. All of the woods we have described as yielding are easily bent for all purposes, and so besides are mulberry and wild fig; while those which are moderately moist are suitable for boring and sawing, since dry woods give way beyond the part which you bore or saw, whereas green woods except hard oak and box offer a more obstinate resistance, and fill up the teeth of saws in an ineffective even line; this is the reason why the teeth are bent each way in turn, so as to get rid of the sawdust.

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§ 16.84.1  Ash is the most compliant wood in work of any kind, and is better than hazel for spears, lighter than cornel, and more pliable than service-tree; indeed the Gallic ash even has the suppleness and light weight required for chariots. The elm would rival it were not its weight against it. Beech also is easily worked, although brittle and soft; also cut in thin layers of veneer it is flexible, and is the only wood suitable for boxes and desks. The holm-oak as well cuts into extremely thin layers, and also has a not unattractive colour, but it is most reliable for things subjected to friction, for instance the axles of wheels, for which ash is selected because of its pliancy, as also is holm-oak for its hardness and elm for both qualities. But wood is also used in small pieces for the operations of carpentry, and a remarkable fact stated is that the most serviceable holders for augers are made from wild olive, box, holm-oak, elm and ash, and the best mallets from the same woods and larger ones from pine and holm-oak. But with these timbers also seasonable felling is more conducive to strength than if done prematurely, inasmuch as hinges made of olive, a very hard wood, that have been left too long unmoved in doorways have been known to put out shoots like a growing plant. Cato recommends holly, laurel or elm for making levers, and Hyginus horn-beam, holm-oak or Turkey-oak for the hafts of agricultural implements.

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§ 16.84.2  The principal woods for cutting into layers and for using as a veneer to cover other kinds of wood are citrus, turpentine-tree, varieties of maple, box, palm, holly, holm-oak, the root of the elder, and poplar. Also the alder, as has been stated, supplies a tuberosity that can be cut into layers, as do the citrus and the maple; no other trees have tuberosities so much valued. The middle part of trees is more variegated, and the nearer the root the smaller and the more wavy are the markings. This first originated the luxury use of trees, covering up one with another and making an outside skin for a cheaper wood out of a more expensive one. In order that one tree might be sold several times over, even thin layers of wood have been invented. And this was not enough: the horns of animals began to be dyed and their tusks cut in slices, and wood to be inlaid and later veneered with ivory. Next came the fancy of ransacking even the sea for material: tortoise-shell was cut up to provide it, and recently, in the principate of Nero, it was discovered by miraculous devices how to cause it to lose its natural appearance by means of paints and fetch a higher price by imitating wood. A little time ago luxury had not thought wood good enough, but now it actually manufactures wood out of tortoiseshell. By these methods high prices are sought for couches and orders are given to outdo turpentine wood, make a more costly citrus, and counterfeit maple.

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§ 16.85.1  If one thinks of the remote regions of the world and the impenetrable forests, it is possible that some trees have an immeasurable span of life. But of those that the memory of man preserves there still live an olive planted by the hand of the elder Africanus on his estate at Liternum and likewise a myrtle of remarkable size in the same place — underneath them is a grotto in which a snake is said to keep guard over Africanus's shade — and a lotus tree in the precinct of Lucina at Rome founded in 375 B.C., a year in which no magistrates were elected; how much older the tree itself is uncertain, but at all events there is no doubt that it is older, since it is from the grove in question that the goddess Lucina takes her name. This tree is now about 500 years old; still older, though its age is uncertain, is the lotus free called the Hair Tree, because the Vestal Virgins' offering of hair is brought to it.

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§ 16.86.1  But there is another lotus tree in the precincts of Vulcan founded by Romulus from a tithe of his spoils of victory, which on the authority of Masurius is understood to be of the same age as the city. Its roots spread right across the Municipal Offices as far as the Forum of Caesar. With this there grew a cypress of equal age, which about the closing period of Nero's principate fell down and was left lying.

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§ 16.87.1  But on the Vatican Hill there is a holm-oak that is older than the city; it has a bronze tablet on it with an inscription written in Etruscan characters, indicating that even in those days the tree was deemed venerable. The people of Tivoli also date their origin far before the city of Rome; and they have three holm-oaks still living that date even earlier than their founder Tiburnus, the ceremony of whose installation is said to have taken place near them; but tradition relates that he was the son of Amphiaraus, who died in battle before Thebes a generation before the Trojan War.

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§ 16.88.1  Authorities say that there is a plane-tree at Delphi that was planted by the hand of Agamemnon, and also another at Caphya, a place in Arcadia. There are trees at the present day growing on the tomb of Protesilaus on the shore of the Dardanelles opposite the city of the Trojans, which in every period since the time of Protesilaus, after they have grown big enough to command a view of Ilium, wither away and then revive again; while the oaks on the tomb of Ilus near the city are said to have been planted at the date when the place first began to be called Ilium.

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§ 16.89.1  It is said that at Argos there still survives the olive to which Argus tethered Io after she had been transformed into a heifer. West of Heraclea in Pontus there are altars dedicated to Jupiter under his Greek title of Stratios, where there are two oak trees planted by Hercules. In the same region there is a port called Harbour of Amyeus, famous as the place where King Bebryx was killed; his tomb ever since the day of his death has been shaded by a laurel tree which they call the Mad Laurel, because if a piece plucked from it is taken on board ships, quarrelling breaks out until it is thrown away. We have mentioned the region of Aulocrene, traversed by the route leading from Apamea into Phrygia; in it travellers are shown the plane-tree from which Marsyas was hanged after losing his match with Apollo, and which was selected for the purpose on account of its size even then. Moreover at Delos may be seen a palm tree dating back to the time of the same deity, and at Olympia a wild olive from which was made the wreath with which Hercules was crowned for the first time — veneration for it is preserved even now. Also the olive tree produced by Minerva in the competition a is reported still to exist at Athens.

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§ 16.90.1  On the other hand pomegranates, the fig and the apple class are extremely short-lived; and among apples those that ripen early are more short-lived than those that ripen late and the sweet ones than the sour, and the same is the case with the sweeter variety among the pomegranates, and likewise among vines, and particularly the more fruitful ones. Graecinus states that there have been cases of vines living 600 years. It also appears that trees growing in water die more quickly. Laurels, apples and pomegranates age rapidly, it is true, but they put out shoots again from their roots. Consequently the hardiest trees to live are olives, seeing that it is generally agreed among the authorities that they last 200 years.

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§ 16.91.1  On a hill named Corne in the territory of Tusculum, near the city, there is a grove named Corne which has been held in reverence from early times by the district of Latium as sacred to Diana; it consists of a beech coppice the foliage of which has the appearance of having been trimmed by art. This grove contains one outstanding tree which in our generation excited the affection of the orator Passienus Crispus, who had twice been consul and who subsequently became still more distinguished by marrying Agrippina and becoming the stepfather of Nero; Crispus used regularly not merely to lie beneath the tree and to pour wine over it, but to kiss and embrace it. Close to this grove is a holm-oak which is also famous, as measuring thirty-four feet round the trunk, and sending out what look like ten separate trees of remarkable size and forming a wood of itself.

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§ 16.92.1  It is a well-known fact that trees are killed by ivy. Some people believe that a similar property noxious to trees, though operating more slowly, is also trees. contained in mistletoe — for this plant also is recognised as by no means among the least remarkable on account of other properties beside its berries. For some varieties of plants cannot grow in the earth, and take root in trees, because they have no abode of their own and consequently live in that of others: instances of this are mistletoe and the plant in Syria called cadytas, which twines itself round not only trees but even brambles, and likewise in the district about Tempe in Thessaly the plant called polypodium, and also the dolichos and the serpyllum.

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§ 16.92.2  Also a plant that grows on a wild olive after it has been lopped is called phaunos, while one that grows on the fuller's teazel is called hippophaestum; it has hollow stalks, small leaves and a white root, the juice of which is considered very useful for purgatives in epilepsy.

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§ 16.93.1  There are three kinds of mistletoe. One that grows as a parasite on the fir and the larch is called stelis in Euboea and hyphear in Arcadia, and the name of mistletoe is used for one growing on the oak, hard oak, holm-oak, wild pear, turpentine-tree, and indeed most other trees; and growing in great abundance on the oak is one which they call dryos hyphear. There is a difference in the case of every tree except the holm-oak and the oak in the smell and poison of the berry and the disagreeably scented leaf, both the berry and the leaf of the mistletoe being bitter and sticky. The hyphear is more useful than vetch for fattening cattle; at first it only acts as a purge, but it subsequently fattens the beasts that have stood the purging process, although they say that those with some internal malady cannot stand it. This method of treatment is employed for forty days in summer. An additional variety is said to be found in mistletoe, in that when it grows on deciduous trees it also sheds its leaves itself, but when growing on an evergreen tree it retains its leaves. But universally when mistletoe seed is sown it never sprouts at all, and only when passed in the excrement of birds, particularly the pigeon and the thrush: its nature is such that it will not shoot unless it has been ripened in the stomach of birds. Its height does not exceed eighteen inches, and it is evergreen and always in leaf. The male plant is fertile and the female barren, except that even a fertile plant sometimes does not bear.

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§ 16.94.1  Mistletoe berries can be used for making bird-lime, if gathered at harvest time while unripe; for if the rainy season has begun, although they get bigger in size they lose in viscosity. They are then dried and when quite dry pounded and stored in water, and in about twelve days they turn rotten — and this is the sole case of a thing that becomes attractive by rotting. Then after having been again pounded up they are put in running water and there lose their skins and become viscous in their inner flesh. This substance after being kneaded with oil is bird-lime, used for entangling birds' wings by contact with it when one wants to snare them.

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§ 16.95.1  While on this subject we also must not omit the respect shown to this plant by the Gallic provinces. The Druids — that is what they call their magicians — hold nothing more sacred than mistletoe and a tree on which it is growing, provided it is a hard-oak. Groves of hard-oaks are chosen even for their own sake, and the magicians perform no rites without using the foliage of those trees, so that it may be supposed that it is from this custom that they get their name of Druids, from the Greek word meaning 'oak'; but further, anything growing on oak-trees they think to have been sent down from heaven, and to be a sign that the particular tree has been chosen by God himself. Mistletoe is, however, rather seldom found on a hard-oak, and when it is discovered it is gathered with great ceremony, and particularly on the sixth day of the moon (which for these tribes constitutes the beginning of the months and the years) and after every thirty years of a new generation, because it is then rising in strength and not one half of its full size. Hailing the moon in a native word that means 'healing all things,' they prepare a ritual sacrifice and banquet beneath a tree and bring up two white bulls, whose horns are bound for the first time on this occasion. A priest arrayed in white vestments climbs the tree and with a golden sickle cuts down the mistletoe, which is caught in a white cloak. Then finally they kill the victims, praying to God to render his gift propitious to those on whom he has bestowed it. They believe that mistletoe given in drink will impart fertility to any animal that is barren, and that it is an antidote for all poisons. So powerful is the superstition in regard to trifling matters that frequently prevails among the races of mankind.

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§ 17.1.1  WE have now stated the nature of the trees that grow of their own accord on land and in the sea; and there remain those which owe what is more truly described as their formation than their birth to art and to the ingenious devices of mankind. But it is in place first to express surprise at the way in which the trees that, under the niggardly system that we have recorded, were held in common ownership by the wild animals, with man doing battle with them for the fruit that fell to the ground and also with the birds for that which still hung on the tree, have come to command such high prices as articles of luxury — the most famous instance, in my judgement, being the affair of Lucius Crassus and Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus. Crassus was one of the leading Roman orators; he owned a splendid mansion, but it was considerably surpassed by another that was also on the Palatine Hill, belonging to Quintus Catulus, the colleague of Gaius Marius [102 BCE] in the defeats of the Cimbrians; while by far the finest house of that period was by universal agreement the one on the Viminal Hill owned by Gaius Aquilius, Knight of Rome, who was even more celebrated for this property than he was for his knowledge of civil law, although nevertheless in the case of Crassus his mansion was considered a reproach to him. Crassus and Domitius both belonged to families of high distinction, and they were colleagues as consuls and afterwards, in 92 B.C., as censors: owing to their dissimilarity of character their tenure of the censorship was filled with quarrels between them. On the occasion referred to, Gnaeus Domitius, being a man of hasty temper and moreover inflamed by that particularly sour kind of hatred which springs out of rivalry, gave Crassus a severe rebuke for living on so expensive a scale when holding the office of censor, and repeatedly declared that he would give a million sesterces for his mansion; and Crassus, who always had a ready wit and was good at clever repartees, replied that he accepted the bid, with the reservation of half a dozen trees. Domitius declined to buy the place even for a shilling without the timber. 'Well then,' said Crassus, 'tell me pray, Domitius, am I the one who is setting a bad example and who deserves a mark of censure from the very office which I am myself occupying — I, who live quite unpretentiously in the house that came to me by inheritance, or is it you, who price six trees at a million sesterces?' The trees referred to were nettle-trees, with an exuberance of spreading, shady branches; Caecina Largus, one of the great gentlemen of Rome, in our young days used frequently to point them out in the mansion, of which he was then the owner, and they lasted — as we have already also spoken of the limits of longevity in trees — down to the Emperor Nero's conflagration, [AD 64] thanks to careful tendance still verdant and vigorous, had not the emperor mentioned hastened the death even of trees. And let nobody suppose that Crassus's mansion was in other respects a poor affair, and that it contained nothing beside trees to attract this provoking bid from Domitius; on the contrary, he had already erected for decorative purposes in the court of the mansion six pillars of marble from Mt. Hymettus, which in view of his aedileship he had imported to embellish the stage of the theatre — and this although hitherto there were no marble pillars in any public place: of so recent a date is luxurious wealth! And at that date so much greater distinction was added to mansions by trees that Domitius actually would not keep to the price suggested by a quarrel without the timber in question being thrown in.

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§ 17.1.2  In former generations people even got their surnames from trees: for instance Frondicius, the soldier who performed such remarkable exploits against Hannibal, swimming across the Volturnus with a screen of foliage on his head, and the Licinian family of the Stolones — stolo being the word for the useless suckers growing on the actual trees, on account of which the first Stolo received the name from his invention of a process of trimming vines. In early days trees even were protected by the law, and the Twelve Tables provided that anybody wrongfully felling another man's trees should be fined 25 asses for each tree. What are we to think? That people of old who rated even fruit-trees so highly believed that trees would rise to the value mentioned above? And in the matter of fruit-trees no less marvellous are many of those in the districts surrounding the city, the produce of which is every year knocked down to bids of 2000 sesterces per tree, a single tree yielding a larger return than farms used to do in old days. It was on this account that grafting, and the practice of adultery even by trees, was devised, so that not even fruit should grow for the poor. We will now therefore state in what manner it chiefly comes about that such a large revenue is derived from these trees, going on to set forth the genuine and perfect method of cultivation, and for that purpose we shall not treat of the commonly known facts and those which we observe to be established, but of uncertain and doubtful points on which practical conduct chiefly goes wrong; as it is not our plan to give careful attention to superfluities. But first of all we will speak about matters of climate and soil that concern all kinds of trees in common.

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§ 17.2.1  Trees are specially fond of a north-east aspect, wind in that quarter rendering their foliage denser and more abundant and their timber stronger. This is a point on which most people make a mistake, as the props in a vineyard ought not to be placed so as to shelter the stems from wind in that quarter, and this precaution should only be taken against a north wind. What is more, exposure to cold at the proper season contributes very greatly to the strength of the trees, and they bud best under those circumstances, as otherwise, if exposed to the caresses of the winds from the south-west, they languish, and especially when in blossom. In fact if the fall of the blossom is followed immediately by rain, the fruit is entirely ruined — so much so that almonds and pears lose their crop of fruit if the weather should be only cloudy or a south-west wind prevail. Rain at the rising of the Pleiades indeed is extremely unfavourable for the vine and the olive, because that is their fertilizing season; this is the four-day period that decides the fate of the olives, this is the critical point when a south wind brings the dirty clouds we spoke of. Also cereals ripen worse on days when the wind is in the south-west, though they ripen faster. Cold weather only does damage when it comes with northerly winds, or not at the proper seasons; indeed for a north-east wind to prevail in winter is most beneficial for all crops. But there is an obvious reason for desiring rain in that season, because it is natural for the trees when exhausted by bearing fruit and also by the loss of their leaves to be famished with hunger, and rain is a food for them. Consequently experience inspires the belief that a mild winter, causing the trees the moment they have finished bearing to conceive, that is to bud, again, this being followed by another exhausting period of blossoming, is an extremely detrimental thing. Indeed if several years in succession should take this course, even the trees themselves may die, since no one can doubt the punishment they suffer from putting forth their strength when in a hungry condition; consequently the poet who told us to pray for finer winters was not framing a litany for the benefit of trees. Nor yet is wet weather over midsummer good for vines. It has indeed been said, thanks to the fertility of a vivid imagination, that dust in winter makes more abundant harvests; but, quite apart from this, it is the prayer of trees and crops in common that snow may he a long time. The reason is not only because snow shuts in and imprisons the earth's breath when it is disappearing by evaporation, and drives it back into the roots of the vegetation to make strength, but because it also affords a gradual supply of moisture, and this moreover of a pure and extremely light quality, owing to the fact that rime is the foam of the waters of heaven. Consequently the moisture from snow, not inundating and drenching everything all at once, but shedding drops as from a breast in proportion to the thirst felt, nourishes all vegetation for the very reason that it does not deluge it. In this way the earth also is made to ferment, and is filled with her own substance, not exhausted by seeds sown in her trying to suck her milk, and when lapse of time has removed her covering she greets the mild hours with a smile. This is the method to make corn crops fatten most abundantly — except in countries where the atmosphere is always warm, for instance Egypt: for there the unvarying temperature and the mere force of habit produce the same effect as management produces elsewhere; and in any place it is of the greatest benefit for there to be nothing to cause harm. In the greater part of the world, when at the summons of heaven's indulgence the buds have hurried out too early, if cold weather follows they are shrivelled up. This is why late winters are injurious, even to forest trees as well, which actually suffer worse, because they are weighed down by their own shade, and because remedial measures cannot help them, to clothe the tender plants with wisps of straw not being possible in the case of forest trees. Consequently rain is favourable first at the period of the winter storms, and next with the wet weather coming before the budding period; and. a third season is when the trees are forming their fruit, though not at the first stage but when the growth has become strong and healthy. Trees that hold back their fruit later and need more prolonged nourishment also receive benefit from late rains, for instance the vine, the olive and the pomegranate. These rains, however, are required in a different manner for each kind of tree, as they come to maturity at different times; consequently you may see the same storm of rain causing damage to some trees and benefiting others even in the same class of trees, as for example among pears, winter varieties require rain on one day and early pears on another, although they all alike need a period of wintry weather before budding. The same cause that makes a north-west wind more beneficial than a south-west wind also renders inland regions superior to places on the coast — the reason being that they are usually cooler — and mountain districts superior to plains, and rain in the night preferable to rain by day, vegetation getting more enjoyment from the water when the sun does not immediately make it evaporate.

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§ 17.2.2  Connected with this subject is also the theory of the situation for vineyards and trees what aspect they should face. Virgil condemned their being planted looking west, but some have preferred that aspect to an easterly position, while most authorities, I notice, approve the south; and I do not think that any hard and fast rule can be laid down on this point — skilled attention must be paid to the nature of the soil, the character of the locality and the features of the particular climate. In Africa for vineyards to face south is bad for the vine and also unhealthy for the grower, because the country itself lies under the southern quarter of the sky, and consequently he who there chooses a westerly or northern aspect for planting will achieve the best blending of soil with climate. When Virgil condemns a western aspect, there seems no doubt that he condemns a northern aspect also, although in Italy below the Alps it has generally been experienced that no vineyards bear better than those so situated. The wind also forms a great consideration. In the province of Narbonne and in Liguria and part of Etruria it is thought to be a mistake to plant vines in a position directly facing a west-north-west wind, but at the same time to be a wise arrangement to let them catch the wind from that quarter sideways, because it moderates the heat of summer in those regions, although it usually blows with such violence as to carry away the roofs of houses. Some people make the question of aspect depend on the nature of the soil, letting vines planted in dry situations face east and north and those in a damp one south. Moreover, they borrow rules from the vines themselves, by planting early varieties in cold situations, so that their ripening may come before the cold weather, and fruit-trees and vines that dislike dew, with an eastern aspect, so that the sun may carry off the moisture at once, but those that like dew, facing west or even north, so that they may enjoy it for a longer time. But the rest, virtually following Nature's system, have recommended that vines and trees should be placed so as to face north-east; and Democritus is of opinion that the fruit so grown also has more scent. We have dealt in Book Two with positions facing north-east and the other quarters, and we shall give more meteorological details in the next Book. In the meantime a clear test of the healthiness of the aspect seems to lie in the fact that trees facing south are always the first to shed their leaves. A similar influence also operates in maritime districts: sea breezes are injurious in some places, while at the same time in most places they encourage growth; and some plants like having a distant view of the sea but are not benefited by being moved nearer to its saline exhalations. A similar principle applies also to rivers and marshes: they shrivel up vegetation by their mists or else they serve to cool excessively hot districts. The trees that we have specified like shade and even cold. Consequently the best course is to rely on experiment.

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§ 17.3.1  It comes next after the heavens to give an account of the earth, a subject no easier to deal with, inasmuch as the same land is not as a rule suited for trees and for crops, and the black earth of the kind that exists in Campania is not the best soil for vines everywhere, nor is a soil that emits thin clouds of vapour, nor the red earth that many writers have praised. The chalky soil in the territory of Alba Pompeia and a clay soil are preferred to all the other kinds for vines, although they are very rich, a quality to which exception is made in the case of that class of plants. Conversely the white sand in the Ticino district, and the black sand found in many places, and likewise red sand, even when intermingled with rich soil, are unproductive. The signs adduced in judging soil are often misleading. A soil in which lofty trees do brilliantly is not invariably favourable except for Those trees: for what grows higher than a silver fir? yet what other tree could have lived in the same place? Nor do luxuriant pastures always indicate a rich soil: for what is more famous than the pastures of Germany? but immediately underneath a very thin skin of turf there is sand. And land where plants grow high is not always damp, any more, I protest, than soil that sticks to the fingers is always rich — a fact that is proved in the case of clay soils. In point of fact no soil when put back into the holes out of which it is dug completely fills them, so as to make it possible to detect a close soil and a loose soil in this manner; and all soil covers iron with rust. Nor can a heavy or a light soil be detected by a standard of weight, for what can be understood to be the standard weight of earth? Nor is alluvial soil deposited by rivers always to be recommended, seeing that some plants do not flourish in a damp situation; nor does that much praised alluvial soil prove in experience to be beneficial for a long period, except for a willow. One of the signs of a good soil is the thickness of the stalk in corn, which incidentally in the famous Leborine plain in Campania is so large that they use it as a substitute for wood; but this class of soil is everywhere hard to work, and owing to this difficulty of cultivation puts almost a heavier burden on the farmer because of its merits than it could possibly inflict by reason of defects. Also the soil designated glowing-coal earth appears to be improved by marl; and in fact tufa of a pliable consistency is actually held by the authorities to be a desideratum. For vines Virgil actually does not disapprove of a soil in which ferns grow; and many plants are improved by being entrusted to salt land, as they are better protected against damage from creatures breeding in the ground. Hillsides are not denuded of their soil by cultivation if the digging is done skilfully, and not all level ground gets less than the necessary amount of sun and air; and some varieties of vine, as we have said, draw nourishment from frosts and clouds. All matters contain some deeply hidden mysteries, which each person must use his own intelligence to penetrate. What of the fact that changes often occur even in things that have been investigated and ascertained long ago? In the district of Larisa in Thessaly the emptying of a lake has lowered the temperature of the district, and olives which used to grow there before have disappeared, occur before; while on the other hand the city of Aenos, since the river Hebrus was brought near to it, has experienced an increase of warmth a and the district round Philippi altered its climate when its land under cultivation was drained. On the other hand on land belonging to Syracuse a farmer who was a newcomer to the district by removing the stones from the soil caused his crops to be ruined by mud, until he carried the stones back again. In Syria they use a light ploughshare that cuts a narrow furrow, because the subsoil is rock which causes the seeds to be scorched in summer.

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§ 17.3.2  Again, immoderate heat and cold have a similar effect in certain places. Thrace owes its fertility in corn to cold, Africa and Egypt to heat. There is one place in the island of Chalcia belonging to Rhodes which is so fertile that they reap barley sown at its proper time and after carrying it at once sow the field again and reap a second crop of barley with the other harvest. In the district of Venufrum a gravel soil is found to be most suitable for olives, but in Baetica very rich soil. The vines of Pucinum bare scorched on rock, whereas those of Caecubum grow in the damp ground of the Pontine Marshes. So much variety and diversity obtains in the evidence of experience and in soil. Vopiscus Caesar when appearing in a case before the Censors spoke of the plains of Rosia as 'the paps of Italy', where stakes left lying on the ground the day before were hidden with grass; but these plains are only valued for pasture. Nevertheless Nature did not wish that we should be uninstructed, and has caused errors to be fully admitted even where she had not given clear information as to the good points; and accordingly we will first speak about soil defects. A bitter soil is indicated by its black undergrown plants; shrivelled shoots indicate a cold soil, and drooping growths show a damp soil; red earth and damp clay are noted by the eye — they are very difficult to work, and liable to burden the rakes or ploughshares with huge clods — although what is an obstacle to working the soil is not also a handicap to its productivity; and similarly the eye can discern the opposite, an ash-coloured soil and a white sand; while a barren soil with its hard surface is easily detected by even a single stroke of a prong. Cato defines defects of soil briefly and in his customary style: 'Take care when the soil is rotten not to dent it either with a waggon or by driving cattle over it'. What do we infer from this designation to have been the thing that so much alarmed him that he almost prohibits even setting foot on it? Let us compare it with rottenness in wood, and we shall find that the faults of soil which he holds in such aversion consist in being dry, porous, rough, white, full of holes and like pumice-stone. He has said more by one striking word than could be fully recounted by any quantity of talk. For some soil exists which analysis of its vices shows to be not old in age, a term which conveys no meaning in the case of earth, but old in its own nature, and consequently infertile and powerless for every purpose. The same authority gives the view that the best land is that extending in a level plain from the base of a mountain range in a southerly direction, this being the conformation of the whole of Italy, and that the soil called 'dark' is 'tender'; consequently this will be the best land both for working and for the crops. We need only try to see the meaning of this remarkably significant expression 'tender', and we shall discover that the term comprises every desideratum. 'Tender' soil is soil of moderate richness, a soft and easily worked soil, neither damp nor parched; it is soil that shines behind the ploughshare, like the field which Homer, the fountainhead of all genius, has described as represented by a divine artist in a carving on a shield, and he has added the marvellous touch about the furrow showing black although the material used to represent it was gold; it is the soil that when freshly turned attracts the rascally birds which accompany the ploughshare and the tribe of crows which peck the very footprints of the ploughman.

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§ 17.3.3  In this place moreover may be quoted a dictum as to luxury that is also undoubtedly to the point. Cicero, that other luminary of learning, says 'Unguents with an earthy taste are better than those with the flavour of saffron' — he preferred the word 'taste' to 'smell'. It is certainly the case that a soil which has a taste of perfume will be the best soil. And if we need an explanation as to what is the nature of this odour of the soil that is desiderated, it is that which often occurs even when the ground is not being turned up, just towards sunset, at the place where the ends of rainbows have come down to earth, and when the soil has been drenched with rain following a long period of drought. The earth then sends out that divine breath of hers, of quite incomparable sweetness, which she has conceived from the sun. This is the odour which ought to be emitted when the earth is turned up, and when found it will deceive no one; and the scent of the soil will be the best criterion of its quality. This is the kind of earth usually found in land newly ploughed where an old forest has been felled, earth that is unanimously spoken highly of. And in the matter of bearing cereals the same earth is understood to be more fertile the more often cultivation has been suspended and it has lain fallow; but this is not done in the case of vineyards, and consequently the greater care must be exercised in the selection of their site, so as not to justify the opinion of those who have formed the view that the land of Italy has by this time been exhausted. In other kinds of soil, it is true, ease of cultivation depends also on the weather, and some land cannot be ploughed after rain, as owing to excessive richness it becomes sticky; but on the other hand in the African district of Byzacium, that fertile plain which yields an increase of one hundred and fifty fold, land which in dry weather no bulls can plough, after a spell of rain we have seen being broken by a plough drawn by a wretched little donkey and an old woman at the other end of the yoke. The plan of improving one soil by means of another, as some prescribe, throwing a rich earth on the top of a poor one or a light porous soil on one that is moist and too lush, is an insane procedure: what can a man possibly hope for who farms land of that sort?

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§ 17.4.1  There is another method, discovered by the provinces of Britain and those of Gaul, the method of feeding the earth by means of itself, and the kind of soil called marl: this is understood to contain a more closely packed quality of richness and a kind of earthy fatness, and growths corresponding to the glands in the body, in which a kernel of fat solidifies. This also has not been overlooked by the Greeks — indeed what have they left untested? They give the name of leucargillum to a white clay that they use on the land at Megara, but only where the soil is damp and chilly. The other substance brings wealth to the provinces of Gaul and Britain, and may suitably receive a careful description.

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§ 17.4.2  There had previously been two kinds of marl, but recently with the progress of discoveries a larger number have begun to be worked: there is white marl, red marl, dove-coloured marl, argillaceous marl, tufa marl and sand marl. It has a twofold consistency, rough or greasy, each of which can be detected by its feel in the hand. Its use is correspondingly double, to feed cereals only or to feed pasture-land as well. Tufa marl nourishes grain, and white marl, if it is found where springs rise, has unlimited fertilizing properties, but it is rough to handle, and if it is scattered in excessive quantities it scorches up the soil. The next kind is the red marl, which is known as acaunumarga, consisting of stone mingled with a thin, sandy earth. The stone is crushed on the land itself, and in the earliest years of its employment the fragments make the cornstalks difficult to cut; however, as it is extremely light it can be carried for only half of the cost charged for the other varieties. It is scattered on the land thinly; it is thought to contain a mixture of salt. With both of these kinds a single scattering serves for fifty years to fertilize either crops or pasture.

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§ 17.4.3  Of the marls that are greasy to the touch the chief one is the white. It has several varieties, the most pungent being the one mentioned above. Another variety of white marl is the chalk used for cleaning silver; this is obtained from a considerable depth in the ground, usually from pits made 100 feet deep, with a narrow mouth but with the shaft expanding in the interior, as is the practice in mines. This chalk is chiefly used in Britain. Its effect lasts for 80 years, and there is no case of anybody having scattered it on the same land twice in his lifetime. A third kind intermixed with a greasy earth, and it is a more effective, white marl is called glisomorga; this is fullers' chalk more dressing for pasture than for corn, so that, when a crop of corn has been carried, before the next sowing a very abundant crop of hay can be cut, although while growing corn the land does not produce any other plant. Its effect lasts 30 years; but if it is scattered too thickly it chokes the soil just as Signia plaster does. For dove-coloured marl the Gallic provinces have a name in their own language, eglecopaia; it is taken up in blocks like stone, and is split by the action of sun and frost so as to form extremely thin plates. This kind of marl is equally beneficial for corn and grass. Farmers use sandy marl if no other is available; but they use it on damp soils even if another sort is available. The Ubii are the only race known to us who while cultivating extremely fertile land enrich it by digging up any sort of earth below three feet and throwing it on the land in a layer a foot thick; but the benefit of this top-dressing does not last longer than ten years. The Aedui and the Pictones have made their arable land extremely fertile by means of chalk, which is indeed also found most useful for olives and vines. But all marl should be thrown on the land after it has been ploughed, in order that its medicinal properties may be absorbed at once; and it requires a moderate amount of dung, as at first it is too rough and is not diffused into vegetation; otherwise whatever sort of marl is used it will injure the soil by its novelty, even with dung it does not promote fertility in the first year. It also makes a difference what sort of soil the marl is required for, as the dry kind is better for a damp soil and the greasy kind for a dry soil, while either sort suits land of medium quality, either chalk-marl or dove-marl.

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§ 17.5.1  Farmers north of the Po are so fond of employing ash that they prefer it to dung, and they burn stable dung, which is the lightest kind, in order to get the ash. Nevertheless they do not use both kinds of manure indifferently in the same field, and do not use ashes in plantations of shrubs, nor for some kinds of crops, as we shall explain later. Some are of the opinion that dust helps the growth of grapes, and they sprinkle it on the fruit when it is forming and scatter it on the roots of the vines and the trees. It is certainly the case that in the Province of Narbonne a wind from west-north-west ripens vintage grapes, and in that district dust contributes more than sunshine.

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§ 17.6.1  There are several varieties of dung, and its actual employment dates a long way back; as far back as Homer an aged king in the poem is found thus enriching his land with his own hands. The invention of this procedure is traditionally ascribed to King Augeas in Greece, and its introduction in Italy to Hercules, though Italy has immortalized Stercutus son of Faunus on account of this invention. Marcus Varro gives the first rank to thrushes' droppings from aviaries, which he also extols for fodder of cattle and swine, declaring that no other fodder fattens them more quickly. If our ancestors had such large aviaries that they supplied manure for the fields, it is possible to be hopeful about our own morals! But Columella puts manure from dovecots first, and next manure from the poultry-yard, condemning the droppings of water birds entirely. The rest of the authorities advocate the residue of human banquets as one of the best manures, and some of them place even higher the residue of men's drink, with hair found in curriers shops soaked in it, while others recommend this liquor by itself, after water has been again mixed with it and even in larger quantity than when the wine is being drunk; the fact being that a larger amount of badness has to be overcome in the liquor when to the original poison of the wine the human factor has been added. These are contested questions; and they use man even for nourishing soil. Next to this kind of manure the dung of swine is highly commended Columella alone condemning it. Others recommend the dung of any quadruped that feeds on clover, but some prefer pigeons' droppings. Next comes the dung of goats, after that sheep's dung, then cow-dung and last of all that of beasts of burden.

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§ 17.6.2  These distinctions were recognized in early days, and at the same time I do not find modern rules for the use of dung, since in this matter also old times are more serviceable; and before now in some parts of the provinces there has been so large and valuable a supply of beasts that the practice has been seen of passing dung through a sieve, like flour, the stench and look of it being transformed by the action of time into something actually attractive. (It has lately been found that olives particularly thrive on ashes from a lime kiln.) To the rules given Varro adds the employment of the lightest kind of horse-dung for manuring cornfields, but for meadowland the heavier manure produced by feeding barley to horses, which produces an abundant growth of grass. Some people even prefer stable-manure to cow-dung and sheep's droppings to goat's, but they rate asses' dung above all other manures, because asses chew their fodder very slowly; but experience on the contrary pronounces against each of these. It is however universally agreed that no manure is more beneficial than a crop of lupiue turned in by the plough or with forks before the plants form pods, or else bundles of lupine after it has been cut, dug in round the roots of trees and vines; and in places where there are no cattle they believe in using the stubble itself or even bracken for manure.

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§ 17.6.3  Cato says: 'You can make manure of stable-litter, lupines, chaff, beanstalks and holm-oak or oak leaves. Pull up the dane-wort and hemlock out of the crop, and the high grass and sedge growing round osier beds; use this as litter for sheep, and rotten leaves for oxen.' — 'If a vine is making poor growth, make a bonfire of its shoots and plough in the ashes therefrom.' He also says: 'Where you are going to sow corn, give your sheep a free run on the land.'

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§ 17.7.1  Moreover Cato also says that there are certain crops which themselves nourish the land: 'Cornland is manured by grain, lupine, beans and vetches'; just as on the contrary: 'Chick-pea, because it is pulled up by the roots and because it is salt, barley, fenugreek, bitter vetch, — these all scorch up a cornland, as do all plants that are pulled up by the roots. Do not plant stone-fruit in cornland.' — Virgil holds the opinion that cornland is also scorched by flax, oats and poppies.

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§ 17.8.1  They recommend making dung-heaps in the open air in a hole in the ground made so as to collect moisture, and covering the heaps with straw to prevent their drying up in the sun, after driving a hard-oak stake into the ground, which will keep snakes from breeding in the dung. It pays extremely well to throw the manure on the ground when a west wind is blowing and during a dry moon; most people misunderstand this and think that it should be done when the west wind is just setting in, and only in February, whereas most crops require manuring in other months also. Whatever time is chosen for the operation, care must be taken to do it when the wind is due west and the moon on the wane and accompanied by dry weather. Such precautions increase the fertilizing effect of manure to a surprising degree.

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§ 17.9.1  Having begun by stating at considerable length the principles of climate and soil, we will now describe the trees that are produced by the care and skill of mankind. There are almost as many varieties of these as there are of those that grow wild, so bountifully have we repaid our debt of gratitude to Nature; for they are produced either from seed or from root-cuttings or by layering or tearing off a slip or from a cutting or by grafting in an incision in the trunk of a tree. As for the story that at Babylon they plant palm-leaves and produce a tree in that way, I am surprised that Trogus believed it. Some trees however can be grown by several of the above methods, and some by all of them.

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§ 17.10.1  And the majority of these methods were taught us by Nature herself, in particular that of sowing a seed, because when a seed fell from a tree and was received into the earth it came to life again. Indeed there are some trees that are not grown in any other way, for instance chestnuts and walnuts, with the exception, that is, of those intended for felling; but also some grown in other ways are grown from seed as well, though a different kind of seed — for instance vines and apples and pears — as with these a pip serves as a seed, and not the actual fruit, as in the case of the trees mentioned above. Also medlars can be grown from seed. All of these trees are slow in coming on, and liable to degenerate so as to have to be restored by grafting; and sometimes this happens even with chestnuts.

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§ 17.11.1  Some trees on the other hand have the property of not degenerating at all in whatever way they are propagated, for instance cypresses, the palm and laurels — for the laurel also can be propagated in a variety of ways. We have stated the various kinds of laurel. Of these the Augusta, the berry laurel and the laurustinus are propagated in a similar manner: their berries are picked in January, after they have been dried by a spell of north-east wind, and are spread out separately, so as not to ferment by lying in a heap; afterwards some people treat them with dung in preparation for sowing and soak them with urine, but others put them in running water in a wicker basket, and stamp on them till the skin is washed away, which otherwise is attacked by stagnant moisture and does not allow them to bear. They are planted in a freshly dug trench a hand's breadth deep, about twenty in a cluster; this is done in March. These laurels can also be propagated by layering, but the laurel worn in triumphal processions can only be grown from a cutting. Myrtles of all varieties are grown from berries in Campania, but at Rome by layering. Democritus tells us that the Taranto myrtle is also grown in another way: the berries are taken, and after being crushed lightly so as not to break the pips are mixed into a paste with water and this is pounded up and smeared on a rope, which is then put in the ground; from this, he says, will grow up a remarkably thick hedge, from which slips can be transplanted. They also grow brambles for hedges in the same way, by smearing a rope of rushes with blackberries. In case of scarcity, laurel and myrtle seeds are ready for transfer at the end of three years.

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§ 17.11.2  Among the trees that are grown from seed, Mago deals elaborately with those of the nut class. He says that the almond should be sown in soft clay soil with a south aspect, but that it also does well in hard warm ground, but in a rich or damp soil it dies or does not bear. He recommends choosing for sowing almonds shaped as much as possible like a sickle, and picked from a young tree, and says they should be soaked for three days in diluted manure, or else on the day before sowing in water sweetened with honey; and that they should be put in the ground with their point downward and with their sharp edge facing north-east; that they should be sown in groups of three, placed four inches apart from each other in a triangular formation; and that they should be watered every ten days, until they begin to swell. Walnuts are sown lying on their sides with the join of the shell downward; and pine-cones are planted in groups of about seven, contained in pots with a hole in the bottom, or else in the same way as a laurel that is being grown from berries. The citron is grown from pips and from layers, and the sorb from seed or from a cutting from the root or from a slip; but the citron needs a warm situation, whereas the sorb requires a cool and damp one.

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§ 17.12.1  Nature has also taught the art of making nurseries, as from the roots of many trees there shoots up a teeming cluster of progeny, and the mother tree bears offspring destined to be killed by herself, inasmuch as her shadow stifles the disorderly throng — as in the case of laurels, pomegranates, planes, cherries and plums; although with a few trees in this class, for instance elms and palms, the branches spare the young suckers. But young shoots of this nature are only produced by trees whose roots are led by their love of sun and rain to move about on the surface of the ground. All of these it is customary not to put in their own ground at once, but first to give them to a foster-mother and let them grow up in seed-plots, and then change their habitation again, this removal having a marvellously civilizing effect even on wild trees, whether it be the case that, like human beings, trees also have a nature that is greedy for novelty and travel, or whether on going away they leave their venom behind when the plant is torn up from the root, and like animals are tamed by handling.

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§ 17.13.1  Also Nature demonstrated another kind of propagation resembling the previous one, and suckers torn away from trees continued to live; in this procedure the slips are torn away with their haunch as well, and carry off with them some portion also from their mother's body with its fibrous substance. This is a method used in striking pomegranates, hazels, apples, sorbs, medlars, ash plants, figs, and above all vines; but the quince if struck in this way deteriorates in quality. From the same method a way was discovered of cutting off slips and planting these, a plan first adopted with elders, quinces and brambles, which were planted for the purpose of making a hedge, but later it was also introduced as a way of growing trees, for instance poplars, alders, and willow, which last is even planted with the cutting upside down. Suckers are planted out at once in the place chosen for them to occupy; however, before going on to other classes of plants it is desirable to speak of the management of a nursery.

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§ 17.14.1  For, with a view to a nursery it pays to chose soil of the highest quality, since it often comes about that a nurse is more ready to humour young things than a mother. Consequently the soil should be dry and sappy, and well worked with a double mattock so as to be hospitable to the new arrivals, and it should resemble as closely as possible the earth into which they are to be transplanted; and before all the plot must be cleared of stones, and fenced in well enough to protect it even from the inroads of poultry; and it should be as free from cracks as possible, so that the sun may not penetrate into it and scorch the roots. The seeds should be sown eighteen inches apart, as if the plants touch one another, besides other defects they get worm-eaten; and it pays to hoe them and weed them fairly often, and also to prune the seedlings themselves when they branch and accustom them to endure the knife. Cato also recommends erecting hurdles supported on forked sticks, the height of a man, to catch the sun, and thatching these with straw to keep off the cold; and he says that this is the method for rearing pear and apple seeds, and pine cones, and also cypresses, as even they can be grown from seed. Cypress seed consists of very small grains, some of them scarcely perceptible, and we must not remark on Nature's miracle of producing trees from so small seed when a grain of wheat or barley is so much larger, not to reckon a bean. What resemblance have apple seeds and pear seeds to their source of origin? To think that from these beginnings is born the timber that contemptuously rebuffs the axe, presses that are not overcome by immense weights, masts for sails, battering rams for demolishing towers and walls! Such is the force and such the potency of Nature. But the crowning marvel will be that there is something that derives its origin from a teardrop, as we shall mention in the proper place.

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§ 17.14.2  Well then, in the months that we have specified, the tiny seed-balls are gathered from the female cypress — for the male tree, as we have said, is barren — and are put to dry in the sun; and they burst open and emit their seed, which has a remarkable attraction for ants, a fact that actually increases the marvel, for the germ of such huge trees to be consumed for the food of such a small animal! The seed is sown in April, after the earth has been levelled by means of rollers or rammers; it is scattered thickly and a layer of earth a thumb deep is sprinkled upon it from sieves: it is not strong enough to rise up against a greater weight, and it twists back under the ground; on this account another method is merely to tread it into the earth. Every three days it is given a light watering, after sunset so as to soak in the moisture even, until the plants break out from the earth. They are transplanted after a year, when the seedling is nine inches long, regard being paid to the weather so that they may be planted under a bright sky and when there is no wind. And wonderful to say, on that day and that day only it is dangerous for them if there is the smallest sprinkle of rain or a breath of wind; whereas for the future the plants are continually safe and secure, and later on they have a dislike for humidity. Jujube-trees are also grown from seed sown in April. Tuber-apples are better grafted on the wild plum, the quince or the buckthorn bush, the last being a wild thorn. Any thorn also takes grafts of the sebesten-plum extremely well, and also takes the sorb-plum satisfactorily.

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§ 17.14.3  As for the recommendation to transfer plants from the nursery to some other place before they are planted out in the place assigned to them, I consider that this causes unnecessary trouble, albeit this process does guarantee the growth of leaves of a larger size.

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§ 17.15.1  Elm-seed should be collected about the first of March, before the tree is clothed with foliage, when the seed is beginning to turn yellow. Then it should be left in the shade to dry for two days, and afterwards thickly sown in ground that has been broken up, and a layer of earth sifted fine in a sieve should be sprinkled on it, of the thickness recommended in the case of cypresses; and if no rain comes to your assistance, it must be watered. A year afterwards the plants should be removed from the rows of the beds to the elm-grounds and planted at a distance of a foot apart each way. Atinian elms it pays better to plant in autumn, because they are grown from cuttings, having no seed. For a grove in the neighbourhood of the city they should be transplanted when they are five years old, or, as some hold, when they have reached a height of twenty feet. They should be set in what is called a 'nine-square-foot' trench, 3 ft. deep and 3 ft. broad and even larger. When they have been planted, mounds 3 ft. high from the ground level should be heaped round them — the name for these mounds in Campania is 'little altars'. The spacing must be settled according to the nature of the place: in level country it is suitable to plant the young trees wider apart. It is also proper to plant out poplars and ashes earlier, because they bud more quickly — that is, planting should start on the 13th of February: these frees also growing from cuttings. In spacing out trees and plantations and planning vineyards the diagonal arrangement of rows is commonly adopted and is essential, being not only advantageous in allowing the passage of air, but also agreeable in appearance, as in whatever direction you look at the plantation a row of trees stretches out in a straight line. In the case of poplars the same method of growing them from seed is used as with elms, and also the same method of transplanting them from nurseries or forests.

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§ 17.16.1  It is consequently of the first importance for shoots to be transplanted into similar or better toil, and not moved from warm or early ripening positions into cold or backward ones, nor yet from the latter to the former either; and to dig the trenches some time in advance — if possible, long enough before to allow the holes to get covered over with thick turf. Mago advises a year in advance, so as to let the holes absorb the sunshine and rain, or, if circumstances do not allow of this, he recommends making fires in the middle of the holes two months before, and only planting the seedlings in the holes so prepared just after rain has fallen. He says that in a clay soil or a hard soil the pits should measure 4 ft. 6 in. each way, 3 or 4 inches more on sloping sites, and he prescribes their being dug like an oven, narrower at the orifice; in black earth he advises a hole 3 ft. 4 in. deep, in the form of a square of the same dimensions. The authorities agree that the holes ought not to be more than 24 ft. deep or 2 ft. wide, but nowhere less than 18 in. deep. Because of the fact that in damp pound one gets through to the neighbourhood of water, Cato advises that if the place is damp the holes should be a yard wide at the orifice and 16 inches wide at the bottom, and 4 ft. deep, and that they should be floored with stones, or, if stones are not available, with stakes of green willow, or, if these are also not available, with brushwood, so as to reduce their depth by six inches. To us, after what has been said as to the nature of trees, it appears proper to add that those which are fond of the surface of the ground, for instance the ash and the olive, must be sunk deeper in; these and similar trees should be sunk four feet down, but for the others a depth of three feet will be enough. And there is no harm in trimming the parts that have become exposed: 'Lop clear that root there,' said General Papirius Cursor when to intimidate the chief magistrate of Praeneste he ordered the lictor to draw his axe. Some persons recommend putting at the bottom a layer of potsherds — others prefer round stones — in order to hold in the moisture and also let some through, thinking that flat stones do not act in the same way and prevent the root from reaching the earth. A middle course between the two opinions would be to pave the bottom with a layer of gravel.

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§ 17.16.2  Some people recommend transplanting a tree when it is not less than two years old and not more than three, others when it is large enough round to fill the Cato's view a is that it ought to be more than five inches thick. The same authority would not have omitted, if it were important, to recommend making a mark in the bark on the south side, so that when trees were transplanted they might be set in the same directions as regards the seasons as those to which they were accustomed, to prevent their north sides from being split if set facing the midday sun and their south sides from being nipped if facing the north wind. Some people also follow the contrary plan in the case of a vine or a fig, replanting them turned the other way round, from the view that this makes them grow thicker foliage and afford better shelter to their fruit and be less liable to lose it, and that a fig-tree so treated also becomes strong enough to be climbed. Most people only take care to make the wound left where the end of a branch has been lopped face south, not being aware that this exposes it to cracks caused by excessive heat; I should prefer to let a lopped end point somewhat east of south or somewhat west of south. It is equally little known that care should be taken not to let the roots become dry owing to delay in replanting, and not to dig up trees when the wind is in the north or in any quarter between north and southeast, or at all events not to leave the roots exposed to the wind in these quarters; such exposure causes trees to die without the growers knowing the cause. Cato disapproves of wind in any quarter and of rain also during all the time while transplantation is going on. It will be a good precaution against wind and rain to leave as much as possible of the earth in which the trees have been living clinging to their roots, and to bind them all round with turf, though for this purpose Cato directs conveying the trees to the fresh place in baskets, no doubt most useful advice; and moreover be thinks it satisfactory for the top layer of soil to be put at the bottom of the hole. Some writers say that with pomegranates to lay stones at the bottom of the hole will prevent the fruit from bursting open on the tree. It is better to plant the roots in a bent position; and it is essential for the tree itself to be so placed as to be exactly in the middle of the hole. It is said that if a fig-tree is planted stuck in a squill — this is a kind of bulb — it bears fruit very quickly, and is not liable to attacks of worm, a defect from which all other kinds of fruit trees planted in a similar way are exempt. Who can doubt that great care ought to be taken with the fibres of the roots, so that they may appear to have been taken, not torn, out of the ground? On this account we omit the remaining rules that are admitted, for instance that the earth round the roots should be rammed tight with a light mallet, which Cato thinks of primary importance in this matter, also advising that a wound made on the trunk should be plastered over with dung and bandaged with leaves.

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§ 17.17.1  A part of this topic is the question of the spaces between the trees. Some people have advised planting pomegranates, myrtles, and laurels rather close together, only three yards apart, apples a little wider apart, pears still wider, and almonds and figs wider again; although this matter will best be decided by taking account of the length of the branches and the dimensions of the places concerned, as well as of the shadow of each particular tree, since these too must be considered: even large trees throw only small shadows when their branches curve round into a circular shape, as in the ease of apples and pears, whereas cherries and laurels throw exceptionally wide shadows.

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§ 17.18.1  We turn now to certain special properties of the shade of different trees. That of walnut is heavy, and even causes headache in man and injury to anything planted in its vicinity; and that of the pine-tree also kills grass; but both the pine and the walnut withstand wind, as also their projecting branches shield them like penthouses. Very heavy raindrops fall from the pine oak and holm-oak, but none at all from the cypress, which throws a very small compact shadow around it; and fig-trees give only a light shadow, however much spread out, and consequently it is not necessary to make it a rule not to plant them between vines. Elms give a gentle shade which actually promotes the growth of any plants that it falls on, although Atticus holds the view that also the shade of elms is one of the most oppressive, nor do I doubt that it is so if they are allowed to shoot out into branches, although I do not think that the shade of the elm does any harm when the tree is kept within bounds. The shade of the plane also though dense is agreeable, as we may learn from the evidence of grass, which under no other tree covers the banks more luxuriantly. The poplar with its gaily quivering leaves gives no shade at all; the shade of the alder is dense but permits the growth of plants. The vine gives enough shade for itself, as its quivering foliage and constant tossing tempers the sunshine with shadow, while by the same means it affords shelter in a heavy shower of rain. Nearly all trees of which the leaves have long stalks afford only light shade.

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§ 17.18.2  Even this department of knowledge is not to be despised, nor put in the last class, inasmuch as to each kind of plant shade is either a nurse or else a stepmother — at all events for the shadow of a walnut tree or a stone pine or a spruce or a silver fir to touch any plant whatever is undoubtedly poison.

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§ 17.19.1  The question of raindrops falling from trees can be settled briefly. With all the trees which are so shielded by the spread of their foliage that the rainwater does not flow down over the tree itself the drip does cruel injury. Consequently in this enquiry it will make a great deal of difference over what space the soil in which we are going to plant causes the various trees to grow. In the first place, hillsides in themselves require smaller intervals between the trees. In places exposed to the wind, it pays to plant trees closer together, but nevertheless to give the olive very wide spacing, Cato's opinions for Italy being that olives should be planted 25 or at most 30 feet apart; but this varies with the nature of the sites. The olive is the largest of all the trees in Andalusia; in Africa, however, so it is stated — the guarantee for this statement will rest with the authorities who make it — there are a number of trees called 'thousand-pounders', from the weight of oil that they produce in a year's crop. Consequently Mago has prescribed a space of 75 feet all round, or in thin, hard soil exposed to the wind, 45 feet at least. Andalusia however reaps most abundant crops of corn grown between the olives. It will be agreed that it shows shameful ignorance to thin full-grown trees more than a proper amount and hasten them into old age, or to cut them down altogether, by doing which the persons who planted them frequently manifest their own incompetence. Nothing is more disgraceful for farmers than to do a thing and then have to be sorry for it, so that in fact it pays much better to err by leaving too much space between some trees are by nature slow growers, and in particular those that only grow from seed and that live a long time. Those on the other hand that are short-lived, for instance the fig, pomegranate, plum, apple, pear, myrtle and willow, grow quickly, and nevertheless they lead the way in producing their riches, for they begin to bear at three years old, making some show even before. Among these the pear is the slowest of all to bear, and the cypirus and the false cypirus bush the quickest, for this group flowers straight away and goes on to produce its seed. But all trees mature more quickly if the suckers are removed and the nourishing juices brought back into a single stem.

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§ 17.21.1  Nature has likewise also taught the art of reproducing from layers. Brambles curving over with their slender and also excessively long shoots plant their ends in the earth again and sprout afresh out of themselves, in a manner that would fill up the whole place if resistance were not offered by cultivation, so that it would be positively possible to imagine that mankind was created for the service of the earth. Thus a most evil and execrable circumstance has nevertheless taught the use of the layer and the quickset. Ivies also have the same property. Beside the vine, Cato gives instructions for layering the fig, olive, pomegranate, all kinds of apples, laurels, plums, myrtle, filberts and Praeneste nuts, and the plane.

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§ 17.21.2  There are two kinds of layer. A branch is bent down from the tree into a hole measuring four feet each way, and after two years is cut off at the bend, and three years later the growth is transplanted to another place; if it is desired to carry layers so struck a considerable distance, it is most suitable to plant them at once in baskets or earthenware pots, so that they may be carried to the fresh site in these. The other method is more elaborate; it is effected by inducing roots to grow on the tree itself by passing branches through earthenware pots or baskets and packing them round with earth, and so enticing roots to grow right among the fruit and at the ends of the branches — as branch-ends to form roots in this way are obtained at the top of the tree, by the daring device of creating another tree a long way off the ground — and after the same interval of two years as in the previous method cutting off the layer and planting it together with the basket. Savine is grown from a layer and also from a slip; it is said that wine-lees or crushed brick from walls make it grow marvellously; and rosemary is reproduced by the same methods and also from a branch, since neither savine nor rosemary has a seed; the rhododendron is grown both by layering and from seed.

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§ 17.22.1  Nature has also taught the method of grafting by means of seed; a seed that has been hurriedly swallowed whole by a hungry bird and has become sodden by the warmth of its belly is deposited together with a fertilizing manure of dung in a soft bed in the fork of a tree, or else, as often happens, is carried by the wind into some crevice or other in the bark; a result of this we have seen a cherry tree growing on a willow, a plane on a laurel, a laurel on a cherry, and berries of different colours growing together. lit is also reported that the same thing may be caused by a jackdaw when it hides seeds in the holes that are its storehouses.

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§ 17.23.1  From this has been derived the process of inoculation, consisting in opening an eye in a tree by cutting away the bark with a tool resembling a shoemaker's punch and enclosing in it a seed that has been removed from another tree by means of the same tool. This was the method of inoculation used in old days in the case of figs and apples; but the method described by Virgil is to find a recess in a knot of bark burst open by a shoot and to enclose in this a bud obtained from another tree.

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§ 17.24.1  And so far Nature has herself been our instructor; but grafting was taught us by Chance, another tutor and one who gives us perhaps more frequent lessons, and this was how he did it: a careful farmer, making a fence round his house to protect it, put under the posts a base made of ivy-wood, so as to prevent them from rotting; but the posts when nipped by the bite of the still living ivy created life of their own from another's vitality, and it was found that the trunk of a tree was serving instead of earth. Continuing, the surface of the wood is levelled off with a saw and the trunk smoothed with a pruning-knife. Afterwards there is a twofold method of procedure; and the first method consists of inserting the graft between the bark and the wood, as people in former days were afraid of making a cleft in the trunk; although subsequently they ventured to bore right into the middle and adopted the plan of forcing the graft into the pith itself inside it, inserting only one graft as the pith would not take more. But subsequently a more elaborate method is for as many as six grafts to be added to reinforce their liability to die and their number, a cleft being carefully made through the middle of the trunk and being kept open by means of a thin wedge until the graft, the end of which has been pared into a point, goes right down into the crack.

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§ 17.24.2  In this process a great many precautions have to be observed. First of all we must notice what kind of tree will stand grafting of this nature, and what tree it will take a graft from. Also the sap is variously distributed, and does not lie under the bark in the same parts with all trees: in vines and figs the middle is drier, and generation starts from the top, shoots for grafting being consequently taken from the top of the tree, whereas in olives the sap is round the middle and grafts are also taken from there, the tops being parched up. Grafts and trunk grow together most easily when they have the same kind of bark and when they flower at the same time, so that they have the affinity of the same season and a partnership of juices; whereas it is a slow business when there is incompatibility between dry tissues and damp ones, and between hard and soft barks. The other points to be observed are not to make the cleft at a knot, as the inhospitable hardness repudiates a newcomer; to make it at the shiniest place; not to make it much more than three inches long, nor on a slant, nor so as to be transparent. Virgil says that grafts must not be taken from the top, and it is certain that the slips should be obtained from the shoulders of the tree that look north-east, and from trees that are good bearers and from a young shoot, unless the tree on which they are to be grafted is an old one, as in that case the slip must be stouter. A further point is that slips that are going to be grafted must be pregnant, that is, swelling with bud-formations, and in expectation of giving birth in that year, and they must be at all events two years old, and not thinner than the little finger. But grafts are also inserted the other way round a when the intention is for them not to grow so long but to spread out. Before all things it will be serviceable for them to have buds and to be glossy, as nothing shabby or shrivelled anywhere will gratify one's hopes. The pith of the slip grafted should be put touching the place in the mother tree where the wood and the bark meet, for that is more satisfactory than to place it level with the bark outside. The process of giving a point to the slip for grafting must not strip the pith quite bare, but only make it visible through a narrow aperture; the point must slope off in an even wedge not more than three inches long, which is most easily achieved by dipping the slip in water when paring it. It must not be exposed to wind while it is being pointed. The bark must not be allowed to become separated from the wood in either the graft or the trunk. The graft must be pressed right down to where its bark begins, but it must not be forced out of shape while it is being pressed home, nor have its bark folded back in wrinkles. Consequently shoots dripping with sap should not be used for grafting, no more, I swear, than ones that are dry, because in the former case excess of moisture causes the bark to slip, while in the latter owing to defective vitality it makes no moisture and does not incorporate with the trunk. Moreover there is a religious rule that a graft must be inserted while the moon is waxing; and that both hands must be used in pressing it home; and apart from that, to use both hands at once in this job requires less effort, as it involves combining their forces. Grafts pressed in too forcibly are slower in bearing but last more stoutly, while the contrary procedure has the opposite results. The crack must not gape too wide and afford a loose hold, nor yet not wide enough, so as to squeeze the graft out or to kill it by pressure; special care must be taken to avoid the latter in the trunk of a tree that takes the graft with an excessively powerful hold. In order that a cleft may be left in the middle, some people make a line of cleavage in the trunk with a pruning-hook and bandage the actual edge of the incision with a withe, and afterwards force it apart with a wedge, the bandage keeping it from gaping open too freely. Some slips are grafted on plants in a seed-plot and then are transplanted on the same day. If a rather thick stock is used for grafting, it is better to insert it between the bark and the wood, after using a wedge, preferably of bone, to loosen the bark, so as not to break it. Cherry-trees have their inner rind removed before the incision is made. They are the only trees that are grafted even after midwinter. After the bark has been removed they have a layer of a sort of down, and if this gets a hold on the graft it makes it decay. The most effective way of tightening the bandage is by driving a wedge into it; it suits best to insert it as close to the ground as the formation of the tree and the knots allows. Grafts ought not to project to a length of more than six inches.

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§ 17.24.3  Cato recommends making a mixture of pounded white clay or chalk and cow-dung and so working it to a sticky consistency, and putting this into the fissure and smearing it round it. From his remarks on the subject it is easily seen that at that period they used to insert the graft between the wood and the bark and not otherwise, nor used they to put the slips more than two inches in. He advises grafting pear and apples during the spring and fifty days after midsummer and after the vintage, but olives and figs only in the spring and when a cloudless moon is shining, and moreover in the afternoon and not if there is a south wind blowing. It is remarkable that he is not content to have safeguarded the graft in the manner described, and to have protected it against rain and frost by means of turf and soft bundles of split osiers, but he says it must be covered with a layer of buglois — a species of plant — as well, and that this should be tied on with a layer of straw; whereas nowadays they think it is very adequately packed with a wrapping of mud and chaff, the graft projecting two inches from the bark.

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§ 17.24.4  Those who do their grafting in spring are pressed for time, as the buds are just shooting, except in the case of the olive, the eyes of which are pregnant for a very long time, and it has a very small amount of sap under the bark, which when too abundant is injurious to the grafts. But with pomegranates and the fig and other trees of a dry nature it is far from beneficial to put off grafting till a late season. A pear-tree however may be grafted when actually in blossom, and the process may be carried forward even into May. If however cuttings of fruit trees have to be brought from a considerable distance, it is believed that they best preserve their sap if they are inserted in a turnip, and it is best to store them near a stream or a pond, packed between two hollow tiles blocked up at each end with earth; but it is thought that vine-cuttings are best stored in dry ditches, under a covering of straw, with earth then piled over them so as to let their tops protrude.

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§ 17.25.1  Cato has three ways of grafting a vine: he advises cutting the stock short and splitting it through the pith, and then inserting into it the shoots after sharpening them at the end in the manner stated above, and making the cambium of the two meet; the second method is, in case the vines are contiguous with one another, to pare down on a slant the side of each that faces the other and to tie them together with the cambiums joined; and the third is to bore a slanting hole in the vine down to the pith and insert slips a couple of feet long, and to tie the graft in that position and cover it up with a plaster of pounded earth, with the shoots upright. Our generation has improved on this method, so as to employ a Gallic auger which makes a hole in the tree without scorching it, because all scorching weakens it, and to select a slip that is beginning to bud, and not to let it protrude from the stock by more than two eyes, ... of an elm ... tied on with a withe put two round ... on two sides with a knife, so that the slime which is the greatest enemy of vines may chiefly exude through them, and then when the whips have made two feet of growth, to cut the tie of the graft, allowing its growth to make thickness. They have fixed the time for grafting vines from the autumn equinox till the beginning of budding. Cultivated plants are grafted on roots of wild ones, which are of a closer texture, whereas if slips of cultivated plants arc grafted on the trunks of wild ones they degenerate to the wild variety. The rest depends on the weather: dry weather is most favourable for grafts, because a remedy for its ill effects is to place earthenware pots of ashes on the stock and let a small amount of water filter through the ashes; but grafting by inoculation likes a light fall of dew.

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§ 17.26.1  Scutcheon grafting may itself also be thought to have sprung from grafting by inoculation, but it is most suited to a thick bark, such as that of fig-trees. The procedure is to prune all the branches so that they may not attract the sap, and then, at the most flourishing part of the tree and where it displays exceptional luxuriance, to remove a scutcheon, without allowing the knife to penetrate below the bark; and then to take a piece of bark of equal size from another tree, together with a protuberant bud, and press it into the place, fitting the join so closely that there is no room for a scar to form and a single substance is produced straight away, impervious to damp and to air — though all the same it is better to protect the splice by plastering it with mud and tying it with a bandage. People in favour of modem fashions make out that this kind of grafting was only recently invented, but it is found already in the old Greek writers and in Cato, who prescribed this method of grafting for the olive and the fig, in conformity with his invariable precision actually defining the proper measurement: he says that a piece of bark four inches long and three wide should be cut out with a knife, and so fitted to its place and smeared with that pounded mixture of his described above, in the same way as in grafting an apple. In the case of vines some people have combined with this kind of grafting the fissure method, removing a little square of bark on the side and then forcing in the shoot. We have seen beside the Falls of Tivoli a tree that has been grafted in all these ways and was laden with fruit of every kind, nuts on one branch, berries on another, while in other places hung grapes, pears, figs, pomegranates and various sorts of apples; but the tree did not live long. And nevertheless it is impossible for us by our experiments to attain to all the things found in Nature, as some cannot possibly come into existence except spontaneously, and these only occur in wild and uninhabited places. The tree most receptive of every kind of graft is believed to be the plane, and next to it the hard-oak, but both of these spoil the flavours of the fruit. Some trees, for instance the fig and the pomegranate, can be grafted in all the different methods, but the vine does not admit scutcheons, nor do trees that have a thin bark or one that peels off and cracks; nor do trees which are dry or contain only a little sap admit of inoculation. Inoculation is the most prolific of all methods of grafting, and grafting by scutcheon comes next, but both are very subject to displacement; and a graft that relies on the support of the bark only is very speedily dislodged by even a light breeze. Grafting by insertion is the firmest, and produces more fruit than a tree grown from planting.

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§ 17.26.2  We must not omit one extremely exceptional case. In the territory of Naples a Knight of Rome named Corellius, a native of Este, grafted a chestnut with a slip cut from the tree itself, and this is how the celebrated variety of chestnut tree named after him was produced. Subsequently his freedman Tereus grafted a Corellius chestnut again. The difference between the two varieties is this: the former is more prolific but the latter, the Tereus chestnut, of better quality.

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§ 17.27.1  It is mere accident that by its own ingenuity has devised the remaining kinds of reproduction; it taught us to break off branches from trees and plant them because stakes driven into the earth had taken root. This method is used to grow many frees, especially the fig, which can be grown in all the other ways except from a cutting; the best plan indeed is to take a comparatively large branch and point it at the end like a stake and drive it deep into the earth, leaving a small head above ground and covering up even this with sand. Pomegranates also are grown from a branch, the passage into the hole having first been widened with stakes; and so also the myrtle; in all of these a branch is used that is three feet long and not so thick as a man s arm, and the bark is carefully preserved and the trunk sharpened to a point at the end.

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§ 17.28.1  The myrtle is grown from cuttings as well as in other ways, and that is the only way used for the mulberry, because superstitious fear of lightning forbids its being grafted on an elm. Consequently we must now speak about the planting of cuttings. In this care must be taken above all that the cuttings are made from trees that bear well, that they are not bent in shape nor scabbed or forked, that they are thick enough to fill the hand and not less than a foot long, that they are planted without injury to the bark and always with the cut end and the part that was nearest the root downward, and during the process of budding the plant is kept heaped over with earth until it attains strength.

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§ 17.29.1  We shall best convey in Cato's own words the rules that he judged necessary to keep in looking after olives: 'Make the olive slips that you are going to plant in the hole a yard long, and handle them carefully so as not to damage the bark when cutting or trimming them. Make those you are going to plant in the nursery a foot long. Plant them thus: the place must be first dug over with a mattock and have the soil well loosened; when you put the slip in, press down the slip with your foot; if it does not go down far enough, drive it in with a mallet or a beetle, and be careful not to break the bark while you are driving it in. Do not make a hole beforehand with a dibble into which to put the slip: if you do not, it will live better. The slips do not mature till three years old, when the bark will turn. If you plant them in holes or in furrows, put them in groups of three and keep these apart. Cheek just by the eye that they do not project more than four fingers' breadth above the earth. — In taking up an olive tree you should use great care and carry the roots with as much earth as possible; when you have well covered up the roots, tread them down well, so that nothing may injure them. If anyone asks what is the time for planting an olive, the answer is, where there is a dry soil, at seed-time, but where it is rich, in the spring.

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§ 17.30.1  Begin to prune an olive-yard a fortnight before the spring equinox; the six weeks from then onward will be the right time for pruning. Prune it in this way: in a really fertile place, remove all the parts that are dry and any branches broken by the wind; in a place that is not fertile, trim away more and reduce well and disentangle out and make the stocks smooth. — In the autumn season turn up the earth round the olive-trees and add dung. — The man who stirs over his olive-yard most often and deepest, will plough up the thinnest roots. If be ploughs badly, the roots will spread out on the top of the ground and will become thicker, and the strength of the olive-trees will go away into them.

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§ 17.30.2  We have already stated, in treating of olive-oil, what kinds of olive trees Cato tells us to plant and in what kind of soil, and what aspect he advises for olive-yards. Mago recommends that on sloping ground and in dry positions and in a clay soil they should be planted between autumn and the middle of winter, but in heavy or damp or watery soil between harvest and the middle of winter — though it must be understood that he gave this advice for Africa. Italy at any rate, at the present time, does its planting chiefly in spring, but if one chooses to plant in autumn as well, there are only four days of the forty between the equinox and the setting of the Pleiades on which it injures olives to be planted. It is peculiar to Africa that it grafts them on a wild olive, in a soft of everlasting sequence, as when they begin to get old the shoot next for engrafting is put in and so another young tree grows out of the same one and the process is repeated as often as is necessary, so that the same olive-yards go on for generations. The wild olive however is propagated both by grafting and by inoculation.

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§ 17.30.3  It is bad to plant an olive where an oak-tree has been dug up, because the worms called raucae breed in oak roots and go over to olives. It has been ascertained to pay better not to bury the cuttings in the ground or to dry them before they are planted. It has been found better for an old olive-yard to be raked over every other year between the spring equinox and the rising of the Pleiades, and also to have the moss scraped off the trees, but for them to be dug round every year just after midsummer with a hole a yard across and a foot deep, and to be manured with dung every third year.

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§ 17.30.4  Mago also tells us to plant almonds between the rising of Arcturus and the shortest day, and not to plant all kinds of pears at the same time, as they do not blossom at the same time either; he says that those with oblong or round fruit should be planted between the setting of the Pleiades and the shortest day, but the remaining kinds in midwinter after the setting of the Arrow, with an eastern or northerly aspect; and a laurel between the setting of the Eagle and the setting of the Arrow. For the rule as to the time for planting and that for grafting are connected: the authorities have decided that for the greater part grafting should be done in spring and autumn, but there is also another suitable season, about the rising of the Dog-star, known to fewer people because it is understood not to be equally advantageous for all localities, but as we are enquiring into the proper method not for a particular region but for the whole of nature we must not omit it. In the district of Cyrene they plant when the yearly winds are blowing, as they also do in Greece, and particularly the olive in Laconia. The island of Cos also plants vines at that season, but the rest of the farmers in Greece, though they do not hesitate to inoculate and to graft trees at that season, do not plant trees then. And the natural qualities of the localities carry very great weight in this matter; for in Egypt they plant in every month, and so in every country that has a summer rainfall, but in India and Ethiopia trees are necessarily planted later, in autumn. Consequently there are three regular periods for germination, spring and the rise of the Dog-star and that of Arcturus. For in fact not only do animals possess a strong appetite for copulation, but the earth and all vegetable growths have a much greater desire, the indulgence of which at the proper season is of the greatest importance for conception, and peculiarly so in the case of grafts, as both graft and stock share a mutual eagerness to unite. Those who approve of spring for grafting begin it immediately after the equinox, stating that the buds are just coming out, which facilitates the joining of the barks; but those who prefer autumn begin at the rising of Arcturus, because the grafts at once so to speak take root and are prepared when they reach springtime, and do not have their strength taken away immediately by budding. Some kinds of trees however have a fixed time of year everywhere, for instance cherries and almonds, which have to be planted or grafted about midwinter; but as to the greater number of trees the lie of the land will make the best decision, as cold and damp lands must be planted in spring, but dry and warm sites in autumn. The system general in Italy at all events assigns the times for planting in the following manner: for a mulberry from February 13 to the spring equinox; for a pear the autumn, provided it is not less than a fortnight before the shortest day; for summer apples and quinces, and also sorbs and plums, from midwinter to February 13; for the Greek carob and for peaches, right through autumn till midwinter; for the nuts, walnut and pine-cone and filbert and almond and chestnut, from March 1 to March 15; for the willow and broom about March 1. The broom is grown from seed in dry places and the willow from a slip in damp localities, as we have stated.

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§ 17.30.5  There is moreover a new method of grafting — so that I may not wittingly pass over anything that I have anywhere discovered — devised by Columella, as he himself states, for the purpose of effecting a union even between trees of different natures and not easily combined, for example figs and olives. He gives instructions to plant a fig-tree near to an olive, with not too wide a space between for the fig at full spread to touch a branch of the olive, the most supple and pliant branch possible being chosen, and all the time during the process it must be trained by practice in curving; and afterwards, when the fig has gained full strength, which he says is a matter of three or at most five years, the top of it is cut off and the branch of the olive is itself also pruned and with its head shaved to a point in the way that has been stated is inserted in the shank of the fig, after having been secured with ties to prevent its escaping because of the bend in it. In this way, he says, by a sort of combination of layering and grafting, in three years the branch shared between the two mother trees grows together, and in the fourth year it is cut away and belongs entirely to the tree that has adopted it; this method however is not yet generally known, or at all events I have not yet obtained a complete account of it.

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§ 17.31.1  For the rest, the same account that has been given above about warm and cold and damp and dry substances has also demonstrated the method of trenching. In watery soils it will be suitable to make trenches neither broad nor deep, but the contrary in warm and dry ground, so that they may receive and retain water as much as possible. This is the method used in cultivating old trees as well, as in very warm localities growers heap earth over the roots in summer and cover them up, to prevent the heat of the sun from parching them. In other places they turn up the earth round them and give access to the air, but also in winter pile up earth to protect them from frost; whereas growers in hot climates open up the roots in winter and try to obtain moisture for the thirsty trees. Everywhere the rule is to dig a circular trench three feet in circumference round the tree, though this is not done in meadowland because the roots, owing to their love of sun and moisture, wander about on the surface of the ground — And let these be our general observations in regard to planting and grafting trees for fruit.

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§ 17.32.1  It remains to give an account of those which are grown as supports for other trees, particularly for vines, and which are felled for timber. Among these the first place is taken by willows, which arc planted in a damp place, but in a hole dug two and a half feet deep, a truncheon or rod 18 inches long being used, the stouter the more serviceable. They should be set six feet apart. When three years old they are lopped off two feet from the ground to make them spread out wide and to enable them to be cut back without using ladders; for the willow is the more productive the nearer it is to the ground. It is advised that these frees also should be dug round every year, in April. This is the mode of cultivating the osier willow. The stake willow is grown both from a rod and from a truncheon, in a hole of the same depth. It is proper to cut rods from it in about three years; but these also fill up the place of trees that are growing old, by means of a layered new growth cut off after a year. A single acre of osier-willow will supply enough for 25 acres of vineyard. The white poplar is also grown for the same purpose, the hole being two feet deep and the cutting eighteen inches long and left two days to dry; the truncheons are planted one foot nine inches apart and a layer of earth a yard deep is thrown on the top of them.

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§ 17.33.1  The reed likes an even moister soil than osiers do. It is planted by putting the bulb of the root, which others call the 'eye' in a hole nine inches deep, two feet six inches apart; and it renews itself of its own accord when an old reed-bed has been rooted up, a method that has been found to pay better than thinning out, as used to be done previously, because the roots get twisted up together and are hilled by their mutual inroads. The time to plant is before the eyes of the reeds swell up, which is before the first of March. It goes on growing till midwinter, and stops when it is beginning to get hard, which is the indication that it is ready for cutting; though it is thought that the reed also requires digging round as often as the vine does. It is also planted in a horizontal position, not buried deep in the ground, and as many shoots spring up as there are eyes. It is also grown by being planted out in a hole a foot deep, with two eyes buried so that the third knot is just touching the earth, and with the head bent down so as not to hold the dew. It is cut when the moon is on the wane. For propping vines a reed dried in smoke is more serviceable than one still green.

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§ 17.34.1  The chestnut-tree is preferred to all other props because of the ease with which it is worked its obstinate durability, and because when cut it nuts again even more abundantly than the willow. It asks for a light yet not sandy soil, and especially a damp gravel or glowing-coal earth or even a powdery tufa, and it will grow in a site however shady, and facing north and extremely cold, or even in one on a slope; but at the same time it refuses dry gravel, red earth, chalk, and all rich fertile soils. We have said that it is grown from the nut, but it will only grow from very large ones, and only when they are planted five in a heap together. The soil underneath must be kept broken up from November to February, when the nuts detach themselves and fall from the tree and sprout in the ground underneath it. They should be planted in a hole measuring nine inches each way, with spaces of a foot between them. After two years they are transferred from this seed-plot to another and replanted two feet apart. People also grow them from a layer, which indeed is easier in their case than with any other tree: for the root is bared and the layer laid in the trench at full length, and then it throws out a new shoot from the top left above the earth and another from the root. When transplanted however it does not know how to make itself at home and dreads the novelty for almost two years, but afterwards it puts out shoots. Consequently plantations felled for timber are replenished by sowing nuts rather than by planting quicksets. The mode of cultivation is not different from that used for the trees a mentioned above: it is by loosening the soil and pruning the lower part for the next two years. For the rest the tree looks after itself, as its shadow kills off superfluous suckers. It is lopped before the end of the sixth year. The props provided by one acre are enough for twenty acres of vines, as they even grow forked in two from the root, and they last till after the next lopping of the plantation they come from.

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§ 17.34.2  The sessile-fruited oak is grown in a similar way, though later by three years in lopping, and less difficult to propagate in whatever soil it is sown; this is done in spring, with an acorn (but only a sessile-oak is grown from one) in a hole nine inches deep, with two foot spaces between the plants; the ground is lightly hoed four times a year. A sessile-oak grown as a prop is least liable to rot, and it makes new shoots when lopped most of any timber. Timber trees in addition to those we have mentioned are the ash, laurel, peach, hazel, apple, but these shoot more slowly and when fixed in the ground scarcely stand the action of the soil, not to mention the damp. The elder, on the contrary, which is very strong timber for a stake, is grown from cuttings like the poplar. About the cypress we have already said enough.

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§ 17.35.1  And now that a preliminary account has been given of what may be called the rigging that supports the vines, it remains to give a particularly careful description of the nature of the vines themselves.

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§ 17.35.2  The shoots of the vine, and of certain other trees that have a somewhat spongy inner substance, have stalks with knotted joints that make divisions across the pith. The actual lengths of cane are short, and get shorter towards the top, and they close up their pieces between the knots with joints at each end. The pith, or what is really the life-giving soul of the tree, stretches forward filling up the length in front of it, so long as the knots are open, with a tube that allows a passage; but when they have become solidified and prevent passage, the pith is thrown back and bursts out at its lowest part close to the previous knot with a series of alternate lateral forks, as has been stated in the case of the reed and of the giant fennel; with these the swelling from the bottom knot can be observed on the right and that at the next one on the left, and so on alternately. In the case of a vine, when this swelling makes a knob at the knot it is called a 'germ', but before it makes a knob, in the hollow part it is called an 'eye' and at the actual top a 'germ'. This is the way in which the main shoots, side-shoots, grapes, leaves and tendrils are formed; and it is a remarkable fact that those growing on the right-hand side are the stronger.

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§ 17.35.3  Consequently when these slips are planted it is necessary to cut the knots in them across the middle, without letting the pith run out. And in the case of a fig nine-inch slips are planted in holes made in the ground with pegs, in such a way as to have the parts that were nearest to the tree sunk into the earth and two eyes projecting above the surface (the term 'eyes' in slips of trees properly denotes the points from which they send out shoots). It is because of this that even when bedded out the slips occasionally produce in the same year the fruit they were going to bear on the tree if they have been planted at the proper time when pregnant, and give birth in their other position to the progeny they had begun to conceive. Fig-trees struck in this way are easily transplanted two years later, as this tree in compensation for the rapidity with which it grows old is endowed with the property of coming to maturity very rapidly.

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§ 17.35.4  Vines give more numerous kinds of shoots for planting. The first point is that none of these are used for planting except useless growths lopped off for brush-wood, whereas any branch that bore fruit last time is pruned away. It used to be the custom to plant the shoot with a knob of the hard wood on each side of it, and this explains why it is still called a 'mallet-shoot'; but afterwards the practice began of pulling it off with its own heel, as is done in the case of the fig; and there is no kind of slip that grows better. A third kind has been added that strikes even quicker, which has the heel removed; these slips are called 'arrows' when they are twisted before being set out, 'three-bud slips' when they are cut off and set without being twisted. By this method several can be obtained from the same shoot. To plant from young leafy shoots is unproductive, and a slip for planting must only be taken from a shoot that has already borne fruit. A shoot that has few knots in it is deemed unlikely to bear, whereas a crowd of buds is a sign of fertility. Some people say that only shoots that have flowered should be planted. It does not pay so well to plant arrow-slips, because anything that is twisted easily gets broken in being moved. Shoots chosen for planting should be not less than a foot long, with five or six knots; that length of shoot will not possibly have less than three buds. It pays best to plant them on the same day as they are cut off, or if a considerable postponement cannot be avoided, to keep them well protected, as we have instructed, or at all events to be careful not to lay them down on the surface of the earth and let them be dried up by the sun and nipped by wind or frost. Shoots that have been left too long in a dry place should be soaked in water for several days to restore their freshness.

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§ 17.35.5  The soil whether in a nursery or a vineyard should be exposed to the sun and should he as soft as possible, and it should be tinned over with a two-pronged fork three feet down, and thrown back with a two-spit spade or mattock to swell naturally in ridges four feet high, so that each trench goes down two feet; and when dug the earth must be cleaned of weeds and spread out, so that no part may be left uncultivated, and it must be levelled accurately by measurement: unequal ridges show that the ground has been badly dug. The part of the ground lying between the banks must also be measured. Shoots are planted either in a hole or in a longer trench, and the finest possible layer of earth is heaped over them, although in a thin soil this is of no use unless a layer of richer soil is spread underneath. The earth should cover up not fewer than two buds and should just touch the third; it must be pressed down to the same level and compacted with the dibble; in the nursery plot there should be spaces eighteen inches broad and six inches longways between every two settings; and the mallet-shoots so planted should after two years be cut back to their bottom knot, if the knot itself is spared. From this point they throw out the substance of eyes, with which at the end of three years the quickset is planted.

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§ 17.35.6  There is also a luxury method of growing vines — to tie four mallet-shoots together at the bottom with a tight string and so pass them through the shank bones of an ox or else through earthenware pipes, and then bury them in the earth, leaving two buds protruding. This makes the shoots grow into one, and when they have been cut back they throw out a new shoot. Afterwards the pipe is broken and the root is left free to acquire strength and the vine bears grapes on all its constituent shoots. Under another method recently discovered a mallet-shoot is split down the middle and after the pith has been scraped out the actual lengths of stalk are tied together, every precaution being taken to avoid hurting the buds. The mallet-shoot is then planted in a mixture of earth and dung, and when it begins to throw out stalks, it is cut down and dug round several times. Columella guarantees that a vine so grown will bear grapes with no stones in them, although it is extremely surprising that the planted slips themselves will live after being deprived of their pith.

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§ 17.35.7  think I ought not to omit to mention that trees will grow even from slips that have no joint in them; for instance box-trees come up if planted with five or six extremely slender slips tied together. It was formerly the practice to break off these slips from a box tree that had not been pruned, as it was believed that otherwise they would not live; but experience has done away with that notion.

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§ 17.35.8  After the management of the nursery follows the arrangement of the vineyards. These are of five kinds — with the branches spreading about on the ground, or with the vine standing up of its own accord, or else with a stay but without a cross-bar, or propped with a single cross-bar, or trellised with four bars in a rectangle. It will be understood that the same system that belongs to a propped vine is that of one in which the vine is left to stand by itself without a stay, for this is only done when there is a shortage of props. A vineyard with the single cross-bar is arranged in a straight row which is called a canterius; this is better for wine, as the vine so grown does not overshadow itself and is ripened by constant sunshine, and is more exposed to currents of air and so gets rid of dew more quickly, and also is easier for trimming and for harrowing the soil and all operations; and above all it sheds its blossoms in a more beneficial manner. The cross-bar is made of a stake or a reed, or else of a rope of hair or hemp, as in Spain and at Brindisi. More wine is produced by a rectangle-frame vineyard (the name is taken from the rectangular openings in the roofs of the courts of houses); this is divided into compartments of four by the same number of cross-bars. The method of growing vines with this frame will be described, and the same account will hold good in the case of every sort of frame, the only difference being that in this case it is more complicated.

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§ 17.35.9  There are in fact three ways of planting a vine; the best is to use ground that has been dug over, the next best to plant in a furrow, and the last to plant in a hole. The method of digging over has been described; for a furrow a spade's breadth is enough, and for holes the breadth of a yard each way. In each method the depth must be a yard, and consequently the vine transplanted must be not less than a yard long, even so allowing two buds to be above the surface. It is essential to soften the earth by making very small furrows at the bottom of the hole and to mix dung with it. Sloping ground requires deeper holes, with their edges on the lower side banked up as well. Some of these holes will be made longer, so as to take two vines at opposite ends, and these will be called beds. The root of the vine should be in the middle of the hole, but the slip itself, bedded in firm soil, should be pointing due east, and at first it should be given supports made of reed. Vineyards should be bisected by a main path running east and west, six yards wide so as to allow the passage of carts going in opposite directions; and they should be intersected by other cross-paths ten feet wide running through the middle of each acre, or, if the vineyard is a specially large one, it should have a main cross-path north and south as many feet wide as the one east and west, but always be divided up by fifth-row cross-paths — that is, so that each square of vines may be enclosed by every stay. Where the soil is heavy it should only be planted after being dug over several times, and only quickset should be planted, but in a thin, loose soil even a mallet-shoot may be set in a hole or a furrow. On hillsides it is better to drive furrows across the slope than to dig up the soil, so that the falling away of earth may be held up by the cross-banks formed by the furrows. In rainy conditions or dry soil when the weather is wet mallet-shoots are best planted in autumn, unless the character of the particular area requires otherwise: a dry and hot soil will call for autumn planting, but a damp and cold soil will need it as late as the end of spring. It is no good planting a quickset either in dry soil, nor is it much use to plant a mallet-shoot in dry soils either, except after rain, but in well watered soils a vine may properly be planted even when it is producing leaves, and right on to midsummer, as is the practice in Spain. It is most advantageous if there is no wind on the day for planting, and though many growers like a south wind, Cato disapproves of this.

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§ 17.35.10  The space between every two vines in a soil of medium density should be five feet, and in a rich soil four feet at least, and in a thin soil eight feet at most — growers in Umbria and Marsia leave a space of up to twenty feet to allow of ploughing between the rows, in the case of the vineyards for which the local name is 'ridged fields'; vines should be planted further apart in a rainy and misty district but closer together in a dry one. Elaborate economy has discovered a way of saving space, when planting a vineyard on ground that has been well dug over, by making a nursery-bed at the same time, so that while the quickset is planted in the place it is to occupy, the mallet-shoot is also planted, so that it may be transplanted between the vines as well as between the rows of props; this plan gives about 16,000 quick-sets in an acre of ground, while it makes a difference of two years' fruit, as a planted quickset bears two years later than a transplanted mallet-shoot.

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§ 17.35.11  A quickset placed in a vineyard after two years is cut back right down to the ground, leaving only one eye above the surface; a stake is fixed close to the plant, and dung is added. In the following year also it is again lopped in a similar way, and it acquires and fosters within it sufficient strength to bear the burden of reproduction. Otherwise in its hurry to bear it would shoot up slim and meagre like a bulrush and unless it were restrained with the pinning described would spend itself entirely on growth. No tree sprouts more eagerly than the vine, and unless its strength is kept for bearing, it turns entirely into growth.

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§ 17.35.12  The best props for vine are those of which we have spoken, or else stakes from hard-oak and olive or if they are not available, props obtained from the juniper, cypress, laburnum or elder. Staves of all other kinds must be cut back every year. For the cross-bar, reeds tied together in bundles are best for the growth of the vine, and they last five years. When shorter branches are tied together with brush-wood so as to make a sort of rope, the arcades made of them are called rope-trellises.

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§ 17.35.13  In its third year a vine sends out a quick-growing strong sprig (which in time becomes a tree); and this leaps up to the cross-bar. Thereupon some growers 'blind' it by removing the eyes with a pruning-knife turned upward, with the object of making it grow longer — a most damaging practice, as the tree's habit of putting out shoots is more profitable, and it is better to trim off leafy shoots from the plant tied to the cross-bar to the point where it is decided to let it make strength. Some people forbid touching it in the year after it is transplanted, and do not allow it to be trimmed with a pruning-knife till after 5 years, but then advise cutting it back to three buds. Others prune it back even the next year, but so as to let it add three or four new joints every year, and finally bring it up to the level of the cross-bar in the fourth year. Both methods make the tree slow to fruit, and also shrivelled and knotty, with the growth natural to dwarfs. But it is best for the mother to be strong and for the new growth to strike out boldly. Also there is no safety in a shoot covered with scars — that idea is a great mistake, due to inexperience: any growth of that sort arises from a blow, it is not due to the mother vine. She should possess her full strength while the new shoot is growing sturdy, and she will welcome her yearly progeny with her whole substance when it is permitted to be born: Nature engenders nothing piecemeal. When the new growth has become strong enough it will have to be put in position on a cross-bar at once, but if it is still rather weak it must be pruned back and put in a sheltered position directly under the bar. It is the strength of the stem and not its age that decides; it is rash to put a vine under control before it has reached the thickness of one's thumb. In the following year one branch or two according to the strength of the parent vine should be brought on, and the same shoots must be nursed in the following year also if lack of strength makes this necessary, and only in the third year should two more be added; nor should more than four branches ever be allowed to grow — in short no indulgence should be shown, and fertility should always be kept in check. Also Nature is such that she wants to produce offspring more than she wants to live — all that is subtracted from a plant's wood is added to the fruit; the vine on the contrary prefers its own growth to the production of fruit, because fruit is a perishable article; thus it luxuriates ruinously, and does not fill itself out but exhausts itself.

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§ 17.35.14  The nature of the soil will also provide advice: in a thin soil, even if the vine possesses strength, it must be pruned back and kept within the cross-bar, so that all its young growth may shoot underneath the bar. The gaps between will have to be very small, so that the vine may just touch the bar and hope to grasp it but not actually do so, and consequently may not recline upon it and spread itself out luxuriously. This restriction must be so carefully managed that the vine may still want to grow rather than to bear.

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§ 17.35.15  The main branch should have two or three buds below the cross-bar from which wood may be produced, and then it should be stretched out along the bar and tied to it, so as to be held up by it, not to hang down from it, and then after the third bud it should be fastened more tightly to it by means of a tie, because that also has the effect of restraining the outgrowth of the wood and causing a more abundant outburst of shoots short of the tie; but it is forbidden to tie the end of the main branch. The nature of the vine is that the part hanging down or bound with a ligature yields fruit, and most of all the actual curve of the branch, but that which is short of the ligature makes wood, I suppose because the vital spirit and the pith mentioned above meets an obstacle. The woody shoot so produced will bear fruit in the following year. Thus there are two kinds of main branches; the shoot which comes out of the hard timber and promises wood for the next year is called a leafy shoot a or else when it is above the scar a fruit-bearing shoot, whereas the other kind of shoot that springs from a year-old branch is always a fruit-bearer. There is also left underneath the cross-bar a shoot called the keeper — this is a young branch, not longer than three buds, which will provide wood next year if the vine's luxurious growth has used itself up — and another shoot next to it, the size of a wart, called the pilferer, is also left, in case the keeper-shoot should fail.

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§ 17.35.16  A vine called on to produce fruit before it completes seven years from being planted as a slip turns into a rush-like growth and dies. Nor is it thought proper to allow an old main branch to shoot out to a great length and as far as a fourth prop, like the old growths called by some 'snake-branches' and by others 'cables', so as to make what are named male growths'. When a vine has become hard, it is very bad to bring it across on a trellis. When a vine is four years old the main branches themselves also are twisted over, and each throws out one growth of wood, first one and then the next ones, and the earlier shoots are pruned away. It is always better to leave a keeper-shoot, but this should be one next the vine, and not longer than the length that was stated; and if the main branches shoot too luxuriantly, to twist them back, so that the vine may produce only four growths of wood, or even only two if it is trained on a single cross-bar.

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§ 17.35.17  If the vine is to be trained by itself without a prop, at the beginning it will want some sort of support until it learns to stand and to rise up straight, while in all other respects it will need the same treatment from the start, except that it will need to have the pruned stumps distributed by pruning in a regular cluster all round, so that the fruit may not overload one side of the tree. Incidentally, the fruit weighing down the bough will prevent it from shooting right up high. With this vine a height of above a yard begins to bend over, but all the others start bending at five feet, only the height must not be allowed to exceed the average height of a man. Growers also put low cages round the vines that spread out on the ground, to restrict their spread, with trenches made round them, so that the straggling branches may not meet each other and fight; and the greater part of the world lets its vintage grapes lie on the ground in this manner, inasmuch as this custom prevails both in Africa and in Egypt and Syria and the whole of Asia and at many places in Europe. In these vineyards therefore the vine ought to be kept down close to the ground, nourishment being given to the root in the same way and at the same time as in the case of a vine trained on a cross-bar, care being always taken to leave merely the pruned stumps, with three buds on each in fertile land and two where the soil is thinner, and it pays better to have many of them than to have long ones. The properties of soil that we have spoken of will make themselves felt more powerfully the nearer the bunches of grapes are to the ground.

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§ 17.35.18  It pays best to keep the different kinds of vine separate and plant each plot with only one sort, for a mixture of different varieties spoils the flavour even in the wine and not only in the must; or if they are mixed, it is essential not to combine any but those that ripen at the same time. The richer the soil and the more level the ground the greater the height of the cross-bars required, and high cross-bars also suit land liable to dew and fog and where there is comparatively little wind, whereas lower bars suit thin, dry and parched land and places exposed to the wind. The cross-bars should be tied to the prop as tightly as possible, but the vine should be kept together with an easy tie. We stated what kinds of vines should be grown and in what sort of soil and with what aspect when we were enumerating the natures of the various vines and wines.

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§ 17.35.19  The remaining points connected with the cultivation of the vine are vehemently debated. The majority of writers recommend digging over the vineyard after every fall of dew throughout the whole of the summer, but others forbid this while the vines are in bud, because the eyes get knocked off or rubbed by the drag of people going between the rows, and for this reason it is necessary to keep away all cattle, but especially sheep, as their fleeces most easily remove buds; they also say that raking does harm while bunches of grapes are forming; that it is enough for a vineyard to be dug over three times in a year, between the spring equinox and the rising of the Pleiades, at the rise of the Dog-star, and when the grapes are turning black. Some people give the following rules: to dig over an old vineyard once between vintage and midwinter (though others think it is enough to loosen the soil round the roots and manure it), a second time after April 13 but before the vines bud, that is before May 10, and then before the vine begins to blossom, and after it has shed its blossom, and when the bunch is changing colour; but more expert growers declare that if the ground is dug more often than necessary the grapes become so thin-skinned that they burst. It is agreed that when vineyards are dug it should be done before the hottest part of the day, and likewise that a mud-like wet soil ought not to be either ploughed or dug; and that the dust raised by digging is beneficial to the vine as a protection against sun and fog.

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§ 17.35.20  It is agreed that the spring trimming of foliage should take place within ten days from May 15, at all events before the vine begins to blossom, and that it should be done below the level of the cross-bar. As to the subsequent trimming opinions vary: some people think that it should take place when the vine has shed its blossom, others when the grapes are just beginning to ripen. But on this point the instructions of Cato shall decide; for we also have to describe the proper method of pruning.

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§ 17.35.21  This is set about directly after the vintage when the warmth of the weather allows; but even in warm weather on natural principles it never ought to be done before the rise of the Eagle, as we shall show when dealing with astronomical considerations in the following volume, nor yet when the wind is in the west — inasmuch as excessive haste involves a double possibility of error. If a late snap of wintry weather should nip the vines while still suffering from wounds inflicted by recent treatment, it is certain that their buds will be benumbed by the cold and the wounds will open, and the eyes, owing to the juice dripping from them, will be nipped by the inclemency of the weather; for who does not know that frost makes them brittle? All this depends on calculations regarding labour on large estates, not on the legitimate acceleration of Nature's processes. Given suitable weather, the earlier vines are pruned, the larger amount of wood they make, and the later they are pruned, the more abundant supply of fruit. Consequently it will be proper to prune meagre vines earlier and strong ones last; and always to make the cut on a slant, so that rain may fall off easily, and turned towards the ground, with the lightest possible scar, using a pruning-knife with a well sharpened edge and giving a smooth cut; but always to prune between two buds, so as not to wound the eyes in the part of the shoot cut back. They think it a sign of damage for this to be black, and that it should be cut back till one comes to the sound part, since useful wood will not shoot from a bad stock. If a meagre vine has not got suitable branches, it is a very good plan to cut it back to the ground and get it to put out new branches, and in trimming it pays not to remove the shoots growing with a cluster of grapes, for that dislodges the grapes also, except in a newly planted vine. Shoots springing on the side of the branch and not from an eye are judged to be of no use, since moreover a bunch of grapes that springs from a hard branch is so stiff that the bunch can only be removed with a knife. Some people consider that it pays better for a prop to be set between two vines, and that method does make it easier to turn up the earth round them, and it is better for a vine on a single cross-bar, provided, that is, that the trellis itself is a strong one and the locality is not exposed to high winds. In the case of a vine supported by four cross-rails the stay ought to be as close as possible to the load, although to avoid interfering with digging over the soil it ought to be 18 inches away, not more; but they advise digging over before pruning.

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§ 17.35.22  The following are the instructions given by Cato on the whole subject of vine growing: 'Make the vine grow as high as possible, and tie it up well, only not binding it too tight. Treat it in the following manner: turn over the earth round the base of the vines during seed-time; after pruning a vine dig round it and begin to plough; drive continuous furrows to and fro; plant layers of young vines as soon as possible, and then harrow the ground. Prune old vines as little as possible; preferably, if necessary, layer them on the ground and cut off the layers two years later. The time for cutting back a young vine will be when it has gained strength. If a vineyard has become bare of vines, make furrows between the vines and plant a quickset in each; prevent any shade from falling on the furrows, and dig them over frequently. Plant ocinuma clover in an old vineyard if the soil is meagre — forbear to sow anything that makes seed — and put dung, chaff and grape husks or something of that sort round the feet. When a vine begins to show leaves, trim it. Fasten young vines with several ties, so that the stems may not get broken; and as soon as a vine begins to run out into a rod, tie down its young shoots lightly and stretch them out so as to be in the right position. When the grapes begin to become mottled, tie up the vines below. One season for grafting a vine is during spring, and another when the bunch blossoms: the latter is the best. If you want to transplant an old vine, you will only be able to do so if it is of the thickness of an arm. First prune it; do not leave more than two buds on the stem. Dig it well up from the roots, and be careful not to injure the roots. Place it in the hole or furrow just as it was before, and cover it up and tread it down well; and set up the vine and tie it and bend it over in the same direction as it was before; and dig the ground frequently. — Ocinum, which Cato recommends planting in a vineyard, was the old name for a fodder-plant capable of standing shade, and refers to its rapid growth.

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§ 17.35.23  There follows the method of growing vines on a tree, which was condemned in a remarkable way by Saserna the elder and by his son, but highly spoken of by Scrofa — these are the oldest writers on agriculture after Cato, and are very great authorities; and even Scrofa only allows it in Italy, although so long a period of time gives the verdict that high-class wines can only be produced from vines on trees, and that even so the choicer wines are made from the grapes at the top of the trees, while those lowest down give a large quantity: so beneficial is the effect of height. It is on this principle also that trees are selected: first of all the elm (excepting the Atinian variety because it has too many leaves), then the black poplar, for the same reason, it having less dense foliage; also the ash and the fig are not despised by most growers, and even the olive if it has not shady branches. The planting and cultivation of these trees has been abundantly treated. It is prohibited to touch them with the pruning-knife before they are three years old; alternate branches are kept, they are pruned every other year, and in their sixth year they are wedded to the vines. Italy north of the Po beside the trees mentioned above plants its vineyards with cornel, guelder rose, lime, maple, rowan, hornbeam, and oak, but the Venezia uses willow because of the dampness of the soil. Also the elm is lopped of its top and has its middle branches spread out on three levels, no tree as a rule being left more than twenty feet high. On hills and in dry lands the stages of the elms are spread out at a height of eight feet, and on plains and in damp localities at twelve feet.

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§ 17.35.24  The branching of the trunk should face south, and the boughs should spread up from the fork like fingers on the hand, and also have their shaggy growth of thin twigs shaved off, so as not to give too much shade. The proper space between the trees, if the soil is to be ploughed, is forty feet behind and in front and twenty at the sides, but if it is not to be ploughed, twenty feet every way. Growers often grow ten vines against each tree, great fault being found with a farmer who trains less than three on each. It damages any but strong trees to wed vines to them, as the rapid growth of the vines kills them off. It is essential to plant the vines in a trench three feet deep, with a space of a foot between them and the tree; this saves the need of a mallet-shoot and of turning over the ground and the expense of digging, inasmuch as this method of using a tree has the special advantage that for the same ground to carry corn actually benefits the vines, and moreover that the height of the vine looks after itself, and does not make it necessary, as in a vineyard, to guard it with a wall or hedge, or at all events by going to the expense of ditches, so as to protect it from injury by animals.

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§ 17.35.25  In growing vines on a tree the only method used among those already described is that of quicksets or of layers; and of layering there are two varieties, as we have said: that of using baskets projecting from the actual staging of the tree, the most approved method, as it is safest from cattle, and the other one by bending down a vine or a main branch at the side of its own tree or round the nearest to it not occupied. It is recommended that the part of the parent tree above the ground should be scraped, to prevent it from making shoots; and not less than four buds are covered up in the ground so as to take root, while two are left above ground on the head. A vine grown on a tree is set in a trench four feet long, three broad and two and a half deep. After a year a cut is made in the layer down to the cambium, so that it may gradually get used to its roots, and the stem is pruned back at its end down to two buds from the ground; and at the end of two years the layer is completely cut off from the stock and is put back deeper into the ground, so that it may not shoot from the place where it was cut off. As for a quickset, it should be removed immediately after the vintage.

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§ 17.35.26  plan has recently been invented of planting a snake-branch near the tree — that is our name for a veteran main branch that has grown hard with many years' service. The quickest plan in the case of a vine is to cut this old branch off as long as possible and scrape the bark off three-quarters of its length, down to the point to which it is to be buried in the ground — for this reason it is also called a scraped shoot — and then to press it down in the furrow, with the remaining part standing straight up against the tree. If the vine be meagre or the soil thin, it is customary to cut down the plant as close to the round as possible, until the root gets strong, and likewise not to plant it when there is dew on it, nor in a place exposed to a north wind; the vines themselves ought to face north-east, but their young shoots should have a southerly aspect.

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§ 17.35.27  There must be no hurry to prune a young vine, but at first the growth should be collected together into circular shapes, and no pruning should be applied except to a strong plant, a vine trained on a tree being about a year later in bearing fruit than one trained on a cross-bar. Some people forbid pruning altogether until the vine equals the tree in height. At the first pruning it should be cut back six feet from the ground, a shoot being left below and encouraged to grow by bending over the wood. It should have three buds and not more left when it has been pruned. In the following year the branches sent out from these should be spread out on the lowest stages of the trees and allowed to climb to the next higher level every year, one hard growth being always left at each stage, and one growing shoot left to mount up as high as it pleases. In addition, all the whips that have borne fruit last time should. be cut back by pruning, and fresh shoots should have their tendrils cut away all round and be spread out on the stages. Our Italian method of pruning drapes the tree with tresses of vines festooned along the branches and clothes the tresses themselves with bunches of grapes, but the Gallic method spreads out into growths passing from tree to tree, while the method used on the Aemilian Road spreads over supports consisting of Atinian elms, twining round them but avoiding their foliage.

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§ 17.35.28  An ignorant way of some growers is to suspend the vine by means of a tie beneath a bough of the tree, a damaging procedure which stifles it, as it ought to be held back with an osier withe, not tied tightly (indeed even people who have plenty of willows prefer to do it with a tie softer than the one which these supply, namely with the plant which the Sicilians call by the Greek name 'vine-tie', while the whole of Greece uses rush, galingale and sedge); also it ought to be released from its tie for some days and allowed to stray about and spread in disorder and lie down on the ground which it has been gazing at all the year through; for just as draft cattle when unyoked and dogs after a run like to roll on the ground, so even the vines' loins like a stretch when released; also the tree itself enjoys being relieved of the continual weight, like a man recovering his breath, and there is nothing in Nature's handiwork that does not desire some alternations of holiday, after the pattern of the days and nights. On this account pruning the vines directly after vintage and when they are still weary from producing fruit is disapproved of. When they have been pruned they must be tied to the tree again in another place, for unquestionably they feel annoyance at the marks made round them by the tie.

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§ 17.35.29  The cross-shoots of the Gallic method of growing — two from each side if the pair of vines are forty feet apart, but four if twenty — when they meet are intertwined with each other and tied together in a single cluster, during the process being stiffened with the aid of wooden rods where they fail, or if the shoots themselves are too short to allow of this, they are stretched out to reach an unoccupied tree by means of a hook tied to them. lit used to be the custom to prune these cross-shoots every two years, as they make too heavy a weight when they grow old; but it is better to give them time to make a 'scraped' shoot, if their thickness is sufficient; otherwise it pays to supply nourishment to the knobs of the snake-branch about to form.

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§ 17.35.30  There is still one other method intermediate between this one and propagation by layering — that of throwing down the whole vine on the earth and splitting it with wedges, and leading the shoots from a single vine into several trenches, reinforcing the slenderness of each shoot by tying it to a rod, and not lopping off the branches which run out from the sides. A farmer at Novaria, not content with a multitude of shoots carried from tree to tree nor with an abundance of branches, also twines the main branches round forked props set in the ground; and thus beside the faults of the soil the wines are also made harsh by the method of cultivation. Another mistake is made with the vines near the city of Aricia, which are pruned every other year, not because that is beneficial for a vine but because owing to the low price at which the wine sells the expenses might exceed the return. In the Casigliano district they follow an intermediate compromise, and by the plan of pruning away only the decayed parts of the vine and those beginning to wither, and leaving the rest to bear grapes relieved of superfluous weight, the scantiness of the injury inflicted serves instead of all nutriment; but except in a rich soil this method of cultivation degenerates into a wild vine.

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§ 17.35.31  The trees for training vines on require the ground to be ploughed as deep as possible, although the system of growing corn there does not need this. It is not customary for them to be trimmed of leaves, and this economizes labour. They are pruned together with the vine, light being let through the density of branches that are superfluous and consume nutriment. We have given the rule against leaving lopped ends facing north or south, and it is better not to let them face west either, as wounds facing in those directions too suffer for a long time and heal with difficulty, because of undergoing excessive cold or heat; there is not the same freedom as in the ease of the vine, since trees have fixed aspects, but it is easier to hide away the wounds of a vine and twist them in any direction you like. In pruning trees cup-like hollows should be made with a mouth sloping downwards, to prevent water from lodging in them.

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§ 17.36.1  Props should be placed against a vine which it may catch hold of and climb up if they are taller than it is. It is said that espaliers for vines of high quality should be cut about March 19th-23rd, and, if it is intended to keep the grapes for raisins, when the moon is on the wane, but that those cut between the old moon and the new are immune from all kinds of insects. Another theory holds the opinion that vines should be pruned by night at full moon when the moon is in the Lion or Scorpion or Archer or Bull; and in general that they should be planted when the moon is at full, or at all events is waxing. In Italy a gang of ten farmhands is enough for a hundred acres of vineyard.

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§ 17.37.1  And having treated of the planting and cultivation of trees with sufficient fullness, since we have said enough about palms and tree-medick among foreign trees, in order that nothing may be lacking a statement must be given of the other natural features of great importance in relation to all these matters. For even trees are liable to attacks of disease — since what created object is exempt from these evils? But forest trees at all events are said not to have any deadly diseases and only to be liable to damage by hail when they are budding or in flower, and also to be nipped by heat or exceptionally cold wind coming out of season, for cold weather in its proper season actually does them good, as we have stated. 'What then?' it will be said. 'Does not frost kill even vines?' Well, that is how a fault of soil is detected, because it only happens on chilly ground. And consequently we approve of cold in winter time that is due to the climate and not to the soil. And it is not the weakest trees that are endangered by frost, but the largest ones, and when they are thus attacked it is their tops that dry away first, because the sap has been congealed and has not been able to get there.

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§ 17.37.2  Some diseases are common to all trees and some are peculiar to special kinds. Common to all are damage by worms and star-blight and pain in the limbs, resulting in debility of the various parts — maladies sharing even their names with those of mankind: we certainly speak of trees being mutilated and having the eyes of their buds burnt out and many misfortunes of a kind resembling our own. Accordingly they suffer both from hunger and from indigestion, maladies due to the amount of moisture in them, and some even from obesity, for instance all which produce resin owing to excessive fatness are converted into torch-wood, and when the roots also have begun to get fat, die like animals from excessive adipose deposit; and sometimes also they die of epidemics prevailing in certain classes of tree, just as among mankind diseases sometimes attack the slaves and sometimes the urban or the rural lower classes.

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§ 17.37.3  Particular trees are attacked by worm in a greater or smaller degree, but nearly all are liable, and birds detect worm-eaten wood by the hollow sound when they tap the bark. Nowadays indeed even this has begun to be classed as a luxury, and specially large wood-maggots found in oak-wood — the name for these is cosses — figure in the menu as a special delicacy, and actually even these creatures are fed with flour to fatten them for the table. The trees most liable to be worm-eaten are pears, apples, and figs; those that have a bitter taste and a scent are less liable. Of the maggots found in fig-trees some breed in the trees themselves, but others are produced by the insect called in Greek the horned insect; all of them however assume the shape of that insect, and emit a little buzzing sound. Also the service-tree is infected with red, hairy caterpillars, which eventually kill it; and the medlar as well is liable to the same disease when it grows old.

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§ 17.37.4  Star-blight depends entirely on the heavens, and consequently we must include among these causes of injury hail and carbuncle-blight, and also damage due to frost. The former when the plants are tempted by the warmth of spring to venture to burst out settles on them while they are fairly soft and scorches the milky eyes of the buds, the part which in the flower is called the carbuncle. Frost is of a more damaging nature, because when it has fallen it settles down and freezes, and is not dispelled even by any slight breeze, because it only occurs when the air is motionless and calm. A peculiarity however of star-blight at the rising of the Dog-star is a parching heat, when grafts and saplings die, especially figs and vines.

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§ 17.37.5  The olive besides suffering from worm, to which it is as liable as is the fig, is also affected by wart, or, as some prefer to call it, fungus or 'platter'; this is a scorch caused by the sun. Cato states that red scale is also injurious to the olive. Excessive fertility also usually injures vines and olive. Scab is common to all trees. Eruption and epidermic growths on the bark called 'snails' are maladies peculiar to figs, and that not in all districts — for some diseases belong to particular localities.

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§ 17.37.6  But just as man is subject to affliction of the sinews, so also is a tree, and in two ways, as is the case with man: for the force of the disease either attacks its feet, that is the roots, or its knuckles, that is the fingers of the top branches, which project farthest from the whole body; with the Greeks there are special names for each of these diseases. Consequently they turn black, and first there is pain all over and then the parts mentioned also become emaciated and brittle, and lastly comes wasting consumption and death, the sap not entering or not permeating the parts affected. Figs are extremely liable to this disease, but the wild fig is immune from all the maladies we have so far specified. Scab is caused by gentle falls of dew occurring after the rising of the Pleiades; for if the dew has been more copious it gives the tree a good drenching, and does not streak it with scab, although the green figs fall off; but if there has been excessive rain a fig-tree is liable to another malady due to dampness of the roots.

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§ 17.37.7  In addition to worm-disease and star-blight vines suffer from a disease of the joints that is peculiar to them; it is due to three causes — first, loss of buds owing to stormy weather, second, as noted by Theophrastus, pruning done with an upward cut, and third, damage caused by lack of skill in their cultivation; for all injuries to which vines are liable are felt in their joints. One kind of star-blight is dew-disease, when the grapevines shed their blossoms, or when the grapes shrivel up into a hard lump before they grow big. Vines are also sickly when they have been nipped by cold, the eyes being injured by frostbite after the branches have been pruned. This also happens owing to unseasonable hot weather, since everything depends on measure and on a fixed proportion. Defects may also be caused by the fault of the vine-dressers, when the vines are tied too tight, as has been said, or else when the digger trenching round them has injured them with a damaging blow, or even when a careless person ploughing underneath them has displaced the roots or scaled the bark off the trunk; also a contusion may be caused by pruning with too blunt a knife. All of these causes make it more difficult for a vine to bear cold or hot weather, since every harmful influence from outside makes its way into the sore. But the most delicate of all trees is the apple, and particularly any kind that bears sweet fruit. With some trees weakness causes barrenness but does not kill them, as is the case with a pine or a palm if you lop off their top, as they cease to bear but do not die. Sometimes also the fruit by itself is attacked by disease but not the tree, if there has been a lack of rain or of warm weather or wind at the times when they are needed, or if on the contrary they have been too plentiful, for the fruit falls off or deteriorates. The worst among all kinds of damage is when a vine or olive has been struck by heavy rain when shedding its blossom, as the fruit is washed off at the same time.

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§ 17.37.8  Heavy rain also breeds caterpillars, noxious creatures that gnaw away the foliage of olives, and others the flower too, as at Miletus, and leave the half-eaten tree shamefully disfigured. This pestilence is bred by damp sticky heat; and another one due to the same cause occurs if too keen a sun follows, and burns in the damage done by the damp and so alters its nature. There is in addition a malady peculiar to olives and vines, called cobweb, when the fruit gets wrapped up in a soft of webbing which stifles it. There are also certain currents of air which are specially blighting to olives, though they dry up other fruit as well. As to worm, in some trees even the fruits of themselves suffer from it — apples, pears, medlars and pomegranates; but in the case of the olive an attack of worm has a twofold result, inasmuch as if they breed under the skin they destroy the fruit, while if they have been in the actual stone, gnawing it away, they make the fruit larger. Rain following the rising of Arcturus prevents their breeding; and also if this rain is accompanied by a south wind it breeds worms in overripe olives as well, which are then particularly liable to fall off when ripening. This happens particularly with olives in damp localities, making them very unattractive even if they do not drop off. There is also a kind of gnat troublesome to some fruits, for instance acorns and figs, which appears to be bred from the sweet juice a secreted underneath the bark at that season; and indeed these trees are usually sickly.

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§ 17.37.9  Some influences of seasons or localities cannot properly be called diseases, since they cause instantaneous death, for instance when a tree is attacked by wasting or blast, or by the effect of a special wind prevailing in a particular district, like the sirocco in Apulia or the Olympias wind in Euboea, which if it blows about midwinter shrivels up trees with dry cold so that no amount of subsequent sunshine can revive them. This kind of blight infests narrow valleys and trees growing by rivers, and particularly vines, olive and figs; and when this has occurred, it is at once detected at the budding season, though rather later in the case of olives. But it is a sign of recovery in all of them if they lose their leaves; failing that, the trees which one would suppose to have been strong enough to resist the attack die. Sometimes however the leaves dry on the tree and then come to life again. Other trees in the northern countries like the province of Pontus and Thrace suffer from cold or frost if they go on for six weeks after midwinter without a break; but both in that region and in the remaining parts of the world, a heavy frost coming immediately after the trees have produced their fruit kills them even in a few days.

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§ 17.37.10  Kinds of damage due to injury done by man have effects proportionate to their violence. Pitch, oil and grease are particularly detrimental to young trees. To strip off the bark all round trees kills them, except in the case of the cork tree, which is actually benefited by this treatment, because the bark thickening stifles and suffocates the tree; nor does it do any harm to purslane if care is taken not to cut into the body of the plant as well. Beside this, the cherry, the vine and the lime shed some bark, though not the layer next to the body which is essential to life, but the layer that is forced outward as another forms underneath it. The bark of some trees, for instance planes, is fissured by nature. That of the lime after it is stripped grows again almost in its entirety. Consequently with trees the bark of which forms a sear, the sears are treated with mud and dung, and sometimes they do the tree good, if the stripping is not followed by a period of exceptionally cold or hot weather. But some trees, for instance hard oaks and common oaks, die, but rather slowly, under this treatment. The time of year also matters; for instance if a fir or a pine is stripped of its bark while the sun is passing through the Bull or the Twins, when they are budding, they die at once, whereas if they undergo the same injury in winter they endure it longer; and similarly the holm-oak, the hard oak and the common oak. If only a narrow band of bark is removed, it causes no harm, as with the trees above mentioned, although with weaker trees at all events and in a thin soil to remove the bark even from only one part kills the tree. A similar effect is also produced by lopping the top of a spruce, prickly cedar or cypress, for to remove the top or to scorch it with fire is fatal to these trees; and the effect of being gnawn by animals is also similar. Indeed, according to Varro, as we have stated, an olive goes barren if merely licked by a she-goat. Certain trees die of this injury, but some only deteriorate, for instance almonds, the fruit of which is changed from sweet to bitter, but others are actually improved, for instance the pear called the Phocian pear in Chios. For we have mentioned trees that are actually benefited by having the top lopped off. Most trees die also when the trunk is split, excepting the vine, apple, fig and pomegranates, and some merely from a wound, though the pine and all the resinous trees despise this injury. For a tree to die when its roots are cut off is not at all surprising; most trees die even when deprived not of all their roots but of the largest ones or those among them that are essential to life.

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§ 17.37.11  Trees kill one another by their shade or the thickness of their foliage and by robbing each other nutriment; they are also killed by ivy binding them round, and mistletoe does them no good, and cytisus kills them, and they are killed by the plant called halimon by the Greeks. The nature of some plants though not actually deadly is injurious owing to its blend of scents or of juice — for instance the radish and the laurel are harmful to the vine; for the vine can be inferred to possess a sense of smell, and to be affected by odours in a marvellous degree, and consequently when an evil-smelling plant is near it to turn away and withdraw, and to avoid an unfriendly tang. This supplied Androcydes with an antidote against intoxication, for which he recommended chewing a radish. The vine also abhors cabbage and all sorts of garden vegetables, as well as hazel, and these unless a long way off make it ailing and sickly; indeed nitre and alum and warm seawater and the pods of beans or bitter vetch are to a vine the direst poisons.

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§ 17.38.1  Among the maladies of trees it is in place to speak also of prodigies. We find that figs have grown underneath the leaves of the tree, a vine and a pomegranate have borne fruit on their trunk, not on a shoot or a branch, a vine has borne grapes without having any leaves, and also olives have lost their leaves while the fruit remained on the tree. There are also marvels connected with accident: an olive has come to life again after being completely burnt up, also fig-trees in Boeotia gnawed down by locusts have budded afresh. Trees also change their colour and turn from black to white, not always with portentous meaning, but chiefly those that grow from seed; and the white poplar turns into a black poplar. Some people also think that the service-tree goes barren if transplanted to warmer localities. But it is a portent when sour fruits grow on sweet fruit-trees and sweet on sour, and figs on a wild fig-tree or the contrary, and it is a serious manifestation when trees turn into other trees of an inferior kind, from an olive into a wild olive or from a white grape or green fig into a black grape or a black fig, or as when a plane-tree at Laodicea changed into an olive on the arrival of Xerxes. Not to launch out into an absolutely boundless subject, the volume by Aristander teems with portents of this nature in Greece, as do the Notes of Gaius Epidius in our own country, including cases of trees that talked. An alarming portent occurred a little before the civil wars of Pompey the Great, when a tree in the territory of Cumae sank into the ground leaving a few branches projecting; and a statement was found in the Sibylline Books that this portended a slaughter of human beings, and that the nearer to the city the portent had occurred the greater the slaughter would be.

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§ 17.38.2  Another class of portent is when trees grow in the wrong places, as on the heads of statues or on altars, and when different kinds of trees grow on trees themselves. At Cyzicus before the siege a fig-tree grew on a laurel; and similarly at Tralles about the time of Caesar's civil wars a palm grew up on the pedestal of the dictator's statue. Moreover at Rome during the war with Perseus a palm-tree grew up on the altar of Jove on the Capitol, portending victory and triumphal processions; and after this tree had been brought down by storms, a fig-tree sprang up in the same place, this occurring during the censorship of Marcus Messala and Gaius Cassius, a period which according to so weighty an authority as Piso dates the overthrow of the sense of honour. A portent that will eclipse all those ever heard of occurred in our own day in the territory of the Marrucini, at the fall of the emperor Nero: an olive grove belonging to a leading member of the equestrian order named Vettius Marcellus bodily crossed the public highway, and the crops growing on the other side passed over in the opposite direction to take the place of the olive grove.

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§ 17.39.1  Now that we have set out the diseases of trees it is suitable also to state the remedies for them. Some of these are common to all trees and some peculiar to some of them. Remedies common to all are loosening the soil, banking it up, admitting air to the roots or covering them up, making a channel to give them water or to drain it away, dung refreshing them with its juice, pruning to relieve them of weight, also letting out the sap like a surgical blood-letting, scraping a ring of bark, stretching out the vine-sprays and checking the shoots, trimming off and as it were polishing up the buds if they have been shrivelled and roughened by cold weather. Some trees like these treatments more and others less, for example the cypress scorns both water and dung and hates being dug round and pruned and all kinds of nursing, in fact irrigation kills it, whereas it is exceptionally nourishing for vines and pomegranates. In the case of the fig irrigation nourishes the tree itself but makes the fruit decay. Almond-trees lose their blossom if the ground round them is made clean by being dug over. Also trees that have been grafted must not be dug round before they are strong and begin to bear fruit. Most trees however want to have their burdensome and superfluous growth pruned away, just as we have our nails and hair cut. Old trees are cut down entirely and spring up again from some sucker, but they will not all do this but only those whose nature we have stated to allow of it.

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§ 17.40.1  Irrigation is good for trees in the heat of summer but bad for them in winter; in the autumn its effect varies and depends on the nature of the soil, inasmuch as in the Spanish provinces the vintager picks the grapes when the ground is under water, whereas in the greater part of the world it pays to drain off the rain water even in autumn. Irrigation is most beneficial about the rising of the Dog-star, and even then not too much of it, because it hurts the roots when they are soaked to the point of intoxication. The age of the tree also controls the due amount; young saplings are not so thirsty. But those that require most watering are those that have been used to it, whereas those which have sprung up in dry places only need a bare minimum of moisture.

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§ 17.41.1  The harsher vines need to be watered, at all events in the Fabii district of the territory of Sulmo in Italy, where they irrigate even the plough-land; and it is a remarkable fact that in that part of the country water kills herbaceous plants but nourishes corn, and irrigation takes the place of a hoe for weeding. In the same district they irrigate the land round the vines at midwinter to prevent their suffering from cold, the more so if snow is lying or there is a frost; this process is there called 'warming' the vines, owing to the remarkable influence of the sun on the river, which in summer is almost unbearably cold.

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§ 17.42.1  We shall point out the remedies for glowing-coal-blight and mildew in the next Book. In the meantime the list of remedies includes a sort of scarification. The bark when rendered meagre by disease shrinks up and exerts an undue amount of compression on the vital parts of the tree; for this the vine-dressers holding a pruning knife with a very sharp edge in both hands press it into the trunk and make long incisions downwards, and as it were loosen its skin. It proves that this treatment has been beneficial if the scars widen out and fill up with new wood growing between their edges;

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§ 17.43.1  and to a large extent the medical treatment of trees resembles that of human beings, as the bones of trees also are treated by perforation. Bitter almonds are made into sweet ones if the stem of the tree has the earth dug away round it and a ring of holes pierced in it at the bottom, and then the gum exuding is wiped off. Also elms can be relieved of useless sap by having holes pierced in them above the level of the earth right into the cambium when they are getting old, or when they are observed to be receiving excessive nourishment. The sap is also discharged from the bark of figs when swollen by means of light cuts made on a slant; this treatment prevents the fruit from falling off. Fruit-trees that make buds but produce no fruit are treated by making a cleft in the root and inserting a stone in it, and this makes them bear; and the same result is produced in almonds by driving in a wedge of hard oak, and in pears and service-berries by means of a wedge of stone pine, and covering up the hole with ashes and earth. It also pays to cut round the roots of vines and figs when over-luxuriant and to put ashes on the cut parts. Late figs are produced if those of the first crop are picked off the tree still unripe, when they are a little larger than a bean, as a second crop grows which ripens later. Also fig-trees are made stronger and more productive if the tips of all the branches are docked when they begin to make foliage. The object of the process that employs the gall-insect from the wild fig is to ripen the fruit.

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§ 17.44.1  In the gall-insect process it is clear that the unripe figs give birth to gnats, since when these have flown away the fruit is found not to contain any seeds, which have obviously turned into the gnats; these are so eager to escape that most of them leave a foot or part of a wing behind them in forcing their way out. There is also another kind of gnat with a Greek name meaning 'sting-fly'; these resemble drone bees in their sloth and malice, and also in killing the genuine and serviceable insects; for the sting-flies kill the real gnats and themselves die with them. The seeds of figs are also infested by moths, a remedy against them being to bury a slip of mastich upside down in the same hole. But the way to make fig-trees bear very large crops is to dilute red earth with the lees from an olive-press, mix dung with it, and pour the mixture on the roots of the trees when they are beginning to make leaves. Of wild figs the black ones and those growing in rocky places are the most highly spoken of, because they contain the largest number of grains; the best times for the actual process of transference of the gall-insect from the wild fig is said to be just after rain has fallen.

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§ 17.45.1  But it is of the first importance to avoid allowing our remedies to produce other defects, which results from using remedial processes to excess or at the wrong time. To prune away branches is beneficial for trees, but to slaughter them every year without respite is extremely unprofitable. A vine only requires a yearly trimming, but myrtles, pomegranates and olives one every other year, because they produce shoots with great rapidity. All other trees should be trimmed less frequently, and none in autumn; and they must not even have their trunks scraped except in spring. Pruning must not be assault and battery: every part of the tree that is not actually superfluous is conducive to its vitality.

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§ 17.46.1  A similar method belongs to dung. Trees delight in it, but care must be taken not to apply it while the sun is hot, or while it is too fresh, or stronger than is necessary. Swine dung burns the vines unless used at intervals of five years, except if it is diluted by being drenched with water; and so will manure made from tanners refuse unless water is mixed with it, and also if it is used too plentifully: the proper amount is considered to be three modii for every ten square feet. Anyhow that will be decided by the nature of the soil.

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§ 17.47.1  Pigeon and swine manure are also used for dressing wounds in trees. If pomegranates produce sour fruit, it is advised to dig round the roots and apply swine's dung; then in that year the fruit will have a flavour of wine, but next year it will be sweet. Others are of opinion that pomegranates should be watered four times a year with human urine mixed with water, an amphora to each tree, or that the ends of the branches should be sprinkled with silphium diluted with wine; and that if the fruit splits on the tree, its stalk should be twisted; and that figs in any case should have dregs of olive oil poured on them, and other trees when ailing wine-lees, or else lupines should be sown round their roots. It is also good for the fruit to pour round the tree water in which lupines have been boiled. Figs are liable to fall off when it thunders at the Feast of Vulcan; a remedy is to have the ground round the trees covered with barley straw in advance. Cherries are brought on and made to ripen by applying lime to the roots; but with cherries also, as with all it is better to thin the crop, in order to make the fruit left on grow bigger.

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§ 17.47.2  Some trees are improved by severe treatment or stimulated by a pungent application — for instance the palm and the mastich, which get nutriment from salt water. Ashes also have the effect of salt, but it acts more gently; consequently they are sprinkled on figs and on rue, to prevent their getting maggotty or rotting at the roots. It is also advised to pour salt water on the roots of vines if they are too full of moisture, but if their fruit falls off, to sprinkle ashes with vinegar and smear them on the vines themselves, or ashes with sandarach if the grapes rot; but if the vines do not bear, to sprinkle and smear them with ashes mixed with strong vinegar; and if they do not ripen their fruit but let it dry up first, the vines should be lopped down to the roots and the wound and fibres of the wood drenched with strong vinegar and stale urine and covered up with the mud so produced, and repeatedly dug round. If olives give too little promise of fruit, growers bare their roots and expose them to the winter cold, and the trees profit by this drastic treatment. All these methods depend on the state of the weather in each year and sometimes are required later and sometimes more speedily. Also fire is beneficial for some plants, for instance reeds, which when burnt off grow up again thicker and more pliable. Cato moreover gives prescriptions for certain medicaments, also specifying quantity — for the roots of the bigger trees an amphora, for those of the smaller ones half that measure of olive-lees and water in equal amounts, and his instructions are first to dig round the roots and then to pour the liquid on them gradually. In the ease of an olive it should be used more copiously, straw having first been put round the stem, and the same with a fig; with a fig, especially in spring, earth should be heaped up round the roots, and this will ensure that the unripe fruit will not fall off and the tree will bear a larger crop and will not develop roughness of the bark. In a similar manner to prevent a vine from breeding leaf-rolling caterpillar he advises boiling down two gallons of lees of olive-oil to the thickness of honey, and boiling it again mixed with a third part of bitumen and a fourth part of sulphur, this second boiling being done in the open air because the mixture may catch fire indoors; and he says this preparation is to be smeared round the bases and under the arms of the vines, and that will prevent caterpillar. Some growers are content with submitting the vines for three days on end to the smoke from this concoction boiled to the windward of them. Most people think there is as much food value for the plants in urine as Cato assigns to wine-lees, provided it is mixed with an equal quantity of water, because it is injurious if used by itself. Some give the name of the 'fly' to a creature that gnaws away the young grapes; to prevent this they wipe the pruning-knives on a beaver skin after they have been sharpened and then use them for pruning, or smear them with bear's blood after pruning. Ants also are pests to trees; these are kept away by smearing the trunks with a mixture of red earth and tar, and also people get the ants to collect in one place by hanging up a fish close by, or they smear the roots of the tree with lupin pounded with oil. Many people kill ants and also moles with the dregs of olive oil, and to protect the tops of the trees against caterpillars and pests productive of decay they advise touching them with the gall of a green lizard, but as a protection against caterpillars in particular they say that a woman just beginning her monthly courses should walk round each of the trees with bare feet and her girdle undone. Also to prevent any creature from injuring the foliage by noxious nibbling they recommend sprinkling the leaves with cow-dung mixed with water every time there is a shower of rain, as the rain smears the poison of the mixture over the tree: so remarkable are some of the devices invented by human skill, inasmuch as most people believe that hailstorms can be averted by means of a charm, the words of which I would not for my own part venture seriously to introduce into my book, although Cato has published the words of a charm for sprained limbs which have to be bandaged to reed splints. The same author has allowed the felling of consecrated trees and groves after a preliminary sacrifice has been performed, the ritual of which and the accompanying prayer he has reported in the same volume.

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§ 18.1.1  Our next subject is the nature of the various kinds of grain and of gardens and flowers and the other products of Earth's bounty beside trees or shrubs, the study of herbaceous plants being itself of boundless scope, if one considers the variety and number, the blossoms, scents and colours, and the juices and properties of the plants that she engenders for the health or the gratification of men. And in this section it is our pleasant duty first of all to champion Earth's cause and to support her as the parent of all things, although we have already pleaded her defence in the opening part of this treatise. Nevertheless, now that our subject itself brings us to consider her also as the producer of noxious objects, they are our own crimes with which we charge her and our own faults which we impute to her. She has engendered poisons — but who discovered them except man? Birds and beasts are content merely to avoid them and keep away from them. And although the elephant and the ure-ox sharpen and whet their horns on a tree and the rhinoceros on a rock, and boars point the poniards of their tusks upon both trees and rocks, and even animals know how to prepare themselves for inflicting injury, yet which of them excepting man also dips its weapons in poison? As for us, we even poison our arrows and add to the destructive properties of iron itself; we dye even the rivers and the elemental substances of Nature, and turn the very means a of life into a bane. Nor is it possible for us to suppose that animals do not know of these things; for we have indicated the preparations that they make to guard against encounters with serpents and the remedies that they have devised to employ after the battle. Nor does any creature save man fight with poison borrowed from another. Let us therefore confess our guilt, we who are not content even with natural products, inasmuch as how far more numerous are the varieties of them made by the human hand! Why, are not even poisons actually the product of man's violence? Their livid tongue flickers like the serpent's, and the corruption of their mind scorches the things it touches, maligning all things as they do and like birds of evil omen violating even the darkness that is their own element and the quiet of the night itself with their groaning, the only sound they utter, so that like animals of evil omen when they even cross our path they forbid us to act or to be of service to life. And they know no other reward for their abhorred vitality than to hate all things. But in this matter also Nature's grandeur is the same: how many more good men has she engendered as her harvest! flow much more fertile is she in products that give aid and nourishment! We too then will continue to enrich life with the value we set on these things and the delight they give us, leaving those brambles of the human race to the consuming fire that is theirs, and all the more resolutely because we achieve greater gratification from industry than we do from renown. The subject of our discourse is indeed the countryside and rustic practices, but it is on these that life depends and that the highest honour was bestowed in early days.

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§ 18.2.1  Romulus at the outset instituted the Priests of the Fields, and nominated himself as the twelfth brother among them, the others being the sons of his foster-mother Acca Larentia; it was to this priesthood that was assigned as a most sacred emblem the first crown ever worn at Rome, a wreath of ears of corn tied together with a white fillet; and this dignity only ends with life, and accompanies its holders even into exile or captivity. In those days two acres of land each was enough for the Roman people, who assigned to no one a larger amount — which of the persons who but a little time before were the slaves of the Emperor Nero would have been satisfied with an ornamental garden of that extent? They like to have fishponds larger than that, and it is a thing to be thankful for if someone does not insist on kitchens covering a greater area. Numa established worship of the gods with an offering of corn and winning their favour with a salted cake, and, according to Hemina, of roasting emmer wheat because it was more wholesome for food when roasted — though he could attain this only in one way, by establishing that emmer was not in a pure condition for a religious offering unless it had been roasted.

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§ 18.2.2  It was also Numa who established the Feast of Ovens, the holiday when emmer is roasted, and the equally solemn holiday dedicated to the boundary-marks of estates, these bounds being in those days particularly recognized as gods, with the goddesses Seia named from sowing the seed and Segesta from reaping the harvest, whose statues we see in the Circus — the third a of these divinities it is irreverent even to mention by name indoors — and people used not even to taste the produce of a new harvest or vintage before the priests had offered a libation of the first-fruits.

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§ 18.3.1  An area of land that one yoke of oxen could plough in a day used to be called an acre, and a distance which oxen could be driven with a plough in a single spell of reasonable length was called a furlong; this was 40 yards, and doubled longways this made an acre. The most lavish gifts bestowed on generals and valorous citizens were the largest area of land that a person could plough round in one day, and also a contribution from the whole people of one or two quarterns of emmer wheat a head. Moreover the earliest surnames were derived from agriculture: the name 'Pilumnus' belonged to the inventor of the 'pestle' for corn-mills, 'Piso' came from 'pounding' corn, and again families were named Fabius or Lentulus or Cicero according as someone was the best grower of some particular crop. One of the Junius family received the name of Bubulcus because he was very good at managing oxen. Moreover among religious rites none was invested with more sanctity than that of Communion in Wheat, and newly married brides used to carry in their hands an offering of wheat. Bad husbandry was judged an offence within the jurisdiction of the censors, and, as Cato tells us, to praise a man by saying he was a good farmer and a good hush and man was thought to be the highest form of commendation. That is the source of the word locyples, meaning 'wealthy', 'full of room', i.e. of land. Our word for money itself was derived from pecus, 'cattle', and even now in the censor's accounts all the sources of national revenue are termed 'pastures', because rent of pasture-land was for a long time the only source of public income. Moreover flues were only specified in terms of payment of sheep and oxen; nor must we omit the benevolent spirit of the law of early times, in that a judge imposing a fine was prohibited from specifying an ox before he had previously fined the offender a sheep. There were public games in honour of oxen, those conducting them being called the Bubetii. King Servius stamped first the bronze coinage with the likeness of sheep and oxen. Indeed the Twelve Tables made pasturing animals by stealth at night on crops grown under the plough, or cutting it, a capital offence for an adult, and enacted that a person found guilty of it should be executed by hanging, in reparation to Ceres, a heavier punishment than in a conviction for homicide; while a minor was to be flogged at the discretion of the praetor or sentenced to pay the amount of the damage or twice that amount. In fact the system of class and office in the state itself was derived from no other source. The rural tribes were the most esteemed, consisting of those who owned farms, whereas the city tribes were tribes into which it was a disgrace to be transferred, this stigmatizing lack of activity. Consequently the city tribes were only four, named from the parts of the city in which their members resided, the Suburan, Palatine, Colline and Esquiline. They used to resort to the city on market-days and consequently elections were not allowed to be held on market-days, so that the common people of the country might not be called away from their homes. Beds of straw were used for a siesta and for sleeping on. Finally the actual word 'glory' used to be 'adory', owing to the honour in which emmer was held. For my own part I admire even actual words used in their old signification; for the following sentence occurs in the Memoranda of the Priesthood: 'Let a day be fixed for taking augury by the sacrifice of a dog before the corn comes out of the sheath and before it penetrates through into the sheath.'

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§ 18.4.1  Accordingly these being the customs not only were the harvests sufficient for them without any of the provinces providing food for Italy, but even the market price of corn was unbelievably low. Manius Marcius when aedile of the plebs for the first time [456 B.C.] provided the people with corn at the price of an as a peck. Lucius Minucius Augurinus, who had procured the conviction of Spurius Maelius, when he was tribune of the people reduced the price of emmer to an as for a fortnight, and consequently had his statue erected outside the Porta Trigemina, the cost being met by public subscription. Titus Seius during his aedileship supplied the public with corn at an as a peck, on account of which he too had statues erected to him on the Capitol and the Palatine, and he himself at the end of his life was carried to his cremation on the shoulders of the populace. Then it is recorded that in the summer of the year in which the Mother of the Gods was carried to Rome there was a larger harvest than in the preceding ten years. Marcus Varro states that at the date when Lucius Metellus gave a procession of a very large number of elephants in his triumph, the price of a peck of emmer wheat was one as, as also was that of a gallon of wine, 30 pounds of dried figs, 10 pounds of oil and 12 pounds of meat. Nor was this the result of the large estates of individuals who ousted their neighbours, inasmuch as by the law of Licinius Stolo the limit was restricted to 500 acres, and Stolo himself was convicted under his own law because he owned a larger amount of land, held under his son's name instead of his own. Such was the scale of prices when the state had already some luxury. At any rate there is a famous utterance of Manius Curius, who after celebrating triumphs and making a vast addition of territory to [290 B.C.] the empire, said that a man not satisfied with seven acres must be deemed a dangerous citizen; for that was the acreage assigned for commoners after the expulsion of the kings. What therefore was the cause of such great fertility? The fields were tilled in those days by the hands of generals themselves, and we may well believe that the earth rejoiced in a laurel-decked ploughshare and a ploughman who had celebrated a triumph, whether it was that those farmers treated the seed with the same care as they managed their wars and marked out their fields with the same diligence as they arranged a camp, or whether everything prospers better under honourable hands because the work is done with greater attention. The honours bestowed on Serranus found [297 B.C.] him sowing seed, which was actually the origin of his surname. An apparitor brought to Cincinnatus his commission as dictator when he was ploughing his four-acre property on the Vatican, the land now called the Quintian Meadows, and indeed it is said that he had stripped for the work, and the messenger as he continued to linger said, 'Put on your clothes, so that I may deliver the mandates of the Senate and People of Rome'. That was what apparitors were like even at that time, and their name itself a was given to them as summoning the senate and the leaders to put in an immediate appearance from their farms. But nowadays those agricultural operations are performed by slaves with fettered ankles and by the hands of malefactors with branded faces! Although the Earth who is addressed as our mother and whose cultivation is spoken of as worship is not so dull that when we obtain even our farm-work from these persons one can believe that this is not done against her will and to her indignation. And we forsooth are surprised that we do not get the same profits from the labour of slave-gangs as used to be obtained from that of generals!

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§ 18.5.1  Consequently to give instructions for agriculture was an occupation of the highest dignity even with foreign nations, inasmuch as it was actually performed by kings such as Hiero, Attalus Philometor and Archelaus, and by generals such as Xenophon and also the Carthaginian Mago, on whom indeed our senate bestowed such great honour, after the taking of Carthage, that when it gave away the city's libraries to the petty kings of Africa it passed a resolution that in his ease alone his twenty-eight volumes should be translated into Latin, in spite of the fact that Marcus Cato had already compiled his book of precepts, and that the task should be given to persons acquainted with the Carthaginian language, an accomplishment in which Decimus Silanus, a man of most distinguished family, surpassed everybody. But we have given at the beginning a list of the philosophers of originality and the eminent poets and other distinguished authors whom we shall follow in this volume, although special mention must be made of Marcus Varro, who felt moved to publish a treatise on this subject in the eighty-first year of his life.

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§ 18.5.2  Vine-growing began among the Romans much later, and at the beginning, as of necessity, they only practised agriculture, the theory of which we will now deal with, not in the common method but, as we have done hitherto, by making an exhaustive research into both ancient practices and subsequent discoveries, and at the same time delving into causes and principles. We shall also treat of astronomy, and shall give the indubitable signs which the stars themselves afford as regards the earth, inasmuch as authors who have hitherto handled these subjects with some degree of thoroughness may be thought to have been writing for any class of people rather than farmers.

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§ 18.6.1  And first of all we will proceed for the most part by the guidance of oracular precepts, which in no other department of life are more numerous or more trustworthy — for why not assign oracular value to precepts originating from the infallible test of time and the supremely truthful verdict of experience?

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§ 18.6.2  We will borrow a commencement from Cato: 'The agricultural class produces the bravest men, the most gallant soldiers and the citizens least given to evil designs.' 'In buying a farm do not be too eager. In rural affairs do not be sparing of trouble, least of all in buying land'; a bad purchase is always repented. Those about to buy land should before all things give an eye to 'the water supply, the road, and the neighbour'. Each of these rules admits of an important and unquestionable interpretation. Cato advises that in regard to the neighbouring farmers further consideration should be given to the question how prosperous they look; 'for in a good district', he says, 'the people look in good condition'. Atilius Regulus who was twice consul during the Punic war a used to say that it is a mistake to buy unhealthy land in the most fertile districts or the most healthy land in districts that have been worked out. The healthy quality of the district is not always disclosed by the complexion of the inhabitants, because people can carry on even in very unhealthy localities when they are used to them. Moreover some districts are healthy during portions of the year, but no place is really salubrious unless it is healthy all the year round. 'Land with which the owner has a continual struggle is bad land.' Cato bids us as one of the first points to see that the land, if in the position stated above has a good quality of its own, that there is a supply of labour near, and a thriving town, routes for carrying produce away by water or by road, and that the farm is furnished with good buildings and has been well farmed — it is in this that I notice most people make a mistake, as they think that the purchaser scores from slack farming on the part of the previous landlord, whereas nothing is a greater source of loss than a farm that has been neglected. For this reason Cato says that it is better to purchase from a good landlord, and that the lessons to be learnt from others should not be despised, and that it is the same with land as with a human being — it may make large profits, yet if it also involves large expenses, not much balance is left over. In Cato's opinion the most profitable in part of a farm is a vineyard — and not without reason, since above everything he has been cautious as to the matter of outlay of money — and next he puts kitchen-gardens well supplied with water; and this is true, if they are near a town — and the old word for 'meadows' means 'land ready to hand'. Cato moreover when asked what was the most reliable source of profit said, 'Good pasture', and when asked what was the next best, said, 'Fairly good pasture the most important point in considering profit being that the crop that was going to cost the smallest outlay in expenses was the crop most to be recommended. This is a question decided differently in different places, in accordance with the suitability of the various localities; and the same applies to Cato's dictum that a farmer ought to be a good seller; and that he should begin to plant his farm without delay, in his youth, but only build when the land is fully under cultivation, and even then go slowly (and the best course is, as the common saying was, to profit by the folly of other people provided however that keeping up houses is not allowed to be a burden on your estate); but that the owner who is well housed should nevertheless keep visiting his farm rather frequently — and it is a true saying that 'the master's face does more good than the back of his head'.

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§ 18.7.1  The satisfactory plan is that the house shall not be inadequate to the farm nor the farm to the house, not as was done on adjacent estates by Lucius Lucullus and Quintus Scaevola, acting on opposite principles though at the same period, when Scaevola's farmhouse would not hold the produce of his farm and Lucullus's farm was not big enough for his house — a sort of extravagance that occasioned the censor's rebuke that there was less ground to plough than floor-space to sweep. The proper arrangement requires a certain amount of technical skill. Quite recently Gaius Marius, who was seven times consul, built a country house in the district of Misenum, but he relied on the skill he had acquired in planning the layout of a camp, so that even Sulla the Fortunate declared that all the others had been blind men in comparison with Marius. It is agreed that a country house ought not to be put near a marsh nor with a river in front of it — although Homer has stated with the greatest truth that in any case there are always unhealthy currents of air rising from a river before dawn. In hot localities the house should look north, in cold ones south and in temperate situations due east.

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§ 18.7.2  As to proofs by which the quality of the land itself can be judged, we may possibly be thought to have spoken of these with sufficient fullness when discussing the best kind of soil, but nevertheless we will still supplement the indications we have given by some words of Cato more particularly: 'The danewort or the wild plum or the bramble, the small-bulb, trefoil, meadow grass, oak, wild pears and wild apple are indications of a soil fit for corn, as also is black or ash-coloured earth. All chalk land will scorch the crop unless it is an extremely thin soil, and so will sand unless it also is extremely fine; and the same soils answer much better for plantations on level ground than for those on a slope.'

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§ 18.7.3  In old times it was thought that to observe moderation in the size of a farm was of primary importance, inasmuch as the view was held that it was more satisfactory to sow less land and plough it better; and I observe that Virgil was of this opinion. And if the truth be confessed, large estates have been the ruin of Italy, and are now proving the ruin of the provinces too — half of Africa was owned by six landlords, when the Emperor Nero put them to death; though Gnaeus Pompeius must not be cheated out of this mark of his greatness also: he never bought land belonging to a neighbouring estate. Mago's opinion that a landlord after buying a farm ought to sell his town house — that being the opening with which he begins the exposition of his instructions — was too rigorous, and not to the advantage of public affairs, though nevertheless it has the effect of showing that he laid stress on the need for constant oversight.

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§ 18.7.4  The next point requiring attention is the efficiency of bailiffs, and Cato has given many instructions with regard to these. Let it be enough for us to say that the bailiff ought to be as near as possible to his master in intelligence, and nevertheless not think so himself. Farming done by slave-gangs hired from houses of correction is utterly bad, as is everything else done by desperate men. It may appear rash to quote one dictum of the old writers, and perhaps it may be judged impossible to credit unless its value is closely examined — it is that nothing pays less than really good farming. Lucius Tarius Rufus, who, though of extremely humble birth, by his soldierly efficiency won a consulship, though in other respects a man of old-fashioned economy, spent the whole of the money he had accumulated through the generosity of his late Majesty Augustus, about 100 million sesterces, in buying up farms in Picenum and farming them with the purpose of making a name for himself, so that his heir refused to take over the estate. Is it our opinion then that this policy means ruin and starvation? Nay rather, I vow, it is that moderation is the most valuable criterion of all things. Good farming is essential, but superlatively good farming spells ruin, except when the farmer runs the farm with his own family or with persons whom he is in any case bound to maintain. There are some crops which it does not pay the landlord to harvest if the cost of the labour is reckoned, and olives are not easily made to pay; and some lands do not repay very careful farming — this is said to be the case in Sicily, and consequently newcomers there find themselves deceived.

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§ 18.8.1  What then will be the most profitable of farming land? Presumably to follow the oracular dictum: By making good from bad. But it is only fair to justify our forefathers who laid down rules for conduct by their teachings; for the term 'bad lands' they meant to be understood to mean the cheapest lands, and the chief point in their economy was to keep down expenses to the minimum. For the sort of instructions in question were given by men who though they had headed triumphal processions deemed ten pounds of silver as part of one's furniture a criminal extravagance, who when their bailiff died insisted on leaving their victories and returning to their farms, and the cultivation of whose estates was taken over by the government and who commanded armies while the senate acted as their bailiff. Then come all those other oracular utterances: Whoever buys what his farm could supply him with is a worthless farmer; whoever does by day work that he could do by night, except during bad weather, is a bad head of a family, and he who does on working days things that he ought to do on holidays is a worse; and one who works indoors on a fine day rather than in the field is the worst farmer of all.' I cannot refrain from adducing one instance from old times which will show that it was customary to bring before the Commons even questions of agriculture, and will exhibit the kind of plea that men of those days used to rely on to defend their conduct. Gaius Furius Chresimus, a liberated slave, was extremely unpopular because he got much larger returns from a rather small farm than the neighbourhood obtained from very large estates, and he was supposed to be using magic spells to entice away other people's crops. He was consequently indicted by the curule aedile Spurius Albinus; and as he was afraid he would be found guilty, when the time came for the tribes to vote their verdict, he brought all his agricultural implements into court and produced his farm servants, sturdy people and also according to Piso's description well looked after and well clad, his iron tools of excellent make, heavy mattocks, ponderous ploughshares, and well-fed oxen. Then he said: 'These are my magic spells, citizens, and I am not able to exhibit to you or to produce in court my midnight labours and early risings and my sweat and toil.' This procured his acquittal by a unanimous verdict. The fact is that husbandry depends on expenditure of labour, and this is the reason for the saying of our forefathers that on a farm the best fertilizer is the master's eye.

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§ 18.8.2  The remaining rules will be given in their proper places, according as they belong to the various kinds of agriculture. In the meantime we will not omit the principles of general application which occur to us, and particularly that most humane and most profitable advice of Cato to do your best to win the esteem of your neighbours. Cato gives reasons for this advice, but for our part we imagine that nobody can doubt what the reasons are. Also one of Cato's first pieces of advice is a warning to keep your farm hands in good condition. That in agriculture nothing must be done too late is a rule universally held, as is a second rule that each thing must be done at its own time, and a third that it is no use calling back lost opportunities. The malediction uttered by Cato against rotten land has been pointed out at sufficient length; though he is never tired of declaring that whatever can be done by means of an ass costs the least money. Bracken dies in two years if you do not let it make leaf, the best way to kill it is to knock off the stalk with a stick when it is budding, as the juice trickling down out of the fern itself kills the roots. It is also said that ferns plucked up about midsummer do not spring up again, nor do those cut with a reed or ploughed up with a reed placed on the ploughshare. Similarly they also advise ploughing up reed with bracken placed on the ploughshare. A field grown over with rushes should be turned up with the spade after having been first broken with two-pronged forks. Brushwood is best removed by setting fire to it. When land is too damp it is very useful to cut ditches through it and drain it; and in clayey places to leave the ditches open, but in looser soil to strengthen them with hedges or let them have theft sides sloping and on a slant; and to block up some and make them run into other larger and wider ones, and, if opportunity offers, to pave them with flint or gravel; and to stay their mouths with two stones, one on each side, and roof them over with another stone on top. — Democritus has put forward a method of clearing away forest by soaking lupin-flower for one day in hemlock juice and sprinkling it on the roots of the trees.

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§ 18.9.1  And now that the ground has been prepared, we shall proceed to describe the nature of the various kinds of grain. There are two primary varieties, the cereals, such as wheat and barley, and the legumina, such as the bean and chick-pea. The difference between them is too well known to need description.

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§ 18.10.1  There are also two varieties of corn itself distinguished by the different seasons at which they are sown: winter grains, which are sown about the setting of the Pleiades and get their nourishment through the winter from the earth, for instance wheat and barley, and summer grains, which are sown in summer before the rising of the Pleiades, for instance common and Italian millet, gingelly, clary and winter cress: at all events this is the method of Italy. In Greece and Asia however all grains are sown after the setting of the Pleiades, while in Italy some are sown at both dates, and some of these have a third sowing, in spring. Some persons give the name of spring grain to common millet, Italian millet, lentils, chick-pea and groats-wheat, but term bread-wheat, barley, beans and turnip autumn-sowing grains. In the class of wheat one division consists of fodder sown for animals, such as mixed feed, and the same also in the leguminous plants, such as vetch; but lupine is grown for the use of animals and men in common.

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§ 18.10.2  All the leguminous plants except the bean have a single root, which has a woody substance because it is not divided into many branches; the chick-pea has the deepest root. Corn has a number of fibrous roots without ramifications. Barley bursts out of the ground seven days after it is first sown, leguminous plants on the fourth day, or at latest the seventh, beans from fifteen to twenty days; in Egypt leguminous plants emerge on the third day. In barley one end of the grain sends out a root and the other a blade, which flowers before the other corn; and the root shoots out from the thicker end of the grain and the flower from the thinner, whereas with all other seeds both root and flower come from the same end.

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§ 18.10.3  Corn is in the blade during winter; in the spring time corn of the winter variety shoots up into a stalk, but common and Italian millets into a knotted hollow straw, and sesame into a stalk like fennel. The fruit of all kinds of sown grain is either contained in ears, as in the case of wheat and barley, and is protected against birds and small animals by a fence of beard, or is enclosed in pods, as with leguminous plants, or in capsules, as with gingelly and poppy. Both millets are accessible also to small birds, in what can only be called joint ownership with the grower, inasmuch as they are contained in thin skins, leaving them unprotected. Panic, named from its panicles or tufts, has a head that droops languidly and a stalk that tapers gradually almost into a twig; it is heaped with very closely packed grains, with a corymb that is at its longest a foot in length. In millet the hairs embracing the seed curve over with a fringed tuft. There are also varieties of panic, for instance the full-breasted kind, clustered with small tufts growing out of the ear, and with a double point; moreover these grasses are of various colours, white, black, red and even purple. Bread of several kinds is made even from millet, but very little from panic; but there is no grain heavier in weight or that swells more in baking: they get sixty pounds of bread out of a peck, and a peck of porridge out of three-sixteenths of a peck soaked in water. A millet has been introduced into Italy from India within the last ten years that is of a black colour, with a large grain and a stalk like that of a reed. It grows to seven feet in height, with very large hairs — they are called the mane — and is the most prolific of all kinds of corn, one grain producing three-sixteenths of a peck. It should be sown in damp ground.

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§ 18.10.4  Some kinds of grain begin to form the ear at the third joint of the stalk and some at the fourth, but it still remains concealed. Wheat a has four articulations in each stalk, emmer six and barley eight; but the ear does not begin to form before the above-mentioned number of articulations is complete; when this has given signs of occurring, in four or at latest five days they begin to blossom, and after the same number of days or a few more they finish flowering; but with barley this happens in seven days at latest. Varro states that the grains are fully formed in thirty-six days and are ready for reaping after eight months.

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§ 18.10.5  Beans shoot out into leaves and then throw out a stalk which is divided by no joints. The rest of the leguminous plants are tough and woody. Some of them are branching — the chick-pea, the bitter vetch and the lentil. In some the stems spread along the ground if they are not propped up, but peas climb if given a prop, or else they deteriorate. The bean is the only one of the leguminous plants that has a single stem; the lupine also has only one but it does not stand up straight, all the others having branches with a very thin woody stalk, but all of them hollow. Some send out a leaf from the root, some from the top, for instance wheat and barley. Each of these and all the plants that make straw have one leaf at the top — though barley leaves are rough and those of the rest smooth — whereas the bean, the chick-pea and the pea are many-leaved. In corn the leaf is like that of a reed; those of the bean and a large part of the leguminous plants are round; those of the fitch and the pea rather long, that of calavance veined, that of sesame and winter cress the colour of blood. Only the lapin and the poppy shed their leaves. Leguminous plants remain longer in flower, and among them more particularly the fitch and the chick-pea, but longest of all the bean, which flowers for forty days, though the single stalks do not keep their flowers so long, since when one goes off another begins, nor does the whole crop flower at the same time, as with corn, but all the pods form on different days, the blossom starting first at the bottom and rising gradually.

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§ 18.10.6  When cereals have finished flowering, they gradually swell and ripen in 40 days at most, and the same is the case with the bean, but the chick-pea ripens in the fewest days, as it is completely ready in 40 days from sowing. Millet (common and Italian) and gingelly and all the summer grains ripen within 40 days of blossoming, although with considerable differences due to soil and weather; for in Egypt barley is reaped in the sixth month after sowing and wheat in the seventh, while in Greece barley is cut in the seventh month and in the Peloponnese in the eighth, and wheat even later. Grains growing on a stalk form ears with a texture like a tuft of hairs; in beans and leguminous plants the grains are in pods shooting on each side alternately. Cereals are stronger to withstand winter, but the leguminous plants provide a more substantial article of food.

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§ 18.10.7  In wheat the grain has several coats, but barley and good emmer wheat are largely naked, and the oat is especially so. Wheat has a taller stalk than barley, but barley has a more prickly ear. Hard wheat, common wheat and barley are threshed on a threshing floor; thus they are also sown without the husk, just as they are milled, because they are not dried first. On the other hand emmer wheat, and common and Italian millet cannot be freed of husk until they have been dried, and consequently these grains are sown unthreshed, with their husks on. People also keep emmer in its little husks for sowing, and do not dry it by heat.

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§ 18.11.1  Of these grains the lightest is barley, which rarely exceeds fifteen pounds to the peck, and beans twenty-two pounds. Emmer is heavier and wheat heavier still. In Egypt they make flour out of olyra, a third kind of corn that grows there. The Gallic provinces have also produced a special kind of emmer, the local name for which is brace, while with us it is called scandala; it has a very glossy grain. There is also another difference in that it gives about four corn used by the Roman nation for 300 years.

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§ 18.12.1  There are several kinds of wheat that have been produced by various races. For my own part I should not rank any of them with Italian wheat for whiteness and for weight, for which it is particularly distinguished. Foreign wheat can only be compared with that of the mountain regions of Italy; among foreign kinds Boeotia has obtained the first rank, then Sicily, and after that Africa. The third place for weight used to belong to Thracian and Syrian wheat and later also to Egyptian, by the vote of athletes in those days, whose capacity for cereals, resembling that of cattle, had established the order of merit that we have stated. Greece also gave praise to wheat from Pontus, which did not get through to Italy; but of all the varieties of grain Greece gave the preference to dracontias, strangias and the wheat of Selinunte, recognized by the thickness of the straw, because of which it used to count these kinds as appropriate for a rich soil. For sowing in damp soils Greece prescribed spendias, a very light and extremely scanty-growing grain with a very thin stalk, because it required a great deal of nourishment. These were the opinions held in the reign of Alexander the Great, when Greece was most famous and the most powerful state in the whole world, although nevertheless about 145 years before his death the poet Sophocles in his play Triptolemus praised Italian corn before all other kinds, in the phrase of which a literal translation is 'And that happy Italy glows white with bright white wheat'; and also today the Italian wheat is especially distinguished for whiteness, which makes it more surprising to me that the later Greeks have made no mention of this corn.

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§ 18.12.2  At the present the lightest in weight among the kinds of wheat imported to Rome is the wheat Gaul, and that brought from the Chersonese, as they do not exceed twenty pounds a peck, if one weighs the grain by itself. Sardinian grain adds half a pound to this figure, and Alexandrian a third of a pound more — this is also the weight of Sicilian wheat — while that of Southern Spain scores a whole pound more and that of Africa a pound and three-quarters. In Italy north of the Po the peck of emmer to my knowledge weighs 25 pounds, and around Clusium even 26 pounds. It is a fixed law of nature that in any kind of commissariat bread a third part is added in the making to the weight of the grain, just as that the best wheat is that which absorbs three quarts of water into the peck of grain kneaded. Some kinds of grain used by themselves give their full weight, for instance a peck of Balearic wheat produces 35 pounds of bread, but some only do so when blended — for example, Cyprian wheat and Alexandrian, which used by themselves do not go beyond 20 pounds a peck. Cyprus wheat is of a dusky colour and makes black bread, and consequently the white Alexandrian is mixed with it, and that gives 25 pounds of bread to the peck. The wheat of the Thebaid in Egypt makes a pound more. To knead the flour with sea water, which they frequently do in seaside places for the sake of economizing salt, is extremely inexpedient, as there is nothing else that renders the body more liable to disease. When the corn of Gaul and Spain of the kinds we have stated is steeped to make beer the foam that forms on the surface in the process is used for leaven, in consequence of which those races have a lighter kind of bread than others. There is also a difference in the stalk, that of the better sort of grain being thicker. Thracian wheat is clothed with a great many husks, which is necessary for that region because of the excessive frosts. The same reason has also led to the discovery of a three-month wheat, because the snow holds back the ground; it is reaped about three months after sowing, at the same time as wheat is harvested in the rest of the world. This wheat is known all over the Alps, and in the provinces with cold climates no corn flourishes better than this; moreover it has a single stem and in no region holds much grain, and it is never sown except in a thin soil. There is actually a two-month variety in the neighbourhood of Aenus in Thrace, which begins to ripen six weeks after it is sown; and it is surprising that no corn weighs heavier, and that it produces no bran. It is also used in Sicily and Achaia, in both cases in mountain districts, and in Euboea in the neighbourhood of Carystus. So greatly is Columella mistaken in his opinion that even three-month wheat is not a distinct variety, although it is of extreme antiquity. The Greeks call it setanion. It is said that in Bactria the grains of wheat grow so large that a single grain is as big as our ears of corn.

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§ 18.13.1  The one sown first of all the cereals is barley. After explaining the nature of each variety we will also give the date for sowing. India has both cultivated and wild barley, and from it the natives make their best bread, and also porridge. Their favourite grain is however rice, of which they make a drink like the barley-water made by the rest of mankind. Rice leaves are fleshy, resembling leek but broader; the plant is 18 inches high, with a purple blossom and a root of a round shape like a precious stone.

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§ 18.14.1  Barley is the oldest among human foods, as is proved by the Athenian ceremony recorded by Menander, and by the name given to gladiators, who used to be called 'barley-men'. Also the Greeks prefer it to any other grain for porridge. There are several ways of making barley porridge: the Greeks soak some barley in water and then leave it for a night to dry, and next day dry it by the fire and then grind it in a mill. Some after roasting it more thoroughly sprinkle it again with a small amount of water and dry it before milling; others however shake the young barley out of the ears while green, clean it and while it is wet pound it in a mortar, and wash it of husk in baskets and then dry it in the sun and again pound it, clean it and grind it. But whatever kind of barley is used, when it has been got ready, in the mill they mix in three pounds of flax seed, half a pound of coriander seed, and an eighth of a pint of salt, previously roasting them all. Those who want to keep it for some time in store put it away in new earthenware jars with fine flour and its own bran. Italians bake it without steeping it in water and grind it into fine meal, with the addition of the same ingredients and millet as well.

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§ 18.15.1  Barley bread was much used in earlier days, but has been condemned by experience, and barley is now mostly fed to animals, although the consumption of barley-water is proved so conclusively to be very conducive to strength and health: Hippocrates, one of the most famous authorities on medical science, has devoted one whole book to its praises. Utica barley-water is of outstanding quality. There is a kind in Egypt made of the double-pointed grain. The kind of barley used for making this drink in Baetica and Africa is called by Turranius smooth barley. The same authority is of opinion that alpaca and oryza (rice) are the same plant. The recipe for making barley-water is universally known.

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§ 18.16.1  Hulled-wheat grain is used in a similar way for making pap, at all events in Campania and in Egypt;

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§ 18.17.1  and starch is made from, every kind of wheat and common wheat, but the best from three-month wheat. For its discovery we are indebted to the island of Chios, and that is where the best kind comes from today. Its name is Greek, and means 'made without milling'. Next to the starch made from three-month wheat is the kind made of the lightest sort of wheat. This is soaked with fresh water in wooden tubs, with the grain completely covered, the water being changed five times in the course of a day, and preferably in the night time as well, so as to get it mixed up evenly with the grain. When it is quite soft but before it goes sour it is strained through linen or wicker baskets and poured out on a tiled surface that has been smeared with leaven, and left to thicken in the sun. Next to the starch of Chios that from Crete is most highly spoken of; and then comes the Egyptian kind. The test of its quality is smooth consistency and light weight, and the condition of being flesh. It has moreover been mentioned already by Cato among ourselves.

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§ 18.18.1  Barley meal is used as a medicine, and it is remarkable how in treating cattle pills made of it after it has been hardened by roasting at the fire and afterwards ground, sent down into the animal's stomach by the human hand, serve to increase the strength and enlarge the muscles of the body. Some ears of barley have two rows of grains and some more, up to as many as six. In the grain itself there are some varieties: it is longer and smoother or shorter and rounder, lighter or darker in colour, the kind with a purple shade being of a rich consistency for porridge; the light-coloured grain offers the weakest resistance to storms. Barley is the softest of all the grains. It likes to be sown only in a dry, loose soil, which must also be of rich quality. Its chaff is one of the best, indeed for straw there is none that compares with it. Barley is the least liable to damage of all corn, because it is harvested before the wheat is attacked by mildew (and so wise farmers only sow wheat for the larder, whereas barley is sown by the sack, as the saying is), and consequently it brings in a return very quickly; and the most prolific kind is the barley harvested at Carthage in Spain in the month of April. In Celtiberia this barley is sown in the same month, and there are two crops in the same year. All barley is cut sooner than any other grain, as soon as it first ripens, because the grain is carried on a brittle straw and contained in a very thin chaff. Moreover we are told that it makes better pearl-barley if it is lifted before its ripening has been completed.

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§ 18.19.1  Varieties of wheat are not the same everywhere, and where they are the same they do not always bear the same names. The most widely known of them and the most prevalent are emmer (the old name for which was adoreum), common wheat and hard wheat — these are common to most countries. Ariaca wheat which is indigenous in the Gallic provinces is also frequent in Italy; while zea, olyra, and 'rice' or tiphe are only found in Egypt, Syria, Cilicia and Asia and Greece. Egypt makes a prime flour out of its own wheat, but it by no means matches that of Italy. The places that use sea have not got our emmer. Zea also is found in Italy, particularly in Campania, and is called 'seed'; it has that name as being a remarkable thing, as we shall soon explain, which is the reason for Homer's expression zeidoros aroura, 'the tilth that gives us sea' — it is not on account of its 'bestowing life', as some people think. Starch of a coarser quality than the kind mentioned before but otherwise identical is made from it. Emmer is the most hardy of every kind and the one that resists winter best. It stands the coldest localities and those that are under-cultivated or extremely hot and dry. It was the first food of the Latium of old times, a strong proof of this being found in the offerings of adoria, as we have said. It is clear however that for a long time the Romans lived on pottage, not on bread, since even today foodstuffs are also called 'pulmentaria', and Ennius, the oldest of our bards, describing a famine during a siege, recalls how fathers snatched away a morsel from their crying children. Even nowadays primitive rituals and birthday sacrifices are performed with gruel-pottage; and it appears that pottage was as much unknown to Greece as pearl-barley was to Rome.

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§ 18.20.1  No grain is greedier than wheat or draws more nourishment out of the soil. Common wheat may properly designate the choicest variety, whether in whiteness or goodness or weight. It is suitable for moist districts like those in Italy and Gallia Comata, but across the Alps it only keeps its character in the territory of the Allobroges and Remi, while in the other parts of that country it changes in two years into ordinary wheat. The cure for this is to select its heaviest grains for sowing. Common wheat flour makes bread of the highest quality and the most famous pastry. The top place in Italy is taken by a mixture of Campanian common wheat flour with that grown at Pisa, the former being reddish but the chalk-like Pisa variety whiter and heavier. A fair yield from the Campanian grain called 'bolted' is to give four sixteenths of fine flour to the peck, or from what is called common grain, not bolted, five sixteenths, as well as half a peck of fine flour and four sixteenths of the coarse meal called 'seconds', and the same amount of bran; whereas Pisa wheat should give four sixteenths of prime flour, while of the other kinds the yield is the same. The wheats of Clusium and Arezzo give an additional sixteenth of prime flour, but in the remaining qualities they are on a level. If however it is wished to make special flour, the return is sixteen pounds of bread and three pecks of seconds and half a peck of bran. This depends on different methods of milling; for grain ground when dry gives more flour, but if sprinkled with salt water it makes a whiter meal, but keeps more back in the bran. The name for flour, farina, is obviously derived from far, emmer. A peck of flour made of Gallic conmion wheat gives 20 pounds of bread, that of the Italian kind two or three pounds more, in the case of bread baked in a tin — for loaves baked in the oven they add two pounds in either kind of wheat. 'Hard' flour is made from hard wheat, the most highly esteemed coming from Africa. A fair return is half a peck from a peck with five sixteenths of special flour — that is the name given in the case of hard wheat to what in common wheat is called the 'flower'; this is used in copper works and paper mills — and in addition four sixteenths of second quality flour and the same amount of bran, but from a peek of 'hard' flour 22 pounds of bread and from a peck of flower of wheat 16 pounds. The price for this when the market rate is moderate is 40 asses a peek for flour, 8 asses more for 'hard' flour and twice as much for bolted common wheat. There is also another distinction, that when bolted a single time it gives 17 pounds of bread, when twice 18, when three times 19 1/3, and 2 1/2 pounds of second quality bread, the same amount of shorts and six sixteenths of bran.

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§ 18.20.2  Common wheat never ripens evenly, and yet no corn crop is less able to stand delay as, owing to its delicacy of structure, the ears that have ripened shed their grain at once. But it is less exposed to danger in the straw than other cereals, because it always has the ear on a straight stalk and it does not hold dew to cause rust. Best emmer makes the sweetest bread; the grain itself is of closer fibre than ordinary emmer and the ear is at once larger and heavier: a peck of the grain seldom fails to make 16 pounds. In Greece it is difficult to thresh and consequently Homer speaks of it as being fed to cattle — for his word olyra means this grain; but on the other hand in Egypt it is easy to thresh and gives a good yield. Emmer has no beard, nor has common wheat, excepting the kind called Laconian. With these are also to be classed bromos and tragos, entirely foreign grains, resembling rice imported from the east. Tiphe itself also belongs to the same class — the grain from which a rice is produced in our part of the world. With the Greeks there is also zea, and according to their account that grain and tiphe degenerate and go back to wheat, if they are sown after being ground, though not at once, but two years later.

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§ 18.21.1  Nothing is more prolific than wheat — Nature having given it this attribute because it used to be her principal means of nourishing man — inasmuch as a peck of wheat, given suitable soil like that of the Byzacian plain in Africa, produces a yield of 150 pecks. The deputy governor of that region sent to his late Majesty Augustus — almost incredible as it seems — a parcel of very nearly 400 shoots obtained from a single grain as seed, and there are still in existence despatches relating to the matter. He likewise sent to Nero also 360 stalks obtained from one grain. At all events the plains of Leontini and other districts in Sicily, and the whole of Baetica, and particularly Egypt reproduce at the rate of a hundredfold. The most prolific kinds of wheat are branched wheat and what they call hundred-grain wheat. Also a single beanstalk has before now been found laden with a hundred beans.

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§ 18.22.1  We have specified gingelly and common and Italian millets as summer grains. Gingelly comes from India, where it is also used for making oil; the colour of the grain is white. A grain that resembles it in Asia and Greece is erysimum, and the grain called with us irio would be identical with it were it not that it is more filled out, and is to be reckoned as a drug rather than a cereal. Of the same nature is also the irio called in Greece horminum, though it resembles cummin; it is sown with gingelly. No animal will eat either this or irio while green.

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§ 18.23.1  Not all grains are easy to crush, in fact Etruria pounds the ears of emmer, after it has been roasted, with a pestle shod with iron at the end, in a handmill that is serrated and denticulated inside with grooves radiating from a centre, so that if people put their weight into it while pounding the grains are only splintered up and the iron is broken. The greater part of Italy uses a bare pestle, and also wheels turned by moving water, and a millstone. As to the actual method of pounding corn we will put forward the opinion of Mago: he says that wheat should be steeped in a quantity of water beforehand, and afterwards shelled of husk and then dried in the sun and well pounded in a mortar; and barley should be treated in a similar way; of the latter, he says, 20 sixteenths should be wetted with two sixteenths of water. Lentils must be roasted first and then mixed with bran and lightly pounded, or with a fragment of unbaked brick and half a peck of sand added to each 20 sixteenths. Fitch to be treated in the same ways as lentils. Gingelly to be steeped in warm water and spread out, and then rubbed well and dipped in cold water so that the chaff may float to the top, and again spread out in the sun on a linen sheet; and if this is not done very quickly it turns musty with a livid colour. Also there are various methods of pounding the grains themselves which are cleaned of husk. When only the ear is pounded by itself, to be used by goldsmiths, it is called flakes, but if it is beaten out on a threshing-floor together with the straw it is called chaff; this in the larger part of the world is used as fodder for cattle. The refuse from millet, panic and gingelly is called apluda, and by other names in other places.

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§ 18.24.1  Millet flourishes particularly well in Campania, where it is used for making a white porridge; it also makes extremely sweet bread. Moreover the Sarmatian tribes live chiefly on millet porridge, and even on the raw meal, mixed with mare's milk or with blood taken from the veins in a horse's leg. Millet and barley are the only grains known to the Ethiopians.

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§ 18.25.1  The provinces of Gaul, and particularly Aquitaine, also use panic, and so also do the parts of Italy on the banks of the Po, though adding to it beans without water. The races of the Black Sea prefer panic to any other food. All the other kinds of summer corn flourish even better in land watered by streams than in rainy districts, but millet and panic are not at all fond of water, as it makes them to leaves. People advise not growing them among vines or fruit trees, as they believe that this crop impoverishes the soil.

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§ 18.26.1  Millet is specially used for making leaven; if dipped in unfermented wine and kneaded it will keep for a whole year. A similar leaven is obtained by kneading and drying in the sun the best fine bran of the wheat itself, after it has been steeped for three days in unfermented white wine. In making bread cakes made of this are soaked in water and boiled with prime flour of emmer and then mixed with the flour, this process being thought to produce the beat bread. The Greeks have decided that two-thirds of an ounce of leaven is enough for every two half-pecks of flour. Moreover though these kinds of leaven can only be made in the vintage season, it is possible at any time one chooses to make leaven from water and barley, making two-pound cakes and baking them in ashes and charcoal on a hot hearth or an earthenware dish till they turn brown, and afterwards keeping them shut up in vessels till they go sour; then soaked in water they produce leaven. But when barley bread used to be made, the actual barley was leavened with flour of bitter vetch or chickeling; the proper amount was two pounds of leaven to every two and a half pecks of barley. At the present time leaven is made out of the flour itself, which is kneaded before salt is added to it and is then boiled down into a kind of porridge and left till it begins to go sour. Generally however they do not heat it up at all, but only use the dough kept over from the day before; manifestly it is natural for sourness to make the dough ferment, and likewise that people who live on fermented bread have weaker bodies, inasmuch as in old days outstanding wholesomeness was ascribed to wheat the heavier it was.

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§ 18.27.1  As for bread itself it appears superfluous to give an account of its various kinds — in some places bread called after the dishes eaten with it, such as oyster-bread, in others from its special delicacy, as cake-bread, in others from the short time spent in making it, as hasty-bread, and also from the method of baking, as oven bread or tin loaf or baking-pan bread; while not long ago there was even bread imported from Parthia, called water bread because by means of water it is drawn out into a thin spongy consistency full of holes; others call it just Parthian bread. The highest merit depends on the goodness of the wheat and the fineness of the bolter. Some use eggs or milk in kneading the dough, while even butter has been used by races enjoying peace, when attention can be devoted to the varieties of pastry-making. The Ancona country still retains the popularity it won in the invention of bread from using spelt as the material; this bread is steeped for nine days and on the tenth day they knead it up with raisin juice into the shape of a long roll and afterwards put it in earthenware pots and bake it in ovens, the pots breaking in the process. It is not used for food unless it has been soaked, for which chiefly milk or honey-water is employed.

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§ 18.28.1  There were no bakers at Rome down to the war with King Perseus, [171-168 BC] over 580 years after the foundation of the city. The citizens used to make bread themselves, and this was especially the task of the women, as it is even now in most nations. Plautus already speaks of bakers, using the Greek word, in his play named Aulularia, which has caused great debate among the learned as to the authenticity of the line, and it is proved by the expression occurring in Ateius Capito that it was in his day usual for bread to be baked for more luxurious people by cooks, and only those who ground spelt were called 'grinders'; nor used people to have cooks on their regular staff of servants, but they hired them from the provision market. The Gallic provinces invented the kind of bolter noade of horse-hair, while Spain made sieves and meal-sifters of flax, and Egypt of papyrus and rush.

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§ 18.29.1  But among the first things let us give a recipe for alica, a very excellent and healthy food, by means of which Italy has undoubtedly won the palm for cereals. It is no doubt also made in Egypt, but of a rather contemptible quality, whereas in Italy it occurs in a number of places, for instance in the districts of Verona and Pisa, but the most highly recommended variety in Campania. There beneath cloud-capped mountains lies a plain extending in all for about 40 miles on the level. The ground of this plain, to begin by stating the nature of the soil, being dusty on the surface but spongy underneath and also porous like pumice, what is a fault in mountain country turns into an advantage, as the earth allows the frequent rainfall to percolate and passes it through, and so as to facilitate cultivation has refused to become soaked or swampy, while at the same time it does not give back the moisture it receives by any springs, but warms it up inside itself to a moderate temperature and retains it as a kind of juice. The land is in crop all the year round, being sown once with Italian millet and twice with emmer wheat; and yet in spring the fields having had an interval of rest produce a rose with a sweeter scent than the garden rose, so far is the earth never tired of giving birth; hence there is a common saying that the Campanians produce more scent than other people do oil. But as the Campanian plain surpasses all the lands of the world, so in the same degree is Campania itself surpassed by the part of it called Leboriae, and by the Greeks the Phlegraean Plain. This district is bounded on either side by consular roads that run from Pozzuoli and from Cumae to Capua. — Alica is made from 'zea' which we have already called by the name of 'seed'. Its grain is pounded in a wooden mortar so as to avoid the hardness of stone grating it up, the motive power for the pestle, as is well known, being supplied by the labour of convicts in chains; on the end of the pestle there is a cap of iron. After the grain has been stripped of its coats, the bared kernel is again broken up with the same implements. The process produces three grades of alica — very small, seconds, and the largest kind which is called in Greek 'select grade'. Still these products have not yet got their whiteness for which they are distinguished, though even at this stage they are preferable to the Alexandrian alica. In a subsequent process, marvellous to relate, an admixture of chalk is added, which passes into the substance of the grain and contributes colour and fineness. The chalk is found at a place called White Earth Hill, between Pozzuoli and Naples, and there is extant a decree of his late Majesty Augustus ordering a yearly payment of 200,000 sesterces from his privy purse to the people of Naples as rent for this hill — the occasion was when he was establishing a colony at Capua; and he added that his reason for importing this material was that the Campanians had stated that alica could not be made without that mineral. (In the same hill sulphur is also found, and the springs of the Araxus which issue from it are efficacious for improving the sight, healing wounds and strengthening the teeth.) A spurious alica is manufactured chiefly from an inferior kind of sea growing in Africa, the ears of which are larger and blacker and on a short stalk. These are mixed with sand and pounded, and even so there is a difficulty in rubbing off the husks, and only half the quantity of naked grain is produced; and afterwards a quarter the amount of white lime is sprinkled into the grain, and when this has stuck together with it they bolt it through a flour-sieve. The grain that stays behind in the sieve is called residuary and is the largest in size. That which goes though is sifted again in a finer sieve, and is called seconds, and likewise the name of sieve-flour is given to that which in a similar manner stays behind in a third extremely fine sieve that only lets grains like sand through. There is another method of adulteration which is everywhere used: they pick out from wheat the whitest and largest grains, half boil them in pots and afterwards dry them in the sun to half their former size and then again lightly sprinkle them with water and crush them in a mill. A more attractive kind of groats called tragum is made from zea than from other wheat, although it is in fact merely a spurious alica; but it is given whiteness by an admixture of milk boiled in it instead of chalk.

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§ 18.30.1  The next subject is the nature of the leguminous plants, among which the highest place of honour belongs to the beau, inasmuch as the experiment has been made of using it for making bread. Bean meal is called lomentum, and it is used in bread made for sale to increase the weight, as is meal made from all the leguminous plants, and nowadays even cattle fodder. Beans are used in a variety of ways for all kinds of beasts and especially for man. With most nations it is also mixed with corn, and most of all with panic, for this purpose it is either used whole or broken up rather fine. Moreover in ancient ritual bean pottage has a sanctity of its own in sacrifice to the gods. It occupies a high place as a delicacy for the table, but it was thought to have a dulling effect on the senses, and also to cause sleeplessness, and it was under a ban with the Pythagorean system on that account — or, as others have reported, because the souls of the dead are contained in a bean, and at all events it is for that reason that beans are employed in memorial sacrifices to dead relatives. Moreover according to Varro's account it is partly for these reasons that a priest abstains from eating beans, though also because certain letters of gloomy omen are to be found inscribed on a bean-flower. There is also a special religious sanctity attached to the bean; at all events it is the custom to bring home from the harvest a bean by way of an auspice, this being consequently called the harvest-home bean. Also it is supposed to bring luck at auctions if a bean is included in a lot for sale. It is undoubtedly the case that the bean is the only grain that even when it has been grazed down by cattle fills out again when the moon is waxing. It cannot be thoroughly boiled in sea water or other water with salt in it.

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§ 18.30.2  The bean is sown first of the leguminous plants, before the setting of the Pleiades, so that it may get ahead of winter. Virgil advises sowing it all through the spring, as is the custom of Italy near the river Po, but the majority of people prefer bean crops of early sowing to the produce of three months' growth, for the pods and stalks of beans sown early make the most acceptable fodder for cattle. When the bean is in flower it particularly wants water, but when it has shed its blossom it only needs little. It serves instead of stable manure to fertilize the ground it is grown in; consequently in the districts of Macedon and Thessaly when it begins to blossom the farmers plough up the fields. It also grows wild in most places, for example the islands of the North Sea, for which our name is consequently the Bean Islands, and it also grows wild all over Mauretania, though this bean is very hard and incapable of being cooked. It also grows in Egypt, where it has a thorny stalk which makes the crocodiles keep away from it for fear of injuring their eyes. The stalk is two yards long at most and the thickness of a finger: if it had knots in it, it would be like a soft reed; it has a head like a poppy, is rose-coloured, and bears not more than thirty beans on each stalk; the leaves are large; the actual fruit is bitter even in smell, but the root is a very popular article of diet with the natives, and is eaten raw and cooked in every sort of way; it resembles the roots of reeds. The Egyptian bean also grows in Syria and Cilicia, and at the Lake of Torone in Chalcidice.

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§ 18.31.1  Vegetables sown in autumn or spring are the lentil and in Greece the pea. The lentil likes a thin soil better than a rich one, and in any case a dry climate. Egypt has two kinds of lentil, one rounder and blacker, the other the normal shape, which has given the name of lenticle applied to small flasks. I find it stated in writers that a lentil diet conduces to an equable temper. Peas must be sown in sunny places, as they stand cold very badly; consequently in Italy and in severer climates they are only sown in spring, in yielding soil that has been well loosened.

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§ 18.32.1  It is the nature of the chick-pea to contain an element of saltness, and consequently it scorches the soil, and ought not to be sown without having been soaked the day before. There are several varieties differing in size, colour, shape and flavour. One resembles a ram's head and so is called 'ram's chick-pea'; of this there is a black variety and a white one. There is also the dove-pea, another name for which is Venus's pea, bright white, round, smooth and smaller than the ram's chick-pea; it is used by religious ritual in watch-night services. There is also the chickling vetch, belonging to a diminutive variety of chick-pea, uneven in shape and with corners like a pea. But the chick-pea with the sweetest taste is one that closely resembles the bitter vetch; the black and red varieties of this are firmer than the white.

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§ 18.33.1  The chick-pea has round pods, whereas those of other leguminous plants are long, and broad to fit the shape of the seed; the pod of the pea is cylindrical. The pods of calavance are eaten with the seeds themselves. They may be sown in any ground you like from the middle of October to the beginning of November. Leguminous plants ought to be plucked as soon as they begin to ripen, because the seeds quickly jump out and when they have fallen on the ground cannot be found; and the same as regards lupine. Nevertheless it would be proper to speak first about the turnip,

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§ 18.34.1  (authors of our nation have only touched on it in passing, but the Greeks have dealt with it rather more carefully, although even they have placed it among kitchen-garden plants), if we are to follow the proper order, as the turnip should be mentioned directly after corn or at all events after the bean, since its utility surpasses that of any other plant. For to begin with it grows as fodder for all animals, nor is it the lowest in rank among herbs to satisfy the needs of the various kinds of birds as well, and the more so if it is well boiled in water. Cattle also are fond of its leaves, even man esteeming turnip tops when in season no less than cabbage sprouts, also liking them when they are yellow and have been left to die in barns even more than when green. But turnip itself keeps if left in the earth where it grows, and also afterwards if left spread out, almost till the next crop comes, and it serves as a precaution against scarcity of food. It ranks third after wine and corn among the products of the country north of the Po. It is not particular in its choice of soil, growing where almost nothing else can be grown. It actually thrives on mist and frost and cold, growing to a marvellous size: I have seen turnips weighing over 40 pounds. Among our own articles of diet it is popularized by several modes of dressing, and it holds the field for salads when subdued by the pungency of mustard, and is actually stained six different colours beside its own, even purple: indeed that is the only suitable colour served at table. The Greeks have produced two primary classes of turnip, the male and the female, and have shown a way of growing both from the same seed, as they turn male when sown more thickly, and also in difficult ground. The smaller the seed is the better its quality. The Greeks distinguish in all three kinds of turnip, as it either spreads out into breadth or makes a round ball, while a third kind they have named wild turnip, with a root running out to a great length like a radish, and an angular leaf with a rough surface and an acid juice which if extracted at harvest time and mixed with a woman's milk makes an eyewash and a cure for dim sight. They are believed to grow sweeter and bigger in cold weather; warm weather makes them run to leaves. The prize goes to turnip grown in the Nursia district — it is priced at a sesterce per pound, and at two sesterces in a time of scarcity — and the next to those grown on Mt. Algidus:

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§ 18.35.1  but the prize for navews goes to those grown at Amiturnum. Navews have almost the same nature as turnips: they are equally fond of cold places. They are sown even before the first of March, 4 sixteenths of a peck in an acre. The more careful growers recommend ploughing five times before sowing navew and four times for turnip, and manuring the ground in both cases; and they say that turnip grows a finer crop if the seed is ploughed in with some chaff. They advise that the sower should strip for the work, and should offer a prayer in the words, 'I sow for myself and my neighbours.' For both these kinds sowing is properly done between the holidays of two deities, Neptune and Vulcan, and as a result of careful observation it is said that these seeds give a wonderfully fine crop if they are sown on a day that is as many days after the beginning of the period specified as the moon was old when the first snow fell in the preceding winter. In warm and damp localities turnip and navew are also sown in spring.

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§ 18.36.1  The next most extensively used plant is the lupine, as it is shared by men and hoofed quadrupeds in common. To prevent its escaping the reapers by jumping out of the pod the best remedy is to gather it immediately after rain. And of all crops sown none has a more remarkable quality of sensitiveness to the heavenly bodies and the soil. In the first place it turns round every day with the sun, and tells the time to the husbandman even in cloudy weather. Moreover it blossoms three times and buds three times; all the same, it does not like to be covered with earth, and it is the only seed that is sown without the ground being ploughed. It requires most of all a gravelly and dry and even sandy soil, and in any case needs no cultivation. It has such a love for the earth that when it falls on soil however much overgrown with briars it penetrates among leaves and brambles and gets through with its root to the ground.

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§ 18.36.2  We have stated that fields and vineyards are enriched by a crop of lupines; and thus it has so little need for manure that it serves instead of manure of the best quality, and there is no other crop that costs no expenditure at all — seeing that it does not require carrying to the spot even for the purpose of sowing: it sows itself directly from the crop, and does not even need to be scattered, falling on the ground of its own accord. And it is the earliest of all crops to be sown and the latest to be carried, both operations generally taking place in September, because if it does not grow ahead of winter it is liable to suffer from frost. Moreover it can be left just lying on the ground with impunity, as it is protected from all animals by its bitter flavour if a fall of rain does not occur immediately so as to cover it up; although nevertheless growers usually cover it up in a light furrow. Among thicker soils it likes red earth best; to enrich this it must be turned up after the plant has blossomed three times, but when planted in gravel the soil must be turned after every second blossoming. The only kinds of soil it positively dislikes are chalky and muddy soils, and in these it comes to nothing. It is used as a food for mankind as well after being steeped in hot water; as for cattle, a peck per head of stock makes ample and strength-giving feed, while it is also used medicinally for children as a poultice on the stomach. It suits the seed best to be stored in a smoky place, as in a damp place maggots attack the germ and reduce it to sterility. If lupine is grazed off by cattle while in leaf, the only thing to be done is to plough it in at once.

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§ 18.37.1  Vetch also enriches the soil, and it too vets. entails no labour for the farmer, as it is sown after only one furrowing, and it is not hoed or manured, but only harrowed in. There are three seasons for sowing it — about the time of the setting of Arcturus, so that it may provide pasture in December — at that date it is best sown for seed, for it bears seed just as well when grazed down; the second sowing is in January, and the last in March, which is the best crop for providing green fodder. Of all crops sown vetch is the one that is fondest of a dry soil; it does not dislike even shady localities. If it is picked when ripe, its grain supplies chaff that is preferred to all others. If sown in a vineyard planted with trees it takes away the juice from the vines and makes them droop.

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§ 18.38.1  The fitch also is not difficult to cultivate. This needs weeding more than the vetch; and it too has medicinal properties, indeed the fact that his late Majesty Augustus was cured by it stands on record in his own letters. Five pecks of seed are enough for one yoke of oxen in a day. It is said to be injurious to oxen if sown in March and to cause cold in the head if sown in autumn, but sowing it in early spring makes it harmless.

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§ 18.39.1  Silicia or fenugreek also is sown after a mere scratching of the ground, in a furrow not more than four inches deep, and the worse it is treated the better it comes on — a singular proposition that there is something that is benefited by neglect; however the kinds called black spelt and cattle mash need harrowing, but no more.

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§ 18.40.1  The name for secale in the subalpine district of the Taurini is asia; it is a very poor food and only serves to avert starvation; its stalk carries a large head but is a thin straw; it is of a dark sombre colour, and exceptionally heavy. Wheat is mixed in with this to mitigate its bitter taste, and all the same, it is very unacceptable to the stomach even so. It grows in any sort of soil with a hundred-fold yield, and serves of itself to enrich the land.

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§ 18.41.1  Cattle-mash obtained from the refuse of wheat is sown very thick, occasionally with an admixture of vetch as well. In Africa the same mash is obtained from barley. All of these plants serve as fodder, and so does the throwback of the leguminous class, of plant called wild vetch, which pigeons are so fond of that they are said never to leave a place where they have been fed on it.

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§ 18.42.1  In old times there was a kind of fodder which Cato calls ocinum, used to stop scouring in oxen. This was got from a crop of fodder cut green before it seeded. Mamilius Sura gives another meaning to the name, and records that the old practice was to mix ten pecks of bean, two of vetch and the same of fitch for each acre of land and sow this mixture in autumn, preferably with some Greek oats mixed in as well, as this does not drop its seed; he says that the usual name for this mixture was ocinum, and that it used to be grown for cattle. Varro explains the name as due to its rapid growth, deriving it from the Greek word for 'quickly'.

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§ 18.43.1  Lucerne is foreign even to Greece, having been imported from Media during the Persian invasions under Darius [492-450 B.C.]; but so great a bounty deserves mention even among the first of the grains, since from a single sowing it will last more than thirty years. In stalk and leaf it resembles trefoil, being jointed, and as the stalk rises higher the leaves become narrower. Amphilochus devoted one volume to lucerne and tree-medick. The land for it to be sown in is broken in autumn after being cleared of stones and weeded, and is afterwards ploughed over and harrowed and then covered with chalk, the process being repeated a second and a third time at intervals of five days, and after the addition of manure — it requires a dry and rich soil or else a well-watered one — and after the land has been thus prepared the seed is sown in May, as otherwise it is liable to damage from frost. It is necessary for the whole plot to be occupied with closely sown seed, and for weeds shooting up in between to be debarred — this is secured by sowing three modii to the acre — and care must be taken that the sun may not scorch the seed up, and it ought to be covered over with earth immediately. If the soil be damp or weedy, the lucerne is overpowered and goes off into meadow; consequently as soon as it is an inch high it must be freed from all weeds, by hand in preference to hoeing. It is cut when it is beginning to flower and every time it flowers again: this happens six times, or at the least four times, in a year. It must be prevented from running to seed, because till it is three years old it is more useful as fodder. It must be hoed in springtime and rid of all other plants, and till the third year shaved down to the earth with weeding-hoes: this makes the rest of the plants die without damaging the lucerne itself, because of the depth of its roots. If weeds get the upper hand, the sole remedy is in the plough, by repeatedly turning the soil till all the other roots die. It must not be fed to cattle to the point of repletion, lest it should be necessary to let blood. Also it is more useful when green, as it dries into a woody state and finally thins out into a useless dust.

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§ 18.43.2  About tree-medick, which itself also is given a very high rank among fodder, we have spoken sufficiently among the shrubs. And now we have to complete our account of the nature of all the cereals, in one part of which we must also speak about diseases.

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§ 18.44.1  The first of all forms of disease in wheat is the oat. Barley also degenerates into oats, in such a way that the oat itself counts as a kind of corn, inasmuch as the races of Germany grow crops of it and live entirely on oatmeal porridge. The degeneration in question is principally due to dampness of soil and climate, but a subsidiary cause is contained in weakness of the seed, if it is held back too long in the ground before it shoots out. There is also the same explanation if it was rotten when it was sown. But it is recognizable the moment it breaks out of the ground, which shows that the cause is contained in the root. There is also another disease arising in close connection with oats, when after the grain has begun to fill out but its growth is not yet mature, before it makes a strong body it becomes hollow and empty owing to some noxious blast and fades away in the ear by a sort of abortion.

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§ 18.44.2  Wind is injurious to wheat and barley at three seasons — when they are in flower or directly after they have shed their flower or when they are beginning to ripen; at the last stage it shrivels up the grain, while in the preceding eases its influence is to prohibit the seed from forming. Successive gleams of sun appearing out of cloud are also injurious. Also maggots breed in the root when after rains following seed-time a sudden spell of heat has enclosed the moisture in the ground. They also grow in the grain when heat following rain causes the ear to ferment. There is also a small beetle called the cantharis which gnaws away corn crops. When food fails, all these, creatures disappear. Olive oil, pitch and grease are detrimental to seeds, and care must be taken not to let seed come in contact with them before it is sown. Rain is beneficial to crops while in the stalk from the time of germination, but it damages wheat and barley when in blossom; although it does no harm to leguminous plants, excepting chick-pea. Corn crops when beginning to ripen are damaged by rain, and particularly barley. Also there is a white grass like Italian millet that springs up all over the fields, and is also fatal to cattle. As for darnel, caltrops, thistle and burdock, I should not count these any more than brambles among diseases of cereals, but rather among pestilences of the soil itself. One of the most harmful climatic maladies of corn crops and vines is rust. This is most frequent in a district exposed to dew and in shut-in valleys that have no current of air through them, whereas windy places and high ground on the contrary are free from it. Among the vices of corn is also overabundance, when the stalks fall down under the burden of fertility. But a vice common to all cultivated crops is caterpillars, which even attack chick-pea when rain makes it taste sweeter by washing away its saltness.

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§ 18.44.3  There is a weed that kills off chick-pea and fitch by binding itself round them, it is called orobanche; and in a similar way wheat is attacked by darnel, barley by a long-stalked plant called acgilops and lentils by an axe-leaved which the Greeks call axe-grass from its resemblance; these also kill the plants by twining round them. In the neighbourhood of Philippi they give the name of ateramum to a weed growing in rich soil that kills the bean plant, and the name teramum to one that has the same effect in thin soil, when a particular wind has been blowing on the beans when damp. Darnel has a very small seed enclosed in a prickly husk. When used in bread it very quickly causes fits of giddiness, and it is said that in Asia and Greece when the managers of baths want to get rid of a crowd they throw darnel seed on to hot coals. Also the phalangium, a little creature of the spider class, breeds in the fitch, if there is a wet winter. Slugs breed amongst vetch, and sometimes small snails which are produced from the ground and eat away the vetch in a surprising manner. — These broadly speaking are the diseases of grain.

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§ 18.45.1  Such cures of these diseases as pertain to grain in the blade are to be found in the hoe, and when the seed is being sown, in ashes; but the diseases that occur in the seed and round the root can be guarded against by taking precautions. It is believed that seed steeped in wine before sowing is less liable to disease. Virgil recommends steeping bean in native soda and dregs from oil-presses, and also guarantees this as a method of increasing its size. Others however hold the view that it grows specially well if it is kneaded in a mixture of urine and water three days before sowing; and at all events that if the crop is hoed three times it will yield a peck of crushed beans from a peck of whole beans; and that the other kinds of seeds are not liable to maggots if mixed with crushed cypress leaves, and also if sown just before a new moon. As a cure for diseases of millet many recommend carrying a toad round the field at night before it is hoed and then burying it in the middle of the field, with a pot for a coffin; it is then prevented from being damaged by a sparrow or by worms; but it must be dug up before the field is sown, otherwise the land turns sour. They also say that seed is made more fertile if it is touched by the forequarters of a mole. Democritus advises soaking all seeds before they are sown in the juice of the plant that grows on roof-tiles, called in Greek aeizoon and by other people 'under-the-eaves', and in our language 'squat' or 'little finger'. But if damage is being done by blight and by worms adhering to the roots, a common remedy is to sprinkle the plant with pure olive oil lees, not salted, and then to hoe, and if the crop is beginning to shoot out into knots to weed it, so that weeds may not get the upper hand. I know for a fact that flights of starlings or sparrows, the plague of common and Italian millets, can be driven away from them by burying a plant, the name of which is unknown to me, at the four corners of the field, with the remarkable result that no bird whatever will enter it. Mice are driven away by sprinkling the seed with the ashes of a weasel or a cat dissolved in water or with water in which those animals have been boiled; but their poison makes an odour even in bread, and consequently it is thought more satisfactory to steep the seed in ox-gall. As for the greatest curse of corn, mildew, fixing branches of laurel in the ground makes it pass out of the fields into their foliage. Excessive luxuriance in corn-crops is corrected by grazing cattle on them, provided the corn is still in the blade, and although it is eaten down even several times it suffers no injury in the ear. It is absolutely certain that if the ears are lopped off even once the grain becomes longer in shape and hollow inside and worthless, and if sown does not grow. Nevertheless at Babylon they cut the corn twice and the third time pasture it off with cattle, as otherwise it would make only leaves. Even so the exceptional fertility of the soil returns crops with a fifty-fold increase, and to more industrious farmers even with a hundredfold. Nor is there any difficulty in the method of letting the ground be under water as long as possible, in order that its extremely rich and substantial fertility may be diluted. But the Euphrates and the Tigris do not carry mud on to the land in the same way as the Nile does in Egypt, nor does the soil itself produce vegetation; but nevertheless its fertility is so great that a second crop grows of its own accord in the following year from the seeds trodden in by the reapers. This extreme difference of soil prompts me to distribute my description of the various kinds of land among the different crops.

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§ 18.46.1  This then is the opinion of Cato: 'In thick and fertile land wheat should be sown; but if the same land is liable to fog, turnip, radishes, common and Italian millets. In cold or damp land sowing should be done earlier, but in warm land later. In a ruddle-soil or in dark or sandy soil, if it is not damp, sow lupine; in chalk and red earth and rather damp land, emmer wheat; in dry land that is free from grass and not overshaded, wheat; beans in strong soil, but vetch in the least damp and weedy soil; common and other bare wheats in an open and elevated locality that gets the warmth of the sun as long as possible; lentils in poor and ruddle-soil that is free from grass; barley in fallow land and also in land that can produce a second crop; three-month wheat where the land could not ripen an ordinary crop and which is rich enough to produce a second crop.

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§ 18.46.2  The following also is acute advice: 'In a rather thin soil crops should be sown that do not need much moisture, for instance tree-medick, and such of the leguminous plants, except chick-pea, as are gathered by being pulled up out of the ground and not by being cut — which is the reason why they are called "crops", because that is how they are "cropped" — but in rich land the plants that need greater nutriment, such as greens, wheat, common wheat, flax. Under this method consequently thin soil will be assigned to barley, as its root demands less nourishment, while more easily worked and denser earth will be allotted to wheat. In a rather damp place emmer will be sown in preference to other wheat, but in soil of medium quality this and also barley. Hillsides produce a stronger wheat but a smaller crop of it. Emmer and common wheat can do with both chalky and marshy soil.'

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§ 18.46.3  The only portent arising from grain crops that I for my part have come across occurred in the consulship of Publius Aelius and Gnaeus Cornelius, the year in which Hannibal was overcome: it is stated that on that occasion corn grew on trees.

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§ 18.47.1  And now that we have spoken fully about the kinds of grain and of soil, we will now speak about the method of ploughing, beginning with an account of the easy conditions prevailing in Egypt. In that country the Nile plays the part of farmer, beginning to overflow its banks at the new moon in midsummer, as we have said, at first gently and then more or violently, as long as the sun is in the constellation of the Lion. Then when the sun has passed over into the Virgin it slows down, and when the sun is in the Scales it subsides. If it has not risen more than 18 feet, there is certain to be a famine, and likewise if it has exceeded 24 feet; for it retires more slowly in proportion as it has risen in greater flood, and prevents the sowing of seed. It used to be commonly believed that the custom was to begin sowing after the subsidence of the Nile and then to drive swine over the ground, pressing down the seed in the damp soil with their footprints, and I believe that in former days this was the common practice, and that at the present day also the sowing is done without much heavier labour; but nevertheless it is certain that the seed is first scattered in the mud of the river after it has subsided and then ploughed in. This is done at the beginning of November, and afterwards a few men stub up the weeds — their name for this process is botanismus — but the rest of the labourers only visit the fields a little before the first of April, taking a sickle with them. However the harvest is completed in May, and the straw is never more than an ell long, as the subsoil is sand and the corn only gets its support from the mud. The district of the Thebaid has corn of better quality, because Egypt is marshy. Seleucia in Babylon has a similar method but greater fertility, owing to the overflow of the Euphrates and the Tigris, as there the amount of flooding is controlled by the hand of man. Syria also ploughs with a narrow furrow, whereas in Italy in many parts eight oxen strain panting at one ploughshare. In every department of agriculture but most of all in this one the greatest value attaches to the oracular precept: 'what the particular district will stand.'

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§ 18.48.1  Ploughshares are of several kinds. The coulter is the name for the part fixed in front of the share-beam, cutting the earth before it is broken up and marking out the tracks for the future furrows with incisions which the share sloping backward is to bite out in the process of ploughing. Another kind is the ordinary share consisting of a lever with a pointed beak, and a third kind used in easy soil does not present an edge along the whole of the share-beam but only has a small spike at the extremity. In a fourth kind of plough this spike is broader and sharper, ending off in a point, and using the same blade both to cleave the soil and with the sharp edge of the sides to cut the roots of the weeds. An invention was made not long ago in the Grisons fitting a plough of this sort with two small wheels — the name in the vernacular for this kind of plough is plaumorati; the share has the shape of a spade. This method is only used for sowing in cultivated land and land that is nearly fallow; the breadth of the share turns the turves over; men at once scatter the seed on it and draw toothed harrows over the furrows. Fields that have been sown in this way do not need hoeing, but this method of ploughing requires teams of two or three pairs of oxen. It is a fair estimate for forty acres of easy soil and thirty of difficult to be rated as a year's work for one team of oxen.

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§ 18.49.1  In ploughing it is extremely important to obey the oracular utterance of Cato: 'What is good farming? Good ploughing. What is second best? Ploughing. What third? Manuring.' 'Do not plough a crooked furrow. Plough in good time.' In comparatively mild places breaking the ground should begin at midwinter, but in colder districts at the spring equinox; and it should begin earlier in a dry region than in a damp one, and earlier in a dense soil than a loose one and in a rich soil than in a poor one. Where the summers are dry and oppressive and the land chalky or thin, it pays better to plough between midsummer and the autumnal equinox, but in the middle of the hot weather in places where summer heat is moderate, rainfalls frequent and the soil rich and grassy. It is the rule to stir a deep heavy soil even in the winter, but a very thin and dry one a little before sowing.

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§ 18.49.2  Ploughing also has rules of its own: Do not touch a muddy soil. Plough with all your might. Break the ground before you plough. The value of the last process is that turning the turf kills the roots of the weeds. Some people recommend beginning to break the ground at all events at the spring equinox. Land ploughed once in spring is called 'spring-worked land', from the fact of the date; spring-working is equally necessary in the case of fallow land — fallow is land sown every other year. Oxen when going to plough should be harnessed to the yoke as tightly as possible, to make them hold their heads up when ploughing — that makes them least liable to gall their necks; if the ploughing is in between trees and vines, they must wear basket-work muzzles to prevent their nibbling off the tenderest of the buds; a small billhook should be hung on the plough-tail to cut through roots with — this is better than letting the plough tear them up, which is a strain on the oxen; when ploughing finish the row and do not halt in the middle while taking breath. It is a fair day's work to break an acre with a nine-inch furrow and to plough over again an acre and a half, given an easy soil, but otherwise, to break half an acre and plough over one acre, since Nature has appointed laws even for the labour of animals. Every field must be worked with straight furrows and then with slanting furrows as well. Hilly ground is ploughed only across the slope of the hill, but with the share pointing now up hill and now down; a and man has such capacity for labour that he can actually perform the function of oxen — at all events mountain races dispense with this animal and do their ploughing with hoes. Unless a ploughman bends his back to his work he goes crooked — the charge of 'prevarication' is a metaphorical term transferred to public life from ploughing: anyhow it must be avoided in the department of its origin. The share should be cleaned now and then with a stick tipped with a scraper. The ridges between two furrows should not be left untidy, so that clods of earth may not fall off them. A field that needs harrowing after the crop has been sown is badly ploughed: the ground will only have been worked properly where it is impossible to tell in which of two opposite directions the share went. It is also usual to make intermediate runnels by means of a larger furrow, if the place requires this, for these to draw off the water into the ditches.

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§ 18.49.3  After the cross-ploughing has been done there follows the harrowing of clods with a framework or a rake where circumstances require it, and, where local custom allows, this second breaking is also repeated after the seed has been sown, by means of a harrow-framework or with a board attached to the plough covering up the seeds — this process is called ridging; if they are not covered, this is 'unridging' — the original use of the word that means 'raving'. Virgil when he said that the best crop is one that 'twice hath felt the sun and twice the cold', is understood to have desired a fourth ploughing before sowing. Where the soil is rather dense, as it usually is in Italy, it is better to plough five times before sowing, but in Etruria nine times. With beans and vetch however it is a labour-saving plan involving no loss to dispense with preliminary breaking before sowing.

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§ 18.49.4  We will not omit one additional method of ploughing that has been devised in Italy north of the Po owing to damage caused by war. When the Salassi were devastating the farms lying below the Alps they made an attempt to destroy the crops of panic and millet that were just appearing above the ground: but after Nature proved contemptuous of their efforts, they ploughed in the crops; these however came up in multiplied abundance, and thus taught us the practice of ploughing in — artrare as it is now called, that as I believe being the form at that time in use of the word aratrare. This is done either when the stem is beginning to grow or when it has already shot up as far as the second or third set of leaves. Nor will we withhold a recent instance that was ascertained two years ago in the Treviri country: the crops having been nipped by an extremely cold winter, in March they actually sowed the fields again, and had a very bounteous harvest.

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§ 18.49.5  We will now give the remaining methods of cultivation corresponding to the various kinds of corn.

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§ 18.50.1  Common, emmer, hard naked and other emmer wheats and barley should be harrowed, hoed and stubbed on the days that will be stated; a single hand per acre will be enough for each of these kinds of grain. Hoeing loosens in the spring season the harshness of the soil that has been hardened by the rigour of winter, and lets in the fresh sunshine. One who is going to hoe must beware of digging underneath the roots of the corn. Naked and emmer wheats, barley and beans are better for two hoeings. Stubbing, when the crop has begun to make a joint, liberates the roots of the corn by pulling up useless weeds and disengages the crop from clods of turf. Of the legnminous plants chick-pea needs the same treatment as emmer; beans do not want much stubbing, as they overpower weeds; lupine is only harrowed; common and Italian millets are harrowed and hoed, but not hoed a second time and not stubbed; fenugreek and calavances are harrowed only. There are some kinds of ground the fertility of which necessitates combing the crop while in the blade — the comb is another kind of harrow fitted with pointed iron teeth — and even then they also afford pasture for cattle; and the crops that have been eaten down as pasture have to be resuscitated with the hoe. But in Bactria and Africa and at Cyrene all these operations are rendered superfluous by the indulgence of the climate, and after sowing they only go back into the fields at harvest, because the dry atmosphere prevents weeds, the crops depending for nourishment on the dew-fall at night. Virgil advises letting the fields 'lie fallow turn and turn about', and if the extent of the farm allows it, this is undoubtedly extremely useful; but if conditions forbid it, emmer wheat should be sown in ground which has borne a crop of lupines or vetch or beans, and plants that enrich the land. And another point to be noticed as of first importance is this, that some interim crops are sown for the sake of other crops if these have made an unsatisfactory return, as we have said in the preceding volume — not to repeat the same things too often; for the quality of each particular soil is of the greatest importance.

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§ 18.51.1  There is a city-state of Africa called Tacape, in the middle of the desert on the route to the Syrtes and Great Leptis, which has the exceptionally marvellous blessing of a well-watered soil. There is a spring that distributes water over a space of about three miles in every direction, giving a generous supply, but nevertheless it is distributed among the population only at special fixed periods of the day.

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§ 18.51.2  Here underneath palms of exceptional size there are olives, under the olives figs, under the figs pomegranates, and under those vines; and underneath the vines is sown corn, and later leguminous plants, and then garden vegetables, all in the same year, and all nourished in the shade of something else. A plot of soil there measuring four cubits either way, a cubit being measured not from the elbow to the fingertips but to the closed fist, is sold for four denarii. But the unique point is that there are two vintages a year, the vines bearing twice over; and if fertility were not exhausted by multiplied production, each crop would be killed by its own exuberance, but as it is, something is being gathered all the year round, and yet it is an absolute fact that this fertility receives no assistance from human beings.

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§ 18.51.3  There is also a great difference of quality in the water supplied to watered places. In the province of Narbonne there is a celebrated spring with the name of Orga, in which plants grow that are so much sought after by oxen that they put their whole heads under water in trying to get them; but it is a well-known fact that those plants though growing in water only get their nutriment from showers of rain. Consequently it is necessary for everybody to know the nature of the soil and of the water in his own district.

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§ 18.52.1  If the land is of the kind which we designated 'tender', after harvesting the barley it will be possible to sow millet, and when that has been got in turnip-seed, and when the millet and turnip have been harvested barley again, or else wheat, as is done in Campania; and land of that nature is sufficiently ploughed by being hoed. Another order of rotation is for ground where there has been a crop of emmer wheat to lie fallow during the four winter months and to be given spring beans; but it should not lie fallow before being sown with winter-beans. With a soil that is too rich it is possible to employ rotation, sowing a leguminous crop at a third sowing after the wheat has been carried; but a thin soil had better be left fallow till the year after next. Some people forbid sowing wheat except in land that has lain fallow the year before.

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§ 18.53.1  A very important part of this topic is occupied by the proper way of using dung, about which we have also spoken in the preceding volume. The one thing known to everybody is that the land must not be sown unless it has been manured, although even this matter has special rules applying to it. You must not sow millet, panic, turnip or navew except in ground that has been manured, but if the ground has not been manured, you should sow wheat in it rather than barley. Similarly also in the case of fallows, although it is held that in these beans should be sowed, in every case you must sow that crop after the soil has been manured as recently as possible. A person intending to sow something in the autumn should pile dung on the land in September, at all events after rain has fallen; but if intending to sow in the springtime, he should spread dung during the winter — eighteen loads of dung is the proper amount to be given to an acre; but be careful not to spread it before ploughing. But after the seed has been sown, if this manuring has been neglected, the following stage is, before you weed, first to scatter like seed some dust of droppings obtained from hen-coops. But to fix a precise limit for this treatment also, the right amount is to get one load of manure per head of smaller animals and ten loads per head of oxen. If that be not forthcoming, it would look as if the farmer had been slack in providing litter for his stock. Some people think that manuring is best done by keeping the flocks and herds permanently out of doors penned up with netting. If the land is not manured it gets chilled, and if it is given too much manure it becomes burnt up; and it pays better to do the manuring frequently than to manure to excess. It stands to reason that the warmer the soil is the less manure it should be given.

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§ 18.54.1  The best seed is last year's; two-year old of seed is inferior, three-year old very poor, and beyond that it is barren; in fact all things have a limited period of fertility. The seed that falls to the bottom on the threshing-floor should be kept for sowing, as it is the best because the heaviest, and there is no other more efficient way of distinguishing it. An ear having its seeds separated by gaps will be discarded. The best grain is that which is reddish in colour and which when crushed by the teeth shows the same colour inside, and one that has more white inside is inferior. It is a well-known fact that some lands take more seed and others less, and this supplies farmers with a binding and primary augury: when the earth receives the seed more greedily, it is believed to be hungry and to devour the seed. The plan is for sowing to be done more quickly in damp places, to prevent the seed from being rotted by moisture, but later in dry places, so that the rainfalls may come afterwards to prevent the seed from lying for a long time without germinating and so withering away; and similarly when sowing is hurried on it pays to scatter the seed thickly, because it conceives slowly, but when sowing is late, to scatter it thin, because excessive closeness kills it. Also there is a certain science in scattering the seed evenly; at all events the hand must keep in time with the pace of walking, and always go with the right foot. Also it comes about by some not obvious method used by certain people that luck is kind to them and brings a good return. Seed should not be transferred from cold places to warm ones nor from early ripening districts to late ones, and nothing should be transferred in the contrary directions either, as some people out of mistaken ingenuity have advised.

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§ 18.55.1  The right amounts of seed per acre to sow in soil of medium quality are: bare or common wheat 5 pecks, emmer or seed (the kind of grain to which we give that name) 10; barley 6, beans a fifth more than in the ease of wheat, vetch 12, chick-pea, chickling vetch and peas 3, lupine 10, lentil 3 (but it is considered desirable to sow lentils mixed with dry dung), fitch 6, fenugreek 6, calavances 4, hay-grass 20, common and Italian millets a quarter of a peck, or more in a rich soil and less in a thin one. There is also another distinction to make: in thick or chalky or moist soil 6 pecks of bare or common wheat, but in loose and dry and fertile soil 4; for a meagre soil makes a small and empty ear unless it has the corn stalks far apart, whereas fields with a rich soil produce a number of stalks from a single seed and yield a thick crop from thinly scattered seed. Consequently the rule given is to sow between four and six pecks, adding or subtracting a fifth in accordance with the nature of the soil, and the same in a densely planted place or on sloping land as in thin soil. To this applies that oracular utterance, which it is so important to observe: 'Do not grudge the cornfield its seed.' To this Attius in his Praxidike added the advice to sow when the moon is in the constellations of the Ram, the Twins, the Lion, the Scales and Aquarius, but Zoroaster advised sowing when the sun has crossed 12 degrees of the Scorpion and the moon is in the Bull.

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§ 18.56.1  There follows the question postponed to this place, a question that needs very careful consideration — that of the proper date for sowing the crops; it is in a large degree connected with astronomy, and consequently we will begin by setting out the views of all authors in regard to it. Hesiod, the leader of mankind in imparting agricultural instruction, gave only one date for sowing, to begin at the setting of the Pleiades; for he wrote in the Greek country of Boeotia where, as we have said, that is the custom for sowing. It is agreed among the most careful observers that, as in the propagation of birds and animals, so with the earth, there exist certain impulses leading to conception; and the Greeks define this as the period when the earth is warm and moist. Virgil prescribes sowing bare and emmer wheats after the setting of the Pleiades, barley between the autumnal equinox and mid-winter, but vetch and calavances and lentils at the setting of Bootes; with the consequence that it is important to ascertain the exact dates of the rising and setting of these and other stars. There are some who advise sowing before the setting of the Pleiades, at all events in dry land and in the provinces with a warm climate, because the seed keeps safely, there being no damp to make them rot, and within a day after the next fall of rain they break out; while others recommend sowing immediately after the setting of the Pleiades, because about a week later rains follow; and some advise beginning to sow at the autumnal equinox in cold places, but later in warm districts, so that the crops may not be too far forward before winter. But it is universally agreed that sowing must not be done in the period of midwinter, for the convincing reason that winter seeds when sown before midwinter break out in a week, but if sown after it scarcely begin to appear in four weeks. There are some who hasten matters on and put forward the dictum that, while sowing in haste often proves deceptive, sowing late always does. Others on the opposite side think that sowing even in spring is preferable to sowing in a bad autumn, and that if this is necessary it should be done between the arrival of the west wind a and the spring equinox. Some people ignore nice points of meteorology and fix limits by the calendar: flax, oats and poppy in spring and up to the Feast of the Five Days, a practice even now observed in the districts north of the Po, beans and common wheat in November, emmer wheat at the end of September on to October 15, and others after that date on to November 1. Thus these latter writers pay no attention to Nature, while the previous set pay too much, and consequently their elaborate theorizing is all in the dark, as the issue lies between countrymen and literary, not merely astronomical, pundits! And it must be confessed that these matters do chiefly depend on the weather — as in fact Virgil enjoins first before all else to learn the winds and the habits of the stars, and to observe them just in the same way as they are observed for navigation. It is an arduous and a vast aspiration — to succeed in introducing the divine science of the heavens to the ignorance of the rustic, but it must be attempted, owing to the vast benefit it confers on life. Nevertheless we must first submit to contemplation the difficulties of astronomy, which even experts have been conscious of, in order that subsequently our minds may more happily pass on from the study of the heavens and discern the actual events of the past whose future occurrence cannot be known in advance.

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§ 18.57.1  First of all it is almost impossible to explain the system of the actual days of the year and that of the movement of the sun, because to the 365 days an intercalary year adds a quarter of a day and of a night, and consequently definite periods of the stars cannot be stated. In addition to this there is the admitted obscurity of the facts, as sometimes the specification of the seasons runs in advance, and by a considerable number of days (the Greek term for this is προχειμάζειν), whereas at other times it comes behind (in Greek έπιχειμάζειν), and in general the influence of the heavens falls down to the earth in one place more quickly and in another place more slowly; this is the cause of the remark we commonly hear on the return of fine weather, that a constellation has been completed. Moreover although all these things depend on stars that are stationary and fixed in the sky, there intervene movements of stars and hailstorms and rain, these also having no inconsiderable effect, as we have shown, and they disturb the regularity of the expectation that has been conceived. And we must not think that this occurs only to ourselves — it also deceives the rest of the animals, which have greater sagacity about this matter, inasmuch as it is a thing on which their life depends; and the birds of summer are killed by exceptionally late or exceptionally early frosts, and those of winter by untimely spells of heat. This is why Virgil teaches the necessity of acquiring a thorough knowledge of the system of the planets also, warning us to watch the transit of the cold star Saturn. Some people think that butterflies are the most reliable sign of spring, on account of the extremely delicate structure of that insect; but in the very year in which I am writing this treatise it has been noticed that their supply has been three times annihilated by a return of cold weather, and that migratory birds arriving on January 27 brought a hope of spring that was soon dashed to the ground by a spell of very severe winter. The procedure is twofold: first of all it consists in trying to obtain a general principle from celestial phenomena, and then this principle has to be investigated by special signs. Above all there is the variation due to the convexity of the world and the terrestrial globe, the same star revealing itself to different nations at a different time, with the consequence that its influence is not operative everywhere on the same days. Additional difficulty has also been caused by authors through their observations having been taken in different regions, and because in the next place they actually publish different results of observations made in the same regions. But there were three main schools, the Chaldean, the Egyptian and the Greek; and to these a fourth system was added in our own country [46 BC] by Caesar during his dictatorship, who with the assistance of the learned astronomer Sosigenes brought the separate years back into conformity with the course of the sun — and this theory itself was afterwards corrected (when an error had been found), so as to dispense with an intercalary day for a period of twelve successive years, for the reason that the year which had previously been getting in advance of the constellations had begun to lag behind in relation to them. Both Sosigenes himself in his three treatises — though more careful in research than the other writers he nevertheless did not hesitate to introduce an element of doubt by correcting his own statements — and also other authors whose names we prefixed to this volume a have published these theories, although it is seldom that the opinions of any two of them agree. This is less surprising in the case of the rest, as they had the excuse of difference of localities; but as for those who have differed in their views in the same country, we will give one case of disagreement as an example: the morning setting of the Pleiades is given by Hesiod — for there is extant an astronomical work that bears his name also — as taking place at the close of the autumnal equinox, whereas Thales puts it on the 25th day after the equinox, Anaximander on the 30th, Euctemon on the 44th, and Eudoxus on the 48th. We follow the observation of Caesar specially: this will be the formula for Italy; but we will also state the views of others, since we are not treating of a single country but of the whole of nature, though we shall not arrange them under the head of their authors, for that would be a lengthy matter, but of the regions concerned. Only readers should remember that, for the sake of brevity, when Attica is mentioned they must understand the Cyclades islands to be included; when Macedonia, Magnesia and Thrace; when Egypt, Phoenicia, Cyprus and Cilicia; when Boeotia, Locris and Phocis and the adjoining regions always as well; when the Dardanelles, the Gallipoli peninsula as far as Monte Santo; when Ionia, Asia and the islands belonging to it; when the Morea, Achaia and the lands lying to the west of it; and the term Chaldeans will indicate Assyria and Babylonia. That the names of Africa and the provinces of Spain and Gaul are not mentioned will cause no surprise, because none of those who have published accounts of the risings of the constellations have made observations in respect of those countries. Still it will not involve a difficult calculation to ascertain them in those countries as well, by means of the explanation of parallels which we have set out in Book Six, which indicates the astronomical relationship not only of nations but of individual cities as well. Therefore by taking the circular parallel belonging to the countries we have specified and applying it to those that the particular student is seeking, the risings of the constellations will be the same throughout the parts of all the parallels where shadows are of equal length. It is also necessary to point out that the seasons themselves have their own periods every four years, and that they too return without great variation under the system of the sun, but that they are also lengthened every eight years at the hundredth revolution of the moon.

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§ 18.58.1  The whole system however is based on three lines of observation — the rising and the setting of the constellations and the periods of the seasons themselves: there are two modes of observing the risings and settings, as the stars are either hidden by the arrival of the sun and cease to be visible, or they present themselves to the view on the sun's departure (so that custom would have done better to designate the latter as the stars' 'emergence' rather than 'rising', and the former as their 'occultation' rather than 'setting'); or by means of the following mode by the day on which the risings and settings of the stars begin or cease to be visible at the rising or setting of the sun, these being designated their morning or evening risings and settings according as each of them occurs at dawn or at dusk. They require intervals of at least three-quarters of an hour before sunrise or after sunset in order to be visible. Moreover there are some stars that rise and set twice; and all that is said here refers to the stars which we have stated to be fixed stars.

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§ 18.59.1  The divisions of the seasons are fixed by the fourfold distribution of the year corresponding with the increases and decreases of daylight. From midwinter onward this increases in length, and in 90 days 3 hours at the spring equinox the day becomes equal to the night. From then to the summer solstice, a period of 94 days 12 hours, the day is longer than the night ... until the autumn equinox, and then the night having become equal to the day goes on increasing from that point until midwinter, a period of 88 days 3 hours (in the present passage the term 'hours' in each addition and subtraction denotes equinoctial hours and not the hours of any day in particular) and all these changes occur at the eighth degree of the signs of the zodiac, midwinter at the eighth degree of Capricorn, about December 26, the equinox at the eighth of the Ram, the summer solstice at the eighth of the Crab and the other equinox at the eighth of the Scales — which days themselves also usually give some indications of changes of weather. Again these periods are also divided by particular moments of time, all of them at midday — since between the solstice and the autumnal equinox the setting of the Lyre on the 46th day marks the beginning of autumn, and from that equinox to midwinter the morning setting of the Pleiades on the 44th day marks that of winter, and between midwinter and the equinox the prevalence of a west wind on the 45th day marks the period of spring, and the morning rising of the Pleiades on the 47th day from the spring equinox marks the beginning of summer. We will start from sowing-time of wheat, that is from the morning setting of the Pleiades; and we need not interrupt our explanation and increase the difficulty of the subject by mentioning the minor stars, inasmuch as it is at the same date that the stormy constellation of Orion sets after its extensive course.

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§ 18.60.1  Most people anticipate the times for sowing, and begin to sow corn at the eleventh day of the autumnal equinox, as for nine days after the rising of the Crown there is an almost certain expectation of rain. But Xenophon tells us not to begin before the Deity has given the signal — this our Roman author Cicero understood as being done by a fall of rain; although the true method is not to sow before the leaves have begun to fall. Some think that this occurs exactly at the setting of the Pleiades on November 10, as we have said, and even clothes-dealers go by that constellation, and it is very easy to identify in the sky; consequently dealers out to make money, who are careful to watch for chances, make forecasts as to the winter from its setting: thus by a cloudy setting it foretells a wet winter, and they at once raise their prices for cloaks, whereas by a fine weather setting it foretells a hard winter, and they screw up the prices of all other clothes. But our friend the farmer, not learned in astronomy, may find this sign of the weather among his hedgerows and merely by looking at his own land, when he has seen the leaves fall: in that way the year's weather can be estimated, as they fall later in some cases and earlier in others, for the weather is perceived as it is affected by the nature of the climate and the locality, and this method contains the advantage that while it is universal and worldwide it is also at the same time peculiar to each particular locality. This may surprise anyone who does not remember that the pennyroyal hung up in our larders blossoms exactly on midwinter day: so fully has Nature willed that nothing shall be hidden; consequently she has also given us this signal for sowing. This is the true account of the situation, bringing with it Nature's own proofs, inasmuch as she actually advises this mode of approaching the land and promises it will serve as a substitute for manure, and tells us that the land and the crops are shielded by herself against the rigours of frost, and warns us to make haste.

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§ 18.61.1  Varro has advised keeping this rule at all events in sowing beans. Others say that beans should be sown at a full moon, but lentils between the 25th and 30th day of the lunar month, and also vetch on the same days, that being the only way to keep them free from slugs. Some people advise that date for sowing for fodder, but recommend sowing in the spring to obtain seed.

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§ 18.61.2  There is also another more obvious method due to still more remarkable foresight on the part of Nature, under the head of which we will register the opinion of Cicero in his own words:

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§ 18.61.3  The lentisk, ever green and ever teeming,

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§ 18.61.4  Is wont to swell with thrice-repeated produce:

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§ 18.61.5  Thrice bearing fruit, she marks three ploughing seasons.

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§ 18.61.6  One of these seasons, this last one, is the same also for sowing flax and poppy. For poppy Cato gives the following rule: 'On land used for corn burn any twigs and brushwood left over from your utilization of them. Sow poppy in the place where you have burnt them'. Wild poppy boiled in honey is wonderfully serviceable for making throat-cures, and also cultivated poppy is a powerful soporific. So far as to winter sowing.

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§ 18.62.1  But correspondingly to complete a sort of summary of the whole subject of cultivation, it will be suitable at the same time to manure the trees, also to bank up the vines — one hand is enough to do an acre — and where the nature of the locality will allow, to prune the trees and the vines, to prepare the ground with a double mattock for seed-plots, to open up the ditches, to drain water off the land, and to wash out and put away the wine-press. Do not put under the hens to hatch after November 1 until midwinter is past; all through the summer till that date give thirteen eggs to each hen, but fewer in winter, though not less than nine. Democritus thinks that the weather through the winter will be the same as it was on the shortest day and the three days round it, and he thinks so too in regard to the summer and the weather at the summer solstice.

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§ 18.62.2  In most cases the fourteen days round midwinter bring mild weather with calm winds for the sitting of the kingfishers. But in these and all other matters we shall have to conjecture the influence of the stars from the outcome of their indications, and at all events not expect changes of weather to answer to bail on dates fixed in advance.

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§ 18.63.1  Avoid attending to the vine at midwinter. Hyginus recommends straining the wine then, or even racking it off a week after the shortest day has passed, provided a week-old moon coincides with it; and planting cherries about midwinter. It is proper at that date to put acorns in soak as fodder for oxen, a peck per yoke — a larger quantity is injurious to their health; and it is said that whenever they are given this feed, if it is not fed to them for at least 30 days in succession, an outbreak of mange in the spring will cause you to repent. We have given this as the time for cutting timber; and the other kinds of work may be arranged chiefly in the night time, as the nights are so much longer — weaving wicker baskets, hampers and rush baskets, cutting torches, preparing squared vine-props at the rate of thirty and rounded poles at the rate of sixty a day in daytime, and by artificial light five props and ten poles in an evening and the same number in the early morning.

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§ 18.64.1  From midwinter till the west wind blows the important stars that mark the dates, according to Caesar's observations, are the Dog-star setting at dawn on December 30, the day on which the Eagle is reported to set in the evening for Attica and the neighbouring regions; on January 4 according to Caesar's observations the Dolphin rises at dawn and the next day the Lyre, the Arrow setting in the evening on the same day for Egypt; likewise on January 8 the Dolphin before mentioned sets in the evening and there are some days of continuous wintry weather for Italy; and so also when the sun is seen to pass into Aquarius, which happens about January 17. On January 25 the star in the breast of the Lion called according to Tubero the Royal Star sets in the morning and the Lyre sets in the evening of February 4. In the concluding days of this period, whenever the weather conditions allow, the ground should be turned up with a double mattock for planting roses and vines — seventy hands ate enough for an acre — and ditches should be cleaned or new ones made, and the time before daybreak should be used for sharpening iron tools, fitting handles, repairing broken vats, doing up the shelters used for sheep and cleaning the sheeps' fleeces by scraping them.

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§ 18.65.1  Between the period of west wind and the spring equinox, February 16 for Caesar marks three days of changeable weather, as also does February 22 by the appearance of the swallow and on the next day the rising of Arcturus in the evening, and the same on March 5 — Caesar noticed that this bad weather took place at the rising of the Crab, but the majority of the authorities put it at the setting of the Vintager — on March 8 at the rising of the northern part of the Fish, and on the next day at the rising of Orion; in Attica it is noticed that the constellation Kite appears. Caesar also noted March 15 — the day that was fatal to him — as marked by the setting of the Scorpion, but stated that on March 18 the Kite becomes visible in Italy and on March 21 the Horse sets in the morning.

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§ 18.65.2  This space of time is an extremely busy period for farmers and specially toilsome, and it is one as to which they are particularly liable to go wrong — the fact being that they are not summoned to their tasks on the day on which the west wind ought to blow but on which it actually does begin to blow. This must be watched for with sharp attention, and is a signal possessed by a day in that month that is observable without any deception or doubt whatever, if one gives close attention. We have stated in Volume Two the quarter in which that wind blows and the exact point from which it comes, and we shall speak about it rather more fully a little later. In the meantime, starting from the day, whichever it is, on which it begins to blow — not however necessarily February 8, but whether before that date, when the spring is early, or afterwards, when winter goes on after that day, countrymen should find themselves torn between innumerable anxieties and should finish off all the primary tasks which cannot be postponed. Three-month wheat must be sown, vines pruned by the method we have stated, olives attended to, fruit-trees planted and grafted, vineyards dug over, seed-plots arranged and others restored, reeds, willows and brooms planted and cut, and elms, poplars and ash trees planted in the manner stated above. Then it is also suitable to weed the cornfields and hoe the winter crops, and especially emmer wheat; for the latter there is a definite rule, to hoe when it has begun to have four blades showing, but in the case of beans not before they have three leaves out, and even then they should be cleaned with a light hoe rather than dug over, and anyway when they flower they must not be touched during the first fortnight. You should only hoe barley in dry weather. You should have your pruning finished by the equinox. An acre of vineyard takes four hands to prune, and tying up the vines on a tree takes one hand for each fifteen trees. This is the time moreover for kitchen-gardens and rose-beds to be attended to, a subject which will be dealt with separately in the following Books, and it is also the time for landscape gardening; and then is the best occasion for making ditches. The ground is now opened for future operations, as Virgil in particular advises, to allow the sun thoroughly to dry the clods. The more useful opinion recommends ploughing only ground of medium quality in the middle of spring, because in a rich soil the furrows are at once seized on by weeds and in a thin soil the spells of heat that follow dry them up and take away all moisture from the seeds that are to come; there is no question that it is best to plough land of these sorts in the autumn.

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§ 18.65.3  The following are the rules given by Cato for operations in spring: 'to make ditches for the seed-plots, layer vine-nurseries, plant elms, figs, fruit-trees and olives in thick and damp soils, under a dry moon to manure meadows that are not going to be irrigated, and to protect them from westerly winds, and to clean them and root up noxious weeds; to prune fig-trees lightly, make new seed-beds and repair old ones — these operations to be done before you begin to dig over the vineyard.' Cato also says: 'You should begin to plough thin and sandy soils when the pear-tree blossoms, and afterwards plough the successively heaviest and wettest lands last of all.' Consequently there will be two signs for this ploughing, the sign of the mastich showing its first fruit and that of the pear blossoming. There will also be a third sign, that of the squill in the growing bulbs and that of the narcissus among the plants used for wreaths; for these also flower three times, marking the first ploughing by their first flowering, the second by the middle one and the last by the third — inasmuch as things afford hints for other things different from them. And one of the first precautions to be taken is to prevent beans when in flower from coming in contact with ivy; for that season is a baneful and deadly one with ivy. Some plants however also have special signs of their own, for instance the fig: when a few leaves are sprouting from the top, like a vinegar-cup, that indicates that it is the best time for planting fig-trees.

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§ 18.66.1  The vernal equinox appears to end on March 25. Between that day and the morning rising of the Pleiades the first of April according to Caesar indicates bad weather. The Pleiades set on the evening of April 3 in Attica and on the day after in Boeotia, but for Caesar and the Chaldeans on April 5, when for Egypt Orion and his sword begin to set. The setting of the Scales on April 8 according to Caesar announces rain. In the evening The Little Pigs, a stormy constellation bringing boisterous weather on land and sea, sets for Egypt on April 18; it sets on April 16 for Attica and April 17 for Caesar, indicating four successive days of bad weather, but on the 20th for Assyria. This constellation is commonly called Parilicium, because April 21, the birthday of the city of Rome, on which fine weather usually returns, has given a clear sky for observing the heavens, although because of the clouds that it brings with it the Greek name for the constellation is Hyades, which our countrymen, owing to the similarity of the Greek name supposed in their ignorance to have been given it with reference to the word for 'pigs', and so have called the stars the Little Pigs. In Caesar's calendar April 24 is also a marked day. On April 25 the Kids rise for Egypt, and on April 26 the Dog sets in the evening and the Lyre rises in the morning for Boeotia and Attica. On April 27 Orion entirely disappears for Assyria, and on the 28th the Dog. On May 2 the Little Pigs rise in the morning for Caesar, and on May 8 the She-goat, portending rain, while the Dog sets for Egypt in the evening of the same day. That is a fairly precise account of the movements of the constellations down to May 10, which is the date of the rising of the Pleiades.

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§ 18.66.2  In this space of time the farmer must hurry on during the first fortnight with work which he has not had time to finish before the equinox, while realising that this is the origin of the rude habit of jeering at people pruning their vines by imitating the note of the visiting bird called the cuckoo, as it is considered disgraceful and deserving of reproach for that bird to find the pruning-hook being used on the vine; and consequently wanton jokes, though men are merely being made sport of in early spring, are thought to be objectionable as bringing bad luck. To such an extent on the land is every trifle set down as a hint given by Nature.

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§ 18.66.3  In the latter part of this period Italian and common millets are sown, the proper time for sowing them being when the barley has ripened. And the sign alike of the barley being ripe and for sowing these crops consists in the fields in the evening shining with glow-worms (that is what the country-people call those starlike flights of insects, the Greek name for which is lampyrides) thanks to Nature's unbelievable kindness.

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§ 18.67.1  She had already formed the remarkable group of the Pleiades in the sky; yet not content with these she has made other stars on the earth, as though crying aloud: 'Why gaze at the heavens, husbandman? Why, rustic, search for the stars? Already the slumber laid on you by the nights in your fatigue is shorter. Lo and behold, I scatter special stars for you among your plants, and I display them to you in the evening and as you unyoke to leave off work, and I stimulate your attention by a marvel so that you may not be able to pass them by: do you see how their fire-like brilliance is screened by their folded wings, and how they carry daylight with them even in the night? I have given you plants that mark the hours, and in order that you may not even have to avert your eyes from the earth to look at the sun, the heliotrope and the lupine revolve keeping time with him. Why then do you still look higher and scan the heavens themselves? Lo! you have Pleiades at your very feet.' Glow-worms do not make their appearance on fixed days or last a definite period, but certain it is that they are the offspring of this particular constellation. Consequently anybody who does his summer sowing before they appear 'will have himself to thank for labour wasted.' In this interval also the little bee comes forth and announces that the bean is flowering, and the bean begins to flower to tempt her out. We will also give another sign of cold weather being ended: when you see the mulberry budding, after that you need not fear damage from cold.

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§ 18.67.2  Well then, a list of things to be done: to plant olive-cuttings and rake over between the olive trees themselves; in the first days of the equinox to irrigate the meadows; when the grass has grown to a stalk, to shut off the water; to trim the vine (the vine too has a rule of its own: it must be trimmed when the shoots have made four inches in length — one hand can trim an acre); to stir over the corn crops again (hoeing takes 20 days). It is thought that to start hoeing at the equinox injures both vines and corn. This is also the time for washing sheep.

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§ 18.67.3  After the rise of the Pleiades the weather is indicated for Caesar by the morning setting of Arcturus on the following day, the rise of the Lyre on May 13, the setting of the She-goat, and in Attica of the Dog, in the evening of May 21. On May 22, as observed by Caesar, Orion's Sword begins to set; in the evening of June 2, according to Caesar, and for Assyria also, the Eagle rises; on the morning of June 7 Arcturus sets for Italy, and on the evening of June 10 the Dolphin rises. On June 15 Orion's Sword rises, but in Egypt this takes place four days later. Moreover on June 21 Orion's Sword, as observed by Caesar, begins to set; while on June 24 the longest day and shortest night of the whole year make the summer solstice. In this interval of time the vines are pruned and care is taken to give an old vine one digging round and a new one two; sheep are sheared, lupins are ploughed in to manure the land, the ground is dug over, vetches are cut for fodder, beans are gathered and then threshed.

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§ 18.67.4  Meadows are mown about June 1. The cultivation of these is extremely easy for the farmer and involves very little outlay; it requires the following remarks to be made about it. Land should be left in grass where the soil is rich or damp or watered by streams, and the meadows should be watered by the rainfall or by a public aqueduct. If there are weeds, the best plan is to plough up the land and then harrow and hoe it, and sprinkle it with seed fallen out of the hay from haylofts and from mangers before the weeds are harrowed; and it is best not to irrigate the land in the first year, nor to use it for grazing before the second cutting of the hay, so that the grass may not be torn up by the roots or trodden down and weakened. Meadows go off with age, and need to be revived by sowing in them a crop of beans or turnip or millet, and afterwards in the following year corn, and in the third year they should again be left fallow; and moreover every time they are cut they should be gone over with the sickle, for the purpose of cutting all the growth that the mowers have passed over; for it is very detrimental indeed for any weeds to spring up that will scatter seeds. The best crop in meadow land is clover, the next best grass; money-wort is the worst, and it also bears a terrible pod; horse-hair, named from its resemblance to horses' hair, is also a hateful weed. The time for mowing is when the stalk has begun to shed its blossom and to grow strong; the grass must be cut before it begins to dry up. 'Do not mow your hay too late,' says Cato; 'cut it before the seed is ripe.' Some farmers irrigate the fields the day before mowing, but where there is no means of doing this it is better to mow when there are heavy falls of dew at night. Some parts of Italy mow after harvest. Mowing was also a more expensive operation in former days, when only Cretan and other imported whetstones were known, and these would only liven up the blade of a scythe with the help of olive oil; and consequently a man mowing hay used to walk along with a horn to hold the oil tied to his leg. Italy gave us whetstones used with water, which keep the iron in order instead of a file, though the water very soon makes them go green with rust. Of scythes themselves there are two kinds: the Italian kind is shorter, and handy to use even among brambles, whereas the scythe used on the large farms of the Gallic provinces are bigger, in fact they economize labour by cutting through the stalks of the grass in the middle and missing the shorter ones. An Italian mower holds the sickle with only his right hand. It is a fair day's work for one labourer to cut an acre of grass, or to bind 200 sheaves weighing four pounds each. After the grass is cut it must be turned towards the sun, and it must not be piled in shocks till it is dry; unless this rule is carefully kept, the shocks are certain to give off a sort of vapour in the morning and then to be set alight by the sun and to burn up. A hayfield should be irrigated again after it has been mown, so as to provide a crop of autumn hay called the aftermath. At Terni in Umbria even hayfields not irrigated are mown four times a year, but those with irrigation are in most places mown three times, and afterwards as much profit is made out of the pasture as from the hay. Accordingly keeping herds and breeding draft-animals will supply each farmer with his own policy, a most lucrative trade being breeding horses for chariot-racing.

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§ 18.68.1  We have said that the summer solstice comes round on June 24, in the eighth degree of the Crab. This is an important turning-point of the year, an important matter in the world. From midwinter to this point the days continually grow longer. The sun itself climbing northward for six months and having scaled the heights of heaven, from that goal begins to slope and to descend towards the south, proceeding for another six months to increase the length of the nights and to subtract from the measurement of the day. From this point onward is the time for plucking and collecting the various successive crops and for preparing against the fierce cruelty of winter, and to have this change marked with unmistakable signs was only Nature's duty; consequently she has placed such signs in the very hands of the farmers, and has bidden the foliage to turn round on that very day and to indicate that the heavenly body has completed its course — and not the leaves of the forests and of trees distant from human habitation, so compelling those seeking the signs to have to go into remote valleys and mountains, nor yet again the foliage of the trees of the city and those that are only grown by the ornamental gardener, albeit these may be seen at a country house as well; but Nature turns round the foliage of the olive that confronts us at every step, of the lime-tree which we employ for a thousand practical purposes, and even of the white poplar that is married to the vines. Nor is that yet sufficient. 'You have the elm,' she says, 'that is enriched with the vine; I will turn the foliage of this tree also. You strip its leaves for fodder, or prune them off: look at these, and you have a sign of the heavens, for they look towards another quarter of the sky than that towards which they faced yesterday. You use the willow to make withes for binding all things — the lowliest of trees, you yourself are a whole head taller: its leaves also I will turn round. Why complain that you are a mere peasant? It is not owing to me that you do not understand the heavens and know the things thereof. I will bestow a sign upon your ears also: only listen to the cooing of the ring-doves, and beware of thinking that midsummer is past until you have seen the dove sitting on her nest.'

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§ 18.68.2  Between the solstice and the setting of the Lyre, on June 26 by Caesar's reckoning, Orion rises, and Orion's Belt on July 4, in the region of Assyria, while in that of Egypt in the morning rises the scorching constellation of Procyon, which has no name with the Romans, unless we take it to be the same as the Little Dog; it has a great effect in producing hot weather as we shall show a little later. On July 4 the Crown sets in the morning for the people of Chaldea and for Attica the whole of Orion rises on that day. On July 14 Orion ceases rising for the Egyptians, on July 17 Procyon rises for Assyria, and then three days later the great constellation recognized almost everywhere among all people, which. we call the rising of the Dog-star, when the sun has entered the first quarter of the Lion: this occurs on the 23rd day after midsummer. Its rising influences both the seas and the lands, and indeed many wild animals, as we have said in the proper places; nor is this constellation less reverenced than the stars that are assigned to various gods; and it kindles the fire of the sun, and constitutes an important cause of the summer heat. On July 20 the Eagle sets in the morning for Egypt, and the breezes that herald the seasonal winds begin to blow, which in Caesar's opinion is perceived in Italy on July 23. The Eagle sets for Attica on the morning of that day, and the Royal Star in the breast of the Lion rises, according to Caesar, on the morning of July 30. On August 6 one-half of Arcturus disappears; and on August 11 the setting of the Lyre brings the beginning of autumn, according to Caesar's note, but a true calculation has discovered that the date of this is really August 8.

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§ 18.68.3  In this interval of time the crisis for the vines occurs, the constellation which we have called the Little Dog deciding the fate of the grapes, as it is the date at which they begin to be 'charred', as it is called, as though they had been scorched up by a blighting red-hot coal. Hail and stormy weather do not compare with this disaster, nor any of the disasters which have ever caused high market prices, inasmuch as these are misfortunes affecting single farms, whereas charring affects a wide expanse of country although the remedy would not be difficult if mankind did not prefer slandering Nature to benefiting themselves. The story goes that Democritus, who was the first person to realise and point out the alliance that unites the heavens with the earth, when the wealthiest of his fellow-citizens despised his devotion to these studies, foresaw, on the principle which we have stated and shall now explain more fully, that the rising of the Pleiades would be followed by an increase in the price of oil, which at the time was very cheap because of the crop of olives expected; and he bought up all the oil in the whole of the country, to the surprise of those who knew that the things he most valued were poverty and learned repose; and when his motive had been made manifest and they had seen vast wealth accrue to him, he gave back the money paid him for the olives to the anxious and covetous landlords, now repentant, being content to have given this proof that riches would be easily within his reach when he chose. A similar demonstration was later given by Sextius, a Roman student of philosophy at Athens. Such is the opportunity afforded by learning, which it is my intention to introduce, in treating of the operations of agriculture, as clearly and convincingly as I am able.

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§ 18.68.4  Most people have stated that rust in corn and glowing-coal blight in vines are caused by dew burnt into them by very hot sunshine, but I think. This is partly erroneous, and that all blight is caused by frost only, the sun being guiltless. Close attention to the facts will make this clear; for first of all blight is never found to occur except at night and before the sun gives any heat, and it depends entirely on the phases of the moon, since damage of this sort only takes place at the moon's conjunction or at full moon, that is, when the moon's influence is powerful — for the moon is at the full at both phases, as we have often said, but at the point of its conjunction it reflects back to the sky all the light it has received from the sun. The difference between the two phases is great, but it is obvious: the moon is hottest in summer and cold in winter at the conjunction, whereas on the contrary when full it makes the nights cold in summer and warm in winter. The reason is clear, but it is not the one given by Fabianus and the Greek authors. During the moon's conjunction in summer she must necessarily run with the sun in an orbit very near to our earth, glowing with the heat that she receives from his fire close at hand, whereas in winter she must be further away at her conjunction, because the sun also withdraws, and likewise when at the full in summer she must retire a long way from the earth, being in opposition to the sun, whereas in winter the full moon comes towards us following the same orbit as in summer. Consequently, being herself naturally humid, whenever she is cold she freezes up the hoar-frosts falling at that season to an unlimited extent.

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§ 18.69.1  But before all things we ought to remember that there are two kinds of damage done by the heavens. One we entitle tempests, a term understood to include hailstorms, hurricanes and the other things of a similar nature, the occurrence of which is termed exceptionally violent weather; these take their origin from certain noxious constellations, as we have said more than once, for instance Arcturus, Orion, the Kids. The other are those that occur when the sky is quiet and the nights fine, nobody perceiving them except after they have taken place; these are universal, and widely different from the former ones, being termed by some people rust, by others burning and by others coal-blight, though sterility is a term universally applied to them. Of these last we will now speak, as they have never been treated by any writer before us; and we will begin by stating their causes.

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§ 18.69.2  These are two in number, in addition to that depending on the moon, and they are situated in only a few quarters of the heavens. For the Pleiades specially concern farm produce, inasmuch as their rising marks the beginning of summer and their setting that of winter, embracing in the six months' space between them the harvest and vintage and ripening of all vegetation. And the sky also contains the constellation called the Milky Way, which is also easily recognized a by observing two others, the Eagle in the northern region and in the southern the Little Dog, which we have mentioned in its proper place. The Milky Way itself passes through the Archer and the Twins, cutting the equinoctial orbit twice at the sun's centre-point, the intersections being marked by the Eagle on .one side and the Little Dog on the other. Consequently the influences of each of these constellations reach to all cultivated lands, inasmuch as these are the only points at which the centres of the sun and earth correspond. Consequently if on the dates of these constellations the atmosphere is clear and mild and transmits this genial milky juice to the lands of the earth, the crops grow luxuriantly; but if the moon scatters a dewy cold after the manner previously described, the admixture of bitterness, like sourness in milk, kills off the infant offspring. The measure of this injury in various countries is that occasioned in each part of earth's convex surface by the combination of each of these two causes, and so it is not perceived simultaneously in the whole of the world, as daybreak is not either. We have said that the Eagle rises in Italy on December 20, and Nature's system does not permit any of the crops sown to be of certain promise before that day; but if the moon happens then to be in conjunction, all the winter and early spring produce is bound to suffer damage.

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§ 18.69.3  The life of men in early times was rude and illiterate; but nevertheless it will be found that mere observation was not less ingenious among them than theory is now. There were three seasons which they had to fear for their crops, and on this account they instituted the holidays and festivals of Robigalia, Floralia and Vinaha. Numa in the eleventh year of his reign established the Feast of Robigalia, which is 710-672 B.C. now kept on April 25, because that is about the time when the crops are liable to be attacked by mildew. Varro has given this date as fixed by the sun occupying the tenth degree of the Bull, as theory then stated; but the true explanation is that on one or other (according to the latitude of the various observers) of the four days from the twenty-ninth day after the spring equinox to April 28 the Dog sets, a constellation of violent influence in itself and the setting of which is also of necessity preceded by the setting of the Little Dog. So the same people in 238 BC in obedience to the Sibyl's oracles, instituted the Floralia on April 23, in order that all vegetation might shed its blossom favourably. This day is dated by Varro at the sun's entering the 14th degree of the Bull; consequently if full moon falls within these four days, the crops and all the vegetation then in flower will inevitably suffer injury. The First Vinaliaf established in former days on April 23 for tasting the wines, has no reference to the fruits of the earth, nor yet have the festivals so far mentioned to the vines and olives, because their sprouting begins at the rise of the Pleiades, on May 10, as we have explained. This is another four-day period in which it is desirable that the fields may not be fouled by dew — for the cold constellation of Arcturus, setting the next day, nips them — and much more is it desirable that a full moon may not come at this period. On June 2 the Eagle for a second time rises in the evening, and this is a critical day for olives and vines in blossom if a full moon coincides with it. For my own part I am also inclined to consider that June 24, the solstice, is in a similar case, and also the rising of the Dog 23 days after the solstice, though only if the moon's conjunction falls then, as harm is done by the extreme heat and the young grapes are ripened prematurely into a hard knob. Again, harm is done by a full moon on July 4, when the Little Dog rises for Egypt, or at all events on July 17 when it rises for Italy, and similarly between July 20, when the Eagle sets, and July 23. The festival of the Second Vinalia, kept on August 19, has no connexion with these influences. Varro fixes it at the time when the Lyre is beginning to set in the morning, which he holds to be the beginning of autumn and a holiday established for propitiating the weather; but at the present day observation shows that the Lyre sets on August 8.

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§ 18.69.4  Within these periods falls the sterilizing influence of the heavens, though I would not deny the possibility that it is liable to alteration by local climatic conditions, whether cold or hot. But it is enough for us to have demonstrated the principle, leaving the details to be ascertained by individual observation; at all events it will not be doubted that one or other of two things, full moon or the moon's conjunction, is responsible. And in this matter admiration for Nature's benevolence suggests itself, as to the fact that, in the first place, because of the fixed courses of the stars this disaster cannot possibly happen every year, and only on a few nights in the year, and that its occurrence is easy to forecast, and that, in order to prevent its being apprehended through all the months, it has also been foreseen by the law that governs the stars; that the moon's conjunctions are safe in summer except for a period of two days, and a. full moon safe in winter and only formidable in summer and when the nights are shortest, but they have not the same potency by day; moreover that this is so easily understood that that tiny creature the ant, at the moon's conjunction keeps quite quiet, but at full moon works busily even in the nights; that the bird called the parra disappears on the very day when Sirius rises, and remains concealed till it sets, while the oriole, on the contrary, comes out exactly on midsummer day; but that neither phase of the moon is harmful even at night except in fine weather and when there is not a breath of wind, because dews do not fall when it is cloudy or a wind is blowing, and even so there are remedies available.

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§ 18.70.1  When you have occasion for alarm, make bonfires about the vineyards and fields of trimmings or heaps of chaff and weeds and bushes that have been rooted up, and the smoke will act as a cure for them; smoke from chaff is also helpful against fogs, in places where fogs do damage. Some people advise burning three crabs alive among the trees to prevent the vines being injured by coal-blight, others roasting the flesh of a sheat-fish in a slow fire to windward, so that the smoke may spread all through the vineyard. Varro gives the information that a vineyard suffers less damage from storms if, at the setting of the Lyre, which marks the beginning of autumn, a picture of a bunch of grapes is placed among the vines as a votive offering. Archibius in his letter to Antiochus, king of Syria, says that if a toad is buried in a new earthenware jar in the middle of a cornfield, the crop will not be damaged by storms.

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§ 18.71.1  The following arc the rural operations belonging to this interval: to turn up the ground again, to dig round the trees, or to bank them up where a hot locality calls for it — except in a very rich soil crops just budding must not be dug — to clean seed-plots with the hoe, to harvest barley, to prepare the threshing-floor for the harvest, in Cato's opinion by dressing it with olive-lees, and in Virgil's with chalk, a more laborious method. But for the most part people only level it and smear it with a rather weak solution of cow-dung; this appears to be enough to prevent dust.

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§ 18.72.1  There are various methods of actually getting in the harvest. On the vast estates in the provinces of Gaul very large frames fitted with teeth at the edge and carried on two wheels are driven through the corn by a team of oxen pushing from behind; the ears thus torn off fall into the frame. Elsewhere the stalks are cut through with a sickle and the ear is stripped off between two pitchforks. In some places the stalks are cut off at the root, in others they are plucked up with the root; and those who use the latter method explain that in the course of it they get the land broken, although really they are drawing the goodness out of it. There are also these differences: where they thatch the houses with straw, they keep it as long as possible, but where there is a shortage of hay, they require chaff for litter. Straw of Italian millet is not used for thatch; common millet stalks are usually burnt on the ground; barley stalks are kept as extremely acceptable to oxen. The Gallic provinces gather both millets ear by ear, with a comb held in the hand.

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§ 18.72.2  The ear itself when reaped in some places is beaten out with threshing-sledges on a threshing-floor, in others by being trodden on by mares, and in other places it is thrashed out with flails. Wheat is found to give a larger yield the later it is reaped, but to be of finer quality and stronger the earlier it is reaped. The most obvious rule is to reap it 'before the grain hardens and when it has begun to gain colour', but there is an oracular utterance, 'Better to do your reaping two days too soon than two days too late.' Common and bare wheats require the same method on the threshing-floor and in the granary. Emmer being difficult to thresh is best stored with its chaff, and only has the straw and the beard removed. The majority of countries use chaff for hay; the thinner and finer it is and the nearer to dust, the better, and consequently the best chaff is obtained from millet, the next best from barley, and the worst from wheat, except for beasts that are being worked hard. In rocky places they leave straw to dry and then break it up with a flail, to use it as litter for cattle, but if there is a shortage of chaff the straw also is ground for fodder. The method is as follows: it is cut rather early, and sprinkled with strong brine and then dried and rolled up into trusses, and so fed to oxen instead of hay. Some people also set fire to the stubble in the field, a process advertised by the high authority of Virgil; their chief reason however for this plan is to burn up the seed of weeds. The size of the crops and scarcity of labour cause various procedures to be adopted.

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§ 18.73.1  A connected subject is the method of storing corn. Some people recommend building elaborate granaries with brick walls a yard thick, and moreover filling them from above and not letting them admit draughts of air or have any windows; others say they should only have windows facing north-east or north, and that they should be built without lime, as lime is very injurious to corn: the recommendations made with regard to the dregs of olive-oil have been pointed out above. In other places, on the contrary, they build their granaries of wood and supported on pillars, preferring to let the air blow through them from all sides, and even from below. Others think the grain shrinks in bulk if laid on a floor entirely off the ground, and that if it lies under a tile roof it gets hot. Many moreover forbid turning over the grain to air it, as the weevil does not penetrate more than four inches down, and beyond that the grain is in no danger. Columella also advises a west wind when corn is harvested, at which I for my part am surprised, as generally it is a very dry wind. Some people tell us to hang up a toad by one of its longer legs at the threshold of the barn before carrying the corn into it. To us storing the corn at the proper time will seem most important, as if it is got in when insufficiently ripened and firm, or stored while hot, pests are certain to breed in it.

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§ 18.73.2  There are several causes that make grain keep: they are found either in the husk of the grain when this forms several coats, as with millet, or in the richness of the juice, which may be enough to supply moisture, as with gingelly, or in bitter flavour, as with lupine and chickling vetch. It is specially in wheat that grubs breed, because its density makes it get hot and the grain becomes covered with thick bran. Barley chaff is thinner, and also that of the leguminous plants is scanty, and consequently these do not breed grubs. A bean is covered with thicker coats, and this makes it ferment. Some people sprinkle the wheat itself with dregs of olive oil to make it keep better, eight gallons to a thousand pecks; others use chalk from Chalcis or Caria for this purpose, or even wormwood. There is also an earth found at Olynthus and at Cerinthus in Euboea which prevents grain from rotting; also if stored in the ear corn hardly ever suffers injury. The most paying method however of keeping grain is in holes, called ciri, as is done in Cappadocia and Thrace, and in Spain and Africa; and before all things care is taken to make them in dry soil and then to floor them with chaff; moreover the corn is stored in this way in the ear. If no air is allowed to penetrate, it is certain that no pests will breed in the grain. Varro states that wheat so stored lasts fifty years, but millet a hundred, and that beans and leguminous grain, if put away in oil jars with a covering of ashes, keep a long time. He also records that beans stored in a cavern in Ambracia lasted from the period of King Pyrrhus to Pompey the Great's war with the pirates, a period of about 220 years. Chick-pea is the only grain which does not breed any grubs when kept in barns. Some people pile leguminous seed in heaps on to jars containing vinegar, placed on a bed of ashes and coated with pitch, believing that this prevents pests from breeding in them, or else they put them in casks that have held salted fish and coat them over with plaster; and there are others who sprinkle lentils with vinegar mixed with silphium, and when they are dry give them a dressing of oil. But the speediest precaution is to gather anything you want to save from pests at the moon's conjunction. So it makes a very great difference who wants to store the crop or who to put it on the market, because grain increases in bulk when the moon is waxing.

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§ 18.74.1  Next in accordance with the division of the seasons comes autumn, from the setting of the Lyre to the equinox and then the setting of the Pleiades and the beginning of winter. In these periods important stages are marked by the Horse rising in the region of Attica and the Dolphin setting for Egypt and by Caesar's reckoning on the evening of August 12. On August 22 the constellation called the Vintager begins to rise at dawn for Caesar and for Assyria., announcing the proper time for the vintage; an indication of this will be the change of colour in the grapes. On August 28 the Arrow sets for Assyria and also the seasonal winds cease to blow. On September 5 the Vintager rises for Egypt, and in the morning Arcturus for Attica, and the Arrow sets at dawn. On September 9, according to Caesar, the She-goat rises in the evening, while half of Arcturus becomes visible on September 12, indicating very unsettled weather on land and at sea for five days. The account given of this is that if there has been rain while the Dolphin was setting it will not rain while Arcturus is visible. The departure of the swallows may be noted as the sign of the rise of that constellation, since if they are overtaken by it they are killed off. On September 16 the Ear of Corn held by the Virgin rises for Egypt in the morning and the seasonal winds cease; this also appears for Caesar on September 15 and for Assyria on September 19; and on September 21 for Caesar the knot in the Fishes setting and the Equinoctial Constellation itself on September 24. Then there is general agreement, which is a rare occurrence, between Philippus, Callippus, Dositheus, Parmeniscus, Conon, Crito, Democritus and Eudoxus, that the She-goat rises in the morning of September 28 and the Kids on September 29. On October 2 the Crown rises for Attica at dawn, and the Charioteer sets for Asia and for Caesar in the morning of October 3. On October 4 the Crown begins to rise for Caesar, and in the evening of the next day the Kids set. On October 8 for Caesar the bright star in the Crown rises, and in the evening of October 10 the Pleiades; and on October 15 the whole of the Crown. In the evening of October 16 the Little Pigs rise. At daybreak on October 31 for Caesar Arcturus sets and the Little Pigs rise. In the evening of November 2 Arcturus sets. On November 9 Orion's Sword begins to set; and then on November 11 the Pleiades set.

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§ 18.74.2  The agricultural operations that come in these periods of time include sowing turnip and navew, on the days that we have stated. It is commonly thought by country people that it is a mistake to sow turnip after the departure of the stork; our own view however is that it should be sown in any case after the Feast of Vulcan, and the early kind when Italian millet is sown, but that the time for vetch and calavance and plants for fodder is after the setting of the Lyre; it is recommended that this should take place when the moon is silent. This is also the time for getting ready a store of leaves; to collect four leaf-baskets full is a fair day's work for one woodman. If they are stored when the moon is on the wane they do not decay; but they ought not to be dry when collected.

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§ 18.74.3  In old days the vines were never thought to be ripe for the vintage before the equinox, but nowadays I notice they are commonly pulled at any time; consequently we must also specify the times for this by their signs and indications. The rules are as follows: 'Do not pick a bunch of grapes when they are warm' — that is during unbroken dry weather, with no rain in between; 'Do not pick a bunch of grapes if wet with dew', that is if there has been dew in the night, and not before it has been dispelled by the sun. 'Begin the vintage when the grape-shoot begins to droop down to the stem, or when after a grape has been removed from a cluster it has been clearly noticed that the gap does not fill up and that the grapes are no longer getting bigger.' It is a very great advantage for the vintage to coincide with a crescent moon. One pressing ought to fill twenty wine-skins: that is a fair basis. A single wine press is enough for twenty wine-skins and vats to serve twenty acres of vineyard. Some press the grapes with a single press-beam, but it pays better to use a pair, however large the single beams may be. It is length that matters in the case of the beams, not thickness; but those of ample width press better. In old days people used to drag down the press-beams with ropes and leather straps, and by means of levers: but within the last hundred years the Greek pattern of press has been invented, with the grooves of the upright beam running spirally, some makers fitting the tree with a star, but with others the tree raises with it boxes of stones, an arrangement which is very highly approved. Within the last twenty years a plan has been invented to use small presses and a smaller pressing-shed, with a shorter upright beam running straight down into the middle, and to press down the drums placed on top of the grape-skins with the whole weight and to pile a heap of stones above the presses. This is also the time for gathering fruit; one should watch when any falls off owing to ripeness and not because of windy weather. This is also the season for pressing out the lees of wine and for boiling down grape-juice, on a night when there is no moon, or, if done in the daytime, it should be at full moon, or on any other days either before the moon rises or after it sets; and the grapes should not be obtained from a young vine nor from one growing on marshy ground; and only a ripe bunch should be used. It is thought that if wood is brought in contact with the vessel, the liquor gets a burnt and smoky flavour. The proper time for the vintage is the period of 41 days from the equinox to the setting of the Pleiades; we meet with a wise saying of growers who hold that from that day onward it is no good at all to tar a cold wine-butt. Still, before now I have seen vintagers at work even on the first of January owing to shortage of vats, and must being stored in tanks, or last year's wine being poured out of the casks to make room for new wine of doubtful quality. This is not so often due to an overabundant crop as to slackness, or else to avarice lying in wait for a rise in prices. The public-spirited method of an honest head of a household is to use the output of each year as it comes; and this is also quite equally the most profitable plan. As for the other matters relating to wines enough has been said already, and also it has been stated that as soon as the vintage is done the olives must at once be picked; and we have given the facts concerning olive-growing and the operations that must be done after the setting of the Pleiades.

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§ 18.75.1  To these statements we will add what is necessary about the moon and winds and about weather forecasts, so as to complete our account of astronomic considerations. Virgil following the statement paraded by Democritus has even thought proper to assign particular operations to numbered days of the moon, but our own motive, in this section also of our work as in the whole of it, is the practical value of general rules.

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§ 18.75.2  All cutting, gathering and trimming is done with less injury to the trees and plants when the moon is waning than when it is waxing. Manure must not be touched except when the moon is waning, but manuring should chiefly be done at new moon or at half moon. Geld hogs, steers, rams and kids when the moon is waning. Put eggs under the hen at the new moon. Make ditches at full moon, in the night-time. Bank up the roots of trees at full moon. In damp land sow seed at the new moon and in the four. days round that time. They also recommend giving corn and leguminous grains an airing and storing them away towards the end of the moon, making seed-plots when the moon is above the horizon, and treading out grapes when it is below it, as well as felling timber and the other operations which we have specified in their proper places. Nor is the observation of the moon specially easy, and we have already spoken of it in Volume 2; but to give what even countrymen may be able to understand: whenever the moon is seen at sunset and in the earlier hours of the night, she will be waxing and will appear to be cut in half, but when she rises at sunset opposite the sun, so that sun and moon are visible at the same time, then it will be full moon. When she rises with the sunrise and withholds her light in the earlier hours of the night and prolongs it into daytime, she will be waning and will again show only half; but when she has ceased to be visible she is in conjunction, the period designated 'between moons'. During the conjunction she will be above the horizon as long as the sun is and during the whole of the first day, on the second day ten and a quarter twelfths of an hour of the night, and then on the third day and on to the 15th with the same fractions of an hour added in progression. On the 15th day she will be above the horizon all night and also below it all day. On the 16th she will remain below the horizon ten and a quarter twelfths of the first hour of the night, and she will go on adding the same fraction of an hour every day in succession until the period of conjunction, and will add from the daytime to the last parts of the night above the horizon as much as she subtracts from its first parts when below the earth. She will complete thirty revolutions in alternate months but subtract one from that number every alternate month. This will be the theory of the course of the moon; that of the winds is somewhat more intricate.

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§ 18.76.1  After observing the position of sunrise on any given day, let people stand at midday so as to have the point of sunrise at their left shoulder: then they will have the south directly in front of them and the north directly behind them; a path running through a field in this way will be called a cardinal line. It is better then to turn round, so as to be able to see your own shadow, which will otherwise be behind you. So, having interchanged your flanks, so as to have the sunrise of that day at your right shoulder and the sunset at your left, it will be midday when your shadow directly in front of you becomes smallest. Through the middle of the length of this shadow you will have to draw a furrow with a hoe or make a line with ashes let us say 20 ft. long, and at the centre of this line, that is 10 ft. from each end, to draw a small circle, which may be called the umbilicus or navel. The part of the line towards the head of the shadow will be in the direction of the north wind. You who prune trees, do not let the cut ends of them face in that direction, nor should trees carrying vines or vines themselves do so except in the province of Africa, in the Cyrenaica and in Egypt; when the wind is in that quarter, do not plough or perform any of the other operations we shall mention. The part of the line towards the feet of the shadow, facing south, will indicate the south wind, the Greek name of which is as we said Notus: when the wind comes from that quarter, husbandman, do not deal with timber or the vine. For Italy this is a damp wind or else extremely hot, — indeed for Africa it brings fiery heat together with fine weather. In Italy bearing branches should face in this direction, but not the pruned branches of trees or vines; and this wind in the four days of the Pleiades is to be dreaded for the olive, and avoided for their slips by the grafter or for their buds by those engaged in budding. It may be suitable to give some warnings as to the times of day in this region. Woodman, do not prune foliage at midday. Shepherd, when you perceive noon to be approaching as the shadow contracts, drive your flocks out of the sun into a shady place. When you are pasturing your flocks in summer, let them face west in the forenoon and east in the afternoon; otherwise it is harmful, as it is in winter and spring to lead them out into pasture wet with dew [and it has been said above that you must not let them feed facing north], as they go lame, and get blear-eyed from the wind, and die of looseness of the bowels. You must make the ewes face this wind when they are being covered, if you want them to have ewe lambs.

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§ 18.77.1  We have said that the umbilicus must be drawn at the middle of the line. Let another line run transversely through the middle of the umbilicus; this line will run due east and west, and a path that cuts across the land on this line will be called the 'decuman'. Then two other lines must be drawn obliquely to form an X, so as to run down from the right and left of the northern point to the left and right of the southern point. All these lines must run through the same umbilicus, and they must all be equal and the spaces between all of them must be equal. This system will have to be worked out once in each plot of land, or, if you mean to employ it frequently, a wooden model of it may be made consisting of rods of equal length fitted into a small but circular drum. Under the method I am explaining help must be afforded to the understanding even of persons unacquainted with the subject: the rule is to examine the position of the sun at noon, as that is always the same, whereas the sunrise is at a different point in the sky every day from where it was yesterday, so nobody must suppose that the right plan is to take a line on sunrise.

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§ 18.77.2  Having thus worked out a part of the heavens, the end of the line next to north on the east side of it will give the point of sunrise at the summer solstice, that is on the longest day, and the position of the north-east wind, the Greek name for which is Boreas. You should plant trees and vines facing this point; but beware of ploughing or sowing corn or scattering seed when this wind is blowing, for it nips and chills the roots of trees that you will bring to plant. Be taught in advance: some conditions are good for strong full-grown trees and others for saplings. (Nor have I forgotten that the Greeks place in this quarter the wind they call Caecias; but Aristotle, a man of immense acuteness, who took that very view, also gives the earth's convexity as the reason why the north-east wind blows in the opposite direction to the African wind.) And nevertheless the farmer need not fear a north-east wind all the year round in the operations mentioned above; at midsummer it is softened by the sun, and changes its name — it is called Etesias. Consequently be on your guard when you feel the wind cold, and when a north-easter is forecast, as it does so much more damage than a wind due north. North-east is the direction in which the trees and vines should face in Asia, Greece, Spain, the coastal parts of Italy, Campania and Apulia. Breeders who desire to get male stock should pasture their flocks exposed to this wind, so that it may thus fecundate the sire when coupling. The African wind, the Greek name for which is Libs, will blow from the south-west, directly opposite to Aquilo; when animals after coupling turn towards this quarter, you may be sure that they have got females.

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§ 18.77.3  The third line from the north, which we have drawn transversely to the shadow and have called the decuman, will have the sunrise at the equinoxes and the Subsolanus wind, called by the Greeks as a result of the movement and flux of the air. But there are four main kinds:
Eurus, Apheliotes. This is the proper aspect for farm-houses and vineyards in healthy localities. This wind itself brings gentle rains; still Favonius, the wind in the opposite quarter, blowing from the equinoctial sunset, the Greek name for which is Zephyrus, is gentler and drier. This is the direction in which Cato recommended that olive-yards should face; this wind inaugurates the spring, and opens up the land, having a healthy touch of cold, and it will give the right time for pruning vines, tending crops, planting trees. grafting fruit-trees and treating olives; and its breeze will have a nutritive effect. The fourth line from the north, lying nearest the south on the eastern side, will have the sunrise at midwinter and the wind Volturnus, the Greek name for which is Eurus, which itself also is rather dry and warm; this is the proper aspect for beehives and for vineyards in Italy, and the provinces of Gaul. Directly opposite to Volturnus will blow Corus, from the point of sunset at midsummer, on the sunset side of north, its Greek name being Argestes; it also is one of the coldest winds, as are all those blowing from the north; it also brings hailstorms, and is quite as much to be avoided as the north wind. If Volturnus begins to blow from a clear part of the sky, it will not last till night, whereas Subsolanus goes on for the greater part of the night. Whatever the wind is, if it is felt to be hot it will last for several days. The earth suddenly drying up foretells a north-east wind, and if it becomes damp from no visible fall of moisture, a south wind.

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§ 18.78.1  The theory of the winds having now in fact been set out, in order to avoid repetition it is the best plan to pass on to the remaining means of forecasting the weather, since I see that this subject also appealed greatly to Virgil, inasmuch as he records that even in harvest time the winds often engage in battles that are ruinous to inexpert farmers. It is recorded that Democritus above mentioned when his brother Damasus was reaping his harvest, in extremely hot weather besought him to leave the rest of the crop and make haste to get what he had already cut under cover, his prophecy being confirmed a few hours later by a fierce storm of rain. Moreover it is also recommended only to plant reeds when rain is impending and to sow corn when a shower is about to follow. We therefore briefly touch on these subjects also, examining the most relevant facts, and we will take first weather forecasts derived from the sun.

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§ 18.78.2  A clear sunrise without burning heat announces a fine day, but a pale sunrise promises a wintry day with hail. If there was also a fine sunset the day before, the promise of fine weather is all the more reliable. If the sun rises in a vault of clouds it foretells rain, and likewise when the clouds are red before it rises it foretells wind, or if black clouds also mingle with the red, rain as well; when the rays of the rising or setting sun seem to coalesce, that means rain. If the setting sun is surrounded by red clouds, these guarantee fine weather the next day; but if at sunrise the clouds are scattered some to the south and some to the north, although the sky round the sun may be fine and clear, they will nevertheless indicate rain and winds, while if when the sun is rising or setting its rays appear shortened, that will be a sign of rain. If at sunset it rains or the sun's rays attract cloud towards them, they will denote stormy weather for the following day. When at sunrise the rays do not shoot out with great brilliance, although the sun is not surrounded by clouds, they will portend rain. If before sunrise clouds form in masses, they will foretell rough stormy weather, but if they are driven away from the east and go away westward, fine weather. If clouds form a ring round the sun, the less light they leave the more stormy will be the weather, but if even a double ring of cloud is formed, the storm will be all the more violent; and if this occurs at sunrise or sunset, so that the clouds turn red, that will be a sign of a very bad storm indeed. If the clouds do not surround the sun but hang over it they will presage wind in the quarter they come from, and if they arc from the south, rain as well. If the rising sun is surrounded with a ring, wind is to be expected in any quarter in which the ring breaks; but if the whole of it slips away equally, it will give flue weather. If the sun when rising stretches out its rays a long way through the clouds and the middle of its disk is free of cloud, it will be a sign of rain; if the sun's rays become visible before it rises this will mean rain and wind; if the setting sun has a white ring round it, it means a slight storm in the night; if mist, a more violent storm; if the sun when so surrounded is bright, wind; if the ring is very dark, there will be a strong wind in the quarter in which the ring breaks.

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§ 18.79.1  The prognostics of the moon must rightfully come next. Egypt pays most attention to the moon's fourth day. It is believed that if she rises bright and shines with clear brilliance, she portends fine weather, if red, wind, if dark, rain, for the next fortnight. The moon's horns being blunted are always a sign of rain, and when they shoot up threateningly, of wind, but particularly on the fourth day of the moon. If the upper horn points stiffly north it presages a north wind, if the lower horn a south wind; if both horns are upright, a windy night. If the moon on her fourth night is surrounded by a bright ring, this will be a warning of both wind and rain. Varro writes as follows: If on the fourth day of the moon her horns are upright, this will presage a great storm at sea, unless she has a circlet round her, and that circlet unblemished, since that is the way in which she shows that there will not be stormy weather before full moon. If the moon at full has half of her disk clear, this will be a sign of fine weather, but if it is red, that will mean wind, and if darkish, rain. If the moon is enclosed in mist or in a circle of clouds, it will signify wind in the quarter in which the circle breaks; if she is surrounded by two rings, it will mean stormier weather, and the more so if there are three rings or if the rings are dark, broken and torn apart. If the new moon at her birth rises with her upper horn blacked out, she will bring rain when she wanes, but if it is the lower horn, before she is full, and if the blackness is at her centre, she will bring rain at full moon. If when full she has a circle round her, it will denote wind in the quarter where the circle shines brightest, and if at her rising the horns are thicker, it will denote a terrible storm. If when there is a west wind blowing the moon does not make an appearance before her fourth day, she will be accompanied by wintry weather for the whole month. If on her sixteenth day she has a more violently flaming appearance, this will presage violent storms.

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§ 18.79.2  There are also eight periodic points of the moon herself, corresponding to her angles of incidence with the sun, and most observers only notice the moon's prognostics between those points; they are the 3rd, 7th, 11th, 15th, 19th, 23rd and 27th days of the moon, and the day of her conjunction.

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§ 18.80.1  In the third place must come the observation of the stars. These are sometimes seen to move to and fro, and this is immediately followed by wind in the quarter in which they have given this presage. When at the periodic points that we have set out the whole sky is equally brilliant, it will afford a fine and cold autumn. If spring and summer do not pass without a chilly period, they will cause a fine and misty autumn, with less wind. Fine weather in autumn makes a windy winter. When the brightness of the stars becomes suddenly obscured, and that not by cloud or mist, rain or heavy storms are threatened. If several shooting stars are seen, they will announce winds from the quarters in the direction of which they travel, making a white track, steady winds if the stars twinkle, but if this occurs in several parts of the sky, shifting winds and blowing from all quarters. If one of the planets is enclosed by a circle, it means rain. In the constellation of the Crab there are two small stars called the Little Asses, with a small gap between them containing a little nebula called the Manger; when this nebula ceases to be visible in fine weather, a fierce storm follows; but if the northern one of the two stars is obscured by mist, there is a southerly gale, and if the southern one, a gale from the north. A double rainbow foretells rain, or coming after rain, fine weather, but this is not so certain; a ring of clouds round certain stars is a sign of rain.

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§ 18.81.1  A thunderstorm in summer with more violent thunder than lightning foretells wind in that quarter, but one with less thunder than lightning is a sign of rain. If there are flickers of lightning and claps of thunder in a clear sky, there will be stormy weather, but this will be extremely severe when it lightens from all four quarters of the sky; lightning in the north-east only will portend rain for the next day, and lightning in the north a north wind. Lightning on a fine night in the south, west or north-west will indicate wind and rain from the same quarters. Thunder in the morning signifies wind, and thunder at midday rain.

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§ 18.82.1  When clouds sweep over the sky in fine weather, wind is to be expected in whichever quarter the clouds come from. If they mass together in the same place and when the sun approaches are scattered, and if this takes place from a northern direction, they will portend winds, but if from a southern, rain. If when the sun is setting clouds rise into the sky on either side of the sun, they will signify stormy weather; if they are more lowering in the east they threaten rain for the night, but if in the west, rain the next day. If a number of clouds spread like fleeces of wool in the east, they will presage rain lasting three days. When clouds settle down on the tops of the mountains, the weather will be stormy; but if the tops become clear, it will turn fine. When there is heavy white cloud, a hailstorm, a 'white storm' as it is called, will be imminent. A patch of cloud however small seen in a fine sky will give a storm of wind.

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§ 18.83.1  Mists coming down from the mountains or falling from the sky or settling in the valleys will promise fine weather.

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§ 18.84.1  Next after these, signs are given by fires on the earth. When they are pallid and crackling they are perceived as messengers of storms; also it is a sign of rain if fungus forms in lamps, and if the flame is spiral and flickering. When the lights go out of themselves or are hard to light, they announce wind; and so do sparks piling up on the top of a copper pot hanging over the fire, or live coal sticking to saucepans when you take them off the fire, or if when the fire is banked up it sends out a scattering of ashes or emits a spark, or if cinders on the hearth cake together and if a coal fire glows with extreme brilliance.

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§ 18.85.1  Water also gives signs. If when the sea is calm the water in a harbour sways about or makes a splashing noise of its own, it foretells wind, and if it does so in winter, rain as well; if the coasts and shores re-echo during a calm, they foretell a severe storm, as also do noises from the sea itself in a calm, or scattered flakes of foam, or bubbles on the water. Jellyfish on the surface of the sea portend several days' storm. Often also the sea swells in silence, and blown up in unusually high waves confesses that the winds are now inside it.

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§ 18.86.1  And predictions are also given by in certain sounds occurring in the mountains and by moanings of the forests and leaves rustling without any breeze being perceptible; and by the down off poplars and thorns fluttering, and feathers floating on the surface of water, and also in bells a peculiar ringing sound foretelling a storm about to come.

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§ 18.87.1  Presages are also given by animals: for instance dolphins sporting in a calm sea prophesy wind from the quarter from which they come, and likewise when splashing the water in a billowy sea they also presage calm weather. A cuttlefish fluttering out of the water, shell-fish adhering to objects, and sea-urchins making themselves fast or ballasting themselves with sand are signs of a storm; so also frogs croaking more than usual, and coots making a chattering in the morning, and likewise divers and ducks cleaning their feathers with their beak are a sign of wind, and the other water-birds flocking together, cranes hastening inland, and divers and seagulls forsaking the sea or the marshes. Cranes flying high aloft in silence foretell fine weather, and so also does the night-owl when it screeches during a shower, but it prophesies a storm if it screeches in fine weather, and so do crows croaking with a sort of gurgle and shaking themselves, if the sound is continuous, but if they swallow it down in gulps, this foretells gusty rain. Jays returning late from feeding foretell stormy weather, and so do the white birds when they collect in flocks, and land birds when they clamour while facing a piece of water and sprinkle themselves, but especially a rook; a swallow skimming along so close to the water that she repeatedly strikes it with her wing; and birds that live in trees going to cover in their nests; and geese when they make a continuous clamouring at an unusual time; and a heron moping in the middle of the sands.

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§ 18.88.1  Nor is it surprising that aquatic birds or birds in general perceive signs of coming changes of atmosphere; sheep skipping and sporting with unseemly gambols have the same prognostications, and oxen sniffing the sky and licking themselves against the way of the hair, and nasty swine tearing up bundles of hay that are not meant for them, and bees keeping in hiding idly and against their usual habit of industry, or ants hurrying to and fro or carrying forward their eggs, and likewise earthworms emerging from their holes.

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§ 18.89.1  It is also a well-ascertained fact that trefoil bristles and raises its leaves against an approaching storm.

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§ 18.90.1  Moreover when we are at table during our meals vessels into which food is put foretell dreadful storms by leaving a smudge on the sideboard.

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§ 19.1.1  AN account of the constellations, seasons and weather has now been given that is easy even for non-experts to understand does not leave any room for doubt; and for those who really understand the matter the countryside contributes to our knowledge of the heavens no less than astronomy contributes to agriculture. Many writers have made horticulture the next subject; we however do not think the time has come to pass straight to those topics, and we are surprised that some persons seeking from these subjects the satisfaction of knowledge, or a reputation for learning, have passed over so many matters without making any mention of all the plants that grow of their own accord or from cultivation, especially in view of the fact that even greater importance attaches to very many of these, in point of price and of practical utility, than to the cereals. And to begin with admitted utilities and with commodities distributed not only throughout all lands but also over the seas: flax is a plant that is grown from seed and that cannot be included either among cereals or among garden plants; but in what department of life shall we not meet with it, or what is more marvellous than the fact that there is a plant which brings Egypt so close to Italy that of two governors of Egypt Galerius reached Alexandria from the Straits of Messina in seven days and Balbillus in six, and that in the summer [AD 55] 15 years later the praetorian senator Valerius Marianus made Alexandria from Pozzuoli in nine days with a very gentle breeze? or that there is a plant that brings Cadiz within seven days' sail from the Straits of Gibraltar to Ostia, and Hither Spain within four days, and the Province of Narbonne within three, and Africa within two? The last record was made by Gaius Flavius, deputy of the proconsul Vibius Crispus, even with a very gentle wind blowing. How audacious is life and how full of wickedness, for a plant to be grown for the purpose of catching the winds and the storms, and for us not to be satisfied with being borne on by the waves alone, nay that by this time we are not even satisfied with sails that are larger than ships, but, although single trees are scarcely enough for the size of the yardarms that carry the sails, nevertheless other sails are added above the yards and others besides are spread at the bows and others at the sterns, and so many methods are employed of challenging death, and finally that out of so small a seed springs a means of carrying the whole world to and fro, a plant with so slender a stalk and rising to such a small height from the ground, and that this, not after being woven into a tissue by means of its natural strength but when broken and crushed and reduced by force to the softness of wool, afterwards by this ill-treatment attains to the highest pitch of daring! No execration is adequate for an inventor in navigation (whom we mentioned above in the proper place), who was not content that mankind should die upon land unless he also perished where no burial awaits him. Why, in the preceding Book we were giving a warning to beware of storms of rain and wind for the sake of the crops and of our food: and behold man's hand is engaged in growing and likewise his wits in weaving an object which when at sea is only eager for the winds to blow! And besides, to let us know how the Poenas (spirits of retribution) have favoured us, there is no plant that is grown more easily; and to show us that it is sown against the will of Nature, it scorches the land and causes the soil actually to deteriorate in quality.

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§ 19.2.1  Flax is chiefly grown in sandy soils, and with a single ploughing. No other plant grows more quickly: it is sown in spring and plucked in summer, and owing to this also it does damage to the land. Nevertheless, one might forgive Egypt for growing it to enable her to import the merchandise of Arabia and India. Really? And are the Gallic provinces also assessed on such revenue as this? And is it not enough that they have the mountains separating them from the sea, and that on the side of the ocean they are bounded by an actual vacuum, as the term is? The Cadurci, Caleti, Ruteni, Bituriges, and the Morini who are believed to be the remotest of mankind, in fact the whole of the Gallic provinces, weave sailcloth, and indeed by this time so do even our enemies across the Rhine, and linen is the showiest dress-material known to their womankind. This reminds us of the fact recorded by Varro that it is a clan-custom in the family of the Serrani for the women not to wear linen dresses. In Germany the women carry on this manufacture in caves dug underground; and similarly also in the Alia district of Italy between the Po and the Ticinus, where the linen wins the prize as the third best in Europe, that of Saetabis being first, as the second prize is won by the linens of Retovium near the Alia district and Faventia on the Aemilian Road. The Faventia linens are preferred for whiteness to those of Alia, which are always unbleached, but those of Retovium are supremely fine in texture and substance and are as white as the Faventia, but have no nap, which quality counts in their favour with some people but puts off others. This flax makes a tough thread having a quality almost more uniform than that of a spider's web, and giving a twang when you choose to test it with your teeth; consequently it is twice the price of the other kinds.

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§ 19.2.2  And after these it is Hither Spain that has a linen of special lustre, due to the outstanding quality of a stream that washes the city of Tarragon, in the waters of which it is dressed; also its fineness is marvellous, Tarragon being the place where cambrics were first invented. From the same province of Spain Zoela flax has recently been imported into Italy, a flax specially useful for hunting-nets; Zoela is a city of Gallaecia near the Atlantic coast. The flax of Cumae in Campania also has a reputation of its own for nets for fishing and fowling, and it is also used as a material for making hunting-nets: in fact we use flax to lay no less insidious snares for the whole of the animal kingdom than for ourselves! But the Cumae nets will cut the bristles of a boar and even turn the edge of a steel knife; and we have seen before now netting of such fine texture that it could be passed through a man's ring, with running tackle and all, a single person carrying an amount of net sufficient to encircle a wood! Nor is this the most remarkable thing about it, but the fact that each string of these nettings consists of 150 threads, as recently made for Fulvius Lupus who died in the office of governor of Egypt. This may surprise people who do not know that in a breastplate that belonged to a former king of Egypt named Amasis, preserved in the temple of Minerva at Lindus on the island of Rhodes, each thread consisted of 365 separate threads, a fact which Mucianus, who held the consulship three times quite lately, stated that he had proved to be true by investigation, adding that only small remnants of the breastplate now survive owing to the damage done by persons examining this quality. Italy also values the Pelignian flax as well, but only in its employment by fullers — no flax is more brilliantly white or more closely resembles wool; and similarly the flax grown at Cahors has a special reputation for mattresses: this use of it is an invention of the provinces of Gaul, as likewise is flock. As for Italy, the custom even now survives in the word used for bedding. Egyptian flax is not at all strong, but it sells at a very good price. There are four kinds in that country, Tanitic, Pelusiac, Butic and Tentyritic, named from the districts where they grow. The upper part of Egypt, lying in the direction of Arabia, grows a bush which some people call cotton, but more often it is called by a Greek work meaning 'wood': hence the name xylina given to linens made of it. It is a small shrub, and from it hangs a fruit resembling a bearded nut, with an inner silky fibre from the down of which thread is spun. No kinds of thread are more brilliantly white or make a smoother fabric than this. Garments made of it are very popular with the priests of Egypt. A fourth kind is called othoninum; it is made from a sort of reed growing in marshes, but only from its tuft. Asia makes a thread out of broom, of which specially durable fishing-nets are made, the plant being soaked in water for ten days; the Ethiopians and Indians make thread from apples, and the Arabians from gourds that grow on trees, as we said.

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§ 19.3.1  With us the ripeness of flax is ascertained by two indications, the swelling of the seed or its assuming a yellowish colour. It is then plucked up and tied together in little bundles each about the size of a handful, hung up in the sun to dry for one day with the roots turned upward, and then for five more days with the heads of the bundles turned inward towards each other so that the seed may fall into the middle. Linseed makes a potent medicine; it is also popular in a rustic porridge with an extremely sweet taste, made in Italy north of the Po, but now for a long time only used for sacrifices. When the wheat-harvest is over the actual stalks of the flax are plunged in water that has been left to get warm in the sun, and a weight is put on them to press them down, as flax floats very readily. The outer coat becoming looser is a sign that they are completely soaked, and they are again dried in the sun, turned head downwards as before, and afterwards when thoroughly dry they are pounded on a stone with a tow-hammer. The part that was nearest the skin is called oakum — it is flax of an inferior quality, and mostly more fit for lamp-wicks; nevertheless this too is combed with iron spikes until all the outer skin is scraped off. The pith has several grades of whiteness and softness, and the discarded skin is useful for heating ovens and furnaces. There is an art of combing out and separating flax: it is a fair amount for fifteen ... to be carried out from fifty pounds' weight of bundles; and spinning flax is a respectable occupation even for men. Then it is polished in the thread a second time, after being soaked in water and repeatedly beaten out against a stone, and it is woven into a fabric and then again beaten with clubs, as it is always better for rough treatment.

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§ 19.4.1  Also a linen has now been invented that is incombustible, it is called 'live' linen, and I have seen napkins made of it glowing on the hearth at banquets and burnt more brilliantly clean by the fire than they could be by being washed in water. This linen is used for making shrouds for royalty which keep the ashes of the corpse separate from the rest of the pyre. The plants grows in the deserts and sun-scorched regions of India where no rain falls, the haunts of deadly snakes, and it is habituated to living in burning heat; it is rarely found, and is difficult to weave into cloth because of its shortness; its colour is normally red but turns white by the action of fire. When any of it is found, it rivals the prices of exceptionally fine pearls. The Greek name for it is asbestinon, derived from its peculiar property. Anaxilaus states that if this linen is wrapped round a tree it can be felled without the blows being heard, as it deadens their sound. Consequently this kind of linen holds the highest rank in the whole of the world. The next place belongs to a fabric made of fine flax grown in the neighbourhood of Elis in Achaia, and chiefly used for women's finery; I find that it formerly changed hands at the price of gold, four denarii for one twenty-fourth of an ounce. The nap of linen cloths, principally that obtained from the sails of seagoing ships, is much used as a medicine, and its ash has the efficacy of metal dross. Among the poppies also there is a kind from which an outstanding material for bleaching linen is extracted.

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§ 19.5.1  An attempt has been made to dye even linen so as to adapt it for our mad extravagance in clothes. This was first done in the fleets of Alexander the Great when he was voyaging on the river Indus, his generals and captains having held a sort of competition even in the various colours of the ensigns of their ships; and the river banks gazed in astonishment as the breeze filled out the bunting with its shifting hues. Cleopatra had a purple sail when she came with Mark Antony to Actium, and with the same sail she fled. A purple sail was subsequently the distinguishing mark of the emperor's ship.

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§ 19.6.1  Linen cloths were used in the theatres as awnings, a plan first invented by Quintus Catulus when dedicating the Capitol. Next Lentulus Spinther is recorded to have been the first to stretch awnings of cambric in the theatre, at the games of Apollo. Soon afterwards Caesar when dictator stretched awnings [49-44 B.C.]. over the whole of the Roman Forum, as well as the Sacred Way from his mansion, and the slope right up to the Capitol, a display recorded to have been thought more wonderful even than the show of gladiators which he gave. Next even when there was no display of games Marcellus the son of Augustus's sister Octavia, during his period of office as aedile, in the eleventh consulship of his uncle, from the first of August onward fixed awnings of sailcloth over the Forum, so that those engaged in lawsuits might resort there under healthier conditions: what a change this was from the stern manners of Cato the ex-censor, who had expressed the view that even the forum ought to be paved with sharp pointed stones! Recently awnings actually of sky blue and spangled with stars have been stretched with ropes even in the emperor Nero's amphitheatres. Red awnings are used in the inner courts of houses and keep the sun off the moss growing there; but for other purposes white has remained persistently in favour. Moreover as early as the Trojan War linen already held a place of honour — for why should it not be present even in battles as it is in shipwrecks? Homer testifies that warriors, though only a few, fought in linen corslets. This material was also used for rigging ships, according to the same author as interpreted by the more learned scholars, who say that the word sparta used by Homer means 'sown'.

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§ 19.7.1  As a matter of fact the employment of esparto began many generations later, and not before the first invasion of Spain by the Carthaginians. Esparto also is a plant, which is self-sown and cannot be grown from seed; strictly it is a rush, belonging to a dry soil, and all the blame for it attaches to the earth, for it is a curse of the land, and nothing else can be brown or can spring up there. In Africa it makes a small growth and is of no use. In the Cartagena section of Hither Spain, and not the whole of this but as far as this plant grows, even the mountains are covered with esparto grass. Country people there use it for bedding, for fuel and torches, for footwear and for shepherd's clothes; but it is unwholesome fodder for animals, except the tender growth at the tops. For other purposes it is pulled out of the ground, a laborious task for which gaiters are worn on the legs and the hands are wrapped in woven gauntlets, and levers of bone or holm-oak are used; nowadays the work goes on nearly into winter, but it is done most easily between the middle of May and the middle of June, which is the season when the plant ripens.

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§ 19.8.1  When it has been plucked it is tied up in bundles in a heap for two days and on the third day untied and spread out in the sun and dried, and then it is done up in bundles again and put away under cover indoors. Afterwards it is laid to soak, preferably in sea water, but flesh water also will do if sea water is not available; and then it is dried in the sun and again moistened. If need for it suddenly becomes pressing, it is soaked in warm water in a tub and put to dry standing up, thus securing a saving of labour. After that it is pounded to make it serviceable, and it is of unrivalled utility, especially for use in water and in the sea, though on dry land they prefer ropes made of hemp; but esparto is actually nourished by being plunged in water, as if in compensation for the thirstiness of its origin. Its quality is indeed easily repaired, and however old a length of it may be it can be combined again with a new piece. Nevertheless one who wishes to understand the value of this marvellous plant must realize how much it is employed in all countries for the rigging of ships, for mechanical appliances used in building, and for other requirements of life. A sufficient quantity to serve all these purposes will be found to exist in a district on the coast of Cartagena that extends less than 100 miles along the shore and is less than 30 miles wide. The cost of carriage prohibits its being transported any considerable distance.

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§ 19.9.1  We may take it on the evidence of the Greek word for a rush that the Greeks used to employ that plant for making ropes; though it is well known that afterwards they used the leaves of palm trees and the inner bark of lime trees. It is extremely probable that the Carthaginians imported the use of esparto grass from Greece.

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§ 19.10.1  Theophrastus states that there is a kind of bulb growing in the neighbourhood of river banks, which contains a woolly substance (between the outer skin and the edible part) that is used as a material for making felt slippers and certain articles of dress; but he does not state, at all events in the copies of his work that have come into my hands, either the region in which this manufacture goes on or any particulars in regard to it beyond the fact that the plant is called 'wool-bearing'; nor does he make any mention at all of esparto grass, although he has given an extremely careful account of all plants at a date 390 years before our time (as we have also said already in another place); which shows that esparto grass came into use after that date.

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§ 19.11.1  And now that we have made a beginning in treating of the marvels of nature, we shall proceed to take them in order, by far the greatest among them being that a plant should spring up and live without having any root. The growths referred to are called truffles; they are enveloped all round with earth and are not strengthened by any fibres or at least filaments, nor yet does the place they grow in show any protuberance or undergo cracks; and they themselves do not stick to the earth, and are actually enclosed in a skin, so that while we cannot say downright that they consist of earth, we cannot call them anything but a callosity of the earth. They usually grow in dry and sandy soils and in places covered with shrubs. They often exceed the size of a quince, even weighing as much as a pound. They are of two kinds, one gritty in texture and unkind to the teeth, and the other devoid of impurities; they also differ in their colour, which is red or black, and the inside is white. The African variety is the most highly spoken of. I do not think it can be easily ascertained whether they grow in size, or whether this blemish of the earth — for they cannot be understood as anything else — forms at once a ball of the size that it is going to be; nor whether they are alive or not, for they decay in the same way as wood does. We know for a fact that when Lartius Licinius, an official of praetorian rank, was serving as Minister of Justice at Cartagena in Spain a few years ago, he happened when biting a truffle to come on a denarius contained inside it, which bent his front teeth; this will clearly show that truffles are lumps of earthy substance balled together. One thing that is certain is that truffles will be found to belong to the class of things that spring up spontaneously and cannot be grown from seed.

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§ 19.12.1  There is also a similar plant the name of which in the province of Cyrene is which has a remarkably sweet scent and flavour, but is more fleshy than the truffle; and one in Thrace called iton, and one in Greece, ceraunion or 'thunder-truffle'.

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§ 19.13.1  Peculiarities reported about truffles are that they spring up when there have been spells of rain in autumn and repeated thunderstorms, and that thunderstorms bring them out particularly; that they do not last beyond a year; and that those in spring are the most delicate to eat. In some places acceptable truffles only grow in marshy places, for instance at Mytilene it is said that they only grow on ground flooded by the rivers, when the floods have brought down seed from Tiara: that is the place where most grow. The most famous Asiatic truffles grow round Lampsacus and Alopeconnesus, and the most famous Greek ones in the district of Elis.

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§ 19.14.1  The fungus class also includes those called by the Greeks pezicae, which grow without root or stalk.

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§ 19.15.1  Next after these we will speak about laser-wort, a remarkably important plant, the Greek name for which is silphium; it was originally found in the province of Cyrenaica. Its juice is called laser, and it takes an important place in general use and among drugs, and is sold for its weight in silver denarii. It has not been found in that country now for many years, because the tax-farmers who rent the pasturage strip it clean by grazing sheep on it, realizing that they make more profit in that way. Only a single stalk has been found there within our memory, which was sent to the Emperor Nero. If a grazing flock ever chances to come on a promising young shoot, this is detected by the indication that a sheep after eating it at once goes to sleep and a goat has a fit of sneezing. And for a long time now no laser-wort has been imported to us except what grows in Persia or Media and Armenia, in abundant quantity but much inferior quality to that of Cyrenaica, and even so adulterated with gum, sacopenium, or with crushed beans; this makes it even more necessary for us not to omit to state the facts that in the consulship of Gaius Valerius and Marcus Herennius, 30 pounds of laser-wort plant was imported to Rome by the government, and that during the dictatorship of Caesar, at the beginning of the civil war he produced out of the treasury together with gold and silver 1500 lbs. of laser-wort plant.

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§ 19.15.2  We find it stated in the most reliable authors of Greece that this plant first sprang up in the vicinity of the Gardens of the Hesperids and the Greater Syrtis after the ground had been suddenly soaked by a shower of rain the colour of pitch, seven years before the foundation of the town of Cyrenae, which was in the year of our city 143; that the effect of this rainfall extended over 500 miles of Africa; and that the laser-wort plant grew widely in that country as an obstinate weed, and if cultivated, escaped into the desert; and that it has a large thick root and a stalk like that of fennel and equally thick. The leaves of this plant used to be called maspetunt; they closely resembled parsley, and the seed was like a leaf, the actual leaf being shed off in spring. It used to be customary to pasture cattle on it; it first acted as a purgative, and then the beasts grew fat and produced meat of a marvellously agreeable quality. After the plant had shed its leaves the people themselves used to eat the actual stalk, cooked in all sorts of ways, boiled and roasted; with them also it operated as a purge for the first six weeks. The juice used to be obtained in two ways, from the root and from the stalk, and the two corresponding names for it were rizias and caulias, the latter inferior to the former and liable to go bad. The root had a black rind. The juice itself was adulterated for trade purposes by being put into vessels with a mixture of bran added and then shaken up till it was brought into ripe condition; without this treatment it went bad. A proof of its being ripe was its colour and dryness, the damp juice having completely disappeared. Other accounts say that the plant had a root more than 18 inches long, and that at all events there was an excrescence on it protruding above the surface of the ground; that when an incision was made in this, a juice resembling milk would flow out; and that there was a stalk growing above the excrescence which they called magydaris; that the plant had leaves of a golden colour which served as seed, being shed after the rise of the Dog-star when a south wind was blowing, and that out of these fallen leaves shoots of laser-wort used to spring, both root and stalk making full growth in the space of a year. These authors also stated that it was customary to dig round the roots of the plant; and that it did not act as a purge with cattle, but if they were ailing it cured them, or else they died at once, the latter not happening in many cases. The former view corresponds with the Persian variety of silphium.

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§ 19.16.1  There is another kind of laser-wort called magydaris, which is gentler and less violent in its effects, and has no juice; this grows in the neighbourhood of Syria, not being found in the Cyrenaica region. Also there is a plant growing in great abundance on Mount Parnassus that is called laser-wort plant by some persons. All these varieties are used for adulteration, bringing discredit on a very salutary and useful commodity. The first test of the genuine article is in the colour, which is reddish, and white inside when the mass is broken; and the next test is if the juice that drips out is transparent and melts very quickly in saliva. It is employed as an ingredient in a great many medicaments.

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§ 19.17.1  There are also two kinds that are known only to the avaricious herd, as they are very profitable articles of trade. First comes madder, which is indispensable for dyeing woollens and leather; the most highly esteemed is the Italian, and especially that grown in the neighbourhood of Rome, and almost all the provinces teem with it. It grows of itself, but a variety that resembles fitch, but has prickly leaves and stalk, is also grown from seed. This plant has a jointed stem, with five leaves arranged in a circle round each joint. The seed is red and finally turns black, and the root red. Its medicinal properties we shall state in their proper place.

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§ 19.18.1  But the plant called the rootlet has a juice that is only used for washing woollens, contributing in a remarkable degree to their whiteness and softness. It can he grown anywhere under cultivation, but an outstanding self-sown variety occurs in Asia and Syria, on rocky and rugged ground, though the most highly esteemed grows beyond the Euphrates. Its stalk being slender resembles fennel; and it is much sought after by the natives to supply articles of food or perfumes, according to the ingredients with which it is boiled down. It has the leaf of an olive. The Greek name of this plant is 'little sparrow'. It flowers in summer, and the blossom is pretty to look at but has no scent. It is a thorny plant, with a stalk covered with down. It has no seed, but a large root, which is cut up for the purpose mentioned.

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§ 19.19.1  It remains to return from these plants to the cultivation of gardens, a subject recommended to our notice both by its own intrinsic nature and by the fact that antiquity gave its highest admiration to the garden of the Hesperids and of the kings Adonis and Alcinous, and also to hanging gardens, whether those constructed by Semiramis or by Syrus King of Assyria, about whose work we shall speak in another volume. The kings of Rome indeed cultivated their gardens with their own hands; in fact it was from his garden that even Tarquin the Proud sent that cruel and bloodthirsty message to his son. In our Laws of the Twelve Tables the word 'farm' never occurs — the word 'garden' is always used in that sense, while a garden is denoted by 'family estate'. Consequently even a certain sense of sanctity attached to a garden, and only in a garden and in the Forum do we see statues of Satyrs dedicated as a charm against the sorcery of the envious, although Plautus speaks of gardens as being under the guardianship of Venus. Nowadays indeed under the name of gardens people possess the luxury of regular farms and country houses actually within the city. This practice was first introduced at Athens by that connoisseur of luxurious ease, Epicurus; down to his day the custom had not existed of having country dwellings in towns.

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§ 19.19.2  At Rome at all events a garden was in itself a poor man's farm; the lower classes got their market-supplies from a garden — how much more harmless their fare was then! It gives more satisfaction, forsooth, to dive into the depth of the sea and seek for the various sorts of oysters at the cost of a shipwreck, and to fetch birds from beyond the river Rion, birds which not even legendary terrors can protect — in fact these actually make them more prized! or to go fowling for other birds in Numidia and among the tombs of Ethiopia, or to fight with wild beasts, and, in hunting for game for someone else to devour, to be devoured oneself! But I protest, how little does garden produce cost, how adequate it is for pleasure and for plenty, did we not meet with the same scandal in this as in everything else! We could no doubt have tolerated that choice fruits forbidden to the poor because of their flavour or their size or their portentous shape should be grown, that wines should be kept to mature with age and robbed of their virility by being passed through strainers, and that nobody should live so long as not to be able to drink vintages older than himself, and that luxury should also have long ago devised for itself a malted porridge made from the crops and should live only on the marrow of the grain, as well as on the elaborations and modellings of the bakers' shops — one kind of bread for my lords and another for the common herd, the yearly produce graded in so many classes right down to the lowest of the lout: but have distinctions been discovered even in herbs, and has wealth established grades even in articles of food that sell for a single copper? The ordinary public declares that even among vegetables some kinds are grown that are not for them, even a kale being fattened up to such a size that there is not room for it on a poor man's table. Nature had made asparagus to grow wild, for anybody to gather at random; but lo and behold! now we see a cultivated variety, and Ravenna produces heads weighing three to a pound. Alas for the monstrosities of gluttony! It would surprise us if cattle were not allowed to feed on thistles, but thistles are forbidden to the lower orders! Even the water-supply is divided into classes, and the power of money has made distinctions in the very elements. Some people drink snow, others ice, and turn what is the curse of mountain regions into pleasure for their appetite. Coolness is stored up against the hot weather, and plans are devised to keep snow cold for the months that are strangers to it. Other people first boil their water and then bring even that to a winter temperature. Assuredly mankind wants nothing to be as nature likes to have it. Shall even a particular kind of plant be reared to serve only the rich man's table? Can nobody have been warned by the Sacred Mount or the Aventine Hill, and the secessions of the angry Commons? Doubtless the provision-market will level up persons whom money divides into classes. And so, I vow, no impost at Rome bulked larger than the market dues in the outcry of the common people, who denounced them before all the chiefs of state until the tax on this commodity was remitted, and it was discovered that there was no method of rating that was more productive or safer and less governed by chance as this payment is trusted to the poorest, the surety is in the soil, and the revenues lie in open daylight, just as does the surface of their land, rejoicing in the sky whatever be its aspect.

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§ 19.19.3  Cato sings the praises of garden cabbages; people in old days used to estimate farmers by their garden-produce and thus at once to give a verdict that there was a bad mistress in the house where the garden outside, which used to be called the woman's responsibility, was neglected, as it meant having to depend on the butcher or the market for victuals. Nor did people approve very highly of vegetables as they do now, since they condemned delicacies that require another delicacy to help them down. This meant economizing oil, since it was actually counted as a reproach to need a rich sauce. Those products of the garden were most in favour which needed no fire for cooking and saved fuel, and which were a resource in store and always ready; whence their name of salads, easy to digest and not calculated to overload the senses with food, and least adapted to stimulate the appetite. The fact that one set of herbs is devoted to seasoning shows that it used to be customary to do one's borrowing at home, and that there was no demand for Indian pepper and the luxuries that we import from overseas. Indeed the lower classes in the city used to give their eyes a daily view of country scenes by means of imitation gardens in their windows, before the time when atrocious burglaries in countless numbers compelled them to bar out all the view with shutters. Therefore let vegetables also have their need of honour and do not let things be robbed of respect by the fact of their being common, especially as we see that vegetables have supplied even the names of great families, and a branch of the Valerian family were not ashamed to bear the surname Lettuce. Moreover some gratitude may attach to our labour and research on the ground that Virgil also confessed how difficult it is to provide such small matters with dignified appellations.

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§ 19.20.1  There is no doubt that it is proper to have gardens adjoining the farm-house, and that they should be irrigated preferably by a river flowing past them, if it so happens, or if not, be supplied with water from a well by means of a wheel or windmills, or ladled up by swing-beams. The soil should be broken up in preparation for autumn a fortnight after the west wind sets in, and gone over again before midwinter. It will take eight men to dig over an acre of land, mix dung with the soil to a depth of three feet, mark it out in plots and border these with sloping rounded banks, and surround each plot with a furrowed path to afford access for a man and a channel for irrigation.

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§ 19.21.1  Some plants growing in gardens are valued for their bulb, others for their head, others for their stalk, others for their leaf, others for both, others for their seed, others for their cartilage, others for their flesh, or for both, others for their husk or skin and cartilage, others for their fleshy outer coats.

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§ 19.22.1  Some plants produce their fruits in the earth, others outside as well, others only outside. Some grow lying on the ground, for instance gourds and cucumbers; these also grow in a hanging position, though they are much heavier even than fruits that grow on trees, but the cucumber is composed of cartilage and flesh and the gourd of rind and cartilage; the gourd is the only fruit whose rind when ripe changes into a woody substance. Radishes, navews and turnips are hidden in the earth, and so in a different way are elecampane, skirret and parsnips. Some plants we shall call of the fennel class, for instance dill and mallow; for authorities report that in Arabia mallows grow into trees in seven months, and serve as walking-sticks. There is an instance of a mallow-tree on the estuary of the town of Lixus in Mauretania, the place where the Gardens of the Hesperids are said to have been situated; it grows 200 yards from the ocean, near a shrine of Hercules which is said to be older than the one at Cadiz; the tree itself is 20 ft. high, and so large round that nobody could span it with his arms. Hemp will also be placed in a similar class. Moreover there are also some plants to which we shall give the name of 'fleshy', for instance the spongy plants that grow in water-meadows. As to the tough flesh of funguses, we have mentioned it already in treating the nature of timber and of trees, and in the ease of another class, that of truffles, a short time ago.

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§ 19.23.1  Belonging to the class of cartilaginous plants and growing on the surface of the ground is the cucumber, a delicacy for which the emperor Tiberius had a remarkable partiality; in fact there was never a day on which he was not supplied with it, as his kitchen-gardeners had cucumber beds mounted on wheels which they moved out into the sun and then on wintry days withdrew under the cover of frames glazed with transparent stone. Moreover it is actually stated in the writings of early Greek authors that cucumber seed should be soaked for two days in milk mixed with honey before it is sown, in order to make the cucumbers sweeter. They grow in any shape they are forced to take; in Italy green ones of the smallest possible size are popular, but the provinces like the largest ones possible, and of the colour of wax or else dark. African cucumbers are the most prolific, and those of Moesia the largest. When they are exceptionally big they are called pumpkins. Cucumbers when swallowed remain in the stomach till the next day and cannot be digested with the rest of one's food, but nevertheless they are not extremely unwholesome. They have by nature a remarkable repugnance for oil, and an equal fondness for water; even when they have been cut from the stem, they creep towards water a moderate distance away, but on the contrary they retreat from oil, or if something is in their way or if they are hanging up, they grow curved and twisted. This may be observed to take place even in a single night, because if a vessel with water is put underneath them they descend towards it a hand's breadth before the next morning, but if oil is similarly near they will be found curved into crooked shapes. Also if their flower is passed down into a tube they grow to a remarkable length. Curious to say, just recently a new form of cucumber has been produced in Campania, shaped like a quince. I am told that first one grew in this shape by accident, and that later a variety was established grown from seed obtained from this one; it is called apple-pumpkin. Cucumbers of this kind do not hang from the plant but grow of a round shape lying on the ground; they have a golden colour. A remarkable thing about them, beside their shape, colour and smell, is that when they have ripened, although they are not hanging down they at once separate from the stalk. Columella gives a plan of his own for getting a supply of cucumbers all the year round — to transplant the largest blackberry bush available to a warm, sunny place, and about the spring equinox to cut it back, leaving a stump two inches long; and then to insert a cucumber seed in the pith of the bramble and bank up fine earth and manure round the roots, so that they may withstand the cold. The Greeks have produced three kinds of cucumbers, the Spartan, the Sevtalic and the Boeotian; of these it is said that only the Spartan variety is fond of water. Some people tell us to steep cucumber seed in the plant called cidia pounded up before sowing it, which will produce a cucumber having no seed.

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§ 19.24.1  The gourd is also of a similar nature, at all events in its manner of growing: it has an equal aversion for cold and is equally fond of water and manure. Both gourds and cucumbers are grown from seed sown in a hole dug in the ground eighteen inches deep, between the spring equinox and midsummer, but most suitably on the day of the Parilia. Some people however prefer to start sowing gourds on March 1 and cucumbers on March 7, and to go on through the Feast of Minerva. These two plants both climb upward with shoots creeping over the rough surface of walls right up to the roof, as their nature is very fond of height. They have not the strength to stand without supports, but they shoot up at a rapid pace, covering vaulted roofs and trellises with a light shade. Owing to this they fall into these two primary classes, the roof-gourd and the common gourd which grows on the ground; in the former class a remarkably thin stalk has hanging from it a heavy fruit which a breeze cannot move. The gourd as well as the cucumber is made to grow in all sorts of long shapes, mostly by means of sheathes of plaited wicker, in which it is enclosed after it has shed its blossom, and it grows in any shape it is compelled to take, usually in the form of a coiled serpent. But if allowed to hang free it has before now been seen three yards long. The cucumber makes blossoms one by one, one flowering on the top of the other, and it can do with rather dry situations; it is covered with white down, especially when it is growing.

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§ 19.24.2  There are a larger number of ways of using gourds. To begin with, the stalk is an article of food. The part after the stalk is of an entirely different nature; gourds have recently come to be used instead of jugs in bathrooms, and they have long been actually employed as jars for storing wine. The rind of gourd while it is green is thin, but all the same it is scraped off when they are served as food; and although it is healthy and agreeable in a variety of ways, it is nevertheless one of the rinds that cannot be digested by the human stomach, but swell up. The seeds that were nearest the neck of the plant produce long gourds, and so do those next to the bottom, though the gourds grown from them are not comparable with those mentioned above; the seeds in the middle grow into round gourds, and those at the sides into thick and shorter ones. The seeds are dried in the shade, and when they are wanted for sowing they are steeped in water. The longer and thinner gourds are, the more agreeable they are for food, and consequently those which have been left to grow hanging are more wholesome; and this kind contain fewest seeds, the hardness of which limits their agreeableness as an article of diet. Gourds kept for seed are not usually cut before winter; after cutting they are dried in smoke for storing seeds of garden plants — the farm's stock in store. A plan has been invented by which they are preserved for food also — and the same in the case of cucumbers — to last almost until the next crops are available. This method employs brine; but it is reported that gourds can also be kept green in a trench dug in a shady place and floored with sand and covered over with dry hay and then with earth. There are also wild varieties of both cucumbers and gourds, as is the case with almost all garden plants; but these also only possess medicinal properties, and therefore they will be deferred to the Books devoted to them.

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§ 19.25.1  The remaining plants of a cartilaginous nature are all hidden in the ground. Among these, we might appear to have already spoken amply about the turnip, were it not that medical men class the round plants in this group as being of the male sex and the more spread out and curved ones as female, the latter being superior in sweetness and easier to store; though after being repeatedly sown they turn into male plants. The same authorities have made four classes of navews, the Corinthian, Kleonaian, Liothasian and Boeotian, the last also called merely the green turnip. Of these the Corinthian turnip grows to a very large size, with its root almost bare, for only this kind grows upward, not down into the ground as the others do. The Liothasian kind is by some called Thracian navew; it stands cold extremely well. The Boeotian navew is sweet, and also is remarkable for its short round shape, not being elongated like the Kleonaian variety. In fact, generally speaking, navews the leaves of which are smooth also themselves have a sweeter taste, and those with rough and angular and bristly leaves are more bitter. There is also a wild kind the leaves of which resemble colewort. At Rome the prize is given to the turnips of Amiternum, and next to those of Nursia, and the third place to the local variety. The rest of the facts about growing navews have been stated in the passage dealing with turnips.

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§ 19.26.1  Radishes consist of an outer skin and a cartilage, and with many of them the skin is even thicker than the bark of some kinds of trees. They have an extremely pungent flavour, which varies in proportion to the thickness of the skin. The other parts as well are sometimes of a woody substance. They have a remarkable power of causing flatulence and eructation; consequently they are a vulgar article of diet, at all events if cabbage is eaten immediately after them, though if the radish itself is eaten with over-ripe olives, the eructation caused is less frequent and less offensive. In Egypt the radish is held in remarkable esteem because it produces oil, which they make from its seed. The people are very fond of sowing radish seed if opportunity offers, because they make more profit from it than from corn and have a smaller duty to pay on it, and because no plant there yields a larger supply of oil. The Greeks have made three kinds of radish, distinguished by difference of the leaves — the wrinkled a radish, the smooth radish and third the wild kind; though the last has smooth leaves, they are shorter and round, and numerous and bushy; the taste of this radish is however rough, and it acts like a drug with a purgative effect. Among the kinds mentioned before however there is also a difference arising from the seed, since some produce an inferior seed and some an extremely small one; but these defects only apply to the wrinkled-leaf variety. Our own people have made other classes — the Monte Compatri radish, named from its locality, a long and semi-transparent radish, and another shaped like a turnip which they call Syrian radish, about the sweetest and most tender of any, and exceptionally able to stand the winter. It appears however to have been imported from Syria only lately, since it is not found mentioned in the authorities; still, it lasts through the whole of the winter. There is also one wild variety, called by the Greeks cerais, in the Pontus country armor, or by other people leuce, and by our nation armoracia; this radish grows more leaves than root. But in testing the value of all kinds of radishes most attention is given to the stems, as those of a harsh flavour have stems that are rounded and thicker and grooved with long channels, and the leaves themselves are more crinkled and have prickly corners.

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§ 19.26.2  The radish likes to be sown in loose, damp soil. It dislikes dung and is content with a dressing of chaff; and it is so fond of cold that in Germany it grows as big as a baby child. Radish for the spring crop is sown after February 13, and the second sowing, which is a better crop, is about the Festival of Vulcan; but many also sow it in March and April and in September. When it begins to make growth, it pays to bank up every other leaf on each plant and to earth up the roots themselves, as a root that projects above the ground becomes hard and full of holes. Aristomachus advises stripping off the leaves during winter, and piling up earth round the plants to prevent muddy puddles forming round them; and he says that this will make them grow a good size in summer. Some authors have stated that if a hole is made by driving in a stake and covered at the bottom with chaff to a depth of six inches, and a seed is sown in it and dung and earth are heaped on it, a radish grows to the size of the hole. All the same they find saltish soils specially nourishing, and so they are even watered with salt water, and in Egypt, where they are remarkable for sweetness, they are sprinkled with soda. Also brackishness has the effect of entirely removing their pungency, and making them like radishes that have been boiled, inasmuch as boiling a radish sweetens it and turns it into something like a navew.

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§ 19.26.3  Medical men recommend giving raw radishes with salt for the purpose of concentrating the crude humours of the bowels, and they use this mixture to act as an emetic. They also say that radish juice is an essential specific for disease of the diaphragm, inasmuch as in Egypt, when the kings ordered post mortem dissections to be made for the purpose of research into the nature of diseases, it was discovered that this was the only dose that was capable of removing phtheiriasis attacking the internal parts of the heart. Also it is said that the radish was rated so far above all other articles of food that, such is the frivolity of the Greeks, in the temple of Apollo at Delphi, a radish modelled in gold was dedicated as a votive offering, though only a silver beetroot and a turnip of lead. You might be sure that Manius Curius was not a native of Delphi, the general who is recorded in our annals to have been found by the enemy's envoys roasting a turnip at the fire, when they came bringing the gold which he was going indignantly to refuse. Also the Greek author Moschion wrote a whole volume about the radish. Radishes are considered an extremely valuable article of food in winter time, though at the same time people think them to be always bad for the teeth, because they wear them down; at all events they can be used for polishing ivory. There is a great antipathy between radishes and vines, which shrink away from radishes planted near them.

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§ 19.27.1  The rest of the plants that we have placed in the cartilaginous class are of a woodier substance, and it is noticeable that they all have an extremely pungent taste. Among these there is one wild kind of parsnip that grows of its own accord, and another kind belonging to Greece that is grown from a root or from seed set at the beginning of spring or else in autumn, according to Hyginus, in February or in August or September or October, the ground having been dug over as deeply as possible. A root only a year old begins to be serviceable, but a two year old plant is more valuable; it is more agreeable in autumn, and especially for boiling in saucepans, and even so it has a pungency that cannot be got rid of. The marsh-mallow differs from the parsnip in being of a more slender shape; it is condemned as an article of diet, but is useful for medical purposes. There is also a fourth kind of plant that bears the same resemblance to a parsnip, which our people call the Gallic parsnip, but the Greeks, who have subdivided it also into four classes, call daucos; this will have to be mentioned among the medicinal plants.

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§ 19.28.1  The skirret also has been advertised by the emperor Tiberius's requisitioning an annual supply of it from Germany. There is a castle on the Rhine called Gelb where a specially fine kind of skirret grows, showing that cold localities suit it. It contains a core running through its whole length, which is drawn out when it has been boiled, though nevertheless a great part of its bitterness remains, which when it is used as a food is modified by adding wine sweetened with honey, and is actually turned into an attraction. The larger parsnip also contains a core of the same kind, though only when it is a year old. The time for sowing skirret is in the months of February, March, April, August, September and October.

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§ 19.29.1  Elecampane is shorter and more substantial than the roots described, and also more bitter; eaten by itself it disagrees violently with the stomach, but it is very wholesome when blended with sweet things. There are several ways of overcoming its acridity and rendering it agreeable: it is dried and pounded into flour and seasoned with some sweet juice, or it is boiled or kept in soak in vinegar and water, or steeped in various ways, and then mixed with boiled down grapejuice or flavoured with honey or raisins or juicy dates. Another method again is to flavour it with quinces or sorbs or plums, and occasionally with pepper or thyme, making it a tonic particularly salutary for a weak digestion; it has become specially stimulating from having been the daily diet of Julia the daughter of Augustus. Its seed is superfluous, as it is propagated like a reed, from eyes cut out of the root; it also, like the skirret and the parsnip, is planted at either season, spring or autumn, with large spaces left between the plants — for elecampane not less than a yard, because it throws out shoots over a wide space. Skirret is better transplanted.

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§ 19.30.1  Next after these in natural properties are the bulbs, which Cato particularly recommends for cultivation, specially praising the Megarian kind. But the most famous bulb is the squill, although it naturally serves as a drug and is used for increasing the sourness of vinegar; and no other bulb is of larger size, just as also no other has a more powerful pungency. There are two kinds used for medicine, the male squill with white leaves and the female squill with dark leaves; and there is also a third kind, agreeable as an article of diet, called Epimenides's squill — this has a narrower leaf with a less pungent taste. All produce a very large quantity of seed, though they come up more quickly if grown from the bulbs that shoot out round their sides; and to make them grow bigger, the leaves, which in this plant are of a large size, are bent down in a circle round them and covered with soil, so causing the heads to draw all the juice into themselves. They grow wild in very large quantities in the Balearic Islands and Iviza, and throughout the Spanish provinces. The philosopher Pythagoras wrote a whole book about them, including an account of their medicinal properties, which we shall record in the next volume. The remaining kinds of bulbs differ in colour and size and in flavour, some being eaten raw, for instance in the Crimea; next after these the ones that grow in Africa are most highly spoken of, and then those of Anulia. The Greeks have distinguished the following kinds — bolbine, setanion, opition, cyix, aegilops and sisyrinchion; the last possesses the remarkable property that its bottom roots grow in winter, but in the springtime, when the violet has appeared, these diminish while the actual bulb, on the other hand, afterwards begins to swell out. Among the varieties of bulb there is also the one that in Egypt they call the arum, which is very near to the squill in size and to the sorrel in foliage, with a straight stalk a yard long of the thickness of a walking-stick, and a root of softer substance, which can even be eaten raw. Bulbs are dug up before the beginning of spring, or else they at once go off in quality; it is a sign that they are ripe then the leaves become dry at the lower end. The rather green ones are disapproved of, as also are the long and the small ones, whereas those of a reddish colour and rounder shape are praised, as also are those of the largest size. Usually their top has a bitter taste and the middle parts are sweet. Previous writers have stated that bulbs only grow from seed, but as a matter of fact they spring up of themselves in the plains near Praeneste, and also in unlimited quantity in the country round Durocortorum.

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§ 19.31.1  Nearly all kitchen-garden plants have only a single root, for instance radish, beet, parsley mallow. Sorrel has the largest root, going as far as a yard and a half into the ground (the root of the wild sorrel is smaller), and its root is full of sap, and lives a long time even after being dug up. In some of these plants, however, for instance parsley and mallow, the root is fibrous, in some, for instance basil, woody, in others fleshy, as in beet or still more in saffron, and with some, for instance radish and turnip, the roots consist of rind and flesh, and the roots of some, for instance hay-grass, are jointed. Those which have not a straight root support themselves immediately with a great many hairy fibres, for instance orage and blite; but squill and the bulbs and onion and garlic only throw out straight roots. Some of the plants that grow self-sown have more root than leaf, for instance partridge-plant and crocus. Wild thyme, southernwood, turnips, radishes, mint and rue blossom all in a bunch. All other plants shed their blossom all at once as soon as they have begun to do so, but basil does so gradually, starting from the bottom, and consequently it flowers for a very long time. This also happens in the case of the heliotrope. Some plants have a white flower, others yellow and others purple. Wild marjoram and elecampane shed their leaves from the top down, and so sometimes does rue when it has been damaged by an accident. The onion and the leek have especially hollow leaves.

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§ 19.32.1  In Egypt people swear by garlic and onions as deities in taking an oath. Among the Greeks the varieties of onion are the Sardinian, Samothracian, Alsidenian, setanian, the split onion, and the Ascalon onion, named from a town in Judea. In all these the body consists entirely of coats of greasy cartilage; also they all have a smell which makes one's eyes water, especially the Cyprus onions, but least of all those of Cnidos. The smallest of all except the Etruria onion is the setanian, though it has a sweet taste; but the split onion and the Ascalon onion need flavouring. The split onion is left with its leaves on in winter, these being pulled off in spring, and others grow in their place at the same divisions, from which these onions get their name. This has suggested the recommendation to strip the other kinds also of their leaves, so as to make them grow to heads rather than run to seed. Ascalon onions also have a peculiar nature, being in a manner sterile at the root, and consequently the Greeks have advised growing them from seed and not planting them, and moreover sowing them rather late, about springtime, but transplanting them when they are in bud; this method, they say, causes them to fill out and grow quickly, making up for the time lost. But in their case haste is necessary, because when ripe they quickly go rotten. If growls from roots they throw out a stalk and run to seed, and the bulb withers away. There is also a difference of colours, the whitest onions growing at Issus and at Sardis. Those of Crete are also esteemed, though the question is raised whether they are identical with the Ascalon variety, because when grown from seed they make large heads but run to stalk and seed when planted; they only differ from the Ascalon onions in their sweet flavour. In our country we have two principal varieties, one the kind of onion used for seasoning, the Greek name for which is getion-leek and the Latin 'pallaeana', which is sown in March, April or May, and the other the onion with a head, which is sown after the autumn equinox or when the west wind has begun to blow in the springtime. The varieties of the latter, in order of their degrees of pungency, are the African, the Gallic, and those of Tusculum, Ascalon and Amiternae. Those of the roundest shape are the best; also a red onion is more pungent than a white one, or a dry one than one still fresh, and a raw one than one that has been cooked, and also than one that has been kept in store. The Amitemum kind is grown in cold and damp places, and is the only one that grows with a head only, like garlic, all other varieties being grown from seed and next summer producing no seed but only a head which goes on growing in size; but in the following year just the contrary, seed is produced but the actual head goes rotten. Consequently every year there are two separate processes, seed being sown to produce onions and onions planted for seed. Onions keep best stored in chaff. The scallion has hardly any head at all, only a long neck, and consequently it all goes to leaf, and it is cut back several times, like common leek; consequently it also is grown from seed, not by planting. In addition, they recommend digging over the ground three times and weeding out the plant-roots before sowing onions; and using ten pounds of seed to the acre, with savoury mixed in, as the onions come up better; and moreover stubbing and hoeing the ground four times, if not more. Our farmers sow the Ascalon onion in February. The seed of onions is harvested when they begin to turn black, before they get dry.

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§ 19.33.1  It may also be suitable to mention the leek in this family of plants, especially as importance has recently been given to the chive by the emperor Nero, who on certain fixed days of every month always ate chives preserved in oil, and nothing else, not even bread, for the sake of his voice. It is grown from seed sown just after the autumnal equinox; if it is for the purpose of chives, it must be sown rather thickly. It goes on being cut in the same bed till it gives out; and if it is being grown to make heads it is always well manured before it is cut. When it is fully grown, it is moved to another bed, after having the points of the leaves above the central part carefully trimmed off and the tips of the coats drawn back from the heads. Growers in former times used to broaden out the heads by putting them under a stone or a potsherd, and the same with bulbs as well; but now the practice is gently to pull the roots loose with a hoe, so that being bent they may feed the plant and not draw it apart. It is a remarkable fact that although the leek likes manure and a rich soil, it hates damp places. Nevertheless there is a connexion between the varieties and some peculiarity of the soil: the most highly esteemed kind belongs to Egypt, and the next to Ostia and to La Iticcia. There are two kinds of chive; one with grass-green leaves, with distinct markings on them — this is the chive used by druggists — and another kind with leaves of a yellower colour and rounder in shape, on which the markings are less prominent. There is a story that a member of the Order of Knights named Mela, when recalled from a deputy-governorship by the emperor Tiberius to be impeached for maladministration, in extreme despair swallowed a dose of leek-juice weighing three denarii in silver, and immediately expired without suffering any pain. A larger dose is said to have no injurious effect.

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§ 19.34.1  Garlic is believed to be serviceable for making a number of medicaments, especially those used in the country. It is enveloped in very fine skins in entirely separate layers, and then consists of several kernels in a cluster, each of these also having a coat of its own; it has a pungent flavour, and the more kernels there were the more pungent it is. Garlic as well as onions gives an offensive smell to the breath, though when boiled it causes no smell. The difference between the various kinds consists in the time they take to ripen — the early kind ripens in 60 days — and also in their size. Ulpicum also comes in this class, the plant called by the Greeks Cyprian garlic, or by others antiscorodon; it holds a high rank among the dishes of the country people, particularly in Africa, and it is larger than garlic; when beaten up in oil and vinegar it swells up in foam to a surprising size. Some people say that ulpiciim and garlic must not be planted in level ground, and advise placing it in little mounds a yard apart like a chain of forts; there must be a space of four inches between the grains, and as soon as three leaves have broken out the plants must be hoed over: they grow larger the oftener they are hoed. When they begin to ripen, their stalks are pressed down into the earth and covered up: this prevents their making too lush foliage. In cold soils it pays better to plant in the spring than in autumn. Moreover with all of these plants, to prevent their having an objectionable smell, it is advised to plant them when the moon is below the horizon and to gather them when it is in conjunction. The Greek writer Menander states that people eating garlic without taking these precautions can neutralize the smell by eating after it a beetroot roasted on the hot coals. Some people think that the best time for planting both garlic and ulpicum is between the Feast of the Crossways and the Feast of Saturn. Garlic can also be grown from seed, but it is a slow process, as the head only makes the size of a leek in the first year and divides into cloves in the second year, making full growth in the third year; and some people think that this variety of garlic is a finer kind. It must not be allowed to run to seed, but the stalks must be twisted up for purposes of propagation, so that it may form a stronger head. But if garlic or onions are wanted to keep for some time, their heads should be soaked in warm salt water; that will make them last longer and will render them better for use, though barren in seeding. Others are content to begin by hanging them up over burning coal, and think that this expedient is quite sufficient to prevent their sprouting, which it is well known that garlic and onions do even when out of the ground, and after enlarging their small stalk they wither away. Also some people think that garlic keeps best when stored in chaff. There is also another garlic called alum that grows self-sown in the fields, which, after having been boiled to prevent its shooting up again, is scattered about as a protection against the ravages of birds that eat up the seeds, and the birds that swallow it at once become stupefied, and if you wait a little, go completely unconscious and can be caught by hand. There is also a wild kind called bear's garlic, with a similar smell, which has a very small head and large leaves.

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§ 19.35.1  Of kitchen-garden plants the quickest to grow are basil, blite, rape and rocket; these break out of the ground two days after they are sown. Dill comes up in 3 days, lettuce 4, radish 9, cucumber 5, gourd even 6 — cucumber is earlier — cress and mustard 4, summer beet 5, winter beet 9, orage 7, onions 13 or 19, long onion 9 or 11; coriander is more obstinate, and indeed cunila and wild marjoram do not come up before 30 days, but the most difficult of all is parsley, for it comes up in 39 days at the quickest, and in the majority of cases in 49 days. Something also depends on the age of the seed, as fresh seed comes up more quickly in the case of leek, long onion, cucumber and gourd, but parsley, beet, cress, cunila, wild marjoram and coriander grow more quickly from old seed. There is a curious thing about beet seed that the whole of it does not germinate in the same year but some only in the year following, and some even two years later; and consequently a quantity of seed only produces a moderate crop. Some plants only produce seed in the same year as they are planted, but some more often, for instance parsley, leek and long onion, as these when once sown retain their fertility and come up several years running.

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§ 19.36.1  The seeds of most plants are round, but those of some oblong; in a few they are foliated and broad, for instance orage, in some narrow and grooved, for instance cummin. They differ in colour as well, dark or lighter, and also in woody hardness. The seeds of radishes, mustard and turnip are contained in a pod; the seed of coriander, dill, fennel and curnxnin has no cover, that of blite, beet, orage and basil is covered with a skin, while that of lettuces is wrapped in down. No seed is more prolific than basil; they recommend sowing it with curses and imprecations. to make it come up more abundantly; when it. is sown the earth is rammed down. Also people sowing cummin pray for it not to come up. It is difficult for seeds contained in a pod to get dry, particularly basil, and consequently they are all dried artificially to make them fertile. In any case plants grow better when the seed is sown in heaps than when it is scattered; indeed it is on that principle that they sow leek and parsley tied up in strips of rag, and also before sowing parsley they make a hole with a dibble into which they put dung. All plants grow either from seed or from slips, or some both from seed and from cuttings, as rue, wild marjoram, basil — for people lop off the top of this plant too when it has reached the height of a palm; and some plants grow both from seed and from a root, as onion, garlic, bulbs, and the perennials the roots of which stay alive. But with plants that grow from a root the root lives a long time and throws out shoots, for instance bulbs, long onions and squills. Others make shrubby growth and without heads, for instance parsley and beet. When the stalk is cut back, nearly all plants except those which have not got a rough stem throw out fresh shoots, indeed basil, radish and lettuce put out new shoots that can be used; lettuce is thought to be even sweeter if grown from a fresh sprouting. Anyway radish is more agreeable when its leaves have been stripped off before it runs to stalk. The same is also true in the case of turnips, for they likewise if banked up with earth after the leaves have been pulled off go on growing and last into summer.

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§ 19.37.1  Basil, sorrel, spinach, cress, rocket, orage, coriander and dill are plants of which there is Set., only one kind, as they are the same in every locality and no better in one place than another. It is a common belief that rue which you have stolen grows better, just as stolen bees are believed to do very badly. Wild mint, cat-mint, endive and pennyroyal spring up even without being sown. On the other hand plants which we have mentioned and are going to mention have several varieties, and particularly parsley. The parsley that grows wild in damp places has a Greek name meaning marsh-parsley; it has a single leaf and is not of shaggy growth; again, the Greek name of another, a many-leaved parsley resembling marsh-parsley, but growing in dry places, is horse-parsley; a third kind is called mountain-parsley in Greek — it has the leaves of hemlock, a thin root, and seed like that of dill only smaller. Moreover cultivated parsley also has varieties in the leaf, which is bushy and crinkled or scantier and smoother, and also in the stalk, thinner or thicker, and in some plants the stalk is white, in others purple, in others mottled.

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§ 19.38.1  The Greeks have distinguished three kinds of lettuce, one with so broad a stalk that it is said that the wicket-gates of kitchen gardens are often made of them; these plants have leaves rather larger than those of the green garden-lettuce, and extremely narrow, the nutriment being apparently used up elsewhere; the second kind has a round stalk, and the third is a squat-growing plant, called the Spartan lettuce. Other people have classified lettuces by colour and season of sowing, saying that the black lettuce is the kind sown in January, the white in March and the red in April, and that all of these kinds can be transplanted at the end of two months. More precise authorities make a larger number of varieties, the purple, the crinkly, the Cappadocian, the Greek — the last with a smoother leaf and a broad stalk, and in addition the lettuce with a long and narrow leaf, which resembles endive; while the worst kind of all has been given the name in Greek of bitter lettuce, in condemnation of its bitter taste. There is moreover another variety of white lettuce the Greek name for which is poppy-lettuce, from its abundance of juice with a soporific property, although all the lettuces are believed to bring sleep; this was the only kind of lettuce in Italy in early times, which accounts for the Latin name for lettuce, derived from the Latin for milk. A purple lettuce with a very large root is called Caecilius's lettuce, while a round one with a very small root and broad leaves is called in Greek the anti-aphrodisiac, or otherwise the eunuch's lettuce, because this kind is an extremely potent check to amorous propensities. Indeed they all have a cooling quality, and consequently are acceptable in summer. They relieve the stomach of distaste for food and promote appetite. At all events it is stated that the late lamented Augustus in an illness, thanks to the sagacity of his doctor, Musa, was cured by lettuce, which had been refused him by the excessive scruples of his previous doctor, Gaius Aemilius; this was such a good advertisement for lettuces that the method was then discovered of keeping them into the months when they are out of season, pickled in honey-vinegar. It is also believed that lettuces increase the blood-supply.

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§ 19.38.2  There is also a variety called the goat-lettuce of which we shall speak among drugs; and only quite recently there has begun to be introduced among the cultivated lettuces a kind held in considerable esteem called the Cilician lettuce, which has the leaf of the Cappadocian kind, only crinkly and broader.

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§ 19.39.1  Endive cannot be said to belong either to the same class of plant as lettuce or to another class, being better able to endure the winter and having more acridity of flavour; but its stalk is equally agreeable. It is sown after the spring equinox, and the seedlings are bedded out at the end of the spring. There is also a wild endive called in Egypt succory, about which more will be said elsewhere. A method has been discovered of preserving all the stalks or leaves of lettuces by storing them in pots and boiling them in saucepans while fresh. Lettuces can be sown all the year round in favourable soil that is watered by streams and manured, with two months between sowing and bedding out and two between that and maturity. The regular plan, however, is to sow just after midwinter and to bed out when the west wind sets in, or else to sow then and bed out at the spring equinox. White lettuce stands the winter best. All garden plants are fond of moisture and manure, especially lettuce, and even more endive: indeed it pays to plant them with the roots smeared with dung and to loosen the ground round them and fill up with dung. Some use other means also of increasing their size, cutting them back when they have reached six inches high and giving them a dressing of fresh swine's dung. As for colour, it is thought that at all events lettuces grown from white seed can be blanched if as soon as they begin to grow sand from the sea-shore is heaped round them up to half their height and the leaves as they start sprouting are tied hack against the plants themselves.

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§ 19.40.1  Beet is the smoothest of the garden plants. The Greeks distinguish two kinds of beet also, according to the colour, black and whitish — they prefer the latter, which has a very scanty supply of seed, and call it Sicilian beet; indeed they prefer lettuce also with distinctive quality of whiteness. Our people distinguish two kinds of beet according to time of sowing, spring beet and autumn beet, although beet is also sown in June, and the plant transplanted in autumn. Beets also like even their roots to be smeared with dung, and have, a similar liking for a damp place. Beets are also made into a salad with lentils and beans, and are dressed in the same way as cabbages, the best way being to stimulate their insipidity with the bitterness of mustard. The doctors have pronounced beet to be more unwholesome than cabbage, on account of which there are persons who scruple even to taste beets when served at table; and consequently they are preferably an article of diet for people with strong digestions. Beets have a double structure, that of the cabbage, and, at the actual head of the root as it springs up, that of an onion. They are most valued for width, which is secured, as in lettuces, by placing a light weight on them when they have begun to assume their colour. No other garden plant grows broader: occasionally beets spread out to two feet across, the nature of the soil also contributing a great deal to this, inasmuch as the widest spreading beets grow in the territory of Circeii. Some people think that beets are best sown when the pomegranate is in blossom, and transplanted when they have begun to make five leaves; and that by a remarkable difference (if this really exists) white beet acts as a purge and black beet as an astringent; and that when the flavour of wine in a cask is getting spoiled by 'cabbage' it can be restored to what it was by plunging in some leaves of beet.

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§ 19.41.1  Cabbages and kales which now have pre-eminence in gardens, I do not find to have been held in honour among the Greeks; but Cato sings marvellous praises of the head of cabbage, which we shall repeat when we deal with medicine. He classifies cabbages as follows — a kind with the leaves wide open and a large stalk, another with a crinkly leaf, which is called celery-cabbage, and a third with, very small stalks; the last is a smooth and tender cabbage, and he puts it lowest in value. Cabbage is sown all the year round, since it is also cut all the year round, but it pays best to sow it at the autumnal equinox; and it is transplanted when it has made five leaves. In the next spring after its first sowing it yields sprout-cabbage; this is a sort of small sprout from the actual cabbage stalks, of a more delicate and tender quality, though it was despised by the fastidious taste of Apicius and owing to him by Drusus Caesar, not without reproof from his father Tiberius. After the sprout-cabbage from the same stalk we get summer and autumn sprouts, and then winter ones, and a second crop of sprout-cabbage, as no kind of plant is equally productive, until it gets exhausted by its own fertility. The second sowing begins at. the spring equinox, and the seedling is bedded out at the end of spring, so that it may not bear in the sprout-cabbage stage before making cabbage-head; the third is about midsummer, and the produce of this is bedded out during the summer if the place is rather damp and in autumn if it is drier. It has a more agreeable taste if it has not had much moisture or manure, but makes a more abundant growth if they have been plentiful. Ass's dung makes the most suitable manure for it.

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§ 19.41.2  Growing cabbages is also one of the ways of supplying table luxuries, so it will not be out of place to pursue the subject at greater length. A way to produce a kale of outstanding flavour and size is if first of all you sow it in ground that has been dug, and next keep pace with the shoots breaking through the soil by earthing them up and when they begin to rise to a luxuriant height make another pile of earth against them by raising the bank so that not more than their head emerges. The kind so grown is called Tritian cabbage, and it may be estimated that it takes twice the usual outlay and trouble. There are quite a number of other varieties: Cumae cabbage, with its leaf close to the ground and a spreading head; Aricia cabbage, no taller in height, with a leaf more plentiful than tender — this kind is considered extremely useful because underneath almost all the leaves it throws out small sprouts of a peculiar kind; the Pompeii cabbage is taller, and has a thin stalk near the root but grows thicker between the leaves, these being scantier and narrower, but their tenderness is a valuable quality. This cabbage cannot stand cold, which actually promotes the growth of Bruttian cabbages with their extremely large leaves, thin stalk and sharp taste. The Sabellian cabbage has leaves that are quite remarkably crisp and so thick as to exhaust the stalk itself, but these are said to be the sweetest of all the cabbages. There have recently come into notice the Lacuturna cabbages from the valley of La Iticcia, which have a very large head and leaves too many to count; some of these cabbages are bunched together into a circular shape and others bulge out broadwise; and no other cabbages make more head, not counting the Tritian kind, which is sometimes seen with a head measuring a foot across, and which sprouts as early as any other sort. But with any kind of cabbages hoarfrosts contribute a great deal to their sweetness, although a frost after the cabbages have been cut does the plants a great deal of damage, unless the pith is safeguarded by using a slanting cut. Cabbages intended for seed are not cut. A peculiarly attractive kind is one that never exceeds the size of a young plant; they call these halmyridia, because they only grow on the seacoast. They say that these keep green even on a long voyage if as soon as they are cut they are prevented from touching the earth by being put into oil-jars that have been dried just before and are bunged up so as to shut out all air. Some people think that the plant will mature more quickly if in the process of transplanting some seaweed is placed under the foot-stalk, or else a pinch of pounded soda, as much as can be picked up with three fingers; and some have a plan of sprinkling the leaves with soda ground up with trefoil seed. Soda added in cooking also preserves the greenness of cabbages, as does also Apicius's a recipe for steeping them in oil and salt before they are boiled. There is a method of grafting vegetables by cutting short the shoots and inserting into the pith of the stalk seed obtained from other plants; this has even been done in the case of wild cucumber. There is also a kind of wild cabbage which has been made famous particularly by the songs and jests of the troops at the triumph of the late lamented Julius, as in capping verses they taunted him with having at the siege of Dyrrachium made them live on white charlock — this was a hit at the stinginess with which he rewarded their services. This is a wild cabbage sprout.

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§ 19.42.1  Of all cultivated vegetables asparagus needs the most delicate attention. Its origin from wild asparagus has been fully explained, and how Cato recommends growing it in reed-beds. There is also another kind less refined than garden asparagus but less pungent than the wild plant, which springs up in many places even in mountain districts; the plains of Upper Germany are full of it, the emperor Tiberius not ineptly remarking that in that country a plant very like asparagus grows as a weed. In fact the kind that grows wild in the island of Nisita off the coast of Campania is deemed far the best asparagus there is. Garden asparagus is grown from root-clumps, for it is a plant with a large amount of root and it buds very deep down. When the thin stem first shoots above ground the plant is green, and the shoot while making a longer stalk simultaneously tops off into grooved protuberances. It can also be grown from seed. No subject included by Cato is treated more carefully, and it is the last topic of his book, showing that it was a novelty just creeping in. His advice is to dig over a place with a damp or heavy soil and sow the seeds six inches apart each way, so as to avoid treading on them; and moreover to put two or three seeds in each hole, made with a dibble along a line — obviously at that time asparagus was only grown from seed. He recommends doing this after the vernal equinox, using plenty of dung, frequently cleaning with the hoe, taking care not to pull up the asparagus with the weeds, in the first year protecting the plants against winter with straw, uncovering them in spring and hoeing and stubbing the ground; and setting fire to the plants in the third spring. The earlier asparagus is burnt off, the better it thrives, and consequently it is specially suitable for growing in reed-beds, which burn speedily. He also advises not hoeing the beds before the asparagus springs up, for fear of disturbing the roots in the process of hoeing; next plucking off the asparagus heads close to the root, because if they are broken off, the plant runs to stalk and dies off; going on plucking them till they run to seed (which begins to mature towards springtime) and burning them off, and when the asparagus plants have appeared, hoeing them over again and manuring them. Nine years later, he says, when the plants are now old, they must be separated and the ground worked over and manured, and then they must be replanted with the tufts spaced out a foot apart. Moreover he expressly specifies using sheep's dung, as other manure produces weeds. No method of cultivation tried later has proved to be more useful, except that they now sow about February 13 by digging in the seed in heaps in little trenches, usually preparing the seed by soaking it in dung; as a result of this process the roots twine together and form tufts, which they plant out at spaces of a foot apart after the autumn equinox, the plants going on bearing for ten years. There is no soil that asparagus likes better than that of the kitchen-gardens at Ravenna, as we have pointed out. I find it stated that corruda (which I take to be a wild asparagus, called by the Greeks horminos or myacanthos as well as by other names) will also come up if pounded rams' horns are dug in as manure.

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§ 19.43.1  It might bethought that all the vegetables of value had now been mentioned, did not there still remain an extremely profitable article of trade, which must be mentioned not without a feeling of shame. The fact is it is well known that at Carthage and particularly at Cordova crops of thistles yield a return of 6000 sesterces from small plots — since we turn even the monstrosities of the earth to purposes of gluttony, and actually grow vegetables which all four-footed beasts without exception shrink from touching. Thistles then we grow in two ways, from a slip planted in autumn and from seed sown before March 7, the seedlings from which are planted out before November 13, or in cold localities about the season of the west wind. They are sometimes manured as well, if heaven so wills, and come up more abundantly. They are also preserved in honey diluted with vinegar, with the addition of laser-wort root and cummin, so that there may be no day without thistles for dinner.

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§ 19.44.1  A cursory description can suffice for the rest of the plants. The best time for sowing basil is said to be at the Feast of Pales, and some say in autumn also, advising that when it is sown for winter the seed should be moistened with vinegar. Also rocket and cress can be grown very easily either in summer or in winter. Rocket particularly thinks nothing of cold. Its properties are quite different from those of lettuce, and it acts as an aphrodisiac; consequently it is usually blended with lettuce in a salad, so that the excessive chilliness of the lettuce may be tempered and counterbalanced by being mingled with an equal amount of heat. Cress has got its Latin name from the pain that it gives to the nostrils, and owing to this the sense of vigorousness has attached itself to that word in the current expression as denoting a stimulant. It is said to grow to a remarkably large size in Arabia.

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§ 19.45.1  Rue also is sown when the west wind blows in spring, and just after the autumn equinox. It hates cold weather, damp and dung, and likes sunny, dry places and a soil containing as much brick-clay as possible; it requires to be manured with ashes, which are also mixed with the seed to banish caterpillars. Rue was held in special importance in old times: I find that honied wine flavoured with rue was given to the public by Cornelius, Quintus Flamininus's colleague in the consulship, after the election had been concluded. Rue is so friendly with the fig that it grows better under this tree than anywhere else. It can also be grown from a slip, preferably inserted into a hole made in a bean, which holds the slip firmly and nourishes it with its juice. It also reproduces itself by layering, since if the end of a branch curves over, when it touches the ground the plant at once strikes root. Basil also has the same properties, except that its seed dries with more difficulty. Stubbing rue is a process not without difficulty, because it causes itching ulcers, unless it is done with the hands protected by gloves or safeguarded by oiling. The leaves of rue are also preserved, being kept in bundles.

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§ 19.46.1  Parsley sowing begins at the vernal equinox, the seed being first gently pounded in a mortar: it is thought that the parsley is made crisper by this process, or if the seed is rolled or trodden into the earth after being sown. A peculiarity of parsley is that it changes its colour. Achaia it has the distinction of providing the wreath worn by the winners of the sacred contest at Neniea.

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§ 19.47.1  This is also the time for planting mint, using a shoot, or if it is not yet making bud, a matted tuft. Mint is equally fond of damp ground. It is green in summer and turns yellow in winter. There is a wild kind of mint called mentastrum; this is propagated by layering, like a vine, or by planting stalks end downwards. The name of mint has been altered in Greece because of its sweet scent; it used to be called mintha, from which our ancestors derived the Latin name, but now it has begun to be called by a Greek word meaning 'sweet-scented'. It is agreeable for stuffing cushions, and pervades the tables with its scent at country banquets. One planting lasts for a long period. It is closely related to pennyroyal, which has the property which we have spoken of more than once of flowering when it is in a larder. These other herbs, I mean mint and also pennyroyal and catmint, are kept in the same kind of way. Yet of all the seasonings which gratify a fastidious taste, cummin is the most agreeable. It grows on the surface of the ground, hardly adhering to the soil and stretching upward, and it should be sown in the middle of spring, in crumbly and specially warm soils. Another kind of cummin is the wild variety called country cummin, or by other people Thebaic cummin. For pounding up in water and using as a draught in cases of stomachache the most highly esteemed kind in our continent is that grown at Carpetania, though elsewhere the prize is awarded to Ethiopian and African cummin; however some prefer the Egyptian to the African.

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§ 19.48.1  A herb of exceptionally remarkable nature is black-herb, the Greek name for which is horse-parsley, and which others call zmyrnium. It is reproduced from the gum that trickles from its own stalk, but it can also be grown from a root. The people who collect its juice say that it tastes like myrrh, and Theophrastus states that it sprang first from sown myrrh seed. Old writers had recommended sowing horse-parsley in uncultivated stony ground near a garden wall; but at the present day it is sown in land that has been dug over and also after a west wind has followed the autumn equinox. The reason for the old plan was that the caper also is sown principally in dry places, after a plot has been hollowed out for deep digging and stone banks have been built all round it: otherwise it strays all over the fields and takes the fertility out of the soil. It blossoms in summer and continues green till the setting of the Pleiades; it is most at home in sandy soil. The bad qualities of the caper that grows over seas we have spoken of among the exotic shrubs.

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§ 19.49.1  The caraway is also an exotic, and bears a name derived from the country it belongs to; it is chiefly for the kitchen. It will grow in any country if cultivated in the same way as black-herb, though the kind most highly spoken of grows in Carla, and the next best in Phrygia.

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§ 19.50.1  Lovage grows wild in the mountains of its native Liguria, but is cultivated everywhere; the cultivated kind is sweeter but lacks strength. Some people call it panax, but the Greek writer Crateuas gives that name to cow-cunila, though all others call that conyra, which is really cunilago, while real cunila they call thymbra. With us cunila has another name also being called satureia and classed as a spice. It is sown in February; and it is a rival of wild marjoram, the two never being used as ingredients together, because they impart a similar flavour; but only the Egyptian wild marjoram is reckoned superior to cunila.

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§ 19.51.1  Pepperwort also was originally an exotic. It is sown after the spring west wind starts, and then, when it has begun to shoot, it is cut down close to the ground and afterwards hoed and manured. Subsequently the plant thus treated is serviceable for two years with the same shoots, provided it is not attacked by a severe winter, as it is very incapable of bearing cold. It grows to a height of as much as eighteen inches; it has the leaves of the bay-tree, but softer. It is always used mixed with milk.

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§ 19.52.1  Git is grown for use in bakeries, anise and dill for the kitchen and for doctors; sacopenium, employed for adulterating laserwort, is also grown as a garden plant, but only for medicinal purposes.

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§ 19.53.1  There are some plants that are sown in company with others, for instance the poppy, which is sown with cabbage and purslain, and rocket is sown with lettuce. There are three kinds of cultivated poppy: the white, the seed of which in old days used to be roasted and served with honey at second course; it is also sprinkled on the top crust of country loaves, an egg being poured on to make it stick, while celery and git are used to give the bottom crust a festival flavour. The second kind of poppy is the black poppy, from which a milky juice is obtained by making an incision in the stalk. The third kind is called by the Greeks rhoeas and in our country wild poppy; it does indeed grow uncultivated, but chiefly in fields sown with barley; it resembles rocket, and grows eighteen inches high, with a red flower which falls very quickly, and which is the origin of its Greek name. We shall speak of the remaining kinds of self-sown poppy under the head of drugs. That the poppy has always been in favour at Rome is indicated by the story of Tarquinius the Proud, who knocked off the heads of the tallest poppies in his garden and by means of this unspoken rebus conveyed to the envoys sent to him by his son that sanguinary answer of his.

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§ 19.54.1  Again there is another group of plants which are sown at the autumn equinox — coriander, dill, orage, mallow, sorrel, chervil, the Greek name for which is lad's love, and mustard, which with its pungent taste and fiery effect is extremely beneficial for the health. It grows entirely wild, though it is improved by being transplanted: but on the other hand when it has once been sown it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once. It is also used to make a relish, by being boiled down in saucepans till its sharp flavour ceases to be noticeable; also its leaves are boiled, like those of all other vegetables. There are three kinds of mustard plant, one of a slender shape, another with leaves like those of turnip, and the third with those of rocket. The best seed comes from Egypt. The Athenian word for mustard is napy, those of other dialects thlaspi and lizard-herb.

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§ 19.55.1  Most mountains teem with thyme and wild mint, for instance the mountains of Thrace, and so people pluck off sprays of them there and bring them down to plant; and they do the same at Sikyon from mountains there and at Athens from Hymettus. Wild mint is also planted in a similar manner; it grows most abundantly on the walls of wells and round fish-pools and ponds.

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§ 19.56.1  There remain the garden plants of the fennel-giant class, for instance fennel, which snakes are very fond of, as we have said, and which when dried is useful for seasoning a great many dishes, and thapsia, which closely resembles it, of which we have spoken among foreign bushes, and then hemp, which is exceedingly useful for ropes. Hemp is sown when the spring west wind sets in; the closer it grows the thinner its stalks are. Its seed when ripe is stripped off after the autumn equinox and dried in the sun or wind or by the smoke of a fire. The hemp plant itself is plucked after the vintage, and peeling and cleaning it is a task done by candle light. The best is that of Arab-Hissar, which is specially used for making hunting-nets. Three classes of hemp are produced at that place: that nearest to the bark or the pith is considered of inferior value, while that from the middle, the Greek name for which is 'middles', is most highly esteemed. The second best hemp comes from Mylasa. As regards height, the hemp of Rosea in the Sabine territory grows as tall as a fruit-tree. The two kinds of fennel-giant have been mentioned above among exotic shrubs. In Italy its seed is an article of diet; in fact it is stored in pots and lasts for as much as a year. Two different parts of it are used as vegetables, the stalks and the branches. This fennel is called in Greek clump-fennel, and the parts that are stored, clumps.

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§ 19.57.1  Garden vegetables are also liable to disease, like the rest of the plants on earth. For instance basil degenerates with old age into wild-thyme and sisymbrium into mint, and old cabbage seed produces turnip, and so on. Also cummin is killed by broom-rape unless it is thoroughly cleaned: this is a plant with a single stalk and a root resembling a bulb, and it only grows in a thin soil. Another disease peculiar to cummin is scab. Also basil turns pale at the rising of the Dog-star. All plants indeed turn yellow when a woman comes near them at her monthly period. Also various insects breed on garden plants — springtails in turnips, caterpillars and maggots in radish, and also on lettuces and cabbage, both of which are more infested by slugs and snails than radish; and the leek has special insects of its own, which are easily caught by throwing dung on the plants, as they burrow into it. According to Sabinus Tiro in his book On Gardening, which he dedicated to Maecenas, it is also bad for rue, savoury, mint or basil to come in contact with iron.

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§ 19.58.1  The same author has given an account of a remedy against ants, which are not the least destructive of pests in gardens not well supplied with water; the plan is to stop up the mouths of ant-holes with sea-slime or ashes. But the most effective thing for killing ants is the heliotrope plant; and some people also think that water in which an unbaked brick has been soaked is injurious to these insects. A protection for rapes is to sow some fitch with them, and similarly chick-pea for cabbages, as it keeps off caterpillars. If neglect of this precaution has led to the appearance of caterpillars, the remedy is to sprinkle them with a decoction of wormwood or of houseleek; we have mentioned this class of plant, which some call immortel. It is stated that if cabbage seed is soaked in the juice of houseleek before being sown, the cabbages will be immune from all kinds of insects; and it is said that caterpillars can be totally exterminated in gardens by fixing up on a stake the skull of an animal of the horse class, provided it is that of a female. There is also a story that a river crab hung up in the middle of a garden is a protection against caterpillars. Some people touch plants which they want to be immune from caterpillars with slips of blood-red cornel. Also gnats infest damp gardens, especially if there are any shrubs in them; these can be driven away by burning galbanum resin.

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§ 19.58.2  In regard to the deterioration of seeds, some keep longer than others, for instance coriander, beet, leek, cress, mustard, rocket, savory and the pungent seeds generally; while the seeds of orage, basil, gourd and cucumber do not keep so well, and summer seeds in general are not so strong as winter ones. The least lasting is long-onion seed. Of these however which keep best none is of any use after four years, at all events for sowing; they are fit for kitchen use even beyond that period.

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§ 19.59.1  There is a curative property specially effective for raffish, beet, rue and savory in salt water, which moreover also contributes a great deal to their sweetness and to their fertility. All other plants are benefited by being watered with fresh water, the most useful for the purpose being water from streams, which is extremely cool and very sweet to drink; water from a pond or brought by a conduit is not so useful, because it carries with it the seeds of weeds. However it is rain that nourishes plants best, as rainwater also kills insects that breed on them.

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§ 19.60.1  For gardens the times for watering are in the morning and the evening, so that the water may not be heated by the sun. It only suits basil to water it at midday as well; for it is thought that this plant even when first sown will break out most rapidly if at the first stage it is watered with water that is warm. All plants grow better and larger when transplanted, most of all leeks and navews. Also transplanting has a medicinal effect, and such plants as long onion, leek, radishes, parsley, lettuces, turnip and cucumber cease to suffer from injuries when transplanted. But almost all the wild varieties, for example savory, wild marjoram, rue, are smaller in leaf and stalk, and have a more acrid juice. Indeed sorrel is the only one of all the plants of which the wild variety is the better, the cultivated sorrel is called rumix, and it is the strongest of all the plants grown under cultivation or wild; at all events it is reported that when once it has been established it lasts on and is never overcome, and that it is specially everlasting when close to water. It is only used for the table mixed with pearl-barley, which gives it a softer and more agreeable flavour. The wild variety supplies a number of drugs. (And so careful has research been to overlook nothing, that I actually find it stated in a poem that if the seeds of leek, rocket, lettuce, parsley, endive and cress are planted enclosed in hollow pellets of goat's dung, each seed in a separate pellet, they come up wonderfully. With plants of which there is also a wild variety, the latter are thought to be more dry and acrid than the cultivated sort.)

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§ 19.61.1  Now we ought also to speak of the difference of the juices and flavours of herbs, this being even greater in their case than in fruits. The juice of savory, wild marjoram, cress and mustard has an acrid taste; the juice of wormwood and centaury is bitter, that of cucumbers, gourds and lettuces watery; that of thyme and cunilago pungent; that of parsley, dill and fennel pungent and scented. The only flavour not found in plants is the taste of salt, though occasionally it is present as a sort of external layer, like a dust, and this only in the case of the small chick-pea.

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§ 19.62.1  And to show how unfounded, as so frequently, is the view ordinarily held, all-heal has the taste of pepper, and still more so has pepperwort, which consequently is called pepper-plant; and grass of Lebanon has the scent of frankincense, and alexanders that of myrrh. About all-heal enough has been said already. Libanotis grows in thin powdery soil, and in places where there is a heavy dew; it has the root of olusatrum, exactly like frankincense; when a year old it is extremely wholesome for the digestion. Some people call it by another name, rosemary. Alexanders is a garden herb that grows in the same places, and its root has the taste of myrrh. Pepperwort grows in the same way. The remaining plants are peculiar in both scent and taste, for example anise; and so great is their diversity and their potency that not only is one of them modified by another but it is entirely counteracted: cooks use parsley to remove the tang of vinegar from their dishes, and parsley enclosed in bags is also employed by butlers to rid wine of disagreeable odour.

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§ 19.62.2  And so far we have spoken about garden plants merely as providing articles of diet. There still remains indeed a most important operation of nature in the same department, inasmuch as hitherto we have only treated of their produce and given certain summary outlines; whereas the true nature of each plant can only be fully understood by studying its medicinal effect, that vast and recondite work of divine power, and the greatest subject that can possibly be found. Due regard for method has led us not to combine with each object in succession the question of its medicinal value, because a different set of people are concerned with the requirements of medical practice, and either topic would have met with lone interruptions if we had mixed the two together. As it is, each subject will occupy its own section, and any who wish will be able to combine them.

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§ 20.1.1  FROM this point we are going to deal with a most important work of nature, namely to tell man his proper foods, and to force him to acknowledge that his means of living are unknown to him. Nobody should be deceived by the meanness of the names into considering this a petty or trifling task. Herein will be told of Nature at peace or at war with herself, along with the hatreds and friendships of things deaf and dumb, and even without feeling. Moreover, to increase our wonder, all of them are for the sake of mankind. The Greeks have applied the terms 'sympathy' and 'antipathy' to this basic principle of all things: water putting out fire; the sun absorbing water while the moon gives it birth; each of these heavenly bodies suffering eclipse through the injustice of the other. Furthermore, to leave the more heavenly regions, the magnetic stone draws iron to itself while another kind of stone repels it; the diamond, the rare delight of wealth, unbreakable and invincible by all other force, is broken by goat's blood. Other marvels, equally or even more wonderful, we shall speak of in their proper place. I only ask pardon for beginning with trivial though healthful objects. First I shall deal with kitchen-garden plants.

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§ 20.2.1  We have said that there is a wild cucumber much smaller than the cultivated kind. From it is made the drug called elaterium by pressing the juice out of the seed. Unless, to prepare it, the cucumber be cut open before it is ripe, the seed spurts out, even endangering the eyes. After being gathered, the cucumber is kept for one night and then cut open on the next day with a reed. The seed too is kept in ash to prevent the juice from running away. This when pressed out is received in rain water, where it falls to the bottom. Then it is thickened in the sun, and made into lozenges for the great benefit of mankind, being good for dim vision, eye diseases and sores of the eyelids. It is said that if the roots of vines are touched by this juice the grapes are not attacked by birds. The root too when boiled in vinegar is used as ointment in cases of gout, and its juice cures toothache. Dried and mixed with resin it heals impetigo, itch, what are called psora and lichen, parotid swellings and superficial abscesses; it restores the natural colour to scars, while the juice of the leaves mixed with vinegar and poured by drops into the ears is a remedy for deafness.

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§ 20.3.1  The proper season to prepare elaterium is the autumn, and no drug keeps for a longer period. It begins to be potent when three years old; if it is desired to use it earlier, the lozenges must be made less harsh by warming them in vinegar in a new clay pot over a slow fire. The older it is the better, and it has been known to keep, so Theophrastus tells us, for two hundred years, and its power to put out the flame of a lamp it retains right up to the fiftieth year. Indeed, the test of genuine elaterium is whether its application makes a flame flicker up and down before putting it out. The pale smooth variety is better than the grass-green and rough, and is slightly bitter. lit is thought that conception is aided by cucumber seed if a woman keeps it fastened to her body without its having touched the ground; while labour is easier if, without her knowledge, the seed, wrapped in ram's wool, be tied to her loins; but it must be hastily carried out of the house immediately after delivery.

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§ 20.3.2  As to this cucumber itself, those who sing its praises tell us that the best variety grows in Arabia, and the next best in Arcadia; some report that in Cyrene grows a cucumber like the heliotrope, of the size of a walnut, appearing between the leaves and the branches; its seed is curled back like a scorpion's tail but white in colour. Moreover, some call this cucumber 'scorpion'; both its seed and elaterium are most effective antidotes to the sting of the scorpion. The regular dose as purge or emetic is from half to one obolus, according to the idiosyncrasy of the patient, a larger dose being fatal. Similar are the doses when taken in drink as a remedy for phthiriasis and dropsy. Mixed with honey or old olive oil it is used to cure quinsy and tracheal affections.

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§ 20.4.1  Many authorities hold that this cucumber is the same as that known among us as the serpentine, and by some as the stray cucumber, a decoction of which spread over things prevents mice from touching them. The same authorities say that a decoction of it in vinegar applied externally gives immediate relief to gout and to diseases of the joints; that lumbago is cured by the seed dried in the sun, then pounded, and administered in doses of twenty denarii in half a sextarius of water, and that sudden tumours are cured by a liniment made by mixing it with woman's milk. Elaterium promotes menstruation but causes abortion when taken by women with child. It is good for asthma and also for jaundice when I injected into the nostrils. Smeared in the sunshine on the face, it removes therefrom freckles and spots.

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§ 20.5.1  Many authorities assign all these qualities to the cultivated cucumbers, which even apart from cucumfret. them is of great importance. For instance, the seed too, a three-finger pinch of it, when pounded with cummin and taken in wine, is beneficial for coughs, for phrenitis when drunk in woman's milk, a dose of an acetabulum for dysentery, and with an equal weight of cummin for expectoration of pus. Taken in hydromel it is good for diseases of the liver. With sweet wine it is diuretic, while for kidney pain it is used with cumrnin as an enema.

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§ 20.6.1  The gourds called pepones make a very refreshing food, and are also laxative. Their pulp is used as an application for fluxes or pains of the eyes. The root is a cure for the hard sores, like honeycomb, which they call ceria. It also acts as an emetic; it is dried and pounded into flour, the dose being four oboli taken in hydromel, but after it has been drunk a walk of half a mile must be taken. This flour is also used as an ingredient in skin-smoothing cosmetics. The rind too serves as an emetic and clears the face of spots. The leaves also of any kind of cultivated gourd have when applied externally the same effect. The same, mixed with honey, also cure night rash and mixed with wine dog-bites and the bite of multipedes, an insect called seps by the Greeks. It is rather long, with hairy legs, and is particularly harmful to cattle. The bite is followed by swelling, the wound suppurating. The cucumber itself by its smell revives those who have fainted. When peeled and cooked in oil, vinegar and honey, cucumbers are, it is firmly held, more pleasant to the taste.

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§ 20.7.1  There is also found a wild gourd, called by the Greeks σομφός, hollow inside (whence its name), of the thickness of a finger, growing only in rocky soils. If it be chewed the juice is very beneficial to the stomach.

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§ 20.8.1  Another kind of wild gourd is called colocynthis. The fruit is smaller than the cultivated, and full of seed. The pale variety is more useful than the grass-green. Taken by itself when dried it is a drastic purge. Used also as an enema an injection is a remedy for all complaints of the bowels, of the kidneys, and of the loins, as well as for paralysis. After the seed has been picked out, hydromel is added and boiled down to one half, which gives a very safe strength for an injection of four oboli. The stomach is benefited also by taking pills made of the dry powder mixed with boiled honey. In jaundice seven seeds of it are taken, to be followed immediately by hydromel. The pulp added to wormwood and salt cures toothache, while its juice warmed with vinegar makes loose teeth firm. Rubbed on with oil it likewise relieves pains of spine, loins and hips. Moreover, wonderful to relate, an equal a number of its seeds, fastened to the body in a cloth, is said to reduce those fevers which the Greeks call periodic. The warmed juice, also, of the shredded cultivated colocynthis cures earache, and its inner pulp without the seed corns on the feet, as well as the suppurations called by the Greeks άποστήματα. The juice obtained by boiling down the whole pulp along with the seeds makes loose teeth firm and stops toothache, and a boiled mixture of it with wine stops inflammation of the eyes. An application of the pounded leaves with fresh cypress leaves, or of the fruit alone, roasted in a clay pot, reduced to powder and added to goose grease, is a cure for wounds. Moreover, when fresh, with shreds of its bark it cools gout and inflammations of the head, especially of babies, and erysipelas by the application to the part affected of the same shreds, or of the seeds. The juice from scrapings, mixed with rose-oil and vinegar, makes a liniment which cools the heat of fevers. The dust of the dried fruit applied to burns is wonderfully healing. Chrysippus the physician disapproved of gourds as food, but there is a general agreement that they are very beneficial to the stomach, and also for ulceration of the intestines and bladder.

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§ 20.9.1  The turnip too has its medicinal properties. A hot application cures chilblains, besides preventing the feet from being chilled. A hot decoction of it is good even for cold gout, and raw turnip, pounded and mixed with salt, for every ailment of the feet. The seed, made into liniment or drunk in wine, is said to protect against snake bites and poisons; many moreover hold that taken in wine and oil it serves as an antidote. Democritus entirely disapproved of the turnip as a food on the ground that it causes flatulence; Diocles, however, praised it highly, maintaining that it is also aphrodisiac. Dionysius agrees, holding that its effect is greater when it is seasoned with rocket, and that, when roasted and made into an ointment with grease, it is good for pain in the joints.

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§ 20.10.1  Wild turnip grows chiefly in fields; it is bushy, with a white seed, which is twice as big as that of the poppy. For smoothing the skin of the face or of the whole body it is used when mixed with equal parts of the meal of vetches, barley, wheat and lupins. The root is not good for anything.

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§ 20.11.1  The Greeks retain in pharmacology also two varieties of navews. The one with angular leaf-stalks, and a flower like that of dill, called bunion, is beneficial for the purgings of women, for the bladder and for the urine, in the form of a decoction, drunk in hydromel, or in a drachma of the juice; the seed, roasted and ground, taken in four cyathi of warm water, is good for dysentery. It checks urine, however, if a linseed drink be not taken with it. The other kind of navew is called bunias; it is like the radish and turnip, its seed being a splendid remedy for poisons, for which reason it is also used in antidotes.

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§ 20.12.1  We have said that there is also a wild radish. The most popular kind is found in Arcadia, although it also grows elsewhere. It is rather useful as a diuretic. This is its only merit, for in other respects it is heating. In Italy it is also called armoracia.

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§ 20.13.1  Cultivated radishes moreover, besides what has been said about them, purge the stomach, loosen phlegm, promote urine and bring away bile. In addition, a decoction of the skin in wine, drunk in the morning up to three cyathi, break up and eliminate gall-stones. A decoction of the same in vinegar and water is used as liniment for the bites of serpents. The radish too is good for a cough if taken with honey in the morning on an empty stomach; its seed too when roasted and chewed by itself. To use a radish as an amulet and to drink either a decoction of its leaves in water or its juice neat in doses of two cyathi is good for phthiriasis. Good for inflammation is a liniment of radishes crushed by themselves, and for a fresh bruise a liniment made from the skin with honey. Lethargic persons are benefited by eating them at their hottest, asthmatics by the seed, first roasted and then beaten up with honey. Radishes are also useful for poisons, counteracting the sting of the cerastes and of the scorpion. With hands rubbed with radish or its seed you may handle these creatures without fear, and a radish placed on scorpions kills them. Radishes too counteract the poisons of fungi and of henbane, and moreover, as Nicander tells us, the effects of drinking bull's blood. Both the physicians with the name of Apollodorus prescribe radishes to be given for mistletoe poisoning; but Apollodorus of Citium recommends the pounded seed in water, he of Tarentum the juice. Radishes also reduce the size of the spleen, and are good for the liver and pains in the loins; taken also with vinegar or mustard they are beneficial in cases of dropsy, lethargus, epilepsy and melancholia. Praxagoras would administer it to patients with iliac, and Plistonicus to those with coeliae disease. If eaten with honey they also cure ulcers of the intestines and suppurations of the chest. Some for these purposes prefer to cook them in mud; [Mayhoff's reading: 'to smear them over with mud before cooking.'] if so taken they promote, according to them, the menstrual discharge. Taken with vinegar or honey they bring away intestinal worms; a decoction of them boiled down to one third, drunk with wine, is good for intestinal hernia; so taken they draw off superfluous blood. For these purposes and for spitting of blood Medius prescribes that they should be given cooked, as well as to women lying-in to increase the supply of milk; Hippocrates that radishes should be rubbed on the head of women when the hair falls off, and that they should be placed on the navel for pains in the womb. They also bring scars back to the original colour of the skin. An application also of the seed soaked in water arrests ulcers called phagedaenae. Democritus thinks that as a food radishes are aphrodisiac; for this reason, perhaps, some have maintained that they are injurious to the voice. The leaves, but only those of the long radish, are said to improve the eyesight; should however too strong a dose of radish be applied as a remedy, they prescribe the immediate use of hyssop, for it is antipathetic. For deafness the juice of the radish is dropped into the ear. But, for those who would vomit, it is very useful to eat radishes after a meal.

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§ 20.14.1  Like the parsnip is the hibiscum, which some call the wild mallow, and others πλειστολοχεία; it is a cure for ulcers and for broken cartilages and bones. The leaves, taken in water, relax the bowels; they keep serpents away, and used as a liniment heal the stings of bees, wasps and hornets. Its root dug up before sunrise is wrapped in wool of the colour called natural, taken moreover from a ewe that has given birth to a ewe lamb, and bound on scrofulous sores, even when they have suppurated. Some think that when it is to be used for this purpose the root should be dug up with a tool of gold, care being taken not to let it touch the ground. Celsus too prescribes a decoction of the root in wine as a liniment for cases of gout without swelling.

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§ 20.15.1  Another kind is staphylinus, which they call stray parsnip. Its seed, crushed and taken in wine, soothes a swollen belly, and the hysterical chokings and pains of women, to such an extent that it restores the womb to normal, benefits their abdomen, moreover, if applied in raisin wine, benefiting men also when pounded with an equal part of bread and drunk in wine as a cure for bellyache. It is diuretic also, and if applied fresh with honey, or after being sprinkled dry on flour it stays phagedaenic ulcers. Its root, taken in hydromel, Dieuches prescribes against affections of the liver, spleen, loins and kidneys; Cleophantus in cases also of chronic dysentery. Philistion boils it in milk; for strangury he prescribes four ounces of the root, giving it in water for dropsy, likewise for those stricken by pitonitetanus, pleurisy and epilepsy. It is said that those who carry it are not bitten by serpents, and that those who have eaten of it, if bitten, receive no hurt; for bites it is applied with axle-grease, and its leaves are chewed as a remedy for indigestion. Orpheus said that there is in staphylinus a love-philtre, perhaps because it is a proved fact that when eaten it is an aphrodisiac; for which reason some have declared that by it conception is aided. For all other purposes the cultivated kind too is powerful, but the wild plant is more efficacious, especially that growing on rocky soils. The seed of the cultivated kind too is a cure for the sting of scorpions when taken in wine or vinegar and water. Its root used as a dentifrice is a cure for toothache.

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§ 20.16.1  In Syria very great pains are taken over kitchen-gardens; hence the Greek proverb: 'Syrians have plenty of vegetables.' They sow a vegetable called by some gingidion that is very like staphylinus, only it is slighter and more bitter, though its properties are the same. lit is eaten, cooked or raw, with great advantage to the stomach, for it dries up all its humours, however deep these may lie.

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§ 20.17.1  Wild (or stray) skirret is like the cultivated kind and has similar properties. It stimulates the appetite, banishing distaste for food, if taken in vinegar and silphium, or with pepper and honey wine, or if you like with fish sauce. It is both diuretic, as Ophion believes, and an aphrodisiac. Diocles too is of the same opinion, and moreover thinks that it acts as a cordial in convalescence, or is very useful after many vomitings. Heraclides prescribed it for mercury poisoning, for occasional impotence and in convalescence. Hicesius said that the reason why it appeared to be harmful to the stomach was that no one could eat three skirrets in succession; adding however that it was beneficial to convalescents who are beginning to take wine again. The juice, especially of the cultivated variety, checks looseness of the bowels if drunk with goats' milk.

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§ 20.18.1  Since most people confuse the two similar Greek names, σέσελι and σέσελι (σίλι), we have added some account of sili or hartwort, though it is a plant generally known. The best is that of Massilia, for its seed is broad and yellow; the next best, the Aethiopian, is darker, and the Cretan has the strongest smell of all. The root has a pleasant smell, and the seed, it is said, even the vultures eat. When drunk in white wine it is beneficial to man for chronic cough, ruptures and convulsions; likewise for opisthotonic tetanus, affections of the liver, colic and strangury, in doses of two or three spoonfuls. The leaves also are useful because they aid parturition, even that of quadrupeds; it is said that does, when about to give birth, make this their special food. The leaves are also applied to erysipelas, and digestion is much helped if the leaf or seed be eaten after food. It arrests also looseness of bowels in quadrupeds, either pounded and mixed with their drink, or chewed up when they eat their food. It acts as a cure for diseases of oxen, if taken with salt or pounded and injected.

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§ 20.19.1  Elecampane too chewed by people fasting strengthens the teeth. If it is taken from the ground so as not to touch it, a confection of it is healing for a cough; the juice moreover of the boiled root expels worms, and dried in the shade its powdered form cures cough, convulsions, flatulence and affections of the trachea. It keeps off the bite of poisonous creatures. An application of the leaves steeped in wine is used for lumbago.

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§ 20.20.1  There are no wild onions. Cultivated onions, by the running caused by the mere smell, is a cure for feebleness of vision; an even better cure is to apply to the eye some of the juice. Onions are also said to induce sleep, and chewed with bread to heal sores in the mouth; fresh onions applied in vinegar, or dry with honey and wine, dog-bites, provided that the bandage is taken off three days after. Applied in the same way they also heal abrasions. An onion cooked in ash many have applied with barley flour to fluxes of the eyes, and to sores of the genitals. The juice of onions they used as ointment for eyesores, albugo and argema with honey for serpent bites and all kinds of ulcers, with woman's milk for sore ear-laps, and dropped it into them with goose grease or honey for singing or hardness of hearing. Diluted with water it was prescribed for those suddenly smitten with dumbness. In toothache it was poured by drops into the mouth to rinse the teeth; likewise on to wounds made by any wild beasts, especially to those of scorpions. In mange and itch crushed onions have been rubbed on the places affected. Boiled onions were given to eat to those affected by dysentery or lumbago; onion-peelings burnt to ash were applied in vinegar to serpent bites, and onions themselves in vinegar for those of the multipede. Apart from what has been said, there are remarkable differences of opinion among physicians. The latest opinion holds that they are injurious to the viscera and the digestion, causing, it is said, flatulence and thirst. The school of Asclepiades holds that, used as food, onions promote a healthy complexion, and, if they are eaten daily on an empty stomach, preserve a good state of health, are useful to the stomach, loosen the bowels by putting the air in motion, disperse haemorroids when used as a suppository, and the juice, added to that of fennel, is very beneficial in cases of incipient dropsy; added to rue and honey it is used for quinsy, and for dispelling lethargus. Varro is our authority that an onion steeped in salt and vinegar, and then dried, is not attacked by worms.

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§ 20.21.1  Cutleek stops bleeding at the nose if the nostrils be plugged with leek pounded, or mixed with gall-nut or mint; fluxes also after miscarriage are arrested by drinking the juice with woman's milk. It cures chronic cough, and affections of the chest and lungs. By an application of the leaves are healed pimples, burns and epinyctis — is called a sore, also known as syce, in the corner of the eye and perpetually running; some give the same name to livid pustules causing restlessness at night a ... and other sores by leeks pounded with honey; the bites of beasts are treated by leek in vinegar, as are those of serpents and other poisonous creatures. Affections of the ears, however, are treated by leeks and goats, gall, or else leeks and mead in equal proportions. With woman's milk leeks are used for singing in the ears; for headache the juice is poured into the nostrils, or two tablespoons of juice with one of honey are poured into the ears at bedtime. The juice also is drunk with neat wine to counteract the bites of serpents and of scorpions, and a draught can be taken with half a sextarius of wine for lumbago. For spitting of blood, moreover, for consumption, and for chronic catarrhs the juice is beneficial, as is also the leek by itself eaten as food; for jaundice, dropsy and kidney pains an acetabulum of the juice mixed with barley-water. The same dose taken with honey purges the womb. Leek moreover is eaten to counteract the poisons of fungi; it is applied to wounds, is an aphrodisiac, quenches thirst, serves as a pick-me-up after drunkenness, but is said to dim the eyesight, and to cause flatulences which do no harm, however, to the stomach but relax the bowels. Leeks impart brilliance to the voice.

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§ 20.22.1  Headed leek has the same properties as cutleek, but they are stronger. Those who spit blood are given its juice along with ground gall-nut or frankincense, or with gum arabic. Hippocrates directs it also to be given without other ingredient, and is of opinion that a contracted womb opens under its influence; likewise that by its use as food the fertility of women is increased. Beaten up, with honey added, it cleanses sores. Cough, catarrh of the chest, and affections of the lungs and of the trachea are cured by it when given in a draught of barley-water or eaten raw, the head excepted, without bread; it must however be taken only on alternate days, even if pus be expectorated. Given thus it greatly benefits the voice, venery and sleep. The heads, boiled in water that is twice changed checks diarrhoea and chronic fluxes; a decoction of the skin serves as a dye for grey hair.

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§ 20.23.1  Garlic has powerful properties, and is of great benefit against changes of water and of residence. It keeps off serpents and scorpions by its smell, and, as some have maintained, every kind of beast. It cures bites when drunk or eaten, or applied as ointment, being particularly efficacious against the haemorrhoids when taken with wine and brought up by vomiting. Lest we be surprised that it is an antidote against the poisonous bite of the shrewmouse, it neutralizes aconite, which is also known by the name of pardalianehes ['Panther-strangler.'] as well as henbane and dog-bites; for the wounds of the latter it is made into an ointment with honey. For the bites of serpents it is very efficacious to roast it with its own leaves and make a liniment by adding oil; also for bruises on the body, even if they have swollen into blisters. Moreover, Hippocrates thinks that garlic fumigations bring away the afterbirth; by its ash mixed with oil he used to restore to health running sores on the head. To asthmatics it is given cooked, though some have given it raw. Diocles prescribed it wit centaury for dropsy, or in a split fig as a purge, a more efficient one being fresh garlic taken in neat wine with coriander; pounded garlic too has by some been given in milk to asthmatics. Praxagoras again mixed it with wine as a remedy for the jaundice, and with oil and pottage for passion; the latter prescription he also used as a liniment for scrofula. The ancients used also to give it raw to madmen, Diocles gave it well boiled for phrenitis. Pounded and, drunk with vinegar and water it is useful as a gargle for quinsy. By three pounded heads with vinegar toothache is relieved, as it is by rinsing the teeth with a decoction, and inserting garlic itself into the hollow teeth. Garlic juice, mixed with goose-grease, is also dropped into the ears. Garlic, in drink or injected with vinegar and soda, checks phthiriasis and scurf, catarrhs likewise if boiled with milk, also beaten up or mixed with soft cheese; it relieves hoarseness also if taken thus, or in gruel of peas or beans. On the whole, however, it is more useful cooked than raw, boiled than roasted. Thus prepared it is also more beneficial to the voice. When cooked in oxymel it expels tapeworms and other parasites of the intestines; in pottage it cures tenesmus. Well boiled it is used as ointment for pains in the temples; cooked, and then beaten up with honey, it makes an ointment for blisters. For a cough a decoction is taken with stale grease, or with milk; or if there be also spitting of blood or pus, it is roasted under live ashes and taken with an equal part of honey. For sprains and ruptures it is used with salt and oil. With fat, however, it cures suspected tumours. Mixed with sulphur and resin it draws the pus from fistulas, with pitch extracting even arrows. Leprous sores, lichen and freckly eruptions are cleansed and cured by it and wild marjoram, or by a liniment made out of its ash with oil and fish-sauce. Used in this way it is also good for erysipelas. Burnt to ash and mixed with honey it brings back to the original colour parts that are black-and-blue or livid. It is believed that epilepsy too is cured by garlic taken in food and drink, and that one head of it, taken in a dry wine with an obolus of silphium shakes off a quartan ague. Taken in another way, namely boiled in broken beans and eaten with food until health is restored, it cures a cough, and suppuration of the chest, however severe. It induces sleep also, and makes the body generally of a ruddier colour. It is believed to act as an aphrodisiac, when pounded with fresh coriander and taken in neat wine. Its drawbacks are that it dulls the sight, causes flatulence, injures the stomach when taken too freely, and creates thirst. In addition, mixed with emmer-wheat and added to their food it is good for poultry to save them from the pip. Beasts of burden are said to pass urine without pain, if their parts are treated with pounded garlic.

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§ 20.24.1  The chief kind of lettuce growing wild is the one called goat-lettuce, which when thrown into the sea kills immediately all the fish in the neighbourhood. Its milk, or juice, when thickened and then added to vinegar, in doses of two oboli to one cyathus of water, is prescribed for dropsical patients. The crushed stalk and leaves, sprinkled with salt, cure a cut sinew. The pounded plant and vinegar, used as a mouthwash twice a month in the morning, keeps away toothache.

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§ 20.25.1  There is a second kind, called caesapon by the Greeks, the pounded leaves of which, made into an ointment with pearl-barley, heal sores. These two grow in the open fields. A third kind growing in woods is called ίσάτις. Its leaves pounded up with pearl-barley are good for wounds. A fourth kind is used by dyers of wools. Its leaves would be like those of wild sorrel, were they not more numerous and darker. By its root or leaves it stanches bleeding, heals phagedaenic and putrefying ulcers, spreading ulcers, tumours before suppuration, and erysipelas. Taken in drink it is good even for the spleen. Such are the peculiar properties of the several kinds.

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§ 20.26.1  The characteristics, however, common to the wild kinds are whiteness, a stem occasionally a cubit long, and a roughness on the stalk and on the leaves. Of these kinds, one with round, short leaves is called by some hieracion (hawkweed), since hawks, by tearing it open and wetting their eyes with the juice, dispel poor vision when they have become conscious of it. The juice in all of them is white, in its properties, also, like that of the poppy; collected at harvest by cutting the stem, it is stored in new earthenware, being excellent for many purposes. With woman's milk it heals all eye-diseases — white ulcers, films, all wounds and inflammations, and especially dimness of sight. It is also applied to the eyes on wool for fluxes. The same juice purges the bowels if drunk in vinegar and water in doses not exceeding two oboli. Drunk in wine it heals snakebites, as do its leaves and stalks when pounded and drunk in vinegar. They are applied as ointment to a wound, especially for the stings of scorpions; for those, however, of venomous spiders wine and vinegar are added. They also neutralise other poisons, except those which kill by suffocation, or those which hurt the bladder, white lead also being an exception. They are applied to the belly with honey and vinegar to clear away troubles of the bowels. The juice corrects difficulty in making water. Cratenas prescribes it also for dropsy in doses of two oboli with vinegar and a cyathus of wine. Some collect the juice of the cultivated lettuce also, but it is less efficacious. The special properties of lettuces, besides those already mentioned a of causing sleep, checking sexual desire, cooling a heated body, cleansing the stomach and making blood, are not few; it breaks up flatulence, calms belching, aids digestion without ever itself causing indigestion. No other article of diet has a greater power of both increasing appetite and also of diminishing it. In either case moderation of the amount taken is the reason; thus an immoderate amount loosens the bowels, while a moderate amount binds them. Lettuces loosen thick phlegm, and, as some have put on record, clear the senses, being very useful to stomachs which are out of order. They are aided for these purposes by oboli of digestive, the mixer modifying the sharpness by the addition of a sweet wine until it is no greater than that of vinegar sauce, mixing with it, if the phlegm be thick, squill or wormwood wine; if a cough also be experienced, hyssop wine. Lettuces are given with wild endive for coeliac affections and for hardness in the abdomen. White lettuce in great quantity is given to melancholic patients and for bladder troubles. Praxagoras gave it also to patients with dysentery. It is good for fresh burns, if applied with salt before the blisters form. They cheek spreading ulcers, if applied at first with saltpetre, afterwards in wine. Pounded they are applied in cases of erysipelas. The pounded stalks, added to pearl-barley and applied with cold water, soothe cramps and sprains, and eruptions of pimples when applied with wine and pearl-barley. In cholera also they have been given cooked in a pan, for which purpose the most beneficial are the bitter ones with the largest stems. Some people too inject the lettuce milk. Their stalks thoroughly boiled are said to be very beneficial to the stomach; likewise for sleep the summer lettuce especially, and the milky, bitter kind, which we have called meconis. This milk added to woman's milk is prescribed also as very useful for clearness of vision if the eyes and the head are bathed in good time, and likewise for eye troubles caused by chill. I find much other extravagant praise of lettuce: that with Attic honey it is as good as southernwood for chest complaints; that menstruation is regulated by its use as food; that the seed of cultivated lettuce is given for scorpion stings; that the crushed seed taken in wine prevents libidinous dreams; that noxious waters do not harm those who eat lettuce. Some however have maintained that when eaten too often they impair the eyesight.

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§ 20.27.1  Not without healing properties is either kind of beet; the fresh root of either the white variety or of the dark, if soaked and hung on a cord is said to be efficacious against serpent bites; white beet boiled and taken with raw garlic against tapeworms. Dark roots boiled in water remove dandruff; the dark for all purposes is held to be the more efficacious. Its juice relieves headache and giddiness, noises in the ears if poured into them, and it is diuretic. Injected it is a remedy for dysentery and jaundice; the juice used as liniment relieves toothache, besides being an antidote for serpent bites, but only if extracted from the dark root. A decoction, moreover, of the beet itself relieves chilblains. White beet applied to the forehead allays fluxes of the eyes, and mixed with a little alum, erysipelas. Similarly applied, when beaten up without oil it also heals burns. It is also used for eruptions of pimples; again, when boiled, it is applied to spreading sores, likewise raw for mange, and for running sores on the head. Its juice applied with honey to the nostrils clears the head. It is gently boiled with lentils, with vinegar added, in order to relax the bowels. Boiled faster beet checks fluxes of the stomach and bowels.

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§ 20.28.1  There is also a wild beet, called by some limonium, by others neuroides, with leaves much smaller, thinner and closer together, often having eleven stalks. Its leaves, useful for burns, dry the mouth of those who taste them. Its seed, in doses of one acetabulum, is good for dysentery. The liquid moreover decocted from the root of the beet washes out, it is said, the stains on clothes as well as those on parchment.

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§ 20.29.1  Endives also are not without their value in medicine. Their juice with rose oil and vinegar relieves headache; moreover, drunk with wine, pains of the liver and bladder; it is also applied to fluxes from the eyes. The wild endive certain among us have called ambubaia. In Egypt they call the wild kind cichorium; the cultivated they call seris, a variety which is smaller and has more veins.

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§ 20.30.1  Chicory taken in food or applied as liniment cools gatherings. The juice of the boiled-down vegetable loosens the bowels, and benefits liver, kidneys and stomach. Again, if it is boiled down in vinegar it dispels pain of urination, jaundice also if taken in honey wine, provided that there is no fever. It helps the bladder. Boiled down in water it so helps the purgation of women as even to withdraw the dead unborn baby. The Magi add that those who have anointed themselves with the juice of the entire plant, mixed with oil, become more popular, and obtain their requests more easily. So great indeed are its health-giving properties that some call it chreston (useful) others pancration (almighty).

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§ 20.31.1  The wild kind — some call it hedypnois has a broader leaf; boiled, it acts as an astringent upon a relaxed stomach, and eaten raw it checks looseness of the bowels. It is beneficial in dysentery, more so when taken with lentils. Ruptures and cramps are relieved by both kinds, as also are those troubled with a diseased flux of sperm.

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§ 20.32.1  Seris also, itself very similar to lettuce, is of two kinds. The wild is the better; it is dark and grows in summer, while the winter variety, which is whiter, is not so good. Each is bitter, and very beneficial to the stomach, especially to one troubled by a humour. They are cooling when taken with vinegar in food, and when applied as liniment; they disperse other humours besides those in the stomach. With pearl-barley the roots of the wild variety are taken in a draught to benefit the stomach; for heartburn they are applied above the left breast; prepared with vinegar all these are useful for gout, for spitting of blood, and likewise for fluxes of sperm, a dose to be taken on alternate days. Petronius Diodotus, who wrote a medical Herbal, gives many arguments condemning seris altogether, but the opinion of all others is against him.

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§ 20.33.1  It would be a long task to make a list of all the praises of the cabbage, since not only did Chrysippus the physician devote to it a special volume, divided according to its effects on the various parts of the body, but Dieuches also, and Pythagoras above all, and Cato no less lavishly, have celebrated its virtues; the views of the latter it is meet to set forth all the more carefully for the sake of learning what medicine the Roman people used for six hundred years. The earliest Greeks divided cabbage into three varieties; (a) the curly, which they called selinas from the resemblance of its leaves to those of parsley, useful for the stomach and moderately laxative; (b) the helia, with broad leaves growing out of the stem, from which some have called it caulodes, of no importance in medicine; (c) the third, crambe properly so-called, with thinner leaves of plain shape and very close together, is more bitter but very beneficial. Cato thinks most highly of the curly variety, next after it approving the smooth cabbage with large leaves and big stem. He considers it good for headache, dimness of the eyes and sparks in them, for the spleen, the stomach and the hypochondria, when taken raw in the morning with oxymel, coriander, rue, mint and root of silphium, in doses of two acetabula, saying that their power is so great that he who pounds the ingredients together feels himself growing stronger. He therefore recommends that it should either be pounded with these herbs when taken in a draught, or at least be in sauce made from them; while for gout and rheumatic joints a liniment should be made with a dash of rue, coriander and salt, along with barley flour; he adds that its water, boiled down, is wonderfully beneficial for sinews and joints, if they are fomented with it. Wounds, whether fresh or old, and even cancerous sores, which can be healed by no other treatment, should, so he prescribes, first be fomented with hot water and then have pounded cabbage applied to them twice daily. Similar treatment he prescribes for fistulas also and sprains; for tumours too, both such as must be brought to a head and those that need to be dispersed. He says that boiled cabbage prevents dreams and sleeplessness, if you eat fasting as much as possible with oil and salt; gripings it relieves if after boiling it is boiled down again with the addition of oil, salt, cummin and pearl-barley. If when so prepared it is taken without bread, it will, he adds, be more beneficial. Among other things he tells us that bile is cleared away by drinking cabbage in dark wine; and what is more, he recommends that the urine of a person who has lived on a cabbage diet should be kept, because when warmed it is a cure for pains in the sinews. I will add his actual words to explain his thought: 'Little boys, if you bathe them with such urine, never become weak.' He also advises that the juice of cabbage should be poured warm into the ears, with wine added, and he insists that this treatment benefits those who are hard of hearing, and that impetigo by the same means is cured without ulceration.

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§ 20.34.1  Just because we have dealt with Cato it is well to put down now the views of the Greeks also, limiting ourselves to making good Cato's omissions. If not overcooked they think that cabbage brings away bile, also that it loosens the bowels, checking diarrhoea however if it be boiled twice. As cabbage is the enemy of the vine, they say that it opposes wine; that if taken in food beforehand it prevents drunkenness, taken after drinking it dispels its unpleasant effects. They hold that cabbage taken as food greatly brightens the vision, and that the benefit is very great indeed if the juice of raw cabbage and Attic honey merely touch the corners of the eyes. They add that cabbage is very easily digested, and that its use as food clears the senses. The school of Erasistratus loudly declares that nothing is more useful than cabbage for the stomach and sinews, and he therefore prescribes it for paralysis and palsy, as well as for spitting of blood. Hippocrates prescribed twice-boiled cabbage and salt for coeliac trouble and dysentery, also for tenesmus and kidney troubles, holding also that its use as food gave a rich supply of milk to lying-in women and benefited women's purgings. The stalk indeed eaten raw brings out the dead unborn baby. Apollodorus holds that its seed should be eaten, or its juice drunk, to counteract poisonous fungi; Philistion prescribes it to be taken in goat's milk, with salt and honey, for opisthotonic tetanus. I find that gout has been cured by eating cabbage and drinking cabbage water; the latter has been given with the addition of salt for heart-bum also and epilepsy, and with white wine for a period of forty days for diseases of the spleen, as well as for jaundice and phrenitis. For hoarseness he prescribes the juice of the raw cabbage as a gargle or drink, but for hiccoughs he recommends it to be taken in vinegar with coriander, dill, honey and pepper. An application of it is good for flatulence of the stomach, snake bite and putrid sores of long standing; if you like, the mere water may be used with barley meal, the juice in vinegar or with fenugreek. In this way some apply it to aching joints and gouty limbs. An application of it relieves epinyctis and every other kind of spreading eruption, and also sudden dimness of sight; the last too is benefited by eating it in vinegar, but for bruises and other livid marks the application should be of cabbage alone, for leprous sores and itch, of cabbage in vinegar with a ball of alum. Applied in this way it also prevents the hair from falling out. Epicharmus says that a local application of cabbage is very good for troubles of the testes and genitals, that cabbage and crushed beans are more efficacious still, and likewise for convulsions; that with rue it relieves high fever and stomach troubles, and with the seed of rue it brings away the afterbirth and cures the bite of the shrewmouse. The dried leaves when powdered purge by vomit or by stool.

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§ 20.35.1  Of all the varieties of cabbage the most pleasant-tasted is cyma, although it is thought to be unwholesome, being difficult of digestion and bad for the kidneys. Further, we must not forget that the water in which it has been boiled, though praised for its many uses, has a foul smell when poured out on the ground. The ash of dried cabbage-stalks is understood to be caustic, and with stale grease is used for sciatica, but with silphium and vinegar, applied as a depilatory, it prevents the growth of other hair in place of that pulled out. It is also taken lukewarm in oil, or boiled in water by itself, for convulsions, internal ruptures, and falls from a height. Has cabbage then no faults to be charged with? Nay, we find in the same authors that it makes the breath foul and harms teeth and gums. In Egypt too, because of its bitterness, it is not eaten.

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§ 20.36.1  Cato gives vastly higher praise to the wild, or stray, cabbage, so much so that he asserts that the mere powder of the dried vegetable, collected in a smelling-bottle, or the scent only, snuffed up the nostrils, removes nose-troubles and any offensive odour. Some call this variety rock-cabbage; it is strongly antipathetic to wine, so that the vine tries very hard to avoid it, or, if it cannot do so, dies. It has thin leaves, round, small, and smooth; though rather like the ordinary vegetable, it is both whiter and more hairy than the cultivated kind. Chrysippus tells us that it heals flatulence, biliousness and fresh wounds, if applied with honey and not removed till the seventh day; also that beaten up in water it cures scrofula and fistulas. Others moreover maintain that it checks running sores, called nomae, removes too excrescences, and smoothes away scars; that if it is chewed, or if cabbage water be used with honey as a gargle, sores in the mouth or on the tonsils disappear, as also do the itch and chronic leprous sores, if three parts of it and two of alum in strong vinegar be applied as a liniment. Epicharmus thought this cabbage a sufficient remedy if applied to the bite of a mad dog, and an even better one with the addition of silphium juice and strong vinegar; he also said that dogs are killed by it, if given with their meat. Its seed if roasted is a help against serpents, fungi, and bull's blood. The boiled leaves taken in food or applied raw with sulphur and soda relieves splenic diseases and also hardness of the breasts. The ash of its roots even by a mere touch cures a swollen uvula, reduces parotid swellings if applied with honey, and heals bites of serpents. Of the power of cabbage I will add but one proof, which is both striking and wonderful: let the scale form on the inside of any vessel in which water is boiled, so that it cannot be scraped away; yet it disappears if cabbage is boiled in them.

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§ 20.37.1  Among wild cabbages is also lapsana, which is a foot high, has hairy leaves, being like mustard, except that the flower is whiter. It is eaten cooked, and soothes and relaxes the bowels.

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§ 20.38.1  Of all the varieties, sea cabbage is the strongest purgative. On account of its pungency it is cooked with fat meat, and is very bad for the stomach.

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§ 20.39.1  The squill used in medicine is white (the dark squill is female), and the whiter it is the more beneficial. When the dried skin has been torn from it, what is left of the living a plant is cut up and hung on a cord at short distances. Afterwards the dry pieces are plunged still hanging into a jar of very strong vinegar, so as not to touch any part of the vessel. Then the jar, plastered with gypsum, is placed under tiles which receive the sun the whole day long. This is done forty-eight days before the solstice. After this number of days the vessel is removed and the squills taken out, the vinegar being poured into another vessel. This vinegar sharpens the vision, is beneficial for pains of the stomach and sides if taken for two days at a time. But so great is its strength that too copious a draught produces for a moment the appearance of death. Even when chewed by themselves squills are good for the gums and teeth. Taken in vinegar and honey they bring away tapeworm and other intestinal parasites. Fresh squills placed under the tongue prevent dropsical patients from suffering thirst. They are cooked in several ways: either in a pot lined with fat or clay, to be put into an oven or furnace, or else they are cut up and cooked in a stewpan. Raw squills too are dried, then cut up, boiled in vinegar and then applied to snake bites. Another way is to roast the squills and then clean them, after which the centre parts are again cooked in water. Thus prepared they are used for dropsy, as a diuretic, drunk with honey and vinegar in doses of three oboli, and also for diseases of the spleen and stomach, when food floats undigested, provided that no ulceration is felt, for griping pains, jaundice, and chronic cough with asthma. Scrofula is cleared away by squill leaves, if they are left on for four days; dandruff and running sores by an application of squills cooked in oil. Cooked too in honey squills are used as food, especially to promote digestion. So prepared they also purge the bowels. Cooked in oil and mixed with resin squills heal cracks in the feet. The seed mixed with honey is applied to relieve lumbago. Squills too, hung in a doorway, are said by Pythagoras to have power to keep off evil enchantments.

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§ 20.40.1  The other bulbs cure cuts on the face when used with vinegar and sulphur, contraction of the sinews too when pounded up and used by themselves, dandruff when mixed with wine, and the bites of dogs when mixed with honey; Erasistratus would mix them with pitch. The same authority holds that applied with honey they stop a flow of blood. Others add coriander and flour for bleeding at the nose. Theodorus treats lichen also with bulbs in vinegar, adding a dry wine or egg for eruptions on the head. The same authority applies them for eye-fluxes, and their centres for dry ophthalmia. Red bulbs in particular, applied in the sun with honey and soda, remove spots on the face, and freckles when applied with wine or with vinegar. They are wonderfully good too for wounds, either by themselves, or as Damion advises, with honey wine, if the application be allowed to remain for four days at least. By the same means he treats broken ear-laps and hydrocele, adding flour also for pains in the joints. Boiled in wine and applied to the belly they soften hardness abdomen. For dysentery they are given in diluted with rain-water, for internal spasms in the size of a bean compounded with silphium. sweating they are bruised and applied. They good for the sinews, and therefore are given to paralytics. Red bulbs, mixed with honey and salt, heal sprains of the foot very quickly. Megarian bulbs are a strong aphrodisiac; garden bulbs taken with concentrated must or raisin wine help delivery; wild bulbs compounded with silphium and swallowed in pills relieve intestinal wounds and affections. The seed of the last is taken in wine against the bite of venomous spiders. The bulbs themselves are applied in vinegar against the bites of serpents. The ancients used to give the seed in drink to persons raving mad. The flowers of bulbs pounded up remove spots on the legs and patches produced by fire. Diocles thinks that the eyes are weakened by them. He adds that when boiled they are less useful than roasted, and that according to the strength of every variety they are difficult of digestion.

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§ 20.41.1  The Greeks call bulbine a plant with leaves like those of leeks and with a red bulb. This is said to be wonderfully good for wounds, provided that they are recent. The bulb called the emetic from its effects has dark leaves, longer than those of other kinds.

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§ 20.42.1  Asparagus is reported to be one of the most beneficial foods to the stomach. Indeed if cummin is added it disperses flatulence of the stomach and colon; it improves vision also, moves the bowels gently, benefits pains in the chest and spine as well as intestinal trouble, wine being added when it is being cooked. For pains in the loins and kidneys asparagus seed is taken in drink in doses of three oboli, an equal quantity of cummin being added. It is aphrodisiac and very useful as a diuretic, except when the bladder has been ulcerated. Very many recommend that the root be pounded and taken in white wine, when it also disperses stone, and relieves pains of the loins and kidneys. Some also prescribe this root to be taken in sweet wine for pain in the womb. This root boiled down in vinegar is good for elephantiasis. If a man is rubbed with a mixture of pounded asparagus and oil it is said that he is never stung by bees.

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§ 20.43.1  Wild asparagus is called by some corruda, by others Libyan, by the Attics orminus. For all the purposes mentioned above its properties are more efficacious than those of the cultivated asparagus, and those of the whiter kind are the more powerful. Both relieve jaundice. As an aphrodisiac, the water in which it has been boiled is recommended to be drunk in doses up to a hemina. Its seed has the same effect mixed with dill and taken in doses of three oboli of each. A decoction of the juice is also given for the bites of serpents. Its root, mixed with the root of fennel, is among our most efficacious aids. In cases of haematuria the seed of asparagus, of parsley, and of cummin is prescribed by Chrysippus in doses of three oboli in two cyathi of wine. He goes on to say that thus prepared, although it is diuretic, yet it is bad for dropsy, as it is for venery, and also for the bladder unless it is boiled in water; that this water kills dogs if they drink it; that the juice of the root boiled in wine, if it be held in the mouth, cures toothache.

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§ 20.44.1  Parsley is universally popular, for sprigs of it are found swimming in draughts of milk everywhere in the country, and in sauces it enjoys a popularity all its own. Moreover applied with honey to the eyes, provided that they are also frequently fomented with a warm decoction, it is wonderfully beneficial, as also for other fluxes on the limbs, when applied pounded up, either by itself or with bread or pearl-barley. Fish also, if they are sickly in ponds, are revived by fresh parsley. But no other plant taken from the ground has caused such a variety of opinion among the learned. Parsley shows distinction of sex. Chrysippus says that female parsley has hard and curlier leaves, a thick stem and a sharp, hot taste, Dionysius that it is darker, has a shorter root and breeds grubs; both agree that neither should be classed among the foods — nay, that it is altogether a sin to eat parsley, because it is dedicated to the funeral feasts in honour of the dead, and that it is also bad for the eyesight. They say that the stem of female parsley breeds grubs, and because of this those who have eaten it, whether male or female, become barren, and actually that sucking babies become epileptic if their nurses have eaten parsley. The male plant however they say is the less injurious. This is why it is not classed among plants utterly taboo. The application of parsley leaves softens hardness of the breasts. To boil parsley in it makes water sweeter to drink. The juice of the root in particular added to wine relieves lumbago, and hardness of hearing if the same liquid be dropped into the ears. The seed is diuretic, aids the menses and the afterbirth, and restores bruises to their natural colour if they are fomented with a decoction of the seed. Applied with white of egg, or boiled in water and drunk, parsley cures kidney troubles, and ulcers in the mouth when pounded up in cold water. The seed with wine, or the root with old wine, breaks up stones in the bladder. The seed is also given, in white wine, to jaundice patients.

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§ 20.45.1  Hyginus gives the name of apiastrum to melissophyllum, but by general consent the Sardinian variety is condemned as poisonous; I must however include in the same class all plants so placed by Greek writers.

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§ 20.46.1  Olusatrum (alexanders), also called hipposelinum (horse parsley), is antipathetic to scorpions. Its seed taken in drink cures colic and intestinal worms. The seed too, boiled and drunk in honey wine, cures dysuria. Its root, boiled in wine, expels stone, besides curing lumbago and pains in the side. Taken in drink and applied as liniment it cures the bite of a mad dog. A draught of its juices warms those who have been chilled. A fourth kind of parsley is made by some authorities out of oreoselinum (mountain parsley), a straight shrub a palm high, with a seed like cummin, beneficial to the urine and the menses. Heleoselinum (marsh celery) is especially valuable for the bites of spiders; this variety and oreoselinum taken in wine promotes the menses.

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§ 20.47.1  Another kind of parsley, which grows on rocks, is called by some petroselinum (rock parsley); it is especially good for abscesses, two spoonfuls of the juice making a dose with one cyathus of juice of horehound and three cyathi of warm water. Other authorities have added to the parsleys buselinem (cow parsley), which differs from the cultivated kind in the shortness of its stalk and the redness of its root, although its properties are the same. They add that taken in drink or applied it is a powerful antidote against the bites of serpents.

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§ 20.48.1  Ocimum (basil) too was severely condemned by Chrysippus as injurious to stomach, urine and eyesight, adding that it causes madness, lethargus and liver troubles, and that for this reason goats refuse to touch it, so that men also ought to avoid it. Certain authorities add that pounded ocimum, if covered by a stone, breeds a scorpion, and that ocimum chewed and left in the sun breeds worms; the Africans moreover hold that a man's life is lost if he is stung by a scorpion on the same day as he has eaten ocimum. Moreover, some hold that if a handful of ocimum be pounded up with ten sea or river crabs, all the scorpions in the neighbourhood are drawn to it. Diodorus in his Empirica says that the use of ocimum as a food breeds lice. The period that followed saw strong defenders of ocimum who said that goats do eat it, that no man's mind has been affected by it, and that in wine and a little vinegar it cures the stings of land scorpions and the venom of those in the sea. Experience also proves, they say, that ocimum if smelt in vinegar is good for fainting; also for lethargus, and to cool inflammations; for headache, too, if used as a liniment with rose oil or with myrtle oil or with vinegar, and for eye fluxes if applied in wine. It is said too, to be beneficial to the stomach, to disperse flatulence by belching if taken in vinegar, to check looseness of the bowels if applied externally, to be diuretic, applied thus to be good for both jaundice and dropsy, and to check even the diarrhoea of cholera. Philistion therefore prescribed ocimum even for coeliac complaints and when boiled for dysentery; some against the advice of Plistonicus prescribe it in wine for tenesmus, spitting of blood and hardness of the hypochondria. Applied to the breasts it checks the flow of milk. It is very beneficial, especially with goose grease, for the ears of babies. The pounded seed snuffed up the nostrils promotes sneezing, and used as a liniment the flow of mucus from the head; taken as food in vinegar it purges the womb. Mixed with cobbler's blacking it removes warts. Being aphrodisiac it is also administered to horses and asses at the time of service.

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§ 20.48.2  For all these purposes wild ocimum is of greater efficacy, particularly for the troubles caused by frequent vomitings and for abscesses of the womb, the root taken in wine being very efficacious for the bites of wild beasts.

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§ 20.49.1  Rocket seed cures the poisons of scorpions and of the shrewmouse; it keeps off all the little parasites breeding on the body, and removes spots on the skin of the face when applied with honey, freckles when applied with vinegar, reducing livid scars to whiteness when mixed with ox-gall. Taken in wine it is said to harden as it were the feeling of those about to be flogged. As a seasoning for dishes it imparts such a pleasant flavour that the Greeks have called it cuzomon (good broth). It is thought that if the eyes are fomented with slightly pounded rocket, clearness of vision is restored ... the coughing of babies is soothed. A decoction of its root in water extracts broken bones. We have already spoken of rocket as an aphrodisiac; if three leaves of wild rocket plucked with the left hand and pounded are drunk in hydromel, they so act.

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§ 20.50.1  On the other hand cress is antaphrodisiac, but as we have already said sharpens the senses. There are two varieties of it. The white acts as a purge, and carries bile away if one denarius by weight of it be taken in seven of water. It is an excellent cure for scrofula if applied with bean meal and covered with a cabbage leaf. The other kind, which is darker, purges away peccant humours of the head, clears the vision, calms if taken in vinegar troubled minds, and benefits the spleen when drunk in wine or eaten with a fig, or a cough if taken in honey, provided that the dose be repeated daily and administered on an empty stomach. The seed in wine expels all parasites of the intestines, more effectively however if there be added wild mint. Taken with wild marjoram and sweet wine it is good for asthma and cough, and a decoction in goat's milk relieves pains in the chest. Applied with pitch it disperses superficial abscesses; applied in vinegar it extracts thorns from the body and removes spots. When used for carcinoma white of egg is added. It is applied in vinegar to the spleen, but with babies it is best applied in honey. Sextius adds that burnt cress keeps away serpents, and neutralizes scorpion stings; that the pounded plant relieves headache, and mange, if mustard be added; that pounded and placed with fig on the ears it relieves hardness of hearing, and tooth ache if its juice be poured into the ears; and that dandruff and sores on the head are removed if the juice be applied with goose grease. Boils it brings to a head if applied with leaven. It makes carbuncles suppurate and break, and with honey it cleanses phagedaenic ulcers. With pearl barley it is applied in vinegar for sciatica and lumbago, likewise for lichen and rough nails, because its nature is caustic. The best kind, however, is the Babylonian; the wild variety for all the purposes mentioned is the more efficacious.

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§ 20.51.1  But among our chief medicinal plants is rue. The cultivated kind has the wider leaves and the more bushy branches; the wild variety is harsh in its effects and sharper in all respects. The juice is extracted by pounding with a moderate sprinkling of water, and is kept in a copper box. An overdose of this juice possesses poisonous qualities, especially in Macedonia near the river Aliaemon. Strangely enough, it is neutralized by the juice of hemlock; so there are actually poisons of poisons, and hemlock juice is good for the hands and face of those who gather rue. Further, rue, especially the Gallic variety, is one of the chief ingredients of antidotes. Any sort of rue, however, is even by itself a powerful antidote, the pounded leaves being taken in wine, especially against aconite and mistletoe; likewise, whether given in drink or in food, against poisonous fungi. In like manner it counteracts the bites of serpents, seeing that weasels, when about to fight with them, first protect themselves by eating rue. Rue is good for stings of scorpions and for those of spiders, bees, hornets and wasps, for injuries caused by cantharides and salamanders, and for the bites of mad dogs. The juice is drunk in wine in doses of one acetabulum, and the leaves pounded or chewed are applied with honey and salt, or after boiling with vinegar and pitch. It is said that any besmeared with its juice, and even those having it on their persons, are never stung by these poisonous creatures, and that serpents avoid the fumes that come from burning rue. Its most efficient form is the wild root taken with wine. Authorities add that this root is more efficacious if the draught be taken out of doors. Pythagoras divided rue also into (a) male, with smaller leaves and of a grass-green colour, and (b) female, with more luxuriant leaves and more colour. He also thought it injurious to the eyes, wrongly, since engravers and painters use rue as food, with bread or cress, for the sake of their eyes; wild goats also, they say, cat it to improve their vision. Many have dispelled dimness by anointing the eyes with its juice added to Attic honey or to the milk of a woman who has just borne a male child, or even by touching the corners of the eyes with the pure juice. Rue applied with pearl barley relieves fluxes from the eyes; taken in wine or applied with vinegar and rose oil, headaches likewise; if however the headache be chronic, barley flour and vinegar should be the other ingredients. The same plant soon relieves indigestion, flatulence and chronic pains of the stomach. It opens the womb, and corrects displacement of it, if applied in honey to the whole abdomen and chest; added to figs and boiled down to one half it is administered in wine in cases of dropsy. In this form it is also taken for pains in the chest, sides and loins, for coughs and asthma, for complaints of the lungs, liver and kidneys, and for cold shivers. To prevent the after-effects of drinking a decoction of the leaves is taken before indulgence in wine, It is beneficial as a food, raw, boiled or preserved, likewise for colic if boiled in hyssop and taken with wine. In this form it checks internal haemorrhage, and, if injected into them, bleeding nostrils; this form is also good for rinsing the teeth. The juice is also poured into the ears for earache, care being taken, as we have said, to inject only a moderate quantity if the wild variety is used; but for hardness of hearing and for singing in the ears there is added rose oil or bay oil, or else wine and honey. For phrenitis too the juice of pounded rue is poured in vinegar over the temples and cranium. Some have also added wild thyme and bay, rubbing with this mixture the head and the neck. Rue has been given in vinegar for sufferers from lethargus to smell, and a decoction of the juice for epileptics to drink in doses of four cyathi; it has been given before attacks of fever with unbearable chill, and also raw, as food, to sufferers from shivering fits. It is diuretic also, even when there is haematuria; it promotes too menstruation, and brings away the afterbirth and the foetus that has died before delivery, as Hippocrates holds, if it be taken in sweet, dark wine, or so applied locally. He also prescribes fumigation with rue to stimulate the womb. Diocles so applies it in vinegar and honey with barley meal for heartburn: for severe colic, the meal should be boiled in oil and spread over pieces of fleece. Many moreover also think that two drachmae of dried rue and one and a half drachmae of sulphur can be taken for purilent spittings, and for spitting of blood three sprays boiled in wine. Pounded and taken in wine with cheese it is also given to patients with dysentery. Crumbed into a draught it has also been given with bitumen for shortness of breath; for heavy falls three ounces of seed with one pound of oil and a sextarius of wine. The leaves boiled with oil ate applied to parts that have been bitten by frost. If it is diuretic, as Hippocrates holds, it is strange that some prescribe it as an antidiuretic drink for incontinence of urine. An application of rue, with honey and alum, heals itch and leprous sores; vitiligo also and warts, scrofula and similar complaints, with nightshade, lard and beef suet; in vinegar and oil, or white lead, erysipelas; in vinegar, carbuncles. Some prescribe the addition of silphium to the ointment, without using it, however, for the treatment of night pustules. A decoction of it is applied to swollen breasts, and with the addition of wax for outbursts of phlegm; for fluxes of the testicles, however, tender sprigs of laurel are added, and so extraordinary is the effect of these on the abdomen that, it is said, by an ointment of the wild variety with old axle-grease hernia is healed, as are also broken limbs by an application of the pounded seed and wax. The root of rue applied to the part affected restores to normal blood-shot eyes, and scars or spots on any part of the body. Of the other traditions about rue a remarkable one is that, although it is agreed that rue is by nature hot, yet a bunch of rue boiled in rose oil with one ounce of aloes checks the perspiration of those who have rubbed themselves with it, and that its use as food hinders the generative powers. Accordingly it is prescribed for spermatorrhoea and for frequent amorous dreams. Pregnant women must take care to exclude rue from their diet, for I find that the foetus is killed by it. Of all plants rue is the one most generally used for the diseases of quadrupeds also, whether it be difficulty of breathing or the bites of noxious creatures; it is injected through the nostrils in wine, or in vinegar if a bloodsucker has been swallowed; in any type of illness it is compounded as in the corresponding illness in man.

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§ 20.52.1  Mentastrum is wild mint, differing from the cultivated kind in the appearance of its leaves, which have the shape of those of ocimum and the smell of pennyroyal, for which reason some call it wild pennyroyal. If these leaves are chewed and applied, elephantiasis is cured, as was discovered in the time of Pompeius Magnus by the chance experiment of some one who for shame smeared his face with them. The same leaves are applied, or taken in drink, for the bites of serpents, in doses of two drachmae in two cyathi of wine, for the stings of scorpions with salt, oil and vinegar; for the wound of the scolopendra the juice of a decoction is used. The leaves are dried to a powder and kept as an antidote for all poisons. Spread out or burnt, the plant drives away even scorpions. Taken in drink it brings on menstruation, but it kills the foetus. For ruptures, spasms, orthopnoea, cholic and cholera it is very beneficial, and an external application is so for lumbago and gout. The juice is injected into ears that are infected with parasites. It is taken in drink for jaundice, and applied as ointment for scrofula; it prevents amorous dreams, and if taken in vinegar expels worms; for dandruff, vinegar with the plant in it is poured over the head in the sun.

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§ 20.53.1  The smell of mint by itself refreshes our spirits and its flavour gives a zest to food; for this reason it is a familiar ingredient in our sauces. By itself mint prevents milk from turning sour or curdled and thick; for which reason it is added to milk for drinking, and administered in water or in honey wine to such as are choked by a curdled draught. Through the same property it is believed to be a hindrance to generation by not allowing the genital fluids to thicken. Bleeding it checks in both men and women, and stays menstruation; violent disturbance of the bowels also, if taken in water with starch. Ulceration and abscess of the womb are healed by an external application, liver complaints by doses of three oboli in honey wine, spitting of blood by the same in broth. It is wonderfully good for curing sores on children's heads; it dries a wet and braces a dry trachea, in honey wine and water it clears away purulent phlegm, and benefits the voice, if its juice be taken just before a strain is put upon it, not otherwise; a gargle also of the juice added to rue and coriander in milk is good for a swollen uvula. With alum it is good for the tonsils, with honey for a rough tongue, and by itself for internal spasms and for lung complaints. With pomegranate juice, as Democritus tells us, it stops hiccough and vomitings. The juice of fresh mint, inhaled, is good for affections of the nostrils. Pounded by itself mint is good for cholera, taken in a draught of vinegar, for internal fluxes of blood, made into a plaster with pearl barley, for iliac trouble also and tension of the breasts. It is also applied to the temples for headache, and it is taken for the wounds caused by the scolopendra, sea scorpion and serpent. It is applied to fluxes of the eyes, to all eruptions on the head, and to rectal troubles. It prevents too chafing, even if only held in the hand. Added to honey wine it is poured into the ears. It is even said to cure splenic trouble if it be tasted in the garden, without plucking it, if he who bites it says on nine consecutive days that he is curing his spleen; also that a three-finger pinch of the dried powder taken in water relieves stomach ache, and that the same with a sprinkling of drink expels intestinal worms.

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§ 20.54.1  Pennyroyal and mint are strong allies in reviving people who have fainted, both being put, in whole sprays, into glass bottles full of vinegar. For this reason Varro declared that a garland of pennyroyal was more suited to our bedrooms than one of roses, for an application is said to relieve headache; moreover, its very smell protects the head, so it is reported, against injury from cold or heat, and from thirst, nor do they suffer from the heat who carry when they are in the sun two sprays of pennyroyal behind their ears. It is also applied with pearl barley and vinegar for pains. The female plant is the more efficacious. This has a mauve flower, but the male a white one. Taken in cold water with salt and pearl barley it checks nausea; in this form pains in the chest also, and in water by itself pains in the stomach. Likewise it checks gnawings and vomiting if taken with vinegar and pearl barley; in salt, vinegar and pearl barley it loosens the bowels. Boiled with honey and soda it cures complaints of the intestines; in wine it is diuretic, and if the wine be Aminaean it disperses both stone and all internal pains. In honey and vinegar it relieves menstruation and the afterbirth, replaces displaced uterus and expels the dead foetus. Its seed is given to smell in cases of aphasia; to epileptics it is administered with vinegar in doses of one cyathus. If unwholesome water has to be drunk, pounded pennyroyal is sprinkled on it. It relieves physical tiredness if taken in wine; it is rubbed with salt and vinegar on the sinews, and when these are contracted, and with honey for opisthotonic tetanus. A decoction is drunk for serpent bites; pounded it is taken in wine for stings of scorpions, especially if the pennyroyal be grown on dry soil. It is supposed to be good for ulcerations of the mouth, and for cough. The flower of the freshly gathered plant, when burnt, kills fleas by its smell. Xenocrates includes in his prescriptions the administering of a sprig of pennyroyal wrapped in wool to be smelt by sufferers from tertian ague before an attack of fever, or its being placed under the bedclothes for the patient to lie on.

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§ 20.55.1  Wild pennyroyal has for the same purposes as I have mentioned yet more beneficial properties. It is like wild marjoram, has smaller leaves than cultivated pennyroyal, and by some is called dictamnos (dittany). Its taste incites sheep or goats to bleat; for this reason certain Greeks changing one letter only have named it bleehon. Its nature is so heating that it raises a blister on the parts of the body to which it is applied. It does a chill good for the patient to be rubbed with pounded pennyroyal before a bath, as well as before the shivering fit of attacks of ague. For convulsions and gripings of the bowels, and for gout, it is wonderfully efficacious; for cramps it is administered as a drink with honey and salt; in lung troubles it makes expectoration easier. Taken with salt it is beneficial for splenic trouble, bladder, asthma and flatulence; a decoction of it, quite as well as the juice, replaces displaced uterus, and is an antidote for the wound inflicted by scolopendra, whether land or sea variety, by scorpions, and especially for the bite of a man. Its root is most efficacious when fresh for spreading ulcers, but the dried root restores scars to their natural state.

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§ 20.56.1  There is likewise kinship between pennyroyal and catmint. Boiled down to one third in water they disperse chills, help menstruation and allay the heats of summer. Catmint also has power to counteract the poisons of serpents. The smoke and smell of burning catmint drives them away; so those about to sleep in fear of snakes had better place catmint under the bedclothes. The pounded plant is applied to lachrymal fistula, and the fresh plant with one third part of bread mixed in vinegar is used as a liniment for headache. The juice of it dropped into the nostrils when thrown back stops bleeding at the nose; the root likewise, which with myrtle seed makes in warm raisin-wine a gargle that heals quinsy.

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§ 20.57.1  There is also a wild cummin, a very slender plant with four or five serrated leaves, but, like the cultivated variety, of great use, especially as a remedy for stomach trouble. Pounded and taken with bread, or drunk in water and wine, it dispels phlegms and flatulence; pipings also and pains in the bowels. All cummin, however, produces paleness in those who drink the draughts. At least it is reported that the followers of Porcius Latro, a distinguished teacher of rhetoric, imitated by this means the pallor that had followed his close application to study; and not so long ago Julius Vindex, the famous supporter of freedom against Nero, flattered in this way the hopes of legacy-hunters. Applied in the form of lozenges or fresh in vinegar it arrests bleeding at the nose; applied by itself it is good for fluxes from the eyes, and applied with honey it is good for them when swollen. For babies it is sufficient for it to be placed upon the abdomen. For jaundice it is administered in white wine after bathing. Ethiopian cummin is given chiefly in vinegar and water, and in an electuary with honey. The African variety is thought to have the special quality of checking incontinence of urine. Cultivated cummin, parched, and beaten up in vinegar, is given for troubles of the liver, likewise for vertigo; pounded moreover it is given in sweet wine to those who smart from too acrid urine; for disorders of the womb, in wine, and besides with an application of the leaves wrapped up in wool; for swollen testes it is parched and pounded, and applied with honey or with rose oil and wax. For all these purposes wild cummin is more efficacious; moreover with oil it is so for bites of serpents, and for stings of scorpions and scolopendras. A three-finger pinch in wine checks vomiting and nausea. For colic also it is drunk, or applied hot in lint kept in its place by bandages. Taken in wine it opens up suffocations of the womb, the dose being three drachma of cummin in three cyathi of wine. It is poured into the ears with veal suet or honey, when there are noises or ringing in them. For bruises it is applied with honey, raisins and vinegar, for black freckles in vinegar.

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§ 20.58.1  There is a plant very like cummin which the Greeks call ami. Some authorities however consider that it is Ethiopian cummin. Hippocrates called it royal cummin, doubtless because he thought that it was more efficacious than the Egyptian. Most people think that it is of an entirely different nature from cununin, because it is thinner and whiter. Yet its use is similar to that of cummin, for it is put under loaves of bread at Alexandria and included among the ingredients of Alexandrian sauces. It dispels flatulence and griping, promotes urine and menstruation, relieves bruises and fluxes of the eyes, and taken in wine with linseed in doses of two drachmae it is good for the wounds of scorpions, and with an equal proportion of myrrh it is especially good for the bite of the cerastes. Like cummin it produces pallor in the complexion of those who drink it. A fumigation of it with raisins or resin acts as a purge upon the womb. It is believed that those women more easily conceive who smell the plant during sexual intercourse.

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§ 20.59.1  I have said enough about the caper in the treatment of foreign plants. The caper growing overseas is not to be used; that of Italy is less harmful. They say that those who eat capers daily run no risk of paralysis or of pains in the spleen. Its root, pounded and rubbed on the skin in the sun, removes white eruptions. The skin of the root is good for troubles of the spleen if it be taken in wine in doses of two drachmae, but the patient must give up the use of the bath; it is said that in thirty-five days by urine and by stools the whole spleen is brought away. It is given in drink for lumbago and paralysis. Toothache is eased by pounded caper-seed in vinegar, by a decoction of it, or by chewing the root. Boiled in oil it is injected for earache. The sores called phagedaenic are cured by leaves or freshly gathered root applied with honey. In this form the root removes scrofula; boiled In water it removes parotid tumours and worms. For pains in the liver it is pounded and applied with barley meal. It also cures diseases of the bladder. In vinegar and honey it is also given for tapeworm: A decoction in vinegar removes sores in the mouth. Authorities agree that the caper is harmful to the stomach.

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§ 20.60.1  Lovage — some call it panaces — is good for the stomach, likewise for convulsions and flatulence. Some have called it ox cunila, but wrongly, as I have pointed out.

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§ 20.61.1  Besides the cultivated cunila there are several other kinds used in medicine. The one called ox cunila has a seed like that of pennyroyal which is curative if chewed and applied to wounds provided that the bandage is not taken off till the fifth day after. For the bites of serpents it is taken in wine and applied to the wound after being pounded. The bites made by serpents they rub ... likewise tortoises that are going to fight with serpents. Certain people call it panacea (all-heal) in this connection. It relieves tumours and troubles of the male organs, applied dry or after pounding the leaves; for every use it combines wonderfully well with wine.

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§ 20.62.1  There is another, called chicken cunila by Romans, Heracleotic marjoram by the Greeks. Pounded and with the addition of salt it is good for the eyes. It relieves a cough also and liver complaints, pains in the side when mixed into a broth with meal, oil and vinegar, but especially the bites of serpents.

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§ 20.63.1  There is a third kind, which the Greeks call male cunila, and the Romans cunilago; it has a foul smell, wood-like root and a rough leaf. Of all varieties of cunila it is said that this has the strongest qualities, that a handful of it thrown about attracts all the cockroaches in the whole house, that taken in vinegar and water it is a specific against scorpions, and that if a man be rubbed over with three a leaves in oil serpents are kept away.

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§ 20.64.1  On the other hand the cunila called soft has shaggier and prickly branches, and when pounded the smell of honey, the fingers sticking together at its touch; a second variety smells of frankincense, and we have called it libanotis. Either kind in wine or vinegar is an antidote against the bites of serpents; furthermore, pounded and scattered about in water both varieties kill fleas.

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§ 20.65.1  Cultivated cunila too has its uses. The juice with rose oil is good for the ear-laps, and it is taken by itself in drink for stings. From it grows the mountain variety, which is like wild thyme and efficacious against the bites of serpents. It is diuretic and cleanses after childbirth. Wild or cultivated it is a wonderful stimulus to digestion and to the appetite, or relieves indigestion taken fasting and sprinkled in a drink. Useful too for sprains, taken in barley meal with vinegar and water it is very useful for the stings of wasps and the like. Other kinds of libanotis will be dealt with in their proper place.

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§ 20.66.1  Piperitis, which I have also called siliquastrum, is taken in drink for epilepsy. Castor gave a further description of it: a red, long stem, with its knots close together; leaves like those of the bay; a white, small seed, with a taste like pepper; good for the gums, teeth, sweetness of breath and for belching.

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§ 20.67.1  Origanum, which rivals cunila in its wild flavour, as I have said has many varieties useful in medicine. One is onitis, called by some prasion, and not unlike hyssop. Its special use is to be taken in warm water for gnawings of the stomach and indigestion, and in white wine for the stings of spiders and scorpions, while it is applied on wool with vinegar and oil for sprains and bruises.

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§ 20.68.1  Goat origanum is more like wild thyme. Diuretic, it disperses tumours; if taken in drink it is most efficacious for poisoning by mistletoe or by viper bites, for acid belchings from the stomach and for the hypochondria. With honey it is also given for coughs, pleurisy and pneumonia.

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§ 20.69.1  Heraclium too has three varieties. The darker one with the broader leaf is glutinous; the second variety, with a more slender leaf, is more tender and not unlike sampsuchum, which some prefer to call prasion. There is a third kind, intermediate between the other two, but less efficacious than either. The best kind, however, is the Cretan, which also has a pleasant smell, the next best that of Smyrna, having less smell, and the Heracleotic, called onitis, is more useful for drinking. All kinds are used to keep away serpents, are given to eat boiled to those who have been bitten, are diuretic when taken in drink as above, cure with the root of all-heal ruptures and convulsions, dropsy with fig or with hyssop boiled down to one sixth in doses of one acetabulum, likewise itch, prurigo and psoriasis, if given on going down to the bath. Its juice, with woman's milk, is poured into the ears. It cures the tonsils also and uvula, as well as sores on the head. Boiled, and taken in wine with ashes it neutralizes the poison of opium and gypsum. A dose of one acetabulum loosens the bowels; it is applied to bruises, and also for toothache, importing whiteness to the teeth when used as a dentifrice with honey and soda. It checks bleeding at the nose. For parotid tumours it is boiled down with barley meal, for a rough trachea pounded with gall-nut and honey, and its leaves with honey and salt are good for the spleen. Boiled with vinegar and salt, and taken in small doses it loosens thick, black phlegm. Beaten up with oil it is poured into the nostrils for jaundice. Tired bodies are rubbed with it, care being taken not to touch the abdomen. With pitch it cures epinyctis; with a roasted fig it brings boils to a head. It is good for scrofulous swellings if applied with oil, vinegar and barley meal, if with fig, for pains in the side, pounded and applied in vinegar for fluxes of blood from the genitals, and also for bringing away more thoroughly the afterbirth.

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§ 20.70.1  Dittander (pepperwort) is considered to be one of the caustic plants. So it clears the complexion, but produces sores on the skin, which, however, are easily cured with wax and rose oil. Thus used, it always removes leprous sores and psoriasis easily, as well as the sores left by scars. It is said that in cases of toothache, if it be attached to the arm on the side where the pain is, this is diverted to it.

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§ 20.71.1  Git is by some Greeks called melanthium, by others, melaspermon. The best has the most pungent smell and the darkest colour. It cures the wounds of serpents and of scorpions. I find that it is applied in vinegar and honey, and that by burning it serpents are kept away. A dose of one drachma also is taken in drink for the wounds of spiders. Pounded, and smelt in a piece of linen it stops running from the nose, and headaches if applied in vinegar; poured into the nostrils with iris juice it cures fluxes and swellings of the eyes, toothache when boiled with vinegar, ulcers in the month when pounded or chewed; likewise leprous sores and freckles when added to vinegar, difficulty of breathing when taken in drink with soda, and indurations, chronic swellings and suppurations, when used as liniment. It increases the flow of women's milk if taken daily for a few days. Its juice is collected in a similar way to that of henbane, and like it is poisonous if taken in too large doses, a fact more remarkable because the seed actually makes a most pleasant seasoning for loaves of bread. It cleanses the eyes also, is diuretic and an emmenagogue. Moreover, I find that merely by tying thirty grains to the body in a piece of linen, the afterbirth is brought away. It is also said that pounded and applied in urine it cures corns on the feet, and that fumigation with it kills gnats as well as flies.

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§ 20.72.1  Anise too is taken in wine for the stings of scorpions, being one of the few remedies specially praised, whether raw or boiled, by Pythagoras. Green also or dried, it is valued for all such foods as require seasoning or sauce; it is also put under the bottom crust of a loaf. Placed with bitter almonds on the strainers it improves wine. Moreover, the breath is made more pleasant and bad odour removed if anise be chewed in the early morning along with alexanders and a little honey, the mouth being afterwards rinsed with wine, it makes the face look younger. It relieves sleeplessness if hung on the pillow, so that it may be smelt by the sleepers. It sharpens the appetite, to do which has been added to the arts by luxury, ever since the craving for food ceased to come from toil. For these reasons some have called anise anicetum.

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§ 20.73.1  The most esteemed variety is the Cretan; next comes the Egyptian. This in seasoning takes the place of lovage. To burn it and inhale the fumes through the nostrils relieves headache. Evenor recommends its pounded root to be applied to fluxes of the eyes; Iollas recommends a similar application of the plant itself with saffron and wine; by itself, with only pearl barley added, he prescribes it for violent fluxes and for extraction of anything which has got into the eyes. Applied in water it also removes a cancerous growth in the nostril. Used as a gargle with hyssop and honey in vinegar it relieves quinsies; it is poured with rose oil into the ears; phlegm in the chest is cleared away by parched anise taken with honey. For a cough it is better to pound up in honey fifty bitter almonds, peeled, with an acetabulum of anise. A remedy very easy indeed to make consists of three drachmae of anise and two of poppy mixed with honey and divided into pieces of the size of a bean, the dose being three daily. Its chief value, however, is to cause belching, and so it cures flatulence of the stomach, griping of the intestines and coeliac trouble. Boiled, and either smelt or drunk, it also stays hiccough. Its boiled leaves are a remedy for indigestion. To smell the juice of the plant boiled with celery a stops sneezing. Taken in drink it promotes sleep, disperses stone, stays vomiting and swelling of the hypochondria, besides being very useful for chest troubles and for the sinews with which the body is girt. It is good for headache also to pour in drops upon the head the juice of anise boiled with oil. Nothing is considered to be more beneficial to the belly and intestines, and so it is given roasted for dysentery and for tenesmus. Some add opium also, pills of the size of a lupine-seed being swallowed three times a day and washed down in a cyathus of wine. Dieuches used the juice also for lumbago; the pounded seed with mint he gave for dropsy and coeliac trouble; Evenor gave the root also for diseases of the kidneys. Dalion the herbalist prescribed a poultice of anise and parsley for women in labour, and also for pain in the womb; he recommended it to be taken with dill in drink by women in labour. It is applied also in cases of phrenitis, sometimes freshly gathered and with pearl barley; it is also so applied to babies suffering from epilepsy or convulsions. Pythagoras indeed declares that no epileptic fit occurs while anise is held in the hand, and for this reason advises that as much as possible be planted near the home. He also says that to smell it makes for easier childbirth, and that immediately after delivery it should be given in a draught with a sprinkling of pearl barley. Sosimenes used it in vinegar for all indurations and for fatigue, boiling it in oil after adding soda. He guaranteed travellers less fatigue if they took anise seed in drink. For flatulence of the stomach Heraclides gave in honey-wine a three-finger pinch of the seed with two oboli of beaver oil, and in like manner for flatulence in the belly or intestines and for orthopnoea a three-finger pinch of the seed, the same quantity of henbane, and asses' milk added. Many advise that those intending to take an emetic should during the dinner take it in water by acetabula of anise and ten pounded bay leaves. It relieves suffocation of the womb, if it be chewed and applied warm, or if it be taken with beaver-oil in oxymel. A dose of a three-finger pinch of cucumber seed and of the same quantity of linseed, in three cyathi of white wine, dispels vertigo after childbirth. For quartan agues Tlepolemus used a three-finger pinch of the seed of anise and fennel, taken in vinegar and one cyathus of honey. Applied with bitter almonds it relieves diseases of the joints. There are some who believe that its nature neutralizes the poison of asps. Diuretic, it quenches thirst, is an aphrodisiac, promotes with wine a gentle perspiration, and also protects clothes from moths. It is more efficacious always when fresh and the darker it is, yet it injures the stomach except when there is flatulence.

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§ 20.74.1  Dill too causes belching and relieves griping; it arrests diarrhoea. Its roots in water or wine are applied for fluxes from the eyes. To smell its seed when boiling checks hiccoughs. Taken in water it relieves indigestion. Its ash relieves an inflamed uvula, but weakens the eyes and the powers of generation.

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§ 20.75.1  The sacopenium which grows in our country is quite unlike that which comes from overseas. The latter, also called sagapemon, resembles ammoniac gum. It is good for pains in the sides and in the chest, for convulsions, for chronic coughs and expectoration, and for swellings of the hypochondria. It cures also vertigo, palsy, opisthotonic tetanus, diseases of the spleen and loins, and violent chills. It is given in vinegar to be smelt in cases of suffocation of the womb. In other cases it is both given in drink and with oil used as an embrocation. It is also useful as an antidote to harmful drugs.

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§ 20.76.1  Of the cultivated poppy I have mentioned three kinds a and I promised to describe other kinds, those of the wild poppy. Of the cultivated poppy the calyx itself of the white kind is pounded and is taken in wine to induce sleep. The seed cures elephantiasis. From the dark poppy a soporific is obtained by making incisions in the stalk, when the buds are forming (as Diagoras advises), or when the flowers are falling (as Iollas recommends), at the third hour of a clear day, that is to say, when the dew on the plant has dried up. They recommend that the incision be made beneath the head and calyx, and in no other variety either is an incision made into the head itself. Both this juice and that of any other plant is gathered in wool, or if there be but little, by scratching it off, as it is from lettuce, with the thumb nail, doing the same on the following day to any that has since become drier. Poppy juice however being copious thickens, and squeezed into lozenges is dried in the shade; it is not only a soporific, but if too large a dose be swallowed the sleep even ends in death. It is called opium. In this way, we are told, died at Bavilum in Spain the father of Publius Licinius Caecina, a man of praetorian rank, when an unbearable illness had made life hateful to him, and so also several others. For this reason a great controversy has arisen. Diagoras and Erasistratus have utterly condemned it as a fatal drug, forbidding its use moreover in injections on the ground that it is injurious to the eyesight. Andreas has added that the only reason why it does not cause instantaneous blindness is because it is adulterated at Alexandria. Afterwards, however, its use was not disapproved of in the form of the famous drug called διά κωδυών (diacodion). The seed too pounded into lozenges with milk is used to induce sleep, also with rose oil for headache; with rose oil too it is poured into the ears for earache. As a liniment for gout it is applied with woman's milk (the leaves by themselves are also so used), likewise in vinegar for erysipelas and wounds. I myself, however, should disapprove of its addition to eye salves, and much more to what are called febrifuges, digestives and coeliacs; the dark poppy, however, is given in wine for coeliac trouble. All kinds of cultivated poppy are larger than the wild. The heads are round, while those of the wild are long and small, though for all purposes more effective. The poppy is boiled and the liquid drunk for sleeplessness, with the same water the face is fomented. The best poppies grow on dry soils, and where the rainfall is slight. When the heads themselves and the leaves are boiled down, the juice is called meconium, and is much weaker than opium. The chief test of opium is its smell, that of pure opium being unbearable; the next best test is to put it in a lamp, when it should burn with a bright, clear flame, and smell only when it has gone out; adulterated opium does not behave in this fashion. Adulterated opium is also harder to light, and is continually going out. A further test of pure opium is by water, on which it floats as a light cloud, while the impure gathers into blisters. But especially wonderful is the fact that pure opium is detected by the summer sun. For pure opium sweats and melts until it becomes like freshly gathered juice. Mnesides thinks that opium is best kept by adding. the seed of henbane, others by putting it in beans.

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§ 20.77.1  Intermediate between the cultivated poppy and the wild is a third kind, for though growing on cultivated land it is self-sown; we have called it rhoeas or roving poppy. Some gather it and eat it straight away with the whole calyx. It acts as a purge; five heads boiled in three heminae of wine also induce sleep ...

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§ 20.78.1  Of the wild poppy one kind is called ceratitis. Black-seeded, a cubit high, with a thick root covered with a hard skin, it has a little calyx curved like a little horn. Its leaves are smaller and thinner than those of the other wild varieties. The seed is small, ripening at harvest; half an acetabulum of it, taken in honey wine, acts as a purge. The pounded leaves with oil cure eye-ulcers of beasts of burden. Its root, in the proportion of one acetabulum to two sextarii of water, boiled down to one half, is given for complaints of the loins and liver. Its leaves applied in honey are a cure for carbuncles. This variety is called glaucion by some and paralium by others, for it grows within reach of the sea breezes or in alkaline soils.

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§ 20.79.1  A second variety of wild poppy is called heradium, by others aphron, having leaves, if you look at it from a distance, that look like sparrows. Its roots are on the surface of the ground, and its seed is like foam. It is from the use of this plant that linen gets its shiny whiteness. In summer it is pounded in a mortar for epilepsy, the dose being an acetabulum in white wine; for it causes vomiting, and is very useful for the drug called diacodion and arteriace. This preparation however is made by steeping one hundred and twenty heads of this or any other wild poppy in three sextarii of rain water for two days; then they are thoroughly boiled in the same water, and after the whole has been dried it is again boiled down to one half with honey in a slow heat. More recently there has been added six drachmae of saffron, hypocisthis, frankincense and gum arabic, with a sextarius of Cretan raisin-wine. This however is just for show; this simple and old-fashioned remedy depends for its virtues entirely on the poppy and honey.

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§ 20.80.1  A third variety is tithymalon, called by some mecon, by others paralion, with a leaf like that of flax, a white flower, and a head of the size of a bean. It is gathered when the grape is at its best and then dried in the shade. Its seed, taken in half an acetabulum of honey wine, purges the bowels. But the head of any poppy, whether fresh or dried, if applied to the eyes relieves fluxes. Opium taken in nearly neat wine, if administered immediately, is an antidote for the stings of scorpions. Some give this property only to the dark variety, if its heads or leaves be pounded up.

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§ 20.81.1  There is also purslane, which is called peplis, being not much more beneficial than the cultivated variety, of which are recorded remarkable benefits: that the poison of arrows and of the serpents haemorrhoids and prester are counteracted if purslane be taken as food, and if it be applied to the wound, the poison is drawn out; likewise the poison of henbane if purslane be taken in raisin wine, after extraction of the juice. When the plant itself is not available, its seed has a similarly beneficial effect. It also counteracts the impurities of water, and if pounded and applied in wine it cures headache and sores on the head; other sores it heals if chewed and applied with honey. So prepared it is applied also to the cranium of infants, and to an umbilical hernia; for eye-fluxes in persons of all ages, with pearl bailey, to the forehead and temples, but to the eyes themselves in milk and honey; also, if the eyes should fall forwards pounded leaves are applied with bean husks, to blisters with pearl barley, salt and vinegar. Sores in the mouth and gumboils are relieved by chewing it raw; toothache likewise and sore tonsils by the juice of the boiled plant, to which some have added a little myrrh. But to chew it makes firm loose teeth, strengthens the voice and keeps away thirst. Pains at the back of the neck are relieved by it with equal parts of gall nut, linseed and honey, complaints of the breasts with honey or Cimolian chalk, while asthma is alleviated by a draught of the seed with honey. Taken in salad it strengthens the stomach. It is applied with pearl barley to reduce high temperature, and besides this when chewed it also cools the intestines. It arrests vomiting. For dysentery and abscesses it is eaten in vinegar or taken in drink with cummin, and for tenesmus it is boiled. Whether eaten or drunk it is good for epilepsy, for menstruation if one acetabulum be taken in concentrated must, for hot gout and crysipelas if applied with salt. A draught of its juice helps the kidneys and the bladder, expelling also intestinal parasites. For the pain of wounds it is applied in oil with pearl barley. It softens indurations of the sinews. Metrodorus, author of Compendium of Prescriptions from Roots, was of opinion that it should be given after delivery to aid the afterbirth. It checks lust and amorous dreams. A Spanish prince, father of a man of praetorian rank, because of unbearable disease of the uvula, to my knowledge carries except in the bath a root of purslane hung round his neck by a thread, being in this way relieved of all inconvenience. Moreover, I have found in my authorities that the head rubbed with purslane ointment is free from catarrh the whole year. It is supposed however to weaken the eyesight.

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§ 20.82.1  Coriander is not found among wild plants. The best, as is generally agreed, is the Egyptian. It is an antidote for the poison of one kind of serpent, the amphisbaena, both taken in drink and applied. It heals other wounds also, when pounded, besides night rashes and blisters; in this form too, with honey or raisins, all tumours and gatherings, though to treat the anus the pounded plant must be applied in vinegar. Some prescribe three grains of seed to be swallowed before the fit comes on by patients with tertian ague, or more than three to be applied in ointment to the forehead. There are some who believe that it is beneficial to place coriander before sunrise under the pillows. The fresh plant has great power to cool inflammations. Spreading sores also are healed by coriander with honey or raisins, likewise diseased testes, burns, carbuncles and sore ears, fluxes of the eyes too if woman's milk be added, while fluxes from belly or intestines are stayed by the seed taken in water. It is also taken in drink with rue for cholera. Intestinal parasites are expelled by coriander seed, taken with pomegranate juice and oil. Xenocrates records a great wonder, if it be a fact: that if women take in drink one grain of the seed the menses are retarded for one day, for two days if she takes two grains, and so on, one day's delay for each grain taken. M. Varro thinks that by slightly pounded coriander and cummin, with vinegar, meat of any kind can be kept sweet in the heat of summer.

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§ 20.83.1  Orache is also found wild, a vegetable accused by Pythagoras of causing dropsy, jaundice and pallor, and of being very hard indeed to digest; he adds as another drawback that not even in gardens does anything grow near it without drooping. Dionysius and Diocles have added that very many diseases arise from it, that it must never be boiled without changing the water often, that it is injurious to the stomach, and that it is the cause of freckles and pimples. I am at a loss to understand why Solon of Smyrna has stated that orache is difficult to grow in Italy. Hippocrates injects it with beet for complaints of the womb. Lycus of Naples prescribed it to be taken in drink for stings of the Spanish fly, and considered that it might be applied, scesses, incipient boils, and all indurations; with honey, vinegar and soda he used it in this way for erysipelas, and likewise gout. It is said to bring away scabrous nails without producing a sore. There are some who give its seed with honey for jaundice, add soda and rub the throat and tonsils, besides using it as a purge, boiled either by itself or with mallows or lentils. They also give it as an emetic. They use wild orache as a hair-dye as well as for the purposes mentioned above.

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§ 20.84.1  On the other hand, both kinds of mallow, the cultivated and the wild, are highly praised. The two lands of them are distinguished by the size of the leaf. Among cultivated mallows the larger is called by the Greeks malope; the other is called malache, the reason being, it is thought, because it relaxes the bowels. But of the wild kinds, the one with a large leaf and white roots, called althaea, has received from some the name of phstolochia, from the excellence of its properties. Mallows make richer every soil in which they are sown. They are efficacious against every sort of stings, especially those of scorpions, wasps and similar creatures, and those of the shrewmouse. Moreover, those who have been rubbed beforehand with oil and any one of the mallows pounded, or who carry it on their persons, are never stung. A leaf placed on a scorpion paralyses it. Mallows also counteract the poison of white lead. Raw mallow applied with saltpetre extracts splinters and thorns; taken moreover boiled with its root it counteracts the poison of the sea-hare, some adding that it must be brought back by vomiting. Other marvels are reported of the mallows, the most wonderful being that whoever swallows daily half a cyathus of the juice of any one of them will be immune to all diseases. Running sores on the head are cured by mallows that have rotted in urine, lichen and sores in the mouth by them and honey, dandruff and loose teeth by a decoction of the root. With the root of the single-stem plant they stab around an aching tooth until the pain ceases; the same plant a clears scrofula and parotid abscesses, and with the addition of human saliva superficial abscess also, and that without leaving a wound. The seed taken in dark wine clears away phlegm and nausea. The root attached as an amulet in dark wool stays troubles of the breasts; boiled in milk and taken like broth. it relieves a cough in five days. Sextius Niger says that mallows are injurious to the stomach; the Theban lady Olympias that with goose-grease they cause abortion, and others that a handful of their leaves taken in oil and wine assist the menstruation of women. It is agreed at any rate that women in labour are more quickly delivered if mallow leaves are spread under them, but they must be withdrawn immediately after delivery for fear of prolapsus of the womb. They give the juice to be drunk by women in labour; they must be fasting, and the dose is a hemina boiled down in wine. Moreover, they attach the seed to the arm of sufferers from spermatorrhoea, and mallows are so aphrodisiac that Xenocrates maintains that the seeds of the single-stem mallow, sprinkled for the treatment of women, stimulate their sexual desire to an infinite degree, and that three roots attached near to the part have a like effect. He says too that injections of mallow are very good for tenesmus and dysentery, and also for rectal troubles, or fomentations may be used. The juice is also given warm in doses of three cyathi to sufferers from melancholia, and in doses of four to those who are raving; for epilepsy the dose is a hemina of the decoded juice. This juice is also applied warm to patients with stone, and to sufferers from flatulence, griping and opisthotonia. For both erysipelas and burns the leaves are applied boiled down to an oily paste, and they are applied raw with bread for painful wounds. The juice of a decoction is good for sinews, bladder and gnawings of the intestines. The paste soothes the womb whether taken by the mouth or injected; the decoction makes the passage pleasant. For all purposes mentioned above the root of althaea is more efficacious, especially for spasms and ruptures. Boiled in water it checks looseness of the bowels; taken in white wine it is good for scrofula, parotid abscesses and inflammation of the breasts, and an application of the leaves, boiled down in wine, removes superficial abscess. The same leaves dried and boiled down in milk cure very quickly the most racking cough. Hippocrates gave the juice of the boiled-down root to be drunk by wounded men who were thirsty through loss of blood, and applied the plant itself with honey and resin to wounds; likewise to bruises, sprains, and swellings; as above also to muscles, sinews and joints. He gave it to be taken in wine by patients suffering from cramp or dysentery. It is remarkable that water to which this root has been added thickens in the open air and congeals. The fresher it is also, the better.

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§ 20.85.1  Sorrel (lapathum) has similar properties. There is also a wild kind called by some oxalis, by our people rumex and by others gelding sorrel. It has a taste very like that of the cultivated kind, pointed leaves, the colour of white beet and a very small root, being when mixed with axle-grease very efficacious for scrofula. There is also another kind, generally called pointed sorrel, even more like the cultivated kind, but with a leaf more pointed and redder, growing only in marshy localities. There are some who speak of a water sorrel, growing in water, and yet another, horse sorrel, larger, paler and more compact than the cultivated kind. The wild sorrels heal the stings of scorpions and protect from stings those who carry them on their persons. The root, boiled down in vinegar, is good for the teeth, if the juice be used as a mouth wash, while to drink the same is good for jaundice. The seed cures inveterate stomach troubles. The root of horse sorrel, in particular, brings away scabrous nails; its seed taken in wine in doses of two drachmae cures dysentery. The seed of pointed sorret washed in rainwater, with the addition of a piece of gum arabic, of the size of a lentil, is good for spitting of blood. Most excellent lozenges are made from the leaves and root, with the addition of soda and a little frankincense. When wanted for use they are steeped in vinegar.

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§ 20.86.1  But the cultivated kind is applied to the forehead for fluxes from the eyes. With the root they treat lichen and leprous sores; it is boiled down in wine however for scrofula and parotid abscesses, taken in wine for stone, and applied as liniment for complaints of the spleen, being equally good for coelac troubles, dysentery and tenesmus. For all the same purposes the juice of sorrel is more efficacious; it causes belching, is diuretic, and dispels dimness of the eyes; put in the bottom of the bath, or rubbed on the body without oil before taking a bath, it also removes itching of the body. The root also chewed strengthens loose teeth. A decoction of it with wine checks looseness of the bowels; the leaves relax them. Solon has added (not to omit anything) another variety, ox sorrel, differing from the others only in the depth of the root, and by the efficacy of this root, when taken in wine, to cure dysentery.

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§ 20.87.1  Mustard, of which we have three kinds among the cultivated plants, Pythagoras judged to be chief of those whose pungent properties reach a high level, since no other penetrates further into the nostrils and brain. Pounded it is applied with vinegar to the bites of serpents and scorpion stings. It counteracts the poisons of fungi. For phlegm it is kept in the mouth until it melts, or is used as a gargle with hydromel. For toothache it is chewed, for the uvula it is used as a gargle with vinegar and honey. It is very beneficial for all stomach troubles. Taken with food it eases expectoration from the lungs, and is given to asthmatics, as well as for epileptic exhaustion a with the addition of juice of cucumber. lit clears the senses, and, by the sneezing caused by it, the head; it relaxes the bowels; it promotes menstruation and urine. Pounded with figs and cummin, each being one third of the whole, it is applied externally for dropsy. By its powerful smell when mixed with vinegar mustard revives those in epileptic swoons and women fainting with prolapsus, as well as those afflicted with lethargus. Tordylon — that is, the seed of hartwort — is added, and if the lethargy be unusually deep, it is applied with fig in vinegar to the legs or even to the head. Long-standing pains of the chest, loins, hips, shoulders, and whatever deep-seated troubles in any part of the body have to be removed, are relieved by the caustic property of an external application, causing blisters; but when there is great hardness the application is made without the fig, or if too severe burning be feared, between a doubled cloth. They use it with red earth for mange, itch, leprous sores, phthiriasis, tetanus and opisthotonus. With honey they also use it as ointment for scabrous cheeks or dimness of vision, and the juice is extracted in three ways in an earthen pot, in which it is slightly warmed by the sun. There also exudes from the slender stem of the mustard plant a milky juice, which, when it has thus hardened, cures toothache. Seed and root, steeped in must, are pounded together, and a handful is swallowed to strengthen the throat, stomach, eyes, head and all the senses, as well as the lassitude of women, being a very wholesome medicine indeed. Taken in vinegar it also disperses stone. To livid places and bruises it is applied with honey and goose-grease, or else with Cyprian wax. From mustard-seed, steeped in olive oil and then compressed, there is extracted an oil, which is used for stiffness of the sinews, loins and hips, and for violent chills.

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§ 20.88.1  The same nature and properties as those of mustard are said to belong to adarca, mentioned in my account of wild plants, which grows on the bark of reeds right under the tuft.

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§ 20.89.1  Most authorities have placed among the especially valuable plants horehound, called by some Greeks prasion, by others linostrophon, by a few philopais or philochares, a plant too well known to need description. Its leaves and seed pounded together are good for the bites of serpents, pains in the chest and side, and chronic cough; and those who have been troubled with spitting of blood derive extraordinary benefit from its stalks, boiled in water with Italian millet to mellow the harshness of the juice. It is applied externally with grease for scrofula. There are some who prescribe for a cough a two-finger pinch of the fresh seed, boiled down with a handful of emmer to which a little oil and salt has been added, to be swallowed by the patients when fasting. Others consider incomparable for the same purpose an extract of horehound and fennel; three sextarii are extracted and boiled down to two; a sextarius of honey is added and the whole is again boiled down to two. The dose should be a spoonful a day swallowed in a cyathus of water. Pounded horehound with honey is remarkably good for maladies of the male genitals. It clears up lichen if applied in vinegar, and is healing for ruptures, spasms, cramp and the sinews. Taken with salt and vinegar it relaxes the bowels, also helping menstruation and the afterbirth. Dried and powdered it is very efficacious with honey for a dry cough, likewise for gangrene and hangnails. The juice moreover with honey is good for the ear-laps, nostrils, jaundice, and for lessening the secretion of bile; as an antidote for poisons it is among the few most effective. The plant itself with iris and honey purges the stomach, clears the lungs of phlegm, promotes urine, but should be avoided when there is an ulcerated bladder or the kidneys are affected. The juice is also said to improve the eyesight. Castor records two kinds of horehound, the dark and the white, the latter being preferred by him. He puts horehound juice into an empty eggshell, and then pours in the egg itself and honey in equal proportions; this mixture warmed he assures us brings abscesses to a head, cleanses them and heals them. Pounded also he applied horehound with old axle-grease to dog bites.

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§ 20.90.1  Wild thyme is thought to be so named from its being a creeping plant; this characteristic is to be found only in the wild kind, mostly in rocky districts; the cultivated does not creep, but grows up to be a palm in height. That growing spontaneously is a more luxuriant plant, with paler leaves and stalks, an efficacious antidote for serpent bites, particularly those of cenchris scolopendras, land or sea, and scorpions, the stalks and leaves being boiled in wine. When burnt it keeps away all such creatures by its smell, and is an especially potent antidote for the poison of marine creatures. For headache a decoction in vinegar is applied to the temples and forehead, rose oil being added; so also for phrenitis and lethargus. For griping and strangury, for quinsy and vomiting, four drachmae are taken in water. For liver complaints four oboli of the leaves are given, and the same in vinegar for splenic troubles. For spitting of blood it is pounded in two cyathi of oxymel.

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§ 20.91.1  Wild sisymbrium, called by some thymbraion, grows no higher than a foot. The sisymbrium growing in watery districts resembles cress, and both are efficacious for the stings of such creatures as hornets; the kind growing on dry soil has a pleasant scent and is used for wreaths. The leaf is narrower. They both relieve headache as well as fluxes from the eyes, according to the testimony of Philinus. Some add bread, but others boil it in wine by itself. It heals night rashes and spots on women's faces within four days if applied at night and taken away during the day. Vomiting, hiccough, griping and fluxes of the stomach it checks whether taken in food or drunk as juice. It should not be eaten by pregnant women unless the foetus be dead, since even an application of it produces abortion. Taken with wine it is diuretic, the wild kind moreover even expels stone. Those who must remain awake are kept roused by an infusion in vinegar poured on the head.

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§ 20.92.1  Linseed is not only used in combination with other ingredients, but also by itself removes spots on women's faces, and its juice benefits the eyesight. With frankincense and water or with myrrh and wine it relieves fluxes from the eyes, parotid abscesses with honey or grease or wax, fluxes from the stomach when sprinkled in water like pearl barley, and quinsies when boiled in water and oil and applied externally with anise. It is roasted to check looseness of the bowels. For coeliac trouble and dysentery it is applied in vinegar. For pains of the liver it is eaten with raisins; for consumption electuaries are made from the seed with very useful results. Linseed meal, with soda or salt or ash added, softens indurations of the muscles, sinews, joints and nape of the neck, as well as the membranes of the brain. With a fig it also opens and brings to a head a parotid abscess; with the root moreover of wild cucumber it extracts bodies sticking into the flesh, including pieces of broken bone. Boiled in wine it prevents a sore from spreading, and with honey checks eruptions of phlegm. With an equal part of cress it cures scabrous nails, with resin and myrrh complaints of the testes and hernia, and in water gangrene. Stomach ache is cured by a decoction of one sextarius of linseed with an equal quantity of fenugreek in hydromel, and dangerous maladies of the intestines and lower trunk by an enema of linseed in oil or honey.

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§ 20.93.1  Blite seems to be an inactive plant, without flavour or any sharp quality, for which reason in Menander husbands use the name as a term of abuse for their wives. It is injurious to the stomach. It so disturbs the bowels as to cause in some persons. It is said however to be good for scorpion stings when drunk in wine, for corns on the feet when applied in a liniment, and also, with oil, for diseases of the spleen and for pain in the temples. Used as a food it is thought by Hippocrates to check menstruation.

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§ 20.94.1  Spignel is not grown in Italy except by medical men, and by very few of these. There are two kinds of it. The more famous is called Athamanticum or Athamanicum, because, as some think, it was discovered by Athamas, or according to others because the most esteemed variety is found in Athamania. Its leaves are like those of anise, the stem being sometimes two feet high; it has many roots, slanting, dark, and occasionally deep, the plant being less red than the other kind. The root, pounded or boiled and taken in water, is diuretic, and wonderfully good for dispersing flatulence of the stomach, and also for griping and troubles of the bladder and of the womb. With honey it is applied to the joints, and an application with celery to the lower abdomen is diuretic for babies.

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§ 20.95.1  Fennel has been made famous, as we have said, by serpents, which taste it to east off their old skin and with its juice improve their eyesight. Consequently it has been inferred that by fennel juice especially can dimness of human vision also be removed. This juice is collected when the stem is swelling to bud, dried in the sun and applied in honey as an ointment. The most esteemed is gathered in Spain from the teardrops of the plant. It is also made from fresh seed and from incisions in the root when germination has first begun.

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§ 20.96.1  There is in this class of plant a wild variety called hippomarathum, by some myrsineum, with larger leaves and a sharper taste, taller, as thick as a walking-stick, and with a white root. It grows in warm and rocky soils. Diocles has spoken of yet another kind of hippomarathum, with a long, narrow leaf, and a seed like that of coriander. The cultivated kind is used in medicine for the wounds of scorpions and serpents, the seed being taken in wine. The juice is also dropped into the ears, where it kills the worms infesting them. The plant itself is an ingredient of nearly all condiments, being especially suited for digestives. Moreover, it is placed under the crusts of loaves. The seed braces a relaxed stomach, even if taken in fevers, relieves nausea if pounded and taken in water, and is a highly praised remedy for complaints of the lungs and liver. It stays looseness of the bowels, if a moderate amount be taken; when taken for griping it is diuretic, and a decoction drunk when milk fails fills the breasts again. The root cleanses the kidneys when taken with barley water, or if the juice of the boiled-down root be drunk with wine. Taken in wine the root is also good for dropsy, likewise for spasms. The leaves are applied in vinegar to inflamed tumours, and they expel stones in the bladder. In whatever way it is taken it creates an abundance of seed, being very soothing to the privates, whether the root be boiled down with wine for a fomentation, or the plant be pounded up and applied in oil. Many also apply it with wax to bruises, and use the root in the juice or with honey for dog bites, and in wine for the sting of the multipede. Hippomarathum is for all purposes more drastic, expelling stone particularly well, and with a soft wine doing good to the bladder and to retarded menstruation. In this the seed is more efficacious than the root. The dose of either is a two-finger pinch, ground and added to drink. Petrichus who wrote Serpent-lore and Miecion, author of Prescriptions from Roots, thought nothing more efficacious than hippomarathum for serpent bites. Nicander indeed also has placed it far from last in his list of antidotes.

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§ 20.97.1  Hemp at first grew in woods, with a darker and rougher leaf. Its seed is said to make the genitals impotent. The juice from it drives out of the ears the worms and any other creature that has entered them, but at the cost of a headache; so potent is its nature that when poured into water it is said to make it coagulate. And so, drunk in their water, it regulates the bowels of beasts of burden. The root boiled in water eases cramped joints, gout too and similar violent pains. It is applied raw to burns, but is often changed before it gets dry.

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§ 20.98.1  Fennel-giant has a seed similar to that of dill. The kind with one stem divided at the top is supposed to be female. The stems are eaten boiled, and are made tasty with brine and honey, being good for the stomach. If however too many are eaten they cause headache. One denarius of the root in two cyathi of wine is taken for serpent bites, and the root itself is applied to them. So administered it also cures griping, and in oil and vinegar it checks profuse perspirations, even in fevers. To swallow the juice of fennel-giant, of the size of a bean in quantity, loosens the bowels. The pith from the fresh plant is good for the womb, and for all the complaints I have mentioned. To stop bleeding ten seeds are ground and taken in wine or with some pith. There are some who think that the seed should be given for epilepsy from the fourth day of the moon to the seventh, in doses of one spoonful. The nature of fennel-giant is very poisonous to the murena, a mere touch causing death. Castor thought that the juice of the root was also very beneficial to the eyesight.

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§ 20.99.1  We have also spoken in our description of garden plants of the cultivation of thistles, and so we should not put off a discussion of their medical value. Of wild thistles there are two kinds: one being more bushy as soon as it leaves the earth, the other is thicker, but has only one stem. Both kinds have only a few leaves, prickly and with pointed heads, but the latter puts forth in the middle of its points a purple flower, that quickly turns white and is gone with the wind; the Greeks call it σκόλυμος. If this kind be pounded and compressed before it flowers, an application of the juice restores skin and hair lost by mange. The root of any kind boiled in water is said to create thirst in those who are drunkards. It strengthens the stomach, and, if we may believe the report, it also affects the womb in such a way that male children are engendered. Glaucias, at any rate, who seems to have been a most careful student of thistles, put this statement on record. A gum-like mastich coming from thistles makes the breath sweet.

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§ 20.100.1  And now that I am about to leave garden plants, I have appended a very famous preparation from them which is used to counteract the poison of venomous animals. It is carved in verse upon a stone in the temple of Aesculapius in Cos. Take two denarii of wild thyme, and the same of opopanax and of spignel respectively, one denarius of trefoil seed, of aniseed, fennel-seed, ami and parsley, six denarii respectively, and twelve denarii of vetch meal. These are ground and passed through a sieve, and then kneaded with the best wine obtainable into lozenges, each of one victoriatus. One of these is given at a time mixed with three cyathi of wine. King Antiochus the Great is said to have used this preparation as an antidote for the poison of all venomous creatures except the asp.

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§ 21.1.1  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 colours, 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 obvious warning to men that the bloom that pleases the eye most is the soonest to fade. Not even the painter's art, however, suffices to copy their colours and the variety of their combinations, whether two kinds are woven together alternately, and also more than two, or whether with separate festoons of the different kinds chaplets are run through chaplets to form a circle, or crosswise, or sometimes forming a coil.

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§ 21.2.1  Such ornaments were more meagre as used by the ancients, who called them stroppi, from which is derived our strophiolum. Moreover, a general word was itself slow in coming into use, as corona was confined to the ornaments used at sacrifices or as military honours. When however garlands came to be made of flowers, they were called serta, from serere or series. The Greeks too adopted this custom not so long ago.

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§ 21.3.1  For at first it was customary to make from branches of trees the chaplets used at sacred contests as prizes. Later on the custom arose of varying the colour by mixing flowers of different hues, in order to heighten the effect of perfumes and colours in turn. It began at Sikyon through the skill of Pausias the painter and of the garland-maker Glycera, a lady with whom he was very much in love; when he copied her works in his paintings, she to egg him on varied her designs, and there was a duel between Art and Nature. Pictures of this kind painted by that famous artist are still extant, in particular the one called Stephaneplocos, in which he painted the lady herself. This took place later than the hundredth Olympiad [380 BCE]. Floral chaplets being now fashionable, it was not long before there appeared what are called Egyptian chaplets, and then winter ones, made from dyed flakes of horn at the season when earth refuses flowers. At Rome too gradually there crept in the name corollae, given at the first to chaplets because of their delicacy, and presently that of corollaria, after the chaplets presented as prizes began to be made of thin plates, bronze, gilt or silvered.

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§ 21.4.1  Crassus the Rich was the first to make artificial leaves of silver or gold, giving chaplets of them as prizes at his games, to which were also added ribbons. For these to be attached increased the honour of the bare chaplet; this fashion was due to the Etruscan chaplets, to which properly only golden ribbons were fastened. For a long time these ribbons were plain. The custom of engraving them originated with P. Claudius Pulcher, who also added gold-leaf to the inner bark of the lime tree.

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§ 21.5.1  Chaplets, however, even those won in sport, were always regarded as a dignity, for citizens would go down to the Circus in person to compete in the games, besides entering for events their own slaves and horses. This custom explains that law of the Twelve Tables, 'Whoso wins a chaplet in person or by his chattel, let it be given him on the ground of his worth.' No one has doubted that by the 'chaplet won by his chattel' the law means that earned by slaves or by horses. What then was the honour? It lay in the indefeasible right, on the death of the victor or of his parents, to have the chaplet laid on the body during the lying in state at home and when it was being carried out to burial. At other times not even chaplets won at the games were worn indiscriminately,

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§ 21.6.1  and on this matter extremely severe rules were enforced. In the second Punic War Fulvius, a banker, who was said to have looked out into the Forum from his veranda wearing in the daytime a chaplet of roses, was on the authority of the senate led away to prison, not being released before the end of the war. P. Munatius took a chaplet of flowers from a statue of Marsyas and placed it on his own head. Ordered by the Triumyin to be put in chains for this offence he appealed to the tribunes of the people, who refused to intervene. Very different was the custom at Athens, where young revellers a in the forenoon would resort even to the schools of the philosophers. Among us no other instance of this outrageous conduct has taken place except that of Julia, daughter of the late Augustus, who in her night frolics placed a chaplet on the statue of Marsyas, as a letter of that god deplores.

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§ 21.7.1  Flowers as a distinction have been given by the Roman people only to a Scipio. He was surnamed Serapio because of his likeness to a pig-dealer of that name. He died in his tribunate, being high in the esteem of the common people and worthy of the family of the Africani, but not leaving enough. estate to pay for his funeral. So the people contracted for his funeral, contributing their pence, and scattered flowers from every point of vantage along all the route.

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§ 21.8.1  Already by that time chaplets were used to honour the gods, the lares public and private, tombs and spirits of the dead; the highest distinction was the plaited chaplet, such as we find always used in ceremonies of the Saffi. Then they changed over to rose wreaths, and to such a height did luxuriousness rise that no chaplet was fashionable except those stitched together with genuine petals only, presently only those fetched from India or even beyond. In fact the chaplet deemed the smartest prize is made of nard leaves, or of multicoloured silk steeped in perfumes. Such is the latest form taken by the luxury of our women.

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§ 21.9.1  Among the Greeks indeed there have been written monographs on chaplets by Mnesitheus and Callimachus, physicians who specify what flowers are injurious to the head; for health is to a certain extent concerned even in this matter, because it is especially amid the gaiety of drinking parties that strong scents steal unawares to the head, witness the wicked cunning of Cleopatra. For in the preparation for the war that culminated at Actium, Antonius, fearing even the attentiveness of the queen herself, would not take food that had not been foretasted. She is said to have played on his terror by poisoning the tips of the flowers in his chaplet, and then to have laid it on his head. Presently, as the revelry grew wilder, she proposed as a challenge that they 'should drink their chaplets.' Who in such circumstances would suspect treachery? So having gathered the fragments of his chaplet into his cup he was beginning to drink, when she laid on him an arresting hand, with these words: 'Look, I am the woman, Marcus Antonius, against whom, with your new craze for foretasters, you are carefully on your guard. Such my lack of opportunity or means to act if I can live without you!' Then a prisoner was brought in and ordered by her to drink, who died on the spot. About flowers, besides the authors already mentioned, an account has been written by Theophrastus among the Greeks, and some of our own writers have composed books of Anthologica. Nobody has, however, followed up the subject of flowers fully, so far as I can discover. Nor shall I now, of course, put chaplets together — for that would be mere trifling — but I shall include everything about flowers that will seem worthy of record.

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§ 21.10.1  Our countrymen know among garden plants very few kinds of chaplet flowers, practically violets only and roses. The rose grows on what is not so much a shrub as a thorn, appearing also on a bramble; there too it has a pleasant though faint perfume. Every bud appears at first enclosed in a shell full of grains, which presently swells and, after sloping itself into a green cone like a perfume box, gradually reddens, splitting and spreading out into a cup, which encloses the yellow points that stand out of its center. To make chaplets is about the least of the uses of the rose. It is steeped in oil, a process known even at the time of the Trojan War, as Homer bears witness. Furthermore, it has made its way, as we have said, into ointments. By itself it possesses medicinal properties. It is an ingredient of plasters and of eye-salves by reason of its subtle pungency, even being used as a coating for the delicacies of our tables, being quite harmless. The most famous kinds of roses recognized by our countrymen are those of Praeneste and those of Campania. Some have added the Milesian rose, because of its brilliant fiery colour, though it never has more than twelve petals. Next after it is esteemed the Trachinian, of a less brilliant red, and then the Alabandian, less highly prized, with whitish petals; the least prized, having very many, but very small petals, is called the prickly rose. For roses differ in the number of their petals, in the smooth or rough nature of the stem, in colour and in perfume. Those with the fewest petals have five, but in other roses they are more numerous, since there is one kind called the hundred-petalled rose. In Italy this grows in Campania, but in Greece around Philippi, which however is not its native soil. Mount Pangaeus in the neighbourhood grows a rose with many but small petals. The natives transplant it, improving the variety by mere change of place. This kind, however, has not a very strong perfume, nor has any rose whose petal is very broad or large; in brief, an indie tion of the degree of perfume is the roughness of the bark. Caepio, who lived when Tiberius Caesar was Emperor, said that the hundred-petalled variety is never put into chaplets, except at the ends where these are as it were hinged together, since neither in perfume nor in appearance is it attractive. There is also the kind called the Grecian rose by our countrymen, and by the Greeks the lychnis (lamp rose), which appears only in moist localities? It never has more than five petals, is of the size of the violet, and has no perfume. Another kind is called Graecula (little Greek rose), the petals of which are rolled together into a bunch. It never opens unless forced by the hand, and is always like a bud; the petals are very broad. Another kind springs from a stem like that of the mallow, with leaves like olive leaves, called mucetum. Between these in size is an autumn rose, named coroniola (little chaplet); all of these are without perfume except coroniola and the rose growing on a bramble. In so many ways is spuriousness possible! In other districts too the genuine rose also depends to a very great extent upon the soil for its main characteristics. The rose of Cyrene has the finest perfume, for which reason the choicest ointment is to be obtained there. At Carthage in Spain there is an early rose that blossoms throughout the winter. Weather too makes a difference; for in certain years the rose grows with less perfume, and furthermore all roses have more perfume on dry soils than on moist. It likes to be grown on soils that are neither rich nor clayey nor irrigated, being content with a rubbly soil, and fond in particular of ground on which rubble has been spread. The Campanian rose is early, the Milesian late, but the one that continues to flower the latest is the Praenestine. The ground is dug deeper for roses than for crops, but shallower than for vines. They are very slow in growing from the seed, which is in the shell itself, right under the flower, and covered with down. For this reason it is preferred to graft shoots into an incision in the stem. And into the eyelets of the root, as with the reed, there is grafted one kind of rose that is pale, prickly, with very long twigs and five petals, the second among the Greek roses. Every rose however improves with pruning and burning; by transplanting also, as with vines, there is the best and quickest success if slips of the length of four fingers or more are planted after the setting of the Pleiades and then transplanted at intervals of one foot while the west wind is blowing, the earth being frequently turned over around them. Those who try to get their roses early, dig a trench a foot deep about the root, pouring in warm water as the cup is beginning to bud.

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§ 21.11.1  The lily [Devil's Garter] comes nearest to the rose in fame, and there is a certain relationship shown in the ointment and oil, which they call lilinum (oil of lilies). When blended with roses, also, the lily gives a grand combination, making its first appearance when the rose is in mid-season. No flower grows taller; sometimes it reaches three cubits, its neck always drooping under the weight of a head too heavy for it. The flower is of an exceeding whiteness, fluted on the outside, narrow at the bottom and gradually expanding in width after the fashion of a basket. The lips curve outwards and upwards all round; the slender pistil and stamens, the colour of saffron, standing upright in the centre, So the perfume of the lily, as well as its colour, is twofold, there being one for the corolla, and another for the stamens, the difference being slight. In fact when it is nsed to make ointment or oil the petals too are not despised. There is a flower not unlike the lily growing on the plant called the convolvulus, that springs up among shrubs. Without perfume and without the yellow anthers in the centre, it resembles the lily only in colour, being as it were a first attempt by Nature when she was learning to produce lilies. White lilies are propagated by all the means that roses are; more than this, by a peculiar tear-like gum of its own, as is also horse-parsley. No plant is more prolific, a single root often sending out fifty bulbs. There is also a red lily that the Greeks call crinon, some calling its blossom the dog-rose. The most esteemed kind grows at Antioch and at Laodicea in Syria, next to them comes that of Phaselis. The fourth place is held by the kind growing in Italy.

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§ 21.12.1  There is also a bright-red lily, having sometimes a double stem, and differing from other lilies only in having a fleshier root and a larger bulb, and that undivided. It is called the narcissus. Another variety of it has a white flower and a reddish bud. There is this further difference between the ordinary lily and the narcissus, that the leaves of the latter grow straight out of the root. The most popular sort is found on the mountains of Lycia. A third kind has all its characteristics the same as those of the other kinds, except that the cup is light green. All the narcissi blossom late, for the flower comes after the rising of Arcturus and during the autumnal equinox.

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§ 21.13.1  In lily-culture a strange means of dyeing the blooms has been invented by the wit of man. For in the month of July drying stems of the lily are tied together and hung in the smoke. Then, as the little knots bare themselves, these stems in March are steeped in the lees of dark wine or Greek wine, so that they take on the colour. In this state they are planted in little trenches, with a hemina of lees poured round each. In this way bright-red lilies are produced, and it is wonderful that a plant can be so dyed as to grow a bloom that is also dyed.

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§ 21.14.1  Next in esteem comes the violet, of which there are several kinds, the purple, the yellow, the white, all of them planted as are vegetables, from cuttings. Of these kinds however the purple, which comes up wild in sunny, poor soils, springs up with a broader, fleshy leaf, coming straight from the root. It is the only one to be distinguished from the others by a Greek name, being called ion, from which ianthine cloth gets its name. Of the cultivated violets, the most highly esteemed is the yellow variety. The kinds called Tusculan and marine have a slightly broader but less perfumed petals. The Calatian variety however is entirely without perfume and has a very small petal; it is a gift of autumn, but all other kinds bloom in spring.

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§ 21.15.1  Nearest to it comes the caltha, both in colour and in size. In the number of the petals it exceeds the marine violet, which never has over five. The same plant is surpassed in scent, that of the caltha being strong! No less strong is the scent of the plant which they call royal broom, though it is not the flowers that smell, but the leaves.

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§ 21.16.1  Baccar (valerian?) too, called by some field nard, has scent in the root only. That unguents used to be made by the ancients from this root we have a witness in Aristophanes, a poet of the Old Comedy. Whence some used to commit the error of calling it by a Greek name, baccaris. The scent is very like that of cinnamon. It grows on a thin dry soil. Very like it is the plant called combretum, taller than the baccar, and with leaves so thin that they are mere threads. These are only used as unguents. But the mistake of those also must be corrected who have called baccar field nard. For there is another plant with this surname, which the Greeks call asaron, whose shape and appearance we have described among the varieties of nard. Moreover, I find that the plant is styled asaron, because it is not used in the making of chaplets.

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§ 21.17.1  Wild saffron is better than any other. To grow it in Italy is most unprofitable, as a whole bed of saffron yields only a scruple of the essence. It is propagated from a bulb of the root. The cultivated saffron is broader, larger and more handsome, but much less potent; it is degenerating everywhere, and is not prolific even at Cyrene, where grows a saffron whose flowers have always been very famous. But the prime favourite is that of Cilicia, and in particular of Mount Corycus, then that of Mount Olympus in Lycia, and then that of Centuripa in Sicily. Some have given second place to the saffron of Thera. Nothing is adulterated as much as saffron. A test of purity is whether under the pressure of the hand it crackles as though brittle; for moist saffron, as saffron is when adulterated, makes no noise. Another test is whether it stings slightly the face and eyes if after the above test you bring the hand back to the face. There is a kind of cultivated saffron which is for its own sake very attractive to the general public, though it really is of moderate value, called dialeucon. That of Cyrene, on the other hand, has the defect of being darker than any other kind, and loses its quality very rapidly. The best everywhere is that having a very rich nature, and a short pistil; the very worst has an odour of decay. Mucianus is our authority for stating that in Lycia after six or seven years it is transplanted to a well-dug bed; in this way it recovers from its degeneration. It is nowhere used for chaplets, the plant having a leaf that is but little broader than the fibre. But with wine, especially with sweet wine, powdered saffron makes a wonderful mixture to spray the theatre. The saffron plant flowers for only a few days at the setting of the Pleiades and pushes off the flower with its leaves. It is green at the winter solstice, when it is gathered. It is dried in the shade; if in winter, so much the better. The root also is fleshy and longer-lived than that of any other plant. Saffron likes to be trodden on and trampled under foot; destroying it makes it grow better. For this reason it is most luxuriant near footpaths and fountains. Already at the time of the Trojan War it was held in high esteem. Homer, at any rate, praises three flowers — lotus, saffron and hyacinth?

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§ 21.18.1  All spices and also the plants from which they come have different colours, perfumes and juices. It is rare for a thing that smells not to have a bitter taste; on the contrary sweet substances rarely have any smell; and so wines have more smell than must, and all wild plants than the cultivated. The smell of some plants is sweeter at a distance, becoming fainter as the distance is lessened; for instance, that of the violet. A freshly gathered rose smells at a distance, but a faded rose when nearer. All perfume however is stronger in spring, and in the morning; as the day draws near to noon it grows weaker. Young plants also have less perfume than old ones; the strongest perfume however of all plants is given out in middle age. The rose and the saffron have a stronger perfume when they are gathered in fine weather, as have all flowers in warm climates than those in cold. In Egypt however the flowers have very little perfume, the atmosphere being misty and full of dew owing to the wide expanse of river. The scent of some plants is sweet but oppressive. Some, while green, have no smell because of too much moisture, the buceras, for example, which is the same as fenugreek. Watery flowers have perfume not altogether independent of the essential juice, the violet for instance, the rose and the saffron; moreover, watery flowers without this juice always have an oppressive perfume, for example, both kinds of lily. Southernwood and sweet marjoram have pungent scents. Of some plants the flowers only are pleasant, the other parts being scentless, for example, those of the violet and of the rose. Of garden plants the strongest-scented are those that are dry, like rue, mint and parsley, and such as grow on dry soils. Some products have more scent when old, for example the quince, and these same have more when gathered than when growing in the ground. Some have scent only when broken or after being crushed, others only when the skin or bark has been stripped off, others indeed only when burnt, for example, frankincense and myrrh. Crushed flowers are all more bitter than when unbroken. A few, such as the melilot, keep their scent longer when dried. Some impart a scent to the place itself, as does the iris, which also affects the whole of any tree, the roots of which it happens to touch. The hesperis has a stronger scent at night, from which fact it gets its name. No animal has a smell, unless we believe what has been said about the panther.

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§ 21.19.1  This distinction too must not be forgotten, that many flowers, in spite of their perfume, are of no use for chaplets, for example, the iris and Celtic nard, although both have an exquisite perfume. But the iris is valued only for its root, being grown for unguents and for medicine. The most highly esteemed is found in Illyria, and even there not in the coastal districts, but in the woody parts near the Drinon and around Narona. Next after it comes the Macedonian iris, which is white, thin and very long. Third in estimation comes the African iris, which is the largest of all and the bitterest to the taste. The Illyrian moreover is of two kinds: raphanitis, so called from its likeness to the radish, which is the better kind, and rhizotomos. The best, which is reddish, causes sneezing if handled, and has an upright stem a cubit high. The flower is multicoloured, like the rainbow; hence the name 'iris'.

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§ 21.19.2  The Pisidian variety, too, is by no means despised. Those who are going to dig it up pour hydromel around it three months previously. This is as it were a libation to please the earth. Then they draw three circles round it with the point of a sword, gather it and at once raise it heavenwards. It is hot by nature, and when handled raises blisters like those of a burn. It is especially enjoined that those who gather it should be chaste. Not only when dried, but also when in the ground, it is very easily subject to worms. Previously the best iris oil used to be brought from Leucas and Elis — for it has been planted there a long time — now the best comes from Pamphylia, but the Cilician too is highly praised, as is also that coming from the northern parts.

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§ 21.20.1  Celtic nard has leaves that are rather short, and cannot be plaited. It is held together by its many roots, being really a grass rather than a flower, matted as though squeezed by hand; in short, it is a unique kind of turf. Pannonia grows it, and the sunny regions of Norieum and of the Alps, and, of the cities, Eporedia; such is its sweetness that it has begun to be 'a gold mine.' Very pleasant is it for this nard to be sprinkled between clothes,

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§ 21.21.1  as the Greeks do with hulwort, a plant extolled in the praises of Musaeus and Hesiod, who proclaim it to be useful for all things, and especially for winning reputation and honours, in fact as truly marvellous, if only it be true, as they assert, that its leaves are white to the eye in the morning, bright-red at midday, and sea-blue at sunset. There are two kinds of it: field hulwort, which is the larger, and wild hulwort, which is smaller. Some call the plant teutrion. The leaves are like the white hairs of a man, spring up straight from the root, and are never taller than a palm in height.

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§ 21.22.1  Enough has been said about scented flowers. In this sphere luxury, glad to have conquered nature with its unguents, has with its dyed fabrics gone on to challenge those flowers that are commended for their colour. I note that the principal colours are the three following: (1) red, as of the kermes-insect, which, from the loveliness of the dark rose, shades, if you look up at it in a bright light, into Tyrian purple, double-dyed purple and Laconian purple; (2) amethyst, which from violet itself passes into purple, and which I have called ianthine. I am discussing general types of colour, which shade off into many kinds. (3) The third belongs properly to the purple of the murex, but includes many kindred shades. One is the colour of the heliotrope, sometimes of a light, though usually of a deeper, tint; another is that of the mallow, shading into a purple; yet a third, seen in the late violet, is the most vivid of the murex tints. At the present day Nature and luxury are matched together and are fighting out a duel. I read that yellow was the earliest colour to be highly esteemed, but was granted as an exclusive privilege to women for their bridal veils, and that for this reason perhaps it is not included among the principal colours, that is, those common to men and women, since it is joint use that has given the principal colours their dignity.

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§ 21.23.1  Without a doubt no effort of ours can compete with the amaranth. Yet it is more truly a purple ear than a flower, and is itself without scent. A wonderful thing about it is that it likes to be plucked, growing again more luxuriant than ever. It comes out in August, and lasts into the autumn. The prize goes to the amaranth grown at Alexandria, which is gathered for keeping; in a wonderful way, after all flowers are over, the amaranth, if moistened with water, revives and makes winter chaplets. Its special characteristic is implied in its name, given to it because it will not wither.

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§ 21.24.1  The cyanus also declares its colour by its name, and so does the holochrysus. All these flowers however were not in use at the time of Alexander the Great, for writers immediately after his death were silent about them. This silence is clear proof that it was subsequently that they became popular. However, who could doubt that they were discovered by the Greeks, when Italy uses exclusively the Greek names in referring to them?

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§ 21.25.1  But — by heaven! — Italy herself has given the petellium its name, an autumn flower growing near brambles and esteemed only for its colour, which is that of the wild rose. It has five small petals. A wonderful thing about this flower is that the head bends over, and from the joints grow curved petals inclosing yellow seed forming a small corolla of several colours. The bellio too is yellow, with fifty-five lozenge-shaped little beards. These meadow flowers are used for chaplets, but most of such flowers are of no use and therefore without names. Nay, these very flowers are differently named by different people.

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§ 21.26.1  The chrysocome (golden rod) or chrysitis has no Latin name. It is a palm in height, flowering in clusters of shining gold, with a harsh, tending-to-sweet root, which is dark, and it grows in rocky, shady places.

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§ 21.27.1  Having now nearly exhausted the subject also of the most popular colours, I ought to pass on to those chaplets that please only because of the variety in their make-up. They are of two kinds: some are made of flowers, others of leaves. Among the flowers I would include greenweed — for the yellow blossom of this too is gathered — also the oleander, and the jujubes of the kind called Cappadocian, having a scent like that of olive flowers. Among brambles grows the cyclamen, about which I shall say more elsewhere. Its flower, Colossae purple in colour, is used to make up chaplets.

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§ 21.28.1  As foliage for chaplets smilax, ivy and their clusters provide the favourite material; about these I have spoken at length in my chapters on shrubs. There are other kinds also that can be indicated only by their Greek names, because our countrymen for the most part have paid no attention to this nomenclature. Though most of them grow in foreign lands, yet I must discuss them, because my subject is not Italy but Nature.

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§ 21.29.1  So among the leaves used to make chaplets are found those of melotrum, spiraea, wild marjoram, cneorum, that Hyginus calls cassia, conyza, which he calls cunilago, melissophyllum, known to us as apiastrum, and melilot, which we call Campanian garland. For in Italy the favourite kind grows in Campania, in Greece at Sounion, next in repute the melilot of Chalcidice and Crete, being found however everywhere only in wild, woody districts. That chaplets were in antiquity often made from the melilot is shown by the name sertula (garland), which it has adopted as its own. The scent is near to that of saffron, and so is the flower itself. The Campanian is very popular indeed, having very short and very fleshy leaves.

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§ 21.30.1  The leaves of trefoil also are used for chaplets. There are three kinds of it: the first is called by some Greeks minyanthes, by others asphaltion, having a larger leaf than the other kinds, which the garland makers use. The second kind, oxytriphyllon, has a pointed leaf. The third is the smallest of them all. Among these some have a sinewy stem, such as marathum, hippomarathum, myophonum. They use also fennel-giant, the clusters of the ivy and a red flower classified in another kind of the ivies and resembles the wild rose. But in these too it is only the colour that pleases, as they have no perfume. There are also two kinds of cneorum, a dark and a white. The latter has perfume, and both are branchy. They blossom after the autumnal equinox. There are also two kinds of wild marjoram used for chaplets, one having no seed, and the other, which has perfume, being called Cretan.

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§ 21.31.1  There are two sorts of thyme, the pale and the darkish. Thyme blossoms about the solstices when too the bees sip from it, and a forecast can be made about the honey harvest. For the beekeepers hope for a bumper one if there be an abundance of blossom. Showers damage it and make the blossom fall off. The seed of thyme is imperceptible to sight, and yet that of wild marjoram, although very tiny, does not escape our eye. But what does it matter that Nature has hidden it? Reason tells us that the seed is in the flower itself, and if that be sown a plant grows from it. What have men left untried? Attic honey is thought more highly of than any in the whole world. Thyme therefore has been imported from Attica, and grown with difficulty, we are told, from the blossom. But a further hindrance arose through another peculiar characteristic of Attic thyme, which will not survive in the absence of sea breezes. The same view indeed was held of old about all kinds of thyme, and people believed that it was for this reason that it did not grow in Arcadia, while the olive too, they thought, is only found within three hundred stades from the sea. Yet thyme we know today covers even the stony plains of the province of Gallia Narbonensis, being almost the only source of revenue, thousands of sheep being brought there from distant regions to browse upon the thyme.

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§ 21.32.1  Of conyza also two kinds are used in chaplets, male and female. They differ in their leaves. That of the female is thinner, more compressed and narrower; the male, which is more branched, has a pantile-shaped leaf. Its blossom too is of a brighter colour; both blossom late, after Arcturus. The scent of the male is heavier, of the female, sharper; for which reason the female is more suited to counteract the bites of beasts. The leaves of the female have the smell of honey; the root of the male is called by some libanotis, about which I have already spoken.

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§ 21.33.1  Chaplets are also made from the leaves of the flower of Jupiter, sweet marjoram, day-lily, southernwood, Helenium, water-mint, wild thyme, all with woody stalks like those of the rose. The flower of Jupiter is pleasing only for its colour, as it has no scent; it is the same with the flower called in Greek phlox. Both the stalks however and the leaves of the plants just mentioned are fragrant, except those of wild thyme. Helenium is said to have sprung up from the tears of Helen, and therefore is very popular in the island of Helene. It is a shrub spreading over the ground with its nine-inch sprigs, the leaf being like wild thyme.

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§ 21.34.1  Southernwood, which blossoms in summer has a flower of a pleasant but heavy scent and of a golden colour. Left alone it grows of its own accord, reproducing itself by layers from the head. It is however grown from seed better than from the root or from slips; from seed too not without trouble. The seedlings are transplanted — as is the adonium — both in summer. For they are very chilly plants, yet liable to be injured by too much sun. But when they have grown strong, they sprout after the manner of rue. Like southernwood in scent is leucanthemum, with a white flower and abundant leaves.

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§ 21.35.1  Diocles the physician and the people of Sicily have called sweet marjoram the plant known in Egypt as sampsucum. It is reproduced by the two methods, from seed and from branch-cuttings, being longer-lived than the plants mentioned above and of a milder scent. Sweet marjoram produces as copious a quantity of seed as does southernwood, but the latter has one root penetrating deep into the earth, while the roots of the others cling lightly to the surface of the ground. The planting of the rest takes place generally in the beginning of autumn, and also, in some places, in spring, and they delight in shade, water and dung.

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§ 21.36.1  Nyctegreton was one of a few plants chosen for special admiration by Democritus; it is of a dark-red colour, with a leaf like a thorn, and not rising high from the ground; a special kind grows in Gedrosia. He reports that it is pulled up by the roots after the spring equinox and dried in the moonlight for thirty days; that after this it glows at night, and that the Magi and the kings of Parthia use the plant to make their vows. It is also called, he says, chenamyche, because geese are panic-stricken at the first sight of it, and by others nyctalops, because it gleams a long distance by night.

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§ 21.37.1  Melilot grows everywhere, the most popular kind, however, in Attica; everywhere moreover the freshly gathered is preferred, and not the white variety but that most resembling saffron, and that though in Italy the white is the more fragrant.

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§ 21.38.1  The first flower to herald the approach of spring is the white violet, which moreover in the warmer spots peeps out even in winter. Afterwards comes the violet which is called ion, and the mauve one, followed closely by the flame-coloured flower called phlox, but only the wild variety. The cyclamen blossoms twice in the year, in spring and in autumn; it shuns summer and Winter. A little later than those mentioned above come, overseas, the narcissus and the lily, which in Italy, as we have said, is after the rose. But in Greece comes later still the anemone. This however is a flower of the wild bulbs, and different from the plant to be spoken of among the medicinal herbs. It is followed by the oenanthe the melanium and the wild heliochrysus, then the other kind of anemone, which is called the meadow anemone, after which comes the gladiolus, together with the hyacinth. The last to bloom is the rose, which is also the first to fade, except the cultivated kind. Of the others, the hyacinth lasts longest in flower with the white violet and the oenanthe, but the last only if by repeated plucking it is prevented from running to seed. It grows in warm districts, and has the same scent as forming grapes: hence the name. The hyacinth is associated with two forms of a legend; one that it displays the mourning for that youth whom Apollo had loved, and the other that it sprang from the shed blood of Ajax, the veins of the flower being so arranged that on it is to be read Al inscribed in the form of Greek letters. Heliochrysus has a flower like gold, a slight leaf and also a slender but hard stem. The Magi think that to wear a chaplet of this plant, if unguents too be taken from a box of the gold called apyron, leads also to popularity and glory in life. These then are the flowers of spring.

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§ 21.39.1  After them come the summer flowers, lychnis, Jupiter's flower, a second kind of lily, the iphyon also and the amaracus surnamed Phrygian. But the most beautiful to the eye is the pothos. There are two kinds of it: one having the flower of the hyacinth, the other being white and commonly grown for graves, because it lasts well without fading. The iris also blooms in summer. But these too wither and pass away, to be followed again by others in autumn — a third kind of lily, the saffron crocus and the two kinds of orsinus, one without and one with perfume, all of them peeping out at the first showers. Garland-makers actually use the blossom even of the thorn, while the young stalks of the white thorn are preserved to be a delicacy of the table. This is the succession of flowers overseas. In Italy violets are followed by the rose, which is still in blossom when the lily appears. The rose is succeeded by the cyanus, the cyanus by the amaranth. But the vicapervica is an evergreen, surrounded by leaves at the joints after the manner of the scarecrow cord, a plant for the fancy garden, but at times filling the gap when other flowers fail. This plant is called chamaedaphne by the Greeks.

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§ 21.40.1  At the most the life of the white violet is three years. After that time it degenerates. The rose lasts even for five years if it is neither pruned down nor burned; for by these means it renews its youth. We have also said that the soil makes a great difference. For in Egypt all these flowers are without perfume, and the myrtle only has a remarkable one. In some places the buds of all form as much as two months before they do so elsewhere. Rose beds ought to be dug over immediately after the west wind begins and again at the solstice, and great care should be taken that in the interval the ground be kept clean and sweet.

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§ 21.41.1  But gardens and chaplet flowers are closely associated with apiaries and bees, bee-culture being a source of very great profit at slight expense, when circumstances are favourable. Therefore, for the sake of the bees you ought to plant thyme, apiastrum, roses, violets, lilies, tree-medick, beans, bitter vetches, cunila, poppies, conyza, casia, melilot, melissophyllum, cerintha. The last has a white leaf curving inwards, and is a cubit high, with a hollow head containing the honey juice. Of the blossom of these plants bees are very fond, as they are also of mustard, a strange thing to those familiar with the well-known fact that the blossom of the olive is not touched by them. For this reason it is better to keep olive trees away from them, while some trees it would be wise to plant as near the hives as possible, both to attract the swarms as they fly out, and to prevent their straying to too great a distance.

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§ 21.42.1  You must beware also of the cornel tree. If bees taste its blossom they die of diarrhoea. A remedy is to administer crushed sorb apples in honey to those affected, or human urine or that of oxen, or pomegranate seeds sprinkled with Aminaean wine. But what they like most is to have greenweed planted round their hives.

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§ 21.43.1  Wonderful and worthy of record is what I have discovered about their food. Hostilia is a village on the bank of the Padus. When bee-fodder fails in the neighbourhood the natives place the hives on boats and carry them five miles upstream by night. At dawn the bees come out and feed, returning every day to the boats, which change their position until, when they have sunk low in the water under the mere weight, it is understood that the hives are full, and then they are taken back and the honey is extracted. In Spain too for a like reason they carry the hives about on mules.

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§ 21.44.1  The food of bees is of so much importance that even their honey may become poisonous. At Heraclia in Pontus the honey turns out in certain years very deadly, and that from the same bees. As the authorities have not said from what flowers this honey is extracted, I will myself put on record what I have ascertained. There is a plant which, from its deadly effect even on cattle, more particularly upon goats, is called aegolethron. From the blossom of this, when it withers in a rainy spring, bees take in a noxious poison. Thus it happens that it is not in all years that the danger is encountered. The signs of poisonous honey are that it does not thicken at all, its colour inclines to red, its smell is strange and at once causes sneezing, and it is heavier than harmless honey. Cattle which have eaten it throw themselves on the ground, seeking to cool themselves, for they actually drip with sweat.

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§ 21.44.2  Remedies are many, and I will give them in their proper place. But some should be given at once, as the danger is so insidious: there is old honey wine, made from the finest honey, with rue, and also salted fish, these to be repeated several times should the stomach reject them. It is an established fact that this poison, through the excreta, affects even dogs, which suffer similar torture. It is a fact, however, that honey wine made with poisonous honey is, after maturing, quite harmless, and that there is nothing better than this honey, mixed with costum, for improving the skin of women, or, mixed with aloes, for the treatment of bruises.

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§ 21.45.1  There is another kind of honey, found in the same district of Pontus among the people called Sanni, which from the madness it produces is called maenomenon. This poison is supposed to be extracted from the flowers of the oleanders which abound in the woods. Though these people supply the Romans with wax by way of tribute, the honey, because of its deadly nature, they do not sell. In Persis, too, and in Gaetulia of Mauretania Caesariensis, bordering on the Massaesyli, are found poisoned honeycombs, sometimes only in part such, a more deceptive limitation than anything else could be, were it not that the livid colour makes detection easy. What are we to think that Nature meant by these traps; that they should not occur every year, and not in the whole of the comb, and yet be due to the same bees? Was it not enough to have produced a substance in which it was very easy to administer poison? Did Nature also administer it herself in the honey to so many living creatures? What did she mean, except to make man more careful and less greedy? For had she not already bestowed upon the bees themselves a spear, and that a poisoned one, so that a cure for this poison must be given most assuredly without delay? Accordingly, it is healing to apply to the sting the juice of the mallow or of ivy leaves, or for the stung persons to take these in drink. Yet it is wonderful that the bees, carrying poison in their mouths and working it, do not themselves die, unless it be that the great Mistress of all things has given bees this immunity, as she has given immunity against snakebite to the Psylli and to the Marsi among men.

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§ 21.46.1  In Crete is found another wonderful honey. There Mount Carina has a circumference of nine miles, within which no flies are found, and nowhere do flies touch the honey coming from that place. By this test is selected a honey specially suited for medicines.

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§ 21.47.1  It is well for the apiaries to look due east, and to avoid the north wind as well as the west wind. The best hive is made of bark; the next best material is fennel-giant, and the third is osier. Many too have made hives of transparent stone, so that they might look on the bees working inside. It is very useful for the hives to be daubed all over with cow dung, and for a movable cover to be made at the back, that it may be brought forward if the hive be large or the working unproductive, lest the bees lose hope and cease to care; this cover should be gradually slid back so that they do not see how their work has grown. In winter cover the hives with straw, and fumigate them repeatedly, especially with cow dung. This being akin to the bees kills the insects that breed in the hive — spiders, moths and wood worms, besides stimulating the bees themselves. To exterminate the spiders indeed is fairly easy. The moths, a greater plague, are destroyed in the spring by lamps, which are lighted before the hives when the mallow begins to ripen, on a night of the new moon when the sky is clear. Into the flame of these the moths fling themselves.

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§ 21.48.1  If it is felt that the bees are in need of food, it would be well to place at the door raisins or crushed dried figs, as well as carded wool soaked in raisin wine, boiled-down must or hydromel, as well as the hare flesh of poultry. In some summers also, when continued drought has deprived the bees of their food from flowers, the same kinds of food must be supplied to them. When the honey is taken out, the exit of the hive should be smeared with crushed melissophyllum or greenweed, or the middle should be lined with white vine, to prevent the bees from flying away. Honey pots and combs are recommended to be washed with water; this when boiled down is said to make a very wholesome vinegar.

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§ 21.49.1  Wax is made after the honey has been extracted from the combs, but these must be first cleaned with water and dried for three days in the dark; then on the fourth day they are melted in a new earthen vessel on the fire, with just enough water to cover them, and then strained in a wicker basket. The wax is boiled again with the same this to be cold, contained in vessels smeared all water in the same pot, and poured into other water, round inside with honey. The best is that called Punic wax; the next best is very yellow indeed, with the smell of honey, pure, but produced in Pontus, the region of the poisonous honies, which makes me surprised at its established reputation; next is Cretan wax, consisting in very great part of bee-glue, about which we have spoken in treating of the nature of bees. After these comes Corsican wax, which as it is made from honey got by bees from box, is supposed to have a certain medicinal quality. Punic wax is prepared in the following way. Yellow wax is exposed to the wind several times in the open, then it is heated in water taken from the open sea, to which soda has been added. Then they collect with spoons the 'flower,' that is, all the whitest parts, and pour into a vessel containing a little cold water. Then it is boiled again by itself a in seawater, after which they cool the vessel itself with water. When they have done this three times, they dry the wax in the open, by sunlight and by moonlight, on a mat of rushes. For the moon makes it white while the sun dries it; to prevent the sun from melting it, they cover it with a piece of thin linen cloth. The greatest whiteness, however, is obtained if after the exposure to the sun the wax is once more boiled again. Punic wax is the most useful for medicines. Wax becomes dark with the addition of paper ash, and red with an admixture of alkanet; by paints it is made to assume various colours for forming likenesses, for the innumerable uses of men, and even for the protection of walls and of weapons. The other details about honey and about bees have been described in my treatment of the nature of the bee. Of gardens indeed practically the whole account has been given.

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§ 21.50.1  There follow the plants that grow wild. Most peoples use these for food, especially the people of Egypt, a land very fruitful in crops, yet about the only one that could manage without them, so great an abundance of food does it get from plants. In Italy however we know few such, strawberries, wild vine, butcher's broom, samphire, and garden fennel, which some call Gallic asparagus; besides these there are meadow parsnip and willow wolf, though these are delicacies rather than foods.

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§ 21.51.1  In Egypt the most famous plant of this kind is the colocasia, called by some cyamos; they gather it out of the Nile. The stalk of the stem when boiled and chewed breaks up into spidery threads, but the stem itself is handsome, jutting out from leaves which, even when compared with those of trees, are very broad, similar to the leaves called personata which are found in Italian rivers. So much do the people of the Nile appreciate the bounty of their river that they plait colocasia leaves into vessels of various shapes, which they consider make attractive goblets. The colocasia is now grown in Italy.

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§ 21.52.1  In Egypt next in esteem after colocasia comes chicory, which I have spoken of as wild endive. It appears after the Pleiades and its parts bloom in succession. It has a tough root, so that it is even used to make binding ropes. Farther from the river grows anthalium, of the size and roundness use of a medlar, without kernel or peel, and with the leaf of the cyperus. They roast it at a fire and eat it. They eat too oetum, which has few and very small leaves, but a large root. Arachidne indeed and aracos, though they have manifold, branchy roots, have neither leaf nor any green, nor anything else at all above ground. The rest of the plants commonly included by the Egyptians among their foods are thus named: — chondrylla, hypochoeris, caucalis, enthryscum, scandix, called by some tragopogon, which has leaves very like those of saffron, parthenium, trychnum, corchorus, aphace and achynops, the last two appearing just after the equinox. There is a plant called epipetron which never blossoms. But on the other hand aphace, as its flowers fade, puts forth continually others all the winter and all the spring, right on into summer.

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§ 21.53.1  The Egyptians have besides many plants of no repute, but they hold in the highest esteem one called cnecos; it is unknown in Italy and the Egyptians value it, not as a food, but for its oil, which they extract from the seed. The chief varieties are the wild and the cultivated. Of the wild there are two species. One is similar to the cultivated, but has a stiff a stem. This is why the women of old used the stem of this species as a distaff, for which reason it is called by some atractylis. Its seed is white, large and bitter. The other is rather prickly, with a more fleshy stem, which almost trails on the ground, the seed being very small. This belongs to the class of spinous plants, for I must classify also the various kinds of them.

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§ 21.54.1  Some plants then are prickly, while others are without prickles. Of prickly plants the species are many. Of nothing but prickle are asparagus and scorpio, for they have no leaves at all. Some prickly plants, however, have leaves, for instance thistle, erynge, glycyrrhiza and nettle. For all these have a sharp sting in their leaves. Some have foliage also along the prickly spine, as caltrop and rest-harrow. Some again have prickles not on the leaves but on the stem, as pheos, that some have called stoebe. Hippopheos has prickly joints. A peculiar characteristic of the caltrop is that it has also a prickly fruit.

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§ 21.55.1  Of all these kinds the best known is the nettle, often taller than two cubits, the cups of which in blossom pour out a purple down. There are several different kinds. There is the wild, also called female, and the cultivated. One of the wild varieties, called dog nettle, has a sharper sting, even the stem pricking, and fringed leaves. Another, which also gives out a smell, is called the Herculanean nettle. All nettles have a copious, black seed. It is a strange thing that, without any prickly points, the mere down is poisonous, and that only a light touch at once causes to arise itching and blisters like those from burns. The well-known remedy for nettle sting is olive oil. The stinging quality however does not come at once with the plant itself, but only when this has grown strong through the sun. When young indeed in the spring nettles make a not unpleasant food, which many eat in the further devout belief that it will keep diseases away throughout the whole year. The root too of the wild varieties makes more tender all meat with which it is boiled. The harmless nettle, which does not sting, is called lamium. About scorpio I shall speak when I come to deal with medicinal plants.

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§ 21.56.1  The thistle has both leaf and stem covered by a prickly down, and so have acorna, leucacanthos, chalceos, cnecos, polyacanthos, onopyxos, helxine, scolymos. The chamaeleon has no prickles on its leaves. There is however this difference also, that some of these plants have many stems and branches, the thistle for instance, while the cnecos has one stem and no branches. Some are prickly only at the head, the erynge for instance; some, like tetralix and helxine, blossom in summer. Scolymos too blossoms late and long. The acorna is distinguished (from cnecos) only by its reddish colour and richer juice. Atractylis too would be just the same, were it not whiter and did it not shed a blood-like juice that has caused some to call it phonos; it also has a bad smell, and its seed ripens late — in fact not before autumn, though this can be said of all prickly plants. All of these however can be reproduced either from seed or from the root. Scolymus, one of the thistle group, differs from these in that its root is edible when boiled. It is a strange thing that in this group, without intermission throughout the whole summer, part blossoms, part buds, and part produces seed. As the leaves dry the prickles cease to sting. Helxine is not often seen, and not in all countries; it shoots out leaves from its root, out of the middle of which swells up as it were an apple, covered with foliage of its own. The top of its head contains a gum of pleasant flavour, called thorn mastich.

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§ 21.57.1  And cactos also grows only in Sicily; it too has peculiar properties of its own. Its stems, shooting out from the root, trail on the ground; the leaves are broad and prickly. The stems are called cacti, which make, even when preserved, a palatable food. One kind, however, has an upright stem called pternix, of the same pleasant flavour, but it will not keep. The seed is downy, the down being called pappus. When the seeds have been taken away and the rind, there remains something as tender as the brain of the palm. It is called ascalia.

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§ 21.58.1  Tribulus is found only in marshy places. A hard substance elsewhere, near the rivers Nile and Strymon it is used as food. It bends towards the water, has a leaf like that of the elm, and the stalk is long. But in other parts of the world there are two kinds; the one with leaves like those of the chickling-pea, the other with prickly leaves. The latter blossoms later, and tends to be common in the enclosures round country houses. Its seed is rounder, black, and in a pod; that of the other is like sand. Of prickly plants there is yet another kind — rest-harrow. For it has prickles on the branches, to which are attached leaves like those of rue, the whole stem being covered with leaves so that it looks like a chaplet. It springs up on newly ploughed lands, is harmful to the crops and extremely long-lived.

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§ 21.59.1  The stems of some prickly plants trail along the ground, those for example of the plant called coronopus. On the other hand anchusa (alkanet), the root of which is used for dyeing wood and wax, stands upright, as do, of the cultivated kinds, anthemis, phyllanthes, anemone and aphace. Crepis and lotus have a foliated stem.

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§ 21.60.1  The leaves of these plants differ as do the leaves of trees: in shortness or length of stalk, in the narrowness of the leaf itself, in its size, and further in the corners, and indentations; smell and blossom differ also. The blossom lasts longer on some of them, which flower one part at a time, on ocimum for example, and on heliotropium, aphace and onochilis. Many of these plants, like certain trees, have leaves that never die, the chief being heliotropium, adiantum, hulwort.

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§ 21.61.1  Eared plants are yet another kind, to which belong achynops, alopecuros, stelephuros — by some called ortyx, by others plantago, about which I shall speak more fully in the section on medicinal plants — and thryallis. Of these alopecurus has a soft ear and thick down, not unlike the tail of a fox; hence too its name. Stelephuros is very like it, except that it blossoms bit by bit. Chicory and the plants like it have leaves near the ground, budding from the root after the Pleiades.

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§ 21.62.1  Perdicium is eaten by other peoples besides the Egyptians. The name is derived from the partridge, a bird very fond of pecking it out of the ground. It has very many thick roots. There is likewise ornithogala, with a tender white stem half a foot long, soft and with three or four offshoots and a bulbous root. It is boiled in pottage.

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§ 21.63.1  It is strange that the plant lotos and the aegilops do not germiuate from their own seed until a year has passed. Strange too is the nature of anthemis, because it begins to blossom from the top, while all other plants that blossom bit by bit begin to do so from their bottom part.

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§ 21.64.1  A remarkable thing about the burdock, which sticks to one's clothes, is that within it there grows a flower that does not show, but is inside and hidden; it produces seed within itself, as do the animals that bring to birth inside their own bodies. Around Opus is to be found a plant which is also pleasant for a man to eat, and remarkable in that from its leaf there grows a root whereby it reproduces itself.

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§ 21.65.1  Bindweed has only one petal, but folded in such a way that it seems more than one. Chondrylla is bitter, and in the root is an acrid juice. Aphace too is bitter, and so is the plant called picris, which also blossoms throughout the year. It is this bitterness which has given the plant its name.

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§ 21.66.1  It is a remarkable characteristic too of and the squill and of the crocus that, whereas all other plants put forth leaves first and only afterwards round into a stem, in these plants the stem is seen first, and after the stem the leaves. In the crocus however the blossom is pushed up by the stem; in the squill on the other hand the stem makes its appearance first, and then the blossom sprouts out of it. The plant blossoms, as I have said, three times a year, pointing to the three seasons for ploughing.

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§ 21.67.1  Some include among the class of bulbs the root of the cypiros, that is, of the gladiolus. It and makes a pleasant food, one which, when boiled, also renders bread more palatable, and also when kneaded with it more weighty. Not unlike it is the plant which is called thesium, and is acrid to the taste.

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§ 21.68.1  The other plants of the same kind differ in the leaf: asphodel has an oblong, narrow leaf; the squill one broad and flexible; the gladiolus one that its name suggests. Asphodel is used as food. Both the seed and the bulb are roasted, but the second in hot ashes; salt and oil are added. It is also pounded with figs, which Hesiod I thinks is a special delicacy. There is a tradition that if asphodel be planted before the gate of a country house it keeps away the evil influences of sorcery. Homer also mentioned asphodel. Its root is like a navew of moderate size, and no plant has more bulbs, eighty being often grouped together. Theophrastus and the Greeks generally, beginning with Pythagoras, have given the name of anthericus to its stem, a cubit and often two cubits long, with leaves like those of wild leek; it is the root, that is to say the bulbs, that they call asphodel. We of Italy call this plant albucus, and anthericus 'royal spear', the stem of which bears berries, and we distinguish two kinds. Albueus has a stalk a cubit long, large, without leaves and smooth, which Mago recommends should be cut at the end of March or the beginning of April, when the blossoming has ceased but before its seed has begun to swell; he adds that the stalks should be split, and brought out into the sun on the fourth day, and that of the material so dried bundles should be made. The same authority adds that the Greeks call oistos, the plant which we include among sedge and call arrow. He recommends that from the fifteenth of May to the end of October it should be stripped of its skin and dried in mild sunshine, and also that the second kind of gladiolus, called cypiros, which too is a marsh plant, should be cut down to the root through out July, and on the third day dried in the sun until it turns white. Every day however before sunset it should be put back under cover, since night dews are harmful to marsh plants after they have been cut down.

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§ 21.69.1  Mago gives like instructions about the rush also that they call mariscus; for weaving mats he recommends that it too be gathered in June and up to the middle of July, giving the same instructions for drying it which I have mentioned in their proper place when dealing with sedge. He distinguishes another kind of rush, which I find is called the marine rush and by the Greeks oxyschoenos. There are three kinds of it: the pointed, barren rush, which the Greeks call the male, or oxys, while the other two are female, and bear a black seed. One of these, called by the Greeks melancranis, is thicker and more bushy than the first; the third, called holoschoenus, being even more so. Of these melancranis is found apart from other kinds of rush, but oxys and holoschoenus grow on the same turf. The most useful for wickerwork is holoschoenus, because it is pliant and fleshy; it bears a fruit like eggs sticking to one another. The rush we have called male is self-reproduced, the head being bent down into the earth, but melancranis is reproduced from its seed. Except for this, the roots of every kind of rush die every year. Rushes are used for fish-baskets, for the finer sort of wickerwork, and for the wicks of lamps, the pith being especially useful; and they grow to such a size near the maritime Alps that when the hollow is cut open they measure almost an inch across, while in Egypt some are as narrow as the holes in a sieve, and of a length not more useful than others. Some botanists also distinguish as a separate class a triangular rush, which they call cyperos, though many do not recognize a distinction because of the resemblance of the name to cypiros. I however shall keep each distinct. Cypiros is, as I have said, the same as gladiolus, and has a bulbous root. The most esteemed grows in the island of Crete, the next in Naxos and then comes that of Phoenicia. The Cretan is white, with a smell like that of nard; the Naxian has a more pungent smell, the Phoenician a faint one, and the Egyptian (for it grows there also) none at all. Cypiros dispels hard formations of the body, for we must now speak of remedies, as there is a wide use in medicine of flowers and perfumes generally. As for cypiros, I shall follow Apollodorus who said that it should never be taken in drink; yet he maintained its great efficacy for stones in the bladder, which by this means he tries to remove. He has no doubt that it causes miscarriage in women, and records the following strange account of it. Some foreign people, he says, take into the mouth smoke from this plant and thereby reduce the spleen, asserting that they do not leave their homes without inhaling this smoke, as the habit produces, even from day today, increased briskness and greater strength. He adds that to apply cypiros as a liniment with oil is a certain cure for chafings, offensive armpits and abrasions.

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§ 21.70.1  Cyperos is a rush such as I have already described, with three corners, white next the ground, dark and fleshy at the head. The bottom leaves are more slender than those of leeks, the top ones being very small, with the seed between them. The root resembles that of the dark olive, which when it is oblong is called cyperis, being widely used in medicine. The most valued cyperos comes from the region round the temple of Hammon, the second in esteem from Rhodes, the third from Thera, the last from Egypt; as the cypiros also grows there, some confusion of thought results. But cypiros has a very hard root and scarcely any smell; the species of true cyperos have a smell that closely resembles that of nard. There is also a separate Indian plant called cypira, in shape resembling ginger, which when chewed tastes like saffron. The use of cyperos in medicine is to act as a depilatory. It makes an ointment for hang-nails, sores of the genitals and all sores that are in moisture, such as those in the mouth. Its root affords an effective remedy for the bites of snakes and stings of scorpions. The root taken in drink opens the passage of the uterus, but if taken in too strong doses its potency is great enough to cause prolapsus. It promotes urine and the passing of stone, and therefore is most useful to sufferers from dropsy. It is applied to spreading sores, but especially to those of the gullet, either in wine or in vinegar.

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§ 21.71.1  The root of the rush in three heminae of water, boiled down to one third, is a cure for coughs. The seed roasted and taken in water checks diarrhoea and excessive menstruation. The rush, however, called holoschoenus brings on headaches. The nearest parts to the root are chewed as a remedy for the bites of spiders. I find that there is also one other kind of rush, called euripice. Its seed is said to induce sleep, but the dose must be kept small, or coma will result.

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§ 21.72.1  Incidentally I will also mention medicines obtained from the scented rush, for one place where such a rush grows is in Coele Syria, as I have related in the appropriate place. The most esteemed, however, comes from Nabataea, known also as teuchitis; the next best is the Babylonian, and the worst comes from Africa, being without any scent. It is round, affecting the tongue with the stinging taste of sour wine. The genuine kind, on being rubbed, gives out a smell of roses, and the broken bits are red. Dispersing flatulence, it is good for the stomach, and for those who vomit bile. It allays hiccoughs, promotes belching, is diuretic, and a remedy for bladder troubles. For female complaints a decoction is made. With dry resin it is applied to sufferers from opisthotonic tetanus because of its warming properties.

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§ 21.73.1  The rose is both astringent and cooling. There are separate uses for its petals, flowers and heads. The parts of the petals which are white are called nails. In the flower, seed and filament are distinct, as are shell and calyx in the head. The petals are dried, or the juice is extracted from them by one of three methods. They may be treated by themselves, when the nails, in which there is most moisture, are not removed; or when what is left after removing the nails is steeped with oil or wine in glass vessels in the sunshine. Some add salt also, and a few alkanet or aspalathus or fragrant rush, because so prepared the essence is very beneficial for complaints of the uterus and for dysentery. With the nails removed the petals may also have their juice extracted by being pounded, and then strained through a thick linen cloth into a bronze vessel; the juice is then heated on a slow fire until it becomes as thick as honey. For this process only the most fragrant petals must be selected. How wine is made from roses I have described in my treatment of the various kinds of wine. Rose juice is used for the ears, sores in the month, the gums, as a gargle for the tonsils, for the stomach, uterus, rectal trouble, headache — when due to fever either by itself or with vinegar — to induce sleep or to dispel nausea. The petals are burned to make an ingredient of cosmetics for the eyebrows, and dried rose leaves are sprinkled on (chafed) thighs. Fluxes of the eyes also are soothed by the dried leaves. The flower induces sleep, checks menstrual, particularly white, discharges if taken in vinegar and water, as well as the spitting of blood; a cyathus of it in three cyathi of wine relieves stomach-ache. As to the seed, the finest is of a saffron colour, not more than a year old, and should be dried in the shade; the dark seed is harmful. It is used as a liniment for toothache, is diuretic, and may be applied to the stomach or in eases of erysipelas that is not of long standing. Inhaled by the nostrils it clears the head. Rose heads taken in drink cheek diarrhoea and haemorrhage. The nails of rose petals are healing for fluxes of the eyes, for eyesores discharge if the whole rose is applied, unless it is at the beginning of the flux, and then the rose must be dry and mixed with bread. The petals indeed taken internally are very good for gnawings of the stomach and for complaints of the belly or of the intestines, good also for the hypochondria, and they may be applied externally. They are also preserved for food, in the same way as sorrel. Care must be taken with rose petals, as mould quickly settles on them. Some use can be made of dried petals, or those from which the juice has been extracted. Powders, for example, are made from Them to cheek perspiration. These are sprinkled on the body after a bath and left to dry, being afterwards washed off with cold water. The little balls on the wild rose mixed with bears' grease are a remedy for mange.

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§ 21.74.1  Its roots bring great fame to the lily in many ways, being taken in wine for the bites of snakes and for poisoning by fungi. For corns on the foot they are boiled down in wine, and the plaster is not removed for three days. Boiled down with grease or oil they also make hair to grow again on bums. Taken in honey wine they carry off by stool extravasated blood; they are good for the spleen, for ruptures, spasms and the menstrual discharge; while if boiled down in wine and applied with honey they heal cuts of the sinews. They are healing for lichens and leprous sores, cure scurf on the face, and remove wrinkles from the skin. The petals, pickled in vinegar, are applied to wounds; if these are in the testes, it is better to add henbane and wheat flour. The seed is used as an application for erysipelas, flowers and leaves for chronic sores, and the juice extracted from the flower, called honey by some and syrium by others, as an emollient of the uterus, for inducing perspiration and for bringing boils to a head.

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§ 21.75.1  Of the narcissus there are two kinds used by physicians: one with a bright flower and the other with grass-green leaves. The latter is injurious to the stomach, so that it acts as an emetic and as a purge; it is bad for the sinews and causes a dull headache, its name being derived from the word narce, torpor, and not from the youth in the myth. The root of each variety has the taste of honey wine. In a little honey it is good for burns, and the same is beneficial for wounds and sprains. while for superficial abscesses honey should be added to darnel meal. This preparation also extracts bodies that have pierced the flesh. Beaten up in pearl barley and oil it heals bruises, and wounds caused by stones. Mixed with meal it cleans wounds and removes black psoriasis. From its flower is made narcissus oil, which is very useful for softening callosities, for warming parts of the body that have been chilled, and for the ears, but it also produces headache.

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§ 21.76.1  There are both wild and cultivated violets. The mauve ones are cooling and are applied to the stomach for inflammations, to the forehead also when the head bums, to the eyes especially for fluxes, for prolapsus of the anus and of the womb, and to abscesses. Placed on the head in chaplets, or even smelt, they disperse the after-effects of drinking and its headaches, as well as quinsies when taken in water. The mauve variety, taken in water, is a cure for epilepsy, especially in children. The seed of the violet neutralizes the stings of scorpions. On the other hand the flower of the white violet opens abscesses, and even disperses them. Both the white violet, however, and the yellow reduce the menstrual discharge and are diuretic. Freshly gathered they have less potency, for which reason they should be dried and not used until they are at least a year old. Half a cyathus of the yellow violet taken in three of water promotes menstruation. Its roots used with vinegar as a liniment soothe the spleen, and likewise gout, but for inflammations of the eyes myrrh and saffron should be added to them. The leaves with honey cleanse sores on the head. With wax ointment they heal cracks in the anus and such as are in moist parts of the body. Used with vinegar, however, they heal abscesses.

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§ 21.77.1  The Celtic valerian used in medicine is called 'perpressa' by some Roman authorities. It relieves serpent bites, aching and feverish heads, and likewise fluxes from the eyes. It is applied to breasts swollen after childbirth, to incipient fistulas of the eye and to erysipelas. The smell induces sleep. It is beneficial for a decoction of the root to be taken by sufferers from cramp, Violent falls, convulsions, asthma and also chronic cough. Three or four sprays of it are boiled down to one third. A draught of this is cleansing for women after miscarriage, and removes stitch in the side or stone in the bladder. It is pounded with lily petals to make dusting powders, and for the sake of the perfume is laid among clothes. Combretum, which I have said is similar to Celtic valerian, beaten up with axle-grease is a wonderful cure for wounds.

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§ 21.78.1  Hazelwort is said to be beneficial for liver complaints, an ounce being taken in a hemina of diluted honey wine. It purges the bowels after the manner of hellebore, and is good for dropsy, the hypochondria, the uterus and for jaundice. When added to must it makes a diuretic wine. It is dug up when the leaves are forming; it is dried and then stored up. In the shade it very quickly goes mouldy.

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§ 21.79.1  Since certain authorities, as I have said, have given to the root of Celtic valerian the name of rustic nard, I will now add the medicinal uses of Gallic nard also, which I mentioned when dealing with foreign trees, postponing fuller treatment to the present occasion. So for serpent bites it is useful in doses of two drachmae taken in wine, for flatulence of the colon in either water or wine, for troubles of the liver and kidneys, excessive bile, and dropsy, either by itself or with wormwood. It checks excessive attacks of menstruation.

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§ 21.80.1  The root of the plant that in the same place I have called phu is given, either in drink pounded, or else boiled, for suffocation of the womb, and for pains also of the chest or side. It is an emmenogogue and is taken with wine.

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§ 21.81.1  Saffron does not blend well with honey or with anything sweet, but it does so very easily with wine or water. It is very useful in medicine, and is kept in a horn box. It disperses all inflammations, but especially those of the eyes, taken internally a with egg; suffocation of the womb as well, and ulcerations of the throat, chest, kidneys, liver, lungs and bladder, being very useful indeed for inflammation in particular of these organs, as also for cough and for pleurisy. It removes itching also, and promotes urination. Those who take saffron first will not feel after-effects of wine and will become intoxicated with difficulty. Chaplets too made of it alleviate intoxication. It induces sleep, has a gentle action on the head, and is an aphrodisiac. Its blossom, with Cimolian chalk, is used as an application for erysipelas. The plant itself is used as an ingredient in numerous medicines, and there is one eye-salve to which it has actually given its name.

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§ 21.82.1  The lees too of the saffron extracted from saffron juice, which is called crocomagma, have their own uses for cataract and strangury. It is more warming than saffron itself. The best kind is that which, when put in the mouth, stains with the truest saffron colour the saliva and the teeth.

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§ 21.83.1  The red iris is better than the white one. It conduces to the health of babies to have this tied on them, especially when they are teething or suffering from cough, and to inject it into those troubled with tapeworms. Its other properties are not much different from those of honey. It cleanses sores on the head, especially abscesses of long standing. Taken in doses of two drachmae with honey it relaxes the bowels; taken in drink it relieves cough, griping and flatulence, in vinegar, complaints of the spleen. In vinegar and water it is an antidote against the bites of snakes and of spiders; against stings of scorpions two drachmae by weight are taken in bread or water; for dog-bites and abrasions it is applied in oil. So prepared it is also applied to aching sinews, but for lumbago and sciatica resin is added. Its nature is warming. Snuffed up through the nostrils it promotes sneezing and clears the head. For headache it is applied with quinces or with sparrow-apples. It dispels also the after-effects of wine and orthopnoea. Taken in doses of two oboli it acts as an emetic. Applied with honey it draws out splinters of broken bone. For whitlows its meal is used, wine being added for corns and warts, the plaster not being removed for three days. Chewed it sweetens foul breath and offensive armpits. Its juice softens all indurations. It induces sleep, but dries up the semen. It heals cracks in the anus and condylomata, and all excrescences on the body. Some authorities call the wild variety xyris. This disperses scrofulous sores, superficial abscesses and swellings in the groin. It is recommended that for these purposes it should be pulled up with the left hand, and the gatherers should utter the name of the patient and of the complaint for whose sake they are pulling it. While speaking of this plant also I will make known the dishonesty of herbalists. They keep back a part of it and of certain other plants, such as the plantain. If they think their pay insufficient and look for further employment, they bury in the same place the part they kept back, I suppose to make the complaints they have cured break out again. The root of Celtic valerian boiled down in wine checks vomiting and strengthens the stomach.

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§ 21.84.1  Musaeus and Hesiod bid those who are ambitious for honour and glory to rub themselves over with hulwort, and for hulwort to be handled, cultivated, carded on the person to neutralize poisons, to be placed under bedclothes to keep away snakes, to be burnt, to be boiled down, fresh or dry, in wine, and to be used as liniment or taken by the mouth. Physicians prescribe hulwort for splenic complaints in vinegar, for jaundice in wine, for incipient dropsy boiled down in wine, and so prepared also as a liniment for wounds. It brings away the afterbirth and the dead foetus; it relieves pains of the body and empties the bladder; it is applied as ointment for fluxes from the eyes. No other herb makes a more suitable ingredient for the antidote called alexipharmaeon. It is, however, injurious in my opinion to the stomach, and makes the head stuffy, besides causing miscarriage. Some deny this, and go on to add the superstition that, when found, it should for cataract at once be tied round the neck, care being taken not to let it touch the ground. The same state that its leaves resemble those of thyme, except that they are softer and of a more downy whiteness. If too it be pounded with wild rue in rain water it is said to lessen the danger of asp bites; and as well as the blue cornflower it binds and closes wounds, preventing them from spreading.

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§ 21.85.1  Holochrysos taken in wine cures strangury, and applied as liniment fluxes from the eyes; with burnt lees of wine and pearl barley it removes lichens. The root of chrysocome is warming and astringent. It is given in drink for complaints of liver and lungs, while a decoction in hydromel is prescribed for pains in the womb. It promotes menstruation, and if given raw reduces the water of dropsy.

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§ 21.86.1  If the hives are rubbed over with melissophyllum (balm), sometimes called melittaena, the bees will not fly away, for no flower gives them greater pleasure. With besoms made of this plant swarms are controlled with the greatest ease. It is also a most effective remedy for the stings of bees, wasps and similar insects, such as spiders and also scorpions; also with the addition of soda for suffocation of the womb, and in wine for griping of the bowels. Its leaves are applied to scrofulous sores, and with salt for affections of the anus. The juice of the boiled plant promotes menstruation, removes inflammations and heals sores. It alleviates diseases of the joints and the bites of dogs. It is beneficial to sufferers from chronic dysentery and to coeliac patients, asthmatics, and patients with splenic troubles or ulcers on the chest. It is thought excellent treatment to anoint weak eyes with its juice mixed with honey.

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§ 21.87.1  Melilot too is healing to the eyes when mixed with egg-yolk or linseed. With rose oil it also relieves pain in the jaws or head, and with raisin wine earache and swellings or eruptions on the hands; boiled down in wine or pounded and raw it is good for pains in the stomach. It has the same action on the womb; for the testes, however, prolapsus of the anus and other complaints of those parts it should be freshly gathered and boiled down in water or in raisin wine. With the addition of rose oil it makes an ointment for carcinoma. It is thoroughly boiled down in sweet wine, and is particularly effective in the treatment of the tumours called melicerides.

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§ 21.88.1  I know it is believed that trefoil is an antidote for the bite of snakes and scorpions, twenty grains of the seed being taken in a drink of wine or of vinegar and water, or leaves with the whole plant are boiled down to make a decoction; that snakes too arc never seen in trefoil; I know too that it is reported by famous authorities that twenty-five grains of the kind of trefoil I have called minyanthes serve as an antidote for all poisons, and that many other virtues besides are attributed to it as a remedy. But I am led to oppose their views by the authority of a very reliable man; for the poet Sophocles asserts that it is a poisonous, as does Simos also among the physicians, saying that the juice of the decocted or pounded plant, when poured upon the body, produces the same sensations of burning as those felt by persons bitten by a serpent, when this plant is applied to the wound. Wherefore I should be of opinion that it should not be used otherwise than as a counter-poison. For perhaps this is one of the many cases where one poison is poisonous to other poisons. I have likewise noted that the seed of that trefoil the leaves of which are very small is useful, when applied as face-ointment, for preserving the loveliness of women's skin.

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§ 21.89.1  Thyme ought to be gathered while it is in blossom, and to be dried in the shade. There are two kinds of thyme: — one white, with a wood-like root, growing on hills and also the more highly valued; the other kind is darker and with a dark flower. Both kinds are supposed to be very beneficial for brightening the vision, whether taken as food or used in medicines, also for a chronic cough, to ease expectoration when used as an electuary with vinegar and salt, to prevent the blood from congealing when taken with honey, to relieve, applied externally with mustard, chronic catarrh of the throat, and also complaints of the stomach and bowels. They should be used, however, in moderation, since they are heating, and because of this property they are astringent to the bowels; should these become ulcerated, a denarius of thyme should be added to a sextarius of vinegar and honey, and the same for pain in the side, or between the shoulder-blades, or in the chest. They cure troubles of the hypochondria, taken in vinegar and honey, which draught is also given in cases of aberration of mind or of melancholy. Thyme is also administered to epileptics, who when attacked by a fit are revived by its smell. It is said too that epileptics should sleep on soft thyme. It is good also for asthma, difficult breathing, and delayed menstruation; or if the embryo in the womb be dead, thyme boiled down in water to one third proves useful, as thyme moreover does to men also, if taken with honey and vinegar, for flatulence, for swellings of the belly or testes, or for maddening pain in the bladder. An application in wine removes tumours and inflammations, and in vinegar callosities and warts. It is applied with wine for sciatica; pounded and sprinkled in oil on wool it is used for affections of the joints and for sprains, with lard it is applied to burns. It is also administered as a draught in the early stages of affections of the joints, three oboli of thyme in three cyathi of vinegar and honey; pounded, with the addition of salt, it is used for loss of appetite.

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§ 21.90.1  Hemerocalles has a soft leaf of a pale green, and a scented bulbous root, which applied with honey to the belly drives out watery humours and also harmful to blood. The leaves are applied for fluxes of the eyes and for pains in the breasts after childbirth.

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§ 21.91.1  Helenium, which had its origin, as I have said, in the tears of Helen, is believed to preserve physical charm, and to keep unimpaired the fresh complexion of our women, whether of the face or of the rest of the body. Moreover, it is supposed that by its use they gain a kind of attractiveness and sex-appeal. To this plant when taken in wine is attributed the power of stimulating gaiety, the power possessed by the famous nepenthes extolled by Homer of banishing all sorrow. It also has a very sweet juice. The root of it, taken in water fasting, is good for asthma; inside it is white and sweet. It is also taken in wine for snake bites. Pounded it is said further to kill mice.

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§ 21.92.1  Of southernwood authorities mention two kinds: the field and the mountain. The latter, they would have us understand, is female, the former male; both are as bitter as wormwood. The Sicilian is the most highly praised, next comes that of Galatia. While some use is made of the leaves, the seed is more useful for warming, for which reason it is good for sinews, cough, asthma, convulsions, ruptures, lumbago and strangury. Some handfuls are boiled down to one third, and given to drink in doses of four cyathi. The pounded seed also is given in water, a drachma at a time. It is also beneficial to the uterus. With barley meal it brings to a head superficial abscesses, and it is applied as a liniment for inflammation of the eyes, a quince being boiled with it. It keeps snakes away, and for their bites is either taken or applied with wine, being very effective against those creatures whose venom causes shivering and chills, scorpions for instance and poisonous spiders; taken in drink it is good for other poisons, taken in any way it is good for chill fits, and for withdrawing substances embedded in the flesh. It also forces out noxious things from the intestines. They say that a spray of it, laid under the pillow, acts as an aphrodisiac, and that the plant is a most effective countercheck of all magic potions given to produce sexual impotence.

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§ 21.93.1  Leucanthemum mixed with twice the quantity of vinegar is beneficial to asthmatics. Sampsuchum (otherwise amaraion, sweet marjoram) of which the most valued, and the most fragrant, comes from Cyprus, counteracts the stings of scorpions, if applied in vinegar and salt. An application is also very beneficial for irregular menstruation. This plant has less efficacy when taken in drink. With pearl barley it also checks fluxes from the eyes. The juice of the boiled plant relieves gripings. The plant is useful for strangury and dropsy, and in a dry state excites sneezing. There is also made from it an oil, called sampsuchinum or amaracinum, used for warming and softening the sinews, which also warms the uterus. The leaves too are good with honey for bruises and with wax for sprains.

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§ 21.94.1  Up to the present I have spoken only of the anemone used for chaplets; I shall now describe the kinds used in medicine. There are some who use the name phrenion. There are two kinds of it: one is wild, and the other grows on cultivated ground, though both prefer a sandy soil. Of the cultivated anemone there are several species; for it has either a scarlet flower — this is also the most plentiful — or a purple one, or one the colour of milk. The leaves of all these are like the leaves of parsley, and rarely does the plant exceed half a foot in height, the head resembling that of asparagus. The flower never opens except when the wind is blowing, a fact to which it owes its name. The wild anemone is the larger, and its leaves are broader, the flower being scarlet. Many have been misled into identifying the wild anemone with the argemone, others again with the poppy that I have called rhoeas. But there is a great difference between them, because these two blossom after the anemone, which does not yield a juice like theirs, has not their calyx, and there is no likeness except the head like asparagus. Anemones are good for headache and inflammations, for uterine complaints and for lacteal troubles. They also promote menstruation when taken with barley water or used on a wool pessary. The root chewed brings away phlegm, is healing to the teeth and when boiled down to fluxes of the I eyes and to scars. The Magi have attributed to the anemones a kind of mystic potency, recommending that the plant which is first seen should be taken up in that year with the utterance that it is being gathered as a remedy for tertian and quartan agues; after this the blossoms must be wrapped up in a red rag and kept in the shade, and so be used, should occasion arise, as an amulet. If the crushed root of the anemone bearing a scarlet flower be applied to the skin of any living creature, it produces a sore by reason of its astringent qualities, and for this reason it is employed for cleansing ulcerous sores.

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§ 21.95.1  The plant oenanthe grows on rocks, and has a leaf like that of parsnip and a large root, with several heads. Its stem and leaves taken with honey and dark wine make childbirth easy and bring away the afterbirth; taken in honey they are a cure for coughs, and also diuretic. The root also cures complaints of the bladder.

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§ 21.96.1  Heliochrysus is called by some chrysanthemon. It has sprigs of a shining white, and leaves of a dull whitish colour, like those of southernwood, with as it were clusters hanging down all round it, which glisten like gold when reflecting the light of the sun, and never fade. For this reason they make chaplets of it for the gods, a custom which Ptolemy king of Egypt very faithfully observed. It grows in shrubberies. Taken in wine it is diuretic and promotes menstruation. It disperses indurations and inflammations; for burns it is applied with honey. For snake bites and lumbago it is taken in drink. With honey wine it removes congealed blood in the belly or bladder. Three oboli by weight of its leaves, pounded and taken in white wine, check excessive menstruation. It protects clothes by its smell, which however is not unpleasant.

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§ 21.97.1  The hyacinth grows chiefly in Gaul. There they use it to impart a shade to the dye hysginum. The root is bulbous, and well known to slave-dealers, for applied in sweet wine it checks the signs of puberty, and does not let them develop. It relieves colic and counteracts the bites of spiders. It is diuretic. For snake bites, scorpion stings and jaundice its seed is given mixed with southern-wood.

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§ 21.98.1  The seed of lychnis too, that flame-coloured flower, is crushed and taken in wine for snake bites and for the stings of scorpions, hornets and the like. The wild variety of this plant is injurious to the stomach. It loosens the bowels, in doses of two drachmae, bringing away bile most effectively, and is so hurtful to scorpions that the mere sight of it sends them into complete stupor. Its root is called bolites by the people of Asia; tied over the eye it is said to remove white film on the pupil.

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§ 21.99.1  The vicapervica, otherwise chamaedaphne, dried and crushed is given in water for dropsy in doses of a small spoonful, under which treatment the patient very quickly loses the water. A decoction of it in ash and sprinkled with wine dries tumours. Its juice cures complaints of the ears. An application to the belly is said to be very beneficial indeed for diarrhoea.

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§ 21.100.1  A decoction of the root of butcher's broom is given every other day for stone in the bladder, for painful urination, or for blood in the urine. The root ought to be dug up on one day and the decoction made on the morning of the next, a sextarius of it being mixed with two cyathi of wine. There are some also who take in water the pounded root raw, and it is considered that nothing is more wholly beneficial to the male genitals than its small stalks pound and used in vinegar.

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§ 21.101.1  Batis (sea-fennel) too relaxes the bowels. Crushed up it is used raw as a liniment for gout. The Egyptians sow acinos both for chaplets and for food; it would be just the same as ocimum were it not for its rougher branches and leaves, and for its very strong smell. It is both an emmenagogue and diuretic.

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§ 21.102.1  Colocasia, according to Glaucias, mellows the acrid humours of the body, and is beneficial to the stomach.

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§ 21.103.1  Anthalium is a food of the Egyptians, but I have been able to find no other use of it. There is however a plant called anthyllium by some and by others anthyllum, of which there are two kinds. One in leaves and branches is like the lentil, a palm in height, growing on sandy soils with plenty of sun, and slightly salt to the taste. The other kind is like the chamaepitys, but smaller and rougher, with a purple flower and a strong smell, and growing in rocky places. The former kind is very useful for uterine affections and for wounds, being applied with rose oil and milk. It is taken in drink for strangury and gravel of the kidneys in doses of three drachmae. The other kind is taken by the month with honey and vinegar in doses of four drachmae for indurations of the womb, gripings of the bowels, and epilepsy.

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§ 21.104.1  Parthenium is called leucanthes by some, and amaracum by others. Celsus, among the Latin writers calls it perdicium and muralis. It grows in the hedges of gardens, and has a white flower, the smell of an apple and a bitter taste. A decoction of this plant is used to make a sits — bath for induration and inflammation of the womb, and the dried plant is applied with honey and vinegar to bring away black bile. For this reason it is good for dizziness and stone in the bladder. It is used as an application for erysipelas, and also with old axle-grease for scrofulous sores. For tertian agues the Magi recommend us to gather it with the left hand without looking back, while saying for whose sake it is being gathered; then a leaf of it should be placed under the tongue of the patient to be swallowed presently in a cyathus of water.

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§ 21.105.1  Trychnos, spelt by some strychnos, I wish the Egyptian florists did not use for their chaplets; they are tempted to do so by the resemblance of the leaves of both kinds to those of ivy. One of these kinds, bearing in a seed-bag scarlet berries with a stone in them, is called halicacabos, by others callion, and by our countrymen bladder-wort, because of its usefulness in cases of stone and other complaints of the bladder. It is a woody shrub rather than a plant, with large, broad, conical seed-bags, with a large stone inside, which ripens in November. A third kind has the leaves of basil, and should receive the briefest of descriptions from one who is dealing with remedies, not poisons, for a very small amount of the juice causes madness. Yet the Greek writers have actually made a jest of this property. For they have said that a dose of one drachma plays tricks with the sense of shame, speaking of hallucinations and realistic visions; that a double dose causes downright insanity; any addition moreover to the dose bringing instant death. This is the poison which in their innocence very unsophisticated writers have called dorycnion because spears before battle had their points dipped in it, as it grows everywhere. Those who censured it less severely gave it the name manicon; those who from evil motives tried to keep its nature secret called it erythron, or neuras, or (as a few did) perisson, but there is no need to go into more details even for the sake of giving a warning. There is besides another kind, with the name of halicacabos, which is soporific, and kills quicker even than opium, by some called morion and by others moly, yet praised by Diocles and Evenor, by Timaristus indeed even in verse, with a strange forgetfulness of harmless remedies, actually because it is, they say, a quick remedy for strengthening loose teeth to rinse them in wine and halicacabos. They added a proviso, that the rinsing must not go on too long, for delirium is caused thereby. Remedies should not be described the use of which involves the danger of a yet more serious evil. Accordingly, although a third kind of this plant is in favour as a food, and although its flavour is preferred to that of other garden produce, and although Xenocrates prescribes trychnos as being beneficial for every bodily ill, yet the genus is not so helpful that I consider it right on this account to give any more details, especially when the supply is so abundant of harmless remedies. The root of halicacabos is taken in drink by those who, to confirm superstitious notions, wish to play the inspired prophet, and to be publicly seen raving in unpretended madness. The remedy for it, which I am happier to mention, is a copious draught of hot hydromel. Nor will I pass over this: that balicacabos is so antipathetic to the nature of asps that if its root be brought near it stupefies that very power of theirs to kill by stupefaction. Therefore pounded and in oil it is a help to those who have been bitten.

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§ 21.106.1  Corchorum is a plant eaten at Alexandria. It has rolled up leaves, like those of the mulberry, and is beneficial, they say, to the hypochondria, for mange and for freckles. I find also that scab in cattle is very quickly healed by it, and that according to Nicander the bites of snakes also, if gathered before it blossoms.

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§ 21.107.1  Nor would it be right to describe fully the cnecos, otherwise atractylis, an Egyptian plant, were it not for the great help it affords against venomous creatures as well as against poisonous fungi. It is a well-known fact that so long as they hold this plant, those stung by scorpions feel no sharp pain.

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§ 21.108.1  The Egyptians plant pesoluta too in their gardens, using it for chaplets. There are two kinds, female and male; both, it is said, placed under the genitals, are antaphrodisiac, especially for men.

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§ 21.109.1  Since I have frequently to use Greek names when giving weights and measures, I will add at this place their equivalents, once and for all. The Attic drachma, for it is generally the Attic standard that physicians adopt, has the weight of a silver denarius, and the same makes six oboli, the obolus being ten chalci. The cyathus as a measure weighs ten drachmae; when the measure of an acetabulum is spoken of, it means the quarter of a hemina, that is fifteen drachmae. The mna, that our countrymen call the mina, weighs one hundred Attic drachmae.

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§ 22.1.1  NATURE and our earth might have filled the measure of our wonder at them in anyone who reviews even the preceding volume only, with all Nature's gifts in it, and all the kinds of plants created for the needs or pleasures of mankind. But how many more kinds remain, and how much more wonderful they are in their discovery! For of the plants mentioned already the greater number, owing to their excellence as food, perfume or ornament, have led to repeated experiments; of the rest it is their efficacy that proves that nothing is created by Nature without some more hidden reason than those just mentioned.

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§ 22.2.1  Now I notice that some foreign peoples use certain plants on their persons both to make themselves more handsome and also to keep up traditional custom. At any rate among barbarian tribes the women stain the face, using, some one plant and some another; and the men too among the Daci and the Sarmatae tattoo their own bodies. In Gaul there is a plant like the plantain, called glastum; with it the wives of the Britons, and their daughters-in-law, stain all the body, and at certain religious ceremonies march along naked, with a colour resembling that of Ethiopians.

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§ 22.3.1  Moreover we know that clothes are dyed with a wonderful dye from a plant, and, to say nothing of the fact that, of the berries of Galatia, Africa, and Lusitania, the 'coccum' is specially served to colour the military cloaks of our generals, Transalpine Gaul can produce with vegetable dyes Tyrian purple, oyster purple and all other colours. To get these nobody seeks the murex oyster in the depths, offering his person as bait to sea monsters while he hastens to snatch his booty, and exploring a bottom that no anchor yet has touched, merely to discover the means for a matron to charm her paramour more easily and for a seducer to ensnare another's wife. There one stands on land to harvest dyes as we harvest crops; and though there is a complaint that the dye washes out with use, except for this defect luxury could have bedecked itself in brighter colours, and certainly with less risk to life. It is not my intention now to treat this subject fully, but I shall not pass it over entirely, so that I may, by suggesting cheaper materials, curb luxury by expediency, and on another occasion I shall tell how walls are dyed instead of being painted in mosaics. Yet I should not have left out the craft of dyeing altogether, had it ever been included among the liberal arts. In the meantime I shall take a bolder line, and there shall be assigned even to dull, that is to say, lowly plants all the dignity that is their due, since it is a fact that the founders and enlargers of the Roman Empire derived from this source also an immense advantage, because it was from them that came the tufts used when the State needed cures, and also the vervains required in holy ceremonies and in embassies. At any rate both names mean the same thing, that is, a turf from the citadel pulled up with its own earth; and on every occasion when envoys were sent to the enemy to perform clarigatio, that is to demand in loud tones the restitution of plundered property, one in particular was called vervain bearer.

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§ 22.4.1  No crown indeed has been a higher honour than the crown of grass among the rewards for glorious deeds given by the sovereign people, lords of the earth. Jewelled crowns, golden crowns, crowns for scaling enemy ramparts or walls, or for boarding men-of-war, the civic crown for saving the life of a citizen, the triumph crown — these were instituted later than this grass crown, and all differ from it greatly, in distinction as in character. All the others have been given by individuals and personally by generals and commanders to their soldiers, or occasionally to their colleagues, or have been decreed in triumphs by a Senate freed from the anxiety of war and by a people enjoying peace; the grass crown has never been conferred except upon the leader of a forlorn hope, being voted only by the whole army and only to him who rescued it. The other crowns have been conferred by commanders, this alone on a commander by his soldiers. The same crown is called the siege crown when a whole camp has been relieved and saved from awful destruction.

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§ 22.4.2  But if the civic crown is deemed a glorious and hallowed distinction because the life has been saved of only one and even maybe the lowliest citizen, what, pray, ought to be thought of the preservation of a whole army by the courage of one man? This crown used to be made from green grass pulled up from the site where the besieged men had been relieved by some one. For in old times it was the most solemn token of defeat for the conquered to present grass to their conquerors, for to do so meant that they withdrew from their land, from the very soil that nurtured them and even from means of burial. This custom, I know, exists even today among the Germans.

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§ 22.5.1  L. Siccius Dentatus was presented with this crown but once, although he earned fourteen civic crowns and fought out one hundred and twenty battles, victorious in all. So much rarer a thing is it for a decoration to be conferred by rescued men upon the one man who rescued them. Certain commanders have even been decorated more than once, P. Decius Mus, for instance, when military tribune, once by his own army, and again by those who formed the relieved garrison. He showed by a devout act how great a dignity this distinction brought with it, seeing that after the presentation he sacrificed to Mars a white bull, as well as the hundred tawny ones which at the same time had been given to him by the relieved garrison in recognition of his courage. This Decius afterwards when consul with Emperiosus as his colleague sacrificed himself as a victim in order to secure victory. It was also given by the Senate and People of Rome — the highest distinction in my opinion that a human being can attain to — to that Fabius who 'restored the whole Roman State' by refusing to fight, not however on the occasion when he rescued the Master of the Horse and his army; it was then thought preferable for a crown and a new title, 'Father,' to be given him by those whom he had rescued. The unanimous vote I spoke of gave him the honour when Hannibal was driven from Italy, and the crown was the only one placed on the recipient's head by the hand of the State itself, and — a special feature in the case of Fabius — it was the only one given by the whole of Italy.

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§ 22.6.1  Besides these the distinction of the grass crown has been won for service in Sicily by M. Calpurnius Flamma, tribune of the soldiers, and in the war with the Cimbri by Cn. Petreius of Atina, the only centurion to receive it up to the present time. Serving as Head Centurion under Catulus, he harangued his legion when it was cut off by the enemy, killed his own tribune when he hesitated to break through the enemy camp, and brought the legion out. I find in my authorities that in addition to this honour the same man, with the consuls Marius and Catulus at his side, offered sacrifice, wearing the magisterial gown, on a brazier placed for the purpose, and to the music of the piper. Sulla the Dictator also has written that he too was presented by his army with this crown before Nola, when he was lieutenant-general in the Marsian war, and moreover had the scene painted in his Tusculan villa, afterwards the property of Cicero. If Sulla tells the truth, it would make me describe him as all the more detestable, because by his proscription he with his own hand tore the crown from his own head, so much fewer were the citizens he saved than those whom he afterwards slew. Let him also add to this distinction the proud surname of Felix, nevertheless he himself resigned to Sertorius this crown when he besieged the proscribed in every part of the world. Scipio Aemilianus also was, according to Varro, presented with the siege crown in Africa when Manilius was consul, having rescued three cohorts with three others led out to rescue them. Such is the story carved under Scipio's statue by Augustus, now in Heaven, in the Forum Augusti. Augustus himself, in the consulship of Marcus Cicero junior, was on the 13th September presented with the siege crown by the Senate; so inadequate was the civic crown thought to be. Nobody else at all, I find, has received this distinction.

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§ 22.7.1  There were therefore no special plants used in making this crown, but whatever plants had been found on the site of the peril, however lowly and mean, these gave the honour its nobility. That such ignorance about the composition of this crown is rife amongst us I consider less strange when I see the further indifference to the means of preserving health, of banishing physical pain and of warding off death. But who could not with justice censure modern ways? The cost of living has been increased by luxuries and extravagance; never has there been more zest for life or less care taken of it. We believe that care of our life is the duty of others, that others make it their business on instructions from us, and that physicians have already provided for our needs. The enjoyment of pleasures is our personal affair, but our lives we entrust to the charge of somebody else, thereby incurring what I personally hold to be the worst possible disgrace. Moreover, most people actually laugh at me for carrying on research in these matters, and I am accused of busying myself with trifles. It is, however, a great comfort to me in my vast toil to know that Nature too, not I alone, incurs this contempt, for I shall show that she at least has not failed us, having put remedies even into plants that we dislike, seeing that she has given healing properties even to those armed with prickles and thorns. For these remain to be discussed next after those plants I mentioned in the preceding book, as even in them we cannot sufficiently apprehend and admire the forethought of Nature. She had given already the soft plants I spoke of that make pleasant foods; she had coloured the remedies in flowers, and by the mere sight had attracted our attention, combining the helpful with what is actually delightful. Then she devised some so repellent to look at, so cruel to the touch, that we seem almost to hear the voice of Nature justifying herself as she fashions them, and saying that she so creates them lest any greedy animal browse on her own self, any wanton hands steal, any careless steps crush, or any perching bird break; by defending them with these thorns, by arming them with weapons, she is making a protection and safety for her remedies. This very thing then that we hate in them has been devised for the sake of mankind.

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§ 22.8.1  Especially famous among spinous plants is the erynge, or eryngion, that grows to counteract snake bites and all poisons. For stings and bites its root in doses of one drachma is taken in wine, or in water if (as usually happens) such injuries are also accompanied by fever. It is applied to the wounds, being a specific for those caused by amphibious snakes and frogs. Heraclides the physician is of opinion that boiled in goose broth it is more efficacious than any other remedy for aconite and other poisoning. Apollodorus would boil it with a frog a for poisoning, the other authorities say in water only. The plant itself is hardy, bushy, with prickly leaves and jointed stem, a cubit high or occasionally taller, partly palish in colour, partly dark, and with a fragrant root. While it is a cultivated plant it also grows wild on rough, stony ground and on the sea shore, when it is more hardy and darker, with a leaf like that of celery.

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§ 22.9.1  Of these the pale variety is called 'hundred heads' by our countrymen. All kinds have the same properties, and the Greeks make a food of the stem and the root, served in either way you like, boiled or eaten raw. Marvellous is the chnracteristic reported of it, that its root grows into the likeness of the organs of one sex or the other; it is rarely so found, but should the male form come into the possession of men, they become lovable in the eyes of women. This, it is said, is how Phaon of Lesbos too won the love of Sappho, there being much idle trifling on this subject not only among the Magi but also among the Pythagoreans. When used in medicine, however, besides the advantages mentioned above, it relieves flatulence, colic, affections of the heart, stomach, liver and hypochondria, if taken in hydromel, and the spleen if taken in vinegar and water. With hydromel again it helps the kidneys, strangury, opisthotonic tetanus, cramp, lumbago, dropsy, epilepsy, deficiency or excess in menstruation, and all affections of the uterus. With honey it draws out substances embedded in the flesh. Applied with salted axle-grease and wax ointment it heals scrofulous sores, parotid tumours, superficial abscesses, and the falling away of flesh from the bones; fractures also. Taken beforehand it keeps off the after-effects of wine, and checks looseness of the bowels. Some of our countrymen have recommended it to be gathered near the summer solstice and to be applied with rain water for all affections of the neck. Some have recorded that albugo also of the eyes is cured by using it as an amulet.

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§ 22.10.1  Some with eryngium class acanus also, a thorny, short and broad plant, with rather broad thorns. An application of it is said to be wonderfully good for checking haemorrhage.

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§ 22.11.1  Some have incorrectly thought that erynge is the same as liquorice, which therefore should come immediately after erynge in my discussion. The plant itself is undoubtedly among the spinous ones, with prickly, fleshy, gummy leaves, bushy, two cubits high, with a flower like the hyacinth, and fruit the size of the little balls of the plane tree. The finest grows in Cilicia, the next best in Pontus; it has a sweet root, the only part to be used. It is dug up at the setting of the Pleiades, and is as long as lycium root, the boxwood-coloured being superior to the dark and the pliant to the brittle. To be used as a suppository it is boiled down to one-third, for other purposes to the consistency of honey, though occasionally it is pounded, in which form it is applied to wounds and for all affections of the throat. Merely thickened and then placed under the tongue the juice is good for the voice; it is also good for the chest and liver. I have already stated that this root allays hunger and thirst, for which reason some have named it adipsos (thirst-quencher), and prescribed it for dropsy, in order to prevent thirst. Because of this property it is chewed as a mouth medicine, and it is often sprinkled on sores in the mouth and inflammatory swellings of the eyelids. It also cures irritation of the bladder, pains in the kidneys, tumours of the anus, and sores on the genitals. Some have prescribed it in a draught for quartan ague, in doses of two drachmae by weight, with pepper, to be taken in a hemina of water. Chewed, it checks the flow of blood from a wound. Some authorities have asserted that it also expels stone from the bladder.

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§ 22.12.1  One kind of caltrop grows in gardens, the other only in rivers. From both the juice is collected to make eye medicines, for it is of a cooling nature and therefore useful for inflammations and abscesses. Mixed with honey it heals sores that break out of themselves, especially those in the mouth, and also sore tonsils. Taken in drink it breaks up stone in the bladder. The Thracians on the banks of the Strymon feed their horses on the leaves of the caltrop, themselves living on the kernel, out of which they make a very pleasant bread, and one to bind the bowels. The root, if gathered in chastity and purity, disperses scrofulous sores; the seed used as an amulet soothes painful varicose veins; pounded, moreover, and sprinkled in water it kills fleas.

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§ 22.13.1  Stoebe, which some call pheos, boiled in wine is specific for suppurating ears, as well as for black eyes. It is injected into the bowels for haemorrhage and dysentery.

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§ 22.14.1  Hippophaes grows on sandy soils and by the sea. It has pale thorns, and clusters, like those of ivy, with berries partly white and partly red. Its root is rich in a juice which is either dispensed by itself or made up into lozenges with vetch meal. An obolus by weight carries off bile, most healthfully if taken with honey wine. There is another hippophaes, consisting only of very small leaves without stem or flower. The juice of this also is wonderfully good for dropsy. They must be well suited to the constitution of horses too, and must also have received their name for this and no other reason. The fact is that certain plants are created to be remedies for the diseases of animals, the Deity being bounteous in producing protections for them, so that it is impossible to admire enough his wisdom, which arranges the aids according to the type of disease, the cause of it, and its season. Each period of the year has its own appropriate remedy, and scarcely can any be found that is without its safeguards.

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§ 22.15.1  What can be more hateful than the nettle? Yet this plant, to say nothing of the oil which I have said is made from it in Egypt, simply abounds in remedies. Nicander assures us that its seed counteracts hemlock, and also the poison of fungi and of mercury. Apollodorus says that with the broth of boiled tortoise it is good for salamander bites, and as an antidote for henbane, snake bites and scorpion stings. Moreover, its pungent bitterness itself, by the mere touch, forces to subside swollen uvulas, restoring prolapsus of the uterus, and of the anus of babies, besides waking up lethargus patients if it touches their legs or better still their forehead. The same plant with the addition of salt heals dog bites; pounded and inserted it arrests nose bleeding, the root proving even better. Mixed with salt it heals carcinoma and foul ulcers, likewise sprains, superficial abscesses, parotid abscesses and falling away of flesh from the bones. The seed taken with boiled must relieves suffocation of the uterus, and an application checks bleeding at the nose. Taken in hydromel after dinner in a dose of two oboli it makes vomiting easy, while one obolus in wine refreshes after fatigue. Uterine affections are relieved by an acetabulum of the roasted seed, and flatulence by taking it in boiled must. With honey it relieves asthma, clears the chest by the same made into an electuary, and with linseed cures pain in the side. Hyssop may be added and a little pepper. It is used as an application for the spleen; roasted and taken as food it loosens constipated bowels. Hippocrates declares that taken in drink it purges the uterus, that an acetabulum of it roasted and taken in sweet wine and applied with mallow juice relieves uterine pains, that intestinal worms are expelled if it be taken with hydromel and salt, and that a liniment made from its seed replaces disfiguring loss of hair. For affections of the joints and for gout most prescribe application of it with old oil or of the pounded leaves with bears' grease. The crushed root with vinegar is no less useful for the same purposes, and also for the spleen, and boiled in wine and mixed with old and salted axle-grease it disperses superficial abscesses. The same root dried is a depilatory. Phanias the naturalist has sung its praises, maintaining that either boiled or preserved it is a most useful food for the trachea, cough, bowel catarrh, the stomach, superficial abscesses, parotid swellings and chilblains, that with oil it is sudorific, boiled with shell-fish a laxative, that with barley-water it clears the chest and promotes menstruation, and that mixed with salt it arrests creeping sores. For the juice too a use is found. An extract applied to the forehead checks bleeding at the nose; a draught is diuretic, breaks up stone in the bladder, and used as a gargle reduces the uvula. The seed should be gathered at harvest time, that of Alexandria being most prized. For all these purposes, though the milder and tender nettles are efficacious, the well known wild variety is particularly so, and it has this further merit, when taken in wine, of removing leprous sores from the face. We are told that should an animal resist conception, its parts should be rubbed with a nettle.

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§ 22.16.1  That species of nettle which I have called lamium (dead-nettle), a very mild kind with leaves that do not sting, cures with a sprinkling of salt contusions, bruises, burns, scrofulous sores, tumours, gouty pains and wounds. The middle of the leaf is white, and cures erysipelas. Certain of our countrymen have distinguished nettles by their season, stating that the disease is cured if the root of the autumn nettle is used as an amulet for tertian ague, provided that when this root is dug up the names of the patients be uttered and it be said for what man it is taken up and who his parents are, the same method is effective in quartan agues The same authorities add that the root of the nettle with salt added, extracts bodies embedded in the flesh, that the leaves with axle-grease disperse scrofulous swellings, or, if they have suppurated, cause them to clear up and new flesh to be formed.

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§ 22.17.1  Association has given its name to the scorpion plant. For it has seed that resembles the tail of the scorpion, but only a few leaves. It has moreover power over the creature of the same name. There is also another kind, with the same name and properties, that is leafless, with the stem of asparagus, having on its head the sharp point which has given the plant its name.

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§ 22.18.1  Leucacantha, also called phyllos, ischas, or polygonatum, has a root like that of cypirus, which when chewed relieves toothache; pains also in the sides and loins, as Hicesius teaches, the seed or juice being taken in drink, and the dose being eight drachmae. The same plant is used for the cure of ruptures and convulsions.

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§ 22.19.1  Helxine, called by some perdicium (partridge plant) because partridges are particularly fond of eating it, by others sideritis, and by a few people parthenium, has leaves that resemble partly those of the plantain and partly those of horehound, stalks small, close together and reddish in colour, and, in bur-shaped heads, seeds that cling to the clothes. Hence is derived, some hold, the name helxine. The characteristics, however, of the genuine helxine I have described in the preceding book, but this helxine dyes wool, cures erysipelas, every kind of tumour or boil, burns and superficial abscesses. Its juice with white-lead cures also incipient swelling of the throat, and a draught of a cyathus cures chronic cough and all complaints in moist parts, like the tonsils; with rose oil it is good for the ears. It is also applied, with goat suet and Cyprian wax, to gouty limbs.

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§ 22.20.1  Perdieium or parthenium or, to give it yet another name, sideritis, is another plant, called by some of our countrymen urceolaris, by others astercoin. It has a leaf similar to that of basil, only darker, and it grows on tiles and among ruins. Pounded and sprinkled with a pinch of salt it cures the same diseases as dead-nettle, all of them, and is administered in the same way. The juice too taken hot is good for abscesses, and is remarkably good for convulsions, ruptures, bruises caused by slipping or by falling from a height, for instance, when vehicles overturn. A household slave, a favourite of Pericles, first citizen of Athens, when engaged in building the temple on the Acropolis, crawled on the top of the high roof and fell. He is said to have been cured by this plant, which in a dream was prescribed to Pericles by Minerva; therefore it began to be called parthenium, and was consecrated to that goddess. This is the slave whose portrait was cast in bronze, the famous Entrail Roaster.

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§ 22.21.1  The chamaeleon is called by some ixia. There are two kinds of it. The whiter has rougher leaves, and creeps along the ground raising its prickles as the hedgehog does his quills; it has a sweet root and a strong smell. In some districts it exudes a white viscous substance just where the leaves join the stem, especially about the time the Dog-star rises, in the way frankincense is said to form, and this is why it is also called ixia. Women use it as chewing-gum. The other name chamaeleon comes from the varied colour of its leaves; for it changes its colour with the soil — dark here, green there, in some places blue, in others saffron yellow, and of other colours elsewhere. A decoction of the root of the white variety cures dropsy, the dose being a drachma taken in raisin wine. Intestinal parasites also are expelled by a dose of an acetabulum of the same juice taken in a harsh wine with sprigs of wild marjoram. It is diuretic. Dogs too and pigs are killed by this juice in pearl barley with water and oil added. It attracts mice to itself, and kills them, unless they swallow water at once. Some people recommend that its root be cut up and kept suspended by cords, and be boiled in food against those fluxes which the Greeks call ρευματισμοί. Of the dark variety that with a purple flower is said by some to be the male plant, that with a violet flower the female. They grow together, with a stem a cubit high and of the thickness of a finger. Their roots, boiled with sulphur together with bitumen, cure lichen; chewed, moreover, or boiled down in vinegar, they tighten loose teeth, and the juice cures the scab in animals. It kills ticks on dogs, as well as bullocks, choking them as a quinsy does, for which reason some call it ulophonon, and it is also called, because of its offensive smell, cynozolon. These plants too produce a viscous substance, which is very good for sores. The roots too of all their kinds are an antidote to the sting of the scorpion.

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§ 22.22.1  Hartshorn is a longish plant with fissures. Sometimes it is cultivated, because its root, roasted in hot ashes, is a splendid remedy for coeliac complaints.

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§ 22.23.1  Alkanet too has a useful root, which is of the thickness of a finger. It is split into small divisions like the papyrus, and stains the hands the colour of blood; it prepares wool for costly colours. Applied in wax ointment it heals ulcerous sores, especially those of the aged, and also burns. Insoluble in water, it dissolves in oil, and this is the test of genuineness. A drachma of it is given to be taken in wine for pains in the kidneys, or if there be fever, in a decoction of behen nut; also for affections of the liver and spleen and for violent biliousness. It is applied in vinegar to leprous sores and freckles. The pounded leaves, with honey and meal, are applied to sprains, and doses of two drachmae in honey wine check looseness of the bowels. Fleas are said to be killed by a decoction of the root in water.

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§ 22.24.1  There is also another plant, which being like alkanet is called bastard alkanet, though some call it echis or doris or by many other names; it is more downy than the other and less fleshy, the leaves are thinner and more flabby. The root in oil does not give out a red juice, by which test it is distinguished from true alkanet. The leaves or seed taken in drink are a very sure antidote to snake bite. The leaves are applied to stings and bites, and their strong smell keeps snakes away. A draught too is made from the plant for affections of the spine. The Magi recommend that a leaf of it should be gathered with the left hand, with a declaration for whom it is being taken, and used as an amulet for tertian fevers.

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§ 22.25.1  There is another plant also, the proper name of which is onochilon, called by some people anchusa, or archebion, or onochelis, or rhexia, and by many enchrysa. It has a short base, a purple flower, rough leaves and branches, a root blood-red at harvest time, though dark at other times, growing on sandy soils, an antidote to the bites of serpents, especially of vipers, both root and leaves being equally efficacious in food and in drink. Its properties are strongest at harvest time. Its leaves when pounded give out the smell of cucumber. It is given in doses of three cyathi for prolapsus of the uterus. With hyssop it also drives out tapeworms, and for pain of the kidneys or liver it is taken in hydromel, should there be fever, otherwise in wine. The root is applied locally for freckles and leprous sores. It is said that while having it on their person people are never bitten by serpents. There is also another plant similar to this, but smaller, with a red flower, which is also used for the same purposes. It is said that if this plant be chewed, and then spat out on a serpent, the serpent dies.

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§ 22.26.1  Chamomile is most highly praised by Asclepiades. Some call it white chamomile, others leucanthemum, others eranthemis, because it blossoms in spring, others ground-apple (chamemelon), because it has the smell of an apple. A few call it melanthion. Its three varieties differ only in their blossom; they are no taller than a span, with small leaves like those of rue, and with blossom that is white or apple-yellow or purple. It is gathered in spring on thin soils or near footpaths, and put by for making chaplets. At the same season physicians also make up into lozenges the pounded leaves, as well as the blossom and the root. All three are mixed and given in doses of one drachma for the bites of every kind of snake. Taken in drink they bring away the dead foetus, are emmenagogues and diuretic, as well as good for stone, flatulence, affections of the liver, for excessive secretion of bile and for fistula of the eye; chewed it heals running sores. Of all these kinds the most efficacious for stone in the bladder is that which has a purple flower, the leaves and stem of which arc of a rather larger size. Some people give the name eranthemis exclusively to this variety.

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§ 22.27.1  Those who think that the lotus is only a tree can be refuted even by the authority of Homer, who among the plants that grow up to serve the pleasure of the gods mentions the lotus first. Its leaves with honey cause to disappear scars on the eyes, films on the eyes and argema.

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§ 22.28.1  We have also the lotometra, a plant derived from the lotus. From its rotted seed, which is like millet, are made by the shepherds in Egypt loaves that they knead mostly with water or milk. It is said that no bread is more healthful or lighter than this, so long as it is warm, but when cold it becomes heavy and difficult of digestion. It is an established fact that those who live on it are never attacked by dysentery, tenesmus, or any other disease of the bowels. Accordingly it is considered to be one of the remedies for such ailments.

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§ 22.29.1  I have spoken more than once of the marvel of heliotropium, which turns round with the sun even on a cloudy day, so great a love it has for that, luminary. At night it closes its blue flower as though it mourned. There are two varieties — tricoccum and helioscopium. The latter is the taller, although neither is more than half a foot in height, and sends out branches from a single root. Its seed, enclosed in a pod, is gathered at harvest time. It grows nowhere but in a rich, well cultivated soil, but tricoccum grows everywhere. I find it said that, boiled, it is an agreeable sauce, that in milk it is a gentle laxative, and that a draught of the decoction is a most drastic purge. The juice of the taller plant is collected in summer at the sixth hour; it is mixed with wine, which makes it keep longer. Mixed with rose oil it relieves headache. The juice from the leaf, with salt added, takes away warts; or which reason our countrymen have called it wart plant, although it is more worthy to have a name derived from its other properties. For taken in wine or hydromel it counteracts the poison of snakes and scorpions, according to the statements of Apollophanes and Apollodorus. An application of the leaves cures the infantile catarrhs that are called siriasis, and also convulsions, even though caused by epilepsy. It is very healthful, too, to wash out the mouth with a decoction. A draught of the same expels tape-worms and gravel; if cummin be added, it breaks up stone. A decoction should include the root, which with leaves and he-goat suet is applied to gouty limbs. The other kind, called by us tucoccum and having the further name of scorpiuron, has leaves which not only are smaller but also turn towards the ground. Its seed is shaped like a scorpion's tail, which accounts for its name. An application is of great efficacy against the poison of all venomous animals and spiders, but especially against that of scorpions. Those carrying it are never stung, and if with a sprig of heliotropium a circle be drawn on the ground round a scorpion, it is said that it never moves out, and moreover, that if the plant is put on a scorpion, or if a scorpion merely be sprinkled with the wet plant, it dies at once. Four grains of the seed taken in drink are said to be good for quartan ague, three grains however for tertian, or the plant itself may be carried three times round the patient and then placed under his head. The seed is also aphrodisiac, mixed with honey it disperses superficial abscesses. This heliotropium at any rate draws warts out by the root, as well as growths in the seat. Corrupt blood also about the spine or in the loins is withdrawn by an application of the seed, and by a draught or decoction of it in chicken broth, or with beet and lentils. The husk of the seed restores the natural colour to livid patches. The Magi recommend that the patient himself should tie on himself heliotropium, four pieces if the ague be quartan and three if it be tertian, and to say in prayer that he will untie the knots only when the fever has left him, and to lie in bed without taking the plant off.

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§ 22.30.1  Maidenhair too is remarkable, but in other ways. It is green in summer without fading in winter; it rejects water; sprinkled or dipped it is just like a dry plant — so great is the antipathy manifested — whence too comes the name given by the Greeks to what in other respects is a shrub for ornamental gardens. Some call it lovely hair or thick hair, both names being derived from its properties. For it dyes the hair, for which purpose a decoction is made in wine with celery seed added and plenty of oil, in order to make it grow curly and thick; moreover it prevents hair from falling out. There are two kinds: one is whiter than the other, which is dark and shorter. The larger kind, thick hair, is called by some trichomanes. Both have sprigs of a shiny black, with leaves like those of fern, of which the lower are rough and tawny, but all grow from opposite footstalks, close set and facing each other; there is no root. It is mostly found on shaded rocks, walls wet with spray, especially the grottoes of fountains, and on boulders streaming with water — strange places for a plant that is unaffected by water! It is remarkably good for expelling stones from the bladder, breaking them up, the dark kind does so at any rate. This, I am inclined to believe, is the reason why it is called saxifrage (stone-breaker) rather than because it grows on stones. It is taken in wine, the dose being what can be plucked with three fingers. Diuretic, the maidenhairs counteract the venom of snakes and spiders; a decoction in wine checks looseness of the bowels; a chaplet made out of them relieves headache. An application of them is good for scolopendra stings, though it must be taken off repeatedly for fear of burns. The same treatment applies to fox-mange also. They disperse scrofulous sores, scurf on the face and running sores on the head. A decoction of them is beneficial for asthma, liver, spleen, violent biliousness and dropsy. With wormwood an application of them is used in strangury and to help the kidneys. They promote the afterbirth and menstruation. Taken in vinegar or blackberry juice they check haemorrhage. Sore places too on babies are treated by an ointment of maidenhair with rose oil, wine being applied first. The leaves steeped in the urine of a boy [or girl] not yet adolescent, if they be pounded with saltpetre and applied to the abdomen of women, prevent the formation of wrinkles. It is thought that partridges and cockerels become better fighters if maidenhair be added to their food, and it is very good for cattle.

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§ 22.31.1  Picris is so called because of its remarkable bitterness, as I have already stated, and has a round leaf. It is excellent for the removal of warts. Thesium too is of a like bitterness, but is a strong purgative, for which use it is pounded in water.

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§ 22.32.1  Asphodel is one of the most famous plants, so that some have styled it the plant of the heroes; Hesiod said that it also grows in woods, Dionysius that it may be male or female. It is agreed that its bulbs boiled down with barley water are very suitable for wasting bodies and consumptives, and that kneaded with meal they make a very wholesome bread. Nicander too prescribed for the poison of snakes and scorpions either the stalk which I have called anthericum, or the seed, or the bulbs, the dose being three drachmae taken in wine, and he would have them spread under the sleeping place, should there be any fear of venomous creatures. It is also prescribed for poisoning by sea creatures and by land scolopendras. It is strange how in Campania the snails seek its stalk and by sucking shrivel it up. The leaves too in wine are applied to the wounds of venomous creatures. The bulbs are pounded and applied with pearl barley to the sinews and joints. It is a good plan to chop them up and to rub in with them in vinegar; also to put them in water on putrescent sores, and on inflammations too of the breasts and testicles. Boiled down in lees of wine and dabbed on from below with a piece of lint, they cure fluxes of the eyes. In nearly every disease the bulbs are usually boiled before use, but for foul sores on the shins, and for cracks in any part of the body they are dried and reduced to powder. Autumn is the time they are gathered, when their power is at its best. The juice also extracted from crushed or boiled bulbs is, mixed with honey, good for an aching body; and the same, with dried iris and a little salt, helps those who are nicely particular about the odour of their persons. The leaves, boiled down in wine, cure both the complaints mentioned above and also scrofulous swellings, superficial abscesses and sores on the face. The ashes of the root are a remedy for fox-mange and for cracks on the feet or seat, and the juice of the root boiled in oil for chilblains and bums. This is poured into the ears for deafness, and for toothache into the ear opposite to the pain. A moderate dose, one drachma, of the root, taken in wine, is diuretic and an emmenagogue, besides being good for pain in the side, ruptures, convulsions and coughs. Chewing the root acts as an emetic; the seed if taken internally disturbs the bowels. Chrysermus treated parotid abscesses also by a decoction of the root in wine, and scrofulous swellings by the decoction added to cachry in wine. Some say that if, after applying the root, a part of it be hung in the smoke and not taken down before the fourth day, as the root dries up the scrofulous swelling subsides. Diocles used the root for gouty conditions in either way, boiled or raw, and for chilblains a decoction in oil. He prescribed it in wine for violent biliousness and for dropsy. It has also been held that it is aphrodisiac if, with wine and honey, it is used as an ointment or taken as a medicine. Xenocrates also says that a decoction of the root in vinegar removes lichen, itch-scab and leprous sores, further that dried and mixed with henbane and melted pitch it does the same for unpleasant odour from armpits and thighs, and that the hair grows again more curly if the scalp be first shaved and then rubbed with this root; Simos says that a draught of the decoction in wine removes stone of the kidneys. Hippocrates holds that for attacks of the spleen it should be given in the form of seed. When beasts of burden too have sores or itch-scab, an application of the root or of a decoction of it restores the hair that has been lost. The root keeps away mice, which also die if their holes be closed up with it.

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§ 22.33.1  Some have thought that Hesiod means halimon when he speaks of asphodel, but this view I think is wrong. For halimon is a separate plant with a name of its own, which itself has been the cause of no small confusion among our authorities. For some describe it as a thick shrub, pale, free from thorns, with the leaves of an olive, only softer, saying that these are boiled to be used as food, and that the root, taken in hydromel, the dose being a drachma by weight, is good for colic, and also for ruptures and convulsions. Others have said that it is a salty vegetable of the seashore (hence its name), with long, rounded leaves, and highly esteemed as a food. They add that of the two kinds, wild and cultivated, both are good, taken with bread, for dysentery, even with ulceration, and also, in vinegar, for the stomach; that it is applied raw to chronic ulcers, soothes the smart of recent wounds and of sprained ankles, as well as pains of the bladder; that the wild kind has thinner leaves, but greater effects when used for the same purposes as the other, and in healing itch in both man and beast; moreover that the skin becomes clearer and the teeth whiter, its root be used to rub them with, and thirst is not felt by those who put the seed under their tongue; that this kind too is chewed, and both kinds preserved as well. Crateuas has mentioned a third kind also, with longer and more hairy leaves and the smell of cypress, as growing chiefly under ivy and being good for opisthotonic tetanus and cramp, the dose being three oboli to a sextarius of water.

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§ 22.34.1  There are two kinds of acanthus, a plant of the ornamental garden and of the city, which has a broad, long leaf, and covers the banks of borders and the flat tops of the raised portions of gardens. One is thorny and curled, which is the shorter; the other is smooth, and is called by some paederos, by others melamphyllum. Its roots are wonderfully good for burns, sprains, ruptures, convulsions, and those threatened with consumption; for which reason they are boiled for food, mostly in barley water. For gouty limbs too they are applied, pounded and hot.

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§ 22.35.1  Bupleuron is considered by the Greeks to be among the vegetables growing wild. It has a stem a cubit high, many and long leaves, and the head of dill. Hippocrates recommends it as a food, Glauco and Nicander as a medicine. Its seed counteracts the poison of serpents. The leaves or the juice they apply in wine for the removal of the afterbirth, and the leaves with salt and wine for scrofulous swellings. Its root is given in wine for snake bites and as a diuretic.

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§ 22.36.1  Buprestis the Greeks with great inconsistency went to the length of including among their praised foods, and yet they prescribed correctives of it as though it were poison, and the mere name implies that it is poison to oxen at any rate, which it is allowed burst when they taste it. Wherefore it is one of the plants about which I shall not speak at length. Is there indeed a reason why I should describe poisons when dealing with grass crowns, unless there be someone who thinks that for the sake of lust buprestis is desirable, which taken in drink is the most potent aphrodisiac known?

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§ 22.37.1  Elaphoboscon (wild parsnip) is a plant like fennel-giant, with a jointed stem of the thickness of a finger, the seed in clusters hanging down like hartwort, but not bitter, and with the leaves of olusatrum. This too has been praised as a food — in fact it is even preserved for future use — being good as a diuretic, for soothing pains in the side, for curing ruptures and spasms, for dispersing flatulence and colic, and for the wounds of snakes and of all stinging creatures — in fact report has it that deer by eating it fortify themselves against snakes. Fistulas too are cured by the application of the root with saltpetre added, but when used in this way it must first be dried, so that it may not be soaking with its own juice, although the latter does not impair its efficacy as a remedy for snake bites.

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§ 22.38.1  Scandix (chervil) too is classed by the Greeks as a wild vegetable, as Ophion and Erasistratus report. A decoction of it too tones up loose bowels, its seed in vinegar immediately checks hiccough. It is applied to burns and is diuretic. The juice of the decoction is good for stomach, liver, kidneys, and bladder. This is the plant that Aristophanes uses to poke fun at the poet Euripides, implying that his mother had not been a seller of even proper vegetables, but only of scandix. It would be the same sort of plant as enthryscum, were its leaves thinner and more fragrant. Its special merit is that it gives strength to a body exhausted by sexual indulgence, and revives sexual virility when flagging through old age. It checks leucorrhoea in women.

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§ 22.39.1  Iasine (bindweed?) too is considered to be a wild vegetable. It creeps on the ground, is full of milky juice, and bears a white flower called conchylium. This plant too has the same merit of exciting to sexual intercourse. Eaten raw in vinegar with food it brings also a rich supply of milk to nursing mothers. It is health-giving to those suffering from consumption. Applied to the head of babies it makes the hair grow, and the scalp more retentive of it.

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§ 22.40.1  Caucalis too is edible, a plant like fennel, with a short stem and a white flower. It is good for the heart; its juice too is taken as a draught, being especially good for the stomach and urine, for expelling stone and gravel, and for irritation of the bladder. It alleviates also catarrhs of the spleen, liver and kidneys. The seed promotes menstruation, and dries up bilious secretions after childbirth. It is also prescribed for seminal fluxes in men. Chrysippus is also of opinion that it greatly helps conception. It is taken in wine fasting. It is also applied to the wounds caused by poisonous sea creatures, as Petrichus points out in his poem.

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§ 22.41.1  With these is also classed sium, broader than celery, growing in water, rather thick and dark, with an abundance of seed and the taste of cress. It is good for the urine, kidneys, spleen, and for menstruation, whether it is taken as food, just as it is, or in the form of a decoction, or the seed may be given with wine, the dose being two drachmae. It breaks up stone, and neutralizes the water that causes them. An infusion is good for dysentery, and a liniment of it for freckles. An application at night removes spots from women's faces, while made into ointment it clears the skin, soothes hernia, and is a good dressing for scab in horses.

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§ 22.42.1  Syllibus, a plant like white chamaeleon, and equally prickly, is not thought to be worth boiling even in Cilicia or Syria or Phoenicia, the places where it grows, so troublesome is the cooking of it said to be. As a medicine it is of no use at all.

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§ 22.43.1  Scolymus too has been adopted as a food in the East, where it has the further name of limonia. It is a shrub never more than a cubit high, with tufts of leaves and a dark but sweet root; Eratosthenes too praises it as a valuable food for those of moderate means. It is said to be highly diuretic, to cure lichen and leprons sores when applied in vinegar, and according to Hesiod and Alcaeus, to be an aphrodisiac when taken in wine. They have written that when it is in blossom the song of the cricket is shrillest, women are most amorous and men most backward in sexual unions, as though it were through Nature's providence that this stimulant is at its best when badly needed. Offensive odour from the armpits is corrected by an ounce of the root, without the pith, in three heminae of Falernian wine boiled down to one third, to be taken fasting after the bath and again after food, the dose being a cyathus at a time. Xenocrates assures us of a remarkable thing, that he has proved by experiment, that the offensive smell passes off from the armpits by way of the urine.

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§ 22.44.1  Sow-thistle too is edible — at any rate. Callimachus makes Hecale set it before Theseus — both the pale kind and the dark. Both are like lettuce, except that they are prickly, with a stem a cubit high, angular and hollow inside, which on being broken streams with a milky juice. The pale kind, which shines because of the milk in it, is good for asthma if taken with salad-dressing as is lettuce. Erasistratus informs us that it carries away stone in the urine, and that to chew it purifies foul breath. Three cyathi of the juice warmed in white wine and oil aid delivery, but the expectant mother must take a walk immediately after drinking it; it is also given in broth. A decoction of the stem itself makes the milk abundant in nurses and improves the complexion of the babies, being very useful to those women who are subject to curdling their milk. The juice is injected into the ears, and a cyathus of it is drunk warm for strangury, for gnawing pains of the stomach with cucumber seed and pine nuts. It is used also externally for abscesses at the anus. It is taken in drink for the poison of snakes and scorpions, but the root is used as an external application. Boiled in oil and in the skin of a pomegranate the root is also a remedy for complaints of the ears. All these preparations must be made from the white kind. Cleemporus says that the dark kind must not be eaten, because it causes diseases, but he agrees to the use of the white. Agathocles asserts that its juice counteracts even the poison of bull's blood, yet since it is agreed that the dark kind has cooling properties, pearl barley must therefore be added to the application. Zeno recommends the root of the white kind for strangury.

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§ 22.45.1  Condrion or condrille has leaves like those of endive, eaten away as it were round the edges, a stem less than a foot and moist with a bitter juice, and a root like a bean, occasionally manifold. Next to the ground it grows a gum, an excrescence the size of a bean, a pessary of which is said to promote menstruation. The whole with the roots is pounded and divided into lozenges as an antidote for snakebites, for which treatment good reason can be adduced, for field mice wounded by snakes are said to eat it. A decoction of the plant in wine checks looseness of the bowels. The same makes an excellent substitute for gum to keep the eyelashes tidy, however disordered these may be. Dorotheus declares in his verses that it is good for the stomach and the digestion. For the rest, it has been supposed to be bad for women, for the eyes, and for the virility of men.

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§ 22.46.1  Among the things which it is rash to eat I would include mushrooms, as although they make choice eating they have been brought into disrepute by a glaring instance of murder, being the means used to poison the Emperor Tiberius Claudius by his wife Agrippina, in doing which she bestowed upon the world, and upon herself in particular, yet another poison — her own son Nero. Some of the poisonous mushrooms are easily recognized by their being of a pale-red colour, of a putrid appearance and of a leaden hue inside; the furrows of the striated parts are mere chinks, with a pale rim all round the edge. Not all the poisonous kinds are like this, and there is a dry sort, similar to the genuine mushroom, which shows as it were white drops on the top, standing out of its outer coat. The earth in fact produces first a matrix for this purpose, and afterwards the mushroom itself in the matrix, like the yoke inside the egg; and the baby mushroom is just as fond of eating its coat as is the chick. The coat cracks when the mushroom first forms; presently, as the mushroom gets bigger, the coat is absorbed into the body of the foot-stalk, two heads rarely ever springing from one foot. The first origin and cause of mushrooms is the slime and the souring juice of the damp ground, or often of the root of acorn-bearing trees, and at first is flimsier than froth, then it grows substantial like parchment, and then the mushroom, as I have said, is born. How chancy a matter it is to test these deadly plants! If a boot nail, a piece of rusty iron, or a rotten rag was near when the mushroom started to grow, it at once absorbs and turns into poison all the moisture and flavour from this foreign substance. Who can be trusted to have detected the affected specimens except country-folk and those who actually gather them? Other infections even these cannot detect; for instance, if the hole of a serpent has been near the mushroom, or should a serpent have breathed on it as it first opened, its kinship to poisons makes it capable of absorbing the venom. So it would be well not to eat mushrooms until the serpent has begun to hibernate. Indications of this will be given by the many plants, trees, and shrubs, that are always green from the time that the serpent comes out from his hole to the time that he buries himself in it; or even the ash tree will serve, whose leaves do not grow after, nor fall before, the hibernating period. And of mushrooms indeed the whole life from beginning to end is not more than seven days.

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§ 22.47.1  The texture of fungi is rather flabby, and there are several kinds of them, all derived only from the gum that exudes from trees. The safest have firm red flesh less pale than that of the mushroom; next comes the white kind, the stalk of which is distinguished by its enduing in a kind of flamen's cap; a third kind, hog fungi, are very well adapted for poisoning. Recently they have carried off whole households and all the guests at banquets; Annaeus Serenus, for instance, Captain of Nero's Guards, with the tribunes and centurions. What great pleasure can there be in such a risky food? Some have classified fungi according to the kind of tree on which they grow, one class including those growing on the fig, fennel-giant, and the gum-exuding trees; inedible, as I have said, are those on the yew, the robur and the cypress. But who guarantees such things in the market? They all have a leaden colour. This will give an indication of poison, the closer it approximates to that of the bark of the tree. I have pointed out remedies for these poisonous fungi and shall do so again later on; in the meantime let me say that even this plant produces some remedies. Glaucias considers that mushrooms are good for the stomach. Hog fungi are hung up to dry, skewered on a rush as we see them come from Bithynia. These they use as a remedy for the fluxes of the belly that are called bowel catarrh, and for fleshy growths on the anus, which they reduce and in time cause to disappear; they do the like to freckles and spots on women's faces. They are also steeped in water, as lead is, to make an application for diseases of the eyes. They are applied to septic sores and to rashes on the head, and in water to dog bites. I should like also to give some pieces of advice about cooking all kinds of mushrooms, since they are the only kind of food that exquisites prepare with their own hands, feeding on them in anticipation, and handling amber knives and equipment of silver. Those I fungi will be poisonous which become harder in cooking; comparatively harmless will be those that are cooked with some soda added — at any rate if they are thoroughly cooked. They become safer when cooked with meat, or with pear stalks. Pears too are good to take immediately after them. The nature of vinegar too is opposed to them and neutralizes any poisonous action.

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§ 22.48.1  All these fungus growths spring up with showers, and silphium too, as has been mentioned, first grew with a shower. At the present day it is imported chiefly from Syria, this Syrian silphium being not so good as the Parthian, though better than the Median; the silphium of Cyrene, as I have said, is now wholly extinct. The leaves of silphium are used in medicine to purge the uterus and to bring away the dead unborn baby; a decoction of them is made in white, aromatic wine, to be drunk after the bath in doses of one acetabulum. The root is good for soreness of the windpipe, and is applied to collections of extravasated blood; but it is hard to digest when taken as food, causing flatulence and belchings. It is injurious to the passing of urine, but with wine and oil most beneficial for bruises, and with wax for scrofulous swellings. Warts in the seat fall off if fumigated with it several times.

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§ 22.49.1  Laser, which is distilled from silphium in the way I have said, being reckoned one of the most precious gifts of Nature, is used as an ingredient in very many medical prescriptions; but by itself it warms after chills, and taken in drink it alleviates affections of the sinews. In wine it is given to women, and on soft wool is used as a pessary to promote menstruation. Mixed with wax it extracts corns from the feet after they have been cut round with the knife. A piece the size of a chick-pea, diluted, is diuretic. Andreas assures us that, though taken in copious doses, it causes no flatulence, and is a great aid to digestion for the aged and for women; also that it is more beneficial in winter than in summer, and even then more so to teetotalers. Care, however, must be taken that there be no internal ulceration. Taken in the food it is a great help in convalescence; for given at the right time it possesses all the qualities of a caustic medicine, being even more beneficial to those accustomed to it than to those unfamiliar with it. Its employment externally provides sure proofs of its healing power. Taken in drink it neutralizes the poisons of weapons and of serpents; it is applied in water around such wounds, only for the stings of scorpions is oil added. For sores not yet coming to a head it is applied with barley meal or dried fig, for carbuncles with rue, or with honey, or by itself, smeared over with some sticky substance to make it adhere, and, similarly prepared, for dog bites; a decoction in vinegar with the rind of the pomegranate for growths around the anus; for corns commonly known as mortified corns some soda must be mixed with the laser. Mange should be first thoroughly treated with soda, and then the hair is restored by an application with wine, saffron or pepper, mouse dung, and vinegar. Chilblains are treated by fomentations of it with wine and by applications of the decoction in oil. It is used in like manner for callosities, and for corns on the feet, which must first be pared down. It is of especial value against bad waters, unhealthy districts or unhealthy weather, and is used for cough, affections of the uvula, chronic biliousness, dropsy, and hoarseness; for immediately clearing the throat it restores the voice. Diluted with vinegar and water and applied with a sponge it soothes gouty limbs. It is given in gruel to patients with pleurisy who are going to drink wine, and in pills the size of a chick pea, coated with wax, to sufferers from cramp and tetanus. For quinsy it is used as a gargle; for wheezing and chronic cough it is given with leek in vinegar, and with vinegar to those who have swallowed curdled milk. With wine it is given for tubercular affections of the hypochondria and for epilepsy, in hydromel for paralysis of the tongue. Boiled down with honey it is used as liniment for sciatica and lumbago. I should not approve of the advice of the authorities, who say that an aching hollow tooth should be plugged with a stopping of laser and wax, because of the startling proof provided by the man who, as a result of this, threw himself down from a height. The truth is that it enrages bulls to have their muzzles rubbed with it, and mixed with wine it makes serpents burst, so very greedy are they for the wine. For this reason I should not advise the teeth to be cleaned with it, although it is recommended to do so with laser and Attic honey. The uses of laser mixed with other ingredients it would be an endless task to record, and I am dealing with remedies each of one substance for in these their essential nature is manifest. In compounds, however, there is usually risk of misleading guessing, for nobody is sufficiently careful, in making mixtures, to observe the sympathies and antipathies of the essential natures of the ingredients. I shall go more into detail later.

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§ 22.50.1  The value of honey in popular esteem would be no less than that of laser, were not honey produced everywhere. Granted that Nature herself created the one, she yet created an insect, as I have said, to make the other for countless uses, if we try to reckon the compounds of which it is an ingredient. First there is bee-glue in the hives, about which I have spoken; it extracts stings and all substances embedded in the flesh, reduces swellings, softens indurations, soothes pains of the sinews, and heals sores when it seems hopeless for them to mend. Honey itself has a nature that prevents a body from decaying, with a pleasant and not harsh taste, essentially different from salt, very good for the throat, tonsils, quinsy, all complaints of the mouth, and for tongues parched by fever; moreover, the decoction is excellent for pneumonia and pleurisy, while for wounds, snake bites, poisons, fungi and paralysis, it is prescribed in honey wine, although that has peculiar virtues of its own. Honey and rose oil are injected into the ears, and kill nits and offensive parasites on the head. Honey is improved by being skimmed, but it causes flatulence, biliousness and nausea; some think it of itself injurious to the eyes, though there are others on the other hand who recommend that ulcers in the corners be touched with honey. How honey is produced, the different kinds of it, the countries famous for it and the signs of its value, I discussed when treating of the nature of bees and again when I came to flowers, since the plan of my work necessitated the division of things that have to be afterwards combined again by those who wish to learn thoroughly the works of Nature.

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§ 22.51.1  In dealing with the benefits of honey I must include those of hydromel. There are two kinds of it: one is made for the occasion and used fresh, and the other is the matured. Occasional hydromel, made from skimmed honey, is extremely useful as an ingredient of the light diet of invalids (that is strained wheat) for restoring the strength, for soothing the mouth and stomach, and for cooling feverish heat. For it is cold hydromel that is better to be given for loosening the bowels. My authorities state that it should be given to drink to persons subject to chill, and also to those of a poor, weak spirit, whom the same authorities called μικρόψυχοι in harmony with the very ingenious theory that had its origin in Plato. This says that the atoms of things, being smooth or rough, angular or round, are accordingly more or less adapted to the nature of different individuals, and that therefore the same things are not bitter or sweet to everybody; and so, when we are tired or thirsty we are more prone to anger. Therefore also this roughness of the mind, or rather I should say of the soul, is made smoother by a sweeter flavour, which soothes the windpipe and makes more gentle the passage of the breath, so that neither inhalation nor exhalation is violently broken. Each of us may make trial for himself. There is no one who does not find that by food can be softened his anger, grief, sadness, and every violent emotion of the mind. Accordingly I must take notice not only of things which give healing to our bodies, but also of those which heal our character.

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§ 22.52.1  Hydromel is also said to be useful for coughs, but when warmed it provokes vomiting. With oil it is beneficial in eases of white-lead poisoning, also with milk, especially asses' milk, for henbane, and, as I have said, for poisoning by halicacabum. It is poured into the ears, and into fistulas of the genitals. It is applied with soft bread to the uterus, to sudden swellings, to sprains and to all complaints needing soothing treatment. The use of matured hydromel has been condemned by recent authorities as being less harmless than water and keeping less well than wine. When however it has been kept for a long time, it turns into a wine which, as all are agreed, is most injurious to the stomach and bad for the sinews.

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§ 22.53.1  The best honey wine is always made with old wine, it and honey combining very easily, which never happens when the wine is sweet. Made out of dry wine it causes no flatulence in the stomach, nor does it do so when the honey is boiled, and the usual inconvenience with honey wine, a sense of fullness, is not experienced. It also revives a failing appetite. Drunk cold it relaxes the bowels; taken warm it binds them in most cases, and puts on flesh. Many have lived to a very great age on no other food but a mash made with honey wine, as in the well-known case of Pollio Itomilius. He was more than a century old when Augustus, now in Heaven, who was his host, asked him what was the chief means whereby he had kept such vigour of mind and body. His reply was: 'By honey wine within and by oil without.' Varro relates that the rainbow disease (jaundice) has been styled the royal disease because it is treated with the royal drink of honey wine.

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§ 22.54.1  How melitites used to be made out of must and honey I have set out in my account of wine. I believe that this kind of honey has not been made now for generations, so liable was it to cause flatulence. When well matured, however, it used to be given in fever because of its action on the bowels, and also to sufferers from gout and from feebleness of the sinews, and to women who are teetotallers.

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§ 22.55.1  Honey is by nature closely related to wax, the source of which, its virtues, and the districts that produce it, I have discussed in the proper places. All wax however is emollient, warming, and restorative of flesh; the fresher it is the better. It is given to sufferers from dysentery in their gruel, and the whole comb in a porridge of groats that has been previously roasted. Wax and milk are of opposite natures, and ten pills of wax, of the size of a grain of millet will, if swallowed, prevent milk curdling in the stomach. Should the groin swell, the application of white wax to the pubes is a remedy.

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§ 22.56.1  The uses that wax can be put to in combination with other substances would more than fill a pharmacopoeia, and the same is true of other materials that combine usefully with others. These, as I have said, are due to man's ingenuity. Wax salves, poultices, plasters, eye-salves, antidotes, were not made by the divine Mother who created the Universe: they are the inventions of the laboratory, or more correctly of human greed. Nature indeed brings forth her works absolutely perfect; a few ingredients arc chosen a with a purpose, not by guesswork, so that dry substances may be modified by some fluid to facilitate their passage, or moist things by a more substantial body to give the required consistency. But for a man to weigh out, scruple by scruple, the active ingredients that he gathers together and blends, is not human guesswork but human impudence. I myself shall not touch upon drugs imported from India and Arabia or from the outer world. Ingredients that grow so far away are unsatisfactory for remedies; they are not produced for us, nay, not even for the natives who in that case would not sell them. Let them be bought if you like to make perfumes, unguents and luxuries, or even in the name of religion, for we worship the gods with frankincense and costmary. But health I shall prove to be independent of such drugs, if only to make luxury all the more ashamed of itself.

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§ 22.57.1  But having discussed medicines from flowers, garland and garden, as well as herbs which are chewed, how can I possibly omit medicines from cereals? Indeed it would be fitting to mention these as well. In the first place it is a well known fact that those animals that feed on grain are the most intelligent. Grains of common wheat well roasted and then crushed, applied in Aminean wine to the eyes soothe fluxes; moreover, well roasted on an iron plate grains of naked wheat are a quick remedy for frostbite. The flour of naked wheat boiled in vinegar is good for cramp; the bran moreover and rose oil, dried figs and sebesten plums, all boiled down, make a good gargle for tonsils and throat. Sextus Pomponius, father of a man who was praetor, himself the most distinguished man in Nearer Spain, was superintending the winnowing in his barns when he was seized with the pains of gout. Burying himself above his knees into the wheat he was relieved of the pain, and the water in his feet dried up in a wonderful way, so that afterwards he adopted this procedure as a remedy. The absorbent power of wheat is so great that it dries up casks full of liquid. Experienced authorities also prescribe the chaff of wheat or barley to be applied warm for hernia, and the water in which it has been boiled to be used for fomentations. There is to be found in emmer-wheat a little worm like the woodworm. If this be plugged with wax into the hollow of a decayed tooth, it is said that the tooth comes out, or even if the affected part be rubbed with it. Olyra (two-grained wheat) is, as I have said, also called arinca. With a decoction of it a medicine is made which the Egyptians call athera, very beneficial for babies, though adults too use it as a liniment.

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§ 22.58.1  Barley meal, both raw and boiled, disperses abscesses and inflamed gatherings; it softens them and brings them to a head. At other times a decoction of it is made in hydromel or with dried figs, but for pains in the liver, when pus needs to be matured, it should be decocted in wine; when there is difficulty in deciding whether maturing or dispersal is necessary, then it is better for the decoction to be in vinegar, in lees of vinegar, or in boiled down quinces or pears. It is used with honey for multipede stings, in vinegar for snake bites and to stop suppuration, but for bringing away suppurating matter with diluted vinegar to which Gallic resin has been added. For maturing of abscesses, however, and for chronic sores it must be used with resin, for indurations with pigeons' dung or dried fig or ashes, for inflammations of the sinews or of the intestines or pains in the sides with poppies or melilot, and also when the flesh falls away from the bones, for scrofulous swellings with pitch and the urine of a boy below the age of puberty added to oil. With fenugreek it is prescribed for swellings of the hypochondria, and for fevers with honey or stale fat. For suppurations wheat flour is much more soothing. To sinews it is applied with juice of henbane, for freckles, in vinegar and honey. Meal of emmer-wheat, out of which as I have said alica is made, seems to be more efficacious even than barley meal, the three-month variety being the more soothing. It is used warm, in red wine, for the stings of scorpions, spitting of blood, and for tracheal affections. For a cough, goat-suet or butter is added. Fenugreek meal, the most soothing of all, boiled with wine and soda, cures running sores and scurf on the body, stomach ache, and affections of the feet and of the breasts. Darnel meal clears up chronic ulcers and gangrenes more than do the other kinds; for lichens radishes, salt and vinegar must be added, for leprous sores native sulphur, and for headache it should be applied with goose-grease to the forehead. Boiled in wine, with pigeons' dung and linseed, it matures scrofulous swellings and superficial abscesses.

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§ 22.59.1  About the various kinds of pearl barley I have said enough in the discussion of cereals. Physicians are of opinion that its difference from barley meal is due to its being roasted, which makes it wholesome for the stomach, it cheeks looseness of the bowels and inflamed swellings. Combined with mint or other cooling herb it is applied to sore eyes and aching heads, as well as to chilblains and to snake wounds, while for burns it is applied in wine, and it also checks pustules.

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§ 22.60.1  Flour reduced to fine powder has the power of drawing out moisture to such an extent that it extracts blood from bloodshot areas, even to soaking the bandages; if boiled must be added the application is still more efficacious. It is put on callosities and corns on the feet. But when boiled with old oil and pitch, and applied as hot as possible, fine flour is wonderful treatment for eondyloma and all other affections of the anus. Made into pottage it puts on flesh. The flour with which papyrus sheets are stuck together is effectively given in lukewarm drink to those who suffer from spitting of blood.

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§ 22.61.1  Alica is peculiarly Roman, and a discovery of recent date, or the Greeks would not have sung the praises of barley water in preference. It was in my opinion not yet used in the age of Pompey the Great, and for that reason scarcely anything about it has been written by the school of Asclepiades. Its extreme usefulness nobody doubts, whether it is given in hydromel after straining or boiled down to gruel or to thick pottage. For arresting looseness of the bowels alica is roasted, and then honeycomb wax is cooked with it, as I have said above. It is however specially useful for those who by long illness have been reduced to a consumptive condition; the dose is three cyathi put into a sextarius of water and gradually boiled down until all the water has evaporated, when a sextarius of sheep's or goats' milk is added, and the mixture taken daily; after a while honey also is added. By a course of this gruel decline is arrested.

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§ 22.62.1  Common millet checks looseness of the common bowels and removes gripings, for which purposes it is first roasted. For pains of the sinews, and for other pains it is applied hot in a bag. No other application is more useful, for it is very light, very soothing and very retentive of heat. Accordingly it is much used in all cases where the application of heat is likely to prove beneficial. Millet meal and liquid pitch are applied to the wounds inflicted by snakes and multipedes.

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§ 22.63.1  Italian millet was called by the physician Diocles the honey of cereals. It produces the same results as common millet. Taken in wine it is good for dysentery. In like form it is applied hot where warm fomentations are called for. Looseness of the bowels is checked if a decoction in goats' milk is taken twice a day. In this form it is also good for gripings.

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§ 22.64.1  Sesame ground and taken in wine checks vomiting. It is applied to inflammation of the ears and to bums. It has the same effect even while it is in the blade. For this reason it is more copiously applied, decocted in wine, to the eyes. As a food it is injurious to the stomach and causes the breath to smell offensive. It neutralizes the bites of the gecko, and is beneficial to the sores known as malignant the oil made from it, as I have said, is good for the ears. Sesamoides has received its name from its likeness to sesame; it has a smaller leaf, and the grain is bitter. It grows on gravelly soils. Taken in water, it carries away bile. The seed is used as an application for erysipelas, and it disperses superficial abscesses.

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§ 22.64.2  There is also another sesamoides, which grows at Antieyra, and is therefore called by some Anticyricon. It has the seed of sesame, but in other respects is like the plant erigeron, about which I shall speak in the proper place. A three-finger pinch is given in sweet wine as a purge. There they mix with it also one and a half oboli of white hellebore, administering it principally as a purgative for melancholic madness, epilepsy and gouty pains. Taken by itself too in doses of one drachma it empties the bowels.

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§ 22.65.1  The best barley is the whitest. The juice from a rainwater decoction is worked up into lozenges to be used as suppositories for ulcerations of the intestines and of the uterus. Barley ash is applied to bums, to flesh that comes away from the bones, for eruptions of phlegm and for bites of the shrewmouse. The same added to honey and a sprinkling of salt makes the teeth white and the breath smell sweet. It is said that those who use barley bread never suffer from gout in the feet. They also say that, if a man, taking nine grains of barley, trace three times with each of them a circle round a boil, using the left hand, and then throw all the grains into the fire, the boil heals at once. There is also a plant, called phoenicea by the Greeks and mouse barley by our countrymen. This pounded and taken in wine is an excellent emmenagogue.

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§ 22.66.1  To ptisan, which is prepared from barley, Hippocrates devoted a whole volume, lavishing on it praises which today are all given instead to alica, a far more wholesome preparation. Hippocrates however praises ptisan for its merits as a broth, because (as he says) being lubricant it is easily swallowed, quenches thirst, does not swell in the belly, is easily evacuated, and is the only food that can be given twice a day to those fever patients who are in the habit of taking two meals, so different is Hippocrates from those, who treat their patients with a starvation diet. However he forbids the broth to be swallowed whole, or any part of it other than the juice; he says also that it must never be given so long as the feet are cold; indeed that then no drink of any kind should be given. Ptisan can also be made from wheat, when it is more viscous and more beneficial to an ulcerated trachea.

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§ 22.67.1  Starch dulls the eyes, and is injurious to the throat, though that is not the general belief. It also checks loose bowels, arrests fluxes from the eyes, healing ulcerations of them as well as pustules and flows of blood. It softens hard eyelids. With egg it is given to those who have spit blood; in pain of the bladder moreover half an ounce of starch with egg and three egg-shells of raisin wine are given lukewarm after the bath. Moreover, oatmeal boiled in vinegar removes moles.

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§ 22.68.1  The very bread which forms our staple diet has almost innumerable medicinal properties. Applied in water and oil or in rose oil it softens abscesses; in hydromel it is very soothing to indurations. In wine it is given to disperse or to compress as need may be, and, if greater strength be called for, in vinegar for those violent fluxes of phlegm which the Greeks call rheumatism, as well as for bruises and sprains. For all purposes, however, leavened bread, of the kind called autopyrus, is the more beneficial. In vinegar it is also applied to whitlows and to callosities on the feet. Stale bread or sailors' bread, pounded and then baked again, checks looseness of the bowels. For those anxious to improve the voice and for catarrhs it is very beneficial to eat dry bread at breakfast. Sitanins, that is bread made of three-month wheat, applied with honey is a very good cure for bruises on the face or scaly eruptions. White bread soaked in warm or cold water affords a very light food for invalids. In wine it is applied to swollen eyes, and in this form or with the addition of dried myrtle to pustules on the head. Persons with palsy are recommended to eat bread soaked in water, fasting, and immediately after the bath. Moreover, bread burnt in bedrooms removes the close smell, and put in the strainers any unpleasant odour in wine.

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§ 22.69.1  The bean too supplies helpful remedies. For roasted whole and thrown hot into strong vinegar it heals colic. Crushed in a sieve and boiled with garlic it is taken with the daily food for incurable coughs and suppurations of the chest; chewed in the mouth of one fasting it is also applied to ripen or disperse boils, and boiled down in wine for swellings of the testicles and for troubles of the genitals. In the form of meal too, boiled down in vinegar it ripens tumours and breaks them, besides healing contusions and burns. That it is good for the voice we are assured by M. Varro. The ashes too of beanstalks and of the pods are good for sciatica, and with old pigs' lard for chronic pains of the sinews. The husks by themselves boiled down to one third check looseness of the bowels.

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§ 22.70.1  Those lentils are best which are most easily boiled, and in particular those which absorb most water. Although they dull the sight and cause flatulence, yet taken with the food they check looseness of the bowels, especially when thoroughly boiled in rain water; lightly boiled however they relax the bowels. They break the pustules of sores; sores in the month they cleanse and dry up. An application of lentils soothes all abscesses, and especially those that are ulcerated and cracked, but for fluxes of the eyes melilot or quinces must be added. For suppurations lentils are applied with pearl barley. The juice of boiled-down lentils is applied to ulcerations of the mouth or of the genitals; for complaints of the anus rose oil or quinces must be added, and when a stronger remedy is called for pomegranate peel with a little honey as well. At this point, to prevent this mixture from drying quickly beet leaves also are added. Thoroughly boiled in vinegar they are applied also to scrofulous swellings, and to superficial abscesses whether mature or maturing; in hydromel to chaps and with pomegranate peel to gangrenes; with pearl barley also to gouty feet, the uterus, kidneys, chilblains, and to sores that are slow in forming scars. For looseness of the stomach thirty grains of lentils are swallowed. In cholera too and dysentery lentils are more efficacious when boiled in three waters; when so used it is always better to roast them first and pound them, that they may be administered in as fine a state as possible, whether by themselves or with quinces, or else with pears, or myrtle, or wild endive, or dark beet, or plantain. Lentils are injurious to the lungs, in headache, in all pains of the sinews and in biliousness, nor are they good for sleep; boiled in seawater however they are beneficial for pustules, erysipelas, and affections of the breasts, while boiled in vinegar they disperse indurations and scrofulous swellings. As a stomachic they are sprinkled in drinks as is pearl barley. They are good for burns if half-cooked in water and then pounded and passed through a sieve to remove the bran, honey being added presently as the burn heals. They are boiled in vinegar and water for sore throats. There is also a marsh lentil that grows wild in stagnant water. These lentils are of a cooling nature, and so are applied to abscesses and in particular to gouty feet, both by themselves and with pearl barley. They also close up prolapse of the intestines.

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§ 22.71.1  There is a wild lentil called elelisphacos by the Greeks [sphacos by others], smoother than the cultivated lentil, with a smaller, drier and more scented leaf. There is also another kind of it wilder still, and with a heavy smell. The other, the more cultivated variety, has leaves like those of a quince, but smaller and pale, which are boiled with the branches. It promotes menstruation and urine, and heals the wounds of the stingray, numbing the region affected. It is also taken in drink with wormwood for dysentery. With wine it also brings on delayed menstruation, while a draught of its decoction checks any excess. The plant applied by itself stanches the blood of wounds. It also cures snake bite, and if boiled down in wine allays pruritus of the testicles. Our modern herbalists call this plant elelisphacus in Greek and salvia in Latin, a plant like mint, hoary and aromatic. An application brings away the dead unborn baby, as well as worms in sores and ears.

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§ 22.72.1  There is also a wild chickpea, with leaves like the cultivated kind and a heavy smell. Too copious a dose relaxes the bowels, and causes flatulence and colic. Roasted it is supposed to be more healthy. The small chickpea is even more beneficial to the bowels. The meal of each kind heals running sores on the head, though the wild is more efficacious, as well as epilepsy, swollen liver and snake bites. It promotes, the grain in particular, menstruation and urine; it is good for lichen, inflammation of the testicles, jaundice and dropsy. All kinds of chickpea are injurious to ulcerated bladder and to the kidneys. They are more beneficial with honey for gangrenous sores, especially for those called malignant. Warts of every kind some treat by touching each wart with a single chickpea at the new moon; the chickpeas they tie in a linen cloth and throw behind them, believing that so the warts go away. Roman authorities recommend that ram's-head chickpeas be thoroughly boiled in water with salt, two cyathi of it to be taken at a time for strangury; they hold too that this treatment brings away stone from the bladder and cures jaundice. The water in which the leaves and stalks of the chickpea have been boiled, if used as hot as possible to foment the feet, soothe gouty pains, as does an application of the plant itself, pounded up and warmed. The water from boiled columbine chickpea is believed to lessen the rigors of tertian and quartan agues. The dark kind, however, pounded up with half a gall-nut and applied in raisin wine, cures ulcers of the eyes.

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§ 22.73.1  About the bitter vetch I have said a few things in my note concerning it, a pulse to which, applied in vinegar, old authorities attributed a power no less than that they did to cabbage for snake bites and for those of crocodiles and of men. If anybody eats it fasting every day, the spleen, according to very reliable authorities, is reduced in size. Its meal removes not only pimples from the face but also spots from the skin on all parts of the body. It does not allow sores to spread, being very efficacious when they are on the breasts. Applied in wine it makes carbuncles burst. Strangury, flatulence, affections of the liver, tenesmus, and atrophy, when food cannot be assimilated, are relieved by swallowing the roasted grain, held together by honey of the size of a filbert, and so are skin eruptions by a decoction in vinegar, allowed to remain on the affected part till the fourth day. An application in honey prevents superficial abscesses from suppurating. Fomentation with the water of a decoction cures chilblains and pruritus. Moreover it is thought that the whole body assumes a more healthy complexion if this decoction be taken daily on an empty stomach. At the same time this vetch makes unwholesome human food, causing vomiting, disturbing the bowels, and causing heaviness in the head and stomach, besides enfeebling the knees. Soaked, however, for several days it mellows, and is very good for cattle and beasts of burden. The pods of it, pounded green before they harden, with their own stalk and leaves, dye the hair black.

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§ 22.74.1  There are also wild lupins, with weaker properties than the cultivated in every respect except their bitterness. Of all the things that are eaten, none is less heavy or more useful than lupins when dried. They mellow when cooked in hot ash or in hot water. Taken frequently as food they freshen the human complexion; bitter lupins are an antidote for the wound of the asp. Dried lupins, peeled and pounded, make new flesh on black ulcers if applied in a linen cloth. Boiled in vinegar they disperse scrofulous swellings and parotid abscesses. A decoction with rue and pepper is given to persons under thirty, even when feverish, to drive out intestinal worms, while in the case of children they are also applied to the bowels, the patient fasting; another method is to roast them, and to give them either in boiled must as a draught or else in honey. Lupins increase the appetite, and remove squeamishness. Their meal kneaded with vinegar and applied in the bath removes pimples and pruritus, and by itself dries up ulcers. It heals bruises, and, with pearl barley, soothes inflammations. Wild lupins are more efficacious than cultivated for weakness of the hips and loins. A decoction of the same removes freckles and improves the complexion of those who use it as a fomentation. If however they are boiled down to the consistency of honey, they cure even black eruptions and leprous sores. An application of cultivated lupins also causes carbuncles to break; boiled in vinegar they reduce or mature superficial abscesses and scrofulous swellings, and restore to scars the original white of the skin; if however they are thoroughly boiled in rain water, the decoction makes a detergent with which it is good to foment gangrenes, eruptions of rheum, and running ulcers; and it is also good to drink it for splenic affections and, with the addition of honey, for retarded menstruation. Pounded raw with dried fig they are applied in vinegar to the spleen. The root too boiled in water is diuretic. Lupins boiled with the herb chamaeleon cure sick cattle, the water being strained off into their drink. The itch on all quadrupeds is cured by lupins boiled in lees of olive oil, or by a mixture of the lees with a decoction of lupins. The smoke of burnt lupins kills gnats.

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§ 22.75.1  Irio I have said when dealing with cereals to be like sesame, and to be called by the Greeks erysimon. The Gauls call it vela. It is a bushy plant with leaves like those of rocket, but a little narrower, and with a seed like that of cress, being with honey very good for coughs and for expectoration of pus. It is also given for jaundice and for affections of the loins, for pleurisy, colic and coeliac troubles. It is applied moreover to parotid abscesses and to cancerous sores, in water or sometimes with honey to inflamed testicles, and is also very good for babies. With honey and figs it is used for cornplaints of the anus and for diseases of the joints, besides being when taken in drink efficacious against poisons. It also cures asthma, and fistulas also if mixed with old axle-grease, but care must be taken not to let the application touch the interior.

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§ 22.76.1  Horminum (clary) has a seed like cummin, as I have already said, but in other respects it is like the leek. Nine inches high it is of two kinds: one has a darker seed which is oblong, being used as an aphrodisiac and for white spots and films on the eyes.; the other has a paler and a rounder seed. Both when pounded draw thorns from the flesh, if applied by themselves in water; the leaves applied by themselves or with honey disperse superficial abscesses, as also boils before they come to a head, and all acrid humours.

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§ 22.77.1  Moreover, the very pests of the crops are of use. Virgil called darnel unfruitful, and yet when ground and boiled in vinegar it cures impetigo, the quicker the more often the application is changed. It is also used with oxymel for gouty and other pains. The following is the prescription: in one sextarius of vinegar are melted two ounces of honey; the right proportion is to take three sextarii of this mixture and boil down with it two sextarii of darnel meal until it reaches a certain consistency, and then it should be applied warm to the painful limbs. Darnel meal is also used to draw out splinters of bone.

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§ 22.78.1  Miliaria is a plant so called because it kills millet. Pounded and poured with wine into a horn it is said to cure gouty pains in beasts of burden.

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§ 22.79.1  Bromos is the seed of an ear-bearing plant, growing among the weeds of the corn crop, in fact a species of oat, with leaves and stalk like those of wheat, and having as it were little locusts hanging down at the head. The seed is as useful for plasters as is that of barley and similar grain. A decoction is good for coughs.

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§ 22.80.1  Dodder I have mentioned as a plant that kills vetches and leguminous plants; some call it cynomorion from its likeness to a dog's genitals. Its stem is leafless, fleshy and red. It is eaten by itself or, when young, boiled in a saucepan.

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§ 22.81.1  There are poisonous insects, a species of venomous ant, that breed in leguminous plants, stinging the hand and endangering life. For these stings the same remedies are good as have been mentioned for spiders and the phalangium. These then are the cereals that are used in medicine.

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§ 22.82.1  From the cereals are also made beverages zythum in Egypt, caelia and cerea in Spain, cervesia and several other kinds in Gaul and in other provinces; the froth of all these is used by women as a cosmetic for the face. But to come to beverages themselves, it will be best to pass on to a discussion of wine, beginning with the vine our discussion of medicines from trees.

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§ 23.1.1  THE medicinal properties also of cereals have and now been described, as well as those of all plants that spring up from the face of the earth to give us food, flowers or perfume. Their rival in bounty is Pomona, who even to hanging fruits has given healing qualities, not being content to protect, and to nourish with the shade of her trees, the plants I have noted. Nay, it is as though she was vexed at the thought of there being more help in things further away from heaven and coming into use later. For the earliest food of man, she called to mind, had come from trees; in this way he had been led to gaze at the heavens, and he could still obtain his food from herself without recourse to the crops of the field.

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§ 23.2.1  And so, God be praised, she bestowed healing powers on the vine in particular, not being satisfied with having richly supplied it with delicious flavours, perfumes, and unguents, in its omphacium, its oenanthe, and its massaris, which I have described in the proper places. Man, she says, enjoys through me a very great amount of pleasure. It is I who create the juice of the grape and the oil of the olive, I who create dates and fruits in great variety. I am unlike Mother Earth, all of whose gifts must be earned by toil — ploughing by bulls, beating on threshing-floors, and then grinding between millstones, and all to produce food at some indefinite time and with immense labour. But my gifts are perfect before they leave me, and need no laborious preparation. They proffer themselves unasked, and if it be too much trouble to reach them, they actually fall of themselves. She has striven to outdo herself, in that she has created more for our benefit even than for our pleasure.

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§ 23.3.1  Headache and inflammations on the body are relieved by vine leaves and vine shoots combined with pearl barley, heartburn by the leaves alone in cold water, diseases of the joints, moreover, by the leaves mixed with barley meal. Vine shoots pounded and applied to any kind of tumour dry it up; an injection of their juice cures dysentery. The drops of the vine, which are a kind of gum, heal leprous sores, lichen, and itch, but these must first be treated with soda. They also act as a depilatory if the hair be repeatedly smeared with them and oil, and particularly those drops that exude from green vines when burnt, by which even warts are removed. An infusion of the shoots taken as a draught is good for the spitting of blood and for the fainting of women after conception. The bark and dried leaves of vines check the bleeding of wounds, and close up the wound itself. The juice of the white vine, extracted while the vine is still green, removes eruptions on the skin. The ash of the twigs of vines and of grape skins, applied in vinegar, heals condylomata and complaints of the anus; with rose oil, rue and vinegar added, it heals sprains, burns, and swollen spleen. This ash too, in wine but without oil, is sprinkled on parts affected by erysipelas or chafed, besides acting as a depilatory. The ash of the twigs sprinkled with vinegar is also given in drink as a cure for splenic complaints, the dose being two cyathi in lukewarm water, and the patient after taking the draught should lie down on his spleen. The very tendrils by which the vine climbs, pounded and swallowed in water, check habitual vomiting. The ash of vines with old axle grease is good for tumours, cleanses fistulas and in time heals them completely, as it does cramps, and pains in the sinews arising from chill; for bruises however it may be applied thus or with oil, for excrescences of flesh on bones it should be with vinegar and soda, for scorpion stings and dog bites, with oil. The ash of the bark by itself restores the hair on burns.

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§ 23.4.1  How omphacium is made, just before the grape begins to mature, I have already described in my section on unguents; will now notice its medicinal properties. It also cures sores in a moist part of the body, such as the mouth, tonsils or genitals. It is very helpful for clearness of vision and is good for scabrous eyelids, sores in the corners of the eyes, films on the eyes, running sores in any part of the body, flabby scars, and bones with a slimy pus on them. Its strength can be modified by adding honey or raisin wine. Omphacium is also good for dysentery, spitting of blood, and quinsy.

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§ 23.5.1  Closely related to omphacium is oenanthe, a product of the wild vine; I have spoken about it in my account of unguents. The most popular is to be found in Syria, in particular from the white vine around the mountains of Antioch and Laodicea. It is cooling and astringent, is sprinkled on wounds and applied to the stomach, being also useful as a diuretic, for pains in the liver or head, for dysentery, coeliac affections and cholera; for nausea a dose of one obolus is taken in vinegar. It dries up running eruptions on the head, and being very efficacious for affections in moist parts of the body is used with honey and saffron for sores in the mouth and for complaints of the genitals and anus. It checks looseness of the bowels, heals scabrous eyelids and running eyes; taken in wine it cures a disordered stomach, and in cold water the spitting of blood. Its ash is valued for eye-salves, and for cleansing sores, also for whitlows and pterygia. It is burned in an oven until a loaf would be thoroughly cooked. Massaris is produced only for use in perfumes, and all such preparations have been made famous by the greed of the human spirit in its haste to seize them before the proper season.

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§ 23.6.1  Of the grapes left to ripen, the dark have the stronger properties, and so the wine made from them is less agreeable; the white are the more pleasant, because air passes more readily through what is transparent. When fresh they disturb the stomach, and, by causing flatulence, the bowels. Accordingly for fever patients they are disapproved of, at any rate in large quantities; for they cause heaviness in the head and the disease called lethargus. Less injurious are those which after being gathered have been left to hang; this exposure to the air makes them actually beneficial to the stomach, and for sick persons, as they are slightly cooling and remove nausea.

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§ 23.7.1  Next after those that have been hung come in value those kept in chaff; but those kept in grape skins are injurious to the head, bladder and stomach, although they check looseness of the bowels and are very beneficial to those who spit blood. Those which have been preserved in wine or 'sweet wine' go to the head; when however they have been preserved in must they have an effect worse even than those preserved in grape skins. Concentrated must too makes them injurious to the stomach. Physicians hold that the most wholesome grapes are those kept in rain water, although they are the least pleasant to the taste; but their grateful character is felt by those suffering from heartburn, disordered liver, vomiting of bile, cholera, dropsy, and fever accompanied by high temperature. Those however kept in jars stimulate the palate, stomach and appetite, but they are thought to become rather heavy owing to the fumes from the skins. If chickens have eaten the flower of the vine among their food, they never torch the bunches on the vine.

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§ 23.8.1  Vine cuttings that have borne grapes have an astringent property, but are more efficacious if they have been kept in jars.

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§ 23.9.1  Grape stones have the same property. It is because of them that wine causes headache. Roasted and pounded they are beneficial to the stomach. Ground into meal they are sprinkled like pearl barley into drink and taken for dysentery, coeliac affections and a disordered stomach. It is also beneficial to foment with a decoction of them itch scab and pruritus.

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§ 23.10.1  Grape skins by themselves are less injurious to the head or bladder than are the stones. Pounded and applied with salt they are good for inflammation of the breasts. A decoction of them, whether taken as drink or used as a fomentation, relieves chronic dysentery and coeliac affections.

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§ 23.11.1  The theriac grape, about which I have spoken in its proper place, is eaten to counteract the poison from the bites of serpents. The young shoots, too, of this vine are recommended to be eaten and to be applied; wine and vinegar made from these grapes are useful for the same purpose.

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§ 23.12.1  The raisin, or astaphis as it is called, would injure stomach, belly and intestines, were it not that the stones in the fruit itself acts as a corrective. When these are removed raisins are held to be useful for the bladder and for coughs, those from white grapes being the more so, useful also for the trachea and kidneys, just as the wine made from stoned raisins is specific for the poison of the serpent called haemorrhois. For inflamed testicles raisins are applied with the meal of cummin or of coriander, while for carbuncles and diseases of the joints they are pounded without the stones with the addition of rue. Sores should be fomented beforehand with wine. Used with their stones they heal epinyctis, honeycomb ulcers and dysentery. Boiled in oil they are applied to gangrenes with radish skins and honey; for gouty pains and loose nails with heal-all. They are chewed by themselves for cleansing the mouth and with pepper for clearing the head.

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§ 23.13.1  Wild astaphis, otherwise staphis, wrongly called by some uva taminia — for that is a distinct plant — with dark, straight stalks and the leaves of the wild vine, bears what may be called more correctly pods rather than grapes, green and like chickpeas, with a three-cornered stone in them. It ripens at harvest time and grows dark, whereas we are familiar with the red grapes of the taminian vine, and also know that staphis grows on sunny sites, while the taminian vine is found only on shady spots. I should not recommend the use of these stones as a purge owing to the danger of choking, nor yet to dry phlegm in the mouth, because it is injurious to the throat. Pounded they rid the head of lice, as well as the rest of the body, and the more readily if sandarach be mixed with them, and also cure pruritus and itch scab. A decoction in vinegar is made for toothache, for affections of the ears, for fluxes from scars and for running ulcers. The pounded flowers are taken in wine to counteract the poison of serpents; the seed however I should reject because of its excessive heat. Some call the plant pituitaria. Serpent bites in particular are treated by applications of it.

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§ 23.14.1  Labrusca too produces oenanthe, already sufficiently described by me; it is called by the Greeks the wild vine, with thick whitish leaves, jointed stem and a bark covered with fissures. It bears grapes red like the scarlet berry, which clear the faces of women, removing blotches, while pounded and used with the leaves and juice they are good for sciatica and lumbago. A decoction of the root in water and drunk in two cyathi of Coan wine evacuates watery humour in the belly, and for this reason is prescribed for dropsy. I am inclined to believe that it is rather this plant that is popularly called uva taminia. It is used as an amulet, and also for the spitting of blood; only however as a gargle, and, to prevent any of it from being swallowed, there are added salt, thyme and oxymel. For this reason it is thought unsafe to use it as a purge.

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§ 23.15.1  There is a plant like this, but growing in willow-beds. It is therefore known by a distinct name, although it has the same uses; it is called salicastrum. This, pounded and applied with oxymel, is more efficacious in removing itch scab and pruritus whether in man or beast.

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§ 23.16.1  There is a white vine, which the Greeks call variously ampelos leuce, staphyle, melothron, psilotrum, archezostis, cedrosis, and madon. Its twigs are jointed and climbing, with long, thin interstices between the knots. The leaves, thick and bushy, are of the size of ivy leaves, and with jagged edges like those of vine leaves. The root is white, large, and like a radish at first. From it grow out stalks like asparagus. These, boiled and taken in food, are laxative and diuretic. The leaves and the stalks free the flesh from sores, and in particular are applied with salt to phagedaenic ulcers, to gangrenes, and to 'bad legs' The fruiting bunch hangs down in thinly scattered grapes, having a red juice, which turns later on to a saffron yellow. This fruit is well known to the curriers, who use it in the preparation of leather. It is applied to itch scab and leprous sores; if it is boiled with wheat, the decoction when drunk produces an abundance of milk in nurses. The root, famous for many uses, is pounded and taken in doses of two drachmae for snake bite. It removes spots and blotches on the face, freckles, bruises and scars; a decoction in oil is equally efficacious. It is given also in drink for epilepsy, as well as for nervous disorders and giddiness, the daily dose being a drachma by weight for a whole year. In larger doses, however, even the root itself sometimes disorders the senses. Its most remarkable property is that applied in water, as bryony is, it extracts splintered bones, for which reason some call it white bryony, the one they call black bryony being distinct. The addition of honey and frankincense makes it more effective for the same use. Incipient suppurations it disperses; those of long standing it matures and drains. It is an emmenagogue and diuretic. Out of it an electuary is made for asthma and pains in the sides, and for spasms and ruptures. Doses of three oboli taken in drink for thirty days eat up the spleen. In the form of an ointment it is also used with figs as a cure for hangnails. A pessary with wine brings away the afterbirth, and phlegm is brought away by a drachma dose taken in hydromel of the juice of the root — it ought to be dug up before the seed ripens — and this juice used as an ointment either by itself or with vetches shows off the body with what I may call a brighter complexion as well as with a softer skin. It keeps snakes away. The root itself pounded with a plump fig removes wrinkles from the body, but a walk of a quarter of a mile should be taken immediately after the application; otherwise it will cause a burn unless immediately washed away in cold water. The dark vine produces this same effect more pleasantly, for the white vine causes itching.

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§ 23.17.1  There is then also a dark vine, which is the one properly named bryony, called by some Chironia, by others gynaecanthe or apronia, similar to the preceding except for the colour; for that is, as I have said, dark. Diocles preferred its shoots to the real asparagus as a food for promoting urine and reducing the spleen. It is to be found growing mostly in shrubberies and reed beds. Its root is dark outside, but inside of the colour of box-wood. Splintered bones are extracted by it even more effectively than by the vine mentioned above; in other respects it has the same properties. It is a special feature of it that it is a specific for the sores that come on the necks of beasts of burden. It is said that if one grows it round a country house hawks keep away, and the poultry are kept safe. It also heals, in beast or man, if tied round the ankles, congestion of blood that may have settled there. So much then for the various kinds of vines.

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§ 23.18.1  The natural differences shown by musts are these. They are white, dark, or of a colour between the two: from some there can be made wine, from others raisin wine. Manufacture makes innumerable differences, so that the general survey that follows will have to suffice. All must is injurious to the stomach but comforting to the veins. If drunk rapidly after a bath without taking breath, death ensues. It is an antidote to the poisonous nature of cantharicles and to the bites of serpents, especially of haemorrhois and of the salamander. It causes headache, and is injurious to the throat, but good for kidneys, liver, intestines and bladder, for it makes these organs smooth. It is particularly efficacious against the buprestis, opium, curdled milk, hemlock, poisons and dorycninm; it should be taken in oil and brought up again by vomitings. For all purposes white must is the weaker; raisin must is more pleasant, besides causing less headache.

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§ 23.19.1  The varieties of wine, their very many differences, and most of the properties of each I have already described. There is no topic more difficult to handle, or more full of detail, seeing that it is hard to say whether wine does good to more people or harms them. Besides, a draught is fraught with great risk, it being uncertain whether it will immediately turn out to be a help or a poison. And indeed I shall confine my present remarks to the properties of wine as a medicine. Asclepiades composed one volume on its administration, a circumstance which gave him a nickname but his commentators on it afterwards composed an endless number of them. I, with Roman seriousness and with my appetite for the liberal arts, will carefully discuss the separate details, not as a physician, but to point out their effect on human health. But to treat of the various kinds of wine one by one is a vast and baffling task, because medical opinion is very divided.

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§ 23.20.1  In the past there was a strong preference for the wine of Surrentum, followed by one for Alban or Falernian; after that various choices have been popular, each man — so unreasonable are we in our judgments — dictating to everybody else a preference for what he himself finds most pleasant; and yet even with uniformity of opinion how small a part of mankind could make use of these kinds of wine. Today indeed not even our nobility ever enjoys wines that are genuine. So low has our commercial honesty sunk that only the names of the vintages are sold, the wines being adulterated as soon they are poured into the vats. Accordingly, strange indeed as the remark may seem, the more common a wine is today, the freer it is from impurities. Nevertheless, the opinions of the wines we have mentioned seem on the whole the best maintained. If anyone lays stress also on the test of age, that Falernian is wholesome which is neither new nor too old; its middle age begins when it is fifteen years old. Taken as a cold draught it is good for the stomach, but in hot water it is not. For chronic cough and likewise for quartan ague it is swallowed with benefit neat and on an empty stomach. No other wine quickens so much the action of the veins. Astringent to the bowels it puts flesh on the body. It is a firm belief that this wine injures the vision and is not beneficial to nerves or to the bladder. Alban wines are better for the nerves, the sweet ones less so to the stomach, while the dry are even more beneficial than the Falernian. They aid digestion less and tend to overload the stomach, but the wines of Surrentum have no such bad effects, nor do they go to the head, while they check catarrhs of the stomach and intestines. Caecuban wines are no longer produced.

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§ 23.21.1  Of the wines still produced, those of Setia ensure digestion; they have more body than Surrentine wine, more dryness than Alban and less potency than Falernian. Not much inferior to them will be found the Statan wines. It is a firm belief that the wines of Signia are very beneficial to disordered bowels.

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§ 23.22.1  The other considerations will be combined in a general description. By wine are improved men's strength, blood and complexion. Wine it is that distinguishes the middle or temperate zone from the two that lie on either side of it. All the strength produced by the cruel extremes we of the temperate clime derive from the juice of the grape. Bone is nourished by drinking milk, sinews by the beers, and flesh by water. Accordingly, the drinkers of such have a less ruddy complexion, less strength, and less power to endure toil. Wine in moderation strengthens the sinews; excess is injurious to them, as it is also to the eyes. Wine is a tonic to the stomach and a sharpener of the appetite; it dulls sorrow and anxiety, expels urine and chills, and induces sleep. In addition it checks vomiting, and pieces of wool, soaked in wine and applied externally, soften abscesses. Asclepiades asserted that the usefulness of wine is hardly exceeded by the power of the gods. Old wine is diluted with a larger proportion of water, and while being for this reason a more powerful diuretic quenches thirst less effectively. Sweet wine is less inebriating but floats in the stomach; but a dry wine is more easily digested. The lightest wine is that which matures most quickly. That wine is less injurious to the sinews that sweetens as it ages. Less beneficial to the stomach is the wine that is rich and dark; it is, however, more flesh-forming. A thin, dry wine is less flesh-forming, but is more nourishing to the stomach, and passes more rapidly by means of urine, going, however, all the more to the head; this remark may be taken once and for all to apply to every other intoxicating liquor. Wine matured by age and not by smoke is the most wholesome. Wine-dealers first discovered the device, adopted today also by householders as well, of adding age in the storeroom to wines before they have acquired cariosity naturally. By using the word cariosity the men of old gave sound enough advice, since smoke eats out cariosity even in timber, but we moderns on the contrary are convinced that the bitterness of smoke produces in wines the character of age. Wines that are of a very pale colour become unwholesome as they grow older. The more generous a wine is the thicker it becomes with age, contracting a bitter taste, which is very injurious to health, and to spice a less mature wine with it is also unwholesome. Each wine has its peculiar flavour, the presence of which is a sign of great purity each wine has an age — its middle age — when it is most pleasant.

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§ 23.23.1  Those who want to put on flesh or to relax the bowels are benefited by drinking during meals; those on the other hand who are reducing weight and checking looseness of the bowels should not drink at all at meals and but sparingly after. To drink while fasting is a recent innovation that is very injurious to those absorbed in business and trying to keep their mind actively on the alert. In order to induce sleep, however, and to banish worries wine was so taken long ago, as we see from Homer's Helena, who served wine before food. So too it passed into a proverb that 'wine befogs the wits.' It is to wine that we men should attribute the fact that of animals we alone drink when we are not thirsty. To drink water at intervals during bouts is very helpful, as it is also to drink it after a prolonged bout. Intoxication indeed is immediately banished by a draught of cold water. Hesiod recommends the use of strong draughts of wine for twenty days before and twenty days after the rising of the Dog-star. Neat wine indeed is a remedy for poison by hemlock, coriander, henbane, mistletoe, opium, mercury, for the wounds of bees, wasps, hornets, spiders, snakes and scorpions, and for all poisons that harm by chilling, especially for those of the haemorrhois, the prester, and of tree fungi; also for flatulence and gnawings of the hypochondria, for violent vomitings from the stomach, and if the belly or intestines suffer from catarrh; for dysentery, and for sweats after prolonged coughing, while, for eye-fluxes the wine should be slightly diluted. For cardiac affections it is beneficial to apply to the left breast neat wine on a sponge; but for all these purposes the best to use is white wine that is growing old. It is also useful to foment the testicles with warm wine, and administered through a horn to beasts of burden it removes fatigue. Apes and quadrupeds with fingers are said to stop growing if they acquire the habit of drinking neat wine.

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§ 23.24.1  Now I shall discuss wines in relation to sickness. The most wholesome for gentry are the thinnest wines the common sort however may drink what each most fancies, provided that he is in robust health. Wines are most beneficial when all their potency has been overcome by the strainer. We must remember that wine is grape juice that has acquired strength by fermentation. A mixture of several sorts of wine is injurious to anybody. The most wholesome wine is that to which nothing has been added in the state of must, and it is better if not even the wine-vessels have been touched by pitch. As for wines treated with marble, gypsum or lime, who would not dread to touch them, however robust his health? Wine therefore prepared with seawater is particularly injurious to the stomach, to the sinews and to the bladder. Wines seasoned with resin are supposed to be beneficial to cold stomachs but unsuited to those inclined to vomit, just as boiled-down must, and raisin wine, so seasoned, are also unsuitable. New wine seasoned with resin is good for nobody, causing headache and fits of giddiness. For this reason it has been named crapula. The wines already mentioned are good for coughs and catarrhs, as also for coeliac troubles and dysentery, and for the menstruation of women. In this class the red or dark wine is more astringent and more heating. Less harmful is wine seasoned with pitch and with nothing else, but we ought to remember that pitch is nothing but the liquid from burnt resin. This kind of wine heats, digests, cleanses, is beneficial to chest and bowels, and also for pain in the uterus if there be no fever, for chronic catarrh, ulceration, rupture, spasms, abscesses, weak sinews, flatulence, cough, asthma, and for sprains if it be applied on unwashed wool. For all these purposes that wine is more beneficial which has naturally the flavour of pitch and is called pitchy wine in the Helvian district, although taken in excess it flies, as is generally agreed, to the head. As far as fevers are concerned, wine should undoubtedly not be given when fever is present unless the patient be old, and then only when the disease has passed the crisis; in acute diseases only when the patients experience undoubted remissions, and these by preference at night — there is only half the danger for those who drink at night, that is, to induce sleep — nor should it be taken after delivery or a miscarriage, nor by those ill through sexual excess, nor with headache, nor when exacerbations are attended with chill in the extremities, nor in feverish coughs, tremulousness, pains in the sinews or throat, or if the violence of the disease is felt in the region of the groin; nor is it suitable when there is induration of the hypochondria, violent throbbing of the veins, nor in opisthotonus or tetanus, nor in hiccoughs, nor if there be difficulty of breathing accompanied by fever; least of all if the eyes be rigid and staring, or weak and heavy, nor should it be given when the eyes of those who have closed them are full of light, or when the lids do not cover them, or when the same thing happens in sleep, or if the eyes be bloodshot or rheum should form in the corners; certainly not if the tongue be furred a and heavy, and speech is blurred from time to time; nor in dysuria, nor in sudden frights, nor to those who are in convulsions, or again comatose, nor if the seed be emitted in sleep.

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§ 23.25.1  In cardiac disease the one hope of relief lies undoubtedly in wine. Some however think that it should be given only during an attack, others only when there is a remission; the object of the former is to control the sweating, the latter think that there is increased safety when the disease is on the decline, most authorities, I notice, holding this view. It ought at any rate to be given only with food, not after sleep nor after another kind of drink — that is, there must at any rate be thirst — only in the last resort and to a man rather than a woman, to an old man rather than to a young one, to a young man rather than to a boy, in winter rather than in summer, to those used to wine rather than to teetotallers. The dose to be taken depends upon the potency of the wine and also on the amount of water added. The general opinion is that a satisfactory mixture is one cyathus of wine to two of water. If the stomach be disordered, should the food not pass down, the wine must be given once more.

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§ 23.26.1  The artificial kinds of wines, the preparation of which I have mentioned, I think to be no longer made and their use superfluous, since I give instructions about the use of the ingredients themselves of which they are composed. In other respects the pretence of physicians about these had exceeded all bounds; for instance, they prescribed navew wine as beneficial for fatigue after military exercises or riding, and to pass over the others, they recommended even juniper wine. And who would prefer to use wormwood wine rather than wormwood itself? Among the rest let me omit also palm wine, which is injurious to the head, and only useful as a laxative and to relieve the spitting of blood. That wine cannot be considered artificial which I have called bion, for there is nothing artificial about it except the gathering of unripe grapes. It is good for a disordered stomach or a weak digestion, for pregnancy, faintness, paralysis, trembling, giddiness, colic, and sciatica. In time of plague too, and on travels, it is said to be a powerful aid.

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§ 23.27.1  Even when sour, wine still has uses as a remedy. Vinegar has very great cooling qualities, being equally efficacious, however, as a resolvent; earth in fact effervesces when vinegar is poured on it. I have often said, and shall often have to say, how often it is a beneficial ingredient with other things. Drunk by itself it removes nausea and checks hiccough, and to smell it stops sneezing. Kept in the mouth it moderates excessive heat in the bath. Further, drunk with water it is a useful digestive to many when they are convalescing, and a gargle of vinegar and water is a good thing after sunstroke, the eyes too being greatly benefited by fomentation with the same mixture. It is a remedy after swallowing a leech, as well as for leprous sores, scurf, running sores, dog bites, the wounds of scorpions, of the scolopendra and of the shrewmouse; it is also an antidote for the poison and irritation caused by all stinging animals and for the bite of the multipede. Applied warm on a sponge, with either two ounces of sulphur or a bunch of hyssop added to three sextarii of vinegar, it is also a remedy for troubles of the anus. For haemorrhage after excision of stone, or any other, it is applied externally on a sponge, and doses of two cyathi of the strongest vinegar are taken internally. It certainly disperses clotted blood. In the treatment of lichens it is used both internally and externally. Injected it checks looseness of the bowels and catarrh of the intestines, and it is similarly employed for prolapse of the anus and of the uterus. It arrests chronic cough, catarrh of the throat, orthopnoea, and looseness of the teeth. It is injurious to the bladder and to weak sinews. Its great efficacy as an antidote for asp bite was unknown to physicians, but recently a man who was bitten by an asp on which he trod while carrying a skin of vinegar felt the wound every time he put the skin down, but at other times it was as though he had never been bitten. He inferred that vinegar was an antidote and was relieved by taking a draught of it. And it is similarly with vinegar that those rinse out their mouth who suck poison from wounds. Its all-embracing potency is not confined to foods, but includes also very many things; poured on rocks it splits them when attempts to do so with fire have failed. No other sauce serves so well to season food or to heighten a flavour; when used for which purpose its effect is lessened by burnt bread or cummin, or heightened by pepper and laserwort, and without fail is kept in check by salt. On this point I must not pass over a striking illustration of the power of vinegar. In the last years of his life M. Agrippa was afflicted with grievous gout, and could not endure the pain. Guided by the wonderful skill of one of his physicians, and without informing the late Augustus — so strong the urge to be rid of that pain even at the price of losing all power to use his feet and all sensation in them — he plunged his legs into hot vinegar when a paroxysm of the disease was at its worst.

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§ 23.28.1  Squill vinegar is supposed to improve with age. Besides the uses I have mentioned, it is good when foods turn sour on the stomach, a mere taste dispersing that inconvenience, and for those who vomit fasting, for it makes hard the skin of the throat and gullet; it removes offensive breath, braces the gums, strengthens the teeth and improves the complexion. By its use as a gargle it clears hardness of hearing, opening the ear passages. Incidentally it sharpens the eyesight, and is very beneficial for epilepsy, melancholia, giddiness, hysterical suffocations, blows or falls with clotted blood in consequence, weakness of the sinews, and affections of the kidneys — but it must be avoided when there is ulceration.

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§ 23.29.1  The ancients, as Dieuches tells us, prepared oxymel in the following manner. Ten minae of honey, five heminae of old vinegar, a pound and a quarter by weight of sea salt and five sextarii of water, were boiled together in a cauldron, but taken off the boil ten times, when it was poured off and put away to keep. Asclepiades condemned it, and did away with its use altogether — for it used to be given even in fevers — yet he admits that it was beneficial for the bites of the serpent called seps, and for poisoning by opium or mistletoe. It made a warm gargle for quinsy, with benefit to the ears also and to the mouth and throat when affected. For all these purposes they now spray, getting better results, with oxyalme, that is, with salt and fresh vinegar.

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§ 23.30.1  Related to wine is sapa, which is must boiled down until one third remains. That made from white must is the better. It is used as an antidote to cantharides, buprestis, pine caterpillars, which are called pityocampae, salamanders, and to all poisonous bites. Taken in drink with onions it brings away the afterbirth and also the dead foetus. Fabianus states that it is poisonous if a man drinks it fasting just after a bath.

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§ 23.31.1  Next in order come the lees of these several liquids. The lees of wine then are so potent that they are fatal to any who go down into the vats. A lamp let down makes a good test; so long as it goes out danger is indicated. Unrinsed lees are an ingredient of medicines; moreover, with au equal weight of iris they make a liniment for phlegmatic eruptions; dry or moist they are applied to the stings of venomous spiders, to inflammation of testicles or breasts, or of any part of the body; or a decoction may be made in wine with barley meal and dust of frankincense. They are dried as well before being parched. The test of their being properly boiled is if, after cooling, a touch, seems to burn the tongue. If kept in an uncovered place wine lees very rapidly lose their power. Parching adds greatly to their potency. A decoction with fig is very efficacious for checking lichen and scaly eruptions. In this form they are applied also to leprous sores and running ulcers. Taken in drink they are an antidote to poisonous fungi, but a better one when crude. Boiled and rinsed they are used as an ingredient of eye salves. An application of them is healing to the testicles and genitals, but in wine they are taken for strangury. When too they have lost their strength, they are still useful for washing the person as well as clothes; for this purpose they take the place of gum arabic.

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§ 23.32.1  Lees of vinegar, their substance being of what it is, must be more acid and much more caustic. They check the spreading of suppuration, and are beneficial if applied locally to the stomach, the intestines and the belly. They check fluxes of those parts and also menstruation. They disperse superficial abscesses not yet come to a head, quinsies and, applied with wax, erysipelas. These lees also dry up breasts that do not restrain their milk, and remove scabrous nails. With pearl barley they are a very powerful antidote to the poison of the snake called horned, and with melanthium cure the bites of crocodiles and of dogs. These lees too increase their potency when parched. An application of them, so prepared, with the addition of mastic oil turns the hair red in one night. Applied as a pessary with water on a linen cloth they act as a detergent to the uterus.

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§ 23.33.1  Lees of concentrated grape-juice cure burns, the better if the down of reeds be added, and to drink a decoction of the same cures chronic coughs. A decoction made in a saucepan, with salt and fat, is used also for tumours of the jaws and of the neck.

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§ 23.34.1  Next in importance, as is generally recognized, comes the olive. The leaves are, to a very high degree, astringent, detergent and binding. Accordingly sores are healed if these leaves are chewed and applied, headache by a liniment of leaves and oil, by a decoction with honey parts which physicians have cauterized, inflammation of the gums too, whitlows and foul, putrefying sores; with honey, the decoction checks bleeding from sinewy parts of the body. The juice of the leaves is good for carbuncular sores and pustules around the eyes, and for prolapse of the pupil, being therefore a common ingredient of salves, as it heals chronic streaming from the eyes and sores that have eaten into the eyelids. Now the juice is extracted by crushing the leaves with wine and rain water, after which the whole is dried and worked into lozenges. A woollen pessary made from it arrests excessive menstruation, and it is useful for sores running with sanies, as well as for condylomata, erysipelas, spreading sores and epinyctis.

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§ 23.35.1  The flowers of the olive have the same properties. Stems are burnt that have blossoms on them, for the ash to serve as a substitute for spodium; wine is poured over this and it is again burned. Suppurations and superficial abscesses are treated by an application of this ash or of the leaves pounded with honey; for the eyes, however, pearl barley is added. The juice exuding from the wood, burnt while still green, heals lichen, eruptions of scurf, and running sores. As for the drops exuding from the tree itself, especially from the Ethiopian olive, one cannot but be surprised that some have been found to recommend its use as an application for toothache, while yet declaring that it is a poison, who even bid us procure it from the wild olive. The bark of olive root, taken from a tree as young as may be, scraped into honey and taken in frequent small doses, cures spitting of blood and purulent expectoration. The ash of the tree itself mixed with axle-grease cures tumours, withdraws morbid matter from fistulas and heals the fistulas themselves.

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§ 23.36.1  White olives are more useful to the stomach, less so to the belly. Fresh and eaten by themselves as food before they are preserved, they are of excellent use, curing gravel and improving teeth that have been worn or loosened by chewing meat. The dark olive is less useful to the stomach, better for the belly, but of no use to the head and eyes. Both sorts, applied after pounding, are good for burns; the dark, however, is chewed up, and if applied at once from the mouth to the affected part prevents the formation of pustules. Olives preserved in brine cleanse foul ulcers, but are bad for strangury.

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§ 23.37.1  About lees of oil I might seem to have said enough, as I have followed Cato, but their medicinal value must be dealt with. They are excellent for the gums, for sores in the mouth, for strengthening loose teeth, and, poured over the part affected, for erysipelas and spreading sores. For chilblains lees from the dark olive are the more useful, as well as for the fomentation of babies; but those from the white olive are used for a wool pessary. All lees of oil, however, are more beneficial after being boiled down. This is done to the consistency of honey in a copper vessel. They are used, with vinegar, old wine, or honey wine, as the particular case requires, for the treatment of the mouth, teeth, ears, running sores, the genitals and chaps. To wound they are applied on linen cloth, to sprains on wool. Used thus they are of great value, particularly when old, as a medicament, curing fistula. They are injected for ulceration of the anus, genitals, and uterus, but applied as liniment for incipient gout and diseases of the joints. If moreover they are reboiled with omphacium to the consistency of honey, they extract diseased teeth, and with a decoction of lupins and the plant chamaeleon are a wonderful healer of itch scab in beasts of burden. The crude lees are very beneficial as a fomentation for gout.

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§ 23.38.1  Wild-olive leaves have the same qualities. Spodium from the young branches act as a powerful check on catarrhs, reduce inflammations of the eyes, cleanse sores that have eaten into the flesh and restore it, while they gently cauterize those that swell outwards, dry them up and promote cicatrisation. In other respects the properties of wild and of cultivated olive are the same, except that the wild variety has this virtue of its own: a decoction of the leaves in honey is given in doses of three spoonfuls for spitting of blood. Only, wild-olive oil is sharper and more powerful, for which reason it is used to rinse the mouth in order to strengthen the teeth. The leaves with wine are applied to whitlows, to carbuncles, and to reduce any kind of gathering; with honey, however, to those that require cleansing. A decoction too of the leaves, with the juice of the wild olive, is used as an ingredient in remedies for the eyes. It is beneficial to inject it with honey into the ears, even though there is a discharge of pus. Flowers of the wild olive are applied to condylomata and to epinyctis with barley meal to the belly for catarrhs, and with oil to the head for headache. When the skin on the head detaches itself from the bone, the young branches, boiled down and applied with honey, bring them together again. These branches, when fully grown, taken in food check looseness of the bowels and when parched and beaten up with honey, they cleanse corroding sores and make carbuncles burst.

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§ 23.39.1  Of the nature and usefulness of olive oil I have already spoken at length. Here are the kinds that contribute to medicine: the most useful is omphacium, next comes green oil; moreover, it should be as fresh as possible (unless there is special need for the oldest oil), thin, with a pleasant odour and no pungent taste — in fact the reverse of what we look for when it is used in food. Omphacium is good for the gums. If it be retained in the mouth it keeps the teeth white and strengthens loose ones. It checks perspirations.

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§ 23.40.1  Oil of oenanthe has the same qualities as rose of oil, though all oil makes the body supple, giving it vigour and strength. It is injurious to the stomach and makes worse the spreading of sores. It makes the throat sore, and tends to neutralize all poisons, especially white lead and gypsum, if taken in hydromel or a decoction of dried figs for opium poisoning, in water for the poison of cantharides, buprestis, salamander and pine caterpillar, and by itself as an emetic to get rid of any of the poisons mentioned above. It is a restorative after fatigue and severe chills. Six cyathi drunk warm, especially if boiled with rue, cure gripings and drive out worms from the intestines. A hemina-dose drunk with wine and warm water, or with barley water, loosens the bowels; useful to make plasters for wounds, it removes spots from the face. Injected into the nostrils of oxen until they belch, it relieves flatulence. It is more warming, however, to the body if it be old oil, disperses better profuse sweats, reduces better indurations, being of help in cases of lethargus and also when the disease is on the decline. With an equal portion of honey taken from the hive without smoke, it is of some use for improving the vision. It is a remedy for headache and with water reduces high fever. If old oil cannot be obtained, new is boiled down to hasten the properties of age.

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§ 23.41.1  Castor oil is taken with an equal quantity of warm water to open the bowels. It is said to act especially upon the hypochondria. It is good also for diseases of the joints, for all indurations, for the uterus, the ears and bums; with the ashes moreover of the murex shell for inflammation of the anus, and likewise for the itch. It improves the complexion, and through its fertilizing power it promotes the growth of the hair. The seed from which it is made no living creature will touch. The wicks made from the fibres give a brilliantly dear flame, but the oil burns with a dull light because it is much too thick. The leaves in vinegar are applied locally for erysipelas, but fresh leaves by themselves for diseases of the breasts and for eye-fluxes; a decoction of them in wine, with pearl barley and saffron, is used for inflammations, and applied by themselves for three days they clear the complexion.

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§ 23.42.1  Almond oil cleanses, makes the body supple, smoothes the skin, improves the complexion, and with honey removes spots on the face. A decoction also with rose oil or honey and pomegranate rind is good for the ears, kills the little worms in them, and dears away hardness of hearing, vague noises and singing, incidentally relieving headache and pains in the eves. Combined with wax it cures boils and sunburn. With wine it cleans away running sores and scaly eruptions; with melilot, eondylomata. Applied to the head moreover by itself it induces sleep.

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§ 23.43.1  Laurel oil is the more useful the fresher and greener it is. Its quality is heating, and therefore it is applied, warmed in pomegranate rind, for paralysis, convulsions, sciatica, bruises, headache, chronic catarrh and troubles of the ear.

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§ 23.44.1  Similar also is the method of using myrtle oil. It is astringent and hardens. With copper scales and wax it cures sore gums, toothache, dysentery, ulcerations of the uterus, bladder troubles, chronic or running sores, and also eruptions and burns. It heals abrasions, scaly eruptions, chaps, condylomata, and relaxed a joints, removing also offensive odours of the body. It is an antidote to cantharides, the buprestis, and noxious poisons too that injure by causing sores.

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§ 23.45.1  Oil of dwarf myrtle or prickly myrtle has at the same qualities. Oil of cypress has the same effects as oil of myrtle and as oil of citrus. On of walnuts, which we have called caryinum, is useful for mange, and is injected into the ears for hardness of hearing, and an application relieves headache; for the rest, it is sluggish and of a disagreeable taste; indeed, if there should be any rottenness in a kernel a whole peck is spoilt. The oil made from mezerium seed has the same property as castor oil. Oil of mastich is a very useful ingredient of acopum, and would be as profitable as rose oil were it not generally thought to be rather too hard. They use it also for profuse sweating and for the pimples caused by sweats. It is a very efficient cure for the itch in beasts of burden. Oil of behen nut clears away spots, boils and freckles, and heals the gums.

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§ 23.46.1  I have already described the nature of the cyprus and the method of extracting oil from it. Its properties are heating, and it softens the sinews. The leaves make an application for the stomach and for an irritated uterus; their juice too is made into a pessary. The fresh leaves are chewed and used as a remedy for running sores on the head, also for sores in the mouth, gatherings and condylomata. A decoction of the leaves is good for burns and sprains. The leaves themselves, pounded and applied with the juice of the sparrow apple turn the hair red. The blossom applied with vinegar soothes headache, and also, if burnt in a pot of unbaked clay and applied either alone or with honey, heals corroding sores and putrefying ulcers. The smell of the blossom and of the oil induces sleep. Oil of must is astringent and cooling in the same way as oil of oenanthe.

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§ 23.47.1  Oil of balsam is by far the most valuable of all oils, as I have said in my account of unguents. It is efficacious for all snake bites, improves very much clearness of vision, disperses films over the eves, and also eases difficulty of breathing and all kinds of gatherings and indurations. It prevents thickening of the blood and cleanses sores, being very beneficial for ear troubles, headache, palsy, convulsions and ruptures. Taken in milk it is an antidote to aconite, and rubbing the body with it reduces fevers that are accompanied by shivering. It must, however, be used in moderation, since it burns the flesh and aggravates complaints if there be any excess.

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§ 23.48.1  The nature of malobathrum also and the various kinds of it, have been described. It is diuretic; boiled in wine it makes a very useful application for fluxes of the eyes; applied to the forehead it induces sleep, more effectively if the nostrils also be smeared with it, or if it be taken in water. A leaf placed under the tongue improves the sweetness of the mouth and breath, and similarly, if placed among clothes it imparts a pleasant smell.

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§ 23.49.1  Oil of henbane is useful as an emollient but injurious to the sinews; indeed if drunk it causes derangement of the brain. Therminum, or oil of lupins, is emollient, being very similar in its effects to rose oil. Oil of narcissus was mentioned along with the flower. Oil of radishes removes phthiriasis caused by chronic illness and smoothes roughness of the skin on the face. Oil of sesame cures earache, spreading sores, and those called malignant. Oil of lilies, which I have also called Syrian oil, is very useful for the kidneys, for promoting perspiration, for softening the uterus, and for bringing internal abscesses to a head. Oil of Selga, I have said to be beneficial to the sinews, as is also the grass-green oil that the people of Iguvium sell along the Flaminian way.

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§ 23.50.1  Olive honey, which I have said exudes in Syria from the olive trees themselves, has a taste like honey, relaxes the bowels, though not without nausea, and brings away bile in particular if two cyathi be given in a hemina of water. Those who have drunk it become torpid and need to be roused at short intervals. Those about to take part in drinking bouts take a cyathus of it beforehand. Oil of pitch is used for cough, and for itch in cattle.

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§ 23.51.1  Next in honour to the vine and the olive and comes the palm. Fresh dates are intoxicating, though causing headache less when dried, and they are not, so far as can be seen, beneficial to the stomach. They relieve a cough and are flesh-forming food. The juice of boiled dates used to be given by the ancients to invalids instead of hydromel to restore their strength and to assuage thirst; for this purpose they used to prefer Thebaic dates, which are also useful, especially in food, for the spitting of blood. The dates called caryotae are applied with quinces, wax, and saffron to the stomach, bladder, belly and intestines. They heal bruises. The kernels of dates, if they are burnt in a new earthen vessel and the ashes washed, take the place of spodium, are an ingredient of eye-salves, and with the addition of nard make lotions for the eyebrows.

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§ 23.52.1  The palm which bears the myrobalanum, found in Egypt, is very highly esteemed. It has no stone in its dates, as other date-palms have. Taken in a dry wine it checks diarrhoea and excessive menstruation, and unites wounds!

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§ 23.53.1  The palm called date or spathe gives to medicine its buds, leaves, and bark. Its leaves are applied to the hypochondria, stomach, liver, and to sores that spread and refuse to form a scar. The tender bark of it, mixed with resin and wax, heals the itch in twenty days. A decoction of it also is used for diseases of the testicles. It darkens the hair, and fumigation with it brings away the foetus. It is given in drink for diseases of the kidneys, bladder and hypochondria, though it is injurious to the head and sinews. A decoction of it arrests fluxes of the uterus and of the belly; the ashes also cure colic, and taken in white wine are very beneficial for affections of the uterus.

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§ 23.54.1  Next come the various kinds of medicines to be obtained from apples. Of these, spring apples are sour and injurious to the stomach, derange the bowels and bladder, and do harm to the sinews; cooked, however, they are less harmful. Quinces are more pleasant when cooked; though when raw, provided they are ripe, they are good for spitting of blood, dysentery, cholera and coeliac disease. They are not of the same efficacy when cooked, for they lose the astringent power that resides in their juice; nevertheless, a decoction in rain water is made for the purposes I have mentioned above. For stomachache, moreover, they are applied, either raw or in a decoction, after the manner of a wax salve; also to the chest in attacks of high fever. The down on them heals carbuncles. Boiled in wine and applied with wax they restore the hair lost through mange. Raw quinces preserved in honey move the bowels. They add much to the pleasant taste of honey, and make it more beneficial to the stomach. Boiled quinces preserved in honey and beaten up with a decoction of roseleaves are given by some as food for the treatment of affections of the stomach. The juice of raw quinces is good for the spleen, difficulty of breathing, and dropsy, as well as for the breasts, condylomata and varicose veins, and the flowers, both fresh and dried, for inflammations of the eyes, spitting of blood, and to regulate menstruation. A soothing juice is also derived from quinces by pounding them with sweet wine, which is good for coeliac affections and the liver. A decoction of them is also used to foment prolapsus of the uterus and of the intestines. An oil also is extracted from them, which I have called melinum, provided that the fruit is not grown on wet soil. Hence the most useful are the quinces imported from Sicily; while the sparrow quince, although nearly related, is not so good. The root of the quince tree, after a ring has been drawn round it, is pulled up with the left hand, the person doing so being careful to state why he is pulling it, and for whom. An amulet from such a root cures scrofulous sores.

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§ 23.55.1  Honey apples and the other sweet kinds relax the stomach and bowels, cause thirst and heat, but do no injury to the sinews. Round apples arrest looseness of the bowels and vomitings, and act as a diuretic. Wild apples are like sour spring apples and arrest looseness of the bowels; indeed for this purpose they must be used while unripe.

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§ 23.56.1  Citrons, either the fruit or the pips, are taken in wine to counteract poisons. They make the breath pleasant if the mouth be washed with a decoction of them, or with the juice extracted from them. Their pips are prescribed to be eaten by women for the nausea of pregnancy, the fruit itself, moreover, is eaten for weakness of the stomach, but not very easily without vinegar.

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§ 23.57.1  It would be waste of time to go over again the nine varieties of pomegranates. The sweet ones, which I have also called apyrena, are considered to be injurious to the stomach; they cause flatulence, and do harm to the teeth and gums. Those however which resemble these closely in taste, called by me vinous pomegranates, have small pips and are understood to be a little more useful. They are astringent to the bowels and stomach, provided that moderation is observed and surfeit avoided. In fever even these are strictly forbidden, although no pomegranates at all ought really to be allowed, as neither pulp of the seeds nor the juice is anything but injurious. They are equally to be avoided when there is vomiting and bringing up of bile. In these nature has shown us a grape and, not mere must, but actually wine ready made. Both are enclosed in a rather rough skin, which in the case of the bitter fruit is much used. It is popular knowledge that skins are thoroughly tanned by it; hence physicians call it the leather apple. They tell us that it is diuretic, and that a decoction in vinegar with the addition of gall-nut strengthens loose teeth. It is in request for easing the nausea of women with child, since by a taste the foetus is quickened. The apple is divided and soaked in rain water for about three days. This infusion is drunk cold by sufferers from coeliac affections and spitting of blood.

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§ 23.58.1  From the bitter pomegranate is made a medicine which is called stomatice, and is very good for affections of the mouth, nostrils and ears, for dimness of vision, for sores on the eyelid, for the genitals, for so-called corroding sores and excrescences on ulcers, and to counteract the poison of the sea-hares. This is the mode of preparation. After the rind has been taken off the berries are crushed; the juice is boiled down to one-third with saffron, split alum, myrrh and Attic honey, a half-pound of each. Others prepare it also in the following way. Many acid pomegranates are pounded, and the juice is boiled in a new pot to the consistency of honey, for the treatment of lesions of the male genitals and anus, of all lesions treated by lycium, of purulent ears, of incipient fluxes from the eyes, and of red spots upon the hands. Branches of the pomegranate keep away snakes. The rind of the fruit boiled in wine and applied is a cure for chilblains. A pomegranate, pounded and boiled down to one heufina in three heminae of wine, cures griping and acts as a vermifuge. A pomegranate in a new earthen jar with the lid sealed, burnt in a furnace, well pounded and taken in wine, checks looseness of the bowels and cures griping.

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§ 23.59.1  The first bud of this fruit when it is beginning to blossom is called cytinus by the Greeks; it has a wonderful feature, which has come under the notice of many investigators. If a person, after freeing himself from every kind of band — girdle, shoes, even his ring — plucks one of these buds with two fingers, the thumb and the fourth finger, of his left hand, brushes his eyes with it, lightly touching them, and then swallows it without its touching any tooth, he will suffer, it is said, no eye-trouble during the same year. These same buds, dried and pounded, reduce fleshy excrescences, healing gums and teeth, even if they be loose, by the use of a decoction of the juice. The little buds, just as they are except for pounding, are applied to spreading, purulent sores, also to inflamed eyes and for inflammation of the intestines, and for nearly all the affections for which pomegranate rinds are used. They neutralize the stings of scorpions.

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§ 23.60.1  It is impossible sufficiently to admire the pains and care of the old inquirers, who have explored everything and left nothing untried. In this very cytinus are little blossoms, unfolding of course before the pomegranate itself forms, which I have said a is called balaustium. So these blossoms too they investigated, and discovered them to neutralize the stings of scorpions. Taken in drink they arrest excessive menstruation, and heal sores of the mouth, tonsils and uvula, spitting of blood, looseness of the bowels and stomach, disorders of the genitals, and running sores in any part of the body. They dried too these blossoms, to test their efficacy also when thus prepared, and found that reduced to powder they cure sufferers from dysentery even when on the point of death, checking the diarrhoea. Moreover, they have taken the trouble to try out the very pips of the pomegranate berry. Roasted and pounded they are good for the stomach, if taken in food or drink. They are taken by themselves in rain water to arrest looseness of the bowels. The root when boiled yields a juice which kills tapeworm, the dose being one victoriatus by weight. The same root, thoroughly boiled in water serves the same purposes as lycium.

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§ 23.61.1  There is also a wild pomegranate, so called because of its likeness to the cultivated tree. Its roots, which have a red skin, act as a soporific if taken in wine, a denarius by weight being the dose. Its seed taken in drink dries up water under the skin. If pomegranate rind be burned the smoke keeps off gnats.

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§ 23.62.1  All kinds of pears are indigestible food, even for men in health; and to the sick they are as strictly forbidden as wine. Cooked, however, they are remarkably wholesome and pleasant, especially those of Crustumium. All kinds of pears, however, if boiled down with honey are wholesome to the stomach. Out of pears are made plasters for dispersing flesh lesions, and they use a decoction of them for iudurations. By themselves they neutralize the poison of toadstools and tree-fungi, expelling it by their weight in addition to the counteracting effect of their juice. The wild pear is very slow in ripening. Sliced the pears are hung up and dried for checking looseness of the bowels, for which purpose a decoction also of them is efficacious, taken as drink. A decoction also of the leaves with the fruit is used for the same purposes. The ashes of pear wood are even more efficacious against the poison of tree-fungi. Apples and pears, even a small quantity, make a remarkably heavy load for beasts of burden. It is said that a remedy for this is to give them a few to eat, or at least to show some, before beginning the journey.

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§ 23.63.1  The milky juice of the fig has the nature of vinegar, and so like rennet it curdles milk. It is extracted before the fruit is ripe and dried in the shade for clearing up sores and promoting menstruation, the application being a pessary made with yoke of egg, or a draught with starch. With fenugreek meal and vinegar it makes a liniment for gout. It also serves as a depilatory, heals eruptions on the eyelids, as well as lichen and itch. It loosens the bowels. Fig juice has the property of counteracting the poison of hornets, wasps and similar creatures, especially scorpions. With axle-grease it also removes warts. The leaves and unripe figs make a liniment for scrofulous sores and for all sores requiring the use of emollients or resolvents; the leaves by themselves too have the same property. They are used as well for rubbing lichen, mange, and on all occasions where a caustic is called for. The young shoots of the branches are applied to the skin to render dog-bites harmless. The same shoots with honey are applied to the sores called honeycomb. With leaves of wild poppy they extract fragments of bone. Their leaves beaten up with vinegar render harmless the bites of mad dogs. The tender white shoots of the dark fig are applied to boils, and with wax to the bites of the shrewmouse, and the ash from their leaves to gangrenes and to reduce excrescences. Ripe figs are diuretic, laxative, sudorific, and bring out pimples; for this reason they are unwholesome in autumn, since a body perspiring because figs have been eaten becomes very chilled. They upset the stomach, although. only for a while, and they are understood to be bad for the voice. The last figs are more wholesome than the first; doctored a figs, however, are never wholesome. Figs increase the strength of youth; to age they give improved health and fewer wrinkles. They relieve thirst and cool the heat of the body; for this reason they are not to be rejected in the constrictive fevers called stegnae. Dried figs are injurious to the stomach, but wonderfully beneficial to the throat and pharynx. The nature of these is heating, and they cause thirst. They relax the bowels, but are injurious to bowel catarrhs and to the stomach. On all occasions they are beneficial for the bladder, for difficult breathing and for asthma. Likewise for complaints of the liver, kidneys and spleen. They are flesh-forming and strengthening, and therefore the earlier athletes used them as a staple food. It was the trainer Pythagoras who was the first to change their diet of figs for one of meat. A convalescent after a long illness finds them very beneficial, as do sufferers from epilepsy and dropsy. They are applied to all gatherings that need bringing to a head or dispersing, more effectively if combined with lime, soda or iris. Boiled with hyssop they clear the chest of phlegm and chronic cough; boiled with wine they clear away trouble at the anus and swellings of the jaws. A decoction of them makes an ointment for boils, superficial abscesses and parotid swellings. This decoction makes a useful fomentation for female complaints, and the same decoction, combined with fenugreek, is useful in pleurisy and pneumonia. Boiled with rue figs are good for colic; with red copper oxide for sores on the shins and for parotid swellings; with pomegranate for hangnails; with wax for burns and chilblains; for dropsy they are boiled in wine with wormwood and barley meal. If they are chewed with soda added they relax the bowels; beaten up with salt they make a liniment for scorpion stings. Boiled in wine and applied they bring carbuncles to a head. In cases of carcinoma, if there be no ulceration, it is almost specific to apply the richest fig possible, and the same is true of corroding ulcers. The ash from no other wood is more active as a cleanser, healer of wounds, former of new flesh, and as an astringent. It is also taken in drink to disperse blood that has coagulated, and likewise for bruises, violent falls, ruptures, and cramps, the dose being a cyathus to a cyathus of oil and water respectively. It is given to sufferers from tetanus and convulsions: in drink also or in an injection for coeliac trouble and for dysentery. With oil it makes an ointment which has warming properties. Kneaded into a paste with wax and rose oil it forms over burns the slightest of scars. Made into a paste with oil it cures short sight., and ailments of the teeth if used frequently as a dentifrice. It is said that, if anyone with upturned face draws a fig tree down, and a knot of it be bitten off without anybody seeing, to tie this round the neck by a string with a bag of fine leather and wear it as an amulet disperses scrofulous sores and parotid swellings. The crushed bark with oil heals ulcerations of the belly. Raw green figs with soda and meal added remove warts and warty excrescences? The ash of the bushy shoots from the root is a substitute for zinc oxide. After two washings, with white lead added it is worked into lozenges for the treatment of ulcers and scabs on the eyes.

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§ 23.64.  The wild fig is even much more efficacious than the fig; a sprig of it also curdles milk into cheeses. It has less milk in it than the cultivated fig. This milk is collected and hardened by pressure, when it is rubbed on meat to keep it sweet. Diluted with vinegar it forms an ingredient of blistering preparations. It relaxes the bowels; with starch it opens the uterus; with the yolk of egg it promotes menstruation. With fenugreek meal it is applied to gouty limbs. It clears up leprous sores, itch, lichen and freckles, and similarly cures wounds made by venomous creatures and dog bites. Applied on wool this juice is also good for toothache, or hollow teeth may be plugged. The tender stalks and leaves mixed with vetches are a remedy for the poison of marine animals; wine also is added. Beef can be boiled soft with a great saving of fuel if the stalks be added to the water. An application of the unripe figs soften and disperse scrofulous sores and every kind of gathering; to a certain degree the leaves too do the same. The softest leaves with vinegar heal running sores, epinyctis and scurfy eruptions. With honey the leaves cure honeycomb sores and fresh dog bites, with wine corroding sores, and with poppy leaves they extract splinters of bone. Wild figs when green disperse flatulence by fumigation — taken in drink they are an antidote to bulls' blood that has been swallowed, to white lead and to curdled milk — and boiled down in water they disperse when used as a liniment sores of the parotid glands. The young stalks or green fruit of the wild fig, plucked when as small as possible, are taken in wine to counteract scorpion stings. The milk, too, is poured into a wound and the leaves are applied to it, and the same treatment is employed for the bite of the shrewmouse. The ash of the young shoots soothes a sore uvula; the ash of the tree itself applied in honey cures chaps, and the root boiled down in wine cures toothache. The winter wild fig, boiled in vinegar and beaten up, clears up eczema. The branches with the bark removed are scraped to produce particles as fine as sawdust, which are used as an application. The wild fig too one miraculous medicinal property attributed to it; if a boy not yet adolescent break off a branch and tears off with his teeth its bark swollen with sap, the mere pith tied on as an amulet before sunrise keeps away, it is said, scrofulous sores. The wild fig, if a branch be put round the neck of a bull, however fierce, by its miraculous nature so subdues the animal as to make him incapable of movement.

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§ 23.65.1  A plant too, called erinos by the Greeks, must be described here because of the kinship of its name. It is a span high, and generally has five small stalks; it resembles basil, with a white flower and small black seed. Pounded and added to Attic honey this seed cures fluxes of the eyes, the proportions being two cyathi to four drachmae of Attic honey. When broken this plant distils much sweet milk, which with the addition of a little soda is very beneficial for earaches. The leaves are an antidote to poisons.

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§ 23.66.1  The leaves of the plum boiled in wine are good for tonsils, gums and uvula, the mouth being rinsed with this decoction occasionally. The fruit by itself relaxes the bowels, but is not very good for the stomach, though its effects are transitory.

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§ 23.67.1  Peaches are more wholesome, and so is their juice, which is also squeezed out and taken in wine or vinegar. No other food is more harmless than this fruit; nowhere do we find less smell or more juice, though the latter tends to create thirst. Peach leaves pounded and applied arrest haemorrhage. Peach kernels mixed with oil and vinegar make an application good for headache.

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§ 23.68.1  As for wild plums, their fruit or the skin of their root, boiled down in dry wine from one hemina to one third, checks looseness of the bowels and colic. A cyathus of the decoction at a time makes a sufficient dose.

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§ 23.69.1  Both on wild and on cultivated plum trees there forms a gummy substance called lichen by the Greeks and wonderfully beneficial for chaps and condylomata.

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§ 23.70.1  In Egypt and in Cyprus are mulberries of a unique sort, as I have already said. If the outer rind be peeled off they stream with copious juice; a deeper cut (so wonderful is their nature) finds them dry. The juice counteracts the poison of snakes, is good for dysentery, disperses superficial abscesses and all kinds of gatherings, heals wounds, and allays headache and earache. For diseases of the spleen it is taken by the mouth and used as a liniment, as also for violent chills. It very quickly breeds worms. We Romans use the juice quite as much. Taken in wine it neutralizes aconite and the poison of spiders; it opens the bowels, expelling phlegm, tapeworm and similar intestinal parasites. The same effect also is produced by the pounded bark. The leaves boiled in rain water together with the bark of the dark fig and of the vine dye the hair. The juice of the fruit itself moves the bowels immediately; the fruit itself is for the time being good for the stomach, being cooling, though thirst-producing, and if no other food is taken afterwards, it swells up. The juice of unripe mulberries is constipating; there are marvels to be noticed about this tree, mentioned by me in my description of it, which suggest that it has some sort of soul.

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§ 23.71.1  There is made from the mulberry a mouthwash called panchrestos, or arteriace, in the following way. Three sextarii of the juice from the fruit are reduced by a gentle heat to the consistency of honey; then are added two denarii of dried omphacium, or one of myrrh, and one denarius of saffron. These are beaten up together and mixed with the decoction. There is no other remedy more pleasant for the mouth, the trachea, the uvula or the gullet. It is also prepared in another wax. Two sextarii of the juice and one sextarius of Attic honey are boiled down in the mariner I have described above.

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§ 23.71.2  There are besides marvels related of the mulberry. When it begins to bud, but before the leaves unfold, the fruit-to-be is plucked with the left hand. The Greeks call them ricini. These, if they have not touched the ground, when worn as an amulet stay a flow of blood, whether it flows from a wound, the mouth, the nostrils, or from haemorrhoids. For this purpose they are stored away and kept. The same effect is said to be produced if there be broken off at a full moon a branch beginning to bear; it must not touch the ground, and is specially useful when tied on the upper arm of a woman to prevent excessive menstruation. It. is thought that the same result is obtained if the woman herself breaks off a branch at any time, provided that it does not touch the ground before it is used as an amulet. Mulberry leaves pounded, or a decoction of dried leaves, are used as an application for snake bite, and it is of some benefit to take them in drink. The juice extracted from the skin of the root, and drunk in wine or diluted vinegar, counteracts the poison of scorpions. There must also be given a recipe of the ancients. The juice of the ripe fruit was mixed with that of the unripe, and the two boiled in a copper vessel to the consistency of honey. Some used to add myrrh and cypress and then to bake the mixture very hard in the sun, stirring it three times a day with a spatula. This was their stomatice, which they also used to help the formation of a scar on wounds. Another method was to squeeze the juice from dried fruit; this greatly improved the flavour of viands, and was moreover used in medicine for corroding sores, phlegm on the chest, and whenever astringent treatment of the bowels was called for. It was also used to rinse the teeth. A third kind of juice is to make a decoction of the leaves and root, to be applied in oil to burns. The leaves are also applied by themselves. An incision into the root at the time of harvest yields a juice admirably suited to relieve toothache, gatherings and suppurations, besides acting as a purge. Mulberry leaves soaked in urine remove hair from hides.

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§ 23.72.1  Cherries relax the bowels, but are injurious to the stomach; dried cherries arrest looseness of the bowels and are diuretic. I find it stated in my authorities that if anyone swallows cherries with their stones in the morning, when the dew is on them, the bowels are so relieved that the feet are freed from gout.

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§ 23.73.1  Medlars, except the setanian, which is nearer to the apple in its properties, act astringently upon the stomach and check looseness of the bowels. Likewise sorb apples when dried; but when fresh they are beneficial to the stomach and to disordered bowels.

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§ 23.74.  Pine nuts, containing resin, if lightly crushed and boiled down to one half with a sextarius of water to each nut, cure spitting of blood when the decoction is taken in doses of two cyathi. A decoction of the bark of the pine in wine is prescribed for colic. The kernels of the pine nut allay thirst, heartburn, gnawings of the stomach and the peccant humours that settle there; they tone up the system, and are beneficial for the kidneys and bladder. They seem to relieve roughness of the throat or of a cough, and drive out bile when taken in water, wine, raisin wine or a decoction of dates. For severe gnawing pains of the stomach they are combined with cucumber seed and juice of purslane, and also for ulcerations of the bladder and affections of the kidneys, since they are also diuretic.

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§ 23.75.1  A decoction of roots of the bitter almond clears the complexion of spots and makes it of a more cheerful colour. Almonds themselves induce sleep and increase the appetite; they are diuretic and act as an emmenagogue. They are applied for headache, especially in fever; if the headache arises from wine, the application is with vinegar, rose oil and a sextarius of water. With starch and mint they arrest haemorrhage, and to anoint the head with the mixture is good for lethargus and epilepsy; mixed with old wine they heal epinyctis and purulent sores, with honey dog bites and, after preliminary fomentation, scaly eruptions on the face. Taken in water, too, they remove pains of the liver and kidneys, and they are often made also into an electuary for this purpose with resin from the turpentine tree. For stone and strangury they are beneficial taken in raisin wine, and for clearing the skin taken crushed in hydromel. In an electuary they are good for the liver, for a cough and for colic, if a little elelisphacus be added. The electuary is taken in honey, and is of the size if a filbert. It is said that if about five of these almonds are taken before a carouse drinkers do not become intoxicated, and that foxes die if they eat them without having water at hand to lap. Less efficacious as a remedy are sweet almonds, yet these two are purging and diuretic. Eaten fresh they lie heavy on the stomach.

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§ 23.76.1  Greek nuts taken in vinegar with wormwood seed are said to cure jaundice, applied by themselves affections of the anus, condylomata in particular, as well as coughs and spitting of blood.

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§ 23.77.1  Walnuts have received their name in Greek from the heaviness of the head which they because; the trees themselves, in fact, and their leaves give out a poison that penetrates to the brain. The kernels if they are eaten have the same effect, though the pain is less severe. Freshly gathered, however, they are more agreeable. The dried nuts are more oily, and injurious to the stomach, difficult digestion, productive of headache and bad for a cough; they are good, however, for those who intend to vomit fasting, for tenesmus and for colic, as they bring away phlegm? Taken in time these nuts deaden the effects of poisons, neutralize onions and make their flavour milder. They are applied to inflammation of the ears, with rue and a little honey to the breasts and to sprains, with rue and oil to quinsy, and with onion, salt and honey to the bites of dogs and of humans. By a walnut shell a hollow tooth is cauterized? If the shell be burnt and beaten up with the addition of oil or wine, to anoint a baby's head with the mixture is to promote the growth of hair, and this preparation is also used for mange. The more walnuts eaten, the easier it is to expel tapeworms. Very old walnuts are a cure for gangrenes and carbuncles, as also for bruises; the bark of walnuts cures lichen and dysentery, and the pounded leaves with vinegar cure earache. When the mighty king Mithridates had been overcome, Cn. Pompeius found in a private notebook in his cabinet a prescription for an antidote written in the king's own handwriting: — two dried walnuts, two figs and twenty leaves of rue were to be pounded together with the addition of a pinch of salt; he who took this fasting would be immune to all poison for that day. The kernels of walnuts chewed by a fasting person and applied to the bite of a mad dog are said to be a sovereign remedy.

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§ 23.78.1  Filberts cause headache and flatulence of the stomach, and put more fat on the body than one would think at all likely. Parched they also cure catarrh, pounded too and taken in hydromel they cure chronic cough; some add grains of pepper, others take them in raisin wine. Pistachio nuts have the same uses as pine nuts, and are besides, whether eaten or taken in drink, beneficial for snake bites. Chestnuts cheek effectually fluxes of the stomach and belly; they encourage peristaltic action of the bowels, arrest haemoptysis, and increase the growth of flesh.

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§ 23.79.1  Fresh carobs, injurious to the stomach, relax the bowels; dried carobs are astringent and prove more beneficial to the stomach; they are diuretic. For pain in the stomach some persons boil down to one half three Syrian carobs in a sextarius of water, and drink this decoction. The sap that sweats from a branch of the cornel tree is caught on a red-hot iron plate without the wood touching it; the resulting rust is applied as a cure for incipient lichen. The arbutus or strawberry tree bears a fruit that is difficult of digestion and injurious to the stomach.

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§ 23.80.1  The bay-leaves, bark and berries — is of a heating nature; and so a decoction made from these, especially from the leaves, as is generally agreed, is good for the uterus and bladder. An application of the leaves, moreover, counteracts the poison of wasps, hornets and bees, as well as that of snakes, in particular of the seps, the dipsas band the viper. Boiled with oil the leaves are also good for menstruation; tender leaves pounded and mixed with pearl barley are good for inflammations of the eyes, with rue for those of the testicles, and with rose oil or iris oil for headache. Moreover three leaves, chewed and swallowed for three days in succession, free from cough; the same pounded and with honey free from asthma. The skin of the root is to be avoided by women with child. The root itself breaks up stone in the bladder, and three oboli taken in a draught of fragrant wine are good for the liver. The leaves taken in drink act as an emetic. The berries pounded and applied in a pessary or taken in drink act as an emmenagogue. Doses of two berries with the skin removed taken in wine cure chronic cough and difficulty of breathing. If fever also be present, the berries are given in water, or in a raisin-wine electuary, or boiled down in hydromet. Prepared in the same way they are good for phthisis and for all fluxes of the chest, for they both produce coctions of the phlegm and bring it up. For scorpion stings doses of four berries are taken in wine. Applied in oil the berries clear up epinyctis, freckles, running sores, sores in the mouth, and scaly eruptions; the juice of the berries clear scurf from the skin and phthiriasis; for pain or dullness of the ears it is injected with old wine and rose oil. Those anointed with it are shunned by all venomous animals; taken in drink also it is beneficial for wounds inflicted by them, especially the juice from the bay with very small leaves. The berries with wine are a prophylactic a against serpents, scorpions and spiders; with oil and vinegar they are applied also to the spleen and liver, with honey to gangrene. Further, when there is severe fatigue or chill, anointing with the juice of this berry, to which soda has been added, is beneficial. Some think that delivery is much hastened by taking in water an acetabulum by measure of bay root, fresh root being more efficacious than dried. Several authorities prescribe that ten berries be given in drink for scorpion stings; to cure relaxed uvula that a quarter of a pound of berries or leaves be boiled down to one-third in three sextarii of water, the decoction to be used as a warm gargle; and that to take away headache an uneven number of berries be pounded with oil and warmed. The pounded leaves of the Delphic bay, if smelt occasionally, keep off infection of plague, and the effect is greater if they are also burnt. Oil from the Delphic bay is useful for making wax salves and anodynes, for shaking off chills, for relaxing the sinews, and for the treatment of pain in the side and of the shivers of fever; warmed in the rind of a pomegranate it is also used for earache. The leaves boiled down in water to one-third, and used as a gargle, brace the uvula; taken by the mouth the decoction relieves pains in the bowels and intestines; the most tender leaves, pounded and applied in wine at night, remove pimples and itching. The other varieties of bay have very nearly the same properties. That of Alexandria, or Mt. Ida, taken in doses of three denarii of the root to three cyathi of sweet wine, hastens delivery; it also brings away the afterbirth and acts as an emmenagogue. Taken in drink in the same way, the wild bay, called daphnoides, or by the names already given to it, is beneficial; three drachmae of the leaves, fresh or dried, taken with salt in hydromel, relax the bowels. Chewed, this bay brings up phlegm and the leaves bring up vomit, being injurious to the stomach. In this way, too, the berries, fifteen at a time, are taken as a purge.

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§ 23.81.1  The white cultivated myrtle is less useful in medicine than the dark. Its berries cure haemoptysis, and are taken in wine to counteract poisonous tree-fungi. Even when chewed the day previously they make the mouth smell sweet, and so in Menander the women in Synaristosae [a comedy by Menander] eat them. A denarius of the same by weight is given in wine for dysentery. Made lukewarm they heal with wine obstinate sores on the extremities of the body. With pearl barley they are applied to the eyes for ophthalmia and to the left breast for cardiac disease. In neat wine they are applied to wounds inflicted by scorpions, and for affections of the bladder, headache, lacrimal fistulas before suppuration, and tumours; for pituitous eruptions the kernels are first taken out and then the berries are crushed in old wine. The juice of the berries settles the bowels and is diuretic. For eruptions of pimples and for those of phlegm an ointment is made of the juice and wax salve, and this is also used for the wounds of venomous spiders. The juice also darkens the hair. The oil from the same myrtle is milder than the juice, and so also is myrtle wine, which never intoxicates. When fully matured the wine settles the bowels and the stomach, cures colic and dispels squeamishness. The dried leaves, powdered and dusted over the body, check perspiration even in fever; it is useful also for coeliac trouble, prolapse of the uterus, affections of the anus, running sores, as a fomentation for erysipelas, for loss of hair, scaly eruptions, other eruptions also, and bums. The powder forms an ingredient in the plasters called liparae (emollient), for the same reason as the oil also is which is made from the leaves, for it is a very efficient application to the moist parts of the body, the mouth for instance and the uterus. The pounded leaves themselves are taken in wine as an antidote to the poison of tree-fungi, and moreover mixed with wax are used for diseases of the joints and for gatherings. A decoction of them in wine is prescribed to be taken by sufferers from dysentery and dropsy. They are dried to a powder which is dusted on sores and haemorrhages. They clear away freckles also, hangnails, whitlows, sores on the eyelid, condylomata, affections of the testicles, offensive sores, and also, with wax salve, burns. For pus in the ears they use both the burnt leaves and the juice as well as the decoction. The leaves are also burnt to afford material for antidotes; stalks too, plucked when in flower, are burnt in a furnace in a newly-made clay pot with the lid on and then pounded in wine. The ashes too of the leaves cure bums. If from a sore there be a swelling in the groin, it is a sufficient remedy merely to carry on the person a sprig of myrtle that has touched neither iron nor the ground.

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§ 23.82.1  I have described the preparation of myrtidanum. It is beneficial to the uterus, whether used as a pessary, a fomentation, or a liniment, being much more efficacious than the bark of the tree or the leaves or the berries. There is also extracted a juice from the leaves; the most tender are crushed in a mortar, a dry wine or sometimes rain water poured on them little by little, and the liquid now drawn off. It is used for sores in the mouth and of the anus, for those of the uterus, or of the intestines, for darkening the hair, for moisture at the armpits, for clearing away freckles, and whenever an astringent remedy is indicated.

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§ 23.83.1  The wild myrtle, oxymyrsine or chamaemyrsine, is distinguished from the cultivated by its red berries and small size. Its root is much esteemed. A decoction in wine is taken for pains in the kidneys and for strangury, particularly when the urine is thick and of foul odour; for jaundice and purging the uterus it is pounded with wine. The young stalks also are cooked in ashes and taken as food in the same way as asparagus. The berries, taken with wine or with oil and vinegar, break up stone in the bladder; pounded also in vinegar and rose oil it relieves headache, and taken in drink the jaundice. Castor gave the name of ruscum [Butcher's broom] to the oxymyrsine, having leaves which are a myrtle's but prickly, from which in the country they make brooms; its medicinal properties are the same. So much for the medicines derived from cultivated trees of our cities; lei me pass on to the wild ones of the woods.

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§ 24.1.1  NOR even the woods and the wilder face of Nature are without medicines, for there is no place where that holy Mother of all things did not distribute remedies for the healing of mankind, so that even the very desert was made a drug store, at every point occurring wonderful examples of that well-known antipathy and sympathy. The oak and the olive are parted by such inveterate hatred that, if the one be planted in the hole from which the other has been dug out, they die, the oak indeed also dying if planted near the walnut. Deadly too is the hatred between the cabbage and the vine; the very vegetable that keeps the vine at a distance itself withers away when planted opposite cyclamen or wild marjoram. Moreover, trees, it is said, that are now old and being felled are more difficult to cut down, and decay more quickly, if man's hand touch them before the axe. There is a belief that beasts of burden know at once when their load consists of fruit, and unless it is first shown to them straightway begin to sweat, however small their load may be. Fennel-giant makes very agreeable fodder for the ass; to other beasts of burden, however, it is a quick poison. For this reason the animal is sacred to Father Liber, as is also fennel-giant. Lifeless things also, even the most insignificant, have each their own special poisons. By means of linden bark and fine flour cooks extract excessive salt from food; salt reduces the sickliness of over-sweet things; water that is nitrous or bitter is sweetened by the addition of pearl barley, so that within two hours it is drinkable, and for this reason pearl barley is put into linen wine-strainers. The chalk of Rhodes and the potter's earth of our own country possess a similar property. Affinities show their power when pitch is taken out by oil, both being of a greasy nature. Oil alone mixes with lime, both hating water. Gum is more easily removed by vinegar, ink by water, and countless other examples besides will be carefully given in their proper place.

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§ 24.1.2  Hence sprang the art of medicine. Such things alone had Nature decreed should be our remedies, provided everywhere, easy to discover and costing nothing — the things in fact that support our life. Later on the deceit of men and cunning profiteering led to the invention of the quack laboratories, in which each customer is promised a new lease of his own life at a price. At once compound prescriptions and mysterious mixtures are glibly repeated, Arabia and India are judged to be storehouses of remedies, and a small sore is charged with the cost of a medicine from the Red Sea, although the genuine remedies form the daily dinner of even the very poorest. But if remedies were to be sought in the kitchen-garden, or a plant or a shrub were to be procured thence, none of the arts would become cheaper than medicine. It is perfectly true that owing to their greatness the Roman people have lost their usages, and through conquering we have been conquered. We are the subjects of foreigners, and in one of the arts they have mastered even their masters. But of this more elsewhere.

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§ 24.2.1  In their proper places I have already spoken of the plant called lotus, and also of the Egyptian plant called by the same name, sometimes known also as the tree of the Syrtes. The berries of this lotus, which by our countrymen is called the Greek bean, cheek looseness of the bowels. Shavings of the wood, boiled down in wine, are good for dysentery, irregular menstruation, giddiness and epilepsy. They also prevent the hair from falling out. It is strange that nothing is more bitter than these shavings or sweeter than Lotus fruit. From the sawdust also of the wood a medicine is prepared by boiling it down in myrtle water; it is then kneaded and cut into lozenges, which make a very useful medicine for dysentery, the dose being one victoriatus to three cyathi of water.

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§ 24.3.1  Pounded acorns with salted axle-grease cure the indurations that are called malignant. More potent are those of the holm-oak, and in all acorns the more potent parts are the peel itself and the skin just under it. A decoction of the latter is good for coeliac affections. In cases of dysentery also even the acorn itself is applied. The same decoction is a remedy for snake bites, fluxes and suppurations. The leaves and berries, or the bark, or the liquid of a decoction, counteract poisons. A decoction of the bark in cows' milk is applied to snake bites, and the bark in wine is given for dysentery. The holm-oak has the same properties.

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§ 24.4.1  The scarlet berry of the holm-oak is applied to fresh wounds in vinegar and to fluxes of the eyes in water; it is dropped into eyes that are blood-shot. There is also a kindred berry, found commonly in Africa and Asia, quickly turning into a little worm; for this reason it is called seoleeium, and is in low esteem. The main varieties of it I have already! given.

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§ 24.5.1  We have classified just as many varieties of gall-nut — the solid and the perforated, the white and the dark, the larger and the less. The properties of all are alike, although the best kind comes from Commagene. They remove excrescences of flesh, and are good for the gums, the uvula, and an ulcerated mouth. Burnt and then extinguished with wine they are applied for coeliac affections and dysentery, in honey to whitlows, scabrous nails, hangnails, running sores, eondylomata, and the sores called 'phagedaenie.' A decoction moreover in wine is dropped into the ears and also used as an application the eyes; with vinegar it is used for eruptions and superficial abscesses. The inner part of the nut when chewed relieves toothache, and also chafing of the skin and burns. Taken unripe in vinegar gall-nuts reduce a swollen spleen; then again, burnt and extinguished in salt and vinegar, they check excessive menstruation and prolapse of the uterus if used as a fomentation. All kinds of gall-nut blacken the hair.

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§ 24.6.1  I have already said that the choicest mistletoe is thought to come from the hard-wood oak, and I have given the way of preparing it. Some crush it and boil in water until none of it floats on the surface; others chew the berries and spit out the skins. The best birdlime from mistletoe is without any skin, and very smooth, yellow on the outside and leek-green within. Nothing is more sticky than this birdlime. It is emollient, disperses tumours, and dries up scrofulous sores; with resin and wax it softens superficial abscesses of every sort. Some add galbanum also, equal in weight to each of the other ingredients, and this mixture they use also for the treatment of wounds. The lime smoothes scabrous nails, but the application must be taken off every seven days and the nails washed with a solution of soda. Some superstitiously believe that the mistletoe proves more efficacious if it be gathered from the hard-wood oak at the new moon without the use of iron, and without its touching the ground; that so it cures epilepsy, helps women to conceive if they merely a carry it on their persons; that chewed and applied to sores it heals them most effectively.

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§ 24.7.1  The globules growing on the hardwood oak mixed with bear's grease restore hair lost through manges The leaves, bark and acorns of the Turkey oak dry up gatherings and suppurations, and check fluxes. Paralysed parts of limbs are strengthened by fomenting with a decoction of it, which as a sits bath is useful for drying and bracing these parts. The root of this tree counteracts the poison of scorpions.

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§ 24.8.1  The bark of the cork-tree, pounded and taken in hot water, arrests haemorrhage from either part of the body, and the ashes of the same taken in heated wine are highly praised as a cure for spitting of blood.

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§ 24.9.1  Beech leaves are chewed for affections of the leaves. gums and of the lips. The ashes of the beech nut make a liniment for stone in the bladder, and with honey for mange.

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§ 24.10.1  The pounded leaves of the cypress are applied to fresh wounds, and with pearl barley to the head in cases of sunstroke; they make an application also for hernia, for which too they are taken in drink. With wax they make an ointment also for swollen bread and kneaded in Aminean wine, soothe pains in the feet and sinews. The globules on this tree are taken in drink for snake bites or for the bringing up of blood, and used as an application for gatherings. Gathered while soft, and pounded with axle-grease and bean meal, they are also good for hernia. For the same purpose they are taken in drink. Mixed with meal they are applied to parotid tumours and to scrofulous sores. Pounded with the seed these globules yield a juice, which mixed with oil takes away films on the eyes. Taken too in doses of one victoriatus in wine and used as an ointment with a rich dried fig, from which the seeds have been removed, it cures affections of the testicles, disperses tumours, and with leaven heals scrofulous sores. Cypress root, pounded with the leaves and taken in drink, cures affections of the bladder and strangury, and counteracts the poison of spiders. The shavings taken in drink act as an emmenagogue, and neutralize the stings of scorpions.

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§ 24.11.1  The big cedrus, which they call cedrelate, yields a pitch which is called cedria, very useful for toothache; for it breaks the teeth and brings them out, easing the pain. I have already described how cedrus juice is extracted from the wood, of great use for book-rolls were it not for the headache it causes. It preserves dead bodies uncorrupted by time, but causes living ones to decay — a strange inconsistency, to rob the living of their life and to give a quasi-life to the dead! It also makes clothes decay and kills animal life. For this reason I should not think it ought to be used as a remedy for quinsy, or for indigestion, as some have recommended, taken by the mouth. I should also be afraid to rinse the teeth with it in vinegar, when they ache, or to drop it into the ears for hardness of hearing or worms. Gossip records a miracle: that to rub it all over the male part before coition prevents conception. I should not hesitate to use it as an ointment for phthiriasis or for scurf. It is also recommended to take it in raisin wine to counteract the poison of the sea hare, but more readily it might be used as liniment for leprosy. For foul sores and excrescences in them, and for spots and films on the eyes, certain authorities have prescribed it as an ointment, and have directed that a cyathus of it be drunk for sores on the lung, as well as for tapeworm. There is prepared from it an oil also, which they call 'pisselaeoni' used for all the same purposes, but of greater potency. It is well ascertained that snakes are kept away by the sawdust of cedrus, and that to rub the body with the crushed berries mixed with oil has the same result.

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§ 24.12.1  Cedrides, that is the fruit of the cedrus, cure a cough, are diuretic, arrest looseness of the bowels, and are useful for ruptures, sprains, spasms, strangury and uterine affections, forming an ingredient of antidotes for the poison of sea hares and those poisons mentioned above, and being used for gatherings and inflammations.

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§ 24.13.1  About galbanum I have already spoken. The best kind is considered to be that which is neither moist nor dry, and such as I have indicated. It is taken in drink by itself for chronic cough, asthma, ruptures and sprains; it is used as an application for sciatica, pains in the sides, superficial abscesses, boils, separation of flesh from bones, scrofulous sores, knotty lumps at the joints, and tooth-ache. With honey too it makes an ointment for sores on the head. With rose oil or nard it is injected for pus in the ears. Its smell is beneficial for epilepsy, choking of the uterus, and for weakness of the stomach. A pessary or fumigation brings away the foetus when there is a miscarriage, and so will a branch of hellebore smeared with it and laid under the woman. I have said that snakes are kept off by the fumes caused by burning it; they do not come either near persons rubbed with galbanum. It heals also scorpion stings. A piece the size of a bean is taken in a cyathus of wine for difficult deliveries, and it reduces a displaced uterus; while with myrrh and wine it brings away a dead foetus. With myrrh and wine it also counteracts poisons, particularly those used on arrows. Mixed with oil and spondylium it kills snakes if it but touches them. It is supposed to make urination difficult.

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§ 24.14.1  Similar is the nature of ammoniacum and of its tear, which should be tested in the way I mentioned. It softens, warms, disperses, and dissolves. In eye salves it promotes clearness of vision. It removes itch, scars, and white spots on the eyes, and relieves toothache, more effectively when it has been set alight. It is good for difficulty of breathing, pleurisy, affections of the lungs and bladder, blood in the urine, diseases of the spleen, and sciatica, if it be taken in drink — thus administered it also loosens the bowels — and, boiled with an equal weight of pitch or wax and with rose oil, it makes a good ointment for diseases of the joints and for gouty pains. It brings superficial abscesses to a head, and extracts corns, when mixed with honey — so applied it also softens indurations — and combined with vinegar and Cyprian wax or rose oil it makes a very effective application for diseases of the spleen. A rubbing with ointment made up of this gum, with vinegar, oil and a little soda, is a good remedy for fatigue.

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§ 24.15.1  The nature of storax also I have spoken of in my account of foreign trees. In addition to the qualities there mentioned, the most esteemed kind is very rich, unadulterated, and breaks up into white fragments. It cures coughs, affections of the throat, chest diseases, and obstructions or indurations of the uterus; by the mouth or as a pessary it acts as an emmenagogue; it loosens the bowels. I find in my authorities that a moderate dose dispels melancholy, but that a larger one causes it; that an injection cures singing in the ears, a local application scrofulous sores and knotty lumps on the sinews. It counteracts poisons that harm by chilling, and therefore, among others, hemlock.

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§ 24.16.1  Spondylium, which I described at the same time, is with old oil poured on the heads of sufferers from phrenitis, lethargus and headache of long standing. It is also taken in drink for affections of the liver, for jaundice, epilepsy, asthma, and choking of the uterus; for these fumigation is also beneficial. It loosens the bowels. With rue it is used as a liniment for spreading sores. The blossom is injected with good results into purulent ears, but the juice, when it is being extracted, must be covered over, since it has a wonderful attraction for flies and such-like insects. The shavings of the root inserted into fistulas eat away their callosities. They are also dropped with the juice into the ears. The root also itself is given for jaundice and for affections of the liver and of the uterus. If the head is rubbed with it; the hair becomes curly.

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§ 24.17.1  Sphagnos, or sphacos, or bryon, grows also, as I have pointed out, in Gaul. It is useful in the sits bath for uterine affections, and beaten up, and mixed with cress and salt water, it is also good for the knees and for swellings on the thighs. Taken in drink moreover, with wine and dry resin, it very quickly acts as a diuretic. Beaten up and drunk with wine and juniper berries, it drains off the water in dropsy.

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§ 24.18.1  The leaves and root of the turpentine-tree are applied locally to gatherings; a decoction of them strengthens the stomach. The seed is taken in wine for headache and strangury; it is a gentle aperient and an aphrodisiac.

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§ 24.19.1  The leaves of pitch-pine and of the larch pin crushed and boiled down in vinegar are good for toothache, and the ash of their bark for chafing and burns. Taken in drink it checks looseness of the bowels, is diuretic, and as a fumigation reduces a displaced uterus. The leaves of pitch-pine are specific for affections of the liver, the dose being a drachma by weight taken in hydromel. It is well known that woods consisting only of those trees from which pitch and resin arc scraped off are very beneficial to consumptives, or to those who cannot convalesce after a long illness, and that the air in districts so planted is more health-giving than a sea-voyage to Egypt, or than draughts of milk from cattle that have grazed along summer pastures in the mountains.

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§ 24.20.1  The ground-pine, the Latin name of which is abiga, because it causes abortion, and to some known as 'earth-incense,' has branches a cubit in length, with the flowers and the smell of the pine. A second species is shorter and bent, with leaves like those of ?aizollm. A third variety has the same smell, and therefore also the same name; it is rather small, with a stem as thick as a finger, and with rough, slender, pale leaves, growing on rocky soils. All three are plants, not trees, but should be considered here because their names are derived from that of the pine. They are good for the stings of scorpions, and also for the liver when applied with dates or quinces, as is a decoction of them with barley meal for the kidneys and bladder. Decoctions of them in water are taken also for jaundice and for strangury. The last mentioned kind mixed with honey counteracts the poison of serpents, and in this form too purges the uterus when used as a pessary. Taken as drink it draws away extravasated blood. Rubbing with it promotes perspiration, and it is particularly good for the kidneys. It is also made up into pills with figs for dropsy; these purge the bowels. In doses of one victoriatus by weight in wine it ends lumbago, and also coughs if taken in good time. A decoction in vinegar taken as a drink is said to expel at once the dead foetus.

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§ 24.21.1  For a like reason honourable mention shall be made of pityusa also, which some include in the same class as tithymalus. It is a shrub like the pitch-pine, with a small, purple flower. Bile and phlegm are earned off in the stools by a decoction of the root, the dose being one hemina, and by suppositories made of a spoonful of the seed. A decoction of the leaves in vinegar removes scaly eruptions on the skin and, mixed with a decoction of rue, is good for affections of the breasts, for griping pains, for snake bites and for gatherings in general in their early stages.

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§ 24.22.1  That resin is derived from the trees mentioned above, with its various kinds and native regions, I have stated in my account of wine, and afterwards when dealing with trees. The most general classes are two — the dry resin and the liquid. Dry resin comes from the pine and the pitch-pine, the liquid from the terebinth, larch, lentisk and cypress. For in Asia and Syria these last also produce it. They are mistaken who think that the same resin comes from the pitch-pine as comes from the larch. For the pitch-pine exudes a resin that is rich, and like frankincense in consistency, while the larch produces a thin resin with the colour of honey and a very offensive odour. Medical men use liquid resin only occasionally, generally that from the larch and administered in egg, for coughs and ulcerated bowels, nor is that from the pine much used; the others are only employed after boiling. The various ways of boiling I have fully explained. Of the various trees producing resin, the favourite is the terebinth, which yields one highly scented and very light; of the regions, Cyprus and Syria are most favoured; both resins are of the colour of Attic honey, but the Cyprian is thicker, with more body in it. In the dry kind the qualifies looked for are whiteness, purity and transparency; in every kind, however, that from a mountain soil is preferred to that from the plains, and a north-east aspect produces more highly esteemed resin than any other. Resin is dissolved in oil for the treatment of wounds and for poultices; by means of bitter almonds when used for draughts. Its medical properties are to close wounds, to act as a detergent, and to disperse gatherings; terebinth resin is also good for chest complaints. The last when warmed is used as an ointment for pains in the limbs; it is removed after a walk has been taken a in the sun. Slave-dealers especially are anxious to use this ointment for rubbing over the whole bodies of their slaves, with the object of correcting thinness; by walks afterwards they loosen the skin of every limb, and they have the further object of making possible the assimilation of a greater quantity of food. Next in popularity after terebinth resin comes that from the lentisk, which has an astringent quality and is more diuretic than the others. The rest of the resins loosen the bowels, cure indigestion, relieve chronic coughs, and also, when used as a fumigation, remove obstructions in the uterus. These are specific for the poison of mistletoe, and with beef suet and honey they heal superficial abscesses and similar affections. Lentisk resin is a most excellent remedy for turning outwards ingrowing eyelashes, and is also very useful for fractures and for pus in the ears, and also for irritation of the genitals. Pine resin is a very good remedy for wounds in the head.

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§ 24.23.1  Pitch too, its source and the methods of preparing it, I have already mentioned, as well as its two kinds, the thick and the thin. Of the thick pitches the most useful in medicine is the Bruttian, because being both very rich and very resinous it combines the useful properties of both, the yellow-red kind being of higher value than any other because of this combination. For the further opinion about pitch, that the male tree produces a better kind, cannot I think be entertained. The nature of pitch is to warm, and to fill out the flesh. Mixed with pearl barley it is a specific antidote for the bite of the horned viper, and with honey a good remedy for quinsy, catarrhs and sneezing caused by phlegm. Mixed with rose oil it is poured into the ears, and with wax it is compounded into an ointment. It heals lichen and relaxes the bowels; expectoration it eases if used as an electuary or applied to the tonsils in combination with honey. So used it also cleanses sores and fills them out. With raisins and axle-grease it cleanses carbuncles and festering sores; for creeping sores, however, it is combined with pine bark or sulphur. Some authorities have prescribed it in doses of one cyathus for consumption and chronic cough. It cures chaps in the seat, and on the feet, superficial abscesses, scabrous nails, indurations and displacements of the uterus, and lethargus by inhalation. Scrofulous sores it causes to suppurate if boiled with barley meal and the urine of a child not yet adolescent. Dry pitch is also used for mange; Bruttian pitch heated in wine, with wheat meal, is applied to the breasts of women, the applications being as hot as can be borne.

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§ 24.24.1  How liquid pitch and the oil called pisselaeon are made has been described already. Some boil it down twice and call it palimpissa. Liquid pitch is employed for painting quinsy internally. It is good for earache, for promoting clearness of vision, for use as a lip-salve, for asthmatics, the uterus, chronic cough, frequent expectoration, cramp, nervous tremors, opisthotonic tetanus, paralysis, pains in the sinews, and most effectively for itch-scab in dogs and beasts of burden.

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§ 24.25.1  There is also pissasphaltos, that is pitch combined with bitumen, found in a natural state in the territory of Apollonia; it is sometimes made artificially. It is a specific for itch-scab in cattle and for the sores caused by the young on the teats of their mothers. The best part of it is that which floats on the surface when it is boiled.

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§ 24.26.1  Zopissa, as I have said, is scraped off ships, wax being soaked in sea brine. The best is taken from ships after their maiden voyage. It is also added to poultices to disperse gatherings.

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§ 24.27.1  A decoction in vinegar of pitch pine makes an efficacious wash for aching teeth.

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§ 24.28.1  Of the lentisk tree the seed, bark and gum-drops are diuretic, and astringent to the bowels. A decoction of them is a useful fomentation for creeping sores. It makes a liniment for moist sores and also for erysipelas, and it rinses the gums. The leaves are rubbed on the teeth when they ache; loose teeth are rinsed with the decoction, which also dyes the hair. The gum-drops are good for troubles of the seat, when there is a call for a drying and warming remedy. The decoction too of the gum is useful for the stomach, being carminative and diuretic, and is also applied with pearl barley for headache. The tender leaves are applied to inflamed eyes. The mastic of the lentisk is applied for bending back the eyelashes, for filling out and smoothing the skin of the face, being also useful for spitting of blood, chronic cough, and in all cases where the medical properties of gum acacia are called for. Abrasions are treated by applying the oil made from the seed of lentisk mixed with wax, or a decoction of the leaves in oil; or they may be fomented with these preparations and water. I know for a fact that when the illness of Considia, daughter of Marcus Servilius, a consular, long a resisted all rigorous treatment, it was cured by the physician Democrites, who used the milk of goats which he fed on the lentisk.

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§ 24.29.1  The plane tree neutralizes the poison of the bat; its seed-globules taken in wine in a dose of four denarii act similarly on all poisons of serpents and scorpions, besides healing burns. Pounded moreover with strong vinegar, especially squill-seasoned vinegar, it checks all bleeding, and with the addition of honey removes freckles, cancerous sores and chronic pustules on the neck. The leaves moreover and bark make ointment for gatherings and suppurations, and so does a decoction of them; a decoction of the bark in vinegar is a remedy for sore teeth, but for the eyes a decoction of the most tender leaves in white wine must be made. The down of the flowers is harmful both to the ears and to the eyes. The ashes of the burnt globules heal burns and frost-bites. The bark in wine allays the stings of scorpions.

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§ 24.30.1  The power of the ash-tree to neutralize the poison of snakes I have already mentioned. The seed lies between its leaves which in wine are used for pains in the liver and sides, and draw off the subcutaneous water of dropsy. They lessen corpulence, gradually reducing the body to leanness. These leaves are also beaten up with wine in proportion to the strength of the body; for a child five leaves are soaked in three cyathi of wine, for stronger patients seven leaves in five cyathi. I must not forget the warning of some authorities, who declare that the shavings and sawdust of the ash are to be avoided.

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§ 24.31.1  The root of the maple crushed in wine makes a very efficacious application for pains of the liver.

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§ 24.32.1  The clusters of the white poplar, as I have already described, are used in making unguents. A draught made from the bark is good for sciatica and strangury, and the juice of the leaves, warmed, for earache. Those who hold in their hand a twig of poplar need not fear chafing between the legs. The black poplar that grows in Crete is considered the most efficacious; the seed in vinegar is good for epilepsy. It also discharges a small quantity of resin, which is used for poultices. A decoction of the leaves in vinegar is applied locally for gout. The moisture exuding from the hollows of the black poplar, and giving out an odour when applied with rubbing, removes warts and pimples. Poplars also produce on their leaves drops from which bees make bee-glue. With water these drops also have the same healing properties as bee-glue.

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§ 24.33.1  The leaves, bark and branches of the elm are styptic, and have the property of closing wounds. The inner bark in particular relieves leprous sores, as also does a local application of the leaves soaked in vinegar. One denarius of the bark, taken in a hemina of cold water, purges the bowels, being specific for carrying off phlegms and watery humours. Its tear is also applied locally to gatherings, wounds and burns, which it is good to foment with a decoction. The moisture forming in the pods of this tree brings a brightness to the skin and makes the looks more pleasing. The tips of the little stalks of the leaves boiled down in wine cure tumours and draw out the pus through fistulas. The same property is shown by the inner barks. Many hold that the bark when chewed is very good for wounds, and that the leaves, pounded and sprinkled with water, are so for swollen feet. An application of the moisture too, that exudes, as I have said, from the pith of the tree when lopped, restores hair to the scalp and prevents it from falling out.

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§ 24.34.1  The linden tree is good for practically the same purposes as the wild olive, but its action is milder. Only its leaves, however, are used both for babies' sores and for those in the mouth; they may be chewed or a decoction may be made of them; they are diuretic. Applied locally they check menstruation; taken in drink they draw off extravasated blood.

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§ 24.35.1  The elder has a second, a much smaller species, growing wilder and called by the Greeks chamaeacte, by others helion. A decoction in old wine of the leaves, seed, or root, of either species, taken as drink up to two cyathi for a dose, is bad for the stomach, though carrying off watery humours from the bowels. It also reduces inflammation, especially that of a recent burn, and a dog-bite is relieved by a poultice of its most tender leaves with pearl barley. An application of the juice softens gatherings on the brain, being specific when these are on the membrane that surrounds it. Its berries have weaker properties than the other parts. They dye the hair. A dose of one acetabulum taken in drink is diuretic. The softest of the leaves are eaten with oil and salt to bring away phlegm and bile. For all purposes the smaller kind is the more efficacious. A decoction of the root in wine, taken in doses of two cyathi, draws off the water of dropsy; it also softens the uterus, as does also sitting in baths of a decoction of the leaves. The tender stalks of the cultivated elder boiled in a saucepan relax the bowels; the leaves taken in wine also counteract the bites of snakes.

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§ 24.35.2  An application of young shoots with goat-suet is very good for gout; these are also steeped in water to kill fleas by sprinkling. If a place is sprinkled with a decoction of the leaves flies are killed. Boa is the name given to a disease when the body is red with pimples; beating with a branch of elder is administered as a remedy. The inner bark pounded and taken in white wine relaxes the bowels.

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§ 24.36.1  The juniper, even above all other remedies, is warming and alleviates symptoms; for the rest, it resembles the cedrus. Of it there are two species, one smaller than the other. Either kind when set on fire keeps off snakes. The seed is beneficial for pains in the stomach, chest and side, dispels flatulence and the feeling of chill, relieves coughs and matures indurations. Applied locally it checks tumours; the berries taken in dark wine bind the bowels, and a local application reduces tumours of the belly. The fruit is also an ingredient of antidotes and of digestive remedies, and is diuretic. It is also applied locally to the eyes for fluxes, and it is used for sprains, ruptures, colic, uterine disorders and sciatica, either in doses of four berries with white wine, or a decoction of twenty in wine. There are also some who smear the body with an extract of the seed as a protection against snakebite.

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§ 24.37.1  The fruit of the willow before maturity develops a kind of cobweb, but if it be gathered earlier it is good for the spitting of blood. Mixed with water, the ash from the burnt bark of the tips of the branches cures corns and callosities. It removes spots on the face, more thoroughly when mixed with willow juice. This juice, however, is of three kinds: one exudes like gum from the tree itself; the second flows from an incision, three fingers wide, made in the bark while the tree is in blossom. This sort is useful for clearing away humours that obstruct the eyes, also for thickening where that is necessary, for promoting urine and for draining outwards all gatherings. The third kind of juice is obtained by lopping off the branches, when it drips under the sickle. One, then, of these juices warmed in a pomegranate rind with rose oil is poured into the ears, or a local application is made of the boiled leaves beaten up with wax. For gout too it is most useful to foment the sinews with a decoction of the bark and leaves in wine. The blossom beaten up with the leaves removes scurf on the face. The leaves thoroughly pounded and taken in drink check over-lustful desire; too many doses produce absolute impotence. The seed of the black willow of Ameria with an equal weight of litharge, applied after the bath, acts as a depilatory.

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§ 24.38.1  The agnus castus is not very different from the willow, either for its use in wickerwork or in the appearance of its leaves, but it has a more pleasant smell. The Greeks call it lygos, sometimes agnos, because the Athenian matrons, preserving their chastity at the Thesmophoria, strew their beds with its leaves. There are two kinds of it. The larger grows up to be a tree like the willow; the smaller is branchy, with paler, downy leaves. The first bears pale blossom with some purple in it, and is called the white agnus; the other, which bears only purple blossom, is called the dark agnus. They grow on marshy plains. The seed taken in drink has a taste somewhat like wine; it is said to reduce fevers, to stimulate perspiration when applied as embrocation with oil, and also to dispel lassitude. The trees furnish medicines that promote urine and menstruation. They go to the head like wine — for the smell too is similar — drive flatulence into the lower bowels, check diarrhoea, and greatly benefit dropsy and splenic diseases. They encourage abundant rich milk, and neutralize the poisons of serpents, especially those that bring on chill. The smaller kind makes the more effective remedies for the bite of serpents; one drachma of the seed, or two of the most tender leaves, is taken in wine, or in vinegar and water. Either kind makes a liniment for the bites of spiders; mere smearing drives away poisonous creatures, as does fumigation also, or placing some of the plant under the bed. They check violent sexual desire, and for this reason in particular they act as antidotes to the venomous spider, the bite of which excites the genitals. The blossom and tender shoots mixed with rose oil clear away headache due to intoxication. The seed takes away by fomentation with a decoction the more severe type of headache, purges the uterus also by fumigation or a pessary, and the bowels if drunk with pennyroyal and honey. Boils and superficial abscesses that refuse to come to a head are softened by an application of it with barley meal. With saltpetre and vinegar the seed cures lichens and freckles, with honey sores of the month and of eruptions, those of the testes with butter and vine leaves, chaps in the seat when applied with water, dislocations when applied with salt, soda and wax. With the seed the leaves too are added to plasters for the relief of painful sinews and of gout. A decoction of the seed in oil is poured in drops on the head of sufferers from lethargus or phrenitis. It is said that those who keep a twig in their hand or in their girdle do not suffer from chafing between the thighs.

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§ 24.39.1  The Greeks call erice (heath) a shrub differing only a little from the agnus castus; it has the same colour and very nearly the same leaf as rosemary. Report says that it counteracts the poison of serpents.

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§ 24.40.1  Genista also is used for cords, and has a flower of which bees are very fond. I wonder whether this is the plant that Greek writers have called sparton, because, as I have mentioned, from it the Greeks are wont to make their fishing lines, and whether Homer had it in mind when he said that 'the ships' cords (sparta) were loosed.' It is certain that the Spanish or African esparto grass was not yet in use, and though ships were made with sewed seams, yet it was with flax that they were sewed and never with esparto. The seed of this plant, which the Greeks call by the same name, grows in pods like those of the cowpea, and purges instead of hellebore if a drachma and a half with four cyathi of hydromel are drunk on an empty stomach. The branches, together with the leaves, soaked in vinegar for several days and then beaten up, yield a juice beneficial for sciatica in doses of one cyathus. Some prefer to soak them in seawater and inject as an enema. The same juice with the addition of oil is used as an embrocation for sciatica. Some too use the seed for strangury. Pounded genista with axle-grease cures painful knees.

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§ 24.41.1  Lenaeus calls the myrice (tamarisk) erica (heath), comparing it to the brooms of Ameria . He says that boiled in wine, beaten up with honey, and applied to cancerous sores it heals them. Some authorities consider it to be the same as tamarice. But it is specific for splenic trouble if its juice is extracted and drunk in wine; so wonderful do they make out its antipathy to be to this internal organ, and to this only, that they affirm that if pigs drink out of troughs made of this wood they are found to be without a spleen. And for that reason they give to a man also, if he has an enlarged spleen, food and drink in vessels made of tamarisk. A respected medical authority, moreover, has asserted that a twig, broken off from it without its touching the ground or iron, relieves bellyache, if it be so applied as to be pressed to the body by the tunic and the girdle. The common people, as I have said, call this tree unlucky, because it bears no fruit and never is planted.

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§ 24.42.1  Corinth and the part of Greece around it call brya a tree of which they distinguish two kinds: the wild, which is absolutely barren, and the cultivated. The latter in Egypt and Syria bears, and that abundantly, large-stoned fruit bigger than a gall-nut and bitter to the taste, which physicians use instead of gall-nuts in the medical mixtures which they call antherae. The wood also, and the blossom, leaves and bark, are used for the same purposes, although they are less potent. The pounded bark is given for the spitting of blood and for excessive menstruation, also to sufferers from coeliac disease. An application of the same bark pounded checks all kinds of gatherings. From the leaves is extracted a juice employed for the same purposes. The leaves are also decocted in wine; but by themselves with honey added they are applied to gangrenous sores. A decoction of them taken in wine or the leaves themselves applied locally with rose oil and wax are soothing. So used they also cure epinyctis; a decoction of them is healing to toothache and earache; the root is similarly used for the same purposes. The leaves furthermore are applied with pearl barley to spreading ulcers. A drachma by weight of the seed is taken in drink for the poison of phalangia and other spiders; it is applied however with chicken fat to boils. It is an antidote also to the poison of serpents except that of the asp. It is also good for jaundice, phthiriasis and nits, if a decoction is used as a liniment, and this too checks excessive menstruation. The ash from the tree is good for all the same purposes. They say that if it is mixed with the urine of a castrated ox and taken in either drink or food it is antaphrodisiac. A burning coal of this wood is quenched with the urine mentioned and kept in the shade. This, when you want to light it, crumbles to powder. The Magi have recorded that the urine of a eunuch also has the same effect.

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§ 24.43.1  Nor is the red-twigged tree considered more lucky. Its inner bark opens scars which have healed too soon.

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§ 24.44.1  The leaves of siler applied to the forehead relieve headache. The seed of it too crushed in oil checks phthiriasis. Serpents keep away from this shrub also, and for this reason rustics carry a walking stick made of it.

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§ 24.45.1  Privet, if it is the same tree as the cypros of the East, has its own uses in Europe. Its juice benefits sinews, joints and chills; its leaves everywhere are used to treat chronic ulcer and, with a sprinkling of salt, sores in the mouth; the berries are employed for phthiriasis, and the berries or the leaves for chafing between the thighs. The berries also cure the pip in chickens.

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§ 24.46.1  The leaves of the alder in very hot water are a remedy for tumours.

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§ 24.47.1  I have pointed out twenty kinds of ivy. The medicinal properties of all are twofold in action. Ivy deranges the mind and also clears the head when taken too copiously in drink; taken internally it injures sinews, while an external application does them good. All kinds of ivy, being of the same character as vinegar, are of a cooling nature. They are diuretic when taken in drink; they relieve headache; especially beneficial to the brain and to the membrane enclosing it is an application of soft leaves pounded and boiled with vinegar and rose oil, more rose oil being added afterwards. They are also applied to the forehead, and a decoction of them is used to foment the mouth and to rub the head. They are good for the spleen whether taken in drink or used as liniment. They are also boiled or beaten up in wine for the shivers of ague and for outbursts of phlegm. Clusters also of ivy berries cure splenic trouble, either taken in drink or applied locally; for liver trouble, however, they must be applied. Pessaries of berries promote menstruation. Ivy juice, especially that of the white cultivated ivy, cures complaints and offensive smell of the nostrils. The same poured into the nostrils clears the head, more thoroughly if soda is added. It is also poured with oil into purulent or painful ears. It furthermore removes the ugly marks of scars. For troubles of the spleen the juice of the white kind warmed with hot iron is more efficacious. A sufficient dose is six berries taken in two cyathi of wine. Berries of white ivy taken three at a time in oxymel expel tapeworms, and in this treatment it is also beneficial to apply the berries to the belly. The ivy that I have called golden-berried a draws off in the urine the subcutaneous water of dropsy, if twenty of the golden berries are beaten up in a sextarius of wine and the mixture is drunk in doses of three cyathi. Erasistratus prescribed five berries of the same ivy, pounded in rose oil and warmed in the rind of a pomegranate, for toothache, the injection to be made drop by drop into the ear opposite to the pain. If the berries that have a saffron juice are taken in drink beforehand, they keep off the headache that follows drinking; they are likewise good for the spitting of blood and for colic. The whiter clusters of the dark ivy taken in drink make even men sterile. A decoction in wine of any kind of ivy is applied locally to every kind of ulcer, even if it is malignant. The tears of the ivy act as a depilatory and remove phthiriasis. The blossom of any sort of ivy, taken in dry wine twice a day, a three-finger pinch at a time, corrects dysentery and looseness of the bowels. With wax it is useful as an ointment for bums. The clusters turn the hair black. The juice of the root, taken in vinegar, is good for the bite of poisonous spiders. I find also that patients with diseases of the spleen are cured if they drink from a vessel made of this wood. They crush too the berries, then burn them, and in this way apply them to burns that have previously been bathed with warm water. There are also some who make incisions in ivy for the sake of the juice, which they use for decayed teeth; they say that the teeth break off, those nearest being protected by wax lest they should be injured. They obtain also a gum from ivy, which in vinegar is recommended as very useful for the teeth.

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§ 24.48.1  The Greeks give the name cisthos, which is very like cissos (ivy), to a shrub larger than thyme and with leaves like those of ocimum. There are two kinds of it; the flower of the male is rose-coloured, of the female, white. Both are good for dysentery and looseness of the bowels, the dose being as much of the blossom as can be taken in three fingers, this quantity to be swallowed in a dry wine twice a day; for chronic ulcers and for burns the blossom is applied with wax, and by itself for ulcers in the mouth. It is especially under these shrubs that there grows the hypocisthis, which I shall describe when I treat of herbs.

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§ 24.49.1  The plant called cissos erythranos by the Greeks is like ivy. Taken in wine it is good for sciatica and lumbago; so strong is the property of the berry that it brings away blood in the urine. Chamaecissos again is the name they give to an ivy that never rises from the ground. This too crushed in wine and taken in doses of an acetabulum cures splenic trouble; the leaves with axle-grease are applied to bums. The milax also, which has the further name of anthophoros (flower-bearer), has a likeness to the ivy, though the leaves are more slender. A chaplet of it made with an odd number of leaves is said to be a cure for headache. Some authorities have declared that there are two kinds of milax. One is very nearly everlasting, grows in shaded valleys, is a climber of trees, bears berries in luxuriant clusters, and is most efficacious against all poisonous things to such a degree that, if the juice of the berries is repeatedly administered in drops to babies, no poison will hereafter do them any harm. The other kind is said to be fond of cultivated ground and to grow there, having no medicinal value. The former milax they state to be the one the wood of which, we said, gives out a sound when placed close to the ear. Like it is the plant that some have called elematis, which climbs along trees and is itself jointed. Its leaves cleanse leprous sores; its seed loosens the bowels if an acetabulum of it is taken in a hemina of water or in hydromel. A decoction of it is administered for the same purpose.

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§ 24.50.1  I have pointed out twenty-eight kinds of reed, and nowhere is more obvious that force of Nature which I describe in these books one after another, if indeed the root of the reed, crushed and applied, draws a fern stem out of the flesh, while the root of the fern does the same to a splinter of reed. To increase the number of the various reeds there is that which grows in Judea and Syria and is used for scents and unguents; boiled down with grass or celery seed this is diuretic, and when made into a pessary acts as an emmenagogue. A cure for sprains, for troubles of the liver and of the kidneys, and for dropsy, is two oboli taken in drink; for a cough also inhalation is used, the addition of resin being an improvement; for scurf and running sores is used a decoction with myrrh. Its juice also is collected and made into a drug like elaterium. Of all reeds the parts nearest the root are the most efficacious, and the joints are more efficacious than other pads. The Cyprian reed, called donax, has a bark which, reduced to ash, is a remedy for mange and also for festering sores. Its leaves are used for extracting splinters, and are also good for erysipelas and for all gatherings. The common reed has the power to extract if freshly pounded, and not the root only, for many hold that the reed itself too has this property. The root applied in vinegar cures dislocations and pains of the spine; the same ground fresh and taken in wine is aphrodisiac. The down on reeds placed in the ears deadens the hearing.

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§ 24.51.1  Akin to the reed is a plant growing in Egypt, the papyrus, which, when it has been dried, is especially useful for expanding and drying fistulas, and, by swelling, for opening them to admit medicaments. The paper made from it is, when burnt, one of the caustic remedies. Its ash taken in wine induces sleep. The plant itself applied with water cures callosities.

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§ 24.52.1  Not even in Egypt does the ebony-tree grow, as I have stated, and in my medical research I omit foreign regions; yet I must not pass it by, as it is a great marvel. Its sawdust is said to be a sovereign remedy for the eyes; its wood, ground on the whetstone and mixed with raisin wine, to dispel dimness of vision; its root, applied however in water, to disperse white specks on the eyes; cough too to be cleared away if an equal measure of draeunculus root is added along with honey. Physicians include ebony among erosive remedies.

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§ 24.53.1  The rhododendros has not even found a Latin name among the Romans, names for it being rhododaphne or nerium. It is a strange fact that, while its leaves are poisonous to quadrupeds, to man on the other hand, if rue is added and the mixture taken in wine, they are a protection against the poison of snakes. Sheep too and goats, if they drink water in which these leaves have been steeped, are said to be killed by it.

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§ 24.54.1  Neither has rhus received a Latin name, although many uses are made of it. For it is both a wild plant with myrtle-like leaves and short stems, which expels tapeworms, and also the shrub called 'the tanner's', of a reddish colour, a cubit high, and of the thickness of a finger, the leaves of which when dried are used as is pomegranate rind in the tanning of leather. Physicians moreover use the leaves of rhus for bruises, likewise for coeliac trouble, sores in the seat and for what they call eating (phagedaenic) ulcers. Pounded with honey and applied with vinegar ... a decoction of them is dropped into suppurating ears. A decoction of the branches makes a mouthwash, which is used for the same purposes as that made from mulberries, but it is more efficacious when mixed with alum. This is also applied to dropsical swellings.

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§ 24.55.1  What is called rhus erythros (red sumach) is eryta, the seed of this shrub. It has astringent and cooling properties. It is sprinkled on viands instead of salt when the bowels have been relaxed, and with silphium added makes all meat sweeter. With honey it cures running sores, roughness of the tongue, and livid or excoriated bruises; applied in the same way it very quickly causes wounds on the head to cicatrize. Taken as food it checks excessive menstruation.

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§ 24.56.1  A different plant is erythrodanum, called by some ereuthodanum, and rubia by the Romans, which is used to dye wool and to tan leather. As a medicine it is diuretic, and taken in hydromel cures jaundice (lichen too if applied with vinegar), sciatica and paralysis if the patient bathes daily while taking the draught. The root and the seed are emmenagogues, check diarrhoea and disperse gatherings. The branches with the leaves are applied for snakebites. The leaves also dye the hair. I find in some authorities that jaundice is cured if this shrub is merely looked at while worn as an amulet.

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§ 24.57.1  The plant called alysson differs from the last only in having smaller leaves and branches. It has received its name because it prevents persons bitten by a dog from going mad if they take it in vinegar and wear it as an amulet. The authorities add the wonderful marvel that the mere sight of this shrub dries up sanies.

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§ 24.58.1  Radicula too prepares wools for the dyers; I have said that it is called struthion by the Greeks. It cures jaundice both when taken by itself in drink and in the form of a decoction, and likewise chest troubles; it promotes urine, loosens the bowels and purges the uterus, for which reason physicians call it 'golden goblet'. With honey too it is a splendid remedy for a cough, and in doses of a spoonful for orthopnoea; but with pearl barley and vinegar it removes leprous sores. Again, with panaces and caper root it breaks up and expels stone in the bladder, and a decoction with barley meal and wine disperses superficial abscesses. It is used as an ingredient of poultices, and of eye-salves to improve the vision; it is especially useful for making the patient sneeze, and also for troubles of the spleen and liver. The same plant taken in hydromel in doses of one denarius by weight cures asthma and pleurisy and all pains in the side.

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§ 24.58.2  Dog's-bane is a shrub having a leaf like that of ivy but softer; the tendrils are shorter, and the seed is pointed, grooved, downy, and strong smelling. If given in their food this seed in water kills dogs and all other quadrupeds.

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§ 24.59.1  Rosemary has been mentioned already. There are two kinds of it; one is barren, and the other has a stalk and a resinous seed called cachrys. The leaves have the smell of frankincense. A local application of the fresh root heals wounds, prolapsus of the anus, condylomata, and haemorrhoids. The juice both of the shrub and of the root cures jaundice and such conditions as call for cleansing. It sharpens the eyesight. The seed is given in drink for chronic complaints of the chest and with wine and pepper for uterine trouble; it is an emmenagogue, and with darnel meal is applied locally for gout; an application also clears away freckles, and is used when a calorific or sudorific is called for, also for sprains; milk is increased when it, and when the root, is taken in wine. The herb itself is applied with vinegar to scrofulous sores, and with honey is good for a cough.

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§ 24.60.1  There are, as I have said, many kinds of eachrys. But the one growing on rosemary, the plant just described, is resinous if rubbed. It neutralizes poisons, and the venom of all creatures except snakes. It promotes perspiration, dispels colic, and produces a rich supply of milk.

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§ 24.61.1  Sabine herb, called brathy by the Greeks, is of two kinds. One has a leaf like that of the tamarisk, the other like that of the cypress, for which reason some have called it the Cretan cypress. Many use it instead of frankincense for fumigations; in medicines moreover a double dose is said to be equivalent in strength to a single dose of cinnamon. It reduces gatherings and checks corroding sores; an application cleanses ulcers, and used as a pessary or for fumigation it brings away the dead foetus. With honey it is used as an ointment for erysipelas and carbuncles; taken in wine it cures jaundice. By fumigation sabine herb is said to cure the pip in chickens.

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§ 24.62.1  Like this sabine herb is the plant called selago. It is gathered without iron with the right hand, thrust under the tunic through the left arm-hole, as though the gatherer were thieving. He should be clad in white, and have bare feet washed clean; before gathering he should make a sacrificial offering of bread and wine. The plant is carried in a new napkin. The Druids of Gaul have recorded that it should be kept on the person to ward off all fatalities, and that the smoke of it is good for all diseases of the eyes.

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§ 24.63.1  The same authorities have called samoius (brook-weed) a plant growing in moist regions, which (they say) is to be gathered with the left hand by fasting persons to keep off the diseases of swine and oxen. As one gathers it one must not look at it, nor place the plant anywhere except in the trough, where it should be crushed for the animals to drink.

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§ 24.64.1  I have mentioned a the different kinds of gums. The better the sort of each kind the more potent its effect. Gums are injurious to the teeth, coagulate blood and therefore benefit those who spit blood; they are also good for burns though bad for affections of the trachea; they promote urine and lessen the bitter taste in things. Gums generally are acrid, but the gum that comes from bitter almonds, and is more efficacious for giving astringency to the internal organs, possesses heating properties. The gums from plums, cherries and vines are less esteemed. An application of gum has drying and astringent properties, in vinegar moreover it cures lichens on babies, and four oboli taken in must are good for a chronic cough. Gums are believed to improve the complexion and also the appetite; they are good for stone when taken with raisin wine. They are especially useful for the eyes and for wounds.

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§ 24.65.1  The Arabian thorn — I have mentioned the merits of the Egyptian thorn in my section on scents — even by itself by its thickening nature checks all fluxes, spitting of blood and excessive menstruation, and there is even more potency in its root.

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§ 24.66.1  The seed of the white thorn is a help against the stings of scorpions, and a crown of it when worn lessens headache. Like it is the plant called acanthion by the Greeks, but this has much smaller leaves, which have prickly points and are covered with down like cobweb. In the East this is even gathered to make a silk-like cloth. The leaves by themselves, or the roots, are taken in drink as a cure for opisthotonic tetanus.

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§ 24.67.1  A gum also is produced in Egypt from the acacia-thorn, from a pale tree and a dark, and likewise from a green tree, which is far better than the former two. Gum is also produced in Galatia; it is very inferior, and comes from a more thorny tree than the others. The seed of all the trees is like the lentil, only both grain and pod are smaller. It is gathered in autumn; if gathered earlier, its tonic properties are too powerful. The pods are steeped in rainwater and then pounded in a mortar. The juice is then extracted from them by presses, and finally thickened into lozenges by exposure to the sun in basins. A juice is also extracted from the leaves, but it is less efficacious. For tanning leather they use the seed instead of gall-nuts. The juice of the leaves and of the Galatian acacia is very dark, and considered of little value, as is also the juice of the deep-red kind. The purple gum, the dun-coloured, and that which dissolves most easily — these have the highest tonic and cooling qualities these are particularly useful for eye-salves. For purposes the lozenges are washed by some, roasted by others and by others thoroughly burnt. They dye the hair, and cure erysipelas, creeping ulcers, moist complaints of the body, gatherings, bruised joints, chilblains and hangnails. They check excessive menstruation in women and are good for prolapsus of the uterus and anus, also for the eyes and for sores of the mouth and of the genitals.

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§ 24.68.1  Our common thorn also, from which the fullers' coppers are filled, has a root with uses. Throughout the Spains, many use it as a scent and as an ingredient of ointments, calling it aspalathus of this name in the East, white, and as big as an ordinary tree,

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§ 24.69.1  but it is also the name of a shrub, lower in height but equally thorny, that grows in the islands Nisyrus and Rhodes, called by some ervsisceptrum, by others sphagnos, and by the Syrians diaxylon. The best is that least like fennel-giant, of a red colour or inclining to purple when the bark has been removed. It grows in several regions, but not everywhere has it a perfume. I have described its powerful scent when the rainbow rests extended over the shrub. It cures foul ulcers in the mouth, polypus, ulcerated genitals and those with carbuncles, and also chaps; taken in drink it clears away flatulence and strangury. The bark is good for those who bring up blood, and a decoction of it checks looseness of the bowels. The wild shrub also is thought to have similar properties.

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§ 24.70.1  There is also a thorn with the name of appendix, because the bright red berries hanging from it are called appendixes. These, either raw by themselves or dried and boiled down in wine, check looseness of the bowels and colic. The berries of pyracantha are taken in drink for the bites of serpents.

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§ 24.71.1  Paliurus too is a species of thorn. Its seed the Africans call zura; it is very efficacious for scorpion sting, and likewise for stone and cough. The leaves have an astringent quality. The root disperses superficial abscesses, gatherings and boils; taken in drink it is diuretic. A decoction of it in wine checks looseness of the bowels and neutralizes the poison of serpents. The root especially is given in wine.

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§ 24.72.1  The leaves of the holly, crushed and with the addition of salt, are good for diseases of the joints, while the berries are good for menstruation, coeliac trouble, dysentery and cholera. Taken in wine they check looseness of the bowels. An application of the decocted root extracts objects embedded in the flesh, and is very useful for dislocations and swellings. A holly tree planted in a town house or country house keeps off magic influences. Pythagoras has recorded that by its blossom water is solidified, and that a holly stick, cast at any animal, even if through want of strength in the thrower it falls short of the quarry, of its own accord rolls nearer the mark, so powerful is the nature of this tree. The smoke of the yew tree kills rats and mice.

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§ 24.73.1  Not even brambles did Nature create for harmful purposes only, and so she has given them their blackberries, that are food even for men. They have a drying and astringent property, being very good for gums, tonsils and genitals. They counteract the venom of the most vicious serpents, such as the haemorrhois and prester; the bloom or the berry counteracts that of scorpions. They close wounds without any danger of gatherings. Their stalks are diuretic, being pounded when young and the juice extracted, which is then condensed in the sun to the thickness of honey, and is considered to be, whether taken by the month or used as ointment, a specific for affections of the mouth or eyes, for spitting of blood, quinsy, troubles of the uterus or anus, and for coeliae affections. For affections of the mouth, indeed, even the chewed leaves are efficacious, and they are used as ointment for running sores, or for any kind of sore on the head. Even prepared thus without other ingredient they are applied near a the left breast for heart-burn, also to the stomach for stomach-ache, and to the eyes for procidence. The juice of them is also dropped into the ears. Added to rose wax-salve it heals condylomata. A decoction in wine of its tender shoots is a quick remedy for affections of the uvula. The same shoots, eaten by themselves like cabbage sprouts, or a decoction of them in a dry wine, strengthen loose teeth. They check looseness of the bowels and discharges of blood, and are good for dysentery. They are dried in the shade and then burnt so that the ash may reduce a relaxed uvula. The leaves also dried and crushed are said to be useful for sores on draught animals. The blackberries which grow on them can furnish a better mouth-medicine than even the cultivated mulberry. Made up on the same prescription or with hypocisthis and honey only, they are taken in drink for cholera, for heart-burn, and for the stings of spiders. Among the medicines that are called styptics, there is none more effective than the root of a bramble bearing blackberries boiled down in wine to one third, so that sores in the mouth and the anus may be rinsed with the decoction and fomented; so powerful is it that the very sponges used become hard as stone.

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§ 24.74.1  A second kind of bramble, on which a rose grows, produces a little round growth like a chestnut, an excellent remedy for the stone. It is different from the dog-rose, about which I shall speak a in the next book.

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§ 24.74.2  The cynosbatos is called by some cynapanxis, by others neurospastos. It has a leaf like a man's foot-print. It also bears a black cluster, in the berry of which it has a string, whence the whole shrub is called neurospastos. It is different from the caper that the physicians have called cynosbatos. The stalk of this, pickled in vinegar, is chewed as a remedy for affections of the spleen and for flatulence. The string of it chewed up with Chian mastic cleanses the mouth. The rose-blossom of brambles with axle-grease clears away mange; the berries mixed with oil of unripe grapes dye the hair. The blossom of the blackberry is gathered at harvest-time. The white blossom taken in wine is excellent for pleurisy and also for coeliac affections. The root, boiled down to one-third, checks looseness of the bowels and haemorrhage; the decoction also makes a wash that strengthens the teeth. With the same juice are fomented sores of the anus and of the genitals. The ash from the root replaces a relaxed uvula.

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§ 24.75.1  The Idaean bramble was so called because no other grows on Mount Ida. It is, however, more delicate than other brambles and smaller, with the canes farther apart and less prickly; it grows under the shade of trees. The blossom of it with honey is applied to fluxes of the eyes and to erysipelas, and in water it is given as a drink to patients with disordered stomachs; its other properties are the same as those mentioned above.

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§ 24.76.1  Among the different kinds of brambles is one called rhamnos by the Greeks, paler, more bushy, throwing out branches with straight thorns, not hooked like those of other brambles, and with larger leaves. The other kind of it is wild, darker and inclining to red, bearing a sort of pod. A decoction of the root of this in water makes a drug called lycium. The seed of it brings away the afterbirth. The other, the paler kind, is more astringent, cooling, and more suitable for the treatment of gatherings and wounds. The leaves of either kind, raw or boiled, are made up into an ointment with oil.

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§ 24.77.1  A superior lycium is said to be made from the thorn which is also called chironian, a boxthorn, the characteristics of which I have described among Indian trees, for Indian lycium is considered by far the best. The pounded branches and roots, which are of extreme bitterness, are boiled in water in a copper vessel for three days; the woody pieces are then taken away and the rest boiled again until it is of the consistency of honey. It is adulterated with bitter juices, even with lees of olive oil and with ox gall. The froth, which may be called the flower of the decoction, is an ingredient of remedies for the eyes. The rest of the juice is used for clearing spots from the face and for the cure of itch, chronic fluxes of the eyes and corroding sores in their corners, pus in the ears, sore tonsils and gains, cough and spitting of blood. For these a piece the size of a bean is swallowed, or if there is discharge from wounds it is applied locally, as it is to chaps, ulcers of the genitals, excoriations, fresh, spreading and also festering ulcers, excrescences in the nostrils and suppurations. It is also taken in milk by women for excessive menstruation. The Indian variety is distinguished by the lumps being black outside and red inside, quickly turning black when they have been broken. This kind is very astringent, and bitter. It is useful for all the same purposes as are the other kinds, but especially for treating the genitals.

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§ 24.78.1  Some think that sarcocolla is the tear-like drop of a thorn. It is like powdered frankincense, sweet with a touch of harshness, and gummy. It checks fluxes, and is used especially as an ointment for babies. It too grows black with age, and the whiter it is the better its quality.

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§ 24.79.1  There is still one famous remedy, called oporice, to be included among the medicines that are obtained from trees. Used for dysentery and stomach troubles, it is made in the following way. In a congius of white grape-juice are boiled down over a slow heat five quinces, seeds and all, five pomegranates, one sextarius of sorb-apples, an equal quantity of what is called Syrian sumach, and half an ounce of saffron. The boiling continues until the consistency is that of honey.

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§ 24.80.1  To these remedies I will add those which, because the Greeks have given the same name to different objects, we might be led to suppose came from trees.

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§ 24.80.2  The chamaedrys ('ground oak') is a plant whose Latin name is trixago. Some have called it chamaerops, and others the Trojan plant. It has leaves of the same size as mint leaves, coloured and indented as are those of the oak. Some have called it 'saw-shaped,' saying that it gave rise to the invention of the saw; its blossom is almost purple. It is cropped in rocky localities and is full of juice, being a very efficacious remedy, either by the mouth or as an ointment, for the poison of serpents, and also for disordered stomach, chronic cough, phlegm collected in the throat, ruptures, sprains and pain in the side. It reduces the spleen, promotes menstruation, and is diuretic, being for this reason efficacious in incipient dropsy, a handful of its sprays being boiled down to one-third in a sextarius and a half of water. It is ground in water to make lozenges for the purposes mentioned above. With honey it also heals abscesses and chronic sores, even when foul. There is also made from it a wine, which is useful for troubles of the chest. The juice of the leaves with oil clears away dimness of vision; for the spleen it is taken in vinegar. Used also as embrocation it is warming.

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§ 24.81.1  The chamaedaphne ('ground bay') consists of a single small stem, about a cubit high; the leaves are more slender than those of the bay; the seed, of a red colour, is attached to the leaves. It is applied fresh to the head for headache, it cools feverishness, and for colic it is taken with wine. Its juice when taken by the mouth promotes menstruation and urine, and applied as a pessary in wool it makes easier difficult childbirth.

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§ 24.82.1  The chamelaea ('ground olive') has leaves which resemble those of the olive — they are bitter, however, and scented — growing in rocky places and not exceeding a span in height. It purges the bowels, and draws away phlegm and bile; a decoction is made of the leaves with twice the quantity of wormwood, this juice being drunk with honey.

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§ 24.82.2  An application of the leaves also cleanses ulcers. It is said that if anyone before sunrise says while plucking it that he does so 'to cure white spots in the eyes,' it disperses this affection if worn as an amulet; but that, in whatever way it is gathered, it is beneficial for the eyes of beasts of burden and of cattle.

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§ 24.83.1  The chamaesyce ('ground fig') has leaves like those of the lentil, and not rising above the ground. It is found in dry and rocky localities. Very useful for clearness of vision and for arresting cataract, an ointment prepared from it is also used most beneficially for scars, dimness of sight and films over the eyes. Applied as a pessary on a bit of linen it soothes pains of the uterus. Warts too of every kind are removed by an ointment made from it. It is also beneficial for orthopnoea.

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§ 24.84.1  The chamaecissos ('ground ivy') is a plant with ears like those of wheat, with about five little branches and many leaves. When in blossom it might be taken for the white violet. The root is slender. For sciatica three oboli of the leaves are taken in two cyathi of wine for seven days, but it is a very bitter draught.

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§ 24.85.1  The chamaeleuce ('ground poplar') is called by us Romans farfarum or farfugium. It grows by the side of rivers, and has leaves like those of the poplar, but larger. Its root is placed on live coals of cypress wood, and the fumes of it inhaled through a funnel for chronic cough.

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§ 24.86.1  The chamaepeuce ('ground larch') has leaf resembling that of the larch and is specific for lumbago and pains in the spine. The chamaecyparis ('wound cypress') taken in wine is a powerful antidote to the poisons of all serpents and scorpions. The ampeloprason ('vine leek') grows in vineyards, has the leaves of a leek, causes violent belching, but is an antidote for the bites of serpents. It promotes urine and menstruation. Taken in drink and applied externally it checks discharges of blood from the genital organ. It is also administered to women after child-birth and for the bites of dogs. That plant also which is called stachys bears a resemblance to the leek, but has longer and more numerous leaves, a pleasant smell and a colour verging on saffron yellow. It is a powerful emmenagogue.

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§ 24.87.1  Clinopodium also called cleopiceton, zopyrontion or oeimoides, is like wild thyme, ligneous, a span high, and found on rocky soils; the flowers are arranged in a round circuit, giving the appearance of the feet of a couch. It is taken in drink for sprains, ruptures, strangury and the bites of serpents; the juice of a decoction is likewise employed.

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§ 24.88.1  I shall now append some plants, wonderful indeed but not so well known, postponing more famous ones for succeeding books.

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§ 24.88.2  Roman authorities give the name centuneulus to a plant with leaves resembling the hood of a mantle, found lying on the ground in cultivated fields, and called by the Greeks elematis. Taken in a dry wine it is very good for arresting looseness of the bowels. Bleeding too is arrested by this plant pounded and taken in doses of one denarius by weight to five cyathi of oxymel or warm water; this prescription also helps the afterbirth.

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§ 24.89.1  But the Greeks have also other kinds of clematis, one of which some call aetites, others lagioe, and others the 'slender scammony.' It has branches two feet long, leafy, and not unlike those of scammony, except that the leaves are darker and smaller. It is found in vineyards and cultivated fields, is eaten as salad with oil and salt, and relaxes the bowels. With linseed it is also drunk in a dry wine by sufferers from dysentery. The leaves with pearl barley are applied to fluxes from the eyes, a damp rag being first placed underneath. An application draws scrofulous sores to suppuration, and then a further application with axle-grease completes the cure. With green oil also they are beneficial for haemorrhoids, and with honey for consumptives. Taken as a food they also promote an abundant supply of human milk, applied to the heads of babies they stimulate the growth of hair, and eaten with vinegar. They act as an aphrodisiac.

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§ 24.90.1  There is another clematis, called also the Egyptian, by some daphnoides and by others polygonoides, with a leaf like that of the bay; it is long and slender, and taken in vinegar is efficacious against the bite of serpents, being specific for that of asps.

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§ 24.91.1  It is Egypt especially that produces this clematis, and also the aron, which I have mentioned in my section on bulbs; about it and dracontium there has been sharp controversy, for some have asserted that the two are the same. Glaucias distinguished them by their mode of reproduction, declaring that dracontium is wild aron. Some have called the root aron, but the stem dracontium, though the latter is a totally different plant, if at least it is the same as that called by the Romans dracunculus. For the aron has a black root, broad and round, and much larger, large enough to fill the hand, but dracunculus a reddish one like a coiled snake, from which its name is derived.

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§ 24.92.1  The Greeks themselves moreover have put a wide difference between the two plants. They describe the seed of dracunculus as hot, with so foul a stench that the smell causes pregnant women to miscarry; aron they have lauded to the skies as an excellent food, preferring however the female plant, on the ground that the male is harder, and slower to cook, adding that it clears the chest of disorders, and that dried and sprinkled in drink or made into an electuary it is diuretic and an emmenagogue, as it is also when drunk in oxymel. They prescribed it to be drunk in sheep's milk for ulcerated stomach and bowels; cooked on hot ash and taken in oil they gave it for a cough. Others boiled it in milk for the decoction to be drunk. Thoroughly boiled it was applied by them to fluxes from the eyes, and likewise to bruises and to affected tonsils. Glaucias injected it in oil for troublesome piles, using it with honey as an ointment for freckles. He recommended it also as an antidote against poisons, and, prepared as for coughs, for pleurisy and pneumonia. The seed pounded up with olive oil or rose oil is injected for earache. Dieuches administered it, thoroughly mixed with the powder from a loaf, for coughs, asthma, orthopnoea, and the spitting of pus. Diodotus gave it in the form of an honey electuary for consumption and complaints of the lungs, and even used it as an application for broken bones. Applied round the sexual parts it helps delivery of all animals. Dimness of vision and disorders of the stomach are removed by the juice of the root with Attic honey, and cough by the broth of a decoction with the addition of honey. The juice is a wonderful remedy for ulcers of all kinds, whether corroding, cancerous, spreading, or polypus in the nostrils. The leaves, boiled in wine and oil, are good for bums. Taken in salt and vinegar they are a strong purge, boiled with honey they are good for dislocations, and also fresh or dried, with salt added, for gouty joints. Hippocrates applied them, fresh or dried, with honey locally to boils. As an emmenagogue two drachmae of the seed or root in two cyathi of wine are sufficient, and the same draught, if cleansing after delivery is not effected, also brings away the afterbirth. Hippocrates also used the root by itself as a pessary. It is said too that in times of plague it is healthful to take it in one's food. It dissipates the effects of drunkenness. The fumes arising from it when it bums keep away serpents, especially asps, or make them so tipsy that they are found in a state of torpor. Serpents are also kept off if the body is thoroughly rubbed with aron in oil of bay. For this reason it is also considered beneficial for snakebites if one takes aron in a draught of dark wine. It is said that cheese keeps very well if wrapped in leaves of aron.

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§ 24.93.1  The dracunculus I have referred to is dug up when the barley is ripening and the moon is crescent. Merely to have it on the person keeps away serpents. So beneficial a draught is it said to be to those who have been bitten; and its potency to be greater if iron does not touch the plant. Earache too is relieved by its juice.

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§ 24.93.2  That plant, however, which the Greeks call dracontium has been pointed out to me in three illustrations; the first has leaves like those of beet, a thyrsus and a purple flower; this is like the aron. Others have pointed out a kind with a long root, which is as it were stamped and knotted, and with three stems in all, prescribing a decoction of its leaves in vinegar for the bite of serpents. The third plant pointed out had a leaf larger than that of the cornel and a root like that of a reed, the knots on it being, they said, as many as the plant is years old, the leaves too being also equal in number. They prescribed this plant in wine or water for snakebite.

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§ 24.94.1  There is also a plant called the ails, which too is a native of Egypt. It is similar to the aron, only itself and its leaves are smaller, as is also the root in particular, though it is as big as a full-sized olive. The white kind puts out twin stems, the other kind one only. Either is good for running sores as well as for burns, and for fistula also if a suppository made of it be inserted. Corroding ulcers are arrested by an application of their leaves boiled in water and then beaten up with the addition of rose oil. But there is one great marvel connected with this plant: if it touches the sexual organs of any female animal she is driven to destruction.

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§ 24.95.1  The myriophyllon, which our people call millefolium, has a tender stem like that of fennel, with abundance of leaves, which have also given the plant its name. It is found in marshy districts, and with vinegar makes a splendid treatment for wounds. Iu drink it is taken for strangury, affections of the bladder, asthma, and falls from a height. It is also very efficacious for toothache. In Etruria the name is given to a slim meadow-plant, with many leaves at the sides like hair, and extremely beneficial for wounds; the people declare that applied with axle-grease it unites the tendons of oxen when cut by the ploughshare and closes the wound.

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§ 24.96.1  The pseudobunion has the leaves of the navew; it grows into a bush about a span in height, the most esteemed being found in Crete. For colic, strangury and pains in the sides or hypochondria doses of five or six sprays are taken in drink.

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§ 24.97.1  The myrris, also called myrriza or myrra, is very like hemlock in stem, leaves and flower, but smaller and more slender, and not unpleasant as a food. With wine it promotes menstruation and facilitates delivery. It is said that it is also healthful to take it in drink in time of plague. Given in broth it helps consumptives. It sharpens the appetite and allays the bite of poisonous spiders. Sores too on the face or head are cured by its juice obtained by steeping the plant in water for three days.

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§ 24.98.1  The oenobreches has leaves like those of the lentil, but a little longer, a red flower and a small, slender root. It grows round springs. Dried till it is like flour, and sprinkled in white wine, it stops strangury and checks looseness of the bowels. Rubbing with its juice mixed with oil causes perspiration.

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§ 24.99.1  My proposed task of discussing wonderful plants suggests that I also say a few words about those that are magical. For what plants are more wonderful than they? These were first brought to the notice of our part of the world by Pythagoras and Democritus, who followed as their authority the Magi. Pythagoras declares that water is congealed by the plants coracesia and calicia; but I find no mention of them in other authorities, nor does Pythagoras tell us anything else about them.

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§ 24.100.1  The same authority gives the name of minyas, or corinthia, to a plant of which, he says, the decocted juice, used as a fomentation, immediately heals the bites of serpents. He adds that if it is poured on the grass and a person happens to tread on it, or if by chance it is sprinkled on the body, inevitable death ensues; so absolutely devilish is the poison of this plant, except that it counteracts other poisons.

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§ 24.101.1  The same Pythagoras calls aproxis a plant whose root catches fire at a distance like naphtha; I have spoken about it in my section on the marvels of the earth. He also informs us that the symptoms of diseases which have attacked the human body when the cabbage a is in blossom, even though the patient has been cured, are felt to recur every time this plant blossoms; he speaks of a similar peculiarity following diseases which have attacked when wheat, hemlock or the violet is in flower. I am aware that this book of his is ascribed by some to the physician Cleemporus, but an ancient and unbroken tradition assigns it to Pythagoras. Were the author anyone else, the mere fact that he has considered the result of his labour worthy of that great thinker enhances the authority of a book; but who would believe that Cleemporus acted so, since he published other works, and that under his own name?

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§ 24.102.1  That Democritus was the author of the book called is a well-attested tradition; yet in it this famous scientist, the keenest student next to Pythagoras of the Magi, has told us of far more marvellous phenomena. For example, the plant aglaophotis, which received its name from men's wonder at its magnificent colour, being native, he says, to the marble quarries of Arabia on the Persian side, is therefore also called marmaritis. The Magi use it, he tells us, when they wish to call up gods.

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§ 24.102.2  The achaemenis, he reports, is of an amber colour, leafless and found among the Taradastili of India; criminals, according to him, if they drink it in wine, confess all their misdeeds because they suffer tortures from divers phantoms of spirits that haunt them; he also called it hippophobas, because mares have an intense aversion to it.

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§ 24.102.3  The theombrotion grows, says Democritus, thirty from the Choaspes, being like a peacock in its colourings and of a very fine scent. He goes on to state that the kings of Persia take it in drink for all bodily disorders and for instability of intellect and of the sense of justice, and that it is also called semnion from the majesty of its power.

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§ 24.102.4  Democritus goes on to mention another plant, the adamantis, a native of Armenia and Cappadocia; if it be placed, he says, near lions they lie on their backs and wearily yawn. The reason for the name is because the plant cannot be crushed, Ariana is given as the home of the arianis, a plant of the colour of fire. It is gathered, he says, when the sun is in Leo, and pieces of wood soaked in oil catch fire at its touch.

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§ 24.102.5  Democritus says that the therionarca, growing in Cappadocia and Mysia, makes all wild beasts become torpid, and that they cannot be revived unless sprinkled with the urine of a hyena.

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§ 24.102.6  He tells us that the aethiopis grows in Meroh, that therefore its other name is the merois, that it has the leaf of the lettuce and that it is very beneficial for dropsy if taken in honey wine.

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§ 24.102.7  The ophiusa he speaks of as growing in Elephantine, which also belongs to Ethiopia, a plant livid in colour and revolting to look at, to take which in drink causes such terrible visions of threatening serpents that fear of them causes suicide; wherefore those guilty of sacrilege are forced to drink it. An antidote is palm wine.

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§ 24.102.8  The thalassaegle we are told is found along the river Indus, and is therefore also called potamaugis to drink which causes men to rave, while weird visions beset their minds.

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§ 24.102.9  The theangelus Democritus says, grows on Mount Lebanon in Syria, on Mount Dicte in Crete, and in Babylon and Susa in Persia; the Magi take it in drink to gain power to divine.

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§ 24.102.10  The gelotophyllis grows in Bactria and along the Borysthenes. If this be taken in myrrh and wine all kinds of phantoms beset the mind, causing laughter which persists until the kernels of pine-nuts are taken with pepper and honey in palm wine.

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§ 24.102.11  According to the same authority the hestiateris is a Persian plant, so named from its promotion of good fellowship, because it makes the company gay; it is also called protomediap from its use to gain the highest position at Court; casignete, because it grows only in company with its own species, and not with any other plants; also dionysonymphas, because it goes wonderfully well with wine.

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§ 24.102.12  Helianthes is the name given to a plant with leaves like those of the myrtle, growing in the district of Themiscyra and on the mountains along the coasts of Cilicia. A decoction of it in lion's fat, with saffron and palm wine added, is used, he says, as an ointment by the Magi and the Persian kings to give to the body a pleasing appearance, and therefore it is also called heliocallis.

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§ 24.102.13  The same authority gives the name hermesias to a means of procreating children who shall be handsome and good. It is not a plant, but a compound of ground kernels of pine nuts with honey, myrrh, saffron and palm wine, with the later addition of theombrotion and milk. He prescribes a draught of it to those who are about to become parents, after conception, and to nursing mothers. This, he says, results in children exceeding fair in mind and body, as well as good. Of all these plants he adds also the magical names.

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§ 24.102.14  Apollodorus, a follower of Democritus, added to these plants one that he called aeschynomene, because on the approach of a hand it contracts its leaves, and another called crocis, whose touch, he declares, kills poisonous spiders; Crateuas added the onothuris, by the sprinkling of which in wine he asserted that the fierceness of all animals is calmed; and a little while ago a well-known grammarian added anacampseros, by the mere touch of which, he said, love was restored, even though the lovers parted in hatred. These few remarks are quite enough to have been said for the present about the wonderful powers ascribed to plants by the Magi, as I shall speak of them again on a more fitting occasion.

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§ 24.103.1  Many have described the eriphia. It has a me beetle running up and down inside its stem, making a noise like that of a kid; hence also comes its name. It is said that nothing is better than this plant for improving the voice.

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§ 24.104.1  The wool-plant given to fasting sheep produces an abundance of milk. Equally well known generally is the lactoris, plant full of milk taste of which produces vomitings. Some say that this is the same plant (others say one like it) as that called the military plant, because there is no wound made by iron which is not cured within five days by an application of it in oil.

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§ 24.105.1  Another plant highly popular among the Greeks is the stratiotes, but it grows only in Egypt when the Nile is in flood; it is like the aizoum, only its leaves are larger. It is wonderfully cooling, and applied in vinegar heals wounds, as well as erysipelas and suppurations. It also arrests haemorrhage of the kidneys in a marvellous way if taken in drink with male frankincense.

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§ 24.106.1  A plant that grows on the head of a statue, gathered into piece taken from some garment and tied on with red thread, is said to relieve headache immediately on being applied.

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§ 24.107.1  Any plant whatsoever, gathered before sunrise out of streams or rivers, provided that nobody sees the gatherer, if it is tied as an amulet to the left arm, is said to keep away tertian agues, provided that the patient does not know what is going on.

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§ 24.108.1  The plant called 'tongue' grows around springs. Its root, burnt and pounded with pig's fat — they add that the pig should be black and barren — cures mange if the patients use it as embrocation in the sunshine.

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§ 24.109.1  If the plants that sprout up inside a sieve thrown away on a cross-path are plucked and used as an amulet, they hasten the delivery of lying-in women.

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§ 24.110.1  A plant growing on the top of country dung-heaps is, if taken in water, a very efficacious remedy for quinsies.

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§ 24.111.1  A plant near which dogs make water, if uprooted without the touch of iron, is a very quick remedy for dislocations.

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§ 24.112.1  In my account of vine-supporting trees the tree called rumpotinus received a notice. When it does not support a vine there grows near it a plant called by the Gauls rodarum. It has a stem with knots, like a twig of a fig-tree; the leaves are those of a nettle, whitish in the centre, but in course of time becoming red all over; the blossom is silvery. If the leaves are beaten up with old axle-grease, without being touched by iron, they are a sovereign remedy for tumours, inflammations and gatherings. After being rubbed with it the patient spits to his right three times. They say that the remedy is more efficacious if three persons of different nationalities do the rubbing from left to right.

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§ 24.113.1  What is called the unfilial plant is of a hoary white, in appearance like rosemary, clothed with leaves like a thyrsus and terminating in a head, from which sprout up little branches that also terminate each in a little head of its own. This is why the plant has been called unfilial, because the children out-top their parent. Others have thought that it has been so named rather because no animal touches it. Crushed between two stones this plant gives out an effervescing juice, which added to milk and wine is a sovereign remedy for pansies. Attributed to it is this wonderful property; that they who have tasted it are never attacked by quinsy. Accordingly, they say, it is also given to pigs, and those refusing to swallow the medicine are cut off by that complaint. There are some who think that a little of it is woven into birds' nests, and that this is why chicks are not choked by gulping their food too greedily.

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§ 24.114.1  Venus' comb is so named from its resemblance to combs; its root pounded with mallows extracts all foreign bodies lodged in the flesh.

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§ 24.115.1  The plant called exedum dispels lethargy. The plant notia is well known under various names in the curriers' work-shops; I find that taken in wine or vinegar and water it is most efficacious for the sting of scorpions.

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§ 24.116.1  Philanthropos is a name which the Greeks in witty sarcasm give to a plant because it sticks to the clothes. A chaplet made out of it and placed on the head relieves headaches. But what is called dog-bur, if beaten up in wine with plantain and millefolium, heals cancerous sores, the plaster being taken off every third day. It also cures pigs, if dug up without iron; it is added to their swill before they go to feed, or else given them in milk and wine. Some add that as he is getting it up the digger should say: 'This is the plant argemon, which Minerva discovered to be a remedy for the pigs that shall taste of it.'

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§ 24.117.1  Some have said that tordylon is the seed of sili, others that it is itself a plant, which they have also called syreon. I find nothing recorded of it except that it grows on mountains, that burnt and taken in drink it promotes menstruation and expectoration, the root being even more efficacious, that its juice, swallowed in doses of three oboli, cures ill-orders of the kidneys, and that its root is also an ingredient of emollient plasters.

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§ 24.118.1  Grass, itself the very commonest of plants, trails its knotted blades along the ground, and from them and out of the head sprout many new roots. Its leaves in the rest of the world grow to a fine point, and only on Mount Parnassus sprout leaves thicker together than anywhere else, of the appearance of ivy, and with a white, scented flower. To draught-cattle no other plant is more attractive, whether fresh, or dried into hay and sprinkled with water when it is given them to eat. Its juice too, which is sweet, is said to be collected on Parnassus because of its richness. Over the rest of the world a decoction is used in its place to close cuts; the crushed plant by itself has the same effect and also prevents wounds from becoming inflamed. To the decoction are added wine and honey, by some, equal parts also of frankincense, pepper and myrrh, and the whole is again boiled in a bronze vessel to make a remedy for toothache and eye-fluxes. A decoction of the root in wine cures colic, strangury and sores of the bladder, breaking up stone. The seed causes a stronger flow of urine, and checks looseness of the bowels and vomiting. It is also specific for the bites of the draco. Some prescribe nine knots either from one plant or from two or three to make up that number of joints, rolled up in black wool with the grease still in it, as a remedy for scrofulous sores and superficial abscesses. The person gathering it, they add, ought to be fasting, and in this state he should proceed to the house of the patient while he is away, and on his appearance say three times: Fasting I give a cure to a fasting patient, and so fasten the nine joints as an amulet. This is to be done on three days running. The kind of grass that has seven spaces between knots makes a very effective amulet for headache. For severe pains in the bladder some authorities prescribe a decoction of grass in wine, boiled down to one half, to be drunk after the bath.

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§ 24.119.1  There are some who speak of three kinds of pointed grass. When on each head there are at most five points they call it fixiger grass.; These points plaited together they insert into the nostrils and draw them out again to cause bleeding. The second kind, which is like the aizotim, they use with axle-grease for whitlows, hangnails, and when flesh has grown over the nails, calling it finger grass, because it heals the fingers. There is a third kind of finger grass, but it is slender, growing on ruins or tiles. Its properties are caustic, and it checks creeping ulcers. Grass put round the head checks copious bleeding at the nose. It is said that in the district of Babylon camels are killed by the grass that grows by the side of the roads.

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§ 24.120.1  Held in no less honour is fenugreek, which is also called telis, carphos, bucerasp and aegoceras because its seed is shaped like small horns; the Roman name for it is silicia. The method of sowing it we have described in its proper place. Its properties are to dry, to soften and to dissolve. The juice of the decoction is of help in several ailments of women: whether it is hardness, swelling or contraction of the uterus, the treatment is fomentation and the sitz bath. Injections are also of value. It checks scaly eruptions on the face. Splenic troubles are cured by a local application of a decoction to which soda has been added; the decoction may also be made with vinegar. Such a decoction is also good for the liver. In cases of difficult childbirth Diocles prescribed an acetabulum of its crushed seed in nine cyathi of concentrated must; three-quarters were to be drunk, then the patients were to bathe in hot water, next, as they were sweating in the bath, he gave further half of what remained, and then the rest after the bath. In this way the maximum benefit was obtained. A decoction in hydromel of fenugreek meal with barley or linseed was used by the same physician to make a pessary for violent pains in the uterus; he combined this treatment with a plaster at the base of the abdomen. He treated leprous sores and freckles with equal parts of sulphur and fenugreek meal, the skin having been prepared beforehand with soda, applying the mixture several times a day and not allowing the patient to be rubbed with it. Theodorus treated leprous sores with fenugreek and one-fourth part of cleaned cress steeped in the strongest vinegar. Timon prescribed as an emmenagogue a draught of half an acetabulum of fenugreek seed with nine cyathi of concentrated must and water, and there is no doubt that a decoction of it is very good for ulcerated uterus and intestines, as the seed is for the joints and hypochondria. If, however, it is boiled down with mallows, and honey wine be afterwards added, a draught is praised as a pre-eminent remedy for troubles of the uterus and intestines, seeing that the steam also from the decoction is of the highest value; a decoction of fenugreek, too, removes offensive smells of the armpits. The meal with wine and soda quickly removes scurf and dandruff on the head. A decoction too of the meal in hydromel, mixed with axle-grease, cures complaints of the genitals, likewise superficial abscesses, parotid tumours, gouty affections of feet or hands, affections of the joints and the receding of flesh from the bones; but the meal is kneaded in vinegar for dislocations. A decoction of the meal in vinegar and honey only is used as a liniment for splenic trouble. Kneaded in wine it cleanses cancerous sores; if honey is afterwards added a complete cure is effected. A gruel also of this meal is taken for ulceration of the chest and for chronic cough. It is boiled down for a long time until the bitterness disappears; afterwards honey is added. I shall now proceed to the peculiar glory of plants.

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§ 25.1.1  THIS peculiar glory of plants which I am now going to speak of, Mother Earth producing them sometimes for medicinal purposes only, rouses in one's mind admiration for the care and industry of the men of old; there was nothing left untried or unattempted by them, and furthermore nothing kept secret, nothing which they wished to be of no benefit to posterity. But we moderns desire to hide and suppress the discoveries worked out by these investigators, and to cheat human life even of the good things that have been won by others. Yes indeed, those who have gained a little knowledge keep it in a grudging spirit secret to themselves, and to teach nobody else increases the prestige of their learning. So far has custom departed from fresh research and assistance to life; the supreme task of our great minds has long been to keep within individual memory the successes of the ancients, so allowing them to be forgotten. But, heaven knows, there are some whom a single discovery has added to the number of the gods, whose life on earth at any rate has been made more glorious by their names being given to plants, so kind the thanks of a mindful posterity. This careful research of theirs is less wonderful when rewarded by plants of fascinating growth or attractive as food; but they have scoured also trackless mountain heights, unexplored deserts and all the bowels of the earth, finding out the power of every root and the uses to which can be put mere slim threads of vegetation, and turning to healthful purposes that which the very beasts refuse to touch as food.

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§ 25.2.1  This subject was less popular with our countrymen than it should have been considering their vast appetite for all things useful and good; the first student of it, and for a long time the only one, being that same Marcus Cato, the master of all excellent crafts, who merely touched briefly the subject, without neglecting even veterinary medicine. After him one only of our distinguished men has tried his hand at the subject, Gaius Valgius, an author of approved scholarship, who left unfinished a work dedicated to the late emperor Augustus, beginning also his preface with a devout prayer that his Imperial Highness should always, and above all others, be the healer of every human ill.

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§ 25.3.1  Before Valgius the only Roman who had written on this subject, as far as I can discover, was Pompeius Lenaeus, a freedman of Pompeius Magnus, in whose day, I find, scientific treatment of it first found a home among Roman students. For it was Mithridates, the greatest king of his time, whom Pompeius vanquished, that was, we know by evidence as well as by report, a more attentive investigator of life's problems than any of those born before him. By his unaided efforts he thought out the plan of drinking poison daily, after first taking remedies, in order that sheer custom might render it harmless; he was the first to discover the various antidotes, one of which is even known by his name; he also discovered the mixing with antidotes of the blood of Pontic ducks, because they lived on poison; addressed to him were treatises, still extant, written by the famous physician Asclepiades, who when urgently invited to come from Rome sent instructions instead; Mithridates alone of men is definitely known to have spoken twenty-two languages, and no man of his subject peoples was ever addressed by him through an interpreter during all the fifty-six years of his reign. He then, with his brilliant intellect and wide interests, was an especially diligent student of medicine, and collected detailed knowledge from all his subjects, who comprised a great part of the world, leaving among his private possessions a bookcase of these treatises with specimens and the properties of each. Pompeius however on getting possession of all the royal booty ordered his freedman Lenaeus, a man of letters, to translate these into Latin. This great victory therefore was as beneficent to life as it was to the State.

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§ 25.4.1  Besides these the subject has been treated by Greek writers, whom we have mentioned in their proper places; of these, Crateuas, Dionysius and Metrodorus adopted a most attractive method, though one which makes clear little else except the difficulty of employing it. For they painted likenesses of the plants and then wrote under them their properties. But not only is a picture misleading when the colours are so many, particularly as the aim is to copy Nature, but besides this, much imperfection arises from the manifold hazards in the accuracy of copyists. In addition, it is not enough for each plant to be painted at one period only of its life, since it alters its appearance with the fourfold changes of the year.

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§ 25.5.1  For this reason the other writers have given verbal accounts only; some have not even given the shape of the plants, and for the most part have been content with bare names, since they thought it sufficient to point out the properties and nature of a plant to those willing to look for it. To gain this knowledge is no difficult matter; 11 at least have enjoyed the good fortune to examine all but a few plants through the devotion to science of Antonius Castor, the highest botanical authority of our time; I used to visit his special garden, in which he would rear a great number of specimens even when he passed his hundredth year, having suffered no bodily ailment and, in spite of his age, no loss of memory or physical vigour. Nothing else will be found that aroused greater wonder among the ancients than botany. Long ago was discovered a method of predicting eclipses of the sun and moon — not the day or night merely but the very hour. Yet there still exists among a great number of the common people an established conviction that these phenomena are due to the compelling power of charms and magic herbs, and that the science of them is the one outstanding province of women. At any rate tales everywhere are widely current about Medea of Colchis and other sorceresses, especially Circe of Italy, who has even been enrolled as a divinity. This is the reason, I think, why Aeschylus, one of the earliest poets, declared that Italy abounds in potent herbs, and many have said the same of Circeii, where she lived. Strong confirmatory evidence exists even today in the fact that the Marsi, a tribe descended from Circe's son, are well-known snake-charmers. Homer indeed, the first ancestor of ancient learning, while expressing in several passages great admiration for Circe, gives the prize for herbs to Egypt, even though at that time the irrigated Egypt of today did not yet exist, for it was formed afterwards by the alluvial mud of the river. At any rate he says that Egyptian herbs in great number were given by the wife of the king to the Helen of his tale, including that celebrated nepenthes, which brought forgetfulness and remission of sorrow, to be administered especially by Helen to all mortals. But the first of all those known to tradition to publish anything about botany carefully was Orpheus; after him Musaeus and Hesiod, as we have said, expressed great admiration for the plant called polium; Orpheus and Hesiod recommended fumigations. Homer mentions by name other plants also, which I shall speak of in their appropriate places. After him the celebrated philosopher Pythagoras was the first to compose a book on the properties of plants, assigning their original discovery to Apollo, Aesculapius and the immortal gods generally: Democritus also composed a similar work. Both of them visited the Magi of Persia, Arabia, Ethiopia and Egypt, and so amazed were the ancients at these books that they positively asserted even unbelievable statements. Xanthus, who wrote books on history, relates in the first of them that a young snake, which had been killed, was restored to life by his father, who used a plant called by Xanthus balis, and that the same plant brought back to life one Tylo, whom the snake had killed. Juba too records that a man in Arabia was restored to life by means of a plant. Democritus said, and Theophrastus believed him, that there was a plant which, carried by the bird I have mentioned, forced out by its touch a wedge driven into a tree by shepherds. Although these tales are incredible, yet they fill us with wonder, and force us to admit that there is still much truth in them. Hence too I find that most authorities hold that there is nothing which cannot be achieved by the power of plants, but that the properties of most are still unknown. Among these thinkers was Herophilus, famous in medicine, who is reported to have said that certain plants are perhaps beneficial even when merely trodden on. It has been observed at any rate that wounds and diseases get worse on the arrival of people who have made a journey on foot.

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§ 25.6.1  Such was the condition of medicine in the old days, all of it finding its way into the dialects of Greece. But the reason why more herbs are not familiar is because experience of them is confined to illiterate country-folk, who form the only class living among them; moreover nobody cares to look for them when crowds of medical men are to be met everywhere. Many simples also, though their properties have been discovered, still lack names, for instance, the plant I mentioned when dealing with the cultivation of crops, which we know keeps all birds away if buried at the corners of the cornfield. The most disgraceful reason for this scanty knowledge is that even those who possess it refuse to teach it, just as though they would themselves lose what they have imparted to others. To this must be added that there is no sure method of discovery; for even of those we already know chance has sometimes been the finder; at other times, to speak the truth, the discoverer was a god. Down to recent years there has been no cure for the bite of a mad dog, a symptom of which is dread of water and aversion to drink of any kind. Recently the mother of a man serving in the praetorian guard saw in a dream how she sent to her son to be taken in drink the root of the wild rose, called cynorrhodon, which by its appearance had attracted her the before in a shrubbery. Operations were going on in Lacetania, the part of Spain nearest to Italy, and by chance it happened that the soldier, after being bitten by a dog, was beginning to show a horror of water, when a letter arrived from the mother, who begged him to obey the heavenly warning. So his life was unexpectedly saved, as was that of all who afterwards tried a similar remedy. Elsewhere among our authorities the only medicinal use of cynorrhodon to be found is that the ash of the spongy substance that forms in the middle of its thorns was mixed with honey to make hair grow on the head where mange had left it bare. In the same province, on the land of my host, I learned of a recent discovery there, a stalk called dracunculus, of the thickness of a thumb, with spots of many colours like those of a viper, which people said was a remedy for the bites of all creatures, a different plant from those I have called dracunculus in the preceding book. This one has a different shape, and is an amazing plant in other ways; for when snakes begin to cast their slough it springs up to the height of about two feet, and then buries itself in the ground when snakes do so, and while it is concealed no snake at all is anywhere to be seen. This by itself would be a kindly service of Nature, if it only warned us and pointed out the time of danger.

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§ 25.6.2  Nor is it beasts alone that are guilty of causing injury; at times waters also and regions do the same. When Germanicus Caesarhad moved forward his camp across the Rhine, in a maritime district of Germany there was only one source of fresh water. To drink it caused within two years the teeth to fall out and the use of the knee-joints to fail. Physicians used to call these maladies stomacace and scelotyrbe. A remedy was found in the plant called britannica, which is good not only for the sinews and for diseases of the mouth, but also for the relief of quinsy and snakebite. It has dark, rather long leaves, and a dark root. Its juice is extracted even from the root. The blossom is called vibones; gathered before thunder is heard, and swallowed, it keeps away the fear of quinsy for a whole year. It was pointed out to our men by the Frisians, at that time a loyal tribe, in whose territory our camp lay. Why the plant was so called I greatly wonder, unless perhaps, living on the shore of the British ocean, they have so named the britannica because it is, as it were, a near neighbour of Britain. It is certain that the plant was not so named because it grew abundantly in that island: Britain was at that time an independent state.

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§ 25.7.1  It was one of the ambitions of the past to give one's name a to a plant, as we shall point out was done by kings. It was thought a great honour to discover a plant and be of assistance to human life, although now perhaps some will think that these researches of mine are just idle trifling. So paltry in the eyes of Luxury are even the things that conduce to our health. It is but right, however, to mention in the first place the plants whose discoverers can be found, with their properties classified according to the kinds of disease for which they are a remedy. To reflect indeed on this makes one pity the lot of man; besides chances and changes and the strange happenings that every hour brings, there are thousands of diseases that every mortal has to dread. To distinguish which are the most grievous of them might be considered almost an act of folly, since every man considers that the particular disease from which he is suffering at the moment is the most awful. On this point, however, the experience of time has concluded that the disease causing the sharpest agony is strangury from stone in the bladder; next comes disease of the stomach, and after that pains produced by diseases of the head; these being about the only diseases that are responsible for suicides.

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§ 25.7.2  myself am amazed that the Greeks have described even harmful plants, and not the poisonous ones only, since the state of human life is such that death is frequently a harbour of refuge even for the most excellent of men, Marcus Varro relating that the Roman knight Servius Clodius, owing to the severe pain of gout, was forced to rub his legs all over with a poison, after which that part of his body was as free from sensation as it was from pain. But what excuse was there to point out the means of deranging the mind, of causing abortion, and of many similar crimes. I personally do not mention abortives, nor even love-philtres, remembering as I do that the famous general Lucullus was killed by a love-philtre, nor yet any other unholy magic, unless it be by way of warning or denunciation, especially as I have utterly condemned all faith in such practices. Enough pains, and more than enough, will have been taken if I point out plants healthful to life and discovered in order to preserve it.

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§ 25.8.1  The most renowned of plants is, according to Homer, the one that he thinks is called by the gods moly, assigning to Mercury its discovery and the teaching of its power over the most potent sorceries. Report says it grows today in Arcadia round Pheneus and on Cyllene; it is said to be like the description in Homer, with a round, dark root, of the size of an onion and with the leaves of a squill, and not difficult to dig up. Greek authorities have painted its blossom yellow, though Homer describes it as white. I have met a herbalist physician who said that the plant was also to be found in Italy, and that one could be brought for me from Campania within a few days, as it had been dug out there in spite of the difficulties of rocky ground, with a root thirty feet long, and even that not entire, but broken off short.

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§ 25.9.1  After moly the plant with the highest reputation they call the dodecatheon, as a compliment to the grandeur of all the twelve gods. It is said that taken in water it cures all diseases. Its leaves are seven, very like those of lettuce and sprouting from a yellow root.

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§ 25.10.1  The first plant to be discovered was the peony, which still retains the name of the discoverer; it is called by some pentorobon, by others glycyside, for an added difficulty in botany is the variety of names given to the same plant in different districts. It grows on shaded mountains, having a stem among the leaves about four fingers high, which bears on its top four or five growths like almonds, in them being a large amount of seed, red and black. This plant also prevents the mocking delusions that the Fauns bring on us in our sleep. They recommend us to uproot it at night-time, because the woodpecker of Mars, should he see the act, will attack the eyes in its defence.

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§ 25.11.1  The plant panaces by its very name promises to be a cure for every disease; it has many varieties, and to the gods have been ascribed the discovery of its properties. One variety in fact has the additional name of asclepion, after which Asclepius called his daughter Panacia. The juice of this plant when curdled is like that, already described, of fennel-giant, coming from a root with a thick and salty skin. When it has been pulled up it is a pious duty to fill in the hole with various cereals as an atonement to the earth. Where the juice is prepared, and how, and the most esteemed kind, I have already described in my account of exotic plants. The kind imported out of Macedonia they call bucolicon, because herdsmen collect the sap as it exudes of its own accord; this evaporates very rapidly. As to the other kinds, the least popular is the dark and soft, for these qualities are signs of adulteration with wax.

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§ 25.12.1  A second kind they call heracleon, and say that it was discovered by Hercules; others call it heracleotic or wild origanum, because it is like the origanum I have already described; the root is of no value.

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§ 25.13.1  A third kind of panaces has the surname chironium from Chiron the centaur who discovered it. Its leaf is like that of lapathum, but larger and more hairy. The blossom is golden and the root small. It grows in rich soils. The blossom of this kind is very efficacious, and therefore has a wider range of usefulness than that of the kinds mentioned above.

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§ 25.14.1  The fourth kind is the panaces discovered by the same Chiron and surnamed centaurion, but also phamaceon, a name derived from king Pharnaces, as there is a controversy whether he was, or was not, the discoverer. This kind is grown from seed, having longer leaves than the other kinds, and with serrated edges. Its scented root is dried in the shade, and adds a pleasing taste to wine. Some hold that there are two other kinds of panaces, one with a broad, the other with a slender, leaf.

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§ 25.15.1  Heracleon siderion ('ironwort') is yet another discovery of Hercules. It has a slender stem about four fingers high, a flower of a deep red and leaves like those of coriander. It is found near ponds and flyers, and heals very thoroughly all wounds inflicted by iron.

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§ 25.16.1  A discovery of Chiron's was the vine called chironia, which I have mentioned in my section on the vines I have also mentioned a plant, the discovery of which is attributed to Minerva.

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§ 25.17.1  To Hercules too they ascribe the plant which is called apollinaris by some, altercum by us Romans, but by the Greeks hyoscyamos ('pig's bean'). There are several kinds of it: one has black seed, with flowers that are almost purple, and a thorny calyx, growing in Galatia. The common kind, however, is whiter and more bushy; it is taller than the poppy. The seed of the third kind is like the seed of irio; but all kinds cause insanity and giddiness. A fourth kind is soft, downy, richer in juice than the others, with a white seed, and growing in places near the sea. This is a kind that medical men have adopted, as they have that with a red seed. Sometimes, however, the white seed turns red if gathered before getting ripe, and then it is rejected; and generally no kind is ever gathered before it has become dry. It has the character of wine, and therefore injures the head and brain. Use is made of the seed as it is or when the juice has been extracted from it. The juice is extracted separately also from the stems and leaves. They also use the root, but the drug is, in my opinion, a dangerous medicine in any form. In fact, it is well known that even the leaves affect the brain if more than four are taken in drink; yet the ancients used to take them in wine under the impression that fever was so brought down. An oil is made from the seed, as I have said, which by itself if poured into the ears deranges the brain. It is a wonderful thing that they have prescribed remedies for those who have taken the drink, which implies that it is a poison, and yet have included it among remedies; so unwearied have been researches in making every possible experiment, even to compelling poisons to be helpful remedies.

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§ 25.18.1  Linozostis or parthenion was discovered by Mercury, and so many among the Greeks call it 'Hermes' grass', but all we Romans agree in calling it mercurialis. There are two kinds of it, the male and the female, the latter having the more powerful properties. It has a stem which is a cubit high and sometimes branchy at the top, leaves narrower than those of ocimum, joints close together and many hollow axils. The seed of the female hangs down in great quantity at the joints; while that of the male stands up near the joints, less plentiful, short and twisted; the female seed is loose and white? The leaves of the male plant are darker, those of the female lighter; the root is quite useless and very slender. It grows in flat, cultivated country. A remarkable thing is recorded of both kinds: that the male plant causes the generation of males and the female plant the generation of females. This is effected if immediately after conceiving the woman drinks the juice in raisin wine, or eats the leaves decocted in oil and salt, or raw in vinegar. Some again decoct it in a new earthen vessel with heliotropium and two or three ears of corn until the contents become thick. They recommend the decoction to be given to women in food, with the plant itself on the second day of menstruation for three successive days; on the fourth day after a bath intercourse is to take place. Hippocrates has bestowed very high praise on these plants for the diseases of women; no medical man recognises its virtues after this fashion. He used them as pessaries for uterine troubles, adding thereto honey, or oil of roses or of iris or of lilies, also as an emmenagogue and to bring away the afterbirth. The same effects, he said, resulted from taking them in drink and from using them for fomentations. He dropped the juice into foul-smelling ears, and with the juice and old wine made an embrocation for the abdomen. The leaves he applied to fluxes from the eyes. A decoction of it with myrrh and frankincense he prescribed for strangury and bladder troubles. For loosening the bowels, however, or for fever, a handful of the plant should be boiled down to one half in two sextarii of water. This is drunk with the addition of salt and honey, and if the decoction has been made with a pig's foot or a chicken added, the draught is all the more beneficial. Some have thought that as a purge both kinds should be administered, either by themselves or with mallows added to the decoction. They purge the abdomen and bring away bile, but they are injurious to the stomach. Their other uses we shall give in the appropriate places.

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§ 25.19.1  Achilles too, the pupil of Chiron, discovered a plant to heal wounds, which is therefore called achilleos, and by it he is said to have cured Telephus. Some have it that he was the first to find out that copper-rust is a most useful ingredient of plasters, for which reason he is represented in paintings as scraping it with his sword from his spear on to the wound of Telephus, while others hold that he used both remedies. This plant is also called by some Heraclean panaces, by others siderites, and by us millefolia; the stalk is a cubit high, and the plant branchy, covered from the bottom with leaves smaller than those of fennel. Others admit that this plant is good for wounds, but say that the real achilleos has a blue stalk a foot long and without branches, gracefully covered all over with separate, rounded leaves. Others describe achilleos as having a square stem, heads like those of horehound, and leaves like those of the oak; they claim that it even unites severed sinews. Some give the name sideritis to another plant, which grows on boundary walls and has a foul smell when crushed, and also to yet another, like this but with paler and more fleshy leaves, and with more tender stalks, growing in vineyards; finally to a third, two cubits high, with thin, triangular twigs, leaves like those of the fern, a long foot-stalk and seed like that of beet. All are said to be excellent for wounds. Roman authorities call the one with the broadest leaf royal broom; it cures quinsy in pigs.

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§ 25.20.1  Teucer too in the same age discovered teucrion, called by some hemionion; it spreads out thin, rush-like twigs with small leaves, grows on rough localities, has a harsh taste, never flowers and never produces seed. It is a cure for splenic troubles, a property discovered, as is well known, in the following way; they say that when sacrificial entrails had been thrown on the plant, this stuck to the spleen and consumed it. On account of this the plant is called by some splenion. It is said that pigs which eat its root are found to be without a spleen. There are some who call by the same name a ligneous plant with branches like those of hyssop and leaves like those of the bean, and recommend it to be gathered when it is in flower — so these certainly hold that the plant has a flower — and they praise most highly the sort that comes from the mountains of Cilicia and Pisidia.

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§ 25.21.1  Melampus is well known for his skill in the arts of divination. From him one kind of hellebore is called melampodion. Some hold that the discovery is due to a shepherd called Melampus, who noticed that his she-goats were purged after browsing upon the plant, and by administering the milk of these goats cured the daughters of Proetus of their madness. Wherefore it is well to give here together an account of every kind of hellebore.

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§ 25.21.2  The chief kinds are two, the white and the black. This difference, most authorities say, applies only to the roots, others say that the leaves of black hellebore are like those of the plane but smaller, darker and with more indentations; that the leaves of white hellebore are like those of sprouting beet, but also darker and turning to red on the under side of its grooves, and that both have a stem a span high, resembling that of fennel-giant, wrapped up in skins like those of bulbs, and with a root fringed like that of onions. The black hellebore kills horses, oxen and pigs; so they avoid it, although they eat the white kind. The latter is said to be ripe at harvest, and it grows abundantly on Mount Oita, and the best on one part of it, around the place called Pyra. The black kind is to be found everywhere, but the better sort grows on Helicon, a mountain celebrated also for other plants. Next after the white hellebore of Oita that of Pontus is most approved; the third place is taken by that of Elea, which is said to grow among vines, and the fourth by hellebore of Parnassus, which is adulterated by hellebore from the neighbouring country of Aitolia. Of these the black kind they call melampodium; with it they fumigate and cleanse houses, sprinkling it on sheep, and adding a formal prayer. This kind is gathered with even greater formalities. First a circle is drawn round it with a sword; then the man who is going to cut it looks at the East with a prayer that the gods will grant him permission to do so. He also keeps on the lookout for a flying eagle — for generally one is present when men cut — and if an eagle flies near, it is a sign that the gatherer will die in that year. The white too is not easy to gather: it is very oppressive to the head unless garlic is eaten beforehand, wine swallowed every now and then and the plant dug up quickly. Some call the black kind ectomon, others polyrrhizon. This purges by stool, but the white kind does so by vomiting, and carries away what might cause diseases; once regarded with horror it afterwards became so popular that most scholars took it regularly to sharpen their brains for their studies. It is well known that Carneades, when preparing to reply to the works of Zeno, purged himself with hellebore, and that Drusus among us, most illustrious of our tribunes of the people, who was cheered by all the commons standing before him but charged by the aristocrats with causing the Marsic War, was on the island of Anticyra cured of epilepsy by means of this medicine. For there it is very safe to take the drug because they add to it sesamoides, as I have already said. In Italy it is called veratrum.

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§ 25.21.3  Both hellebores when ground to powder, either by themselves or combined with that of radicula, with which I said wool is washed, cause sneezing, and both cause sleep. But the roots selected are the thinnest, short, and as it were cut off; only the bottom is used, for the top, which is very thick and like an onion, is given as a purge only to dogs. The old physicians used to choose the root with the most fleshy skin, thinking that the pithy part they obtained from such was more delicate. This they used to cover with moist sponges, and when it swelled they would split it lengthwise with a needle; then they would dry the thin strips in the shade, and so use them. Today they administer the shoots themselves, just as they are, that grow from roots with the heaviest skin. The best hellebore as a sharp, hot taste, and gives out dust when broken. It keeps, it is said, its efficacy for thirty years.

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§ 25.22.1  Black hellebore is a cure for paralysis, madness, dropsy without fever, chronic gout and diseases of the joints; it draws from the belly bile, phlegms and morbid fluids. For gently moving the bowels the maximum dose is one drachma; a moderate one is four oboli. Some have mixed scammony also with it, but to add salt is safer. A larger dose given in sweet substances is dangerous; used as a fomentation it disperses films over the eyes. Therefore some have also pounded it and made an eye salve. It matures and clears up scrofulous sores, suppurations and indurations; fistulas also if it be taken off on the third day. With copper scales and sandarach it removes warts. With barley meal and wine it is applied to the abdomen for dropsy. It cures phlegms in cattle and draught animals if a spray be passed across the ear and taken out at the same hour on the next day; with frankincense, wax and pitch, or with pisselaeon it cures itch in quadrupeds.

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§ 25.23.1  The best white hellebore is that which most quickly causes sneezing. It is, however, far more terrifying than the black sort, especially if one reads in our old authorities of the elaborate precautions, taken by those about to drink it, against shivering, choking, overpowering and unseasonable sleep, prolonged hiccough or sneezing, fluxes of the stomach, vomiting, too slow or too long, scanty or too excessive. In fact they usually gave other things to promote vomiting, and drove out the hellebore itself by medicine or enema, or more often they used even bleeding. Furthermore, even when the hellebore proves successful, the various colours of the vomits are terrifying to see, and after the vomits comes the worry of watching the stools, of superintending the bath, of attention to the whole body, all these troubles being preceded by the great terror caused by its reputation, for it is said that meat, if boiled with it. is consumed. It was a fault of the ancient physicians that because of these fears they used to administer this hellebore in smallish doses, since the larger the dose the quicker it is eliminated. Themison gave doses of not more than two drachmae; his successors actually increased the amount to four, because of the fine testimonial given to hellebore by Herophilus, who compared it to a truly courageous general; having aroused all within, it itself marches out in the van. Moreover, a wonderful discovery has been made; hellebore cut with scissors, as we have described, is passed through a sieve; the skin — with which they empty the stomach — remains behind, while the soft part passes through, and is given to stop the vomiting when the purging is too violent.

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§ 25.24.1  Care must be taken, even with happy treatment, not to administer hellebore on a cloudy day; for to do so is followed by unbearable torture.

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§ 25.24.2  Indeed, there is no doubt that summer is a better season to give it than winter. For seven days previously the body must be prepared by acid foods and by abstinence from wine; on the fourth and third days before, an emetic must be taken, and on the preceding day there should be abstinence from dinner. White hellebore is given even a in a sweet medium, although most suitably in lentils or pottage. Recently the method has been discovered of splitting radishes, inserting hellebore, and then pressing the radishes together again, so that the property of the purge penetrates them; the hellebore is thus administered in a modified form. Vomiting begins after about four hours, and the whole business is over in seven. Thus given hellebore is curative of epilepsy, as has been said, giddiness, melancholia, insanity, wild distraction, white leprosy, leprous sores, tetanus, palsy, gouty affections, dropsy and incipient tympanitis stomachic affections, spasmodic grins, sciatica, quartan fever that yields to no other treatment, chronic cough, flatulence and recurrent gripings.

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§ 25.25.1  Hellebore is never prescribed for old people or children, or for those who are soft and effeminate in body or mind, or for the thin or delicate; for women it is less suited than for men, unsuitable too for the nervous or when the hypochondria are ulcerated or swollen, very bad when there is spitting of blood, pain in the side, or sore throat. Applied externally with salted axle-grease it cures pituitous eruptionse on the body and also suppurations of long standing. Mixed with pearl barley it kills rats and mice. The Gauls when hunting dip their arrows in hellebore, and say that the meat when the flesh round the wound has been cut away tastes more tender. Flies too die if pounded white hellebore and milk are sprinkled about. Phthiriasis too is cured by the same preparation.

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§ 25.26.1  To Mithridates himself Crateuas ascribed one plant, called mithridatia. It has two leaves, like those of the acanthus, springing from the root, with a stem between them which supports a rose-pink flower.

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§ 25.27.1  A second plant was attributed to him by Lenaeus, scordotis or scordion, a description of it being in the hand of the King himself; it is one cubit high; its stem is quadrangular, its form is branchy, and the leaves, which are downy, are like oak leaves. It is found in Pontus on rich, moist plains, and is of a bitter taste. There is also another kind of it, with broader leaves and like wild mint, both kinds being useful for very many purposes, both by themselves and also with other ingredients to make antidotes.

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§ 25.28.1  Two kings have claimed to be the discoverer of polemonia; accordingly some call it by that name and some philetaeria, while the Cappadocians call it chiliodynamia. It has a thick root, thin branches with clusters hanging from the ends, and black seed. In other respects it is like rue, and it grows in mountainous districts.

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§ 25.29.1  Eupatoria too enjoys the prestige of a royal discoverer. It has a ligneous stem, dark, hairy, and a cubit or sometimes more in height; the leaves, arranged at intervals, are like those of cinquefoil or hemp, and have five indentations along the edge; they too are dark and feathery. The root is useless, but the seed taken in wine is a sovereign remedy in cases of dysentery.

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§ 25.30.1  Centaury is said to have been the treatment given to Chiron when an arrow fell on his foot as he was handling the arms of Hercules, who was his guest; for which reason some call it chironion. Its leaves are broad and longish, serrated all round the edge; thickly from the root grow jointed stems three cubits high. On these are heads like those of poppies. The root is enormous and reddish, soft and easily broken, up to two cubits in size, streaming with juice and bitter with something of sweetness in it. It grows on hills with a rich soil, the most esteemed in Arcadia, Elis, Messenia, Pholoe and on Mount Lykaion; on the Alps too and in very many other places. In Lycia indeed they also make a lycium from it. Its power to cure wounds is so strong that even pieces of meat, they say, coalesce if they are boiled with it. The part used is the root, the dose being for the patients for whom it will be prescribed two drachmae only. It should be pounded and taken in water if fever be present; those without fever should take it pounded but in wine. The juice of the decoction cures also the diseases of sheep.

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§ 25.31.1  There is a second centaury, surnamed lepton, a plant with small leaves; some call it libadion, because it grows along the side of springs. It is like origanum but with narrower and longer leaves; it has an angular, bushy stem a span high, a flower like that of lychnis, a slight root of no use in medicine, but with healing qualities in its juice. The plant itself is gathered in autumn, and the juice is extracted from the leaves. Some cut up and soak the stems, extracting the juice at the end of eighteen days. This centaury the Romans call the 'gall of earth' on account of its extreme bitterness, while the Gauls call it exacum, because a draught of it evacuates from the body by stool all harmful drugs.

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§ 25.32.1  There is a third, centauris surnamed triorchis. Those who cut it nearly always wound themselves. The juice it gives out is of the colour of blood. Theophrastus relates that it is defended by a species of hawk called triorchis, which attacks those who gather it. From this too it has received its name. The uninformed confuse these characteristics and assign them all to the first kind of centaury.

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§ 25.33.1  Clymenus is a plant called after the king of that name. It has leaves like those of ivy, many branches, a hollow stem girded with joints, a strong smell, and seed like that of ivy; it grows in wooded, hilly districts. I shall say later what diseases it cures if taken in drink; but at the moment I must point out that, while it cures, even men are made sterile by the draught. The Greeks have said that it is like the plantain, with a square stem and seed-bags intertwined like the tentacles of the polypus. The juice too is used in medicine, as it has very great powers of cooling.

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§ 25.34.1  It was a king of the Illyrians named Gentius who discovered gentian, which, though it grows everywhere, is most excellent when it grows in Illyria. The leaf is like that of the ash but of the size of a lettuce leaf; the stem is tender and of the thickness of a thumb, hollow and empty, with leaves at intervals, sometimes three cubits in height, and growing from a pliant root, which is darkish and without smell. It grows abundantly a on watery slopes near the foot of the Alps. The parts used are the root and the juice. The nature of the root is warming, but it should not be taken in drink by women with child.

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§ 25.35.1  Lysimachus too discovered a plant, still named after him, the praises of which have been sung by Erasistratus. It has green leaves like those of the willow, a purple flower, being bushy, with small upright branches and a pungent smell. It grows in watery districts. Its power is so great that, if placed on the yoke when the beasts of burden are quarrelsome it checks their bad temper.

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§ 25.36.1  Women too have been ambitious to gain this distinction, among them Artemisia, the wife of Mausolus, who gave her name to a plant which before was called parthenis. There are some who think that the surname is derived from Artemis Ilithyia, because the plant is specific for the troubles of women. It is also bushy, resembling wormwood, but with larger and fleshy leaves. Of the plant itself there are two kinds: one higher and with broader leaves, the other soft and with more slender leaves, growing only near the seaside. There are some who in inland districts call by the same name a plant with a single stem, very small leaves, abundant blossom bursting out when the grapes are ripening, and with a not unpleasant smell. The sort that some call botrys, and others ambrosia, grows in Cappadocia.

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§ 25.37.1  According to tradition nymphaea was born of a nymph who died of jealousy about Hercules — for this reason some call it heracleon, others rhopalon because its root is like a club — and therefore those who have taken it in drink for twelve days are incapable of intercourse and procreation. The most valued kind grows in the district of Orchomenos and at Marathon. The Boeotians call it mallon and eat the seed. It grows in watery places, with large leaves on the top of the water and others growing out of the root; the flowers are like the lily, and when the blossom is finished a head forms like that of the poppy; the stem is smooth. In autumn is cut the root, which is dark, and is dried in the sun. It reduces the spleen. There is another kind of nymphaea growing in the River Penius in Thessaly. It has a white root, and a yellow head of the size of a rose.

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§ 25.38.1  In the age too of our fathers King Juba discovered a plant to which he gave the name euphorbea, calling it after his own physician Euphorbus. This man was the brother of the Musa we have as the saviour of the life of the late Emperor Augustus. It was these brothers who first adopted the plan of bracing the body by copious douches of cold water after the bath. Before this the custom was to bathe in hot water only, as we find that it is also in Homer. But the treatise also of Juba on this plant is still extant, and it makes a splendid testimonial. He discovered it on Mount Atlas; it has the appearance of a thyrsus and the leaves of the acanthus. Its potency is so great that the juice, obtained by incision with a pole, is gathered from a distance; it is caught in receivers made of kids' stomachs placed underneath. Fluid and like milk as it drops down, when it has dried and congealed it has all the features of frankincense. The collectors find their vision improved. It is employed as treatment for snakebite. In whatever part of the body the bite may be, an incision is made in the top of the skull and the medicament inserted there. The Gaetulians who gather the juice adulterate it out of weary disgust by adding milk, but fire is a test of genuineness, for that which is adulterated emits a nauseating smell. Far inferior to the Atlas juice is that which in Gaul comes from the ground-olive, which bears a red berry like kermes. Broken it resembles hammoniacum, and even a slight taste leaves for a long time a burning sensation in the mouth; after a while this increases until it dries up even the throat.

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§ 25.39.1  The physician Themiso too has spread the fame of a common plant, the plantain, having published a treatise about it as though he were the discoverer. There are two kinds of it: the smaller, with narrower and darker leaves, resembles the tongue of a sheep; the stem is angular and bends downward. It grows in meadows. The other kind is larger and enclosed with leaves as it were with sides. Since these leaves are seven in number the plant is sometimes called heptapleuron. The stem too of this is a cubit high; when it grows on wet soils it is much more efficacious. It has a wonderful power to dry and brace the body, having a cauterizing property. There is nothing that checks so well the fluxes called by the Greeks rheumatismoi, that is, catarrhs.

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§ 25.40.1  Akin to the plantain is buglossos, which is like the tongue of an ox. The most conspicuous quality of this is that thrown into wine it increases the exhilarating effect, and so it is also called euphrosynum, the plant that cheers.

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§ 25.41.1  Akin too is cynoglossos, which is like a dog's tongue, and a most attractive addition to ornamental gardens. It is said that the root of the kind with three seed-bearing stems, if taken in water, is good for tertians, and that with four for quartans. There is also another plant like this which bears tiny bars. Its root taken in water neutralizes the poison of and snakes.

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§ 25.42.1  Another plant is buphthalmus, which is like the eyes of oxen, having leaves like those of fennel, a bushy plant growing around towns, with .... [tender? ] stems that are boiled and eaten. Some call it calchas. This plant with wax added disperses fatty tumours.

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§ 25.43.1  Whole tribes too have discovered plants. Scythia first found out about the one called scythice, which grows round Lake Maeotis. One of its qualities is great sweetness, and it is very beneficial for the complaint called asthma. Another great merit of it is the freedom from hunger and thirst enjoyed by those who keep it in their mouths.

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§ 25.44.1  The same people find the same property in their hippace, which has the unique quality of affecting horses in the same way. It is said that on these two plants the Scythians can fast from food and drink even for as long as twelve days at a time.

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§ 25.45.1  Thrace found out about ischaemon, which is said to stanch bleeding when a vein has not merely been cut but even severed. It creeps along the ground as does millet the leaves are rough and downy. The kind that grows in Italy, stuffed into the nostrils, and also when used as an amulet, stanches bleeding.

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§ 25.46.1  The Vettones in Spain discovered the plant called vettonica in Gaul, serratula in Italy, and cestros or psychrotrophon by the Greeks, a plant more highly valued than any other. It springs up with an angular stem of two cubits, spreading out from the root leaves rather like those of lapathum, serrated, and with a purple fruiting-head. Its leaves are dried into a powder and used for very many purposes. From it are made a wine and a vinegar, good for the stomach and the eyesight. So great is its fame that the home in which it has been planted is considered to be safe from all dangers.

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§ 25.47.1  In Spain too was discovered cantabrica, found by the Cantabri in the period of the late Emperor Augustus. It grows everywhere, having a rush-like stem a foot in length, on which are small, longish flowers, shaped like a work-basket, in which are very tiny seeds. Nor have the Spains been backward in other search after plants; for example, even now today it is the custom at the more festive gatherings, to mix a drink, the 'hundred-plant potion', by adding to honey wine a hundred plants, in the belief that such is both very healthful and very pleasant. Nobody, however, now knows the kinds of plants used and their exact number, although a definite number is given in the name.

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§ 25.48.1  Our own generation remembers the discovery of a plant among the Marsi. It grows also among the Aequicoli around the village of Nervesia, and is called consiligo. It is beneficial, as we shall point out in its own place, in desperate cases of consumption.

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§ 25.49.1  Servilius Democrates also, one of our foremost physicians, recently discovered the value of what he called hiberis, although in the verses he wrote on its discovery he assigned this to an imaginary person. It grows chiefly near old monuments, ruins, and the waste land beside highways. It is an evergreen, with leaves like cress, a stem a cubit high, and with seed that can scarcely be seen. The root has the smell of cress. It is used more efficaciously in summer, and only when freshly gathered will it serve. There is difficulty in pounding it. For sciatica and all complaints of the joints it is, with a little axle-grease added, very beneficial. The longest application is four hours for men and half as long for women; then the patient must go down to the hot water of the baths, and afterwards must be rubbed all over the body with wine and oil. The treatment should be repeated at intervals of twenty days, if any hint of pain persists. This treatment cures all hidden fluxes. The application is not made when inflammation is acute, but only when it has gone down.

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§ 25.50.1  Animals too have discovered plants, and among the chief is the chelidonia. For by means of it swallows cure the eyes of the chicks in the nest, and restore the sight, as some hold, even when the eyes have been torn out. There are two kinds of it. The larger kind is bushy, and its leaf is like that of the wild carrot, but bigger, the plant itself being two cubits high, the colour light and the blossom yellow. The smaller has leaves like those of ivy, rounder and less pale. The juice is like saffron juice and pungent; the seed resembles that of the poppy. Both plants blossom when the swallow arrives and wither when he departs. The juice is extracted while the plants are flowering, and is gently boiled down with Attic honey in a copper vessel over hot ashes, being a sovereign remedy for dimness of vision. The juice is used both by itself and in the eye-salves called chelidonia after the plant.

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§ 25.51.1  Dogs too have found a plant by which they cure loss of appetite, and eat it in our sight, but in such a way that it can never be identified, for it is seen only when chewed up. This animal shows yet greater spitefulness in its secrecy about another plant; for there is one by which it is said to cure itself when bitten by a snake, but it does not crop it when a human being is looking on.

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§ 25.52.1  With greater frankness deer have shown us elaphoboscon, about which we have written, and after yeaning have made known seselis and the black bryony, as we have pointed out;

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§ 25.53.1  dittany also by feeding on it when wounded, the weapons at once falling out. The latter grows nowhere except in Crete, with branches very slender; it resembles pennyroyal and is burning and harsh to the taste. Only the leaves are employed; it has no flower, no seed and no stem; its root is slender and without medicinal value. Even in Crete it does not grow widely, and the goats are wonderfully eager to hunt it out. A substitute for it is false dittany, which grows in many lands, like true dittany in leaf but with smaller branches, and called by some chondris.

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§ 25.53.2  It is recognised at once, as its properties are less potent, for the smallest quantity of true dittany, taken in drink, bums the mouth. Those who gather them store them in a piece of fennel-giant or reed, which they tie up at the ends, to prevent their losing efficacy. There are some who say that both plants grow in many places, but that while the inferior kinds are found on rich soils, true dittany is only seen on rough ground. There is also a third plant called dittany, unlike the others in appearance and properties; the leaves are those of sisymbrium and the branches are larger, but there is the established conviction that whatever simple grows in Crete is infinitely superior to any of the same kind to be found elsewhere, and that the next best herbs are those to be found on Mount Parnassus. Report says that simples grow besides on Mount Pelion in Thessaly, on Mount Telethrius in Euboea, and throughout Arcadia and Laconia, and that the Arcadians indeed use, not medicines, but milk in the spring season, because it is at this time chiefly that herbs are swollen with juices which, when the beasts graze, medicate their udders. But the milk they drink is cow's milk, since kine will feed on almost any kind of plant. The potency of plants becomes clear from two striking examples of their action even on quadrupeds: horses that have grazed around Abdera and what is called 'the bounds of Diomedes' go raving mad, as do also the asses that graze around Potniae.

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§ 25.54.1  Among the most celebrated plants aristolochia received its name, as is clear, from women with child, because they considered it to be αρίστη λεχούσαις, that is, 'excellent for women in childbed.' Latin writers call it 'earth apple,' distinguishing four kinds of it: one with round tubers on the root, and with leaves partly like those of the mallow and partly like those of ivy, but darker and softer: the second is the male plant, with a long root of four fingers' length, thick as a walking-stick; the third is very long and as slender as a young vine, with especially strong properties, and is called by some clematitis and by others cretica. All kinds of this plant are of the colour of boxwood, and have small stems and purple blossom. They bear small berries like caper berries. Only the root has medicinal value. There is also a fourth kind, called plistolochia, more slender than the one last mentioned, with dense, hair-like masses for a root, and of the thickness of a. stoutish rush, which some surname polyrrhizos. All kinds have a drug-like smell, but that of the rather long and slender root is more agreeable; its fleshy outer skin in fact is even suitable for nard ointments. These plants grow on plains with a rich soil. The time to dig them up is at harvest; the earth is scraped off them before they are stored away. The most valued root, however, comes from Pontus, and in every case the heaviest specimens are preferred; for medicines the round is more suitable, for snake bites the longer kind, but its greatest fame is that, if only it is applied to the uterus in beef after conception, it forms according to report male offspring. The fishermen of Campania call the root that is round 'poison of the earth', and I have seen them scatter it over the sea, crushed and mixed with lime. The fish rush to it with wonderful greed, forthwith die, and float on the surface. The kind called polyrrhizos is reported to be very beneficial for sprains, bruises, and falls from a height, if the root is taken in water, for pleurisy and the sinews if the seed is used, and to be tonic and warming; it is reported to be the same plant as satyrion.

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§ 25.55.1  But we must mention also the properties and uses of these plants, and begin with snake bite, the worst ill of all. Cures then are: the plant britannica; the root of all kinds of panaces taken in wine; both flower and seed of chironium taken in drink or applied in wine and oil; what is called ox cunila, which is specific; polemonia or philetaeris, the dose being four drachmae of the root in neat wine; teucria, sideritis, and scordotis in wine, specific remedies for snake wounds, the juice or leaves or a decoction being taken in drink applied; the root of the greater centaury in doses of one drachma in three cyathi of white wine; gentian, particularly good, whether fresh or dried, for snake bites in doses of two drachmae taken with pepper and rue in six cyathi of wine. The smell too of lysimachia keeps snakes away. Those who have been bitten are given chelidonia in wine, and to the bites is applied in particular betony, the power of which is said to be so great that snakes enclosed in a circle of it lash themselves to death. For the bites is given its seed, the dose being a denarius with three cyathi of wine, or else it is ground and three drachmae of the powder are given in a sextarius of water; the powder is also applied locally. Cantabrica too is used, and dittany, and aristolochia, a drachma of the root in a hemina of wine, but the dose must be repeated several times. Aristolochia in vinegar also makes a useful application, and so does plistolochia, in fact the mere hanging of this above the hearth makes all snakes hurry from the house.

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§ 25.56.1  Argemonia too is good, a denarius of its root being taken in three cyathi of wine. It is proper for more details to be given about this plant, and about the others, when the first mention is made of them, and the first mention of each should be when I deal with that medical treatment where its use will prove most effective. It has leaves like those of the anemone, divided like those of celery, a head like that of the wild poppy upon a small stalk, the root also being like that of this poppy, and saffron-coloured juice that is pungent and sharp. It grows in cultivated fields. We Romans distinguish three kinds of it, and the one esteemed is that the root of which smells like frankincense.

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§ 25.57.1  An agaric grows as a white fungus on trees around the Bosporus. A dose is four oboli crushed and two cyathi of oxymel. The kind that grows in Gaul is considered of inferior strength; further, the male is firmer and more bitter — this kind causes headaches — but the female is softer, and at first its taste is sweet, but afterwards turns bitter.

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§ 25.58.1  Echios of either kind is like pennyroyal its foliage is used for chaplets. The dose is two drachmae in four cyathi of wine; likewise with the second kind, which is marked by a prickly down, and also has little heads like a viper's; this is taken in wine and vinegar. Some give the name echios to personata ('masked plant') whose leaf is broader than that of any kind, and which bears large burs. A decoction of the root of this is given with vinegar as a draught. Henbane crushed with the leaves on is given in wine, especially for the poison of asps.

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§ 25.59.1  No plant however is so renowned among the Romans as hiera botane ('sacred plant'). Some call it asistereon, and Latin writers verbenaca. This is the plant which I mentioned as carried to the enemy by envoys. With this the table of Jupiter is swept, and homes are cleansed and purified. There are two kinds of it; one has many leaves and is thought to be female, the other, the male, has fewer leaves. Each kind has several sprigs that are slender, a cubit long and angular; the leaves are smaller and narrower than those of the oak; the indentations too are deeper, the blossom is grey, and the root long and slender. It grows everywhere in flat, moist localities. Some authorities do not distinguish these two kinds but make of them one only, since both have the same properties. Both kinds are used by the people of Gaul in fortune-telling and in uttering prophecies, but the Magi especially make the maddest statements about the plant: that people who have been rubbed with it obtain their wishes, banish fevers, win friends and cure all diseases without exception. They add that it must be gathered about the rising of the Dog-star without the action being seen by moon or sun; that beforehand atonement must be made to Earth by an offering of honeycomb and honey; that a circle must be drawn with iron round the plant and then it should be pulled up with the left hand and raised aloft; that leaves, stem and root must be dried separately in the shade. They say too that if a dining-couch is sprinkled with water in which this plant has been soaked the entertainment becomes merrier. As a remedy for snake bites it is crushed in wine.

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§ 25.60.1  There is a plant like verbascum which is often taken for it in error, but the leaves are less pale, the stems are more numerous, and the blossom is yellow. When thrown away it attracts moths to itself, and for this reason at Rome it is called blattaria, or moth verbascum.

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§ 25.61.1  Molemonium exudes a milky juice which thickens like gum. It grows in moist localities, the dose being one denarius given in wine.

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§ 25.62.1  Cinquefoil is known to everyone, being popular for its actually producing strawberries. The Greeks call it pentapetes, pentaphyllon, or chamaezelon. When it is dug up it has a red root, which as it dries becomes black and angular. The name is derived from the number of the leaves. The plant itself buds and sheds its leaves with the vine. It is also used in purifying houses.

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§ 25.63.1  For snake bite is also given in white wine the root of the plant that is called sparganion.

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§ 25.64.1  Four kinds of daucus were distinguished by Petronius Diodotus. There is no point in giving the details of these, as there are but two species. The most highly valued grows in Crete, the next in Achaia and everywhere in dry districts; it resembles fennel, but has paler, smaller and hairy leaves, a straight stem a foot high, and a root with a very pleasant taste and smell. This kind grows on rocky soils that face the south. The other kinds grow everywhere on earthy hills and cross-paths, but only if the soil is rich; they have leaves like those of coriander, a stem a cubit high, round heads, often more than three, and a wood-like root, which when dry is worthless. Its seed is like that of cummin, while that of the first kind is like millet, white, sharp, and scented and hot in all kinds. The seed of the second kind is more powerful than that of the first, and for this reason should be used sparingly. If one really desires to add a third kind, there is one like staphylinus, called wild carrot, with longish seed and a sweet root. A quadruped, summer and winter, refuses to touch any of these plants except after miscarriage. Of the Cretan kind the root is used, chiefly for snake bites, of the other kinds the seed. The dose is one drachma taken in wine; it is given also to quadrupeds that have been bitten.

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§ 25.65.1  There is a therionarca, different from the magical plant, that grows in our part of the world, a bushy plant with greenish leaves, a rose-coloured flower, and fatal to serpents. This plant too benumbs any kind of wild creature it touches.

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§ 25.66.1  Persolata, a plant everybody knows, is called by the Greeks arcion; it has leaves larger, more hairy, darker and thicker even than those of a gourd, and a white, large root. This is taken in wine, the dose being two denarii by weight.

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§ 25.67.1  The root of cyclamen also is beneficial for the bites of any kind of snake. The plant has smaller, darker and thinner leaves than those of ivy, with no corners but with white spots; the stem is short and hollow, the blossom purple, the root so broad that it might be taken for that of the turnip, and having a dark skin. It grows in shaded spots, is called by our countrymen tuber terrae, and ought to be grown in every home if it is true that wherever it grows no evil spells do any harm. They call it 'amulet', and say that if it is added to wine intoxication comes at once. The root is also dried, cut up fine as is done with the squill, and then stored away. This is boiled down to the consistency of honey. It has however a poisonous quality of its own, and it is said that if a woman with child steps over this root she miscarries.

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§ 25.68.1  There is also another cyclamen with the surname of cissanthemos, differing from the preceding one in that it has jointed stems of no value, winds itself round trees, and bears berries like those of ivy, only soft, and a handsome, white flower; the root is of no value. The berries only are used these are sharp to the taste and sticky. They are dried in the shade, crushed, and cut up into lozenges.

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§ 25.69.1  A third kind of cyclamen has been pointed out to me with the surname of chamaecissos, which has only one leaf, and a branchy root fatal to fishes.

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§ 25.70.1  Among the most popular of plants is peucedanum, the most esteemed kind of which grows in Arcadia; next to this comes the one growing in Samothrace. Its stem is slender, long, like fennel, and leafy near the ground; the root is dark, thick, juicy, and with a strong smell. It grows on shaded mountains and is dug up at the close of autumn. The tenderest and deepest roots are the favourites. These are cut up with bone knives into strips four fingers long and pour out their juice in the shade, the cutters first rubbing their head and nostrils with rose oil lest they should feel vertigo. Another juice also is found sticking to the stems and dripping from incisions in it. It is considered good when it is of the consistency of honey, of a red colour, with a strong but pleasant smell, and hot to the taste. This is used for snake bite, as well as the root and a decoction of it, to make many remedies, the juice however being the most efficacious; it is made thinner by bitter almonds or rue and is taken in drink, while rubbing over the body with it and oil protects people from snakes.

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§ 25.71.1  The smoke of ebulum also, a plant known to everybody, drives snakes away.

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§ 25.72.1  The root of polemonia, even when merely attached as an amulet, is specific against scorpions, and also against poisonous spiders and the other smaller venomous creatures; aristolochia against scorpions, or four-oboli doses of agaric in four cyathi of wine stirred up with it, vervain too with wine, or vinegar and water, against poisonous spiders, so also cinquefoil or daucum.

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§ 25.73.1  Verbascum is called phlomos by the Greeks. There are two primary kinds of it: the pale, which is thought to be male; the other is dark and is regarded as female. There is a third kind, that is found only in woods. The leaves of verbascum are broader than those of cabbage, and hairy; the stem is upright, and more than a cubit high. The seed is black and of no use. The root is single, and of the thickness of a finger. The plants also grow in flat country. Wild verbascum has leaves like those of elelisphacus and tall, while the branches are of a woody texture.

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§ 25.74.1  There are also two sorts of phlomis, both shaggy and with round leaves, growing near the ground. A third is called lychnitis, by some thryallis; it has three or at most four leaves, which are thick and fleshy, and suitable for lamp wicks. It is said that, placed in the leaves of the kind we have called female, a fig does not even begin to go bad. It is almost superfluous to distinguish these various kinds, because they all have the same properties. A draught for the sting of scorpions is made from the root and rue in water, which is as efficacious as it is bitter.

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§ 25.75.1  Thelyphonon is a plant called scorpion some because its root has the shape of one. A mere touch of it kills scorpions, and so it is taken in drink for their stings. It is said that a dead scorpion, if smeared with white hellebore, comes to life again. Thelyphonon kills every kind of quadruped if its root be applied to the genitals, the leaf indeed, which is like that of cyclamen, does so before the end of the same day. The plant itself is jointed, and grows in shaded places. Good for scorpion bite is the juice of betony ore plantain.

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§ 25.76.1  Frogs too have their poisons, brambletoads a virulent one, and I have seen Psylli putting them to a contest loosed from heated pans, and that though their bite brings speedier death than the bite of asps. A helpful remedy is phrynion taken in wine, a plant that some call neuras, and others poterion, having small flowers and many fibrous roots with a pleasant scent.

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§ 25.77.1  Likewise alisma, which some call damasonion, others lyron. The leaves would be like those of the plantaisi were they not narrower, more jagged, and bent downwards; in other respects the two are alike, even in their many veins. It has a single, slender stem, a cubit high and like a thyrsus at the top, with many close-set roots, slender like those of black hellebore, acrid, scented and juicy. It grows in watery places. The other kind of the same plant is found in woods; it is darker, and has larger leaves. The roots of both kinds are used for the poison of frogs and of the sea-hare, the dose being a drachma by weight taken in wine. Cyclamen is another remedy for the poison of sea-hares. The bites of a mad dog also have a highly venomous character, a remedy for which will be found in cynorrhodum, of which I have spoken already, in the plantain, and for all bites of wild beasts in betony with old neat wine, taken as drink or applied locally.

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§ 25.78.1  Peristereos is the name of a plant with a tall stem covered with leaves and sprouting out other stems at the top. It is a great favourite with doves, whence too conies its name. It is said that dogs never bark at those who have this plant about them.

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§ 25.79.1  Next after these plagues come the poisons that men devise for themselves. Remedies for all these and for sorceries will be found in the famous moly of Homer, which is the best, next the antidotes of Mithridates, and also scordotis. Centaury too taken in drink evacuates by stool all poisonous drugs, as does the seed of betony taken in honey wine or in raisin wine, or drachma doses of the powder may be taken in four cyathi of old wine; but the patients must be made to vomit and take a second draught. It is said that those who take this powder every day will not be hurt by any noxious drugs. When poison has been drunk help is given by aristolochia, the dose being the same as for snake bites, by the juice of cinquefoil, and by agaric taken after previous vomiting, the dose being a denarius by weight in three cyathi of hydxomel.

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§ 25.80.1  Antirrinum or pararinon is the name given to wild lychnis, a plant like flax, having no root, a flower like that of the hyacinthus, and seed like the muzzle of a calf. The Magi hold that those rubbed with it improve in beauty and can be hurt by no noxious drug; likewise if anyone wear it on the arm as an amulet.

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§ 25.81.1  They say the same of the plant they call euplia, and maintain that those rubbed with it win a finer reputation. They also say that those carrying artemisia about them are not hurt by noxious drugs, or by any wild beast, and not even by the sun. This plant is also taken in wine to counteract the effects of opium. Seaweed is said to be a specific, and it is also taken in drink for the poison of frogs.

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§ 25.82.1  Pericarpum is a kind of bulb. There are two species of it; one has a red outer skin, the other is like the dark poppy, but its properties are stronger than those of the former; both however are warming. For this reason the plant is administered to counteract hemlock, as is also frankincense and panaces, and chironium in particular. The last is also used for poisoning by fungi.

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§ 25.83.1  But we will go on to add also the various kinds of remedies for each disease attacking the various parts of the body, beginning with the head. Mange is cured by the root of the Heraclian water-lily, ground up and applied, either with pitch or by itself. Polythrix differs from callithrix in having pale, rush-like shoots and more numerous and larger leaves. The main stem too is larger. It strengthens and makes to grow more thickly hair that tends to fall out.

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§ 25.84.1  Lingulaca too may be used, that grows around springs, the root of which, reduced to ashes, is beaten up mixed with the lard of a black sow, care being taken that it is one which has never farrowed; and then it is a great advantage if the application is made in the sunshine. The root of cyclamen is used in a similar way. Dandruff is removed by the root of hellebore boiled down in oil or in water. Headache is cured by the root of any kind of panaces crushed in oil, by aristolochia, by hiberis attached for an hour, or longer if the patient can stand it, a bath being taken at the same time. Daucum also is a cure. Cyclamen too with honey, if pushed into the nostrils, clears the head, sores on which are healed by the same used as ointment. Peristereos also is effective treatment.

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§ 25.85.1  Cacalia or leontice is the name of a plant with seeds like tiny pearls hanging down among large leaves, and mostly found on mountains. Fifteen grains of it are steeped in oil, and with this the head is rubbed in the contrary way to the hair.

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§ 25.86.1  From callithrix also is made a snuff. This plant has the leaves of the lentil; the stems are very slender rushes and the root is very small. It grows in shady, moist places, and has a hot taste.

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§ 25.87.1  Hyssop crushed in oil is good for phthiriasis and itch on the scalp. The best comes from Mount Taurus in Cilicia, the next best from Pamphylia and Smyrna. Upsetting the stomach, it purges by stool if taken with figs, by vomitings if taken with honey. Pounded with honey, salt, and cummin it is also supposed to counteract the poison of snake bites.

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§ 25.88.1  Lonchitis is not, as most people have thought, the same plant as xiphion or phasganion, although the seed is like a spear point; for it has leaves like those of the leek, reddish near the root and more numerous than on the stem, little heads like the masks of comedy, which put out a small tongue, and very long roots. It grows in thirsty soils.

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§ 25.89.1  Xiphion or phasganion on the other hand grows in moist soils. When it first leaves the ground it presents the appearance of a sword, has a stem two cubits high, and a fringed root like a filbert, which must be dug up before harvest and dried in the shade. The upper part of it, beaten up with frankincense and mixed with an equal quantity by weight of wine, extracts bone splinters from the head and all suppurating matter in the body, or any snake bones that have been trodden on; the plant also counteracts poisons. Headache is relieved by rubbing with hellebore beaten up and boiled down in oil or rose oil, or by peucedanum in oil or rose oil and vinegar. The latter made lukewarm is good for the pains generally felt on one side of the head, and also for giddiness. The body is rubbed over with the root to promote perspiration, for it has heating properties.

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§ 25.90.1  Psyllion is called by some cynoides, by others chrystallion, by others sicelicon, and by others cynomyia; it has a slender root of no use in medicine, numerous twigs with grains like beans at the point, leaves not unlike a dog's head and seed not unlike a flea: hence too its name. The seed is in berries, and the plant itself is to be found in vineyards. Its cooling and dispersing properties are very strong. The part used is the seed. For headache it is applied to the forehead and temples in vinegar and rose oil or in vinegar and water. For other purposes it is used as liniment. An acetabulum thickens and coagulates a sextarius of water; then it should be beaten up and the paste applied as liniment to any pain, gathering or inflammation. Wounds in the head are healed by aristolochia, which also brings away fragments of bone in other parts of the body, but especially in the head; the same with plistolochia. Thryselinum is not unlike celery. The root of it chewed clears away catarrhs of the head.

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§ 25.91.1  It is supposed that the sight is improved by the greater centaury if the eyes are fomented by an infusion of it in water; while by the juice of the lesser centaury with the addition of honey gnats are removed, cloudiness and films are dispersed, and scars smoothed out; also that albugo even of draught animals is made better by sideritis. But chelidonia is a wonderful cure for all the above-mentioned eye troubles. The root of panaces with pearl barley is applied to the eyes for fluxes. For checking such fluxes the seed of henbane is taken in wine in doses of an obolus with the same amount of poppy juice. Juice of gentian too is used as ointment, and it is also used instead of poppy juice as an ingredient of the more pungent eye salves. Euphorbeum too improves the vision of those whose eyes are anointed with it. The juice of the plantain is dropped into the eyes for ophthalmia. Films are dispersed by aristolochia, by hiberis attached to the head, and by cinquefoil. Fluxes and eye-diseases generally are made better by verbascum. To fluxes is applied peristereos in rose oil or vinegar. For cataract and film lozenges of cyclamen are dissolved and applied; the juice of peucedanum, as we have said, poppy juice and rose oil being added, is good for improving the vision and for films. Psyllion rubbed on the forehead arrests fluxes.

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§ 25.92.1  Some call the anagallis, acoron. There are two kinds of it: the male with a scarlet flower, and the female with a blue one; neither is more than a span in height, the stem being tender, and the leaves tiny, round and lying on the ground. They grow in gardens and on moist ground. The blue-flowered kind blossoms first. The juice of either kind, applied with honey, disperses film on the eyes, suffusions of blood from a blow, and reddish argema; the results are better if the ointment is made with Attic honey. It dilates the pupils, and so these are smeared with it before perforation for cataract. These plants also cure eye diseases in draught animals. The juice also clears the head if poured through the nostrils, but it must be rinsed out afterwards with wine. A drachma dose of the juice is also taken in wine for snake bites. It is a wonderful thing that cattle avoid the female plant, or if deceived by the resemblance — for the only difference is in the flower — they have partaken of it, they at once seek as a remedy the plant called asyla. We Romans call it 'cat's-eye'. Some instruct the diggers to say nothing until they have saluted it before sunrise, and then to gather it and extract the juice, for so they say its efficacy is at its greatest. About the juice of euphorbea enough has been said. Ophthalmia, if there is swelling, will be benefited by wormwood beaten up with honey, and also by powdered betony.

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§ 25.93.1  Aegilops is cured by the plant of the same name, which grows among barley and has a leaf like that of wheat; either the seed may be reduced to powder, mixed with flour and applied, or the juice may be used. This is extracted from the stem and juicy leaves after taking away the ears, and then it is worked into lozenges with the flour of three-month wheat.

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§ 25.94.1  Some physicians used to employ the mandrake also; afterwards it was discarded as a medicine for the eyes. What is certain is that the pounded root, with rose oil and wine, cures fluxes and pain in the eyes. But the juice is used as an ingredient in many eye remedies. Some give the name eircaeon to the mandrake. There are two kinds of it: the white, which is also considered male, and the black, considered female. The leaves are narrower than those of lettuce, the stems hairy, and the roots, two or three in number, reddish, white inside, fleshy and tender, and almost a cubit in length. They bear fruit of the size of filberts, and in these are seeds like the pips of pears. When the seed is white the plant is called by some arsen, by others morion, and by others hippophlomos. The leaves of this mandrake are whitish, broader than those of the other, and like those of cultivated lapathum. The diggers avoid facing the wind, first trace round the plant three circles with a sword, and then do their digging while facing the west. The juice can also be obtained from the fruit, from the stem, after cutting off the top, and from the root, which is opened by pricks or boiled down to a decoction. Even the shoot of its root can be used, and the root is also cut into round slices and kept in wine. The juice is not found everywhere, but where it can be found it is looked a for about vintage time. It has a strong smell, but stronger when the juice comes from the root or fruit of the white mandrake. The ripe fruit is dried in the shade. The fruit juice is thickened in the sun, and so is that of the root, which is crushed or boiled down to one third in dark wine. The leaves are kept in brine, more effectively those of the white kind. The juice of leaves that have been touched by dew are deadly. Even when kept in brine they retain harmful properties. The mere smell brings heaviness of the head and — although in certain countries the fruit is eaten — those who in ignorance smell too much are struck dumb, while too copious a draught even brings death. When the mandrake is used as a sleeping draught the quantity administered should be proportioned to the strength of the patient, a moderate dose being one cyathus. It is also taken in drink for snake bite, and before surgical operations and punctures to produce anaesthesia. For this purpose some find it enough to put themselves to sleep by the smell. A dose of two oboli of mandrake is also taken in honey wine instead of hellebore — but hellebore is more efficacious — as an emetic and to purge away black bile.

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§ 25.95.1  Hemlock too is poisonous, a plant with a bad name because the Athenians made it their instrument of capital punishment, but its uses for many purposes must not be passed by. It has a poisonous seed, but the stem is eaten by many both as a salad and when cooked in a saucepan. This stem is smooth, and jointed like a reed, of a dark colour, often more than two cubits high, and branchy at the top; the leaves resemble those of coriander, but are more tender, and of a strong smell; the seed is coarser than that of anise, the root hollow and of no use. The seed and leaves have a chilling quality, and it is this that causes death; the body begins to grow cold at the extremities. The remedy lies in using the warming nature of wine before the vital parts are reached; but taken in wine hemlock is invariably fatal. A juice is extracted from the leaves and blossom, for the best time to do so is when the hemlock is in flower. A better juice is extracted from the crushed seed and thickened in the sun for making into lozenges. It causes death by thickening the blood — this is its other outstanding property — and for this reason spots are to be seen on the bodies of those who have been killed in this way. This juice is used instead of water as a solvent for drugs. There is also made from it a poultice to cool the stomach. Its chief use however is as a local application round the eyes to check summer fluxes and to allay pains in them. It forms an ingredient of eye salves, and it checks all catarrhs generally. The leaves also relieve every kind of swelling, pain or flux. Anaxilaus is responsible for the statement that if the breasts are rubbed with hemlock from adult maidenhood onwards they will always remain firm. What is certain is that an application of hemlock to the breasts of women in childbed dries up their milk, and to rub it on the testicles at the time of puberty acts as an antaphrodisiac. I should not like to give directions about remedies in which hemlock is recommended to be taken by the mouth. The most powerful hemlock grows at Susa in Parthia; the next in Laconia, Crete and Asia; in Greece however the strongest is found around Megara, after which comes that of Attica.

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§ 25.96.1  An application of wild cremnos to the removes rheum, and with the addition of pearl barley reduces swellings.

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§ 25.97.1  Molybdaena, that is plumbago, grows everywhere, even on cultivated land; it has a leaf like that of lapathum and is thick and hairy. If the eye is licked occasionally with this plant when chewed, there is removed the species of eye trouble called lead.

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§ 25.98.1  Capnos trunca, the popular name of which is chicken's feet, growing among ruins and on wall-banks, has very slender branches which are far apart, a purple flower and green leaves; its juice disperses films, and so it is an ingredient of eye salves.

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§ 25.99.1  Similar both in name and in its properties, though a different plant, is the bushy capnos, which is very delicate, and has the leaves of coriander, the colour of ashes, and a purple blossom. It grows in gardens and crops of barley. Used as ointment for the eyes it improves the vision and, like smoke, produces tears, and to this fact it owes its name. It also prevents eyelashes that have been pulled out from growing again.

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§ 25.100.1  Acoron has the leaves of the iris, only narrower and with a longer foot-stalk; it has dark roots and less veined, though in other respects these too are like those of the iris, pungent to the taste, with a not unpleasant smell, and carminative. The best come from Daspetost [place unknown, possibly misread by Pliny] in Galatia., then come Cretan roots, but they are found most abundantly in Colchis near the river Phasis and wherever there are watery districts. Fresh roots have a stronger smell than stale, and the Cretan are paler than those of Pontus. They, like the iris, are dried in the shade in slices a finger in length. There are to be found those who give the name of acoron to the root of oxymyrsine, and for this reason some prefer to call this plant acorion. It has powerful properties as a calorific and discutient, is good for cataract and dimness of the eyes, and its juice is taken internally for snake bites.

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§ 25.101.1  The cotyledon is a tiny plant on a tender little stem, with a very small fleshy leaf, which is concave like the hip joint. It grows in maritime and rocky places, fresh green in colour, and with a root that is oval like an olive. The juice is medicine for the eyes. There is another kind of cotyledon with dirty-green leaves, which are broader and closer together than those of the other, spread round the root as though it were an eye; the taste is very harsh, the stem longer than that of the other kind but very slender. It is used for the same purposes as the iris.

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§ 25.102.1  Of the aizoum there are two kinds, the larger of which is planted in earthen pots, and is sometimes called buphthalmos, zoophthalmos, tergethron (because it is useful for love-philtres), hypogeson (for it generally grows under eaves), although some prefer to call it ambrosia or amerimon; Italians call it great sedum, or eye, or little finger. The other kind is rather small, and is called erithales, trithales (because it flowers three times), erysithales, isoetes, sedum by Italians, and both are called aizoum, because they are always green, or sempervivum. The greater aizoum grows to even more than a cubit in height and is thicker than a thumb. At the point the leaves are like a tongue, fleshy, rich with copious juice, as broad as a thumb, some bent to the ground and others upright, so that the circle of them is like an eye in shape. The smaller aizoum grows on walls, ruins, and roof-tiles; it is bushy from the root and leafy to the top, with narrow, pointed and juicy leaves, and a stem a span high. The root is not used.

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§ 25.103.1  Resembling this is a plant that the Greeks call wild andraehle, the Italians inlecebra. It has very small leaves, but broader than those of aizoum, and the head is shorter It grows in rocky districts and is gathered for food. All these have the same properties; they are cooling and astringent. Fluxes of the eyes are cured by an application of the leaves or of the juice used as ointment. For it cleanses sores of the eyes, replaces lost tissue and makes them cicatrize; it unglues the eyelids when sticky. These plants also cure headaches if the temples are smeared with the juice or leaves; they neutralize the bite of venomous spiders; for aconite, however, an especially good antidote is the greater aizotim. It is also said that those who have this plant on their persons are not stung by scorpions. They also cure earache, as does the application of a moderate amount of juice of henbane, or of achillea, of the smaller centaury, of plantain, of peucedanum mixed with rose oil and poppy juice, and of acoron juice with rose leaves. But all these juices are warmed and injected with a strigil, cotyledon being good even for pus in the ears if warmed deer's marrow is added, or the juice of crushed root of ebulum strained through a cloth, then thickened in the sun and, when needed, diluted with rose oil and warmed. Vervain cures swollen parotid glands, as does the plantain, and sideritis with old axle-grease.

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§ 25.104.1  Polypus in the nose is treated successfully by aristolochia with cyperus.

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§ 25.105.1  For the teeth remedies are: chewed root of panaces, chewed root of chironia especially, the juice too if the teeth be rinsed with it, the root of henbane chewed with vinegar, and that of polemonia. The plantain is chewed, or the teeth are rinsed with the juice of the decoction in vinegar. To eat the leaves also is useful, even if the gums are purulent; or the seed of the same plant heals abscesses and gatherings in the gums. Mistolochia too strengthens gums and teeth, as does vervain chewed with its root, or the juice of a decoction in wine or vinegar used as a mouth-wash, and also that of the root of cinquefoil boiled down to one-third in wine or vinegar. Before it is boiled down it is washed in sea water or salt water, and the decoction should be kept in the mouth for a long time. Some prefer to use the ash of cinquefoil as a dentrifrice. The root of verbascum too is boiled down in wine to make a mouth-wash for the teeth, for which purpose also hyssop is employed and the juice of peucedanum with poppy juice; or the juice of auagallis roots, by preference of the female plant, is poured into the nostril opposite to where pain is felt.

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§ 25.106.1  Erigeron is called by us Romans senecio. If a line is traced round it with an iron tool before it is dug up, and if one touches a painful tooth with the plant three times, spitting after each touch, and replaces it into its original ground so as to keep it alive, it is said that the tooth will never cause pain thereafter. This plant has the appearance and softness of trixago, with small, reddish stems. It grows on tiled roofs and on walls. Its name was given to it by the Greeks, because it is of a hoary colour in spring. Its head is divided by many pieces of down, like those of a thorn, that grow out from between the divisions, which is why Callimachus gave it the name of acanthis, and others pappus. Apart from this, however, the Greeks are not in agreement about this plant. Some have said that it has the leaves of rocket, others of the oak but much smaller; some that the root is useless, others that it is good for the sinews, others that it chokes if taken in drink. On the other hand some have given it with wine for jaundice, and as a cure for all complaints of the bladder, heart, and liver. They have said that it brings away gravel from the kidneys. They prescribed for sciatica a drachma with oxynael after a walk, this dose being also very useful in raisin wine for colic; they recommended it also as a salad with vinegar for the internal organs a generally, and they planted it in gardens. There have been some who distinguished a second variety, but without pointing out its qualities, prescribing it to be taken in water for snake bite, and to be eaten by epileptics. I myself shall treat of it only in so far as the Romans have found out by experiment how to use it. Its down, with saffron and a little cold water, is applied crushed to eye fluxes and, roasted with a grain of salt, to scrofulous sores.

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§ 25.107.1  Ephemeron has the leaves of a lily, but smaller, a stem of the same length, a blue flower, a seed of no value, and a single root of the thickness of a thumb, a sovereign remedy for the teeth if it is cut up into pieces in vinegar, boiled down, and used warm as a month wash. And the root also by itself arrests decay if forced into the hollow of a decayed tooth. Root of chelidonia is crushed in vinegar and kept in the mouth, dark hellebore is plugged into decayed teeth, and loose teeth are strengthened by either of these boiled down in vinegar.

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§ 25.108.1  A plant that grows in rivers they call the bath of Venus. In it is a worm which is rubbed round the teeth or plugged with wax into the hollow of a tooth. Care must be taken that the plant does not touch the ground after being pulled up.

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§ 25.109.1  We call ranunculus a plant which the Greeks call batrachion. There are four kinds of it: one with fatter leaves than those of coriander and nearly as broad as those of mallows, of a leaden colour, with a tall, graceful stem and a whitish root. It grows on moist and shaded cross-paths. The second is more leafy, with more indentations in the leaves, and with taller stems. The third is the smallest, with a strong smell and a golden flower. The fourth is like it, but the flower is of the colour of milk. All have a caustic property; if leaves are applied raw, they raise blisters as does fire. Accordingly they are used for leprous sores and itch, and to remove scars on the skin; they are ingredients of all caustic preparations. They are applied to mange, but are removed quickly. The root if chewed up for toothache too long breaks off the teeth, and the dried root chopped flue makes a snuff. Roman herbalists call it strumus, because it cures scrofula and superficial abscesses, if a piece of it is hung up in the smoke. They believe that if it is replanted the maladies they have cured break out again, a similar criminal use being made of the plantain. Sores inside the mouth are cured by juice of plantain, and also by the chewed-up leaves and roots, even if the mouth is suffering from a flux; sores and bad breath are removed by cinquefoil, sores by psyllium.

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§ 25.110.1  I shall also give some prescriptions for offensive breath, which is a very embarrassing complaint. For this purpose myrtle leaves are taken and an equal weight of leaves of lentisk with half the quantity of Syrian gall-nuts. This compound, when beaten up and sprinkled with old wine, may with benefit be chewed in the morning, or one may be made of ivy berries, cassia and myrrh, in equal quantities, added to wine. If the nostrils are the seat of the trouble, even though a cancer-like growth is present, dracontium seed beaten up with honey is very useful. Bruises disappear under applications of hyssop, and scars on the face are removed by rubbing with mandrake.

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§ 26.1.1  THE face of man has also been afflicted with new diseases, unknown in past years not only to Italy but also to almost the whole of Europe, and even then they did not spread all over Italy, or through Illyricum, the Gauls, and the Spains to any great extent, or in fact anywhere except in and around Rome. Though they are painless and without danger to life, yet they are so disfiguring that any kind of death would be preferable.

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§ 26.2.1  The most severe of these they called by a Greek name lichens; in Latin, because it generally began on the chin, it was called mentagra, at first by way of a joke — so prone are many men to make a jest of the misfortunes of others — the name passing presently into common use. The disease seized in many cases at least the whole of the face, with the eyes only unaffected, but passed down however also to the neck, chest and hands, covering the skin with a disfiguring, scaly eruption.

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§ 26.3.1  This plague was unknown to our fathers and forefathers. It first made its way into Italy in the middle of the principate of Tiberius Claudius Caesar, when a Roman knight of Perusia, a quaestor's secretary, introduced the infection from Asia Minor, where he had taken up his duties. Women were not liable to the disease, or slaves and the lower and middle classes, but the nobles were very much infected through the momentary contact of a kiss. The scar left on many who had been hardy enough to endure the treatment was more unsightly than the disease, for caustics were the method employed, and the loathsome complaint broke out afresh unless the flesh was burnt through right to the bones. There arrived from Egypt, the parent of such diseases, physicians who devoted all their attention to this complaint only, to their very great profit, since it is a fact that Manilius Cornutus, of praetorian rank and legate of the province of Aquitania, laid out two hundred thousand sesterces in getting himself treated for that disease. On the other hand, it has more usually happened that new kinds of disease on their first appearance have been epidemic. What can be found more marvellous than this, that some diseases should arise suddenly in a special part of the world, should attack special limbs of human beings or special ages, or even people of a special position in life, (just as if a plague chose its victims), one children, another adults, one making the nobility especially liable, another the poor.

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§ 26.4.1  It is noted in the Annals that it was in the censorship of Lucius Paullus and Quintus Marcius [164 BCE] that there appeared for the first time in Italy the carbuncle, a disease peculiar to the province of Gallia Narbonensis. There died of it in the same year as I compose my work two men of consular rank, Julius Rufus and Laecanius Bassus, the former through the ignorance of his physicians, who tried lancing; the latter, however, through his own tearing out with a needle from his left thumb a splinter (boil) so small that it could scarcely be seen. The carbuncle forms in the most hidden parts of the body, and usually as a red hardness under the tongue, like a pimple but blackish at the top, occasionally of a leaden colour, spreading into the flesh but without swelling, pain, irritation, or any other symptom than sleep, overcome by which the patient is carried off in three days. Sometimes also the disease, bringing shivering, small pustules around the sore, and more rarely fever, has reached the oesophagus and pharynx, causing death very quickly.

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§ 26.5.1  I have said that leprosy did not occur in Italy before the time of Pompeius Magnus, and that though the plague usually begins on the face, a kind of freckle on the tip of the nose, yet presently the skin dries up over all the body, covered with spots of various colours, and uneven, in places thick, in others thin, in others hard as with rough itch-scab, finally however going black, and pressing the flesh on to the bones, while the toes and fingers swell up. This plague is native to Egypt. When kings were attacked, it was a deadly thing for the inhabitants, because the tubs in the baths used to be prepared with warm human blood for its treatment. This disease indeed quickly died out in Italy, as also did that called by the ancients gemursa, which appeared between the toes, the very name being now obsolete.

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§ 26.6.1  This itself is a wonderful fact, that some diseases should disappear from among us while others remain endemic, as for example colum. It was in the principate of Tiberius Caesar that this malady made its way into Italy. Nobody suffered from it before the Emperor himself, and the citizens were greatly puzzled when they read in his edict, in which he begged to be excused because of illness, a name they had never heard before. What are we to say that this means, what wrath of the gods? Were the recognised kinds of human disease, more than three hundred, too few, that they must be increased by new ones also to add to man's fears? No fewer either are the troubles which man brings upon himself by his own agency. These remedies that I record were those used by the ancients, Nature in a way making medicine herself, and their vogue was a long one. Certainly the works of Hippocrates, who was the first to put together, and that with great distinction, rules for medical practice, we find full of references to herbs, equally so the works of Diocles of Carystus, who comes next after Hippocrates in time and reputation, likewise those of Praxagoras and Chrysippus, and then comes Erasistratus of Ceos; while Herophilus indeed, although the founder of an over-subtle sect, we know recommended before all others this method of treatment. But little by little experience, the most efficient teacher of all things, and in particular of medicine, degenerated into words and mere talk. For it was more pleasant to sit in a lecture-room engaged in listening, than to go out into the wilds and search for the various plants at their proper season of the year.

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§ 26.7.1  However, the ancient system of medicine remained unshaken, and claimed as its own considerable remains of its once acknowledged sphere, until, in the time of Pompeius Magnus, one Asclepiades, a professor of rhetoric, who found his gains in that profession too small, but had a brain brilliant enough for success in other professions, suddenly abandoned rhetoric for medicine. A man who neither had practised it nor knew anything of remedies that call for sharp eyes and personal experience, but could attract by his eloquent and daily-practised oratory, was forced to reject all simples, and reducing the whole of medicine to the discovery of causes, made it a matter of guesswork. He recognised especially five principles of general application: fasting from food, in other cases abstinence from wine, massage, walking, and the various kinds of carnage-rides. Since every man realised that he could provide these things for himself, and since all applauded him as if the easiest things were also true, Asclepiades brought round to his view almost all the human race, just as if he had been sent as an apostle from heaven.

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§ 26.8.1  He used, moreover, to attract men's minds by the empty artifice of promising the sick, now wine, which he administered as opportunity occurred, while now he would prescribe cold water; and since Herophilus had anticipated him in inquiring into the causes of diseases, and Cleophantus among the ancient physicians had brought to prominent notice the treatment by wine, he preferred, according to Marcus Varro, to win for himself the surname of 'cold-water giver.' He devised also other attractive methods of treatment, such as suspended beds, so that by rocking them he could either relieve diseases or induce sleep; again, he organized a system of hydropathy, which appeals to man's greedy love of baths, and many other things pleasant and delightful to speak of, which won him a great professional reputation. His fame was no less great when, on meeting the funeral cortege of a man unknown to him, he had him removed from the pyre and saved his life. This incident I give lest any should think that it was on slight grounds that so violent a changes took place. One thing alone moves me to anger: that one man, of a very superficial race, beginning with no resources, in order to increase his income suddenly gave to the human race rules for health, which however have subsequently been generally discarded. The success of Asclepiades owed much to the many distressing and crude features of ancient medical treatment; for instance, it was the custom to bury patients under coverings, and to promote perspiration by every possible means, now to roast the body before a fire, or continually to make them seek sunshine in our rainy city, nay throughout rainy imperial Italy: then for the first time were used hot-air baths, heated from below, treatment of infinite attractiveness. Besides this he did away with the agonizing treatment employed in certain diseases; for example in quinsy, which physicians used to treat by thrusting an instrument into the throat. He rightly condemned emetics also, which were at that time employed unduly often. He disapproved also of administering draughts that are injurious to the stomach, a criticism which is to a great extent a sound one. That is why I always point out in the first place those remedies that are beneficial to the stomach.

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§ 26.9.1  Above all Asclepiades was helped by Magian deceits, which prevailed to such a degree that they were strong enough to destroy confidence in all herbal remedies. It was believed that by the plant aethiopis rivers and pools are dried up; that by the touch of onothuris all things shut are opened; that if achaemenis is thrown on the ranks of an enemy the lines turn their backs in panic; that latace was wont to be given by the Persian king to his envoys, so that wherever they went they might enjoy an abundant supply of everything, with much similar nonsense. Where then were these plants when the Cimbri and the Teutones raised their awful war yells, or when Lucullus with a few legions laid low so many kings of the Magi? Or why have Roman generals always made victualling a first care in their wars? Why did Caesar's soldiers at Pharsalia feel hunger, if abundant plenty could have been given them by the happy property of a single plant? Would it not have been better for Scipio Aemilianus to open the gates of Carthage by a plant than to shake the defences for so many years with battering-rams? Let the Pomptine marshes be drained today by the plant merois, and much land be recovered for Italy near Rome. But as for the medical prescription found in the same Democritus, to ensure the begetting of beautiful, good and lucky children, did it ever give such offspring to any Persian king? It would certainly be wonderful that the credulity of our forefathers, though it arose from most sound beginnings, reached the height it did, if in any matter man's wit knew moderation, and I were not about to show, in the appropriate place, that this very system of medicine invented by Asclepiades has surpassed even Magian nonsense. It is without exception the nature of the human mind that what begins with necessities is finally carried to excess. I shall therefore go on to describe the omitted properties of the plants I dealt with in the preceding book, adding any other plants that my judgment will suggest.

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§ 26.10.1  But of lichen, which is so disfiguring a disease, I shall amass from all sources a greater number of remedies, although not a few have been noticed already. Remedies, then, are pounded plaintain, cinquefoil, root of asphodel in vinegar, shoots of the fig-tree boiled down in vinegar, and the root of hibiscus with bee-glue and strong vinegar boiled down to one quarter. The affected part is also rubbed with pumice, as a preparation for the application of rumex root pounded in vinegar, or of mistletoe scum kneaded with lime. A decoction too of tithymallus with resin is highly recommended; the plant lichen however is considered a better remedy than all these, a fact which has given the plant its name. It grows among rocks, has one broad leaf near the root, and one small stem with long leaves hanging down from it. This plant removes also marks of scars; it is pounded with honey. There is another kind of lichen, entirely clinging, as does moss, to rocks; this too is used by itself as a local application. It also stops bleeding if the juice is dropped into wounds, and applied locally it is good for gatherings. With honey also it cures jaundice, if the mouth and tongue are smeared with it. Patients undergoing this treatment are ordered to bathe in salt water, to be rubbed with almond oil, and to abstain from garden vegetables. To treat lichen is also used the root of thapsia pounded with honey.

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§ 26.11.1  For the treatment of quinsy argemonia is taken in wine, hyssop is boiled down with figs and used as a gargle, peucedanum is used with rennet of the seal in equal parts, and proserpinaca pounded with sprats-brine and oil, or else held beneath the tongue. Cinquefoil juice also, in doses of three cyathi. This also used as gargle is good for all affections of the throat; verbascum taken in water is specific for the tonsils.

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§ 26.12.1  For scrofulous sores are prescribed plantain, the great celandine with honey and axle-grease, cinquefoil, root of persollata also with axle-grease — the application is covered with the plant's leaves — artemisia also and the root of mandrake in water. Broad-leaved sideritis dug up with a nail in the left hand is attached as an amulet, but the healed patients must guard it, lest herbalists wickedly plant it again, as I have said in certain places, and bring about a relapse, a danger against which I find those also are warned who have been cured by artemisia, and those too cured by plantain. Damasonium, which is also called alisma, is gathered at the solstice and applied in rainwater to the sores, the leaf being crushed, or the root pounded, with axle-grease, but the application must be covered with a leaf from the same plant. The same method is used for all pains in the neck and for tumours in any part of the body.

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§ 26.13.1  The daisy grows in meadows. It has a white flower, to a certain distance tinged with red. It is held that an application of it is more efficacious if artemisia is added.

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§ 26.14.1  Condurdum too is a plant blooming at the summer solstice, having a red flower. Hung round the neck it is said to arrest scrofula; the same is said of vervain with plantain. All complaints of the fingers and specifically whitlows are successfully treated with cinquefoil.

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§ 26.15.1  Of chest complaints quite the most distressing is cough. Remedies for it are: root of panaces taken in sweet wine, juice of henbane (even when there is spitting of blood; the fumes too of bnrning henbane help the cough), scordotis also mixed with cress and dry resin pounded with honey — even by itself it makes expectoration easy — the greater centaury too, even when there is spitting of blood, for which complaint the juice of the plantain also is a remedy, three oboli of betony in water for spitting of pus or blood, root of persollata in doses of one drachma with eleven pine seeds, juice of peucedanum. For pains in the chest acorum is a help, and for this reason it is a component of antidotes, a help too for cough are daucum and the Scythian herb. The last is helpful for all chest complaints. For cough and spitting of pus, the dose being three oboli in the same amount of raisin wine, the golden-flowered verbascum is a good remedy. The potency of this plant is so great that beasts of burden that are not only suffering from cough but also broken-winded, are relieved by a draught, and the same I find is true of gentian. The root of caccalia, soaked in wine and chewed, is good not only for cough but also for the throat. A decoction of five sprays of hyssop, two of rue, and three figs, clears the chest and soothes the cough.

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§ 26.16.1  Bechion is also called tussilago. There are two kinds of it. Wherever the wild kind grows it is believed that springs run under the surface, and the plant is considered a sign by the water-finders. The leaves are rather larger than those of ivy, numbering five or seven, whitish underneath and pale on the upper side. There is no stem, or flower, or seed, and the root is slender. Some think it is the same as areion, and chamaeleuce under another name. The smoke of this plant, dried with the root and burnt, is said to cure, if inhaled deeply through a reed, an inveterate cough, but the patient must take a sip of raisin wine at each inhalation.

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§ 26.17.1  The second kind is called by some salvia, being like verbascum. Finely ground, strained and warmed, it is taken in drink for a cough and pains in the side; this prescription is also a remedy for scorpion stings and the poison of the sea dragon. An embrocation also of the plant and oil is good for snakebites. For cough, pains in the side and in the chest, a decoction is made of a bunch of hyssop and a quarter of a pound of honey, and verbascum with rue is taken in water, or powdered betony in hot water.

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§ 26.18.1  The stomach is strengthened by the juice of scordotis, by centaury, by gentian taken in water, by plantain, either taken by itself in food or mixed with lentils or alica gruel. Although betony in general lies heavy on the stomach, yet taken in drink, or if the leaves are chewed, it cures its troubles; aristolochia also may be taken in drink or dry agaric chewed, neat wine being drunk after a while, and nymphaea heraclia or juice of pencedanum may be applied locally. Psyllion is applied to inflammations, or pounded cotyledon with pearl-barley, or aizoum.

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§ 26.19.1  Molon has a striated stalk, soft small leaves, and a root four fingers long, at the end of which is a head like that of garlic. Some give it the name of syron. In wine it cures stomach troubles and difficulty of breathing, as do the greater centaury in an electuary, plantain, its juice or as food, pounded betony, in the proportion of one pound to half an ounce of Attic honey and taken daily in hot water, and aristolochia or agaric in doses of three oboli taken in hot water or ass's milk. Cissanthemus is given in drink a for orthopnoea, for that and for asthma hyssop, while for pains in the liver, chest, and side, if there is no fever, the juice of peucedanum. For spitting of blood also agaric is of help; a victoriatus by weight is pounded and given in five cyathi of honey wine. For this complaint amomum is equally good. For liver complaints fresh teucria is specific, taken in the proportion of four drachmae to one hemina of vinegar and water, or betony, one drachma to three cyathi of hot water: the same amount of betony, in two cyathi of cold water, is given for heart affections. The juice of cinquefoil is a remedy for affections of the liver and lungs, for spitting of blood, and for all internal blood impurities. Both kinds of anagallis are wonderfully good for liver complaints. Those who have eaten the plant called capnos (smoke) pass bile in their urine. Acoron is a cure for liver diseases, and daucum for those of the chest and hypochondria.

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§ 26.20.1  Ephedra, called by some anabasis, grows generally in wind-swept regions, climbs trees and hangs down from their branches. It has no leaves, but numerous rush-like, jointed tufts, and a pale root. For cough, asthma and colic it is given pounded in a dark-red, dry wine; and it may be made into a gruel, to which wine should be added. Another remedy is gentian, thoroughly pounded after being steeped the day before, the dose being a denarius by weight in three cyathi of wine.

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§ 26.21.1  Geum has little roots, slender, blackish and with a pleasant smell. It not only is a cure for pains in the chest or side, but also dispels indigestion, having besides a pleasant taste. Vervain however is a cure for troubles of all the internal organs — sides, lungs, liver and chest. But especially good for the lungs, and for those attacked by pulmonary tuberculosis, is the root of the plant consiligo, which I have said was but recently discovered. It is a sovereign remedy indeed for lung trouble in pigs and in all cattle, even though it is merely placed across the ear-lap. It ought to be drunk in water and held continuously in the mouth under the tongue. Whether the part of this plant above ground is of any use is not yet agreed. The kidneys are benefited by plantain taken as food, by betony taken in drink, and by agaric taken in drink as is prescribed for cough.

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§ 26.22.1  Tripolion is found on coastal rocks washed by the waves, but neither in the sea nor on dry ground; the leaf is that of isatis only thicker, the stem a span high and divided at the end, and the root white, thick, with a strong smell and a hot taste. Cooked in emmer wheat it is prescribed for patients with liver complaint. This plant is thought by some to be the same as polium, about which I have spoken in its proper place.

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§ 26.23.1  Gromphaena, which has its leaves alternately green and rose-colour along the stem, taken. in vinegar and water cures spitting of blood;

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§ 26.24.1  and the plant malundrum cures troubles of the liver; it grows among the corn and in meadows, with a strong scent and a white flower. Its young shoot a is beaten up in old wine.

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§ 26.25.1  The plant calcetum likewise is crushed with grape-skins and applied locally. Betony root acts as a gentle emetic, administered as is hellebore, the dose being four drachmae taken in raisin wine or in honey wine. The same is true of hyssop beaten up with honey, the result being better if cress or irio is taken first. Another cure is molemouium in doses of one denarius by weight. The milky juice of sillybum also, which thickens into a gum, is taken with honey, the dose being as above, and is excellent for carrying off bile. On the other hand, vomiting is arrested by wild cummin, or by powdered betony, both taken in water. Distaste for food is banished and indigestion dispelled by daucum, by powdered betony in hydromel, and by plantain boiled down as are greens. Hemionion relieves hiccoughs, as also does aristolochia, and clymenus relieves asthma. For pleurisy and pneumonia the greater centaury, and likewise hyssop, are taken in drink, and for pleurisy is taken juice of peucedanum.

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§ 26.26.1  Halus also, which the Gauls call sil and the Veneti cotonea, cures pain in the side, as well as kidney troubles, sprains and ruptures. It is like ox-eunila, and the tops are like those of thyme. It is sweet and allays thirst. Its roots are in some districts light, in others dark.

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§ 26.27.1  The same good effect on pain in the sides is given by chamaerops, taken in wine, a plant with myrtle-like leaves around its twin stems, and with heads like those of a Greek rose. Agaric, taken in drink as for cough, relieves sciatica and pains in the spine, as does powdered stoechas or betony, taken in hydromel.

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§ 26.28.1  The greatest part however of man's trouble is caused by the belly, the gratification of which is the life's work of the majority of mankind. For at one time it does not allow food to pass, at another it will not retain it, at another it does not take it, at another it does not digest it; and so much have our customs degenerated that it is chiefly through his food that a man dies. This, the most troublesome organ in the body, presses as does a creditor, making its demands several times a day. It is for the belly's sake especially that avarice is so acquisitive; for its sake luxury uses spices, voyages are made to the Phasis, and the bottom of the ocean is explored. Nobody, again, is led to consider how base an organ it is by the foulness of its completed work. Therefore the tasks of medicine concerned with the belly are very numerous. Looseness of the bowels is checked by a drachma dose of fresh scordotis beaten up with wine, or by the same quantity taken in a decoction, by polemonia in wine, which is also given for dysentery, by root of verbascum in doses of two fingers' size taken in water, the seed of nymphaea heraclia taken with wine, the upper root of xiphium, the dose being a drachma by weight, taken in vinegar, the seed of plantain beaten up in wine, plantain itself boiled in vinegar, or groats taken in plantain juice, also the plant boiled with lentils, or the plant dried, powdered and sprinkled in drink with parched and pounded poppies, juice of plantain injected or drunk, or betony in wine made warm with hot iron. Betony is also administered in a dry wine for coeliac affections, for which hiberis also is applied locally in the way I have described. For tenesmus the root of nymphaea heraclia is taken in wine, psyllium in water, or a decoction of root of acoron. The juice of aizoum checks looseness of the bowels and dysentery, and expels round worms. Root of symphytum taken in wine checks looseness of the bowels and dysentery, as does the root of daucum. Leaves of aizoum thoroughly beaten up in wine arrest griping pains, as does dried alcima powdered and taken with wine.

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§ 26.29.1  Astragalus has long leaves with many slanting incisions, around the root three or four stems covered with leaves, blossom like that of the hyacinthus, and roots that are hairy, matted, red and very hard. It grows on stony ground that is exposed to sunshine and also to falls of snow, like the ground around Pheneus in Arcadia. Its property is to brace the body. Its root, taken in wine, checks looseness of the bowels, a result of which is that it is diuretic by forcing back their fluid, as most things do that check looseness. It cures dysentery also when ground in light-red wine, but it is ground only with difficulty. Fomentation with the same plant is very good for gum-boils. It is gathered at the end of autumn, when it has lost its leaves, and is dried in the shade.

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§ 26.30.1  Looseness of the bowels is also checked by both kinds of ladanum; the one that grows in cornfields must be first crushed and passed through a sieve. It is taken in hydromel, or in wine of a good vintage. The name of ladon is given to a plant from which in Cyprus is made the ladanum that clings to the beards of goats; a finer sort is prepared in Arabia. Today a kind is also found in Syria and in Africa, called toxicum. For they surround with pieces of wool strings fastened across a bow, and drag it over the plant; to this wool adhere the dew-like tufts of ladanum. I have said more about the plant in my section on unguents. This ladanum has a very strong smell and is very hard to the touch. In fact a great deal of earth sticks to it, while the most valued kind is clean, scented, soft, green and resinous. Its nature is to soften, to dry, to mature abscesses, and to induce sleep. It prevents the hair from falling off, and preserves its dark colour. It is poured into the ears with hydromel or rose-oil. With the addition of salt it cures scurf on the skin and running sores, and chronic cough when taken with storax; it is also a very effective carminative.

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§ 26.31.1  Looseness of the bowels is checked too by chondris, also called pseudodictamnum. Hypocisthis, called by some orobothron, which is like an unripe pomegranate, grows as I have said under the cisthus, and from this fact derives its name. Either kind of hypocisthis (there are two; the white and the red), dried in the shade and taken in dark-red, dry wine, checks looseness of the bowels. The part used is the juice, which braces and dries, and it is the red kind that arrests better stomach catarrhs, spitting of blood when three oboli are taken with starch in drink, and dysentery when taken in drink or injected; similarly vervain given in water, or in Aminnean wine if there is no fever, the dose being five spoonfuls added to three cyathi of wine.

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§ 26.32.1  Layer also, which grows in streams, when preserved and boiled cures gripings,

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§ 26.33.1  potamogiton, however, taken in wine, cures dysentery as well and coeliac affections. The latter is a plant with leaves like those of beet, only it is a smaller and more hairy plant, never rising more than a little above the surface of the water. Only the leaves are used. which have a cooling and bracing quality, being especially useful for bad legs, and, with honey or vinegar, for corroding ulcers. The plant known to Castor under this name was different; it had slender leaves like horsehair, a long, smooth stem, and grew in marshy districts. With its root Castor used to cure scrofulous sores and indurations. The crocodile has an antipathy a to potamogiton, so that crocodile hunters carry some of it on their persons. Achillea too checks looseness of the bowels. Statice also has the same properties, a plant that bears seven heads, like the heads of a rose, upon seven stems.

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§ 26.34.1  Ceratia, a plant with one leaf, and a large, knotted root, taken in food cures sufferers from coeliac disease and dysentery. Leontopodium, called by some leuceoron, by others dorypetron, by others thorybethron, is a plant the root of which, in doses of two denarii by weight added to hydromel, checks looseness of the bowels and carries off bile. It grows on flat land with a thin soil. Its seed, taken in drink, is said to cause nightmares. Lagopus taken in wine, or in water if there is fever, checks looseness of the bowels. It is also attached to the groin when there is swelling there. It grows in cornfields. Many recommend above all else for desperate cases of dysentery doses of a decoction in milk of the roots of cinquefoil, or aristolochia, a victoriatus by weight in three cyathi of wine. When the prescriptions mentioned above are to be taken warm, it will be found best to heat them with red-hot iron. On the other hand a drachma of the juice of the lesser centaury taken in a hemina of water with a little salt and vinegar purges the bowels and carries off bile; the greater centaury dispels griping pains. Betony acts as an aperient, four drachmae being added to nine cyathi of hydromel; so also euphorbeum or agaric, in doses of two drachmae with a little salt, taken in water or in three oboli of honey wine. Cyclamen too is an aperient, either taken in water or used as a suppository; the same in its action is a suppository of chamaecissos. A handful of hyssop, boiled down to one third with salt, or pounded in oxymel and salt, both carries off phlegm and expels worms from the intestines. Root of peucedanum carries off both phlegm and bile.

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§ 26.35.1  Both kinds of anagallis, taken in hydromel, are purgative, as is also epithymum, which is the blossom of the thyme like satureia. The only difference is that this has a grass-green flower, the other thyme a white one. Some call it hippopheos. Less beneficial to the stomach, it causes vomitings, but dispels colic and flatulence. As an electuary it is also taken with honey, and sometimes with iris, for chest troubles. From four to six drachmae with honey and a little salt and vinegar move the bowels. Others give a different account of epithymum: that it grows without a root, has a small head like a little hood, is red in colour and is dried in the shade, and a dose of half an acetabulum, taken in water, carries off phlegm and bile, acting as a gentle aperient.

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§ 26.36.1  Nymphaea too in a dry wine loosens the bowels, as also does pycnocomon, which has leaves like rocket, but thicker and more acrid, a round root of a yellow colour and an earthy smell, a quadrangular stem, of moderate length and slender, and the blossom of basil. It is found on stony ground. Its root, taken in hydromel in doses of two denarii by weight, thoroughly purges the bowels of bile and phlegm. A drachma of the seed, taken in wine, causes wild dreams. Capnos trunca also carries away bile.

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§ 26.37.1  Of polypodium, a plant called by Romans filicula, being like a fern (filix), the root is medicinal, hairy, grass-green inside, as thick as the little finger, with indented edges so as to look like a polypus's arms, of a sweetish taste, and to be found in stony soils or under old trees. The juice is extracted from the root soaked in water, and chopped up fine the root itself is sprinkled on cabbage, beet, mallows and pickled fish, or else boiled with gruel to make a gentle aperient usable even in fever. It brings away bile and phlegm, although injurious to the stomach. Dried and reduced to powder it eats away polypus if pushed up the nostrils. There is no flower and no seed.

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§ 26.38.1  It is by relaxing the stomach that a scamonium too brings away bile and loosens the bowels, unless indeed to two oboli of it are added two drachmae of aloes. This is the juice of a plant with many branches at the root, fleshy, three-cornered, pale leaves, and a thick, wet, nauseating root. It grows in rich, pale soil. Near the rising of the Dog-star a hollow is made in this root, so that the juice may collect in it automatically; this is dried in the sun and worked into lozenges. The root itself or the skin is also dried. The kind most approved grows in the regions of Colophon, Mysia and Priene. This is shiny, as like as possible to bull glue, spongy with very fine cracks, quickly melting, with a poisonous smell, gummy, becoming like milk at a touch of the tongue, extremely light, and turning white when dissolved. This happens too with bastard scamonmm, which is made, generally in Judea, with flour of bitter vetch and juice of sea spurge, and even chokes those who take it. The bastard kind is detected by the taste, for the genuine burns the tongue. It is to be used when two years old, being of no use either before or after. It has been prescribed by itself in water or in hydromel and salt, the dose being four oboli, but most effectively with aloes, though honey wine must be taken as soon as purging begins. The root too is boiled down in vinegar to the consistency of honey, the decoction being applied to leprous sores, and with oil it is used as an ointment for the head when there is headache.

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§ 26.39.1  Tithymallus is called 'milky plant' by us Romans, sometimes 'goat lettuce.' It is said that, if letters are traced on the body with its milk and then allowed to dry, on being sprinkled with ash the letters become visible. And it is by this means, rather than by a letter, that some lovers have preferred to address unfaithful wives. The kinds of it are many, the first being surnamed characias, which is also considered the male plant. five or six branches, a cubit long, as thick as a finger, red and juicy; the leaves at the root are very like those of the olive, and on the top of the stem is a head a like that of the rush. It grows on rough ground near the sea. The seed is gathered in autumn together with the head; after being left to get dry in the sun it is pounded and stored away; as to the juice, as soon as down begins to form on fruit, twigs are broken off, and juice therefrom is caught on meal of bitter vetch or on figs and left to get dry with them. Five drops are enough to be caught on each fig, and it is reported that a dropsical patient on taking a fig has as many motions as the fig has caught drops of juice. When the juice is being collected care must be taken that it does not touch the eyes. A juice is also extracted from pounded leaves, but one less efficacious than the former. A decoction too is made from the branches. The seed is also used, boiled down with honey, to make purgative pills. The seed is also inserted with wax into hollow teeth. A decoction too of the root in wine or oil is used as a monthwash. The juice is applied locally for lichen; it is taken internally as a purge, being both an emetic and an aperient; apart from this it is bad for the stomach. Taken in drink with the addition of salt it brings away phlegm, but to bring away bile saltpetre must be added; if it is desired that the purging shall be by stool, the drink should be vinegar and water; if by vomiting, raisin wine or hydromel. A moderate draught is made up with three oboli. It is better taken on a fig, and after food. The juice burns the throat slightly; for it is of so heating a nature that, applied externally by itself to the body, it raises blisters as fire does, and so it is sometimes used as a cautery.

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§ 26.40.1  The second kind of tithymallus is called myrtites by some, and caryites by others, having leaves like those of the myrtle, pointed and prickly, but larger, and growing like the first kind in rough ground. Its heads are gathered when the barley is beginning to swell, dried in the shade for nine days and thoroughly dried in the sun. The fruit does not ripen all together, but a part in the following year. It is called the nut, and for this reason the Greeks have surnamed this tithymallus earyites. It is gathered when the harvest is ready, washed, and then dried. It is given with twice the amount of black poppy, the dose being one acetabulum altogether. It is a less violent emetic than the preceding, as are also the others. Some have given the leaf also in a similar dose, the nut however by itself in honey wine or raisin wine, or with sesame. It carries off phlegm and bile by stool. Sores in the mouth it cures, but for corroding ulcers in the mouth the leaf is eaten with honey.

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§ 26.41.1  The third kind of tithymallus is called paralius or tithvmallis. It has a round leaf, a stem a span high, reddish branches, and a white seed, which is gathered when the grape begins to form, and after being dried and pounded is taken in doses of one acetabulum as a purgative.

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§ 26.42.1  The fourth kind of tithymallus is called helioscopios. It has the leaves of purslane, and four or five small branches standing out from the root, which are reddish, half a foot high and full of juice. This kind grows around towns, and has a white seed of which pigeons are very fond. The name helioscopios has been given to this plant because it moves its heads round to follow the sun. Bile it carries away by urine or stool when taken in doses of half an acetabulum in oxymel. Its other uses are the same as those of characias.

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§ 26.43.1  The fifth kind is called cyparittias, because its leaves are like those of cypress. It has a double or triple stem, and grows in fiat country. Its properties are the same as those of helioscopios or characias.

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§ 26.44.1  The sixth kind is called by some platyphyllos, by others corymbites, and by others amygdalites from its likeness to the almond tree. Its leaves are broader than those of any other. It kills fish. Root, leaves or juice are purgative if a dose of four drachmae is taken in honey wine or hydromel. It is specific for carrying away morbid fluids.

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§ 26.45.1  The seventh kind is surnamed dendroides, and is called by some cohios, and by others leptophyllos. It grows among rocks, and is the most thickly headed of all the kinds. It has very large, reddish stems, and an abundance of seed. The properties are the same as those of characias.

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§ 26.46.1  Apios ischas or raphanos agria spreads out on the ground two or three rush-like stalks of a reddish colour with leaves like those of rue. The root is like that of an onion, but bigger, and this is the reason why some call it the wild radish. Inside it has a white pap, outside, dark skins. It grows in rough, hilly spots, sometimes also in grass land. Dug up in spring, it is pounded and immersed in an earthen vessel. After throwing away what floats on the surface they use the juice that remains as a purge and emetic, the dose being an obolus and a half in hydromel. Prepared after this fashion a dose of an acetabulum is also given for dropsy. The dried root powdered is also sprinkled in a draught. They say that the upper part of it brings away the hues by vomiting, the lower part by stool.

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§ 26.47.1  Colic is cured by any kind of panaces, by betony, except when the cause is indigestion, by the juice of peucedanum, which also, being carminative, dispels flatulence, by the root of acoron, or by daucum, if it is taken as a salad like lettuce. Cyprian ladanum, taken in drink, is good for intestinal complaints, as also is powdered gentian, of the size of a bean, taken in warm water, or plantain taken in the morning, the dose being two spoonfuls with one of poppy in four cyathi of wine which is not old. It is also given before going to sleep with the addition of soda or pearl barley, provided that it is long after the last meal. For colitis a hemina of the juice is injected, even when fever is present.

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§ 26.48.1  Agaric taken in drink, the dose being three oboli in one cyathus of old wine, is good for disorders of the spleen, as is the root in honey wine of all kinds of panaces, but best of all is teneria, dried and taken in drink by boiling down to one hemina a handful of it with three heminae of vinegar. In vinegar it is also used as a liniment, or, if that cannot be borne, in figs or water. Polemonia is taken in wine, or a drachma of betony in three cyathi of oxymel, or aristolochia as used for snake bite. Argemonia, taken in food on seven consecutive days, is said to reduce the spleen, and so are two oboli of agaric in oxymel. It is reduced also by the root of nymphaea heraclia taken in wine or by itself. Cissanthemus, if a drachma is taken twice daily in two cyathi of white wine for forty days, is said to carry off the spleen gradually in the urine. Useful too is a decoction of hyssop with fig, or of the root of lonchitis before it sheds its seed, while a decoction of root of peucedanum is good for both spleen and kidneys. The spleen is reduced by the juice of acoron taken by the mouth — the roots are very useful for trouble of the hypochondria and groin — by the seed of clymenus taken in drink for thirty days, the dose being a denarius by weight in white wine, by powdered betony taken in honey and squill vinegar, and by root of lonchitis in water. Teucrium is used as liniment, likewise scordium with wax, or agaric with powdered fenugreek.

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§ 26.49.1  For diseases of the bladder and for the cure of stone, which causes as we have said the most severe torture, help is obtained from polemonia taken in wine, from agaric, from leaves or root of plantain taken in raisin wine, from betony as we prescribed it for the liver; this last, taken in drink and used as liniment, is good for hernia and wonderfully effective for strangury. Some recommend betony, vervain and millefolium, in equal parts and taken in water, as a sovereign remedy for stone. It is certain that strangury is cured by dittany also, and by cinquefoil boiled down to one third in wine. The latter preparation is very useful to be taken, and to be used locally as a liniment, by sufferers from intestinal hernia. The upper part of the root of xiphilum also is diuretic; it is given in water and applied locally as liniment for intestinal hernia in infants. For bladder troubles the juice of peucedanum is applied locally, and psyllion is so applied for hernia and umbilical rupture in infants. The two kinds of anagallis are diuretic, as is a decoction of root of acoron, or the root by itself pounded and taken in drink; these are good for all troubles of the bladder, for stone both cotyledon and its root, and also, for all inflammations of the genitals, equal parts by weight of the stem, of the seed, and of myrrh. Ebulum ground with its tender leaves and taken in wine expels stone, and applied locally cures complaints of the testicles. Erigeron too with powdered frankincense and sweet wine cures inflammation of the testicles. Root of symphytum used as liniment reduces intestinal hernia, and white hypocisthis is good for corroding ulcers of the genitals. Artemisia too in sweet wine is given for stone and for strangury; root of nymphaea heraclia in wine relieves pains of the bladder.

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§ 26.50.1  The same property is to be found in crethmos, a plant very highly praised by Hippocrates. It is also one of the wild plants that are eaten — at any rate in Callimachus the peasant Hecale puts it on the table — and a species of garden elate. It has one stem a span high, and a hot seed, scented like that of libanotis, and round. When dried it bursts, and has inside a white kernel, which some call cachrys. The leaves are fleshy, and whitish like those of the olive only thicker, and salt to the taste; there are three or four roots, of the thickness of a finger. It grows in rocky places by the sea. It is eaten, raw or boiled, with cabbage, and has a pleasant, aromatic taste; it is also preserved in brine. It is especially useful for strangury, the leaves, stem, or root being taken in wine. The complexion also of the skin is improved by it, but too large a dose causes flatulence. A decoction relaxes the bowels, brings away urine and humours from the kidneys, as does the powder of dried alcima taken in wine, and relieves strangury, more efficaciously however if daucum is added. It is also good for the spleen, and is taken in drink for snake bites. Phlegm or strangury in draught animals also is relieved if crethsnos is sprinkled over their barley.

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§ 26.51.1  Anthyllion is very like the lentil, and taken in wine cures bladder troubles and arrests bleeding. A second plant, anthyllis, is like chamaepitys, and has a purple flower, a heavy scent, and a root like that of endive. It is even better treatment taken in oxymel for epilepsy.

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§ 26.52.1  Cepaea is like purslane, but has a darker root, which is of no value. It grows on sandy shores, and has a bitter taste. Taken in wine with root of asparagus it is very good indeed for the bladder.

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§ 26.53.1  The same properties are to be found in hypericon — some call it chamaepitys, others conssum — which has the stem of a garden vegetable, thin, reddish, and a cubit high. The leaves are like those of rue and have a pungent smell. The seed, which is black, is in a pod, and it ripens at the same time as barley. This seed is of a bracing quality, checks diarrhoea and promotes urine; it is taken with wine for bladder troubles.

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§ 26.54.1  There is another hypericon, called by some caro, having a leaf like that of the tamarisk — it grows underneath it — but more fleshy and less red. It is scented, more than a span high, with a sweet and rather pungent taste. The seed is of a heating nature and therefore causes inflammation, but it is not injurious to the stomach; it is particularly good for strangury, if the bladder is not ulcerated. Taken in wine it is also good for pleurisy,

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§ 26.55.1  as moreover is callithrix for the bladder if beaten up with eummin and administered in white wine. Vervain too if boiled down with the leaves to one third, or its root in warm honey wine, expels stone from the bladder, as does also perpressa, which grows near Arretium and in Illyricum; it is taken in drink, boiled down in water from three heminae to one. Trefoil, taken in wine, and chrysanthemum, have the same effect. Stone is expelled also by anthemis, which has five small leaves growing from the root, two long stems and a rose-coloured flower. The roots pounded by themselves a layer, raw.

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§ 26.56.1  Silaus grows in running streams with gravelly bottoms; a cubit high it resembles celery. It is boiled as is an acid vegetable, and is very good for the bladder, which if it suffers from is cured by the root of panaces, a plant otherwise injurious to the bladder. Stone is expelled by the wild apple, a pound of the root being boiled down to one half in a congius of wine — a hemina of it is taken daily for three days, the rest is taken in wine — by sea-nettle, by daucum, and by the seed of plantain in wine.

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§ 26.57.1  The plant of Fulvius, beaten up with wine, is another remedy for stone. It is one of the plants named after the discoverer, and is well known to botanists.

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§ 26.58.1  Scordion is diuretic; hyoscyamus reduces swollen testicles; the genitals are effectively treated by juice of peucedanum, and by its seed in honey; strangury by three-oboli doses of agaric in one cyathus of old wine, by two-drachmae doses of root of trefoil in wine, and by one-drachma doses of daucum or of its seed. Sciatica is cured by pounded seed and leaves of erythrodanus, by panaces taken in drink and rubbed on the affected part, by polemonia, and by a decoction of the leaves of aristolochia. Agaric indeed cures both the tendon called 'broad' and pain in the shoulders, the dose being three oboli taken in one cyathus of old wine. For sciatica cinquefoil is both taken in drink and applied, as is also a decoction of scammony with barley meal added. The seed of either kind of hypericum is taken in wine. Affections and chafings of the seat are cured very quickly by plantain, condylomata by cinquefoil; if however these have already become callous, by cyclamen root in vinegar. The blue anagallis pushes back prolapsus of the anus; the red anagallis on the contrary makes it worse. Cotyledon is wonderfully good treatment for condylomata and for piles; so is, for swollen testicles, the application of root of acoron, pounded and boiled down in wine. Cato says that those carrying on their persons Pontic wormwood never suffer from chafing between the thighs. Other authorities add pennyroyal to the list of remedies; this, gathered by a fasting man and tied behind him, prevents pains in the groin or relieves those which have begun already.

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§ 26.59.1  Inguinalis ('groin-wort'), called by some argemonion, a plant growing anywhere in briar patches, needs only to be held in the hand to be of benefit.

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§ 26.60.1  Superficial abscess is cured by panaces in honey, plantain with salt, cinquefoil, root of persollata administered as for scrofula; also by damasonium and by verbascum, pounded with its root, sprinkled with wine, wrapped round with its leaves, and heated, thus prepared, on embers, so that it may be applied hot. Those with experience have assured us that it makes all the difference if, while the patient is fasting, the poultice is laid upon him by a maiden, herself fasting and naked, who must touch him with the back of her hand and say: 'Apollo tells us that a plague cannot grow more fiery in a patient if a naked maiden quench the fire;' and with her hand so reversed she must repeat the formula three times, and both must spit on the ground three times. Other cures are mandrake root in water, a decoction of scammony root with honey, sideritis crushed with stale grease, marruvium with stale axle-grease, or chrysippios — another plant named after its discoverer — with plump figs.

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§ 26.61.1  Nymphaea heraclia, as I have said, takes away altogether sexual desire; a single draught of it does so for forty days; sexual dreams too are prevented if it is taken in drink on an empty stomach and eaten with food. Applied to the genitals the root also cheeks not only desire but also excessive accumulation of semen. For this reason it is said to make flesh and to improve the voice. Sexual desire is excited by the upper part of xiphium root given in wine as a draught; also by the plant called eremuos agrios and by ormenos agrios crushed with pearl barley.

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§ 26.62.1  But very high on the list of wonders is the plant orchis, or serapias, which has the leaves of leek, a stem a span high, and a purple flower. The root has two tubers, like testicles, so that the larger, or, as some put it, the thinner, taken in water excites desire; the smaller, or softer, taken in goat's milk checks it. Some say that this orchis has leaves like those of the squill, only smoother and smaller, and a prickly stem. The roots cure sores in the mouth and phlegm on the chest; taken in wine they are constipating. Satyrion is a sexual stimulant. There are two kinds of it: one with longer leaves than those of the olive, a stem four fingers high, purple blossom, and a double root shaped like human testicles, which swells and subsides again in alternate years. The other kind has the further name of satyrios orehis, and is thought to be female. It is distinguished from the former kind by the spaces between the joints, by its more branchy, bushy shape, also by its root's being like a phallus. The plant is generally found near the sea.

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§ 26.62.2  This latter kind, if applied with pearl barley or by itself after being pounded, relieves swellings and affections of the privy parts. The root of the former kind, taken in the milk of a farmyard sheep, causes erections; taken in water, however, it makes them subside.

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§ 26.63.1  The Greeks speak of a satyrion that has leaves like those of the lily, but red, smaller, and springing from the ground not more than three in number, a smooth, bare stem a cubit high, and a double root, the lower, and larger, part favouring the conception of males, the upper, and smaller, the conception of females. Yet another kind of satyrion they call erythraicon, saying that its seed is like that of the vitex, but larger, smooth and hard; that the root is covered with a red rind, and contains a a white substance with a sweetish taste, and that the plant is generally found in hilly country. They tell us that sexual desire is aroused if the root is merely held in the hand, a stronger passion, however, if it is taken in a dry wine, that rams also and he-goats are given it in drink when they are too sluggish, and that it is given to stallions from Sarmatia when they are too fatigued in copulation because of prolonged labour; this condition is called prosedamum. The effects of the plant can be neutralized by doses of hydromel or lettuce. The Greeks indeed always, when they wish to indicate this aphrodisiac nature of a plant, use the name satyrion, so applying it to crataegis, thelygonon, and arrenogonon, the seeds of which resemble testicles. Again, those carrying on their persons the pith of tithymallus branches are said to become thereby more excited sexually. The remarks on this subject made by Theophrastus generally a weighty authority, are fabulous. He says that the lust to have intercourse seventy times in succession has been given by the touch of a certain plant whose name and kind he has not mentioned.

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§ 26.64.1  Tied to the part as an amulet, sideritis reduces varicose veins and does its work without pain. Gout was a rarer disease within the memory, not only of our fathers and grandfathers, but also of our own generation. It is also itself a foreign complaint; had it existed in Italy in early times it would have received a Latin name. It must not be considered incurable, for many cases have been cured without treatment, and yet more with it. Useful remedies are roots of panaces with raisins, juice of henbane with meal, or the seed of henbane, scordion in vinegar, hiberis as already prescribed, vervain beaten up with axle-grease, and the root of cyclamen, a decoction of which is also good for chilblains. Cooling applications for gouty pains are made from xiphion root, psyllion seed, hemlock with litharge or axle-grease, and aizotim for the first onset of red, that is hot, gout. Good for either kind however is erigeron with axle-grease, plantain leaves beaten up with a little salt added, and argemonia pounded with honey. Vervain too may be applied as a remedy — or the feet may be soaked in the water in which it has been boiled,

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§ 26.65.1  or the lappago that is like anagallis, but more branchy and leafy, and with a strong smell. This kind of plant is called mollugo; like it, but with rougher leaves, is asperugo. The juice of the former a is taken daily, the dose being one denarius by weight in two cyathi of wine.

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§ 26.66.1  The sovereign remedy, however, for this complaint is phycos the lassion, or seaweed, which is like lettuce, and is used as a ground-colour for the purple of the murex; it is sovereign, not for gout only, but for all diseases of the joints, if applied before it becomes dry. There are moreover three kinds of it: one is broad, the second is rather long and inclining to red, and the third, which has curly leaves, is used in Crete to dye cloth. They have all the same medicinal uses. Nicander gave these too in wine for snakebite. A further remedy is the seed, soaked in water, of the plant I have called psyllion: one hemina of such seed is compounded with two spoonfuls of Colophonian resin and one spoonful of frankincense. Another highly valued remedy is made from leaves of mandrake pounded with pearl barley. When however ankles swell, water-mud kneaded with oil makes a wonderfully good plaster; for the joints the juice of the smaller centaury is very beneficial, as it is also for the sinews; beneficial too is centauris. For the sinews running across the shoulder blades, for the shoulders, for the backbone and the loins, a good remedy is betony, taken as prescribed for the liver; for the joints an application of cinquefoil, leaves of mandrake with pearl barley, or its root pounded fresh with wild cucumber or boiled down in water; for chaps on the toes the root of polypodium; for the joints juice of henbane with axle-grease, the decocted juice of amomum, a decoction too of centunculus, or fresh moss soaked in water and bound round the part until the water dries off, and also root of lappa boaria taken in wine. Cyclamen boiled down in water is a good remedy for chilblains and for all other affections caused by cold; for chilblains cotyledon too with axle-grease, leaves of batrachion and the juice of epithymum. Corns are extracted from the feet by ladanum mixed with beaver-oil, and by vervain in wine.

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§ 26.67.1  Having now finished the complaints that affect separate limbs I shall go on to describe those that attack the whole body. Of remedies that are generally useful I learn that the best is dodecatheum, to be given in drink, a plant I have already described; next the roots of all kinds of panaces, especially good for long illnesses, and the seed is used for intestinal complaints; for general bodily pains however juice of seordion and also of betony, which taken in drink is specific for removing a leaden colour of the skin and restoring a more pleasing complexion.

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§ 26.68.1  Geranion is called by some myrris and by others myrtidas. It resembles hemlock, but with smaller leaves and shorter in the stem, round, and of a pleasant taste and smell. In this way it is described by our Roman authorities; but Greeks say that it has leaves a little lighter in colour than those of the mallow, thin stems, and downy, with branches at interval and two spans long; on them are the leaves, among which on the tips of the stems are miniature heads of cranes. A second kind has leaves like those of anemone, which are marked with rather long incisions, and a round root like an apple, sweet, and very beneficial to convalescents. The last seems to be the true geranion. It is taken in drink for consumption twice a day in doses of one drachma in three cyathi of wine; the same prescription is good for flatulence, and eaten raw the plant has the same effect. The juice of the root is good for ear trouble; for opisthotonic tetanus four-drachmae doses of seed are taken in drink with pepper and myrrh. Consumption is cured too by drinking plantain juice, and by plantain itself boiled and taken as food. Eaten with salt and oil on waking from sleep in the morning it is very refreshing. It is also given every other day to those who we say are wasting away, but to consumptives we give betony made up with honey into an electuary of the size of a bean, or agarie in raisin wine in two-oboli doses, or daucum with the greater centaury in wine. Cases of phagedaena, a word meaning bulimia as well as rodent ulcer, are treated by tithymallus with sesame.

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§ 26.69.1  Of the maladies that affect the whole body sleeplessness is the most common. As remedies for it are recommended panaces, clymenos, aristolochia — by the smell or by bathing the head — aizoum, that is houseleek, wrapped in black cloth and placed under the pillow without the knowledge of the patient. Onothera also, that is onear, is soporific although exhilarating in wine, having leaves like those of the almond tree, rose-coloured blossom, a bushy shape and a long root, which when dried smells of wine, and given in their drink soothes even wild beasts. Indigestion causing nausea is relieved by betony; it also if taken in drink after dinner promotes digestion; in doses of one drachma by weight in three cyathi of oxymel it also removes the after-effects of drink, as does agaric too taken in hot water after food. Betony is said to cure paralysis and so does hiberis as prescribed previously. It is also good for numbness of the limbs; so also is argemonia, by removing all symptoms indicating that surgical treatment (i.e. venesection) may be necessary.

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§ 26.70.1  Epilepsy is cured by the root of the panaces. I have called heraclion taken in drink with seal's rennet; three quarters of the mixture must be panaces. Other cures are plantain in drink, doses of one drachma of betony or three oboli of agaric in oxymel, leaves of cinquefoil in water, and also archezostis, but the last must be taken in drink for a year. Other cures are dried root of baccar crushed to powder and taken in hot water in doses of three cyathi with one of coriander, pounded centunculus in vinegar or honey or hot water, vervain taken in wine, three crushed berries of hyssop taken in water for sixteen days, equal quantities of peucedanum and seal's rennet taken in drink, crushed leaves of cinquefoil taken in wine for thirty days, powdered betony in doses of three denarii by weight with a cyathus of squill vinegar and an ounce of Attic honey, scammony in doses of two oboli with four drachmae of beaver-oil.

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§ 26.71.1  The chills of fever are relieved by agaric taken in hot water, tertian fevers by sideritis with oil, by crushed ladanum, a plant found in grain fields, by plantain in hydromel taken in two-drachma doses within two hours before a paroxysm, juice of its root soaked or pounded, or by the root itself beaten up in water heated with hot iron. Some physicians have prescribed doses of three roots in three cyathi of water, changing three to four if the fever is quartan. If one takes, when bugloss is withering, the pith out of a stem and says that he does it to free so and so from fever, attaching to the patient seven leaves before a paroxysm begins, he is freed, it is said, from the fever. Another remedy is betony in doses of one drachma in three cyathi of hydromel, or agaric, especially in fevers attended with violent shivers. Some have prescribed doses of three cinquefoil leaves for tertians, of four for quartans, and of more for the other fevers; others prescribe for all three oboli with pepper in hydromel. Vervain in wine indeed is a remedy for fever even of beasts of burden, but for tertians the plant must be cut at the third joint, and for quartans at the fourth. For quartans and feverish shivers is taken in drink the seed of either kind of hypericum, powdered betony, which checks all shiverings, and panaces also, which is of such a heating nature that those about to travel through snow are recommended to take it in drink and to be rubbed with it. Violent chills are also checked by aristolochia.

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§ 26.72.1  Phrenitis is cured by sleep, which will be induced by pouring on the head an infusion of peucedanum in vinegar, or the juice of either anagallis. On the other hand it is difficult to awaken sufferers from lethargus; this is done by touching the nostrils with euphorbeum in vinegar, or with the juice of peucedanum. For delirium betony is taken in drink. Carbuncles are made to burst by panaces, and cured by powdered betony in water, or by cabbage and frankincense with frequent draughts of hot water; or the ash from a burning coal extinguished in the patient's presence may be picked up with a finger and applied. Other remedies are pounded plantain and tithymallus characites.

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§ 26.73.1  Remedies for dropsy are: panaces; plantain as food, after dry bread without any drink; two-drachma doses of betony in two cyathi of wine or honey wine; agaric, or lonchitis seed, two spoonfuls for a dose taken in water; psyllion in wine; juice of either anagallis; root of cotyledon in honey wine; root of fresh ebulum, shaken only and not washed, a two-finger pinch for a dose, taken in an emma of old wine and hot water; root of trefoil in wine, two drachmae for a dose; the tithymallus called platyphyllon; seed of the hypericum known as caros; acte, which some identify with ebulum, the root, if there is no fever, being crushed in three cyathi of wine, or the seed being taken in dark wine; vervain also, a good handful being boiled down in water to one half. The most efficacious remedy however is believed to be the juice of chamaeacte. An of phlegm is relieved by plantain, by cyclamen root in honey, and by pounded leaves of ebulum in old wine. An application of the last cures boa also, an eruption of red pimples, and the juice of strychnos applied as liniment cures itch.

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§ 26.74.1  Erysipelas is treated with aizoum, pounded leaves of hemlock, and root of mandrake — it is cut into slices as is cucumber, hung first over must, then in smoke, and finally pounded taken in wine or vinegar. It is beneficial too to foment with myrtle wine, or to use as an ointment two ounces of mint with one ounce of native sulphur beaten np together in vinegar, or soot mixed with vinegar. There are several kinds of erysipelas, among them one called zoster, which goes round the patient's waist, and is fatal if the circle becomes quite complete. Remedies are: plantain with Cimolian chalk, penstereos by itself and the root of persollata; as remedies for the creeping forms can be used root of cotyledon with honey wine, aizoum, and the juice of linozostis with vinegar.

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§ 26.75.1  Root of polypodinm made up into liniment is a remedy for dislocations, and the pain and swelling are taken away by seed of psyllion, plantain leaves beaten up with a little salt, ground seed of verbascum boiled in wine, and hemlock with axle-grease. The leaves of ephemeron are applied in the form of liniment to tumours and swellings that are still able to be dispersed.

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§ 26.76.1  The most striking symptom of jaundice is the effect upon the eyes; the bile penetrates even between the membranes, thin and close together as they are. Hippocrates says that if jaundice supervenes from the seventh day of a fever it is a fatal symptom. I however know of recoveries even from this desperate condition. But cases of jaundice occur without fever, and can be overcome by the greater centaury, taken in drink as I have prescribed, by betony, by three-oboli doses of agaric in a cyathns of old wine, and by three-oboli doses of vervain leaves taken for four days in a hemina of warmed wine. The quickest remedy however is juice of cinquefoil taken in doses of three cyathi with salt and honey. Three-drachmae doses of root of cyclamen are taken in drink while the patient is in a warm place protected from chilly draughts — the medicine induces sweats full of gall — and good is done by leaves of tussilago in water, by seed of linozostis of either kind sprinkled in drink or boiled down with wormwood or chick peas, by hyssop berries taken with water, by the herb lichen, the patient during the treatment abstaining from all other vegetables, by polythrix administered in wine, and by struthion in honey wine.

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§ 26.77.1  A common complaint, affecting any part of the body, but especially an inconvenient part, is what are called boils, sometimes a fatal malady after surgical operations. Pounded leaves of pycnocomon with pearl barley are a remedy if the boil has not yet come to a head. Boils are also dispersed by applications of leaves of ephedron.

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§ 26.78.1  Fistulas also form in any part of the body through the careless use of the surgeon's knife. The lesser centaury, if suppositories made from it are inserted with boiled honey, is a help; so is plantain juice poured into them, cinquefoil with salt and honey, ladanum with beaver-oil, and cotyledon with deer's marrow warmed and applied; the pith of verbascum root, cut as slender as a suppository, is inserted into the fistula, or there may be used root of aristolochia or juice of tithymallus.

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§ 26.79.1  Gatherings and inflammations are cured by an application of argemonia leaves, all indurations and gatherings by vervain, or by cinquefoil boiled down in vinegar, by leaves or root of verbascum, by an application of hyssop in wine, by fomenting with a decoction of acoron root, and by aizotim; for bruises, indurations, and for pitted sores in the flesh the remedy is illecebra. All foreign bodies buried in the flesh may be extracted by leaves of tussilago, by daucum, or by seed of leontopodium beaten up in water with pearl barley. To suppurations are applied leaves, or seed, of pycnocomon beaten up with pearl barley, likewise orchis. For affections of the bones a very efficacious cure is said to be an application of satyrion root, and for corroding sores and gatherings of all kinds an application of seaweed used while it is still wet. Root of alcima too disperses gatherings.

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§ 26.80.1  Burns are healed by plantain, and by arctium so well that no scars are seen. A decoction in water of crushed arctium leaves is used as liniment for burns, and so are cyclamen roots with aizoum, and the plant itself of the hypericum I have called corissum.

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§ 26.81.1  Good for sinews and joints are plantain beaten up with salt and argemonia pounded in honey. Juice of peucedanum is rubbed all over those suffering from spasms or tetanus. For indurations of the sinews juice of aegilops is used as liniment, and for pains of the sinews erigeron (or epithymum) is so used in vinegar. Spasms and opisthotonic tetanus are benefited by thorough rubbing with seed of the hypericum known as caros, and this seed also benefits if taken in drink. Sinews even when severed are said to be healed by phrynion, beaten up or chewed, if it is applied immediately. Spasms, palsy, and opisthotonic tetanus are treated by root of alcima taken in hydromel. So taken it also warms rigors.

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§ 26.82.1  Haemorrhage is checked by the red seed of the plant paeonia — the root also is styptic — but by clymenus when blood is discharged from the mouth or nostrils, or when it flows from the bowels or the uterus; by lysimachia too taken in drink, or applied as liniment, or inserted into the nostrils, also by plantain seed, by cinquefoil taken in drink and applied, by hemlock seed beaten up in water and inserted into the nostrils should there be epistaxis, by aizoum and by root of astragalus. Ischaemon too and achillia check bleeding.

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§ 26.83.1  Equisaetum, called hippuris by the Greeks, and found fault with by me when I discussed meadow land, it is in fact hair of the earth resembling horse hair — reduces the spleen of runners if as much as the pot will hold is boiled down to one third in new earthenware, and taken in drink for three days in doses of one hemina. There must be abstinence from fatty foods for at least one day previously. The Greeks hold various views about this plant; some under the same name speak of a dark plant with leaves like those of the pine, assuring us that, so wonderful is its nature, its mere touch stanches a patient's bleeding; some call it hippuris, others ephedron, others anabasis. Their account is that it grows near trees, which it climbs, and hangs down in many dark, rush-like hairs as if from a horse's tail; that its little branches are jointed, and its leaves few, slender and small; that the seed is round, resembling that of coriander, that its root is ligneous, and that it grows mostly in plantations. Its property is to brace the body. Its juice, kept in the nostrils, checks haemorrhage therefrom, and it also checks looseness of the bowels. Taken in a sweet wine, in doses of three cyathi, it is good for dysentery, promotes passing of urine, and cures cough and orthopnoea, ruptures also and spreading sores. The leaves are taken in drink for complaints of the bowels and bladder; the plant itself reduces intestinal hernia. The Greeks recognise yet another hippuris, which has shorter, softer and paler hairs, making a very useful application in vinegar for sciatica, and also for cuts, as it stanches the flow of blood. Nymphaea also beaten up is applied to wounds from blows, and peucedanum with cypress seed is taken in drink if blood is brought up through the mouth or flows from the lower passages. Sideritis has such a powerful effect that if bandaged to a gladiator's wound, however recent, it stops the bleeding, as does also the ash or cinders of fennel-giant, though more efficacious still is the fungus that grows about its root.

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§ 26.84.1  For epistaxis however hemlock seed also beaten up in water and inserted into the nostrils is held to be efficacious, and so is stephanomelis in water. Ground betony taken in goat's milk checks haemorrhage from the breasts, as does crushed plantain. The juice of the latter is given to those who vomit blood. For sporadic bleeding however is recommended an application of persollata root with stale axle-grease.

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§ 26.85.1  For ruptures, sprains, and falls from a height remedies are: the greater centaury, gentian root beaten up or boiled down, or its juice, betony, and especially when the lesion is caused by straining the voice or sides, panaces, scordium, aristolochia in drink, agaric also for bruises and falls, the dose being two oboli taken in three cyathi of honey wine or, if there is fever, in hydromel, the verbascum with the golden flower, root of acoron, all the kinds of aizoum; the most efficacious preparation however being the juice of the greater aizoum, the broth too of symphytum or a decoction of the root, raw daucos, erysithales — the flower is yellow, the leaves those of the acanthus — taken in wine, chamaerops also and irio in soup, or any preparation of plantain, likewise.

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§ 26.86.1  Sulla the dictator perished from phthiriasis; in the very blood of the patient creatures come to life that will eat up his flesh? The disease is combated by rubbing the whole body with juice of the taminian grape, or with hellebore juice and oil. Taminian grapes indeed boiled down in vinegar remove this nuisance even from garments.

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§ 26.87.1  Ulcers are of many kinds, and the methods of treatment are many. To running sores is applied in warmed wine the root of any kind of panaces. A specific for drying them is the herb I have chironia; beaten up with honey it opens hard swellings, and affords relief to desperate cases of spreading ulcers; it is diluted with wine and combined with flower of copper, and seed, flower or root may be used indiscriminately. This plant with pearl barley is also good for old wounds, so too is heraclion siderion, apollinaris, psyllium and tragacantha. Scordotis with honey cleanses them; its powder consumes morbid excrescences of flesh, if sprinkled on them by itself. Polemonia heals ulcers that are called malignant; the greater centaury, whether sprinkled or applied as liniment, the tuft also of the lesser centaury, boiled down or beaten up, cleanses and thoroughly heals even chronic ulcers. The seed pods of clymenus are applied to fresh wounds. From gentian too is made a liniment for spreading ulcers; the pounded root is boiled down in water to the consistency of honey or the juice may be used; from gentian is made a lycium for wounds. Lysimachia is good treatment for fresh wounds, and plantain for ulcers of all kinds, especially for those of old men and babies. It is better when softened by fire, and with wax-salve cleanses the thickened lips of ulcers and arrests corrosive sores. The pounded plant when applied should be covered with its own leaves. Suppurations, gatherings and pitted ulcers are also dried up by chelidonia, wounds are healed so well that it is even used instead of spodium. It is also applied with axle-grease to sores that are already despaired of. Dittany taken in drink forces out arrows; an external application causes to fall out other kinds of weapons — the dose for a draught is an obolus of the leaves in a cyathus of water — and bastard dittany is almost as effective; both too disperse suppurations. Aristolochia also eats away festering ulcers, with honey cleanses those that are foul, expels worms, the callosities also that form in ulcers and all things embedded in the flesh, especially with resin arrows and bone splinters; but the pits of ulcers it fills up by itself or with the addition of iris. For fresh wounds it is used in vinegar; for chronic ulcers vervain is used, or cinquefoil with salt and honey. The roots of persollata are applied to fresh wounds that have been inflicted by iron, and the leaves to old wounds, axle-grease being added to both with a covering of the plant's leaves. Other applications are damasonium, used as for serofula, and the leaves of verbascum in vinegar or wine. Peristereos is good for all kinds of ulcers, even when hard and festering. Running ulcers are cured by root of nymphaea heraclia, also by the root of cyclamen, by itself, in vinegar, or with honey. This last is also excellent for fatty tumours, as is hyssop for running ulcers, and peucedanum also, which when used for fresh wounds is so powerful as to exfoliate bones. The two kinds of anagallis also have this property, and check fluxes and the sores called nomae, being useful for fresh wounds, but especially for those on the flesh of the aged. Abscesses and foul ulcers may be treated with fresh leaves of mandrake and wax-salve, wounds with its root and honey or oil, or with hemlock added to wheat and neat wine. For herpes also, nomae and festering ulcers, aizoum may be used, as may erigeron for verminous sores, for fresh wounds root of astragalus, and for chronic ulcers either kind of hypocisthis, which cleanses them. The seed of leontopodium, beaten up in water and applied with pearl barley, extracts the heads of arrows, as does also the seed of pycnocomon. The juice of tithymallus characites heals gangrenes, phagedaenic sores and purulent ulcers, as does a decoction of the branches with pearl barley and oil; the roots of orchis moreover with honey cure even malignant sores, healing wounds without further addition, and whether dry or freshly gathered. Onothera heals ulcers that are becoming virulent. The Scythians treat wounds with scythice. For carcinoma argemonia applied with honey is very efficacious. For ulcers prematurely healed root of asphodel, boiled down as I have said, beaten up with pearl barley and applied, is good; but apollinaris is good for any kind of sore, and root of astragalus, beaten to powder, for ulcers that are running, and so is callithrix boiled down in water; specific however for sores caused by footwear is vervain, crushed lysimachia also, and dried nymphaea reduced to powder. But when these last have become chronic polythrix proves more useful.

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§ 26.88.1  Polycnemon is like ox cunila, and its seed resembles that of pennyroyal; it has a wood-like stem with many joints, and its clusters are scented, with a pungent but sweet smell. When chewed it is applied to cuts made by iron, but is taken off on the fifth day. Symphyton very quickly causes a scar to form, as also does sideritis, which is applied with honey. The seed and leaves of verbascum, boiled down in wine and beaten up, bring away everything embedded in the flesh, as do mandrake leaves with pearl barley, or cyclamen roots with honey. Trixago leaves crushed in oil are applied especially to spreading ulcers as is also seaweed beaten up in honey; betony, with the addition of salt, is used for carcinoma and chronic pustules on the neck.

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§ 26.89.1  Warts are removed by argemonia in vinegar, by root of batrachium, which also brings away scabrous nails, and by an application of the leaves or juice of either kind of linozostis. All kinds of tithymallus remove all kinds of warts, hangnails, and pimples on the face. Ladanum smoothes away scars and restores the colour. A traveller who has artemisia and elelisphacus tied on him does not, they say, feel any fatigue.

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§ 26.90.1  For diseases of women a very good general remedy is the black seed, taken in hydromel, of the plant paeonia; its root also has the same property. An emmenagogue is seed of panaces with wormwood, and a sudorific emmenagogue is scordotis, taken internally or applied locally. Betony in doses of one drachma to three cyathi of wine is taken for all uterine affections, and for those that result from childbirth. Excessive menstruation is checked by an application of achillia or a sitz bath in a decoction of it. To the breasts is applied henbane seed in wine — but to the uterus henbane root in a plaster ... and also chelidonia. A pessary of panaces roots brings away retarded afterbirth or the dead foetus. The uterus is purged by panaces, taken by itself in wine, and by a pessary of it with honey. Polemonia taken in wine forces out the afterbirth, and the fumes of it when burnt correct the uterus. Juice of the lesser centaury taken in drink or used as a fomentation is an emmenagogue, and the root of the greater centaury, used in the same ways, is good for uterine pains, while if it is scraped and applied as a pessary it brings away a dead foetus. Plantain is applied as a pessary in wool for pain in the uterus; for hysterical suffocation it is taken in drink. But it is dittany that is of the greatest efficacy; it is an emmenagogue, and forces out the foetus when dead or lying transversely — an obolus of the leaves is taken in water — being so efficacious in these respects that it is not even introduced into the bedroom of pregnant women. Not only when taken in drink but also when used as embrocation or a fumigation it has medicinal power. Bastard dittany is very nearly as good, but for an emmenagogue it is boiled down with neat wine, the dose being one denarius by weight. Very many however are the ways in which aristolochia does good, for it is an emmenagogue, hastens the afterbirth, and brings away a dead foetus; myrrh and pepper being added it is taken in drink or used as a pessary. It also checks prolapsus of the uterus, whether used as fomentation, fumigation or pessary, especially the slender aristolochia. Hysterical suffocations and delayed menstruation are relieved by agaric taken in doses of three oboli to a cyathus of old wine, by a pessary of peristereos in fresh lard, and by antirrhinon with rose oil and honey. The root also of Thessalian nymphaea cures uterine pain when used as a pessary; taken in dark-red wine it checks excessive menstruation; on the contrary, root of cyclamen is an emmenagogue if taken in drink or a used as a pessary; a sits bath in the decoction is a remedy for troubles of the bladder. Cissanthemos taken in drink forces out the afterbirth and heals the uterus. The upper part of the root of xiphium is an emmenagogue, the dose being a drachma taken in vinegar. Peucedanum calms hysterical suffocations by its smell when burnt; leucorrhoea is purged especially by psyllion in doses of one drachma to three cyathi of water. Seed of mandrake taken in drink purges the uterus; a pessary of its juice is an enimenagogue and brings away a dead foetus. Excessive menstruation again is checked by mandrake seed with live sulphur; on the contrary, menstruation is promoted by batrachium, taken in drink or food, a plant which, though when raw it has, as I have said, a burning taste, is made agreeable, when cooked, by salt, oil and cummin. Daucum in drink readily acts as an emmenagogue, and readily brings away the afterbirth; fumigation with ladanum corrects the uterus, and the plant is applied locally for pain there and ulceration. Scammony taken in drink or used as a pessary forces out a dead foetus. Either kind of hypericum, used as a pessary, acts as an eminenagogue; pre-eminently so, however, as Hippocrates believes, does crethmos, the seed, or the skin of the root, being taken in wine; it also brings away the afterbirth, and taken in water is helpful in hysterical suffocations, as is the root of geranion, which is specific for the afterbirth and for inflation of the uterus. Hippuris, taken in drink and applied as a pessary, purges the uterus, as does polygonus taken in drink. The root of alcima too is an emmenagogue, leaves of plantain a violent one, as is also agaric in hydromel. Artemisia beaten up is good for the uterus, applied as a pessary in iris oil or with fig or with myrrh. Its root taken in drink purges the uterus so violently that it expels a dead foetus. A sitz bath of a decoction of the branches is an enimenagogue, and also hastens the afterbirth; so too acts a drachma of the leaves taken in drink. For all the same purposes the leaves are also good when merely applied with barley meal to the base of the abdomen. Acoron too is beneficial for internal diseases of women, and so is either kind of conyza, and also crethmos. The two kinds of anthyllis, taken in wine, are very useful for uterine troubles, for griping pains there, and for delay of the afterbirth. Callithrix used for fomentations is healing to the uterus, removes albugo on the head, and beaten up in oil stains the hair. Geranion taken in a white wine, and hypocisthis taken in a red, check excessive menstruation. Hyssop relieves hysteria. The root of vervain, taken in water, is a sovereign remedy for all troubles at or after childbirth. Some physicians prescribe pencedanum in dark-red wine mixed with crushed cypress seed. But seed of psyllixun, boiled in water and taken while still warm, relieves all fluxes of the uterus. Symphyton beaten up in dark-red wine promotes menstruation. Scordotis taken in drink hastens delivery, the dose being a drachma of the juice in four cyathi of hydromel. Leaves of dittany given in water are excellent for this purpose. It is an established fact that a single obolus of them by weight immediately brings away the foetus, even if it is dead in the uterus, without any distress to the lying-in woman. Good in a similar way is bastard dittany, but slower, also cyclamen used as an amulet, cissanthemos taken in drink, and powdered betony in hydromel.

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§ 26.91.1  Arsenogonon and thelygonon are plants bearing clusters like the flowers of the olive, but paler, and a white seed like that of the poppy. It is said that thelygonon, taken in drink, causes the conception of a female; arsenogonon differs from it in having a seed like that of the olive, but in no other way; taken in drink this plant is said to cause the generation of males, if we care to believe it. Some hold that both plants are like basil, but that the seed of arsenogonon is double, resembling testicles.

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§ 26.92.1  For affections of the breasts the aizoum I have called a digitillum is an outstanding remedy. Erigeron in raisin wine makes the breasts richer in milk, as does soncum boiled with emmer wheat; the plant called mastos, however, is applied as liniment. The hairy affection appearing on the breasts at childbirth, brick-red spots on the face, and other skin troubles, are removed by gentian, or by an application of nymphaea heraclia, and all kinds of spots by root of cyclamen. The grains of caccalia, mixed with melted wax, smooth the face, taking away the wrinkles, and all facial troubles are removed by root of acoron.

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§ 26.93.1  Lycium juice dyes the hair flaxen; hypericum, also called corissum, dyes it black, as does ophrys, a plant like indented cabbage, but with only two leaves. Polemonia, too, boiled down in oil, imparts a black colour. Depilatories I myself indeed regard as a woman's cosmetic, but now today men also use them. But very efficacious is held to be archezostis, as also the tithymalli, the juice being applied frequently with oil either in the sun or when the hairs have been pulled out. Hyssop in oil heals the itch in quadrupeds, and sideritis is specific for the quinsy in swine. But I must go on to describe the remaining kinds of plants.

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§ 27.1.1  THE mere treatment of this subject undoubtedly increases the admiration that I at least feel for the men of old; the greater the number of plants waiting to be described, the more one is led to revere the careful research of the ancients and their kindness in passing on the results. Without a doubt even the bounteousness of Nature herself might seem to have been surpassed by them in this way if the discoveries had been the result of human endeavour. But as it is, it is clear that this bounteousness has been the work of the gods, or at least due to their inspiration, even when the actual discoverer was a man, and that the same Mother of all things both produced the herbs and made them known to us. This is the greatest miracle of life, if we care to admit the truth. To think that the Scythian plant, for example, is brought from the marshes of Maeotis, euphorbea from Mount Atlas and from beyond the pillars of Hercules, where the works of Nature actually begin to fail; on another side britannica, from islands in the ocean lying beyond the mainland, aethiopis too from the clime scorched by the constellations of heaven, and other plants moreover passing hither and thither from all quarters throughout the whole world for the welfare of mankind, all owing to the boundless grandeur of the Roman Peace, which displays in turn not men only with their different lands and tribes, but also mountains, and peaks soaring into the clouds, their offspring and also their plants. May this gift of the gods last, I pray, for ever! So truly do they seem to have given to the human race the Romans as it were a second Sun.

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§ 27.2.1  But who could revere enough the diligent research of the ancients? It is established that of all poisons the quickest to act is aconite, and that death occurs on the same day if the genitals of a female creature are but touched by it. This was the poison that Marcus Caelius accused Calpurnius Bestia of using to kill his wives in their sleep. Hence the damning peroration of the prosecutor's speech accusing the defendant's finger. Fable has it that aconite sprang out of the foam of the dog Cerberus when Hercules dragged him from the underworld, and that this is why it grows around Heraclea in Pontus, where is pointed out the entrance to the underworld used by Hercules. Yet even aconite the ancients have turned to the benefit of human health, by finding out by experience that administered in warm wine it neutralizes the stings of scorpions. It is its nature to kill a human being unless in that being it finds something else to destroy. Against this alone it struggles, regarding it as more pressing than the find. [This is the only fight, when the aconite discovers a poison in the viscera.] What a marvel! Although by themselves both are deadly, yet the two poisons in a human being perish together so that the human survives. Moreover even remedies used by wild beasts have been handed down by the ancients, who have shown how venomous a creatures also by themselves obtain healing. Scorpions, touched by aconite, become numbed, and are pale and stupefied, acknowledging their defeat. They find a help in white hellebore, its touch dispelling the torpor; the aconite yields to two evil foes, one peculiar to itself and one common to all creatures. If anyone believes that these discoveries could, by any chance, have been made by a man, he shows himself ungrateful for the gods' gifts. They touch flesh with aconite, and kill panthers by a mere taste of it, otherwise panthers would overrun the regions where they are found. For this reason some have called aconite pardalianehes, that is panther-strangler. But it has been proved that panthers are at once saved from this death by tasting human excrement; surely nobody doubts that this remedy has been found by Chance, and that on every occasion it is even today a new find, since wild animals have neither reason nor experience for results to be passed from one to another. This Chance therefore, this is that great deity who has made most of the discoveries that enrich our life, this is the name of him by whom is meant she who is at once the Mother and the Mistress of all creation. Either guess is equally likely, whether we judge that wild animals make these discoveries every day or that they possess a never-failing instinct. Again it is shameful that all animals except man know what is health-giving for themselves. Our ancestors however advertised the view that aconite is also a very health-giving ingredient of preparations for the eyes, openly declaring their belief that no evil a at all is without some admixture of good. It will therefore be right for me, who have described no poisons, to point out the nature of aconite, if only for the purpose of detecting it. It has leaves like those of cyclamen or of cucumber, not more than four, rising from the root and slightly hairy, and a root of moderate size, like a crayfish (cammarus), whence some have called it cammaran, and others thelyphonon, for the reason I have given already. The end of the root curves up a little like a scorpion's tail, whence some have called it also scorpion. There have been some who would prefer to call it myoctonos since at a distance, even a long distance, its smell kills rats and mice. The plant grows on bare crags which are called aconae, and for that reason some have given it the name of aconite, there being nothing near, not even dust, to give it nourishment. This then is the reason for its name given by some; others have thought it was so named because it had the same power to cause rapid death as whetstones had to give an edge to an iron blade; no sooner was the stone applied than its rapid action was noticeable.

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§ 27.3.1  Aethiopis has leaves like those of phlomos, large, numerous and hairy, growing from the root. The stem is quadrangular, rough, like that of arction and hollowed by many axils. The seed is like that of vetch, white and geminate; the roots are numerous, long, fleshy, soft, and gluey to the taste. When dry these become black and hard, so that they might be taken for horns. This plant grows not only in Aethiopia, but also on Mount Ida in the Troad and in Messenia. The roots are gathered in autumn and dried in the sun for some days to prevent their growing mouldy. Taken in white wine they are a remedy for uterine troubles, and a decoction is given by the mouth for sciatica, pleurisy and rough throats. The Aethiopian kind, however, gives the greatest, and immediate, relief.

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§ 27.4.1  Ageraton resembles fennel-giant, is two spans high and like origanum, and the flowers are golden knobs. The fumes when the plant is burnt are diuretic and purge the uterus: used in a sits bath the plant does this more effectively. The reason for the name is [not this but] because it lasts for a long time without fading.

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§ 27.5.1  The aloe bears a resemblance to the squill, but it is larger, and has more fleshy leaves, and with slanting streaks. Its stem is tender, red in the centre, and not unlike anthericus; the root is single, as it were a stake sunk into the ground. It has an oppressive smell, and a bitter taste. The most valued kind is imported from India, but it also grows in the province of Asia. This kind is used only for wounds, the freshly gathered leaves, or the juice, having a wonderful power of uniting. For this reason it is planted in conical jars, as is the greater aizoum. Some, before the seed ripens, make an incision in the stem to get the juice; some do so in the leaves as well. Drops too form spontaneously on it, and adhere. Some therefore recommend that the ground where the aloe has been planted should be beaten down hard, so as to prevent absorption. Some have reported that in Judea beyond Jerusalem can be found mineral aloes. This however is the most inferior kind of all, and no other is darker or more moist. So the best aloes will he fatty and shiny, of a ruddy colour, friable, compact like liver, and easily melted. The kind to be rejected is dark and hard, gritty, and adulterated with gum and acacia, the adulteration being easily detected by the taste. The nature of an aloe is bracing, astringent! and gently warming. There are many uses for it, but the chief is to relax the bowels, for it is almost the only laxative that is also a stomach tonic, no ill effects whatever resulting from its use. A drachma is taken in drink, but for fluxes of the stomach a spoonful in two cyathi of warm or cold water is taken twice or three times a day at intervals, as circumstances require; but for purging the bowels the maximum dose is three drachmae, which is more effective if food is taken after the draught. With a dry wine it prevents the hair from falling out, the head being thoroughly rubbed in the contrary way to the hair. It relieves headache if it is applied in vinegar and rose oil to the temples and forehead, or a dilute solution may be poured over them. All eye troubles, it is agreed, are cured by the aloe, but it is specific for itch and scaliness of the eyelids; it is also good, applied with honey, especially with Pontic honey, for marks and bruises; for diseased tonsils or gums, for all sores in the mouth, and for spitting of blood, the dose is a drachma, taken in water if the spitting is not excessive, and in vinegar if it is. Haemorrhage due to wounds also, or to any other cause, it arrests if used by itself or in vinegar. In other ways too it is very useful for wounds, as it promotes cicatrisation. It is also sprinkled on ulcerated male genitals, condylomata and chaps of the anus, sometimes in wine, in raisin wine, or else dry by itself, according as the treatment may need mild measures or coercive. It also gently arrests excessive bleeding from haemorrhoids. For dysentery it is injected, and for indigestion it is taken in drink shortly after the evening meal. For jaundice the dose is three oboli in water; for internal purgings pills also are swallowed made up with boiled honey or turpentine resin. It removes hangnails; for eye preparations it is washed, to let the most gritty parts settle, or else it is roasted in an earthen vessel and occasionally stirred with a feather so that the roasting may be even throughout.

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§ 27.6.1  Alcea has leaves like those of the vervain called aristereon, three or four stems covered with leaves, flowers like a rose, and white roots, six at most, a cubit long, and slanting. It grows in a soil which is rich but not dry. The root is used in wine or water for dysentery, diarrhoea, ruptures and sprains.

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§ 27.7.1  Alypon is a small sprout with a soft head, and not unlike beet, sharp to the taste and viscous, very pungent and burning. In hydromel with a little salt added it loosens the bowels. The smallest dose is two drachmae, a moderate one four, the maximum being six. When given as a purge it is taken in chicken broth.

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§ 27.8.1  Alsine, which some call myosoton, is found in groves; hence its name. It begins to grow just after midwinter, and withers at midsummer. When it puts forth its leaves, they are like the ears of little mice. However, I shall describe another plant, to which more properly would be given the name myosotis. Alsine would be just the same as helxine, were it not that it is smaller and less hairy. It grows in gardens and especially on walls. When being bruised it smells like cucumber. It is used for gatherings and inflammations, and for all purposes for which helxine is employed, but with less efficacy. Especially is it applied to eye fluxes, and with barley meal to sore genitals and ulcers. Its juice is poured into the ears.

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§ 27.9.1  Androsaces is a whitish plant, bitter, leafless, with seed pods in hairy tufts. It grows especially along the sea coast of Syria. For dropsy are prescribed two-drachma doses of the plant pounded or boiled down in water, vinegar, or wine, for it is a powerful diuretic. It is also prescribed for dropsy and applied locally. The seed too has the same properties.

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§ 27.10.1  Androsaemon, or, as others have called it, ascyron, is not unlike hypericum, about which I have already spoken, but the stalks are larger, closer together, and redder. Its leaves are pale and shaped like those of rue; the seed resembles that of the dark poppy. The stalk tops when crushed give out a juice of the colour of blood. Their smell is resinous. It grows in vineyards; about the middle of autumn it is dug and hung up. When used as a purge it is pounded with the seed and taken early in the morning or after dinner, the dose being two drachmae in hydromel, wine, or plain water, and the whole draught a sextarius. It brings away bile, and is excellent for sciatica, but on the following day should be swallowed a drachma of caper root well mixed with resin. This dose should be repeated after an interval of four days. After the actual purging wine should be drunk by the stronger patients and water by the weaker. The plant is applied also to gouty limbs, to burns, and, as it stanches blood, to wounds.

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§ 27.11.1  Ambrosia, an indeterminate name loosely given to other plants, is the primary name of one in particular, which is branchy and close set, slender about three spans high, with a root one span less, and with leaves around the bottom of the stem resembling those of rue. The seed is on the twigs, hanging dawn in clusters, and has a vinous smell; and so the plant is called botrys by some, although others call it artemisia. The Cappadocians use it for chaplets. In medicine it is used as a discutient.

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§ 27.12.1  Anonis, which some prefer to call ononis, is branchy, and like fenugreek, except that it is more bushy and more hairy. It has an agreeable smell, and becomes prickly after spring. Preserved in brine it is also used as food, while the fresh plant cauterizes the edges of ulcers. The root is boiled down in vinegar and water for toothache, and taken in drink with honey it also expels stone from the bladder. For epilepsy it is given in oxymel boiled down to one half.

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§ 27.13.1  Anagyros, which some call acopon, is bushy, with a strong smell and a flower like that of cabbage. The seed grows in little horn-like pods of some length; it is kidney-shaped and becomes hard during the harvests. The leaves are placed on gatherings, and tied as an amulet on women in difficult labour, care being taken to remove them immediately after delivery. But if a dead foetus does not come away, or if the afterbirth or menstruation is retarded, the leaves are taken in raisin-wine, a dose being a drachma. Similar doses are given for asthma, and in old wine the leaves are given for the bites of poisonous spiders. The root is employed to disperse or mature boils; the seed chewed acts as an emetic.

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§ 27.14.1  Anonymus has found a name by not finding one. It is imported from Scythia. Hicesius, a physician of no small authority, spread its fame, as did Aristogiton; it is excellent for wounds if applied pounded in water; taken however in drink it is equally good for blows on the breasts or on the hypochondia, likewise for spitting of blood. Some authorities have held that wounded patients should take it in drink. The further statement I think fabulous, that if burnt fresh it acts as solder for iron or copper.

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§ 27.15.1  Aparine, called by some omphalocarpos, by others philanthropos, is branchy, hairy, and with five or six leaves arranged at intervals in a circle around the branches. The seed is round, hard, hollowed, and rather sweet. It grows in cornfields, or gardens, or meadows, and is so prickly as even to cling to the clothes. The seed, taken in drachma doses in wine, is efficacious against the bite of serpents and poisonous spiders. The leaves, applied locally, check excessive bleeding from wounds. The juice is poured into the ears.

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§ 27.16.1  Arction, which some prefer to call arcturns, has leaves like those of verbascum, except that they are more hairy. The stem is long and soft, and the seed like that of cummin. It grows on rocky soils, and has a tender root, whitish and sweet. A decoction of it in wine is given for toothache, but it must be retained in the mouth. The decoction is drunk for sciatica and strangury. In wine the root is applied to burns and chilblains, which are also fomented with the seed pounded in wine with the root.

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§ 27.17.1  Asplenon, called by some hemionion, has many leaves four inches long, a slimy root, pitted as is a fern's, whitish and hairy. There is no stem, flower or seed. It grows on rocks and on shaded, damp walls, the most approved kind in Crete. A decoction of its leaves in vinegar, taken as a draught for thirty days, is said to reduce the spleen, the leaves being also applied locally. They relieve too hiccoughs. This plant, as it causes barrenness, must not be given to women.

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§ 27.18.1  Asclepias has leaves like those of ivy, bug branches, numerous roots that are slender and scented, stinking flowers, and a hatchet-shaped seed. It grows on hills. The roots cure colic and are used for snakebite; they are not only taken in drink but also applied locally.

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§ 27.19.1  Aster is called by some bubonion, because it is a sovereign remedy for affections of the groin. Its stem has two or three oblong leaves, and on the top are little heads with rays like stars. In drink it is also taken for snake bites. But as medicine for the groin it is enjoined to be plucked with the left hand, and to be tied as an amulet next the girdle. As an amulet it is also good for sciatica.

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§ 27.20.1  Ascyron and ascyroides are like one another and also like hypericon, but what is called ascyroides has larger branches, which are like fennel-giant, red and with small yellow heads. The seed, in little cups, is very small, black, and resinous. The hairy tufts when crushed cause stains like blood, and therefore some have called the plant androsaemon. Two-drachmae doses of the seed, taken in a sextarius of hydromel, are used for sciatica. It loosens the bowels, brings away bile, and is applied to burns.

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§ 27.21.1  Aphaca has very slender and tiny leaves. Taller than the lentil it also bears larger pods, in which are three or four seeds, darker and smaller than those of the lentil. It grows in cultivated fields, and has bracing qualities more powerful than those of the lentil, its other uses being the same. A decoction of the seed checks fluxes of the stomach and bowels.

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§ 27.22.1  In my authorities I have found no description of alcibium, but only that its pounded root and leaves are applied locally, and taken in drink, for snake bite; a handful of the pounded leaves with three cyathi of neat wine, or three drachmae by weight of the root with the same measure of wine.

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§ 27.23.1  Alectoros lophos, which we Romans call, 'comb' (crista), has several leaves like a cock's comb, a slender stem, and black seed in pods. Boiled with ground beans it is useful for cough, and with the addition of honey for film on the eyes. The seed is cast whole into the eye; it does no harm but attracts the film to itself. Changing colour it begins to turn from black to white, swells, and works out by itself.

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§ 27.24.1  We Romans call alum what the Greeks call symphyton petraion. It is like ox cunila, with small leaves and three or four branches growing from the root, which have tips like those of thyme; a ligneous plant, scented, sweet to the taste, promoting saliva, and with a long, red root. It grows on rocks (hence its surname petraion, 'rocky'), and is very useful for affections of the sides and kidneys, for colic, chest, lungs, spitting of blood, and sore throat. The root is pounded and taken in drink or boiled down in wine; sometimes too this is used as embrocation. Moreover, chewed it allays thirst, and is especially cooling to the lungs. It is also applied to dislocations and bruises, and it soothes the intestines. Cooked in hot ashes, pounded, after removal of the pods, with nine peppercorns and taken in water, it is binding to the bowels. So excellent is it for healing wounds that, added even to pieces of meat that are being boiled, it binds them together. Hence its Greek name symphyton. It is also good for broken bones.

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§ 27.25.1  Red seaweed for scorpion stings.

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§ 27.26.1  Actaea has leaves with an offensive smell, rough and jointed stems, black seed like that of ivy, and soft berries. It grows on shaded, rough, watery wound. In doses of a full acetabulum it is given for internal diseases of women.

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§ 27.27.1  Ampelos agria is a name given to a plant with hard leaves of an ashy colour, as I have described in my account of cultivated trees. It has long, hard-skinned twigs, of a red colour like the blossom we call flame of Jupiter. It bears in little clusters seed like pomegranate pips. Its root, boiled down in three cyathi of water with the addition of two cyathi of Coan wine, is a gentle aperient, and therefore is given to dropsical patients. The clusters remove the spots on women's faces. Sciatica too is relieved by this plant ground up with the leaves and applied with its own juice.

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§ 27.28.1  There are several kinds of wormwood. The Santonic comes from the state of the Santoni in Gaul, the Pontic from Pontus, where cattle fatten on it, and so are found to be without gall; there is no finer wormwood than this, the Italian being far more bitter, but the pith of Pontic wormwood is sweet. About its use there is general agreement, for it is a plant very easily found, and one of the most useful, being moreover especially honoured at the religious rites of the Roman people, seeing that at the Latin festival there is a race for four-horse chariots on the Capitoline Hill, the winner of which takes a draught of wormwood, our ancestors thinking, I believe, that health was a very grand prize to give. It strengthens the stomach and for this reason it is used, as I have said, to give a flavour to wines. A decoction in water, which is afterwards cooled in the open for a day and a night, is also taken; six drachmae of the leaves with their branches are boiled down in three sextarii of rain water; salt too should be added. When very old it can still be used. There is also administered an infusion of wormwood in water; for this preparation should be styled 'infusion,' and an essential of the infusion is that, whatever quantity of water is used, for three days the preparation should be wholly enclosed. Pounded wormwood is rarely employed; rarely too the extracted juice. It is extracted, however, as soon as the seed begins to swell, the plant being soaked in water for three days when fresh and for seven when dried; it is then boiled down to one third in a bronze vessel, ten heminae to forty-five sextarii of water; and after being strained to remove the solid pieces it is boiled down again to the thickness of honey, just like juice obtained from the lesser centaury. But this juice is injurious to the stomach and head, while the decoction I mentioned is very wholesome. For it is astringent to the stomach, and with sil, Gallic nard and a little vinegar, brings away bile, promotes urine, soothes the bowels, curing them when in pain, drives out worms from the belly, and removes nausea and flatulence. With rue, pepper and salt, it takes away the distaste for food, and aids digestion, bringing away undigested food. As a purge, the old custom was to give six drachmae of the seed, three of salt, and a cyathus of honey, in a sextarius of sea water kept for a time, the purge being more efficacious if the amount of salt is doubled. The pounding however must be carefully done, as it is a difficult task. Some have also given the aforesaid weight in pearl barley with the addition of pennyroyal; some the leaves in a dried fig to children, so that the bitter taste is not noticed. Taken with iris it purges the thorax. For jaundice it is taken raw in drink with celery or adiantum. For flatulence it is slowly sipped hot in water; for the liver it is taken with Gallic nard; for the spleen, with vinegar, pottage or fig. In vinegar it is an antidote to poisonous fungi, as also to mistletoe; in wine, to hemlock, the poison of the shrew mouse, sea weever and scorpions. It is a great aid to clear vision. With raisin wine it is applied to eye fluxes, and with honey to bruises. Ear trouble is cured by fumigation with the steam of the decoction, or when bloody pus exudes, by pounded wormwood with honey. Three or four twigs, with one root of Gallic nard and six cyathi of water, are diuretic and an emmenagogue; it is specific for faulty menstruation if taken with honey or applied as a pessary in wool. With honey and soda it is helpful for quinsy. In water it cures night rashes. Recent wounds it heals if applied before they have been touched with water; it cures, moreover, sores on the head. With Cyprian wax or with fig it makes an exceptionally good application for affections of the flanks. It also cures pruritus, but must not be given to feverish patients. Taken in drink on sea voyages it prevents nausea; worn under a belly-band, swellings of the groin. It induces sleep if inhaled through the nose or placed secretly under the sufferer's head. Put into clothes it keeps away moth. Rubbing the body all over with it in oil drives away gnats, as does the smoke of it when burnt. Writing ink mixed with the infusion protects the writing from mice. Ashes of wormwood mixed with ointment and rose-oil stain the hair black.

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§ 27.29.1  There is also a sea wormwood, called by some seriphum, the most approved growing at Taposiris in Egypt. At the ceremonies of Isis the priests carry a branch of it ritually before them. Narrower than the former, and less bitter, it is injurious to the stomach, but softens the bowels and expels intestinal worms. It is taken in drink with oil and salt, or infused into gruel of three-month wheat. A handful is boiled down in a sextarius of water to one-half.

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§ 27.30.1  Ballote has a second name, black leek, given to it by the Greeks. It is a bushy plant, with quadrangulate, dark stems, covered with hairy leaves, larger and darker than those of leek, and with an offensive smell. It proves an effective antidote to dog-bites, the pounded leaves being laid with salt on the wound; cooked also in hot ashes and wrapped in a cabbage leaf they are applied to condylomata. With honey the plant also cleanses foul ulcers.

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§ 27.31.1  Botrys is a bushy plant with yellow twigs. Seed grows all round them, and the leaves are like those of chicory. It is found on the banks of torrents, and is used as treatment for orthopnoea. The Cappadocians call it ambrosia, others artemisia.

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§ 27.32.1  Brabilla has an astringent property like the quince; apart from this my authorities tell me nothing about it.

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§ 27.33.1  Sea bryon is without doubt a plant; it has leaves like those of lettuce, wrinkled, and as it were crumpled. It has no stem, the leaves growing out of a single root. It grows more especially upon rocks and on shells sunk in the ground. Its special properties are to dry, astringency, and to reduce all gatherings and inflammations, in particular those of gout, and whenever there is need of cooling applications.

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§ 27.34.1  The seed of bupleuron I find is given for snakebite, and that wounds are fomented with a decoction of this plant to which has been added leaves of mulberry or of origanum.

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§ 27.35.1  Catanance, Thessalian plant, it would be a waste of time for me to describe, since it is used only for love-potions. One thing it is quite pertinent to say in order to show up the fraud of sorcery: the plant was chosen for this purpose by soothsayers because as it withers it crumples up into the shape of the claws of a dead kite. For the same reason I shall say nothing about cemos.

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§ 27.36.1  There are two kinds of calyx. One is like arum, and grows on ploughed land. It is gathered before it withers, and has the same uses as aris. Its root is also taken in drink as a powerful aperient and emmenagogue, while its stalks, boiled down with the leaves in pulse, cures tenesmus.

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§ 27.37.1  The other kind of it is called by some anchusa, by others rhinoclia, having leaves like those of lettuce, but longer and downy, and a red root. This applied with the finest pearl barley cures erysipelas, and, taken in white wine, liver complaints.

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§ 27.38.1  Circaea is like cultivated trychnos, having a tiny, dark flower, small seed like that of millet forming in a sort of little horn, a six-inch root, generally triple or quadruple, whitish, scented, and with a hot taste. It grows on sunny rocks. An infusion of it in wine is taken for uterine pains and affections. Three ounces of the pounded root should be steeped for a night and a day in three sextarii of wine. The same draught also brings away the afterbirth. The seed taken in wine or hydromel reduces the supply of milk.

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§ 27.39.1  Cirsion is a tender, little sprout, two cubits high, triangular, and surrounded by prickly leaves, the prickles being soft. The leaves are like those of bugloss, but smaller, and whitish. At the tip are small, purple heads, which fall off as down. It is said that this plant, or its root, used as an amulet, cures the pain of varicose veins.

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§ 27.40.1  Crataegonon is like an ear of wheat, with many reed-like shoots, full of joints, springing from a single root. It is found in shaded places. The seed is like that of millet, with a very sharp taste. If three oboli of it in three cyathi of water are taken in wine before supper by the woman, and also by the man, for forty days before conception takes place, the child they say will be of the male sex. There is another crataegonos, which is called thelygonos; it is distinguished from the other by its mild taste. There are some who maintain that women who take the flower of crataegonos in drink conceive within forty days. These plants with honey also heal chronic black ulcers, fill up the pits of ulcers, add flesh to atrophied parts, thoroughly cleanse purulent sores, disperse superficial abscesses, and soothe gout and every kind of gathering, in particular those on the breasts. By crataegos or crataegon Theophrastus a would have us understand the tree which in Italy is called aquifolium.

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§ 27.41.1  Crocodileon is like black chamaeleon in shape, with a long root uniformly thick, and a pungent smell. It grows in sandy places. Taken in drink it causes copious epistaxis of thick blood; it is also said to reduce the spleen.

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§ 27.42.1  Cynosorchis, called by some orchis, has leaves like olive leaves, soft, three in number and lying on the ground to the length of half a foot. The root is bulbous, longish, and in two parts, the upper being harder and the lower softer. Found generally in vineyards these are boiled and eaten as are bulbs. If men eat the larger of these roots, male children are said to be conceived, but female if the smaller is eaten by women. In Thessaly men take in goat's milk the softer root as an aphrodisiac, but the harder as an antaphrodisiac. The one part neutralizes the other.

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§ 27.43.1  Chrysolachanum, growing in pine woods, is like lettuce. If applied at once it heals cut sinews. Elsewhere too is said to grow a kind of chrysolachanum with a golden flower and leaves like those of cabbage. It is eaten boiled as a soft vegetable. This plant, tied on as an amulet so that the patient can look at it, is said to cure jaundice. I know that this account of chrysolachanum is inadequate, yet I find no more detail given, for a further fault of which our modern herbalists, at least, are guilty is that they have described but briefly, and even by a mere name, plants well known to themselves just as if these were generally familiar. They say, for instance, that coagulum terrae (earth rennet) is constipating and diuretic if taken in water or wine, and that

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§ 27.44.1  the pounded leaves of eucullus with vinegar cure the bites of serpents and the stings of scorpions. Some give this plant another name, strumus, others the Greek name of strychnus. It has black berries; a cyathus of juice from these, with two of honey wine, is good treatment for lumbago, as also for headache if used with rose oil for bathing the brow, while for serofulous sores the plant itself is applied locally.

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§ 27.45.1  Couferva is peculiar to running streams, Alpine in particular, so named from confer-vamainare, to solder together. It is more like a freshwater sponge than a moss or vascular plant, being a hairy, dense, and porous mass. To my knowledge a man who, pruning a very high tree, fell and broke nearly all his bones, was treated with this plant. His entire body was enveloped in it; whenever it dried it was sprinkled with its native water but rarely taken off, only in fact for renewals when the plant lost its strength. The patient recovered in an almost incredibly short time.

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§ 27.46.1  The Cnidian grain has the colour of kermes-red, and in size is larger than a peppercorn. Its heating properties are so great that it is swallowed in bread, lest it should scorch the throat in its passage. A sovereign remedy for hemlock poisoning, it also checks looseness of the bowels.

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§ 27.47.1  Dipsacos has leaves like those of lettuce, with prickly knobs on the middle of their backs. The stem, two cubits long and rough with the same prickles, has joints enfolded by pairs of leaves, forming hollow axils in which collects a salt, dewy fluid. On the top of the stem are little heads, which bristle with prickles. The plant grows on watery ground. A decoction of the root in wine heals chaps of the anus; fistulas as well, but the decoction must be reduced to the consistency of wax, so that a suppository may be inserted into the fistula. It also removes warts of all kinds, for which purpose some apply the juice that is found in the axils which I mentioned above.

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§ 27.48.1  Dryopteris, which is like fern, grows on trees; it has sweetish leaves with a slight indentation and a hairy root. It has caustic properties, so that its crushed root is also used as a depilatory, for it is rubbed on until the skin sweats, and then again and a third time without washing the sweat away.

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§ 27.49.1  Drabe is a similar plant to phonos, with slender stalks a cubit high surrounded on either side by leaves the size of a thumb, similar to those of oxymyrsine, but whiter and softer. The blossom is white and like that of the elder. The stalks are eaten boiled, but its seed is used instead of pepper.

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§ 27.50.1  Elatine has leaves like those of cassia, very small, shaggy and round, with five or six little branches, half a foot long, which are covered with leaves right from the root. The plant grows among the corn, is harsh to the taste and therefore good for fluxes of the eyes; the leaves are pounded with pearl barley and applied, a napkin being placed underneath. The plant boiled with linseed makes a gruel that cures dysentery.

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§ 27.51.1  Empetros, called calcifraga by us Romans, is found on coastal mountains, generally on a rock. When it has grown near the sea it is salt, and taken in drink brings away bile and phlegms; when farther off and in deeper soil it tastes more bitter. It brings away fluid, and is taken in broth of some kind or in hydromel. When stale it loses its potency, but when fresh and boiled down in water or beaten up it is diuretic and breaks up stone in the bladder. Those who seek to win belief in this assurance assert that pebbles boiled with it are broken up.

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§ 27.52.1  Epicactis, called by some elleborine, is a small plant with tiny leaves; taken in drink it is very useful for liver complaints and to counteract poisons.

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§ 27.53.1  Epimedion is a stem, not large, with ten or even twelve leaves like ivy leaves. It never flowers, has a slender, blackish, evil-smelling root, and ...[an insipid taste? ] This plant, which grows in damp soils, is one of those with bracing and cooling properties, and should be avoided by women. Its leaves, beaten up in wine, check the growth of maidens' breasts.

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§ 27.54.1  Enneaphyllon has nine long leaves, and is of caustic nature. When applied it is wrapped up in wool, lest it cauterize too far, for it raises blisters immediately. It is very good for the pains of lumbago and sciatica.

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§ 27.55.1  Ferns are of two kinds, neither having blossom or seed. Some Greeks call pteris, others blachnon, the kind from the sole root of which shoot out several other ferns exceeding even two cubits in length, with a not unpleasant smell. This is considered male. The other kind the Greeks call thelypteris, some nymphaea pteris. It has only one stem, and is not bushy, but shorter, softer and more compact than the other, and channelled with leaves at the root. The root of both kinds fattens pigs. In both kinds the leaves are pinnate on either side, whence the Greeks have named them pteris. The roots of both are long, slanting, and blackish, especially when they have lost moisture; they should, however, be dried in the sun. Ferns grow everywhere, but especially in a cold soil. They ought to be dug up at the setting of the Pleiades. The root must be used only at the end of three years, neither earlier nor later. Ferns expel intestinal worms, tapeworms when taken with honey, but for other worms they must be taken in sweet wine on three consecutive days; both kinds are very injurious to the stomach. Fern opens the bowels, bringing away first bile, then fluid. tapeworms better with an equal weight of scammony. To treat catarrhal fluxes two oboli by weight of the root are taken in water after fasting for one day, with a taste of honey beforehand. Neither fern should be given to women, since either causes a miscarriage when they are pregnant, and barrenness when they are not. Reduced to powder they are sprinkled over foul ulcers as well as on the necks of draught animals. The leaves kill lice and will not harbour snakes, so that it is well to spread them in suspected places; by the smell too when burnt they drive away these creatures. Among ferns also physicians have their preference; the Macedonian is the best, the next best comes from Cassiope?

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§ 27.56.1  Femur bubulum ('ox thigh') is the name given to a plant which, applied fresh and beaten up in vinegar and salt, is one of the remedies beneficial for the sinews.

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§ 27.57.1  Galeopsis, called by some galeobdolon or galion, has stem and leaves like those of the nettle, but smoother, and giving off when beaten up an offensive smell; the flower is purple. It grows along hedges and lanes everywhere. Its leaves and stalks, beaten up in vinegar and applied, cure indurations and malignant growths, dispersing scrofulous sores, superficial abscesses and parotid swellings. It is also beneficial to use the juice of a decoction as a fomentation. With the addition of salt moreover it heals festering sores and gangrenes.

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§ 27.58.1  Glaux, called of old eugalacton, has leaves like those of cytisus and the lentil; they are whiter underneath. The branches, five or six in number, extremely slender and springing from the root, lie along the ground; on them form small, purple blossoms. It is found near the sea, and is boiled in similago porridge to stimulate a rich supply of milk; those who have drunk a dose should proceed to a bath.

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§ 27.59.1  Glaucion grows in Syria and Parthia, a low plant, with tightly packed leaves, rather like those of the poppy but smaller and dirtier looking; it has a foul smell and a bitter, astringent taste. The seed, of a saffron colour, is put into a pot lined with fuller's clay and heated in an oven. Then it is taken out, and a juice of the same name is extracted from it. Both the juice and beaten-up leaves are used for the fluxes that fall in streams from the whole eye. There is made from it a salve called by physicians diaglaucin. It also restores a rich supply of milk if this fails. When taken for this purpose, water is the medium.

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§ 27.60.1  Glycyside, called by some paeonia or pentorobon, has a stem two spans high; two or three others go with it. This stem is reddish, with bark like that of bay; the leaves resemble those of isatis, only more fleshy, rounder, and smaller. The seed is in pods, with some grains red, some black. There are however two kinds of the plant. The one to the roots of which are attached about six or eight rather long bulbs like acorns is regarded as female. The male has no more bulbs, since it is supported only by a single root, a span deep, white, and astringent to the taste. The leaves of the female smell of myrrh, and are closer together. The plants grow in woods. It is said that they should be dug up by night, because to do so in the daytime is dangerous, for the woodpecker called 'bird of Mars' assaults the eyes. That there is a danger, however, of prolapsus of the anus when a root is being dug up, I hold to be a very fraudulent lie, calculated to exaggerate the real facts. These plants are of manifold use. The red grains check red menstrual discharge, about fifteen being taken in dark-red wine. The black grains are healing to the uterus, the same number being taken in raisin or ordinary wine. The root in wine relieves all pains of the belly, opens the bowels, cures opisthotonic tetanus, jaundice, and complaints of the kidneys and bladder; for the trachea and the stomach however a decoction in wine is used, which also acts astringently on the bowels. It is eaten too as a food, but as a medicine four drachmae are enough. The black grains, taken in wine to the number mentioned, also prevent nightmares, while for stomach ache and for gnawing colic it is beneficial both to eat them and to apply them locally. Suppurations too are dispersed, recent by the black seed and old by the red. Both kinds are good for snakebites, and to cure stone in children when strangury is beginning.

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§ 27.61.1  Gnaphalium is called by some chamaezelon; its pale, soft leaves are used as flock; the two indeed are similar. It is given in a dry wine for dysentery, arrests fluxes of the belly and excessive menstruation, is injected for tenesmus and applied to festering ulcers.

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§ 27.62.1  Xenocrates calls gallidraga a prickly marsh-plant like leucacanthus, with a tall stem like fennel-giant, on the top of which is perched an egg-shaped ball. In this, he says, as summer advances, are bred maggots, which are kept in a box and attached with bread, as an amulet, to the arm on the same side as an aching tooth, and the pain disappears at once in a wonderful manner. These maggots, he says, retain their potency for not more than a year, and then only if they have not touched the ground.

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§ 27.63.1  Holcus grows on dry rocks. The plant is like barley that has grown again after cutting, with ears at the top of a slender straw. Tied round the head or round the arm this plant draws ears (orisias) from the flesh, for which reason some call it aristis.

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§ 27.64.1  Hyoseris is like endive, but smaller and rougher to the touch; crushed it is a splendid remedy for wounds.

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§ 27.65.1  Holosteon (all-bone) is a plant with nothing hard about it, the name being an antiphrasis coined by the Greeks, just as they call gall sweet. Its root is so slender as to look like hair. Four fingers long, the plant has narrow leaves like grass and an astringent taste, growing on hills with deep soil. Taken in wine for sprains and ruptures it also closes wounds, for it even fastens together pieces of meat when boiled with them.

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§ 27.66.1  Hippophaeston is to be found among the thorns out of which fullers' pots are made up, having no stem, no blossom, but only little, hollow heads and many small leaves of the colour of grass. Its little roots are whitish and soft. Their juice is extracted in summer; the dose to open the bowels is three oboli, being used especially in epilepsy, palsy, dropsy, and to treat giddiness, orthopnoea, and incipient paralysis.

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§ 27.67.1  Hypoglossa has leaves shaped like those of wild myrtle, concave, prickly, and on them as it were tongues, small leaves growing out of the leaves proper. A chaplet made from these and placed on the head relieves headache.

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§ 27.68.1  Hypecod grows in cornfields and has leaves like those of rue. Its properties are those of poppy juice.

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§ 27.69.1  The plant of Ida has leaves like those of oxymyrsine, and to them adhere as it were tendrils, which bear the blossom. The plant itself cheeks looseness of the bowels, menstruation, and all excessive bleeding, as it has astringent, and repressive properties.

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§ 27.70.1  Isopyron is called by some phaselion, because its leaf, which resembles that of anise, twists itself into the shape of the tendrils of the passeolus. At the top of the stem grow little heads, slender, full of seed like that of melanthium, and very efficacious, when taken with honey or hydromel, for cough, other chest complaints, and also those of the liver.

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§ 27.71.1  Lathyris has many leaves like those of lettuce, but slighter, and many buds, in which the seed is enclosed in envelopes as is that of the caper. When the buds are dry, the seeds, of the size of a peppercorn, are taken out; they are white, sweet, and easily shelled. Twenty of them in fresh water or hydromel cure dropsy, and also draw away bile. Those who wish for a more violent purge take the pods themselves with the seeds, but since they injure the stomach the plan has been devised of taking them with fish or chicken broth.

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§ 27.72.1  Leontopetalon, called by some rapadion, has leaves like cabbage leaves and a stem half a foot long. There are several side branches, and at the ends, in pods like those of chick-peas, is the seed. The root is like a turnip, large and blackish. It grows on cultivated ground. Taken in wine the root neutralises the poison of serpents of every kind [or 'of the bites of all serpents'], and no other remedy acts more quickly. It is also given to sufferers from sciatica.

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§ 27.73.1  Lycapsos has longer and coarser leaves than those of lettuce, a long stem, with many subsidiary others, hairy and a cubit long, and a small, purple flower. It grows in flat, meadowy land. With barley meal it makes a local application for erysipelas. The juice with hot water added promotes perspiration in fevers.

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§ 27.74.1  Among all plants nothing is more wonderful than lithospermum, called by some exonychon, by others 'Juppiter's corn,' and by others 'corn of Hercules.' The plant is about five inches high, with leaves twice as big as those of rue, and ligneous little branches of the thickness of a rush. Near the leaves it grows as it were little beards, which are single, and on their tops little stones, white and round as pearls, as big as a chick-pea but as hard as a stone. Where they are attached to pedicels these jewels have little holes, in which is the seed. The plant grows indeed in Italy, but the most highly valued in Crete, and I have never seen anything among plants that filled me with greater wonder. So charming the adornment that one might think that the jeweller's art had arranged gleaming white pearls symmetrically among the leaves; very exquisite and difficult the birth of a gem from a plant! The authorities say that it lies and spreads over the ground; have seen it only when gathered, not when so growing. It is indisputable that a drachma by weight of these jewels taken in white wine breaks up and brings away stone, and cures strangury. There is no other plant the medicinal property of which can be recognised with greater confidence; its very appearance is such that at once by a glance, even without being told, people can become aware of this property.

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§ 27.75.1  On ordinary stones near rivers grows a dry, hoary moss. One of them is rubbed with another one smeared with human spittle; with the latter stone is touched eczema, and he who touches says: 'Begone, cantharides, for a savage wolf seeks your blood.'

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§ 27.76.1  Limeum is the name given by the Gauls to a plant that they use to make a drug, called by them deer poison, with which when hunting they poison their arrows. As much of the plant as is usually used for one arrow is mixed with three bushels of saliva stimulant, and when cattle are sick this mash is forced down their throats. Afterwards they must be tied to their stalls until they are purged — for they usually go wild — and if sweating ensues cold water should be poured over them.

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§ 27.77.1  Leuce, a plant like mercurialis, has a reason for the name it bears, because a white line runs down the middle of the leaves, which is why some call it mesoleucion. Its juice heals fistulas; crushed, the plant itself cures malignant ulcers. Perhaps it is the same as the plant called leueas, which is a remedy for the poison of all sea creatures. My authorities do not report its appearance; they only say that the wild plant has the broader leaves, that this is the more efficacious, and has the more pungent seed.

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§ 27.78.1  A description of leucographis I have nowhere found in writing. I am the more surprised at this because in three-obol doses with saffron it is considered useful for haemoptysis, and also for the coeliae disease; beaten up in water and applied as a pessary for excessive menstruation; useful too as an ingredient of eye salves, and for filling up ulcers that form on tender parts of the body.

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§ 27.79.1  Medion has leaves like those of cultivated seris; the stem is three feet long, on which is a large, purple, round flower, bearing tiny seeds; the root is half a foot long. The plant grows on shaded rocks. The root checks excessive menstruation, two-drachma doses, with honey, being taken in the form of an electuary for a few successive days. For the same purpose the seed too is given in wine.

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§ 27.80.1  Myosota or myosotis is a smooth plant with several stems growing from one root, these being red to a certain extent and hollow; narrow leaves grow at the bottom, longish, with a spine along the back, dark, carefully arranged in pairs at regular intervals. There are slender stalks growing from the axils, and the blossom is blue. The root, of the thickness of a finger, is fringed with many filaments like hairs. It has septic and ulcerating properties, and so heals lacrimal fistulas. The Egyptians say that if, on the twenty-eighth day of the month they call thoth (a day generally falling in our August), you rub yourself over in the morning with the juice of this plant before speaking to anyone, you will not in that year a suffer from ophthahnia.

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§ 27.81.1  Myagros is a plant like fennel-giant, with leaves like those of madder; it is three feet high. The seed is oily, and from it is extracted an oil. This juice, used as liniment, is good treatment for an ulcerated mouth.

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§ 27.82.1  The plant called nyma, with its three long leaves like those of endive, makes a liniment that restores the colour of a skin disfigured by scars.

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§ 27.83.1  Natrix is the name of a plant the root of which, when pulled up, gives out the foul smell of he-goats. In Picenum they use this plant to drive away from women what are, with a strange credulity, called Fatui. I myself should believe that it is the hallucination of minds delirious in this way that is helped by such a drugs.

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§ 27.84.1  Odontitis is classed as a hay with close-set stalks growing from the same root, jointed, triangular and dark. At the joints it has small leaves, longer however than those of polygonum, seed like barley in the axils, and a tiny, bright red flower. It grows in meadows. A decoction of its stalks, a handful in a dry wine, is a cure for toothache, but it must be kept in the mouth.

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§ 27.85.1  Othonna grows in Syria. It is like eruca, has leaves full of holes and a saffron flower. This is why some have called it anemone. Its juice is a suitable ingredient of eye salves, for it is slightly biting, warming, and astringent, because of its drying nature; it clears away scars, films and all obstructions. Some say that it is washed, and then, after drying, worked up into lozenges.

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§ 27.86.1  Onosma has long leaves up to about three fingers in length, lying on the ground like those of anchusa. It has no stem, no blossom and no seed. If a woman with child should eat it or step over it, she is said to miscarry.

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§ 27.87.1  Asses are said, if they have eaten onopradon, to break wind. It is diuretic and an emmenagogue, checks looseness of the bowels, and disperses suppurations and gatherings.

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§ 27.88.1  Osyris bears dark twigs, slender and pliant, on which are dark leaves like those of flax. The seed on the twigs is black to begin with, and then the colour changes to red. From them are made cosmetics for women. A decoction of the roots taken by the mouth cures jaundice. These roots also, if cut off before the seed ripens and dried in the sun, check looseness of the bowels; but, if dug up after the ripening and boiled down in gruel, they are good treatment for catarrhs of the belly, and by themselves they are beaten up and taken in rain water.

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§ 27.89.1  Oxys has three leaves. It is given for a relaxed stomach, and is also eaten by sufferers from intestinal hernia.

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§ 27.90.1  Polyanthemum, called by some batrachion, with its caustic property clears away scars and brings back a healthy colour. It also effaces psoriasis.

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§ 27.91.1  Polygonum is the name given by the Greeks to the plant we Romans call sanguinaria. It does not rise from the ground, has leaves like those of rue, and resembles grass. Its juice poured into the nostrils checks epistaxis, and taken with wine stays haemorrhage in any part of the body and the spitting of blood. Those who hold that there are several kinds of polygonum would have this to be considered the male plant, and to be so named because of the great number of its seeds or from its being a shrub with close-packed branches. Some call it polygonaton from its many joints, others thalattias or carcinothron or clema, many myrtopetalum. There are also to be found some who say that this kind is the female, and that the male is larger, less dark, with the joints closer together, and swelling with seed under all the leaves. However this may be, the property of these plants is to be astringent and to cool. Their seed relaxes the bowels, and taken in larger doses is diuretic; it checks catarrhs, and if these have not occurred it is of no uses The leaves are applied to a heated stomach, and also used to make liniment for a painful bladder and for erysipclas. The juice is also dropped into purulent ears and painful eyes. It used also to be given by itself in doses of two cyathi, before the paroxysms of agues, especially tertian and quartan, also for cholera, dysentery and a relaxed stomach. The third kind, called orion, grows on mountains and is like a tender reed. It has one stem with knots close together and fitted one into another, leaves resembling those of the pitch pine, and a root of no medicinal use. This kind is less efficacious than those already mentioned, and used especially for sciatica. The fourth kind is called wild polygonum, a shrub that is almost a tree; it has a ligneous root, a red trunk like that of the cedar, branches like those of spartum, two spans long, and with three or four dark, knotted joints. This kind too is of an astringent nature, and tastes like a quince. It is boiled down in water to one third, or dried and powdered for sprinkling on ulcerations of the mouth and excoriated bruises, but for sore gums the plant itself is chewed. It arrests corrosive ulcers, and all those that spread or are slow to heal; for frostbite however it is specific. Herbalists also use it for quinsy; for headache they make a chaplet of it which they place on the head; while to cure eye fluxes they put one round the neck. For tertian ague some pluck it with the left hand and attach it as an amulet, and for haemorrhage also. There is no other plant that they keep in a dry state more than they do polygonum.

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§ 27.92.1  Pancratium some prefer to call 'little squill.' It has leaves resembling those of the white lily, but longer and thicker, and a root like a large, red bulb. Its juice taken with retch flour relaxes the bowels and cleans ulcers. With honey it is given for dropsy and affections of the spleen. Others boil it down until the water becomes sweet, pour this off, pound the root, and work it into lozenges, which they dry in the sun and use afterwards for sores on the head and all other ailments that call for a detergent. Moreover, they give in wine a three-finger pinch for cough, and an electuary made of it for pleurisy or pneumonia. They also give it to be taken in wine for sciatica, for colic, and as an emmenagogue.

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§ 27.93.1  Peplis, called by some syce, by others meconion or meconaphrodes, grows into a shrub from one slender root, and has leaves like those of rue but a little broader. Under the leaves is a round seed, smaller than that of the white poppy. It is generally gathered among vines at harvest time, and is dried with its seed after a vessel has been placed beneath to catch this. Taken in drink it relaxes the bowels, bringing away bile and phlegm. A moderate dose is an acetabulum in three heminae of hydromel. It is sprinkled over foods and relishes to loosen the bowels.

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§ 27.94.1  Periclymenon too is a plant which grows into a shrub, having after an interval two leaves which are whitish and soft. And at the top among the leaves is a seed which is hard, and difficult to pluck. The plant grows in cultivated fields and in hedges, climbing round supports of any kind. Its seed is dried in the shade, pounded, and worked up into lozenges. These, dissolved in three cyathi of white wine, are given for thirty days to cure splenic affections, the spleen being reduced either by blood in the urine or through the bowels, as is plain immediately from the tenth day. The boiled leaves too are diuretic, and also beneficial to asthmatics; they aid delivery and bring away the afterbirth if taken in drink in a similar way.

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§ 27.95.1  Pelecinos I have said grows in cornfields. It makes a bushy plant with its stalks, and has leaves like those of the chick-pea. It bears seed, like git seed as we know it, in three or four pods curved like little horns. This seed is bitter, a good stomachic, and an ingredient of antidotes.

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§ 27.96.1  Polygala is a full span in height, with leaves, like those of lentil, on the top of the stem, and with an astringent taste. Taken in drink it promotes an abundant supply of milk.

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§ 27.97.1  Poterion, or as some call it, phrynion or neuras, is a spreading shrub, shrivelled and prickly, with thick down, small round leaves, long branches that are soft, flexible and slender, and a long flower of a grass-green colour. The seed is not used in medicine, but has a sham, aromatic taste. The plant is found on moist hills. It has two or three roots, two cubits in depth, sinewy, white and firm. It is dug np in autumn, and when the shrub has been cut away, the root yields a juice like gum. An application of the root is said to be a wonderful healer of wounds, especially of sinews even when they have been severed. A decoction of the root also, taken with honey, is good for relaxed, weak, or cut sinews.

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§ 27.98.1  Phalangitis is called by some phalangion, by others leucanthemum, or, as I find in some copies, leucacantha. It has little branches, never fewer than two, which grow in opposite directions; white flowers like the red lily in shape, a black, broad seed, of the shape of half a lentil, but much thinner, and a slender root of a grass-green colour. The leaves, flowers or seed of this plant are of help for the treatment of wounds inflicted by scorpions, poisonous spiders, and serpents; they are also good for griping colic.

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§ 27.99.1  To describe phyteuma is in my opinion a waste of time, because it is used only for love-philtres.

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§ 27.100.1  Phyllon is the name given by the Greeks to a plant that grows on rocky heights. The female is more grass-green in colour than the male, with a slender stem and a small root. The seed is like the round seed of a poppy. This kind causes births of its own sex, the male those of males, differing from the female merely in its seed, which resembles that of the olive when it is just beginning to form. Both kinds are taken in wine.

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§ 27.101.1  Phelandrion grows in marshy places, and has leaves resembling celery. Its seed is taken in drink for stone and troubles of the bladder.

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§ 27.102.1  Phaleris has a stalk which is long and slender as a reed; at the top is a drooping flower; the seed resembles sesame seed, and is one of the remedies that break up stone in the bladder, being taken in wine, vinegar, or with honey and milk; it also cures complaints of the bladder.

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§ 27.103.1  Polyrrhizon has leaves like those of myrtle, and many roots. These are pounded and given in wine for snake bite. They are also of benefit when quadrupeds are bitten.

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§ 27.104.1  Proserpinaca is a common plant, and an excellent remedy for scorpion stings. It also, they say, when thoroughly crushed and with the addition of brine and sprats oil, makes an excellent remedy for quinsy; moreover, however tired one may be, even so weary as to lose one's voice, to put it under the tongue is said to dispel the fatigue; also that to swallow it results in healthful vomiting.

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§ 27.105.1  Rhecoma is imported from the regions beyond Pontus. The root resembles dark costus, but is smaller and a little redder, without smell but with a hot, astringent taste. When pounded it also is of a wine-like colour, but inclining to saffron. Used as liniment it reduces gatherings and inflammations, and heals wounds; in raisin wine it relieves eye-fluxes; with honey it removes dark bruises, and in vinegar other livid marks. Powdered it is sprinkled over malignant sores; for spitting of blood a drachma by weight is taken in water; for dysentery too and coeliac disease, should no fever be present, it is given in wine, but where there is fever, in water. It is easier to pound if it is steeped the night before. Its decoction too is given, to be drunk in double doses, for ruptures, sprains, bruises, and tumbles from a height. Should there be pains in the chest, a little quantity of pepper and myrrh is added; should the stomach be relaxed, it is taken in cold water; so also for chronic cough and spitting of pus, likewise for liver complaints, spleen complaints, sciatica, kidney troubles, asthma, and orthopnoea. Roughness of the trachea is cured by three-oboli doses of it pounded and taken in raisin wine, or by its decoction. Lichen also is cleared away by an application of the root in vinegar. It is taken in drink for flatulence, chills, feverish shivers, hiccough, colic, herpes, heaviness of the head, bilious giddiness, tired pains, and sprains.

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§ 27.106.1  Around Ariminum is well known the plant called reseda. It disperses all gatherings and inflammations. Those who use it in treatment add these words: Reseda, allay diseases; Dost know, dost know, what chick here uprooted thee? May he have neither head nor feet. They say these words three times, and spit three times on the ground.

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§ 27.107.1  Stoechas grows only in the islands of the same name, a fragrant plant with the foliage of hyssop and a bitter taste. Taken in drink it is an emmenagogue, and relieves pains in the chest. It is also an ingredient of antidotes.

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§ 27.108.1  Solanum according to Cornelius Celsus is called by the Greeks. It has repressive and cooling properties.

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§ 27.109.1  Smyrnion has a stem like that of celery, and rather broad leaves, which grow mostly about its many shoots, from the curve of which they spring; they are juicy, bending towards the ground, and with a drug-like smell not unpleasing with a sort of sharpness. The colour shades off to yellow; the heads of the stems are umbellate, as are those of celery; the seed is round and black. It withers at the beginning of summer. The root too has a smell, and a sharp, biting taste, being soft and full of juice. Its skin is dark on the outside, but the inside is pale. The smell has the character of myrrh, whence too the plant gets its name. It grows on rocky hills, and also on those with plenty of earth. It is used for warming and for reducing. Leaves, root, and seed are diuretic and emmenagogues. The root binds the bowels, and an application of it disperses gatherings and suppurations, if not chronic, as well as indurations; mixed with cachry, polium, or melissophyllum, it is also taken in wine to counteract the poison of spiders and serpents, but only a little at a time, for if taken all at once it acts as an emetic, and so is sometimes given with rue. Seed or root is a remedy for cough and orthopnoea, also for affections of thorax, spleen, kidneys or bladder, and the root is for ruptures and sprains; it also facilitates delivery and brings away the afterbirth. In wine with crethmos it is also given for sciatica. It promotes sweating and belching, and therefore dispels flatulence of the stomach. It causes wounds to cicatrize. There is also extracted from the root a juice useful for female ailments, and for affections of the thorax and of the hypochondria, for it is warming, digestive and cleansing. The seed is given in drink, especially for dropsy, for which the juice also is used as liniment. The dried skin is used in plasters, and also as a side-dish with honey wine, oil and garum, especially when the meat is boiled.

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§ 27.109.2  Sinon tastes very like pepper and aids digestion. It also is very good for pain in the stomach.

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§ 27.110.1  Telephion resembles purslane in both stem and leaves. Seven or eight branches from the root make a bushy plant with coarse, fleshy leaves. It grows on cultivated ground, especially among vines. It is used as liniment for freckles and rubbed off when dry; it makes liniment also for psoriasis, to be applied for about three months, six hours each night or day; afterwards barley meal should be applied. It is also good treatment for wounds and fistulas.

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§ 27.111.1  Trichomanes resembles adiantum, but is thinner and darker; the leaves are like those of the lentil, closely set, small, and opposite one another. The decoction, taken in white wine, with wild cummin added, cures strangury. Eaten as food it prevents hair falling off, or if it has already done so, restores it. Beaten up and applied in oil it makes a thick growth when there is mange. Sneezing too is provoked by the taste.

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§ 27.112.1  Thalictrum has coriander-like leaves, but a little more fleshy, and the stem of a poppy. It grows everywhere, but particularly in flat, meadowy country. The leaves with honey are good treatment for ulcers.

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§ 27.113.1  Thlaspi is of two kinds. One has narrow leaves, a finger in breadth and length, turned towards the ground, and divided at the tip. The stem is half a foot long, not without branches, and with seed enclosed in shield-like pods and shaped like a lentil, except that — hence comes the name — it is indented. The blossom is white, and the plant grows in lanes and in hedges. The seed has a sharp taste and brings away bile and phlegm by both vomit and stools. The measure of a dose is an acetabulum. Injections are good for sciatica, if continued until they draw blood. It is also an emmenagogue but kills the foetus. The other thlaspi is called by some Persicon napy; it has broad leaves and large roots, while the plant itself is useful to make an injection for sciatica. Both kinds are good for affections of the groin. The picker is recommended to say that he is taking it as a remedy for the groin, all kinds of gatherings, and wounds. He should lift it with one hand.

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§ 27.114.1  We are not told the nature of the plant trachinia. I think it untrue, and the assurance of Democritus fantastic, that used as an amulet it consumes the spleen in three days.

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§ 27.115.1  Tragonis, or tragion, grows only on the shores of the island of Crete, and resembles juniper in seed, leaf and branches. Its milky juice, hardened into gum, or its seed taken in drink, brings away sharp points embedded in the flesh. For use as liniment it is beaten up when fresh and applied with wine, or it is dried, powdered, and applied with honey. It also promotes abundance of milk, and is a specific for ailments of the breasts.

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§ 27.116.1  There is also another plant, tragos, called by some scorpion, half a foot high, bushy, without leaves, and bearing tiny red clusters with wheat-like seeds, and pointed at the extremity. This plant too grows in coastal districts. Ten or twelve extremities of clusters, pounded and taken in wine, are good for coeliac affections, dysentery, spitting of blood, and excessive menstruation.

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§ 27.117.1  There is also tragopogon, called by some come with a small stem, leaves like those of saffron, a long, sweet root, and at the top of the stem a broad, dark calyx. It grows on rugged soils, and is eaten but never used in medicine.

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§ 27.118.1  Such is all that I have been told or discovered worth recording about plants. At the close, I think it not out of place to add a warning that their properties vary with their age. As I have said, elaterium lasts longest, dark chamaeleon forty years, centaury not more than twelve, peucedanum and aristolochia up to six, and the wild vine one year — that is, if they are kept in the shade. And of external animals indeed none attack the roots that I have mentioned except the sphondyle, a kind of creeping thing, which infests them all.

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§ 27.119.1  There is no doubt either that the potency and efficacy of all roots are lessened if the fruit ripens before they are dug, and it is the same with seeds if the root has been cut previously for the sake of the juice. The properties moreover of all plants are weakened by habit, and they cease to be beneficial when needed if they have been in daily use; similarly with harmful plants. All plants however have greater efficacy and potency when they grow in cold regions subject to north-east winds, and likewise those that grow in dry.

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§ 27.120.1  There are also considerable differences between races. I have heard for instance about tapeworms and maw-worms, that they infest the peoples of Egypt, Arabia, Syria and Cilicia, while on the contrary they are never found at all among those of Thrace and Phrygia. This is less remarkable than their being found among the Thebans, but not among the Athenians, although Attica and Boeotia are adjoining territories. That thought brings me to the nature of animals themselves, and to the remedies for all diseases, of even greater reliability, that are implanted in them at birth. For again, the Mother of all creation both willed that no animal should be born merely to eat or to satisfy the appetites of others, implanting also healthful medicines in their vitals, because she was implanting them even in unconscious things, and she also willed that those outstanding aids to life should come from another life, a thought beyond all else most wonderful.

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§ 28.1.1  I should have finished describing the character of all things growing between heaven and earth, leaving only whatever is dug out of the ground itself, if dealing with remedies derived from plants and shrubs did not make me digress to the wider sphere of medicines obtained from the very living creatures that themselves are healed. Well then, shall I, who have described plants and forms of flowers, including many rare things that are difficult to find, say nothing about the benefits to man that are to be found in man himself, nothing about the other kinds of remedies that live among us, especially as life itself becomes a punishment for those who are not free from pains and diseases? Surely I must, and I shall devote all my care to the task, although I realize the risk of causing disgust, since it is my fixed determination to have less regard for popularity than for benefiting human life. Furthermore, my investigations will include foreign things and even outlandish customs; belief here can appeal only to authority, although I myself also, when choosing my detail, have striven to find views almost universally believed, and I have stressed careful research rather than abundance of material. One thing it is very necessary to point out: I have already described the natures of living creatures and the discoveries we owe to each (for they did no less good by discovering medicines than they do by supplying them). I am now showing what help is to be found in the creatures themselves. I did not entirely leave out this then; so although the new matter is different, it is yet intimately connected with the old.

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§ 28.2.1  But I shall begin with man seeking aid for himself out of himself, and at the outset there meet us a most baffling puzzle. The blood too of gladiators is drunk by epileptics as though it were a draught of life, though we shudder with horror when in the same arena we look at even the beasts doing the same thing. But, by Heaven!, the patients think it most effectual to suck from a man himself warm, living blood, and putting their lips to the to drain the very life, although it is not the custom of men to apply their mouths at all to the wounds even of wild beasts. Others seek to secure the leg-marrow and the brain of infants. Not a few among the Greeks have even spoken of the flavour of each organ and limb, going into all details, not excluding nail parings; just as though it could be thought health for a man to become a beast, and to deserve disease as punishment in the very process of healing. And, by Heaven!, well deserved is the disappointment if these remedies prove of no avail. To look at human entrails is considered sin; what must it be to eat them? Who was the first, Osthanes, to think of such devices as yours? For it is you who must bear the blame, you destroyer of human rights and worker of horrors; you were their first founder, in order, I suppose, to perpetuate your memory. Who first thought of chewing one by one human limbs? What soothsaying guided him? What origin could your medical practices have had? Who made magic potions more innocent than their remedies? Granted that foreigners and barbarians had discovered the rites, did the Greeks also make these arts their own? There is extant a treatise of Democritus stating that one complaint is more benefited by bones from the head of a criminal, and other complaints by those of a friend or guest. Moreover, Apollonius put in writing that to scrape sore gums with the tooth of a man killed by violence is most efficacious, and Meletos that the gall of a human being cures cataract. Artemon treated epilepsy with draughts of water drawn from a spring by night and drunk out of the skull of a man killed but not cremated. From the skull of a man hanged Antaeus made pills to cure the bites of a mad dog. Even quadrupeds too have been cured by remedies taken from a man; to cure flatulence in oxen their horns have been pierced and human bones inserted; for sick pigs wheat has been given which had remained for a whole night where a man had been killed or cremated. Far from me and my writings be such horrors. I shall speak not of sins but of aids, such as when will prove an effective remedy the milk of lying-in women, or human saliva, or contact with a human body, and the like. I do not indeed hold that life ought to be so prized that by any and every means it should be prolonged. You holding this view, whoever you are, will none the less die, even though you may have lived longer through foulness or sin. Wherefore let every man consider that first among the remedies for his soul is this: that of all the blessings given to man by Nature none is greater than a timely death, and herein the brightest feature is that each man can have the power to bestow it on himself.

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§ 28.3.1  Of the remedies derived from man, the first raises a most important question, and one never settled: have words and formulated incantations any effect? If they have, it would be right and proper to give the credit to mankind. As individuals, however, all our wisest men reject belief in them, although as a body the public at all times believes in them unconsciously. In fact the sacrifice of victims without a prayer is supposed to be of no effect; without it too the gods are not thought to be properly consulted. Moreover, there is one form of words for getting favourable omens, another for averting evil, and yet another for a commendation. We see also that our chief magistrates have adopted fixed formulas for their prayers; that to prevent a word's being omitted or out of place a reader dictates beforehand the prayer from a script; that another attendant is appointed as a guard to keep watch, and yet another is put in charge to maintain a strict silence; that a piper plays so that nothing but the prayer is heard. Remarkable instances of both kinds of interference are on record: cases when the noise of actual ill omens has ruined the prayer, or when a mistake has been made in the prayer itself; then suddenly the head of the liver, or the heart, has disappeared from the entrails, or these have been doubled, while the victim was standing. There has come down to us a striking example of ritual in that with which the Decii, father and son, devoted themselves; extant too is the plea of innocence uttered by the Vestal Tuccia when, accused of unchastity, she carried water in a sieve, in the year of the City six hundred and nine. Our own generation indeed even saw buried alive in the Cattle Market a Greek man and a Greek woman, and victims from other peoples with whom at the time we were at war. The prayer used at this ceremony is wont to be dictated by the Master of the College of the Quindecimviri, and if one reads it one is forced to admit that there is power in ritual formulas, the events of eight hundred and thirty years showing this for all of them. It is believed today that our Vestal virgins by a spell root to the spot runaway slaves, provided they have not left the City bounds, and yet, if this view is once admitted, that the gods hear certain prayers, or are moved by any form of words, the whole question must be answered in the affirmative. Our ancestors, indeed, reported such wonders again and again, and that, most impossible of all, even lightning can be brought by charms from the sky, as I have mentioned on the proper occasion.

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§ 28.4.1  Lucius Piso in the first book of his Annals tells us that King Tullus Hostilius used the same sacrificial ritual as Numa, which he found in Numa's books, in an attempt to draw Jupiter down from the sky, and was struck by lightning because he made certain mistakes in the ceremony; many indeed assure us that by words the destinies and omens of mighty events are changed. During the digging of foundations for a shrine on the Tarpeian Hill there was discovered a human head. For an interpretation envoys were sent to Olenus of Cales, the most distinguished seer of Etruria. Perceiving that the sign portended glory and success, Olenus tried by questioning to divert the blessing to his own people. He first traced with his staff the outline of a temple on the ground in front of him, and then asked: 'Is this then, Romans, what you say? "Here will be the temple of Jupiter, All-good and Almighty; here we found the head?"' The Annals most firmly insists that the destiny of Rome would have passed to Etruria, had not the Roman envoys, forewarned by the seer's son, replied: 'Not exactly here, but it was in Rome that we say the head was found.' It is said that the same thing happened again when a clay four-horse chariot, designed for the roof of the same shrine, grew larger in the furnace, and once more in a similar way was the happy augury retained. Let these instances suffice to show that the power of omens is really in our own control, and that their influence is conditional upon the way we receive each. At any rate, in the teaching of the augurs it is a fundamental principle that neither evil omens nor any auspices affect those who at the outset of any undertaking declare that they take no notice of them; no greater instance of the divine mercy could be found than this boon. Again, in the actual laws of the Twelve Tables we find also these words: 'Whoever shall have bewitched the crops,' and in another place: 'whoever shall have cast an evil spell.' Verrius Flaccus cites trustworthy authorities to show that it was the custom, at the very beginning of a siege, for the Roman priests to call forth the divinity under whose protection the besieged town was, and to promise him the same or even more splendid worship among the Roman people. Down to the present day this ritual has remained part of the doctrine of the Pontiffs, and it is certain that the reason why the tutelary deity of Rome has been kept a secret is to prevent any enemy from acting in a similar way. There is indeed nobody who does not fear to be spellbound by imprecations. A similar feeling makes everybody break the shells of eggs or snails immediately after eating them, or else pierce them with the spoon that they have used. And so Theocritus among the Greeks, Catullus and quite recently Virgil among ourselves, have represented love charms in their poems. Many believe that by charms pottery can be crushed, and not a few even serpents; that these themselves can break the spell, this being the only kind of intelligence they possess; and by the charms of the Marsi they are gathered together even when asleep at night. On walls too are written prayers to avert fires. It is not easy to say whether our faith is more violently shaken by the foreign, unpronounceable words, or by the unexpected Latin ones, which our mind forces us to consider absurd, being always on the look-out for something big, something adequate to move a god, or rather to impose its will on his divinity. Homer said that by a magic formula stayed the haemorrhage from his wounded thigh; Theophrastus that there is a formula to cure sciatica; Cato handed down one to set dislocated limbs, Marcus Varro one for gout. The dictator Caesar, after one serious accident to his carriage, is said always, as soon as he was seated, to have been in the habit of repeating three times a formula of prayer for a safe journey, a thing we know that most people do today.

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§ 28.5.1  I should like to reinforce this part of my argument by adding an appeal to the personal feeling of the individual. Why on the first day of the year do we wish one another cheerfully a happy and prosperous New Year? Why do we also, on days of general purification, choose persons with lucky names to lead the victims? Why do we meet the evil eye by a special attitude of prayer, some invoking the Greek Nemesis, for which purpose there is at Rome an image of the goddess on the Capitol, although she has no Latin name? Why on mentioning the dead do we protest that their memory is not being attacked by us? Why do we believe that in all matters the odd numbers are more powerful, as is implied by the attention paid to critical days in fevers? Why at the harvest of the first-fruits do we say: 'These are old,' and pray for new ones to take their place? Why do we say 'Good health' to those who sneeze? This custom according to report even Tiberius Caesar, admittedly the most gloomy of men, insisted on even in a carriage, and some think it more effective to add to the salutation the name of the sneezer. Moreover, according to an accepted belief absent people can divine by the ringing in their ears that they are the object of talk. Attalus assures us that if on seeing a scorpion one says 'Two,' it is checked and does not strike. The mention of scorpions reminds me that in Africa nobody decides on anything without first saying 'Africa,' whereas among all other peoples a man prays first for the approval of the gods. But a when a table is ready it is a universal custom, we see, to take off one's ring, since it is clear that scrupulous actions, even without words, have their powers. Some people, to calm mental anxiety, carry saliva with the finger to behind the ear. There is even a proverb that bids us turn down our thumbs to show approval. In worshipping we raise our right hand to our lips and turn round our whole body, the Gauls considering it more effective to make the turn to the left. All peoples agree in worshipping lightning by clucking with the tongue. If during a banquet fires have been mentioned we avert the omen by pouring water under the table. It is supposed to be a most unlucky sign for the floor to be swept while a diner is leaving the banquet, or for a table or dumbwaiter to be removed while a guest is drinking. Servius Sulpicius, a noble Roman, has left an essay on why we should not leave the table; for in his day it was not the custom to have more tables than there were guests; for if a course or a table is recalled by a sneeze and nothing of it tasted afterwards, it is considered an evil portent, as is to eat nothing at all. These customs were established by those of old, who believed that gods are present on all occasions and at all times, and therefore left them to us reconciled even in our faults. Moreover, it has been remarked that a sudden silence falls on a banquet only when the number of those present is even, and that it portends danger to the reputation of each of them. Food also that fell from the hand used to be put back at least during courses, and it was forbidden to blow off, for tidiness, any dirt; auguries have been recorded from the words or thoughts of the diner who dropped food, a very dreadful omen being if the Pontiff should do so at a formal dinner. In any case putting it back on the table and burning it before the Lar counts as expiation. Medicines set down by chance on a table before being used are said to lose their efficacy.

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§ 28.5.2  To cut the nails on the market days at Rome in silence, beginning with the forefinger, is a custom many people feel binding on them; while to cut the hair on the seventeenth day of the month and on the twenty-ninth prevents its falling out as well as headaches. A country rule observed on most Italian farms forbids women to twirl their spindles while walking along the road, or even to carry them uncovered, on the ground that such action blights the hopes of everything, especially the hope of a good harvest. Marcus Servilius Nonianus, a leading citizen of Rome, who was not so long ago afraid of ophthalmia, used to tie round his neck, before he mentioned the disease himself or any one else spoke to him about it, a sheet of paper fastened with thread, on which were written the two Greek letters rho and alpha; Mucianus, three times consul, following the same observance, used a living fly in a white linen bag. Both avowed that by these remedies they themselves were kept free from ophthalmia. We certainly still have formulas to charm away hail, various diseases, and burns, some actually tested by experience, but I am very shy of quoting them, because of the widely different feelings they arouse. Wherefore everyone must form his own opinion about them as he pleases.

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§ 28.6.1  Persons possessed of powers of witchcraft and of the evil eye, along with many peculiar characteristics of animals, I have spoken of when dealing with marvels of the nations; it is superfluous to go over the ground again. Of certain men the whole bodies are beneficent, for example the members of those families that frighten serpents. These by a mere touch or by wet suction relieve bitten victims. In this class are the Psylli, the Marsi, and the Ophiogenes, as they are called, in the island of Cyprus. An envoy from this family, by name Evagon, was at Rome thrown by the consuls as a test into a cask of serpents, which to the general amazement licked him all over. A feature of this family, if it still survives, is the foul smell of its members in spring. Their sweat also, not only their saliva, had curative powers. But the natives of Tentyris, an island on the Nile, are such a terror to the crocodiles that these run away at the mere sound of their voice. All these peoples, so strong their natural antipathy, can, as is well known, effect a cure by their very arrival, just as wounds grow worse on the entry of those who have ever been bitten by the tooth of snake or dog. The latter also addle the eggs of a sitting hen, and make cattle miscarry; so much venom remains from the injury once received that the poisoned are turned into poisoners. The remedy is for their hands to be first washed in water, which is then used to sprinkle on the patients. On the other hand, those who have once been stung by a scorpion are never afterwards attacked by hornets, wasps or bees. He may be less surprised at this who knows that moths do not touch a garment that has been worn at a funeral, and that snakes are with difficulty pulled out of their holes except with the left hand. One of the discoveries of Pythagoras will not readily deceive you: that an uneven number of vowels in given names portends lameness, blindness, or similar disability, on the right side, an even number of vowels the same disabilities on the left. It is said that difficult labour ends in delivery at once, if over the house where is the lying-in woman there be thrown a stone or missile that has killed with one stroke each three living creatures — a human being, a boar, and a bear. A successful result is more likely if a light-cavalry spear is used, pulled out from a human body without the ground being touched. The result indeed is the same if the spear is carried indoors. So too, as Orpheus and Archelaus write, arrows drawn out of a body and not allowed to touch the ground act as a love-charm upon those under whom when in bed they have been placed. Moreover, add these authorities, epilepsy is cured by food taken from the flesh of a wild beast killed by the same iron weapon that has killed a human being. Some men have healing powers confined to parts of their body. We have mentioned the thumb of King Pyrrhus and at this there used to be shown a shoulder blade of Pelops, which was stated to be of ivory. Many men even today have scruples about cutting hair from moles on the face.

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§ 28.7.1  I have however pointed out that the best of all safeguards against serpents is the saliva of fasting human being, but our daily experience may teach us yet other values of its use. We spit on epileptics in a fit, that is, we throw back infections. In a similar way we ward off witchcraft and the bad luck that follows meeting a person lame in the right leg. We also ask forgiveness of the gods for a too presumptuous hope by spitting into our bosom; the same reason again accounts for the custom, in using any remedy, of spitting on the ground three times by way of ritual thus increasing its efficacy, and of marking early incipient boils three times with fasting saliva. It is surprising, but easily tested, that if one is sorry for a blow, whether inflicted by hand or by a missile, and at once spits into the palm of the hand that gave the wound, the resentment of the victim is immediately softened. Corroborative evidence is often seen in draught animals; when the animal has been flogged to lameness, after the remedy of spitting has been tried, it at once resumes its pace. Some persons indeed add force to their blows in a similar way by spitting into the hand before making their effort. Let us therefore believe that lichens too and leprous sores are kept in check by continual application of fasting saliva, as is also ophthalmia by using saliva every morning as eye ointment, carcinomata by kneading earth apple a with saliva, and pains in the neck by applying fasting saliva with the right hand to the right knee and with the left hand to the left knee; let us also believe that any insect that has entered the ear, if spat upon, comes out. It acts as a charm for a man to spit on the urine he has voided; similarly to spit into the right shoe before putting it on, also when passing a place where one has run into some danger. Marcion of Smyrna, who wrote on the virtues of simples, tells us that the sea scolopendra bursts if spat upon, as do also bramble and other toads. Ofilius says that serpents too burst if one spits into their open mouths, and Salpe that sensation in any numbed limb is restored by spitting into the bosom, or if the upper eyelids are touched with saliva. If we hold these beliefs, we should also believe that the right course, on the arrival of a stranger, or if a sleeping baby is looked at, is for the nurse to spit three times at her charge. And yet the baby is further under the divine protection of Fascinus, guardian not only of babies but of generals, a deity whose worship, part of the Roman religion, is entrusted to the Vestals; hanging under the chariots of generals at their triumphs he defends them as a physician from jealousy, and the similar physic of the tongue bids them look back, so that at the back Fortune, destroyer of fame, may be won over.

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§ 28.8.1  The bite of a human being is considered to be a most serious one. It is treated with ear wax, and (let no one be surprised) this, if applied locally at once, is also good for the stings of scorpions and for the bites of serpents, being more efficacious if taken from the ears of the sufferer. Hangnails too are said to be cured in this way; the bite of serpents by a human tooth ground to powder.

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§ 28.9.1  The hair cut off first from a child's head, if tied round the affected part, is said to relieve attacks of gout, as does the application of the hair of all, generally speaking, who have not arrived at puberty. The hair of adult men also, applied with vinegar, is good for dog bites, with oil or wine for wounds on the head. If we believe it, the hair of a man torn from the cross is good for quartan ague; burnt hair is certainly good for carcinoma. The first tooth of a child to fall out, provided that it does not touch the ground, if set in a bracelet and worn constantly on a woman's arm, keeps pain away from her private parts. If the big toe is tied to the one next to it, swellings in the groin are relieved; if the two middle fingers of the right hand are lightly tied together with a linen thread, catarrhs and ophthalmia are kept away. Again, a stone voided by a sufferer from bladder trouble, if attached above the pubes, is said to relieve other similar patients as well as pains in the liver, and also to hasten childbirth. Granius adds that the stone is more effective for the last purpose if it has been cut out by an iron knife. If the man by whom a woman has conceived unties his girdle and puts it round her waist, and then unties it with the ritual formula: 'I bound, and I too will unloose,' then taking his departure, childbirth is made more rapid.

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§ 28.10.1  The blood let from any part of the patient himself makes, we are told by Orpheus and Archelaus, a very efficacious application for quinsy; efficacious too if applied to the mouth of those who have fainted in an epileptic fit, for they rise up immediately. Some say the big toes should be pricked and the drops of blood applied to the face, or that a virgin should touch it with her right thumb; hence their conclusion that epileptics should eat virgin meat. Aeschines the Athenian used the ash of excrements for quinsy, sore tonsils, sore uvula, and carcinomata.

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§ 28.10.2  This medicament he called botryon. Many kinds of illness are cleared up by the first sexual intercourse, or by the first menstruation; if they do not, they become chronic, especially epilepsy. Moreover, it is held that snake bites and scorpion stings are relieved by intercourse, but that the act does harm to the woman. They say that neither ophthalmia nor other eye troubles afflict those who, when they wash their feet, touch the eyes three times with the water they have used.

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§ 28.11.1  We are assured that the hand of a person carried off by premature death cures by a touch scrofulous sores, diseased parotid glands, and throat affections; some however say that the back of any dead person's left hand will do this if the patient is of the same sex. A piece bitten off from wood struck by lightning by a person with hands thrown behind his back, if it is applied to an aching tooth, is a remedy we are told for the pain. Some prescribe fumigation of the tooth with a human tooth from one of the same sex, and to use as an amulet a dog-tooth taken from an unburied corpse. Earth taken out of a skull acts, it is said, as a depilator for the eyelashes, while any plant that has grown in the skull makes, when chewed, the teeth fall out, and ulcers marked round with a human bone do not spread. Some mix in equal quantities water from three wells, pour a libation from new earthenware, and give the rest to be drunk, at the rise of temperature, by sufferers from tertian ague. These also wrap up in wool and tie round the neck of quartan patients a piece of a nail taken from a cross, or else a cord taken from a crucifixion, and after the patient's neck has been freed they hide it in a hole where the sunlight cannot reach.

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§ 28.12.1  Here are some lies of the Magi, who say that a whetstone on which iron tools have been often sharpened, if placed without his knowledge under the pillows of a man sinking from the effects of poisoning, actually makes him give evidence about what has been given him, where and when, but not the name of the criminal. It is certainly a fact that the victim of lightning, if turned upon the wounded side, at once begins to speak. Some treat affections of the groin by tying with nine or seven knots a thread taken from a web, at each knot naming some widow, and so attach it to the groin as an amulet. To prevent a wound's being painful they prescribe wearing as an amulet, tied on the person with a thread, the nail or other object that he has trodden on. Warts are removed by those who, after the twentieth day of the, month, lie face upwards on a path, gaze at the moon with hands stretched over their head, and rub the wart with whatever they have grasped. If a corn or callus is cut when a star is falling, they say that it is very quickly cured, and that applying to the forehead the mud obtained by pouring vinegar over a front door's hinges relieves headaches, as does also the rope used by a suicide if tied round the temples. Should a fish bone stick in the throat, they say that it comes out if the feet are plunged into cold water; if however it is another kind of bone, bits of bone from the same pot should be applied to the head; if it is a piece of bread that sticks, pieces from the same loaf must be placed in either ear.

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§ 28.13.1  Moreover, important remedies have been made by the profit-seeking Greeks even with human off-scouring from the gymnasia; for the scrapings from the bodies soften, warm, disperse, and make flesh, sweat and oil forming an ointment. This is used as a pessary for inflammation and contraction of the uterus. So used it is also an emmenagogue; it soothes inflammations of the anus and condylomata, likewise pains of the sinews, dislocations, and knotty joints. More efficacious for the same purposes are scrapings from the bath, and so these are ingredients of ointments for suppurations. But those that have wax salve in them, and are mixed with mud, are more efficacious only for softening joints, for warming and for dispersing, but for all other purposes they are less powerful. Shameless beyond belief is the treatment prescribed by very famous authorities, who proclaim that male semenis an excellent antidote to scorpion stings, holding on the other hand that a pessary for women made from the faeces of babies voided in the uterus itself is a cure for barrenness; they call it meconium. Moreover, they have scraped the very walls of the gymnasia, and these off-scourings are said to have great warming properties; they disperse superficial abscesses, and are applied as ointment to the sores of old people and children. as well as to excoriations and burns.

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§ 28.14.1  It would be all the less seemly to pass over the remedies that are in the control of a man's will. To fast from all food and drink, sometimes only from wine or meat, sometimes from baths, when health demands such abstinence, is held to be one of the most sovereign remedies. Among the others are physical exercise, voice exercises, anointing, and massage if carried out with skilled care; for violent massage hardens, gentle softens, too much reduces flesh and a moderate amount makes it. Especially beneficial however are walking, carriage rides of various kinds, horse riding, which is very good for the stomach and hips, a sea voyage for consumption, change of locality for chronic diseases, and self-treatment by sleep, lying down, and occasional emeties. Lying on the back is good for the eyes, on the face for coughs, and on either side for catarrhs. Aristotle and Fabianus tell us that dreaming is most common around spring and autumn, and especially when we lie on the back; when we lie on the face there are no dreams at all. Theophrastus says that quicker digestion results from lying on the right side, more difficult digestion from lying on the back. Sunshine too, best of remedies, we can administer to ourselves, we can the vigorous use of towels and scrapers. To bathe the head with hot water before the hot steam of the bath, and with cold water after it, is understood to be very healthful; so it is to drink cold water before a meal and at intervals during it, and to take a draught of the same before going to sleep, breaking your sleep, if you like, in order to drink. It should be observed that no animal except man likes hot drinks, which is evidence that they are unnatural. Experience plainly shows that it is good before sleeping to rinse the mouth with neat wine as a safeguard against offensive breath, and with cold water an uneven number of times in the morning to keep off toothache; that to bathe the eyes in vinegar and water prevents ophthalmia, and that general health is promoted by an unstudied variety of regimen. Hippocrates teaches that the habit of not taking lunch makes the internal organs age more rapidly; in this aphorism, however, he is thinking of remedies, not encouraging gluttony, for by far the greatest aid to health is moderation in food. L. Lucullus gave charge over himself to a slave to enforce control, and he, an old man who had celebrated a triumph, suffered the very deep disgrace of having his hand kept away from the viands even when feasting in the Capitol, with the added shame of obeying his own slave more readily than himself.

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§ 28.15.1  Sneezing caused by a feather relieves a cold in the head, and sneezing and hiccough are relieved by touching with the lips, it is said, the nostrils of a mule. For sneezing Varro advises us to scratch the palm of each hand with the other; most people advise us to transfer the ring from the left hand to the longest finger of the right, and to dip the hands into very hot water. Theophrastus says that old people sneeze with greater difficulty than others.

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§ 28.16.1  Sexual intercourse was disapproved of by Democritus, as being merely the act whereby one human being springs from another. Heaven knows, the less indulgence in this respect the better. Athletes, however, when sluggish regain by it their activity, and the voice, when it has lost its clearness and become husky, is restored. It cures pain in the loins, dullness of vision, unsoundness of mind and melancholia.

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§ 28.17.1  To sit in the presence of pregnant women, or when medicine is being given to patients, with the fingers interlaced comb-wise, is to be guilty of sorcery, a discovery made, it is said, when Alcmena was giving birth to Hercules. The sorcery is worse if the hands are clasped round one knee or both, and also to cross the knees first in one way and then in the other. For this reason our ancestors forbade such postures at councils of war or of officials, on the ground that they were an obstacle to the transaction of all business. They also forbade them, indeed, to those attending sacred rites and prayers; but to uncover the head at the sight of magistrates they ordered, not as a mark of respect, but (our authority is Varro) for the sake of health, for the habit of baring the head gives it greater strength. When something has fallen into the eye, it does good to press down the other; when water gets into the right ear, to jump with the left leg, leaning the head towards the right shoulder; if into the left ear, to jump in the contrary way; if saliva provokes a cough, for another person to blow on the forehead; if the uvula is relaxed, for another to hold up the top of the head a with his teeth; if there is pain in the neck, to rub the back of the knees, and to rub the neck for pain in the back of the knees; to plant the feet on the ground for cramp in feet or legs when in bed; or if the cramp is on the left side to seize with the right hand the big toe of the left foot and vice versa; to rub the extremities with pieces of fleece to step shivers or violent nose-bleeding; with linen or papyrus the tip of the genitals and the middle of the thigh to check incontinence of urine; for weakness of the stomach to press together the feet or dip the hands into very hot water. Moreover, to refrain from talking is healthful for many reasons. Maecenas Melissus, we are told, imposed a three-year silence on himself because of spitting of blood after convulsions. But if any danger threatens those thrown down, climbing, or prostrate, and as a guard against blows, to hold the breath is an excellent protection, a discovery which, I have stated, we owe to an animal. To drive an iron nail into the place first struck by the head of an epileptic in his fall is said to be deliverance from that malady. For severe pain in the kidneys, Loins or bladder, it is supposed to be soothing if the patient voids his urine while lying on his face in the tub of the bath. To tie up wounds with the Hercules knot makes the healing wonderfully more rapid, and even to tie daily the girdle with this knot is said to have a certain usefulness, for Demetrius wrote a treatise in which he states that the number four is one of the prerogatives of Hercules, giving reasons why four cyathi or sextarii at a time should not be drunk. For ophthalmia it is good to rub behind the ears, and for watery eyes the forehead. From the patient himself it is a reliable omen that, as long as the pupils of his eyes reflect an image, a fatal end to an illness is not to be feared.

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§ 28.18.1  Our authorities attribute to urine also great power, not only natural but supernatural; they divide it into kinds, using even that of eunuchs to counteract the sorcery that prevents fertility. But of the properties it would be proper to speak of I may mention the following: — the urine of children not yet arrived at puberty is used to counteract the spittle of the ptyas, an asp so called because it spits venom into men's eyes; for albugo, dimness, scars, argema, and affections of the eyelids; with flour of vetch for burns; and for pus or worms in the ear if boiled down to one half with a headed leek in new earthenware. Its steam too is an emmenagogue. Salpe would foment the eyes with urine to strengthen them, and would apply it for two hours at a time to sunburn, adding the white of an egg, by preference that of an ostrich. Urine also takes out ink blots. Men's urine relieves gout, as is shown by the testimony of fullers, who for that reason never, they say, suffer from this malady. Old urine is added to the ash of burnt oyster-shells to treat rashes on the bodies of babies, and for all running ulcers. Pitted sores, burns, affections of the anus, chaps, and scorpion stings, are treated by applications of urine. The most celebrated midwives have declared that no other lotion is better treatment for irritation of the skin, and with soda added for sores on the head, dandruff, and spreading ulcers, especially on the genitals. Each person's own urine, if it be proper for me to say so, does him the most good, if a dog-bite is immediately bathed in it, if it is applied on a sponge or wool to the quills of an urchin that are sticking in the flesh, or if ash kneaded with it is used to treat the bite of a mad dog, or a serpent's bite. Moreover, for scolopendra bite a wonderful remedy is said to be for the wounded person to touch the top of his head with a drop of his own urine, when his wound is at once healed.

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§ 28.19.1  Urine gives us symptoms of general health: if in the morning it is clear, becoming tawny later, the former means that coction is still going on, the latter that it is complete. A bad symptom is red urine, a bad one also when it bubbles, and the worst of all when it is very dark. Thick urine, in which what sinks to the bottom is white, means that there is pain coming on about the joints or in the region of the bowels; if it is green, that the bowels are diseased. Pale urine means diseased bile, red urine diseased blood. Bad urine also is that in which is to be seen as it were bran, and cloudiness. Watery, pale, urine also is unhealthy, but thick, foul-smelling urine indicates death, as does thin, watery urine from children. The Magi say that when making urine one must not expose one's person to the face of the sun or moon, or let drops fall on anyone's shadow. Hesiod advises us to urinate facing an object that screens, lest our nakedness should offend some deity. Osthanes assured people that protection against all sorcerers' potions is secured by letting one's own morning urine drip upon the foot.

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§ 28.20.1  Some reported products of women's bodies should be added to the class of marvels, to say nothing from men; of tearing to pieces for sinful practices the limbs of stillborn babies, the undoing of spells by the menstrual fluid, and the other accounts given not only by midwives but actually by harlots. For example: that the smell of burnt woman's hair keeps away serpents, and the fumes of it make women breathe naturally who are choking with hysteria; this same ash indeed, from hair burnt in a jar, or used with litharge, cures roughness and itch of the eyes, as well as warts and sores on babies; that with honey it cures also wounds on the head and the cavities made by any kind of ulcer, with honey and frankincense, superficial abscesses and gout; that with lard it cures erysipelas and checks haemorrhage, and that when applied it cures also irritating rashes on the body.

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§ 28.21.1  As to the use of woman's milk, it is agreed that it is the sweetest and most delicate of all, very useful in long fevers and coeliac disease, especially the milk of a woman who has already weaned her baby. For nausea of the stomach, in fevers, and for gnawing pains, it is found most efficacious, also with frankincense for gatherings on the breasts. It is very beneficial to an eye that is bloodshot from a blow, in pain, or suffering from a flux, if it is milked straight into it, more beneficial still if honey is added and juice of narcissus a or powdered incense. For all purposes, moreover, a woman's milk is more efficacious if she has given birth to a boy, and much the most efficacious is hers, who has borne twin boys and herself abstains from wine and the more acrid foods. Mixed moreover with liquid white of eggs, and applied to the forehead on wool soaked in it, it checks fluxes of the eyes. But if a toad has squirted its fluid into the eye it is a splendid remedy; for the bite also of the toad it is drunk and poured in drops into the wound. It is asserted that one who has been rubbed with the milk of mother and daughter together never needs to fear eye trouble for the rest of his life. Affections of the ears also are successfully treated by the milk mixed with a little oil, or, if there is any pain from a blow, warmed with goose grease. If there is an offensive smell from the ears, as usually happens in illnesses of long standing, wool is put into them soaked in milk in which honey has been dissolved. When jaundice has left traces remaining in the eyes, the milk together with elaterium is dropped into them. A draught of woman's milk is especially efficacious against the poison of the sea-hare, of the buprestis, or, as Aristotle tells us, of dorycnium, and for the madness caused by drinking henbane. Combined with hemlock it is also prescribed as a liniment for gout; others make it up with the suint of wool and goose grease, in the form that is also used as an application for pains of the uterus. A draught also acts astringently upon the bowels, as Rabirius writes, and is an emmenagogue. The milk of a woman however who has borne a girl is excellent, but only for curing spots on the face. Lung affections also are cured by woman's milk, and if Attic honey is mixed with it and the urine of a child before puberty, a single spoonful of each, I find that worms a too are driven from the ears. The mother of a boy gives a milk a taste of which, they say, prevents dogs from going mad.

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§ 28.22.1  The saliva too of a fasting woman is judged to be powerful medicine for bloodshot eyes and fluxes, if the inflamed corners are occasionally moistened with it, the efficacy being greater if she has fasted from food and wine the day before. I find that a woman's breast-band tied round the head relieves headache.

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§ 28.23.1  Over and above all this there is no limit to woman's power. First of all, they say that hailstorms and whirlwinds are driven away if menstrual fluid is exposed to the very flashes of lightning; that stormy weather too is thus kept away, and that at sea exposure, even without menstruation, prevents storms. Wild indeed are the stories told of the mysterious and awful power of the menstruous discharge itself, the manifold magic of which I have spoken of in the proper place. Of these tales I may without shame mention the following: if this female power should issue when the moon or sun is in eclipse, it will cause irremediable harm; no less harm if there is no moon; at such seasons sexual intercourse brings disease and death upon the man; purple too is tarnished then by the woman's touch. So much greater then is the power of a menstruous woman. But at any other time of menstruation, if women go round the cornfield naked, caterpillars, worms, beetles and other vermin fall to the ground. Metrodorus of Scepsos states that the discovery was made in Cappadocia owing to the plague there of Spanish fly, so that women walk, he says, through the middle of the fields with their clothes pulled up above the buttocks. In other places the custom is kept up for them to walk barefoot, with hair dishevelled and with girdle loose. Care must he taken that they do not do so at sunrise, for the crop dries up, they say, the young vines are irremedially harmed by the touch, and rue and ivy, plants of the highest medicinal power, die at once. I have said much about this virulent discharge, but besides it is certain that when their hives are touched by women in this state bees fly away, at their touch linen they are boiling turns black, the edge of razors is blunted, brass contracts copper rust and a foul smell, especially if the moon is waning at the time, mares in foal if touched miscarry, nay the mere sight at however great a distance is enough, if the menstruation is the first after maidenhood, or that of a virgin who on account of age is menstruating naturally for the first time. But the bitumen also that is found in Judea can be mastered only by the power of this fluid, as I have already stated, a thread from an fluid. infected dress is sufficient. Not even fire, the all-conquering, overcomes it; even when reduced to ash, if sprinkled on clothes in the wash, it changes purples and robs colours of their brightness. Nor are women themselves immune to the effect of this plague of their sex; a miscarriage is caused by a smear, or even if a woman with child steps over it. Lais and Elephantis do not agree in their statements about abortives, the burning root of cabbage, myrtle, or tamarisk extinguished by the menstrual blood, about asses' not conceiving for as many years as they have eaten grains of barley contaminated with it, or in their other portentous or contradictory pronouncements, one saying that fertility, the other that barrenness is caused by the same measures. It is better not to believe them. Bithus of Dyrrhachium says that a mirror which has been tarnished by the glance of a menstruous woman recovers its brightness if it is turned round for her to look at the back, and that all this sinister power is counteracted if she carries on her person the fish called red mullet. Many however say that even this great plague is remedial; that it makes a liniment for gout, and that by her touch a woman in this state relieves scrofula, parotid tumours, superficial abscesses, erysipelas, boils and eye-fluxes. Lais and Salpe hold that the bite of a mad dog, tertians, and quartans are cured by the flux on wool from a black ram enclosed in a silver bracelet; Diotimus of Thebes says that even a bit, nay a mere thread, of a garment contaminated in this way and enclosed in the bracelet, is sufficient. The midwife Sotira has said that it is a very efficacious remedy for tertians and quartans to smear with the flux the soles of the patient's feet, much more so if the operation is performed by the woman herself without the patient's knowledge, adding that this remedy also revives an epileptic who has fainted. Icatidas, the physician, assures us that quartans are ended by sexual intercourse, provided that the woman is beginning to menstruate. All are agreed that, if water or drink is dreaded after a dog-bite, if only a contaminated cloth be placed beneath the cup, that fear disappears at once, since of course that sympathy, as Greeks call it, has an all-powerful effect, for I have said that dogs begin to go mad on tasting that blood. It is a fact that, added to soot and wax, the ash of the flux when burnt heals the sores of all draught-animals, but menstrual stains on a dress can be taken out only by the urine of the same woman, that the ash, mixed with nothing but rose oil, if applied to the forehead, relieves headache, especially that of women, and that the power of the flux is most virulent when virginity has been lost solely through lapse of time. This also is agreed, and there is nothing I would more willingly believe, that if doorposts are merely touched by the menstrual discharge, the tricks are rendered vain of the Magi, a lying crowd, as is easily ascertained. I will give the most moderate of their promises: take the parings of a patient's finger nails and toe nails, mix with wax, say that a cure is sought for tertian, quartan or quotidian fever, and fasten them before sunrise on another man's door as a cure for these diseases. What a fraud if they lie! What wickedness if they pass the disease on! Less guilty are those of them who tell us to cut all the nails, throw the parings near ant holes, catch the first ant that begins to drag a paring away, tie it round the neck, and in this way the disease is cured.

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§ 28.24.1  This is all the information it would be right for me to repeat, most of which also needs an apology from me. As the rest of it is detestable and unspeakable, let me hasten to leave the subject of remedies from man. Taking the other animals I shall try to find what is striking either in them or in their effects.

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§ 28.24.2  The blood of an elephant, particularly that of the male, checks all the fluxes that are called rheumatismi. Ivory shavings with Attic honey are said to remove dark spots on the face, and ivory dust whitlows. By the touch of the trunk headache is relieved, more successfully if the animal also sneezes. The right side of the trunk used as an amulet with the red earth of Lemnos is aphrodisiac. The blood too is good for consumption, and the liver for epilepsy.

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§ 28.25.1  Lion fat with rose oil preserves fairness of complexion and keeps the face free from spots; it also cures frostbite and swollen joints. The lying Magi promise those rubbed with this fat a readier popularity with peoples and with kings, especially when the fat is that between the brows, where no fat can be. Similar promises are made about the possession of a tooth, especially one from the right side, and of the tuft beneath the muzzle. The gall, used with the addition of water as a salve, improves vision, and if lion fat is added a slight taste cures epilepsy, provided that those who have taken it at once aid its digestion by running. The heart taken as a food cures quartans; the fat with rose oil cures quotidians. Wild beasts run away from those smeared with it, and it is supposed to protect even from treachery.

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§ 28.26.1  They say that a camel's brain, dried and taken in vinegar, cures epilepsy, as does the gall taken with honey, this being also a remedy for quinsy; that the tail when dried is laxative, and that the ash of the burnt dung makes the hair curl. This ash applied with oil is also good for dysentery, as is a three-finger pinch taken in drink, and also for epilepsy. They say that the urine is very useful to the fullers, and for running ulcers — it is a fact that foreigners keep it for five years, and use hemina-doses as a purgative — and that the tail hairs plaited into an amulet for the left arm cure quartan fevers.

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§ 28.27.1  The Magi have held in the highest admiration the hyena of all animals, seeing that they have attributed even to an animal magical skill and power, by which it takes away the senses and entices men to itself. I have spoken of its yearly change of sex and its other weird characteristics; now I am going to speak of all that is reported about its medicinal properties. It is said to be a terror to panthers in particular, so that a panther does not even attempt to resist an hyena; that a person carrying anything made of hyena leather is not attacked, and, marvellous to relate, if the skins of each are hung up opposite to one another the hairs of the panther fall off. When an hyena is running away from the hunter, any swerve it makes to the fight has for its object stepping in the man's tracks as he now goes in front. If it succeeds, the man is deranged and even falls off his horse. Should however the hyena swerve to the left, it is a sign of failing strength and a speedy capture; this will be easier however if the hunter tie his girdle with seven knots, and seven in the whip with which he controls his horse. The Magi go on to recommend, so cunning are the evasions of the fraudulent charlatans, that the hyena should be captured when the moon is passing through the constellation of the Twins, without, if possible, the loss of a single hair. They add that the skin of its head if tied on relieves headache; that the gall if applied to the forehead cures ophthalmia, preventing it altogether if an ointment is made of gall boiled down with three cyathi of Attic honey and one ounce of saffron, and that the same prescription disperses film and cataract. They say that clear vision is secured better if the medicament is kept till old, but it must be in a box of copper; the same is a cure for argema, scabbiness, excrescences and scars on the eyes, but opaqueness needs an ointment made with gravy from fresh roasted liver added to skimmed honey. They add that hyena's teeth relieve toothache by the touch of the corresponding tooth, or by using it as an amulet, and the shoulders relieve pains of the shoulders and arm muscles; that the animal's teeth (but they must be from the left side of the muzzle), wrapped in sheep skin or goat skin, are good for severe pains in the stomach, the lungs taken as food for coeliac disease, and their ash, applied with oil, for pain in the belly; that sinews are soothed by its spinal marrow with its gall and old oil, quartan fevers relieved by three tastes of the liver before the attacks, gout by the ash of the spine, with the tongue and right foot of a seal added to bull's gall, all being boiled together and applied on hyena skin. In the same disease the gall of the hyena (so they say) with the stone of Assos beneficial; adding that those afflicted with tremors, spasms, jumpiness, and palpitation, should eat a piece of the heart boiled, but the rest must be reduced to ash and hyena's brain added to make an ointment; that an application of this mixture or of the gall by itself removes hairs, those not wanted to grow again must first be pulled out; by this method unwanted eyelashes are removed; that for pains in the loins flesh of an hyena's loins should be eaten and used us an ointment with oil; that barrenness in women is cured by an eye taken in food with liquorice and dill, conception being guaranteed within three days. For night tenors and fear of ghosts one of the large teeth tied on with thread as an amulet is said to be a help. They recommend fumigation with such a tooth for delirium, and to tie one round in front of the patient's chest, adding fat from the kidneys, or a piece of liver, or of skin. A woman is guaranteed never to miscarry if, tied round her neck in gazelle leather, she wears white flesh from a hyena's breast, seven hyena's hairs, and the genital organ of a stag. A hyena's genitals taken in honey stimulate desire for their own sex, even when men hate intercourse with women; nay the peace of the whole household is assured by keeping in the home these genitals and a vertebra with the hide still adhering to them. This vertebra or joint they call the Atlas joint; it is the first. They consider it too to be one of the remedies for epilepsy. They add that burning hyena fat keeps serpents away; that the jawbone, pounded in anise and taken in food, relieves fits of shivering, and that fumigation with it is an emmenagogue. They lie so grossly as to declare that, if an upper tooth from the right side of the muzzle is tied to the arm of a man, his javelin will never miss its mark. They say too that the palate of a hyena, dried, and warmed with Egyptian alum, cures foul breath and ulcers in the month, if the mixture is renewed three times; that those however who carry a hyena's tongue in their shoe under the foot never have dogs bark at them; that if a part of the left side of the brain is smeared on patients' nostrils dangerous diseases are relieved, whether of man or quadruped; that the hide of the forehead averts the evil eye, and the flesh of the neck, whether eaten, or dried and taken in drink, is good for lumbago; that sinews from the back and shoulders should be used for fumigating painful sinews; that hairs from the muzzle, applied to a woman's lips, act as a love-charm; that the liver given in drink cures colic and stone in the bladder. But they add that the heart, taken either in food or in drink, gives relief from all pains of the body, the spleen from those of the spleen, the caul with oil from inflamed ulcers, and the marrow from pains of the spine and of tired sinews; that the kidney sinews taken with frankincense in wine restore fertility lost through sorcery; that the uterus with the rind of a sweet pomegranate given in drink is good for the uterus of women; that the fat from the loins, used in fumigation, gives even immediate delivery to women in difficult labour; that the spinal marrow used as an amulet is a help against hallucinations, and fumigation with the male organ against spasms, as well as ophthalmia; a that for ruptures and inflammations a help is the touch of an hyena's feet, which are kept for the purpose, of the left foot for affections on the right side, and of the right foot for affections on the left side; that the left foot, drawn across a woman in labour, causes death, but the right foot laid one her easy delivery. The Magi say that the membrane enclosing the gall, taken in wine or in the food, is of use in cardiac affections; that the bladder taken in wine relieves incontinence of urine, and the urine found in the bladder, drunk with oil, sesame, and honey added, relieves chronic acidity of the stomach; that the first or eighth rib, used in fumigation, is curative for ruptures, but the spinal bones are so for women in labour; the blood taken with pearl barley is good for colic, and if the doorposts are everywhere touched with this blood, the tricks of the Magi are made ineffective, for they can neither call down the gods nor speak with them, whether they try lamps, bowl, water, globe, or any other means; that to eat the flesh neutralizes the bites of a mad dog, the liver being still more efficacious. They add that the flesh or bones of a man found in the stomach of an hyena when killed relieve gout by fumigation; that if fingernails are found in them it is a sign of death for one of the hunters; that excrement or bones, voided when the beast is being killed, can prevail against the insidious attacks of sorcerers; that dung found in the intestines is, when dried, excellent for dysentery, and, taken in drink and applied with goose grease, gives relief anywhere in the body to the victims of noxious drugs; that for dog-bites, however, rubbing with the fat as ointment, and lying on the skin, are helpful; that on the other hand those rubbed with the ash of the left pastern bone, boiled down with weasel's blood, incur universal hatred, the same effect being produced by a decoction of the eye. Over and above all these things they assert that the extreme end of the intestine prevails against the injustices leaders and potentates, bringing success to petitions and a happy issue to trials and lawsuits if it is merely kept on the person; that the anus, worn as an amulet on the left arm, is so powerful a love-charm that, if a man but espies a woman, she at once follows him; that the hairs also of this part, reduced to ashes, mixed with oil, and used as ointment on men guilty of shocking effeminacy, make them assume, not only a modest character, but one of the strictest morality.

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§ 28.28.1  Almost as legendary is the crocodile, in its nature a also — I mean the famous one, which is amphibious; for there are two kinds of crocodiles. His teeth from the right jaw, worn as an amulet on the right arm, are (if we believe it) aphrodisiac, while the dog teeth, stuffed with frankincense (for they are hollow), drive away the intermittent fevers if the sick man can be kept for five days from seeing the person who fastened them on. It is said that pebbles taken from his belly have a similar power to check feverish shivers as they come on. For the same reason the Egyptians rub their sick with its fat. The other kind of crocodile is similar to this, though much smaller in size, living only on land and eating very sweet-scented flowers. Its intestines therefore are much in demand, being hued with fragrant stuff called crocodilea, which with leek juice makes a very useful salve for affections of the eyes, and to treat cataract or films. Applied also with cyprus oil crocodile removes blotches appearing on the face, with water indeed all those diseases the nature of which is to spread over the face, and it also clears the complexion. It removes freckles, pimples, and all spots; two-oboli doses are taken in oxymel for epilepsy, and a pessary made of it acts as an emmenagogue. The best kind is very shiny, friable, and extremely light, fermenting when rubbed between the fingers. It is washed in the same way as white lead. They adulterate it with starch or Cimoliau chalk, but mostly with the dung of starlings, which they catch and feed on nothing but rice. We are assured that there is no more useful remedy for cataract than to anoint the eyes with crocodile's gall and honey. They say that fumigation with the intestines and the rest of its body is of benefit to women with uterine trouble, as it is to wrap them up in a fleece impregnated with its steam. Ashes from burning the skin of either kind of crocodile, applied in vinegar to the parts in need of surgery, or even the fumes, cause no pain to be felt from the lancet. The blood of either kind, if the eyes are anointed with it, improves the vision and removes eye scars. The body itself, boiled without the head and feet, is eaten for sciatica and cures chronic cough, especially that of children, as well as lumbago. Crocodiles also have a fat, a touch of which makes hair fall out. Used as embrocation this protects from crocodiles, and is poured by drops into their bites. The heart, tied on in the wool of a black sheep, the firstborn of its mother, the wool having no other colour intermixed, is said to drive away quartan fevers.

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§ 28.29.1  To these animals I will add others very like them and equally foreign, taking first the chamaeleon, thought by Democritus worthy of a volume to itself, each part of the body receiving separate attention. It afforded me great amusement to read an exposure of Greek lies and fraud. The chamaeleon is also as big as the crocodile just mentioned, differing only in the greater curve of the spine and in the size of its tail. People think it the most timid of animals, and that it is for this reason it continually changes its colour. Over the hawk family it has very great power, for as a hawk flies overhead, it is brought down to the chamaeleon, they say, and made an unresisting prey for other animals to tear. Democritus relates that its head and throat, if burnt on logs of oak, cause storms of rain and thunder, as does the liver if burnt on tiles. The rest of what he says is of the nature of sorcery, and although I think that it is untrue. I shall omit all, except where something must be refuted by being laughed at; examples are as follow. The right eye, plucked from the living animal and added to goat's milk, removes white ulcers on the eyes; the tongue, worn as an amulet, the perils of childbirth. The same eye, if in the house, is favourable to childbirth; if brought in, very dangerous. The tongue, taken from the living animal, controls the results of cases in the courts; the heart, tied on with black wool of the first shearing, overcomes quartan fevers. The right front foot, tied as an amulet to the left arm by hyena skin, is powerful protection against robbery and tenors of the night, and the right teat against fears and panic. The left foot however is roasted in a furnace with the plant that also is called chamaeleon, an unguent is added, and the lozenges thus made are stored away in a wooden vessel and, if we believe it, make the owner invisible to others. The right shoulder has power to overcome adversaries and public enemies, especially if a person throws away sinews of the same animal and treads on them. But as to the left shoulder, I am ashamed to repeat the grotesque magic that Democritus assigns to it; how any dreams you like be may sent to any person you like; how these dreams are dispelled by the right foot, just as the torpor caused by the right foot is dispelled by the left flank. In this way headache is cured by sprinkling on the head wine in which either side of a chamaeleon has been soaked. If sow's milk is mixed with the ash of the left thigh or foot, gout is caused by rubbing the feet with the mixture. It is practically a current belief that anointing the eyes for three days with the gall is a cure for opaqueness of the eye and cataract, that serpents run away if the gall is dropped into fire, that weasels run together when it is thrown into water, while hairs are removed from the body when it is rubbed therewith. Democritus relates that the same result comes from applying the liver with the lung of the bramble toad; that moreover the liver makes of no effect love charms and philtres, curing melancholy also if the juice of the herb helenium is drunk in a chamaeleon's skin; that the intestines and their content (although the animal lives without food) with the urine of apes, if smeared on the door of an enemy, brings on him the hatred of all men; that by its tail rivers and rushing waters are stayed and serpents put to sleep; that the tail also, if treated with cedar and myrrh and tied on to a twin palm-branch, divides the water struck with it, so that all within becomes plain. Would that Democritus had been touched with such a branch, seeing that he assures us that by it wild talk is restrained! It is clear that a man, in other respects of sound judgement and of great service to humanity, fell very low through his over-keenness to help mankind.

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§ 28.30.1  A similar animal is the scincos — and indeed it has been styled the land crocodile — but it is paler, and with a thinner skin. The chief difference, however, between it and the crocodile is in the arrangement of the scales, which are turned from the tail towards the head. The Indian is the biggest scincos, next coming the Arabian. They import them salted. Its muzzle and feet, taken in white wine, are aphrodisiac, especially with the addition of satyrion and rocket seed, a single drachma of all three and two drachmae of pepper being compounded. One-drachma lozenges of the compound should be taken in drink. Two oboli of the flesh of the flanks by itself, taken in drink with myrrh and pepper in similar proportions, are believed to be more efficacious for the same purpose. It is also good for the poison of arrows, as Apelles informs us, if taken before and after the wound. It is also an ingredient of the more celebrated antidotes. Sextius says that more than a drachma by weight, taken in a hemina of wine, is a fatal dose, and that moreover the broth of a scincos taken with honey is antaphrodisiac.

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§ 28.31.1  There is a kind of relationship between the crocodile and the hippopotamus, for they both live in the same river and both are amphibious. The hippopotamus, as I have related, was the discoverer of bleeding, and is most numerous above the prefecture of Sais. His hide, reduced to ash and applied with water, cures superficial abscesses; the fat and likewise the dung chilly agues by fumigation, and the teeth on the left side, if the gums are scraped with them, aching teeth. The hide from the left side of his forehead, worn as an amulet on the groin, is an antaphrodisiac; the same reduced to ash restores hair lost through mange. A drachma of a testicle is taken in water for snake bite. The blood is used by painters.

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§ 28.32.1  The lynx too is a foreign animal, and has keener sight than any other quadruped. On the island of Carpathus all their nails, with the hide, make, it is said, a very efficacious medicine when reduced to ash by burning. They say that these ashes taken in drink by men check shameful conduct, and sprinkled on women lustful desire; that they also cure irritation of the skin and that the urine cures strangury. And so, as is said, the animal at once covers it with earth by scratching with his paws. This urine is also prescribed for pain in the throat.

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§ 28.33.1  Hitherto I have dealt with things foreign, but will now turn to the Roman world speaking first of remedies common to all animals and excellent in quality, such as milk and its uses. Mothers milk is for everybody the most beneficial. [It is very bad for women to conceive while nursing; their nurselings are called colostrati, the milk being thick like cheese. But colostra is the first milk given after delivery, and is thick and spongy.] But any woman's milk is more nourishing than any of hem kind the next being that of the goat; this perhaps is the origin of the story that Jupiter was nursed in this way. The sweetest milk after woman's is that of the camel, the most efficacious that of the ass. A big species or a big individual yields its milk more readily. Goat's milk is the most suited to the stomach, as the animal browses rather than grazes. Cow's milk is more medicinal, sheep's sweeter and more nourishing, although less useful for the stomach because of its greater richness. All spring milk, however, is more watery than that of summer, as is that from new pastures. The highest grade, however, is that of which a drop stays on the nail without falling off. Milk is less harmful when boiled, especially with sea pebbles. Cow's milk is the most relaxing, and any milk causes less flatulence when boiled. Milk is used for all internal ulcers, especially those of the kidneys, bladder, intestines, throat, and lungs, externally for irritation of the skin, and for outbursts of phlegm, but it must be drunk after fasting. And I have mentioned in my account of herbs, how in Arcadia cow's milk is drunk by consumptives, and by those in a decline or poor state of health. Cases too are quoted of patients who by drinking ass's milk have been freed from gout in feet or hands. To the various kinds of milk physicians have added another, named schiston, that is, divided. It is made in this way: milk, by preference goats milk, is boiled in new earthenware and stirred with fresh branches of a fig-tree, after adding as many cyathi of honey wine as there are heminae of milk. When it boils, to prevent its boiling over a silver cyathus of cold water is lowered into it so that none is spilled. Then taken off the fire it divides as it cools, and the whey separates from the milk. Some also boil down to one-third the whey itself, which is now very vinous indeed, and cool it in the open air. But the most efficacious way to drink it is a hemina at a time at intervals, five heminae in all on fixed days; it is better to take a drive afterwards. It is given for epilepsy, melancholia, paralysis, leprous sores, leprosy, and diseases of the joints. Milk is also injected for smarting caused by purges, or, for the swatting of dysentery, milk boiled down with sea pebbles or with barley gruel. For smarting intestines also cow's milk or sheep's is the more effective. Fresh milk too is injected for dysentery, and raw milk for colitis, uterus trouble, snake bite, swallowing pine-caterpillars, buprestis, the poison of Spanish fly or salamander, and cow's milk is specific when there has been taken in drink Colchicum, hemlock, doryenium, or sea hare, as ass's milk is for gypsum, white lead, sulphur, quicksilver, and constipation in fever. It also makes a very useful gargle for ulcerated throats, is drank by convalescents from weakening illness, said to be 'in a decline,' and also for fever which is without headache. To give to children before food a hemina of ass's milk, or failing that of goat's milk, and if the rectum smarted at stool, the ancients held to be one of their secrets. Better for orthopnoea than other remedies is whey of cow's milk with the addition of cress. The eyes also are bathed for ophthalmia with a hemina of milk to which have been added four drachmae of pounded sesame. Splenic diseases are cured by drinking goat's milk for three days without any other food, but the goats must fast for two days and then browse on ivy the third day. Drinking milk is generally bad for headache, complaints of the liver, spleen and sinews, for fevers, for giddiness except as a purge, and for a heavy cold, cough, and ophthalmia. Sheep's milk is very beneficial for tenesmus, dysentery, and consumption; there have been some who said that this milk is also the most wholesome for women.

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§ 28.34.1  The kinds of cheese I discussed when speaking of udders and the separate parts of animals. Sextius gives to cow's-milk cheese the same properties as he gives to that from mare's milk, which is called hippace. Beneficial to the stomach are those not salted, that is to say the fresh. Old cheeses bind the bowels and reduce flesh, being rather bad for the stomach; on the whole salty foods reduce flesh, soft foods make it. Fresh cheese with honey heals bruises, a soft cheese binds the bowels, and relieves gripes if lozenges of it are boiled in a dry wine and then roasted in a pan with honey. Coeliac affections are cured by the cheese that they call saprum, taken in drink after being pounded in wine with salt and dried sorb apples; carbuncles of the genitals by an application of pounded goat's-milk cheese. Sour cheese also with oxymel is applied in the bath alternately with oil to remove spots.

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§ 28.35.1  From milk is also made butter, among barbarian tribes accounted the choicest food, one that distinguishes the rich from the lower orders. Mostly cow's milk is used (hence the name), but the richest comes from sheep's — it is also made from goat's — but in winter the milk is warmed, while in summer the butter is extracted merely by shaking it rapidly in a tall vessel. This has a small hole to admit the air, made just under the mouth, which is otherwise completely stopped. There is added a little water to make the milk turn sour. The part that curdles most, floating on the top, is skimmed off, and with salt added is called oxygala; the rest they boil down in pots. What comes to the surface is butter, a fatty substance. The stronger the taste, the more highly is butter esteemed. When matured it is used as an ingredient for several mixtures. It is by nature astringent, emollient, flesh-forming, and cleansing.

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§ 28.36.1  Oxygala is made in yet another way, by adding sour milk to the fresh that it is wished to turn sour. It is very good for the stomach; of its properties I shall speak in the appropriate places.

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§ 28.37.1  Of remedies common to animals the next in repute is fat, especially pig's fat, which to the men of old was not a little sacred. At any rate brides even today touch ritually the doorposts with it on entering their homes. Lard is matured in two ways, with salt or by itself; it is so much the more beneficial when matured. The name axungia (axle-grease) is the one adopted by the Greeks also in their writings. Nor is the cause of its properties a mystery, for the pig feeds on the roots of plants, so that there are very many uses even for its dung. Therefore I shall not speak of other grease than that of the pig. By far the more beneficial is that from a sow that has not littered, [but much snore excellent is that of boars]. Axle-grease then is used for softening, warming, dispersing, and cleansing. Certain medical men recommend for gout a mixture of it with goose grease, bull suet and suint; if however the pain should persist, they add wax, myrtle berries, resin, and pitch. Unsalted axle-grease is good for bums or frostbite; for chilblains add equal measures of barley-ash and gall nuts. It is also beneficial for chafed limbs, and relieves weariness and fatigue from a journey. Fresh axle-grease, three ounces in three cyathi of wine with honey added, is boiled down for chronic cough. Old grease taken in pills cures even consumption, but it must have matured without salt, for salt grease is not recommended at all except where cleansing is required and where there is no ulceration. Some boil down three ounces of axle-grease and of honey wine in three cyathi of wine to treat consumption, recommending that on every fourth day liquid pitch should be taken in egg. Poultices of it are applied to the sides, chest, and shoulders of consumptive patients, and so great is its power that even when fastened to the knees as an amulet the taste comes back to the mouth and they seem to be spitting it out. Fat from a sow that has not littered is used with very great advantage by women as a cosmetic, but for itch any kind is good, mixed with a third part of beef suet and pitch, all being warmed together. Unsalted axle-grease used as a pessary nourishes the foetus when there is the threat of a miscarriage. Mixed with white lead or litharge lard gives to scars the colour of the surrounding skin, and with sulphur cleans scabrous nails. It cures too the falling-out of hair, and with a quarter of a gall nut sores on the head of women; as a fumigant it is good for eyelashes. It is also given to consumptives, in doses of one ounce with a hemina of old wine boiled down until of the whole three ounces remain; some add also a little honey. With lime it is applied to superficial abscesses, also to boils and to indurations of the breasts. It cures ruptures, sprains, cramps, and dislocations; with white hellebore corns, chaps, and callosities; and parotid swellings with pounded earthenware that has contained salted food, the same being also good for scrofulous sores. Rubbing in the bath with this fat removes irritation and pimples, and administered in yet another way it is good for gout: mixed with old oil, crushed sarcophagus stone, and cinquefoil pounded in wine, or with lime, or with ash. A special plaster too is made of 75 denarii by weight of lard mixed with 100 of litharge, very useful for inflamed ulcers. They also think it useful to treat such sores with boar's grease, and to apply it with resin to those that spread. The men of old used lard in particular for greasing the axles of their vehicles, that the wheels might revolve more easily, and in this way it received its name. So also with that rust of the wheels it made a useful medicament for affections of the anus and of the male genitals. The old physicians valued most the fat taken from the kidneys: removing the veins they rubbed it briskly with rain water, boiled it down several times in new earthenware, and then finally stored it away. It is agreed that when salted it has increased power of softening, warming, and dispersing, and that it is more useful when washed with wine. Masurius tells us that the men of old gave the palm to wolf's fat; that, he said, was why new brides were wont to smear with it the door-posts to keep out all evil drugs.

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§ 28.38.1  Corresponding to fat in other animals is suet in ruminants; used in other ways it is of no less potency. All suet is prepared by taking out the veins, washing in seawater or salt water, and then pounding in a mortar with frequent sprinklings of seawater. Afterwards it is boiled until all smell disappears, and then by continual exposure to the sun it is bleached to a shining white. All suet from the kidneys is highly valued. But if stale suet is being put to use, it is recommended first to melt it, then wash it several times in cold water, and then to melt it after pouring on it wine with the most fragrant bouquet. They boil it in the same way again and again, until all the rankness disappears. Many recommend that in this way should be prepared the fat in particular of bulls, lions, panthers, and camels. Their use will be given in the appropriate places.

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§ 28.39.1  The various marrows too are all in use. All marrow is emollient, filling, drying, and warming. The most highly valued is that of deer, next of calves, and then of goats, male and female. Marrow is prepared before autumn; it should be fresh, washed, dried in the shade, then passed melted through a sieve, strained through a linen cloth, and then stored away in an earthenware vessel in a cool place.

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§ 28.40.1  But of all the parts common to animals gall by far the most efficacious. Its nature is warming, pungent, dissolvent, extractive, and dispersive. That of the smaller animals is understood to be more delicate, and so is thought to be more useful for eye medicaments. Bull's gall is particularly potent, staining even bronze and basins with a golden colour. All gall is prepared when fresh by tying with stout thread the mouth of the gall bladder, steeping it for half an hour in boiling water, then drying it out of the sun, and storing away in honey. That of horses alone is condemned as a poison. Therefore the sacrificial flamen is not allowed to touch a horse, although at the public sacrifices at Rome a horse is even offered as a victim.

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§ 28.41.1  Moreover the blood of horses has a corrosive power; the blood of mares also, except that of virgin animals. It cleans out ulcers and eats away their lips. Fresh bull's blood indeed is reckoned one of the poisons, except at Aegira. For there the priestess of Earth, when about to prophesy, drinks bull's blood before she goes down into the eaves. So strong is that famous sympathy I speak of that it sometimes becomes active under the influence of religions awe or of a place. Drusus, tribune of the people, is reported to have drunk goat's blood because he wished, by his pallor, to accuse his enemy Q. Caepio of having poisoned him, and so to arouse hatred against him. So great is the power of he-goats' blood that iron tools cannot in any other way be hardened to a finer edge, and roughness is smoothed more thoroughly by it than by a file. Accordingly blood cannot be included among the remedies common to animals, and so each kind of blood will be discussed according to its effects.

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§ 28.42.1  For I shall arrange remedies according to each malady, serpents' bites requiring very full treatment. Nobody is unaware that deer are their deadly enemies, in that they drag any they may find from their holes and eat them. Not only, however, when whole and alive are they the enemy of serpents; the parts of their body are so also. The fumes from their horns when burnt, as I have said, keep serpents away; but if the topmost bones of a stag's neck have been burnt, serpents are said to assemble. The skins of the same animal make a bed in which one may sleep without fear of snakes, and the rennet taken in vinegar prevents being bitten; if it is merely handled, in fact, on that day no serpent strikes. A stag's testicles dried, or the dried male organ, are in wine a salutary drink; so is that stomach which is called centipellio. Serpents keep away from those who have about them merely a stag's tooth, or have been rubbed with the marrow or suet of stag or fawn. As I have already pointed out, to sovereign remedies is preferred the rennet of a young stag cut from his mother's uterus. Stag's blood, if with it are burnt on a lentisk-wood fire dracontion, cunilago and anchusa, is said to collect serpents together; then they scatter, it is said, if in place of blood pyrethrum is added. In my Greek authorities I find mentioned an animal that they call ophion, smaller than a stag and like it only in its hair, which is found nowhere save in Sardinia. I believe that it is extinct today, and therefore I give no remedies from it. The brain and blood of a wild boar is another approved protection against serpents, as is its liver preserved and taken in wine with rue, likewise the fat with honey and resin, and given in the same way boar's liver and the fibre only of the gall-bladder, the dose being four denarii by weight, or the brain taken in wine. The horn or hair of she-goats, when burnt, is said to keep serpents away, and the ash from the horn, whether taken in drink or applied, to be efficacious for their bites; as are also draughts of their milk with taminian grapes, or of their urine with squill vinegar; so too an application of goat cheese with marjoram, or of goat suet with wax. Thousands of remedies besides from the goat are given in prescriptions, as will be pointed out; ibis is surprising to me, because it is said never to be free from fever. The potency of the wild-goatgoats are a very numerous species, as I have said is greater, but a he-goat too has a potency of its own. Democritus also holds that if a goat is the only one at a birth he supplies more efficacious remedies. An application also of she-goat's dung boiled down in vinegar is approved treatment for snake bite, and so is the ash of fresh dung boiled down in wine; speaking generally, slow convalescents from snake bite recover best in a goat's stable. Those who want more efficacious treatment apply immediately as a plaster a slaughtered she-goat's belly cut open, including any dung found inside. Others fumigate with fresh kid-meat, not taking away the hair, and with the same fumes drive snakes away. They also use a fresh kid-skin for the wound, or the flesh and dung of a horse fed by pasture and the rennet of a hare in vinegar; the same for scorpions and the shrewmouse. It is said that rubbing with hare's rennet protects froth being stung or bitten. Those stung by a scorpion are helped by she-goat's dung, more efficaciously if it is boiled down in vinegar; the fat and broth of the decoction, if drunk, helps those too who have swallowed a buprestis. Moreover, if anyone says in the ear of an ass that he has been stung by a scorpion, the mischief, it is said, at once passes over into the animal, all venomous creatures run away from an ass's burning lung, and those stung by a scorpion are benefited by fumigation with the dung of a calf.

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§ 28.43.1  Wounds made by the bite of a mad dog some cut round into the quick and apply veal, giving to drink veal broth, or else axle-grease pounded with lime, or he-goat's liver, an application of which is said to keep off entirely the dread of water. Approved treatment is also she-goat's dung applied in wine, and to drink a decoction of the dung of badger, cuckoo and swallow. For the other beast-bites dried goat's cheese with marjoram is applied and recommended to be taken in drink; to human bites is applied boiled beet boiled veal being more efficacious, if it is not taken off before the fifth day.

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§ 28.44.1  Sorceries are said to be counteracted by a wolf's preserved muzzle, and for this reason they hang one up on the gates of country houses. The same effect is supposed to be given by the whole fur from a wolf's neck, the legs included, for so great is the power of the animal that, besides what I have already stated, his footprints when trodden on by horses make them torpid.

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§ 28.45.1  Those who have swallowed quicksilver find a remedy in lard. By drinking ass's milk poisons are neutralized, especially if henbane has been swallowed, or mistletoe, hemlock, sea-hare, opocarpathum, pharicum, dorycnium, or if milk has done harm by curdling, for there is poison in the first coagulation of it. I shall give many other uses of ass's milk, but it should be remembered to use it when fresh, or nearly fresh and warmed, for no milk loses its power more rapidly. The bones too of the ass, crushed and boiled, are given for the poison of the sea-hare. All these remedies are more efficacious from the wild ass. About wild horses the Greeks have not written, because Greek lands did not breed them, but it must be inferred that all remedies from them are more potent than from the tame animal. By mare's milk are neutralized the poison of the sea-hare and arrow poisons. The Greeks had not the urus or the bison to try out, although the Indian jungles swarm with wild cattle. All the same remedies from them, however, it is reasonable to believe, are proportionally more efficacious. So cow's milk too is said to neutralize all poisons, especially those mentioned before, and if ephemerum has gone down the throat or Spanish fly administered, and to expel by vomiting all the noxious substances; goat broth also to act in the same way on Spanish fly. Those poisons however that cause fatal ulceration are relieved by veal-suet or beef-suet. But for leeches swallowed in drink butter, with vinegar warmed by hot iron, is a remedy, butter even by itself being beneficial against poisoning, for if one has no oil butter is a good substitute. It and honey together cure the bites of millipedes. Tripe broth and also veal suet are thought to neutralize the poisons mentioned above, especially however aconite and hemlock. Fresh goat-cheese is a remedy for those who have taken mistletoe in drink, as is goat's milk for Spanish fly, and with Taminian grapes for swallowing ephenserum. Goat's blood boiled with the marrow is taken for arrow poison, kid's for the other poisons, kid's rennet for mistletoe, white chamaeleon and bull's blood, for which another remedy is hare's rennet in vinegar; for the stingray however, and for the stings or bites of all sea creatures, hare's rennet or that of a kid or lamb, the dose being a drachma by weight in wine. Hare's rennet is also an ingredient of antidotes against poisons. The moth too that flutters to the lamplight is counted among noxious drugs; an antidote is goat's liver, as is its gall for sorcerer's potions made from the field weasel. At this point I shall return to the various kinds of diseases.

Event Date: -1 LA

§ 28.46.1  Bear's grease mixed with ladanum and adiantum prevents the hair from falling out, and cures mange, and scanty eyebrows, if mixed with the lamp-black from lamp wicks and the soot that collects in their nozzles. Mixed with wine it cures dandruff. Good too for the last is the ash of deer's horn in wine, good also to prevent vermin from breeding in the hair, likewise goat's gall with Cimolian chalk and vinegar, the mixture being allowed to dry a little on the head; sow's gall too, and the urine of a bull. If indeed it should be old, with the addition of sulphur it also cures dandruff. It is thought that a thicker growth of hair and prevention of greyness are given by an ass's genital organ reduced to ash; this should be pounded with oil in a leaden mortar, and applied after shaving the head. They also think that thicker hair is encouraged by applying the urine of a young ass. Nard is mixed with it because of its nastiness. For mange is applied warmed bull's gall with Egyptian alum. Running sores on the head are healed efficaciously by bull's urine, also by stale human urine with the addition of cyclamen and sulphur, more efficaciously however by the gall of a calf, which warmed with vinegar also removes nits. For sores on the head calf's suet pounded with salt is very useful. Fox fat is also recommended, but especially cats' dung applied with an equal quantity of mustard; goat's horn, ground to powder or reduced to ash, a he-goat's being better, with the addition of soda, tamarisk seed, butter, and oil, the head being first shaved; this treatment is wonderful for preventing loss of hair, just as goat's meat, reduced to ash and applied with oil, darkens the eyebrows. Goat's milk is said to remove nits, the dung with honey to replace hair lost by mange, likewise the hoofs reduced to ash and added to pitch. Hare's flesh reduced to ash, with oil of myrtle, prevents hair from falling out. Headache is relieved by drinking the water left after an ox or ass has drunk, and also, if we care to believe it, by the genital organ of a male fox fastened round the head, and by a deer's horn reduced to ashes and applied in vinegar, rose oil, or iris oil.

Event Date: -1 LA

§ 28.47.1  To eye fluxes is applied beef suet boiled with oil; scabrous eyes are smeared with the same and deer's born reduced to ash, but the tips by themselves are thought to be more efficacious. Cataract is benefited by applying round the eyes the excrement of a wolf, dimness by smearing them with its ash and Attic honey, also with bear's gall, and epinyctis with wild boar's fat and rose oil. The ash of an ass's hoof smeared on the eyes with the same ass's milk removes scars and albugo. The marrow from the right front leg of an ox, pounded and added to soot, eyelashes, affections of the eyelids and of the corners of the eyes (the soot for this purpose is prepared as for a calliblepharum, best from a papyrus wick and sesame oil, the soot being wiped off with feathers into a new vessel), very efficiently however it prevents the hairs once pulled out there from growing again. From the gall of a bull with white of egg are made eye-salves, and dissolved in water they are applied for four successive days. Calf suet with goose-grease and juice of ochnum is very good for affections of the eyelids. Calf marrow, with equal weights of wax and of oil or rose-oil, with an egg added, is applied to indurations of the eyelids. Eye fluxes are relieved by an application in warm water of soft cheese made from goat's milk, or, if there is swelling, in honey; in both cases there should be fomentation with warm whey. Dry ophthalmia is cured by taking the small loins of pork, burning, pounding, and then placing them on the eyes. She-goats are said never to suffer from ophthalmia, because of certain herbs they eat, and likewise gazelles; for this reason it is recommended that at the new moon their dung should be swallowed, coated with wax. Since they see equally well at night, it is thought that those who have no night vision (the Greeks call them nyctalopes) are cured by the blood of a he-goat, but also by the liver of a she-goat boiled down in a dry wine. Some smear the eyes with the gravy from a she-goat's roasted liver, or with its gall; they prescribe its meat as a food, and fumigation of the eyes with the steam that arises from the cooking; they also consider it important for the animal to have been of a red colour. They also wish the eyes to be fumigated with the steam of the liver boiled in a clay pot; some say that it should he roasted. The gall indeed of goats is employed in many ways; with honey for dimness; with a third part of white hellebore for opaqueness of the lens; with wine for sears, albugo, dimness, pterygia, and argema; but with cabbage juice for affections of the eyelids, the hairs being first pulled out, and the application being left to dry; with human milk for rupture of the eye-coats. For all purposes preserved gall is thought to be more efficacious. Goat's dung with honey is a not unvalued ointment for eye fluxes, or the marrow for eye pains, or a hare's lung, and for dimness its gall with raisin wine or honey. Wolf's fat also or pig's marrow is prescribed as an ointment for ophthalmia. But it is said that those who carry a fox's tongue in a bracelet will never suffer from ophthalmia.

Event Date: -1 LA

§ 28.48.1  Pain in the ears and ear affections are cured by the urine of a wild boar kept in a glass vessel, by the gall of a wild boar, pig, or ox, with citrus oil and rose oil in equal proportions, but best of all by warm bull's gall with leek juice, or with honey should there be suppuration, and for foul odour the gall by itself warmed in a pomegranate rind. Ruptures in this region are thoroughly healed by the gall with woman's milk. Some hold that for hardness of hearing also the ears should be rinsed out with this wash, others add serpents' slough and vinegar (they insert the mixture on wool), the ears being first rinsed with warm water, or, if the hardness of hearing amounts to deafness, they pour in bull's gall with myrrh and rue warmed in pomegranate rind, also fat bacon; or fresh ass's dung with rose oil is inserted in drops, all being warmed. More useful is the foam of a horse, or fresh horse-dung reduced to ash and mixed with rose-oil, fresh butter, beef suet with goose grease, she-goat's or bull's urine, or that used by fullers, stale, and warmed until the steam rises up the neck of the jar (a third part of vinegar is added and little myrrh), the dung, mixed with the gall, of a calf that has not tasted grass added to the slough of snakes, the ears being first warmed; these medicaments are inserted into the ears on wool. Beneficial is also veal suet, with goose grease and juice of ocimum; the marrow of a calf mixed with rounded cummin and poured into the ear; and for tar pains the seminal fluid of a hog, caught as it drips from a sow before it can touch the ground; for fractures of the ears the glue made from the genitals of calves and melted in water; for other affections the fat of foxes, goat's gall with warm rose-oil or with leek juice, or, if any part of the ear has been ruptured, with woman's milk; if there is hardness of hearing, ox gall with the urine of a goat, male or female, or if there is pus. But whatever the use may be, it is thought that these remedies are more efficacious if they ate smoke-dried for twenty days in a goat's horn. Another approved treatment is a third of a denarius of hare's rennet and half a denarius of sacopenium in Ammincan wine. Parotid swellings are reduced by bear's grease with an equal weight of wax and bull suet (some add hypocisthis), and an application of butter by itself after previous fomentation with a decoction of fenugreek, more efficaciously with the addition of strychnos. Beneficial also are the testicles of foxes and bull's blood dried and pounded, she-goat's urine warmed and poured by drops into the ear, and an application of she-goat's dung with axle-grease.

Event Date: -1 LA

§ 28.49.1  Loose teeth are made tight by the ash of deer's horn, which relieves their pain, whether used as dentifrice or in a mouth wash. Some consider more efficacious for all the same purposes the unburnt horn ground to powder. Dentifrices are made in either way. A grand remedy too is a wolf's head reduced to ash. It is certain that bones are generally found in the excrements of wolves. Used as an amulet these have the same effect, and hare's rennet relieves toothache if poured through the ear. Hare's head reduced to ash makes a dentifrice, and with nard added corrects a bad odour from the mouth. Some prefer to add as well ash from the burnt heads of mice. There is found in the flank of a hare a bone like a needle, with Which they recommend aching teeth to be scraped. The ignited pastern bone of an ox, applied to teeth that are loose and aching, tightens them; the ash of the same with myrrh makes a dentifrice. The bones also of pigs' feet, when burnt, have the same effect, as have the bones from the sockets round which the hipbones move. It is well known that by these, when inserted into the throat of draught cattle, worms are cured, that by them, when burnt, teeth are tightened, as they are, when loosened through a blow, by ass's milk, by the ash of an ass's teeth, or by the lichen of a horse poured with oil through the ear. This lichen is not the same as hippomanes, which being pernicious on several grounds I omit, but an excrescence on the knees of homes and above their hoofs. Moreover, in the heart of horses is found a bone like very large canine teeth; with this they prescribe the painful tooth to be scraped, or with the tooth, corresponding to the place of the aching tooth, extracted from the jawbone of a dead horse. Anaxilaus has informed us that the fluid coming from mares when covered, if ignited on lamp wicks, shows weird appearances of horses' heads, and similarly with asses. But hippomanes has such virulent and magical properties that, added to the molten bronze for a figure of an Olympian mare, it maddens any stallions brought near with a raving sexual lust. Teeth are also healed by workman's glue boiled down in water, applied, and shortly after taken off, the teeth immediately to be rinsed in wine in which the rind of sweet pomegranates has been boiled. It is also thought efficacious to rinse the teeth in goat's milk or bull's gall. The ash from a freshly-killed she-goat's pastern bones makes a popular dentifrice, and, so that I need not repeat myself, the same is true of nearly all female farm quadrupeds.

Event Date: -1 LA

§ 28.50.1  It is thought that ass's milk removes wrinkles from the face, making the skin white and soft, and it is well known that some women every day bathe their cheeks in it seven times, keeping carefully to that number. Poppaea, wife of the Emperor Nero, began this custom, even preparing her bathtubs with the milk, and for this purpose she was always attended by troops of she-asses. Pituitous eruptions on the face are removed by the application of butter, the addition of white-lead being an improvement, but spreading sores by unmixed butter with a sprinkling of barley meal on top, and ulcers on the face by the membrane, still moist, that follows the birth of a calf. The following recipe may seem a trifle, but to satisfy the women I must not omit it: the pastern bone of a white bull-calf, boiled for forty days and nights until it melts to a jelly, and applied on a linen cloth, gives whiteness to the skin and smoothes away wrinkles. They say that bull's dung brings a rosy colour to the cheeks, though it is better to rub them with crocodilea, but before and after they must be bathed with cold water. Brick-red spots and discolorations of the skin are removed by calf dung kneaded by hand with oil and gum, sores and cracks in the mouth by veal suet or beef suet with goose grease and juice of ocimum. There is yet another compound, veal suet with deer's marrow and white-thorn leaves pounded together. The same effect is given by marrow with resin, even if it is cow marrow, and by the broth from cow beef. An excellent cure for facial lichens is the gluey substance made from the genitals of calves, dissolved in vinegar with native sulphur, stirred up with a fig branch and applied fresh twice a day, and the same boiled down in honey and vinegar for leprous sores, which are also removed by a warm application of he-goat's liver, as is leprosy by goat's gall. Moreover, leprous sores and scurf are removed by bull's gall with soda, or at the rising of the Dog-star by ass's urine; spots on the face by the gall of either animal broken up in water without addition; after the skin has come away sun and winds must be avoided. A similar effect is also obtained by bull's gall or veal gall, with the seed of cunila, and the ash of deer's horn burnt at the rising of the lesser Dog-star. By ass suet their natural colour is restored to scars, especially to those removed by he-goat's gall mixed with cheese, native left by lichen or leprous sores. Freckles too are sulphur, and sponge ash; the consistency of the mixture should be that of honey. Some have preferred to use matured gall, mixing one obolus of warm bran and four oboli of honey, the spots being first rubbed. An efficacious mixture is also he-goat's suet with melanthium, sulphur, and iris; for cracks in the lips the suet with goose grease, deer's marrow, resin, and lime. I find in my authorities that those with freckles are debarred from assisting at magic ritual.

Event Date: -1 LA

§ 28.51.1  Cow's milk or goat's is helpful for ulcerated tonsils or trachea. It is used as a gargle, of the usual warmth, either newly milked or heated. Goat's milk is more useful, boiled down with mallow and a little salt. For ulceration of the tongue or trachea a remedy is a gargle of tripe broth, while for tonsils are specific dried fox kidneys pounded with honey and applied, and for quinsy bull's or goat's gall with honey, or badger's liver in water. Butter remedies offensive breath and ulcerated mouth. If a pointed thing or anything else sticks in the throat, external rubbing with cat's dung is said either to bring it up or to make it pass down. Scrofulous sores are dispersed by a warm application of wild-boar's gall or ox gall (but hare's rennet, on a linen cloth with wine, is applied only when there is ulceration) or by the ash of the hoof of ass or horse applied in oil or water, the urine heated, the ash of an ox's hoof in water, the hot dung in vinegar, goat suet with lime or dung boiled in vinegar, or a fox's testicles. Soap is also good, an invention of the Gallic provinces for making the hair red. It is made from suet and ash, the best from beech ash and goat suet, in two kinds, thick and liquid, both being used among the Germans, more by men than by women.

Event Date: -1 LA

§ 28.52.1  For pains in the neck it should be rubbed with butter or bear's grease, and for stiffness with beef suet, which with oil is good for scrofulous sores. The rigid cramp, called opisthotonus, is relieved by she-goat's urine poured into the ears or by an application of the dung with bulbs, crushed nails by binding round them the gall of any animal, and whitlows by dried bull's gall dissolved in hot water. Some add sulphur and alum, all the ingredients being of equal weight.

Event Date: -1 LA

§ 28.53.1  Cough is cured by wolf's liver in warmed wine, by bear's gall mixed with honey, by the tips of the horns of ox or cow reduced to ash, by the saliva of a horse taken for three days (they say that the horse dies), by a deer's lung dried in smoke with the gullet, then pounded in honey and taken daily as an electuary, the species of deer more efficacious for this purpose being the subulo. Spitting of blood is cured by the ash of deer's horn, and by hare's rennet, the dose being one third part of a denarius, with Samian earth and myrtle wine. hare's dung reduced to ash and taken in wine in the evening cures night coughs, and inhaling the smoke of burning hare's fur brings up difficult expectorations. Purulent ulceration of the chest or lungs, and foul breath from the lungs, are very effectively relieved by butter boiled with an equal measure of Attic honey until it turns red, the dose being a spoonful taken in the morning; some instead of honey have preferred to add larch resin. For spitting of blood it is said to be beneficial to drink ox or cow blood, a moderate amount taken in vinegar. But to trust recommendations of bull's blood is hazardous; bull glue, however, in three-oboli doses is taken with warm water for chronic spitting of blood.

Event Date: -1 LA

§ 28.54.1  An ulcerated stomach is cured by drinking ass's milk or cow's milk; gnawings of the stomach by beef boiled in a mixture of vinegar and wine; catarrhs by the ash of deer's horn; spitting of blood by fresh kid's-blood taken hot, in doses up to three cyathi, with an equal amount of strong vinegar, or by one part of kid's rennet with two parts of vinegar;

Event Date: -1 LA

§ 28.55.1  pains of the liver by dried wolf's liver in honey wine; by dried ass's liver, with two parts of rock parsley and three nuts, pounded in honey and taken in food, and by he-goat's blood made suitable for food. For asthma, effective above all things is to drink the blood of wild horses, next to drink warm ass's milk, or cow's milk boiled, the part drunk being the whey only, with the addition for every three heminae of a cyathus of white cress steeped in water and then tempered with honey. A fox's liver or lung also in dark wine, or bear's gall in water, loosens the breath passage.

Event Date: -1 LA

§ 28.56.1  Pains in the loins and all other complaints needing emollients should be treated by rubbing with bear's grease, or the ash of wild boar's or pig's dried dung should be sprinkled in a draught of wine. [The Magi too add their usual lies: first of all, that the madness of he-goats is soothed if their beard is stroked, and if it is cut off, they do not stray to another herd.] For sciatica they apply cow-dung heated in leaves over hot embers. With this dung they mix goat's dung, prescribing that as much as it can contain should be held hot in the hollow of the hand, a linen cloth soaked in oil being placed underneath; if the left side aches the medicament should be held in the right hand, and vice versa; the dung for this purpose, they say, must be taken up with the point of a bronze needle. The treatment is continued until the warmth is felt to have reached the loins; afterwards they rub the hand with pounded leek, the loins also with the dung itself and honey. For this pain they also recommend sufferers to swallow a hare's testicles. For pain in the kidneys they prescribe the kidneys of a hare to be swallowed raw, or if boiled at least not to be touched by a tooth. Bowel pain indeed never, they say, afflicts those who carry about them the pastern bone of a hare.

Event Date: -1 LA

§ 28.57.1  The spleen is relieved by wild boar's or pig's gall taken by the mouth, by ash of deer's horn in vinegar, but most efficaciously by matured ass's spleen, with the result that benefit is felt within three days. The first dung passed by an ass's foal, called polea, is administered by the Syrians in oxymel. There is also administered in wine as a sovereign remedy the dried tongue of a horse, as Caecilius Bion reports that he learnt from foreigners. Spleen of ox or cow is administered in a similar way; if fresh it is roasted or boiled and taken in food. There are also applied for pains in the spleen twenty crushed heads of garlic in the bladder of an ox with a sextarius of vinegar. For the same purpose the Magi recommend a calf's spleen to be bought at the price asked, without any haggling, attention to this also affecting the efficacy of the ritual. This spleen should be divided lengthwise and attached to the patient's tunic on both sides. As he puts it on, the patient should allow the spleen to fall to his feet, then pick it up and dry in the shade. At the same time as this happens, the diseased spleen of the patient is said to shrink, and he himself to be freed from his complaint. Beneficial too is fox lung dried on embers and taken in water, and kids' spleen applied locally.

Event Date: -1 LA

§ 28.58.1  Binding to the bowels are stag's blood, stag's horn reduced to ash, wild boar's liver taken in wine, unsalted and fresh, the same liver roasted, pig's liver, he-goat's liver boiled down to one fifth in wine, hare's rennet of the size of a chick-pea in wine, or if there is fever, in water — some add a gall-nut, others are content with hare's blood by itself — boiled milk, horse dung reduced to ash in a draught of water, the root of an old horn of a bull reduced to ash and sprinkled on a draught of water, he-goat's blood boiled down over charcoal, the juice, taken by the mouth, of goat's skin boiled down with the hair on, horse rennet and goat's blood, marrow, or liver. The bowels are loosened by wolf's gall applied to the navel with elaterium, or by draughts of mare's milk, or of goat's milk with salt and honey, by she-goat's gall with juice of cyclamen and a little alum — some prefer to add both soda and water — bull's gall pounded with wormwood and used in the form of a lozenge as a suppository, and by large doses of butter. Those with coeliac disorder or dysentery are benefited by cow's liver, a three-finger pinch of the ash of deer's horn taken in a draught of water, by hare's rennet kneaded in bread, but in pearl barley if blood is brought away, and by ash of wild boar's, pig's, or hare's dung sprinkled on a draught of warm wine. It is also reported that veal broth is a popular remedy to relieve sufferers from coeliac disorder or dysentery. Ass's milk makes a more beneficial draught with the addition of honey, the dung, reduced to ash and taken in wine, is no less efficacious for either complaint, poke too, which I mentioned just now, horse's rennet, that some call hippace, even if blood is brought away, or the dung ash and crushed teeth of the same animal, a health-giving powder, and taken with boiled cow's milk. For dysentery is prescribed the addition of a little honey, and if there are griping pains to apply to the navel the ash of deer's horn or bull's gall mixed with cummin, and the fleshy parts of a gourd. New cheese made from cow's milk is injected for both complaints, so also four heminae of butter with two ounces of terebinth resin, or with a decoction of mallows, or with rose oil. There is administered also veal suet, beef suet, or the marrow (they are boiled with a little flour and wax, and with oil, so that to drink the mixture is possible, and the marrow is also kneaded in bread), and goat's milk boiled down to one half; if there is also griping, proiropum is added. It is thought by some that a sufficient remedy for griping is even a single dose of hare's rennet taken in warm wine; more careful people also apply as embrocation to the belly goat's blood with barley meal and resin. For all fluxes from the belly an application of soft cheese is recommended, but matured cheese powdered a is used for coeliac disorders and dysentery, the dose being a cyathus of cheese in three cyathi of ordinary wine. A decoction of goat's blood with goat's marrow is beneficial for dysentery, roasted she-goat's liver for coeliac complaints, or, better still, that of a he-goat boiled down in dry wine and drunk, or applied to the navel in myrtle oil. Some boil it down from three sextarii of water to one hemina with rue added. They also use the roasted spleen of a she-goat or he-goat with the suet of a he-goat in bread baked over hot ashes, the best suet being from the kidneys of a she-goat, which should be swallowed by itself, and be immediately followed by a draught of moderately cold water. Some prescribe also a decoction of the suet in water, made into a stew with other ingredients — pearl barley, cummin, dill, and vinegar. They also rub the belly of sufferers from coeliac disorders with a decoction of honey and goat's dung. For both complaints they also use kid's rennet, of the size of a bean, taken in myrtle wine, or kid's blood made into a food, called 'blood pudding.' They also inject into dysentery patients bull glue dissolved in hot water. Flatulence is dispersed by calf dung boiled down in wine. Disorders of the intestines are greatly benefited by a decoction of deers' rennet with lentils and beet, and so taken in food, by the ash of hare's fur boiled down with honey, by a draught of goat's milk boiled down with mallows with the addition of a little salt; if goat's rennet too is added the beneficial effects will be much greater. The same is the effect of goat's suet in some kind of stew, to be immediately followed by a draught of cold water. A kid's hams also reduced to ash are said to be wonderfully healing to intestinal rupture, and the dung of a hare, boiled down with honey and taken daily in doses the size of a bean, to be so beneficial as they have cured desperate cases. Highly recommended also is the broth of a goat's head with the fur still on.

Event Date: -1 LA

§ 28.59.1  Tenesmus, that is a frequent and ineffectual desire to go to stool, is removed by drinking ass's milk, or cow's milk. Worms are expelled by ash of deer's horn, taken in drink. The bones that I have said are found in the excrements of a wolf, tied on to the arm as an amulet without touching the earth, are a cure for colitis. Polea also, mentioned above, is of great benefit if boiled down in sapa, likewise too powdered pig's dung and cummin in the water of a decoction of rue, and young deer's horn reduced to ash, mixed with African snails pounded with their shells and taken in a draught of wine.

Event Date: -1 LA

§ 28.60.1  The tortures of stone in the bladder are relieved by the urine of a wild boar and by his bladder itself taken as food; both remedies are more efficacious if first thoroughly smoked. The bladder should be eaten boiled, and be a sow's if the patient is a woman. There are also found in the liver of these animals little stones, or hard substances like stones, white, and like those found in the liver of the common pig. These, crushed and taken in wine, are said to expel stone. His own urine is such a burden to the boar himself that unless he has voided it he is not strong enough for flight, and is overcome as if spellbound. It is said that the urine dissolves the stone. Stone is also expelled by a hare's kidneys, dried and taken in wine. In the ham joints of pigs I have said there are bones the broth from which is beneficial for urinary disorders. The kidneys of an ass, dried, pounded, and given in neat wine, cure complaints of the bladder. The excrescences on the legs of horses, taken for forty days in wine or honey wine, expel stone. Beneficial too is the ash of a horse's hoof in wine or water, the dung also in honey wine of she-goats, that of wild goats being more efficacious, the ash also of goat's hair, while for carbuncles on the privates are used the brains and blood of a wild boar or pig. Creeping sores however in the same part are cured by the burnt liver of these animals, best if the fire is of juniper wood, mixed with paper and orpiment, by their dung reduced to ash, by ox gall with Egyptian alum and myrrh, kneaded to the consistency of honey, moreover by an application of beet boiled in wine, also by beef; but running ulcers by beef suet with the marrow of a calf boiled down in wine, by goat's gall with honey and blackberry juice, even if the sores are spreading. They say that goat's dung too with honey or vinegar is beneficial, and also butter by itself. Swelling of the testicles is reduced by veal suet with the addition of soda, or by calf's dung boiled down in vinegar. Incontinence of urine is checked by a wild-boar's bladder, if eaten roasted, by the ash of a wild-boar's or pig's hoofs sprinkled on a drink, by the bladder of a sow burnt and taken in drink, of a kid also, or by its lung, by the brain of a hare in wine, by a hare's roasted testicles, or the rennet, with goose grease in pearl barley, or by the kidneys of an ass pounded in neat wine and drunk. The Magi recommend that, after drinking in sweet wine a boar's genital organ reduced to ash, the patient should make water in a dog's bed and add a prayer, that he may not himself make water, as a dog does, in his own bed. On the other hand, the bladder of a pig is diuretic, if, without touching the ground, it is applied to the pubic part.

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§ 28.61.1  Complaints of the anus are greatly benefited by bear's gall and bear's fat; some add litharge and frankincense. Beneficial too is butter with goose grease and rose oil; the quantities are determined by circumstances; the mixture must be easy to apply. Greatly beneficial too is bull's gall in scraps of linen; it makes chaps to cicatrize. Swellings in that part of the body are reduced by veal suet, especially by that from the groin, with rue; other complaints are cured by goat's blood with pearl barley, condylomata by goat's gall by itself, or by wolf's gall in wine. Superficial and other abscesses in any part are dispersed by bear's blood, and likewise by bull's dried and powdered. The finest remedy, however, is said to be the stone which the wild ass is reported to pass in his urine when he is being killed; more fluid than it at first, it grows thick when on the ground. This stone fastened to the thigh as an amulet disperses all inflamed swellings and clears away any suppuration. It is found, however, rarely and not always in the wild ass, but it is wonderfully famous as a remedy. Beneficial also is the urine of an ass with melanthium, a horse's hoof reduced to ash and applied with oil and water, the blood of a horse, especially of a stallion, and the blood or gall of an ox or cow. Beef too has the same effect if applied hot, the ash of the hoof in water or honey, the urine of she-goats, the flesh too of he-goats boiled down in water or their dung boiled down with honey, a boar's gall, and a pigs' urine applied on wool. It is well known that riding on a horse chafes and galls the inner side of the thighs; most useful for all such troubles is to rub on the groin the foam from the mouth of a horse. The groin also swells because of sores; the remedy is to tie within the sore three horse hairs with three knots.

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§ 28.62.1  Gout is benefited by bear's grease and bull suet with an equal weight of wax as well; to which some add hypocisthis and gall nut. Others prefer he-goat suet with the dung of a she-goat and with saffron, mustard, pounded stalks of ivy, and perdicium or the blossom of wild cucumber. Highly praised also is ox dung with lees of vinegar and the dung of a calf that has not yet tasted grass, or, by itself, the blood of a bull, a fox boiled down alive until only the bones remain, or a wolf boiled alive in oil as though to make a wax-salve, he-goat's suet with an equal quantity of helxine, a third part of mustard, calcined goat's dung and axle-grease. Moreover, to put a burning-hot poultice of this dung under the big toes is said to be excellent for sciatica, and bear's gall very useful for diseases of the joints, as are also the feet of a hare worn as an amulet, while gouty pains are alleviated by a hare's foot, cut off from the living animal, if the patient carries it about continuously on the person. Chilblains and all chaps on the feet are healed by bear's grease, more efficaciously with the addition of alum, by goat suet, by a horse's teeth ground to powder, by the gall and fat of a wild boar or pig, by the lung applied to them even if they are chafed or broken by a knock, but if they are frost bites, by a hare's fur reduced to ash; if they are broken, by the lung of the same animal cut up or reduced to ash. Sunburns are most beneficially treated by ass suet, and also by suet of an ox or cow with rose oil. Corns, chaps, and calluses are cured by an application of fresh wild-boar's dung, or pig's, taken off on the third day, by their pastern bones reduced to ashes, by the lung of wild boar, pig, or deer; chafing from shoes by the application of an ass's urine with the mud made by it; corns by beef suet with powdered frankincense; chilblains, however, by burnt leather, if from an old shoe so much the better, sores from footwear by the ash of goat leather in oil. The pains of varicose veins are alleviated by the ash of calf's dung boiled down with the bulbs of a lily, with the addition of a little honey, and so are all inflamed places that threaten to suppurate. The same preparation is good for gout and diseases of the joints, especially if it is taken from a male calf, for chafed joints the gall of wild boars or of pigs applied in a heated linen cloth, the dung of a calf that has not tasted grass, also the dung of goats boiled down in vinegar with honey. Scabrous nails are cured by veal suet, also by goat suet mixed with sanderach. Warts however are removed by the ash of calf's dung in vinegar, or by the urine with its mud of an ass.

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§ 28.63.1  For epilepsy it is beneficial to eat a bear's testes or to take those of a wild boar in mare's milk or water, likewise wild-boar's urine in oxymel, with increased efficacy if it has dried in his bladder. There are also given the testicles of pigs dried and pounded in sow's milk, abstinence from wine preceding and following for ten days. There are also given the lungs of a hare preserved in salt, with a third part of frankincense, taken in white wine for thirty days; likewise a hare's rennet, an ass's brain in hydromel, first smoked on burning leaves, half an ounce a day for five days, or an ass's hoofs reduced to ash and two spoonfuls taken in drink for a whole month, likewise his testes preserved in salt and sprinkled on drink, preferably on ass's milk, or on water. The odour of the afterbirth of she-asses, especially if they have had a male foal, inhaled on the approach of a fit, repels it. There are some who recommend eating with bread the heart of a black jackass in the open air on the first or second day of the moon, some the flesh, others drinking for forty days the blood diluted with vinegar. Certain people mix an ass's urine with smithy water in which hot iron has been dipped, and use the same draught to treat delirious raving. To epileptics is also given mare's milk to drink, the excrescence on a horse's leg taken in oxymel; there is given too goat's flesh roasted on a funeral pyre, as the Magi would have it, goat suet boiled down with an equal weight of bull's gall stored in the gall bladder without touching the earth, and taken in water with the patient standing upright. The disease itself is detected by the fumes of burnt goat's horn or deer's horn. Rubbing with the urine of an ass's foal mixed with nard is said to be beneficial to the planet-struck.

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§ 28.64.1  Jaundice is cured within two days by deer's horn reduced to ash, by the blood of an ass, likewise by the dung of an ass's foal, the first to pass afterbirth, of the size of a bean and taken in wine. The first dung too of a young colt, administered in a similar way, has the same effect.

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§ 28.65.1  For broken bones a sovereign remedy is the ash of the jawbone of a wild boar or of a pig; likewise boiled bacon-fat, tied round the fracture, heals with marvellous rapidity. For broken ribs however the highest praise is given to goat's dung in old wine; it opens, extracts, and completely heals.

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§ 28.66.1  Fevers are kept away by the flesh of deer, as I have said, those indeed which return at fixed intervals by the salted right eye of a wolf worn as an amulet if we are to believe the Magi. There is a kind of fever called amphemerinos. It is said that he is freed from this who drinks three drops of blood from an ass's ear in two heminae of water. For quartans the Magi prescribe the excrement of a cat with the claw of a horned owl worn as an amulet, and to prevent a relapse the amulet should not be removed before the seventh periodic return. Who pray could have made this discovery? What sort of combination is this? Why was an owl's claw chosen rather than anything else? Some more moderate people have prescribed the salted liver of a cat killed when the moon is on the wane, to be taken in wine before the access of a quartan. The Magi also apply to the toes and fingers ox or cow dung reduced to ash and sprinkled with children's urine. They use the heart of a hare as an amulet, and give hare's rennet before each access. There is also given with honey fresh goat's cheese with the whey carefully pressed out.

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§ 28.67.1  A remedy for melancholia is calf's dung boiled down in wine. Victims of lethargy are amused by applying to the nostrils in vinegar the excrescence on the leg of an ass, by the fumes from goat's horns or goat's hair, and by wild boar's liver; accordingly it is also administered to the comatose. Consumptives are benefited by wolf's liver in thin wine, by the lard of a sow fed on herbs, and by ass's flesh taken in its gravy. This treatment for the complaint is very popular in Achaia. The smoke also from dried dung of an ox fed on green fodder, inhaled through a reed, is said to be beneficial, or the burnt tip of the horn of an ox, the dose being two spoonful, with the addition of honey, swallowed in pills. It is held by not a few authorities that by she-goat's suet in groat porridge consumption and cough are cured, or by fresh suet melted with honey wine, an ounce of suet added to a cyathus of wine and stirred with a spray of rue. An authoritative writer assures us that a despaired-of consumptive has recovered by being treated with a cyathus of mountain-goat suet and the same amount of the milk. Some have written that pig's dung reduced to ash, taken in raisin wine, has proved of value, or the lung of a stag, especially a subulo, dried in smoke and pounded in wine.

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§ 28.68.1  Good for dropsy is urine from the bladder of a wild boar given little by little in the drink, that being more beneficial which has dried up with its bladder, the ash of bull's dung especially but also that of oxen — herd animals I mean; it is called bolbiton — three spoonfuls in a hemina of honey wine, cow dung for women, bull dung for men (the Magi have made a sort of mystery of this distinction), the dung of a bull calf applied locally, ash of calf dung with staphylinus seed in equal proportions taken in wine, and goat's blood with goat's marrow. That of a he-goat is considered more beneficial, especially if he has browsed on lentisk.

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§ 28.69.1  There is applied for erysipelas bear's fat, especially that on the kidneys, fresh dung of calves or cattle, dried goat's cheese with leek, scrapings of deer's skin rubbed off with pumice and pounded in vinegar. For inflamed itch the foam of a horse or the ash of his hoof; for pituitous eruptions ass's dung reduced to ash with butter; for black pimples dried goat's cheese in honey and vinegar, applied in the bath, no oil being used, for pustules pig's dung reduced to ash and applied in water, or the ash of deer's horn,

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§ 28.70.1  for dislocations the fresh-dung of wild boar or of pig, or of calves, the fresh foam of a boar with vinegar, the dung of a goat with honey, an application of beef, and for swellings pig's dung warmed in an earthen pot and beaten up with oil. All indurations of the body are best removed by an application of wolf's fat. In the case of sores that need to break the most beneficial application is ox dung warmed on hot cinders or goat's dung boiled down in wine or vinegar, for boils beef suet with salt, or if there is pain melted with oil without salt, similarly with goat suet;

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§ 28.71.1  for burns bear's grease with lily roots, dried dung of wild boar or of pig, the ash of pig's bristles from plasterers' brushes beaten up with pig fat, the ash of the pastern bone of bull or cow with wax and deer marrow, bull's gall, hare's dung; but the dung of she-goats is said to heal without a scar. The finest glue is made from the ears and genitals of bulls, and there is no better remedy for burns, but it is more adulterated than any other, a decoction being made from any old skins and even from shoes. The most reliable glue comes from Rhodes, which is used by painters and physicians. The Rhodian too is the more approved the whiter it is; the dark and wood-like is rejected.

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§ 28.72.1  It is thought that for pains in the sinews, even if pus is present there, the most beneficial remedy is a decoction of goat's dung in vinegar with honey. Strains and injuries from a blow are treated with wild-boar's dung collected in spring and dried; the same remedy is also good for charioteers who have been dragged along, or wounded by a wheel, or bruised in any way, even if the dung is applied while fresh. There are some who think it more beneficial to boil the dung in vinegar. Moreover, they assure us that this dung, reduced to powder and taken in drink, is curative of ruptures and sprains; for falls from vehicles it should be taken in vinegar. The more recent authorities reduce it to ash and take in water, saying that even the Emperor Nero used to refresh himself with this draught, since he was ready even by this means to distinguish himself in the three-horse chariot-race. They think that the next most efficacious dung is that of pigs.

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§ 28.73.1  Bleeding is stayed by deer's rennet in vinegar, by hare's also, by the latter reduced to ash with the fur, also by the application of ass's dung reduced to ash — the effect is more powerful if the ass is male, vinegar mixed with the ash, and wool used for the application to any haemorrhage, horse dung being similarly used, by the head and thighs, or dung, of calves, reduced to ash and applied in vinegar, also by the ash in vinegar of goat's horn or dung. The sanies, however, exuding from he-goat's liver when cut up is more efficacious, as is the liver of goats of either sex, reduced to ash and taken in wine or applied to the nostrils in vinegar, or the leather of a he-goat, but only that of a wine bottle, reduced to ash and with an equal weight of resin, by which remedy bleeding is stayed and the wound closed. Kid's rennet also in vinegar and kid's thighs burnt to ash are reported to be similarly effective.

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§ 28.74.1  Ulcers on the shins or shanks arc healed by bear's grease mixed with ruddle, but spreading ulcers by wild boar's gall with resin and white lead, by the jawbones of wild boars or pigs reduced to ash, by the application of dried pigs'-dung, also by goat's dung, kneaded in vinegar and warmed. The other kinds of sores are cleansed and filled up by butter, by the ash of deer's horn or by deer's marrow, by bull's gall with cyprus oil or he-goat's dung. To wounds inflicted with iron is applied pigs' dung, either fresh or dried and powdered. Injected into phagedaenic ulcers and fistulas is bull's gall with juice of leek or woman's milk, or else dried blood with the herb cotyledon. Cancerous sores are treated with hare's rennet and an equal weight of caper sprinkled in wine, gangrenes by bear's gall applied with a feather, spreading ulcers by the ash of ass's hoofs sprinkled over them. Flesh is eaten away by the corrosive action of horse's blood and by the ash of dried horse-dung, but the ulcers coming under the class they call phagedaenic by the ash of ox-hide with honey. Veal prevents fresh wounds from swelling. Foul ulcers and those called malignant are healed by dung of ox or cow with honey, or by the ash of calf's dung in woman's milk, fresh wounds inflicted with iron by melted bull's glue, which is taken off on the third day. Ulcers are cleansed by dry goat's-cheese in vinegar and honey, while spreading ulcers are checked by goat suet with wax, and the addition of pitch and sulphur makes the cure complete. In a similar way malignant ulcers are improved by the ash of a kid's thighs in woman's milk, and for carbuncles are used a sow's brains, roasted and applied.

Event Date: -1 LA

§ 28.75.1  For itch in men the best cure is the marrow of the ass, or ass's urine applied with its own mud, butter likewise, which with warm resin also benefits itch in draught animals, bull glue melted in vinegar and with lime added, goat gall with the ash of alum; ox or cow dung is good for bovae, whence comes the name of the disease. Itch in dogs is cured by the fresh blood of ox or cow, applied again when it is dry, and on the following day washed off with lye ash.

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§ 28.76.1  Thorns and similar objects are extracted by a cat's excrements, also by a she-goat's in wine, by any kind of rennet but especially by hare's with powdered frankincense and oil, or else with an equal weight of mistletoe, or with bee glue. Black scars are brought back to the original colour by ass's suet, and made fainter by warmed calf's gall. Physicians add myrrh, honey and saffron, and keep in a bronze box; some add to the mixture flower of bronze.

Event Date: -1 LA

§ 28.77.1  The purgings of women are aided by bull's gall applied as a pessary in unwashed wool — Olympias, a woman of Thebes added suint and soda — by ash of deer's horn taken in drink, and uterine troubles by an application also of this, and by two-oboli pessaries of bull's gall and poppy juice. It is beneficial also to fumigate the uterus with deer's hair. It is reported that hinds, when they realise that they are pregnant, swallow a little stone which, found in their excrements or in the uterus — for it is found there also — prevents miscarriage if worn as an amulet. There are also found in the heart and in the uterus little bones that are very useful to women who are pregnant or in child-bed. But about the pumice-like stone which in a similar way is found in the uterus of cows I have spoken when dealing with the nature of oxen. The uterus is softened by an application of wolf's fat, pains there by wolf's liver, but to have eaten the flesh of the wolf is beneficial for women near delivery, or at the beginning of labour the near presence of one who has eaten it, so much so that sorceries put upon the woman are counteracted. But for such a person to enter during delivery is a deadly danger. The hare is also of great use to women. The uterus is benefited by the dried lung taken in drink, fluxes by the liver taken in water with Samian earth, the afterbirth is eased by hare's rennet — the bath must be avoided the day before — by the rennet applied also with saffron and leek juice; a pessary of it in raw wool brings away a dead foetus. If the uterus of the hare is taken in food, it is believed that males are conceived; that the same result is obtained by eating its testicles and rennet; that the foetus of a hare, taken from its uterus, brings a renewed fertility to women who are passed child-bearing. But the sanies of a hare is given by the Magi even to the male partner that conception may occur, and likewise to a maiden nine pellets of hare's droppings to make the breasts permanently firm. They also use for this purpose the rennet with honey as liniment, and the blood to prevent hairs plucked out from growing again. For inflation of the uterus it is beneficial to make with oil a liniment of wild boar's dung or pig's. More efficacious is the dried dung reduced to powder to sprinkle in the drink, even if the woman is suffering the pains of pregnancy or childbirth. By drinking sow's milk with honey wine childbirth is eased, while taken by itself it refills the drying breasts of nursing mothers. These swell less if rubbed round with a sow's blood. If they are painful they are soothed by drinking ass's milk, which taken with the addition of honey is also beneficial for the purgings of women. Ulcerations also of the uterus are healed by the dried suet of the same animal, which applied in raw wool as a pessary softens uterine indurations, while by itself either fresh or dried suet, applied in water, acts as a depilatory. Dried ass's spleen, applied in water to the breasts, produces an abundant supply of milk, and used in fumigation corrects displacement of the uterus. Fumigation with ass's hoofs hastens delivery, so that even a dead foetus is extracted; only then is the treatment applied, for it kills a living infant. Ass's dung applied fresh is said to be a wonderful reliever of fluxes of blood, as is also the ash of the same dung, an application which is also beneficial to the uterus. By horse's foam, applied for forty days before they first grow, hairs are prevented, also by a decoction of deer's horns, which is more beneficial if the horns are new. It is beneficial to wash out the uterus with mare's milk. But if the foetus is felt to be dead, it is expelled by taking in fresh water the excrescence from the leg of a mare, also by fumigation with the hoof or the dried dung. An injection of butter stays prolapsus of the uterus. A hardened uterus is opened by ox gall mixed with rose oil, with an external application of terebinth resin on unwashed wool. They say that prolapsus of the uterus is corrected also by fumigation with the dung of an ox, that delivery is aided, and conception also, by drinking cow's milk. It is certain that sterility may result from sufferings at childbirth. This kind of barrenness, we are assured by Olympias of Thebes, is cured by bull's gall, serpents' fat, copper rust and honey, rubbed on the parts before intercourse. Calf's gall also, sprinkled on the uterus during menstruation just before intercourse, softens even indurations of the bowels checks the flow if rubbed on the navel, and is generally beneficial to the uterus. The amount of gall prescribed is a denarius by weight; this and a third part of poppy juice, with as much almond oil as seems to be called for. The mixture is laid on unwashed wool. A bull-calf's gall beaten up with half the quantity of honey is stored away for uterine complaints. If women about the time of conception eat roasted veal with aristolochia, they are assured that they will bring forth a male child. A calf's marrow, boiled down in wine and water with calf's suet and applied to an ulcerated uterus, is beneficial, as is the fat of foxes with the excrement of cats, the last being applied with resin and rose oil. It is thought that to fumigate the uterus with goat's horn is very beneficial. The blood of wild she-goats with sea palm acts as a depilatory, while of other she-goats the gall softens callus of the uterus if sprinkled on it, and after a menstruation causes conception; such an application also acts as a depilatory; after the hairs are pulled out it is kept on for three days. Midwives assure us that a flux, however copious, is stayed by drinking the urine of a she-goat, or if an application is made of her dung. The membrane that covers the newborn offspring of she-goats, kept fill dry and taken in wine, brings away the afterbirth. To fumigate the uterus with the hairs of kids is thought to be beneficial, and it is so for a flux of blood if kid's rennet is taken in drink, or applied locally with seed of hyoscyamus. Osthanes says that if the loins of a woman are rubbed thoroughly with the blood of a tick from a black wild-bull, she will be disgusted with sexual intercourse, and also with her love if she drinks the urine of a he-goat, nard being added to disguise the foul taste.

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§ 28.78.1  For babies nothing is more beneficial than butter, either by itself or with honey, especially when they are troubled with teething, sore gums, or ulcerated mouth. The tooth of a wolf tied on as an amulet keeps away childish terrors and ailments due to teething, as does also a piece of wolf's skin. Indeed the largest teeth of wolves tied as an amulet even on horses are said to give them unwearied power of speed. Hare's rennet applied to the mothers' breasts checks the diarrhoea of babies. Ass's liver mixed with a moderate amount of panaces and let drip into the mouth protects babies from epilepsy and other diseases; the treatment, it is prescribed, should continue for forty days. Ass's hide laid on babies keeps them free from fears. The first teeth of horses to fall out make the cutting of teeth easy for babies who wear them as an amulet, a more efficacious one if the teeth have not touched the ground. Ox spleen in honey is administered internally and externally for painful spleen; for running sores with honey ... a calf's spleen boiled in wine, beaten up, and applied to little sores in the mouth. The brain of a she-goat, passed through a golden ring, is given drop by drop by the Magi to babies, before they are fed with milk, to guard them from epilepsy and other diseases of babies. Restless babies, especially girls, are quietened by an amulet of goat's dung wrapped in a piece of cloth. Rubbing the gums with goat's milk or hares' brains makes easy the cutting of teeth.

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§ 28.79.1  Cato thought that to take hare as food is soporific, and a popular belief is that it also adds charm to the person for nine days, a flippant pun, but so strong a belief must have some justification. According to the Magi the gall of a she-goat — she must be an animal sacrificed — induces sleep if applied to the eyes or placed under the pillow. Sweats are checked by rubbing the body with myrtle oil and ash of goat's horn.

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§ 28.80.1  Aphrodisiacs are: an application of wild-boar's gall, pig's marrow swallowed, or an application of ass's suet mixed with a gander's grease; also the fluid that Virgil too describes as coming from a mare after copulation, the testicles of a horse, dried so that they may be powdered into drink, the right testis of an ass taken in wine, or a portion of it worn as an amulet on a bracelet; or the foam of an ass after copulation, collected in a red cloth and enclosed, as Osthanes tells us, in silver. Salpe prescribes an ass's genital organ to be plunged seven times into hot oil, and the relevant parts to be rubbed therewith, Dalion the ash from it to be taken in drink, or the urine of a bull after copulation to be drunk, or the mud itself made by it applied to the pubic parts. On the other hand antaphrodisiac for men is an application of mouse's dung. Intoxication is kept away by the roasted lung of a wild boar or pig, taken in food the same day on an empty stomach, or the lung used may be that of a kid.

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§ 28.81.1  In addition, wonderful things are reported of the same animals: that if a horse casts his shoe, as often happens, and some one picks it up and puts it away, it is a cure of hiccoughs in those who remember where they have put it; that a wolf's liver is like a horse's hoof; that horses burst themselves which, carrying a rider, follow the tracks of wolves; that there is a kind of quarrelsome force in the pastern bones of pigs; that if, in case of fire, a little dung is brought out of the stables, sheep and oxen are more easily pulled out and do not run back; that the flesh of he-goats does not taste strong if on the day they are killed they have eaten barley bread or drunk diluted laser; that no meat, salted when the moon is on the wane, is eaten by maggots. So much care has been taken to leave nothing out, that I find that a deaf hare fattens more quickly, and that there are also medicines made for animals: it is prescribed that if draught cattle suffer from haemorrhage, there should be injected pig's dung in wine; and that for the diseases of oxen suet, native sulphur, and a decoction of wild garlic, should all be pounded and given in wine, or else fox fat; that horse flesh thoroughly boiled and taken in drink cures the diseases of pigs, while those of all quadrupeds are cured by a she-goat boiled whole with the hide and a bramble toad; that chickens are not touched by foxes if they have eaten dried fox-liver, or if the cocks have trodden the hens wearing a piece of fox skin round their necks; similarly with a weasel's gall; that the oxen in Cyprus eat human excrement to cure themselves of colic; that the hoofs of oxen are not chafed underneath if the bases of their horns are first rubbed with liquid pitch; that wolves do not enter a field if one is caught, his legs broken, a knife driven into the body, the blood sprinkled a little at a time around the boundaries of that field, and the body itself buried in that place at which the dragging of it began; or if the share, with which that year the first furrow of that field was cut, is knocked from the plough and burnt on the hearth of the Lares where the family assemble, a wolf will harm no animal in that field so long as the custom is kept up. We will now turn to animals in a peculiar class by themselves, which are not either tame or wild.

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§ 29.1.1  THE nature of remedies, and the great number of those already described or waiting to be described, compel me to say more about the art of medicine itself, although I am aware that no one hitherto has treated the subject in Latin, and that the judgement passed on all new endeavours is uncertain, especially on such as arc barren of all charm, and the difficulty of setting them forth is so great. But since it is likely to come into the minds of all students of the subject to ask why ever things ready to hand and appropriate have become obsolete in medical practice, the thought occurs at once that it is both a wonder and a shame that none of the arts has been more unstable, or even now more often changed, although none is more profitable. To its pioneers medicine assigned a place among the gods and a home in heaven, and even today medical aid is in many ways sought from the oracle. Then medicine became more famous even through sin, for legend said that Aesculapius was struck by lightning for bringing Tyndareus back to life. But medicine did not cease to give out that by its agency other men had come to life again, being famous in Trojan times, in which its renown was more assured, but only for the treatment of wounds.

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§ 29.2.1  The subsequent story of medicine, strange to say, lay hidden in darkest night down to the Peloponnesian War, when it was restored to the light by Hippocrates, who was born in the very famous and powerful island of Cos, sacred to Aesculapius. It had been the custom for patients recovered from illness to inscribe in the temple of that god an account of the help that they had received, so that afterwards similar remedies might be enjoyed. Accordingly Hippocrates, it is said, wrote out these inscriptions, and, as our countryman Varro believes, after the temple had been burnt, founded that branch of medicine called 'clinical.' Afterwards there was no limit to the profit from medical practice, for one of the pupils of Hippocrates, Prodicus, born in Selymbria, founded iatraliptice ('ointment cure'), and so discovered revenue for the anointers even and drudges of the doctors.

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§ 29.3.1  Changes from their tenets were made, with a flood of verbiage, by Chrysippus, and from Chrysippus also a violent change was made by his pupil Erasistratus, a son of the daughter of Aristotle. For curing King Antiochus he received a hundred talents from King Ptolemy, his son, to begin my account of the prizes also of the profession.

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§ 29.4.1  Another medical clique, calling themselves 'Empirics' because they relied on experience, arose in Sicily, where Acron of Agrigentum received support from Empedocles, the physical scientist.

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§ 29.5.1  These schools disagreed with each other, and were all condemned by Herophilus, who divided pulsation into rhythmic feet for the various periods of life. Then this sect also was abandoned, because it was necessary for its members to have book-learning, and that sect also was changed that afterwards had been founded, as I have related, by Asclepiades. He had a pupil called Themison, who at first followed his master, but then later in life he also changed his tenets, a further change being made by Antonius Musa, another pupil of Asclepiades, with the support of the late Emperor Augustus, whose life in a dangerous illness he had saved by reversing the treatment. I pass over many famous physicians, among them men like Cassius, Calpetanus, Arruntius and Rubrius. Two hundred and fifty thousand sesterces were their annual incomes from the Emperors. Q. Stertinius said that the Emperors were in his debt because he had been content with an income of five hundred thousand sesterces a year, proving by a counting of homes that his city practice had brought in six hundred thousand. A like fortune also was showered by Claudius Caesar upon his brother, and the estates, although exhausted by beautifying Naples with buildings, left to the heir thirty million, Arruntius alone in the same age leaving as much. Then there arose Vettius Valens, celebrated for his intrigue with Messalina, wife of Claudius Caesar, and equally so for his eloquence. Chancing to gain followers and power he founded a new sect. The same generation in the principate of Nero rushed over to Thessalus, who swept away all received doctrines, and preached against the physicians of every age with a sort of rabid frenzy. The wisdom and talent he showed can be fully judged even by one piece of evidence: on his monument on the Appian Way he described himself as iatronices, the conqueror of physicians. No actor, no driver of a three-horse chariot, was attended by greater crowds than he as he walked abroad in public, when Crinas of Massilia united medicine with another art, being of a rather careful and superstitious nature, and regulated the diet of patients by the motions of the stars according to the almanacs of the astronomers, keeping watch for the proper times, and outstripped Thessalus in influence. Recently he left ten millions, and the sum he spent upon building the walls of his native city and other fortifications was almost as much. These men were ruling our destinies when suddenly the state was invaded by Charmis, also from Massilia, who condemned not only previous physicians but also hot baths, persuading people to bathe in cold water even during the winter frosts. His patients he plunged into tanks, and we used to see old men, consulars, actually stiff with cold in order to show off. Of this we have today a confirmation even in the writings of Annaeus Seneca. There is no doubt that all these, in their hunt for popularity by means of some novelty, did not hesitate to buy it with our lives. Hence those wretched, quarrelsome consultations at the bedside of the patient, no consultant agreeing with another lest he should appear to acknowledge a superior. Hence too that gloomy 'inscription on monuments.' It was the crowd of 'physicians that killed me.' Medicine changes every day, being furbished up again and again, and we are swept along on the puffs of the clever brains of Greece. It is obvious that anyone among them who acquires power of speaking at once assumes supreme command over our life and slaughter, just as if thousands of peoples do not live without physicians, though not without physic, as the Roman people have done for more than six hundred years, although not slow themselves to welcome science and art, being actually greedy for medicine until trial led them to condemn it.

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§ 29.6.1  In fact this is the time to review the outstanding features of medical practices in the days of our fathers. Cassius Hemina, one of our earliest authorities, asserts that the first physician to come to Rome was Archagathus, son of Lysanias, who migrated from the Peloponnesus in the year of the city 535, when Lucius Aemilius and Marcus Livius were consuls. He adds that citizen rights were given him, and a surgery at the crossway of Acilius was bought with public money for his own use. They say that he was a wound specialist, and that his arrival at first was wonderfully popular, but presently from his savage use of the knife and cautery he was nicknamed 'Executioner,' and his profession, with all physicians, became objects of loathing. The truth of this can be seen most plainly in the opinion of Marcus Cato, whose authority is very little enhanced by his triumph and censorship; so much more comes from his personality. Therefore I will lay before my readers his very words.

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§ 29.7.1  I shall speak about those Greek fellows in can their proper place, son Marcus, and point out the result of my enquiries at Athens, and convince you what benefit comes from dipping into their literature, and not making a close study of it. They are a quite worthless people, and an intractable one, and you must consider my words prophetic. When that race gives us its literature it will corrupt all things, and even all the more if it sends hither its physicians. They have conspired together to murder all foreigners with their physic, but this very thing they do for a fee, to gain credit and to destroy us easily. They are also always dubbing us foreigners, and to fling more filth on us than on others they give us the foul nickname of Opici. I have forbidden you to have dealings with physicians.

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§ 29.8.1  And this Cato died in the 605th year of the City and the 85th of his own life, so that nobody can think that he lacked opportunities in public life, or length of years in private life, to gather experiences. What then? Are we to believe that he condemned a very useful thing? No, by heaven! For he adds the medical treatment by which he prolonged his own life and that of his wife to an advanced age, by these very remedies in fact with which I am now dealing, and he claims to have a notebook of recipes, by the aid of which he treated his son, servants, and household; these I rearrange under the diseases for which they are used. It was not medicine that our forefathers condemned, but the medical profession, chiefly because they refused to pay fees to profiteers in order to save their lives. For this reason even when Aesculapius was brought as a god to Rome, they are said to have built his temple outside the city, and on another occasion upon an island, and when, a long time too after Cato, they banished Greeks from Italy, to have expressly included physicians. I will magnify yet further their wisdom. Medicine alone of the Greek arts we serious Romans have not yet practised; in spite of its great profits only a very few of our citizens have touched upon it, and even these were at once deserters to the Greeks; nay, if medical treatises are written in a language other than Greek they have no prestige even among unlearned men ignorant of Greek, and if any should understand them they have less faith in what concerns their own health. Accordingly, heaven knows, the medical profession is the only one in which anybody professing to be a physician is at once trusted, although nowhere else is an untruth more dangerous. We pay however no attention to the danger, so great for each of us is the seductive sweetness of wishful thinking. Besides this, there is no law to punish criminal ignorance, no instance of retribution. Physicians acquire their knowledge from our dangers, making experiments at the cost of our lives. Only a physician can commit homicide with complete impunity. Nay, the victim, not the criminal, is abused; his is the blame for want of self-control, and it is actually the dead who are brought to account. Panels of judges are tested according to custom by the censorial powers of the Emperor; their examination invades the privacy of our homes; to give a verdict on a petty sum a man is summoned from Cadiz and the Pillars of Hercules; indeed, before the penalty of exile can be inflicted forty-five selected men are given power to vote on it; yet on the judge himself what manner of men sit in consultation to murder him out of hand! We deserve it all, so long as not one of us cares to know what is necessary for his own good health. We walk with the feet of others, we recognise our acquaintances with the eyes of others, rely on others' memory to make our salutations, and put into the hands of others our very lives; the precious things of nature, which support life, we have quite lost. We have nothing else of our own save our luxuries. I will not abandon Cato exposed by me to the hatred of so vainglorious a profession, or yet that Senate which shared his views, and that without seizing, as one might expect, any chances of accusation against the profession. For what has been a more fertile source of poisonings? Whence more conspiracies against wills? Yes, and through it too adulteries occur even in our imperial homes, that of Eudemus with Livia, wife of Drusus Caesar, and that of Valens with the royal lady with whom his name is linked. We may grant that the blame for such sins may lie with persons, not with the medical profession; Cato, I believe, had no more fears for Rome about these matters than he had about the presence in Rome of royal ladies. Let me not even bring charges against their avarice, their greedy bargains made with those whose fate lies in the balance, the prices charged for anodynes, the earnest-money paid for death, or their mysterious instructions, that a cataract should be moved away and not pulled off. The result is that the brightest side of the picture is the vast number of marauders; for it is not shame but the competition of rivals that brings down fees. It is well known that the Charmis aforesaid exchanged one sick provincial for 200,000 sesterces by a bargain with Alcon the wound-surgeon; that Charmis was condemned and fined by the Emperor Claudius the sum of 1,000,000 sesterces, yet as an exile in Gaul and on his return from banishment he amassed a like sum within a few years. Let the blame for this sort of thing also be laid on persons. I must not accuse even the dregs of that mob or its ignorance: the irresponsibility of the physicians themselves, with their out-of-the-way use of hot water in sickness, their strict fasts for patients, who when in a fainting condition are stuffed with food several times a day, their thousand ways moreover of changing their minds, their orders to the kitchen, and their compound ointments; for none of life's seductive attractions have they refrained from touching. I am inclined to believe that our ancestors were displeased with imports from abroad and with the fixing of prices by foreigners, but not that Cato foresaw these things when he condemned the profession. There is an elaborate mixture called theriace, which is compounded of countless ingredients, although Nature has given as many remedies, anyone of which would be enough by itself. The Mithridatic antidote is composed of fifty-four ingredients, no two of them having the same weight, while of some is prescribed one sixtieth part of one denarius. Which of the gods, in the name of Truth, fixed these absurd proportions? No human brain could have been sharp enough. It is plainly a showy parade of the art, and a colossal boast of science. And not even the physicians know their facts; I have discovered that instead of Indian cinnabar there is commonly added to medicines, through a confusion of names, red lead, which, as I shall point out when I discuss pigments, is a poison. These things however concern the health of individuals; but those other practices, which Cato feared and foresaw, much less harmful and less regarded, such as the heads of that profession themselves admit about themselves, those, I say, have ruined the morals of the Empire, I mean the practices to which we submit when in health — wrestlers' ointments, as though they were intended to treat ill health, broiling baths, by which they have persuaded us that food is cooked in our bodies, so that everybody leaves them the weaker for the treatment, and the most submissive are carried out to be buried, the draughts taken fasting, vomitings followed by further heavy potations, effeminate depilations produced by their resins, and even the pubes of women exposed to public view. It is certainly true that our degeneracy, due to medicine more than to anything else, proves daily that Cato was a genuine prophet and oracle when he stated that it is enough to dip into the works of Greek brains without making a close study of them. Thus much must be said in defence of that Senate and those 600 years of the Roman State, against a profession where the treacherous conditions allow good men to give authority to the worst, and at the same time against the stupid convictions of certain people who consider nothing beneficial unless it is costly. For I feel sure that some will be disgusted at the animals I shall treat of, although Virgil did not disdain to speak quite unnecessarily of ants and weevils, and of: -

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§ 29.8.2  'sleeping places heaped up by cockroaches that avoid the light.'

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§ 29.8.3  Nor did Homer disdain amid the battles of the gods to tell of the greed of the fly, nor yet did Nature disdain to create them because she creates man. Therefore let each take into account, not things themselves, but causes and results.

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§ 29.9.1  But I shall commence with admitted medical aids, that is, with wools and eggs, to give first honours to things of the first importance. Certain matters even out of their proper place it will be necessary to discuss, at least as incidental asides. Nor would material be wanting for rhetoric if it pleased me to pay attention to anything else than to making my work trustworthy, seeing that fable even says that among the first a medicines was one from the ashes and nest of the phoenix, just as though the story were fact and not myth. It is to joke with mankind to point out remedies that return only after a thousand years. The old Romans assigned to wool even supernatural powers, for they bade brides touch with it the doorposts of their new homes; and besides dress and protection from cold, unwashed wool supplies very many remedies if dipped in oil and wine or vinegar, according as the particular need is for an emollient or a pungent remedy, for an astringent or a relaxing one, being applied, and frequently moistened, for dislocations and aching sinews. For dislocations some add salt also; others apply with wool pounded rue and fat, likewise for bruises and swellings. To rub too the teeth and gums with wool and honey is said to make the breath more pleasant, and to fumigate with wool benefits phrenitis. Nose bleeding is checked by inserting wool and rose oil; another way is to put it into the ears and plug them rather firmly. It is applied moreover with honey to old sores. Wounds it heals if dipped in wine, or vinegar, or cold water and oil, and then squeezed out. A ram's fleece washed in cold water and soaked in oil, soothes inflammations of the uterus in women's complaints, and by fumigation reduces prolapsus. Unwashed wool applied or used as a pessary extracts a dead foetus; it also stays uterine fluxes. Plugged into the bites of a mad dog it is taken away after the seventh day. With cold water it cures hangnails. Again, dipped into a hot mixture of soda, sulphur, oil, vinegar and liquid pitch, all as hot as possible, and applied twice a day, wool relieves lumbago. Unwashed ram's wool also stays bleeding if bound round the joints of the extremities. The most highly esteemed wool is: all from the neck, and that from the districts of Galatia, Tarentum, Attica, and Miletus. Unwashed wool is applied to excoriations, blows, bruises, contusions, crushed parts, galling, falls, pains in the head and elsewhere, and with vinegar and rose oil to inflammation of the stomach. The ash of wool is applied to chafings, wounds, and burns. lit is added to medicaments for the eyes, and also used for fistulas and suppurating ears. For this purpose some take shorn wool, others wool plucked out, cut off the ends, dry, card, place in a vessel of unbaked clay, steep in honey, and burn. Others place under it a layer of pitch-pine chips, make several alternate layers, sprinkle with oil, and set on fire. The ash is rubbed by the hand into little pots, with water added, and then allowed to settle. The operation is repeated several times, with changes of water, until the ash becomes slightly astringent to the tongue without stinging it; then it is stored away. It has a caustic property that makes it an excellent detergent for the eyelids.

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§ 29.10.1  Moreover, even the greasy sweat of sheep that clings to the wool under the hollows of their flanks and forelegs — it is called oesypum (suint) — has uses almost innumerable. The most prized is that obtained from Attic sheep. There are several ways of preparing it, but the most approved is to take fresh-plucked wool from the parts mentioned, or first to gather the greasy sweat from any part, then warm it in a bronze pot over a slow fire, cool it again, collect in an earthen vessel the fat that floats on the top, and boil again the stuff originally used. Both the fats obtained are washed in cold water, strained through linen, heated in the sun until they become white and transparent, and then stored away in a box of stennum. The test of its purity is that it should retain the strong smell of the grease, and when rubbed with the hand in water, should not melt, but become white like white-lead. It is very useful for inflammations of the eyes and hard places on the eyelids. Some bake it in an earthen jar until it is no longer fatty, holding that in this condition it is a more useful remedy for sores that have eaten into the eyelids, for indurations there, and for watery itch at the corners. It heals, not only sores of the eyes, but also with goose grease those of the mouth and genitals. With melilot and butter it cures inflammations of the uterus, chaps in the anus, and condylomata. Its other uses I shall set out in order later on. The sweaty grease too that gathers into pills about the tail, dried by itself and ground to powder, is wonderfully beneficial if rubbed on the teeth, even when these are loose, and on the gums when they suffer from malignant, running sores. Furthermore, clean pieces of fleece are applied to blind pains, either by themselves or with sulphur added, and their ash to afflictions of the genitals, being so potent that they are even placed over medicinal applications. Wool is also the best of remedies for sheep themselves if they lose their appetite and will not pasture. For if their tails are tied as tightly as possible with wool plucked therefrom they at once begin to feed, and it is said that all the tail outside the knot dies off.

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§ 29.11.1  Wool has also a close affinity with eggs, the two being laid together on the forehead for eye fluxes. There is no need for the wool, when so used, to have been treated with radicula, or for anything else except to spread on it white of egg and powdered frankincense. White of egg by itself, poured into the eyes, checks fluxes and cools in laminations, although some prefer to add saffron, and eggs can take the place of water in eye salves. But for infant ophthahnia scarcely anything else is so remedial as egg mixed with fresh butter. Eggs beaten up with olive oil relieve erysipelas if beet leaves are tied on top. White of egg mixed with pounded gum ammoniac sets back eyelashes, and removes spots on the face with pine nuts and a little honey. The face itself if smeared with egg is not burnt by the sun. If scalds are at once covered with egg they do not blister — some add barley flour and a pinch of salt — while sores from a burn are made wonderfully better by roasted barley with white of egg and pig's lard. The same treatment is used for affections of the anus, and even for procidence in the case of infants; for chaps on the feet the white of eggs is boiled down with two denarii by weight of white lead, an equal weight of litharge, a little myrrh, and then wine; for erysipelas is used the white of three eggs with starch. It is also said that white of egg closes wounds and expels stone from the bladder. The yolk of eggs, boiled hard, mixed with a little saffron and honey, and applied in woman's milk, relieves pains of the eyes; or it may be placed over the eyes on wool with rose oil and honey wine, or applied in honey wine with ground celery-seed and pearl barley. Swallowed liquid, without letting it touch the teeth, the yolk by itself is good for cough, catarrh of the chest, and rough throats. Applied externally or taken internally the raw yolk is specific for the bite of the haemorrhois. It is also good for the kidneys, and for irritation or ulceration of the bladder. For spitting of blood five yolks of egg are swallowed raw in a hemina of wine, and for dysentery they are taken with the ash of their shells, poppy juice, and wine. With the same weight of plump raisins and pomegranate rind yolk of egg is given in equal doses for three days to sufferers from coeliac affections. Another way is to take the yolks of three eggs, three ounces of old bacon fat and of honey, and three cyathi of old wine, beat them up until they are of the consistency of honey, and take in water when required pieces of the size of a filbert. Yet another way is to fry three eggs after steeping them whole the day before in vinegar, and to use them so for spleen diseases, but to take them in three cyathi of must for the spitting of blood. Eggs are used with bulbs and honey for persistent bruises. Boiled and taken in wine they also check menstruation; inflation too of the uterus if applied raw with oil and wine. They are useful too, with goose grease and rose oil, for pains in the neck; for affections of the anus also, if hardened over fire and applied while the additional benefit of the heat is still retained; for condylomata with rose oil; for burns they are hardened in water, then over hot coals; when the shells have been burned off, finally the yolks are applied in rose oil. Eggs become entirely yolk (they are then called sitista) when the hen has sat upon them for three days before they are taken up. The chicks found in eggs taken with half a gall nut settle a disordered stomach, but care must be taken to eat no other food for the next two hours. There are also given to dysentery patients chicks boiled in the egg itself and added to a hemina of dry wine and the same quantity of oil and pearl barley. The membrane peeled off the shell of a raw or boiled egg heals cracks in the lips. The shell reduced to ash and taken in wine cures discharges of blood. It must be burnt without the membrane. From this ash is also made a dentitrice. It also checks menstruation if applied with myrrh. The strength of the shells is so great that no force or weight will break them when the eggs are perpendicular, but only when the oval is slightly inclined. Childbirth is made easier by whole eggs, with rue, dill, and cummin, taken in wine. Itch and irritation of the skin are removed by a mixture of oil, cedar-resin, and eggs; running ulcers too on the head by eggs mixed with cyclamen. For spitting of pus or blood is swallowed a raw egg warmed with juice of cutleek and an equal amount of Greek honey. There are given to patients with a cough boiled eggs beaten up with honey, or raw eggs with raisin wine and an equal measure of oil. Eggs are also injected for complaints of the male organs, the dose being one egg with three cyathi of raisin wine and half an ounce of starch, given after the bath; for snake bite they are applied after boiling them and beating up with the addition of cress. How helpful in many ways eggs are as food is well known, for they pass a swollen throat and incidentally by their heat soothe it. There is no other food so nourishing in sickness without overloading the stomach, and it has the nature of both food and drink. I have said that the shell is softened of eggs steeped in vinegar. Eggs so prepared and kneaded into bread with flour give refreshment to patients with coeliac affections. Some think it more useful, after softening them in this way, to bake them in shallow pans; when so prepared they check not only diarrhoea but also excessive menstruation; or if the attack is specially severe they are swallowed raw with flour and water, or the yolks from these eggs by themselves are boiled hard in vinegar, and then roasted with ground pepper to check diarrhoea. There is also made for dysentery an excellent remedy by pouring an egg into a new earthen vessel, and so that there may be equal quantities of all the ingredients, in the shell of this egg are measured honey, then vinegar, and oil, which are mixed, and stirred many times. The more excellent the quality of these ingredients the more sovereign will the remedy be. Others substitute for oil and vinegar the same amounts of red resin and wine. There is yet another method of compounding: only the quantity of oil remains the same, and with it are boiled down together two sixtieths of a denarius of pine bark, one of the shrub I have called rhus, and five oboli of honey, but no other food must be taken until four hours have passed. Many also treat colic by beating up two eggs together with four heads of garlic, warming with a hemina of wine, and so giving the mixture as a draught. To omit no attractive feature of eggs, white of egg mixed with quicklime fastens together broken glass. So great indeed is its power that wood dipped in egg will not take fire, and not even cloth stained with it will burn. But I have been speaking only about farmyard hen's eggs; there remain also other birds, the eggs of which are of great utility; about them I shall speak on the proper occasions.

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§ 29.12.1  There is, moreover, a kind of egg which is very famous in the Gauls, but not mentioned by the Greeks. Snakes intertwined in great numbers in a studied embrace make these round objects with the saliva from their jaws and the foam from their bodies. It is called a 'wind egg.' The Druids say that it is tossed aloft by the snakes' hisses, and that it ought to be caught in a military cloak before it can touch the earth. The catcher, they say, must flee on horseback, for the serpents chase him until they are separated by some intervening river. A test of a genuine egg is that it floats against the current, even if it is set in gold. Such is the clever cunning of the Magi in wrapping up their frauds that they give out as their opinion that it must be caught at a fixed period of the moon, as if agreement between snakes and moon for this act depended upon the will of man. I indeed have seen this egg, which was like a round apple of medium size, and remarkable for its hard covering pitted with many gristly cup-hollows, as it were, like those on the tentacles of an octopus. The Druids praise it. highly as the giver of victory in the law-courts and of easy access to potentates. Herein they are guilty of such lying fraud that a Roman knight of the Vocontii, for keeping one in his bosom during a lawsuit, was executed by the late Emperor Claudius, and for no other reason. However, this embrace and fertile union of snakes seem to be the reason why foreign nations, when discussing peace terms, have made the herald's staff surrounded with figures of snakes; and it is not the custom for the snakes on a herald's staff to have a crest.

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§ 29.13.1  As in this Book I am going to treat of the very useful goose egg, and of the goose itself, our respects are due to the famous preparation called commagenum. It is made from goose grease, a very popular medicament everywhere, [and for this purpose especially in Commagene, a district of Syria] with cinnamon, cassia, white pepper, and the herb called cornmagene. The mixture is put into vessels and buried in snow; it has a pleasant smell, and is very useful for chills, sprains, blind or sudden pains, and for all the complaints treated by anodynes being equally good as an ointment and as a medicine. It is also prepared in Syria in another way. The grease of the birds is treated in the manner I shall describe, and there are added to it erysisceptrum, balsam-wood, ground palm, and also crushed reed, the same quantity of each as of the grease, the whole being warmed two or three times in wine. But it must be prepared in winter, for it will riot set in summer unless wax is added. There are many other remedies made from the goose, which surprise me as much as the many from the goat, for the goose and the crow are said to be afflicted with disease from the beginning of summer well into the autumn.

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§ 29.14.1  I have spoken of the fame won by the geese which detected the ascent of the Capitoline Hill by the Gauls. For the same reasons dogs are punished with death every year, being crucified alive on a cross of elder between the temple of Juventas and that of Sununanus. But the customs of the ancients compel me to say several other things about the dog. Sucking puppies were thought to be such pure food that they even took the place of sacrificial victims to placate the divinities. Genita Mana is worshipped with the sacrifice of a puppy, and at dinners in honour of the gods even now puppy flesh is put on the table. That it was commonly in fact a special dish at inaugural banquets there is evidence in the comedies of Plautus's Dog's blood is supposed to be the best remedy for arrow poison, and this animal seems also to have shown mankind the use of emetics. Other highly praised remedies from the dog I shall speak of on the appropriate occasions. I will now go on with my proposed plan.

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§ 29.15.1  For snake bites efficacious remedies are considered to be fresh dung of sheep boiled down in wine and applied, and mice cut in two and placed on the wound. The nature of mice is not to be despised, especially in their agreement, as I have said, with the heavenly bodies, for the number of their liver filaments becomes greater or less with the light of the moon. The Magi declare that if a mouse's liver in a fig is offered to pigs, that animal will follow the offerer, adding that it has a similar effect on a human being also, but that the spell is broken by drinking a cyathus of oil.

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§ 29.16.1  Of weasels there are two kinds, one wild and larger than the other, called by the Greeks ictis. The gall of both is said to be efficacious against asps, though otherwise poisonous. The other kind, however, which strays about our homes, and moves daily, as Cicero tells us, its nest and kittens, chases away snakes. Its flesh, preserved in salt and given in doses of one denarius by weight, is given in three cyathi of drink to those who have been bitten, or its stomach stuffed with coriander seed is kept to dry and taken in wine. A kitten of the weasel is even better still for this purpose.

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§ 29.17.1  Certain things, revolting to speak of, are so strongly recommended by our authorities that it would not be right to pass them by, if it is indeed true that medicines are produced by that famous sympathy and antipathy between things. The nature for instance of bugs, a most foul creature and nauseating even to speak of, is said to be effective against the bite of serpents, and especially of asps, as also against all poisons. As proof, they say that hens are not killed by an asp on the day they have eaten bugs, and that their flesh then is most beneficial to such as have been bitten. Of the accounts given the least disgusting is how they are applied to bites with the blood of a tortoise, how fumigation with them makes leeches loose their hold, and how they destroy leeches swallowed by animals if administered in drink. And yet some actually anoint the eyes with bugs pounded in salt and woman's milk, and the ears with bugs in honey and rose oil. Those which are field bugs and found in rnallows are burnt, and the ash mixed with rose oil is poured into the ears. The other virtues attributed to bugs, that they are cures for vomiting, quartans, and other diseases, although it is prescribed that they should be swallowed in egg, wax, or a bean, I hold to be imaginary and not worth repeating. Only as a remedy for lethargy are they employed with reason, for they overcome the narcotic poison of asps, and are given in doses of seven in a cyathus of water, and for children in doses of four. For strangury bugs have been inserted into the urethra. So true it is that the Universal Mother gave birth to nothing without very good reasons. Furthermore, a couple of bugs attached to the left arm in wool stolen from shepherds have been said to keep away night fevers, and day fevers when attached in a red cloth. On the other hand, the scolopendra is their enemy, and kills them by fumigation.

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§ 29.18.1  Asps kill those they strike by torpor and coma, inflicting of all serpents the most incurable bites. But their venom, if it comes into contact with the blood or a fresh wound, is immediately fatal, if with an old sore, its action is delayed. Apart from this, however much is drunk, it is harmless, having no corrosive property. And so the flesh of animals killed by their bite may be eaten with safety. I should hesitate to put forward a remedy obtained from these creatures, had not Marcus Varro, in the seventy-third year of his life, recorded that a sovereign remedy for asp bites is for the victim to drink his own urine.

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§ 29.19.1  The basilisk, which puts to flight even the very serpents, killing them sometimes by its smell, is said to be fatal to a man if it only looks at him. Its blood the Magi praise to the skies, telling how it thickens as does pitch, and resembles pitch in colour, but becomes a brighter red than cinnabar when diluted. They claim that by it petitions to potentates, and even prayers to the gods, are made successful; that it provides cures for disease and amulets against sorcery. Some call it Saturn's blood.

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§ 29.20.1  The dragon has no venom. Its head, buried under the threshold of doors after the gods have been propitiated by worship, brings, we are assured, good luck to a home; those rubbed with an ointment of his eyes, dried and beaten up with honey, are not panic-stricken, however nervous, by phantoms of the night; the fat of the heart, tied in the skin of a gazelle on the upper arm by deer sinew, makes for victory in lawsuits; the first vertebra smoothes the approach to potentates; and its teeth, wrapped in the skin of a roe and tied on with deer sinew, make masters kind and potentates gracious. But all these are nothing compared with a mixture that the lying Magi assert makes men invincible, composed of: the tail and head of a dragon, hair from the forehead of a lion and lion's marrow, foam of a victorious racehorse, and the claw of a dog, all attached in deer hide with deer sinew and gazelle sinew plaited alternately. To expose these lies will be no less worth while than to describe their remedies for snakebite, for these too are some of the sorceries of the Magi. Dragon's fat is shunned by venomous creatures, and so too, when burnt, is that of the ichneumon; they shun too those rubbed with nettles pounded in vinegar.

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§ 29.21.1  The head of a viper, placed on the bite, even though the same viper did not inflict it, is infinitely beneficial, as is the snake itself, held up on a stick in steam — it is said to undo the harm done — or if the viper is burnt and the ash applied. But Nigidius asserts that a serpent instinctively comes back to the person it has bitten. Some split skilfully the head between the ears, in order to extract the pebble it is said to swallow when alarmed, but others use the entire head itself. From the viper are made the lozenges called by the Greeks theriaci. Lengths of three fingers are cut off from head and tail, the intestines drawn with the livid part that adheres to the spine, the rest of the body, with the vertebrae extracted and fine flour added, is thoroughly boiled in a pan of water with dill, and the mixture dried in the shade and made into lozenges, which are used in making many medicameats. We must note, it appears, that only from the viper can the preparation be made. Some take the fat from the body, cleaned as described above, boil down with a sectarius of oil to one-half, add three drops from it when necessary to oil, and use as ointment to keep off all harmful creatures.

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§ 29.22.1  Furthermore, it is well known that the application of the entrails of a serpent itself is a help for the bites however hard to cure of any of them, and that those who once have swallowed the boiled liver of a viper are never afterwards bitten by a serpent. A snake too is venomous only when during the month it is angered by the moon, and it is beneficial if a snake is caught alive, beaten up in water, and a bite fomented with the preparation. Moreover, many remedies are believed to be obtained from a snake, as I shall relate in their proper order, and this is why it is sacred to Aesculapius. Democritus indeed invents some weird stories about snakes, how for instance they make it possible to understand the language of birds. The Aesculapian snake [note: the word anguis is here used interchangeably with serpent] was brought to Rome from Bpidaurus, and a snake is commonly kept as a pet even in our homes; so that were not their eggs destroyed in fires there would be an incurable plague of them. The most beautiful snake in the world is the kind, called hydri, that is amphibious, no other snake being more venomous. Its liver when preserved does good to those who have been bitten. The scorpion when pounded up counteracts the poison of the spotted lizard, for there is made from these lizards an evil drug: if one has been drowned in wine it covers the face of those who drink it with an eruption of freckle-like spots. So women, plotting to spoil the beauty of rival courtesans, kill a spotted lizard in the ointment used by them. The remedy is yolk of egg, honey, and soda. The gall of this kind of lizard, beaten up in water, is said to attract weasels.

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§ 29.23.1  Of all venomous creatures the salamander is the most wicked, for while the others strike individuals, and do not kill several together, to say nothing (according to report) of their dying of remorse when they have bitten a man, and of earth's refusal to grant them further admission, the salamander can kill whole tribes unawares. For if it has crawled into a tree, it infects with its venom all the fruit, killing like aconite by its freezing property those who have eaten of it. Nay, moreover, if a slice of bread is placed upon wood or stone that has been touched by a salamander, or if one falls into a well, the bread and the water, like the fruit, are poisoned, while all the hair on the whole body falls off if its saliva has sprinkled any part whatever of the body, even the sole of the foot. Nevertheless, although it is so venomous a creature, some animals, such as pigs, eat it. Under the sway of that same antipathy between things it is likely that his venom is neutralized best of all by those who eat the salamander; but among approved remedies are cantharides taken in drink or a lizard taken in food. The other antidotes I have spoken of, and shall speak of, in the appropriate places. As to the power to protect against fires, which the Magi attribute to the animal, since according to them no other can put fire out, could the salamander really do so, Rome by trial would have already found out. Sextius tells us that as food the salamander, preserved in honey after entrails, feet, and head have been cut away, is aphrodisiac but he denies its power to put fire out.

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§ 29.24.1  Of birds, the chief protection against serpents is the vulture, and it has been noticed that there is less power in the black vulture. They say that the fumes of their burning feathers chase serpents away, and that those who carry about them a vulture's heart are protected not only from the attacks of serpents, but also from those of wild beasts, bandits, and angry potentates.

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§ 29.25.1  The flesh of chickens, torn away and applied warm to the bite, overcomes the venom of serpents, as will also a chicken's brain taken in wine. The Parthians prefer to put on the wound the brain of a hen. Chicken broth also, taken by the mouth, is a splendid remedy, being wonderfully good for many other purposes. Panthers and lions do not touch those rubbed over with this broth, especially if garlic has been boiled in it. A rather powerful purge is the broth of an old cock, which is also good for prolonged fevers, paralysed and palsied limbs, diseases of the joints, headaches, eye-fluxes, flatulence, loss of appetite, incipient tenesmus, complaints of liver, kidneys, and bladder, indigestion and asthma. And so instructions even are current for making it: they tell us that it is more effective boiled with sea-cabbage, or tunny-fish, or caper, or celery, or the herb mercury, with polypodium or dill, but most beneficial when three congii of water are boiled down to three heminae, with the above-mentioned herbs, cooled in the open air and administered, the best time being when an emetic has preceded. I will not pass over a marvel, though it has nothing to do with medicine: if the limbs of hens are stirred up in melted gold they absorb it all into themselves, so violent a poison of gold is chicken. But cocks themselves do not crow if they have a collar of wood shavings round their necks.

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§ 29.26.1  A help against snakebite is also flesh of doves or swallows freshly torn away, and the feet of a homed owl burnt with the herb plumbago. Speaking of this bird I will not omit a specimen of Magian fraud, for besides their other monstrous lies they declare that an horned owl's heart, placed on the left breast of a sleeping woman, makes her tell all her secrets, and that men carrying it into battle are made braver by it. From the horned owl's egg they prescribe recipes for the hair. Now who, I ask, could have ever looked at an horned owl's egg, when it is a portent to have seen the bird itself? Who in any case could have tried it, particularly on the hair? The blood, indeed, of a horned owl's chick is guaranteed even to curl the hair. Of much the same kind would seem to be also their stories about the bat: that if carried alive three times round the house and then fastened head downwards through the window, it acts as a talisman, and is specifically such to sheepfolds if carried round them three times and hung up by the feet over the threshold. Its blood also with thistle the Magi praise as one of the sovereign remedies for snakebite.

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§ 29.27.1  The phalangium is unknown to Italy and of several kinds. One is like the ant, but much larger, having a red head and the rest of the body black with white spots. Its wound is more painful than that of the wasp, and it lives especially near furnaces and mills. One remedy is to show to the bitten person another phalangium of the same kind; for this purpose are kept dead specimens. Their dry bodies are also found, which are pounded and taken as a remedy, as are a weasel's young prepared as I have described. Among classes of spiders the Greeks also include a phalangion which they distinguish by the name of 'wolf.' There is also a third kind of phalangium, a hairy spider with an enormous head. When this is cut open, there are said to be found inside two little worms, which, tied in deer skin as an amulet on women before sunrise, act as a contraceptive, as Caecilius has told us in his Commentarii. They retain this property for a year. Of all such preventives this only would it be right for me to mention, to help those women who are so prolific that they stand in need of such a respite. There is another phalangium called rhox, like a black grape, with a very small month under the abdomen, and very short legs as though not fully grown. Its bite is as painful as a scorpion's sting, forming in the urine as it were spider's webs The asterion is exactly like it, except that it is marked with white streaks. Its bite makes the knees weak. Worse than either is the blue spider; it is covered with black hair, and causes dimness of vision and vomit like spider's web. There is an even worse phalangium, which differs from the hornet only in having no wings. The bite from one of this kind also makes the body thin. The myrmecion in its head resembles the ant, with a black body marked by white spots, and a bite as painful as a wasp. There are two kinds of the phalanginm called tetragnathius, the worse of which has two white lines crossed on the middle of its head, and its bite makes the mouth swell; but the ash-coloured kind, which is whitish in its hind part, is less vicious. Least dangerous of all is the ash-coloured spider which spins its web all over our walls to catch flies. For the bites of all spiders remedial is a cock's brain with a little pepper taken in vinegar and water, five ants also taken in drink, the ash of sheep's dung applied in vinegar, or spiders themselves of any sort that have rotted in oil.

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§ 29.27.2  The bite of the shrewmouse is healed by lamb's rennet taken in wine, by the ash of a ram's hoof with honey, and by a young weasel, as I have prescribed for snakebite. If it has bitten draught-animals, a freshly killed mouse is applied with salt, or a bat's gall in vinegar. The shrew-mouse itself, torn asunder and applied, is a remedy for its own bite; but if a pregnant shrewmouse has bitten, it bursts open at once. It is best if the mouse applied is the one which gave the bite, but they preserve them for this purpose in oil, or enclosed in clay. Another remedy for its bite is earth from a wheel rut. For they say that it will not cross a wheel rut owing to a sort of natural torpor.

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§ 29.28.1  The stelio is said in its turn to be such a great enemy to scorpions that the mere sight of one strikes them with panic, and torpor with cold sweat. Accordingly they let it rot in oil and so smear on scorpion wounds. Some boil down that oil with litharge to make a sort of ointment which they thus apply. This lizard the Greeks call colotes, ascalabotes, or, galeotes. This kind is not found in Italy, for it is covered with spots, has a shrill cry, and feeds on spiders, all which characteristics are lacking in our stelios.

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§ 29.29.1  Beneficial too is ash of hen's dung applied, the liver of a python, a lizard or a mouse torn open, the scorpion laid on the wound it has itself inflicted, or roasted and taken in food or in two cyathi of neat wine. Scorpions are peculiar in that they do not sting the palm of the hand or touch any but hairy parts. A pebble of any kind, if the part next the ground is laid on the wound, relieves the pain, and a potsherd too is said to be a cure if a part covered with earth is applied just as it was taken up — those making the application must not look back, and must take care that the sun does not behold them — and another cure is an application of pounded earthworms. Many other remedies are obtained from earthworms, so they are kept in honey for this purpose. The night owl is an enemy of bees, wasps, hornets, and leeches, and those are not stung by them who carry about their person a beak of the woodpecker of Mars. Hostile to them are also the smallest of the locusts, which are wingless and called attelebi. There is also a venomous kind of ant, not generally found in Italy. Cicero calls it solipuga and in Baetica it is called salpuga. A bat's heart is hostile to these, as it is to all ants. I have said that cantharides are hostile to salamanders.

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§ 29.30.1  But herein arises a much-disputed question, for the fly taken in drink is a poison, causing excruciating pain in the bladder. Cossinus, a Roman knight, well known for his friendship with the Emperor Nero, fell a victim to lichen. Caesar called in a specialist physician from Egypt, who decided on preliminary treatment with Spanish fly taken in drink, and the patient died. But there is no doubt that, with juice of taminian grapes, sheep suet, or that of a she-goat, an external application is beneficial. In what part of the Spanish fly itself the poison lies authorities disagree; some think in the feet and in the head, but others say not. The only point agreed upon is that, wherever the poison lies, their wings help. The fly itself is bred from grub found in the sponge-like substance on the stalk of the wild rose especially, but also very plentifully on the ash. The third kind breeds on the white rose, but is less efficacious. The most potent flies of all are marked with yellow lines across their wings and are plump; much less potent are those that are small, broad and hairy; the least useful however are of one colour, and thin. They are stored away in an earthen pot, not lined with pitch, but the mouth closed with a cloth. They are covered with full-blown roses and hung over boiling vinegar and salt until the steam, passing through the cloth, suffocates them. Then they are stored away. Their property is to cauterise the flesh and to form scabs. Of the same character is the pine-caterpillar, which is found on the pitch-pine, and the buprestis, and they are prepared in a similar way. All these are very efficacious for leprous sores and lichen. They are also said to be emmenagogue and diuretic, and so Hippocrates used them also for dropsy. Spanish fly was the subject of a charge against Cato Uticensis that he had sold poison at an auction of royal property, for he had knocked some down for 60,000 sesterces. And I may remark in passing that at this sale there was sold for 30,000 sesterces ostrich suet, a far more useful fat for all purposes than goose-grease.

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§ 29.31.1  I have also mentioned a kinds of poisonous honey. To counteract it honey is used in which bees have died. The same honey is also a remedy for illness caused by eating fish.

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§ 29.32.1  If a person has been bitten by a mad dog, as protection from hydrophobia is given by an application to the wound of ash from the burnt head of a dog. Now all reduction to ash (that I may describe it once for all) should be carried out in the following way: a new earthen vessel is covered all over with clay and so put into a furnace. The same method is also good when the ash is to be taken in drink. Some have prescribed as a cure eating a dog's head. Others too have used as an amulet a worm from a dead dog, or placed in a cloth under the cup the sexual fluid of a bitch, or have rubbed into the wound the ash from the hair under the tail of the mad dog itself. Dogs run away from one who carries a dog's heart, and indeed do not hark if a dog's tongue is placed in the shoe under the big toe, or at those who carry the severed tail of a weasel which has afterwards been set free. Under the tongue of a mad dog is a slimy saliva, which given in drink prevents hydrophobia, but much the most useful remedy is the liver of the dog that bit in his madness to be eaten raw, if that can be done, if it cannot, cooked in any way, or a broth must be made from the boiled flesh. There is a little worm on the tongue of dogs which the Greeks call lytta (madness), and if this is taken away when they are baby puppies they neither go mad nor lose their appetite. It is also carried three times round fire and given to those bitten by a mad dog to prevent their going mad. The brains of poultry are an antidote, but to swallow them gives protection for that year only. They say that it is also efficacious to apply to the wound a cock's comb pounded up, or goose grease with honey. The flesh of dogs that have gone mad is also preserved in salt to be used for the same purposes given in food. Puppies too of the same sex as the bitten patient are immediately drowned and their livers swallowed raw. An application in vinegar of poultry dung, if it is red, is also of advantage, or the ash of a shrewmouse's tail (but the mutilated animal must be set free alive), an application in vinegar of a bit of earth from a swallow's nest, of the chicks of a swallow reduced to ash, or the skin or cast slough of snakes, pounded in wine with a male crab; for by it even when put away by itself in chests and cupboards they kill moths. So great is the virulence of this plague that even the urine of a mad dog does harm if trodden on, especially to those who are suffering from sores. A remedy is an application of horse dung sprinkled with vinegar and warmed in a fig. Less surprised at all this will be one who remembers that 'a dog will bite a stone thrown at him' has become a proverb to describe quarrelsomeness. It is said that he who voids his own urine on that of a dog will suffer numbness in his loins. The lizard called seps by some and chalcis by others, if taken in wine is a cure for its own bites.

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§ 29.33.1  For sorcerers' poisons obtained from the wild weasel a remedy is a copious draught of chicken broth made from an old bird; it is specific for aconite poisoning, and there should be added a dash of salt. Hens' dung, provided it is white, boiled down in hyssop or honey wine, is used for poisonous fungi and mushrooms, as well as for flatulence and suffocations — a matter for wonder, because if any animal save man should taste this dung, it will suffer from colic and flatulence. Goose blood, with the same quantity of oil, is good for the poison of sea hares, also for all sorcerers' poisons — it is kept with red Lemnian earth and the sap of white thorn, and five drachmae of the lozenges should be taken as a dose in three cyathi of water — also a baby weasel prepared as I have described. Lamb's rennet too is a powerful antidote to all sorcerers' poisons, as is the blood of Pontic ducks; and so when thickened it is also stored away and dissolved in wine. Some are of opinion that the blood of a female duck is more efficacious. In like manner general remedies for all poisons are the crop of storks, sheep's rennet, the broth of ram's flesh (which is specific for cantharides), likewise warmed sheep's milk, which is also good for those who have swallowed buprestis or aconite, the dung of wild doves (specific if quicksilver has been swallowed), and for arrow poisons the common weasel, preserved and taken in drink, two drachmae at a time.

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§ 29.34.1  Bald patches through mange are covered again with hair by an application of ash of sheep's dung with cyprus oil and honey, by the hooves, reduced to ash, of a mule of either sex, applied in myrtle oil; moreover, as our countryman Varro relates, by mouse dung, which he calls also muscerdae, or by the fresh heads of flies, but the patches must first be roughened with a fig leaf. Some use the blood of flies, others for ten days apply their ash with that of paper or nuts, but a third of the whole must be that of flies; others make a paste of fly ash, woman's milk, and cabbage, while some add honey only. No creature is thought to be less teachable or less intelligent than the fly; it is all the more wonderful that at the Olympic sacred games, after the bull has been sacrificed to the god they call Myiodes, clouds of flies depart from out Olympic territory. Hair lost by mange is restored by the ash of mice, their heads and tails, or their whole bodies, especially when this affliction is the result of sorcery; it is restored too by the ash of a hedgehog mixed with honey, or by its burnt skin with liquid pitch. The head indeed of this animal, reduced to ash, by itself restores the hair even to scars. But for this treatment the patches must first be prepared by shaving with a razor. Some too have preferred to use mustard in vinegar. All that will be said about the hedgehog will apply even more to the porcupine. Hair is also prevented from falling out by the ash of a lizard that, in the way I have described, has been burnt with the root of a fresh-cut reed, which must be chopped up fine so that the two may be consumed together, an ointment being made by the admixture of myrtle-oil. All the same results are given more efficaciously by green lizards, and with even greater benefit if there are added salt, bear's grease, and crushed onion. Some thoroughly boil ten green lizards at a time in ten sextarii of old oil, being content with one application a month. Vipers' skins reduced to ashes very quickly restore hair lost through mange, as does also an application of fresh hens' dung. A raven's egg, beaten up in a copper vessel and applied to the head after shaving it, imparts a black colour to the hair, but until it dries oil must be kept in the mouth lest the teeth too turn black at the same time; the application too must be made in the shade, and not washed off before three days have passed. Some use a raven's blood and brains added to dark wine; others thoroughly boil the raven itself and store it away at bed time in a vessel of lead. Some apply to patches of mange Spanish fly pounded with liquid pitch, first preparing the skin with soda — the application is caustic, and care must be taken not to cause deep sores — and prescribe that afterwards to the sores so formed be applied the heads, gall, and dung of mice with hellebore and pepper.

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§ 29.35.1  Nits are removed by dog fat, snakes taken in food like eels, or by the cast slough of snakes taken in drink; dandruff by sheep's gall with Cimolian chalk rubbed on the head until it dries off.

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§ 29.36.1  Headaches have a remedy in the heads of snails, cut off from those that are found without shells, being not yet complete, and the hard stony substance taken from them — it is of the width of a pebble — which are used as an amulet, while the small snails are crushed, and rubbed on the forehead; there is also wool grease; the bones from the head of a vulture attached as an amulet, or its brain with oil and cedar resin, the head being rubbed all over and the inner part of the nostrils smeared with the ointment; the brain of a crow or owl boiled and taken in food; a cock penned up without food for a day and a night, the sufferer fasting with him at the same time, feathers plucked from the neck, or the comb, being tied round the head; the application of a weasel reduced to ash; a twig from a kite's nest placed under the pillow; a mouse's skin burnt and the ash applied in vinegar; the little bone of a slug found between two wheel ruts, passed through gold, silver and ivory, and attached in dog skin as an amulet, a remedy that always does good to most. Applied in oil and vinegar to a fractured skull, cobweb does not come away until the wound is healed. Cobweb also stops bleeding from a razor cut, but haemorrhage from the brain is stayed by pouring into the wound the blood of goose or duck, or the grease of these birds with rose oil. The head of a snail cut off with a reed as he feeds in the morning, by preference when the moon is full, is attached in a linen cloth by a thread to the head of a sufferer from headaches, or else made into an ointment for the forehead with white wax, and an amulet attached of dog's hair in a cloth.

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§ 29.37.1  A crow's brain taken in food is said to make eyelashes grow, and also wool grease and myrrh applied with a warmed probe. We are assured that the same result is obtained by taking the ash of flies and of mouse dung in equal quantities, so that the weight of the whole amounts to half a denarius, then adding two-sixths of a denarius of antimony and applying all with wool grease; or one may use baby mice beaten up in old wine to the consistency of an anodyne salve. When inconvenient hairs in the eyelashes have been plucked out they are prevented from growing again by the gall of a hedgehog, the fluid part of a spotted lizard's eggs, the ash of a salamander, the gall of a green lizard in white wine condensed by sunshine to the consistency of honey in a copper vessel, the ash of a swallow's young added to the milky juice of tithymallus and the slime of snails.

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§ 29.38.1  Opaqueness of the eye-lens is cured, say the Magi, by the brain of a seven-day-old puppy, the probe being inserted into the right side of the eye to treat the right eye and into the left side to treat the left eye; or by the fresh gall of the axio, a kind of owl whose feathers twitch like ears. Apollonius of Pitane preferred to treat cataract with honey and dog's gall rather than using hyena's, as he did also to treat white eye ulcers. The heads and tails of mice, reduced to ash and made into an ointment with honey, restore, they say, clearness of vision; much better the ash of a dormouse or wild mouse, or the brain of an eagle or the gall with Attic honey. The ash and fat of the shrewmouse, beaten up with antimony, is very good for watery eyes — what antimony is I shall say when I speak of metals — the ash of the weasel for cataract, likewise of the lizard, or the brain of the swallow. Pounded snails applied to the forehead relieve eye fluxes, either by themselves or with fine flour or with frankincense; so applied they are also good for sunstroke. To burn them alive also, and to use as ointment the ash with Cretan honey is very good for dimness of vision. For the eyes of draught animals the slough cast in spring by the asp makes with asp fat an ointment that improves their vision. To burn a viper alive in new earthenware, with addition of fennel juice up to one cyathus, and of one grain of frankincense, makes an ointment very good for cataract and dimness of vision; this prescription is called eckeon. An eye salve is also made by letting a viper rot in a jar, and pounding with saffron the grubs that breed in it. A viper is also burned in a jar with salt, to lick which gives clearness of vision, and is a tonic to the stomach and to the whole body. This salt is also given to sheep to keep them in health, and is an ingredient of an antidote to snakebite. Some use vipers as food. They prescribe that, first of all, as soon as the viper has been killed, salt should be placed in its mouth until it melts; then at both ends a length of four fingers is cut off and the intestines taken out; the rest they thoroughly boil in water, oil, salt and dill, and either eat at once, or mix in bread so that it can be used several times. In addition to what has been said above, the broth removes lice from any part of the body, as well as itching from the surface of the skin. Even by itself, the ash of a viper's head shows results; as ointment for the eyes it is very effective, and the same is true of viper's fat. I would not confidently recommend what is prescribed about a viper's gall, because, as I have pointed out in the appropriate place a serpent's poison is nothing but gall. The fat of snakes mixed with bronze rust heals ruptured parts of the eyes, and rubbing with their skin, or slough, cast in spring, gives clear vision. The gall of the boa afro is recommended for white ulcers, cataract, and dimness, and its fat similarly for clear vision.

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§ 29.38.2  The gall of the eagle, which, as I have said, tests its chicks for gazing at the sun, makes, when mixed with Attic honey, an ointment for film on the eyes, dimness of vision, and cataract. There is the same property also in vulture's gall with leek juice and a little honey, likewise in the gall of a cock, especially of a white cock, diluted with water and used for white specks, white ulcers, and cataract. The dung of poultry also, provided that it is red, is prescribed as an ointment for night blindness. The gall of a hen also, and in particular the fat, is recommended for pustules on the pupils, but of course hens are not fattened specially for this purpose. It is a wonderful help, combined with the stones schistos and haematites, for the coats of the eye when torn. The dung also of hens, provided it is white, is kept in old oil and horn boxes for white ulcers on the pupil; while on the subject I must mention the tradition that peacocks swallow back their own dung, begrudging men its benefits. A hawk boiled down in rose oil is thought to make a very efficacious liniment for all eye complaints, as is its dung reduced to ash and added to Attic honey. A kite's liver too is recommended, and also pigeons' dung, applied in vinegar for fistulas, similarly for white ulcers and for sears, goose's gall and duck's blood for bruised eyes, provided that afterwards they are treated with wool grease and honey; partridge gall can be used with an equal weight of honey, but by itself for clear vision. It is on the supposed authority of Hippocrates that the further instruction is given to keep this gall in a silver box. Partridge eggs boiled down with honey in a bronze vessel cure ulcers on the eyes and opaqueness of the lens. The blood of pigeons, doves, turtle doves, or partridges, makes an excellent application for blood-shot eyes. Among pigeons, male birds are supposed to have the more efficacious blood, and a vein under a wing is cut for this purpose, because its natural heat makes it more useful. Over the application should be placed a plaster boiled in honey and greasy wool boiled in oil or wine. Night blindness is cured by the blood of the same birds and by the liver of sheep, as I said a when speaking of goats, with greater benefit if the sheep are tawny. With a decoction also of the liver it is recommended to bathe the eyes and to apply the marrow to those that are painful or swollen. We are assured that the eyes of the horned owl, reduced to ash and mixed with a salve, improves the vision. White ulcers are made better by the dung of a turtle dove, by snails reduced to ash, and by the dung of the cenchris, a bird considered by the Greeks to be a species of hawk. White specks are cured by all the above remedies applied with honey. The honey most beneficial for the eyes is that in which bees have died. He who has eaten the chick of a stork, it is said, will not suffer from ophthalmia for years on end, likewise he who carries about the head of a python. Its fat with honey and old oil is said to disperse incipient dimness. The chicks of swallows are blinded by the full moon, and when their sight is restored their heads are burnt and the ash used with honey to improve the vision and for pains, ophthalmia, and blows. Lizards too are employed in several ways for eye remedies. Some shut up a green lizard in new earthenware, and with them the pebbles called cinaedia, which are used as amulets for swellings on the groin, mark them with nine marks and take away one daily; on the ninth day they set the lizard free, but keep the pebbles for pains in the eyes. Others put earth under a green lizard after blinding it, and shut it in a glass vessel with rings of solid iron or gold. When they can see through the glass that the lizard has recovered its sight, they let it out, and use the rings for ophthalmia; others use the ash of the head instead of antimony for scabrous eyes. Some burn the green lizard with a long neck that is found in sandy places, and use it as ointment for incipient fluxes, as well as for opaqueness of the lens. They also say that when a weasel's eyes have been gouged out with a pointed tool, the sight. is restored, and they use the animal as they used the lizards and rings, saying also that a serpent's right eye worn as au amulet, is good for eye fluxes, if the serpent is set free alive. The ash of a spotted lizard's head makes with antimony an excellent remedy for continually streaming eyes. The web of a fly-spider, particularly its very lair, is said to be a marvellous cure for fluxes if laid in a plaster across the forehead from temple to temple; but it must be collected and applied by a boy before puberty, who waits three days before showing himself to the patient needing cure, during which days the latter must not touch the earth with bare feet. White ulcers also are said to be removed by the white spider with very long and very thin legs, which is pounded in old oil and used as ointment. The spider too, whose very coarse web is generally found in rafters, is said to cure fluxes if worn in cloth as an amulet. The green beetle has the property of sharpening the sight of those who gaze at it, and so the carvers of jewels gaze on one to rest their eves.

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§ 29.39.1  The ears are cleaned by sheep's gall with honey; pain is relieved by drops of bitch's milk; hardness of hearing by her fat with wormwood and old oil, also by goose grease. Some add the juice of onion and a like measure of garlic. They also use without addition ants' eggs, for this creature also has its use in medicine, and it is well known that bears when sick cure themselves by eating these eggs. The fat of geese and of all birds is prepared all the veins are taken out, and in a new earthenware pan with a lid it is melted in the sun with boiling hot water underneath, strained through linen strainers and set aside in new earthenware in a cool place; if honey is added the fat is less likely to go rancid. The ash of mice, either added to honey or boiled with rose oil, if dropped into the ears relieves pain. If some creature has crept into the ear, the sovereign remedy is mouse gall diluted with vinegar; if it is water that has got in, goose grease with the juice of an onion. A dormouse, skinned and the intestines taken out, is thoroughly boiled in honey in a new vessel. Physicians prefer it to be boiled down to one-third in nard, and so stored away, and then when needed poured into the ear in a warmed strigil. It is well ascertained that desperate ear complaints are cured by this remedy, or if a decoction of earthworms and goose grease is injected. The red worms also that are taken off trees, if pounded with oil, make excellent treatment for ulcerated or ruptured ears. Preserved lizards, with salt put into their mouths as they hang suspended, heal bruised ears that are suffering from a blow, most efficaciously those covered with spots of the colour of iron rust and also marked by streaks along the tail. The millipede, by some called centipede or multipede, is one of the earth worms; it is hairy, with many feet, moving sinuously its back as it crawls, drawing itself together when touched, and called by the Greeks oaiscos or jabs. It is said to be a good cure for ear pains if boiled down in pomegranate rind or leek juice. They add also rose oil, and pour it into the ear that is not painful. The kind however that does not move sinuously its back the Greeks call seps or scolopendra; it is smaller and very venomous. The snails that are edible are applied with myrrh or powdered frankincense, and the small, broad snails are made into an ointment with honey for fractured ears. The slough of serpents, burnt in a heated pot, is mixed with rose oil and dropped into the ears, efficacious indeed for all affections, but especially for offensive smell; if pus is present, vinegar is used, and it is better if there be added gall of goat, ox, or turtle — the slough, as some think, loses power if older than a year, or if soaked with rain — the gore of a spider on wool with rose oil, by itself, or with saffron; a cricket dug out with its earth and applied. Great efficacy is attributed to this creature by Nigidius, greater still by the Magi, just because it walks backwards, bores into the earth, and chirrups at night. They hunt it with an ant tied to a hair and put into the cricket's hole, first blowing the dust away lest it bury itself, and so when the ant has embraced it the cricket is pulled out. The lining of the crop of poultry, usually thrown away, if dried and pounded in wine, is poured warm into suppurating ears, likewise hens' fat and a kind of greasy substance coming from the black beetle if its head is pulled off. This, pounded with rose oil, is said to be wonderfully good for the ears, but the wool on which it is inserted must be taken out after a short time, for this grease very quickly turns into something alive, forming a grub. Some write that a dose of two or three of these beetles, boiled down in oil, make very good treatment for the ears, and that when these are bruised crushed beetles are placed in them in a piece of linen. This insect is one of the things that arouse disgust, but because Nature and the research of the ancients are so wonderful I must go fully into the matter here. They have made several classes of them: first the soft kind which, boiled down in oil, they found to make a good ointment for warts. The second kind they called mylvecos, because they are found commonly about mills. The instances they quoted include Musaeus the boxer, who cured leprous sores by this kind rubbed on without their heads. A third kind, one with a loathsome smell and a sharp-pronged tail-end, they say will cure, if applied with pisselaion for twenty-one days, ulcers otherwise incurable, scrofulous sores and superficial abscesses; and without legs and wings bruises, contusions, even malignant sores, itch scab, and boils. Even to hear these remedies mentioned makes me feel sick; but, heaven help us! Diodorus says that he had given these beetles with resin and honey even in cases of jaundice and orthopnoea. So much power has the art of medicine to prescribe any medicament it may wish. The kindliest among physicians have thought that the ash of burnt black beetles should be kept for the purposes mentioned in a horn box, or that crushed they should be given in enemas to sufferers from orthopnoea or catarrh. It is a known fact at any rate that an application brings away things embedded in the flesh. The most suitable honey for the ears also is that in which bees have died. Parotid swellings are reduced by pigeon's dung either by itself or with barley meal or oatmeal, by the brain or liver of an owl, poured with oil into the ear on the side of the swelling, by a multipede with a third part of resin used as ointment, and by crickets, used as ointment or as amulets. Medicine for the remaining kinds of disease from the same animals or from animals of the same kind, I shall speak of in the next Book.

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§ 30.1.1  IN the previous part of my work I have often indeed refuted the fraudulent lies of the Magi, whenever the subject and the occasion required it, and I shall continue to expose them. In a few respects, however, the theme deserves to be enlarged upon, were it only because the most fraudulent of arts has held complete sway throughout the world for many ages. Nobody should be surprised at the greatness of its influence, since alone of the arts it has embraced three others that hold supreme dominion over the human mind, and made them subject to itself alone. Nobody will doubt that it first arose from medicine, and that professing to promote health it insidiously advanced under the disguise of a higher and holier system; that to the most seductive and welcome promises it added the powers of religion, about which even today the human race is quite in the dark; that again meeting with success it made a further addition of astrology, because there is nobody who is not eager to learn his destiny, or who does not believe that the truest account of it is that gained by watching the skies. Accordingly, holding men's emotions in a threefold bond, magic rose to such a height that even today it has sway over a great part of mankind, and in the East commands the Kings of Kings.

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§ 30.2.1  Without doubt magic arose in Persia with Zoroaster. On this our authorities are agreed, but whether he was the only one of that name, or whether there was also another afterwards, is not clear. Eudoxus, who wished magic to be acknowledged as the noblest and most useful of the schools of philosophy, declared that this Zoroaster lived six thousand years before Plato's death, and Aristotle agrees with him. Hermippus, a most studious writer about every aspect of magic, and an exponent of two million verses composed by Zoroaster, added summaries too to his rolls, and gave Agonaces as the teacher by whom he said that he had been instructed, assigning to the man himself a date five thousand years before the Trojan War. What especially is surprising is the survival, through so long a period, of the craft and its tradition; treatises are wanting, and besides there is no line of distinguished or continuous successors to keep alive their memory. For how few know anything, even by hearsay, of those who alone have left their names but without other memorial — Apusorus and Zaratus of Media, Marmarus and Arabantiphocus of Babylon, or Tarmoendas of Assyria? The most surprising thing, however, is the complete silence of Homer about magic in his poem on the Trojan War, and yet so much of his work in the wanderings of Ulysses is so occupied with it that it alone forms the backbone of the whole work, if indeed they put a magical interpretation upon the Proteus episode in Homer and the songs of the Sirens, and especially upon the episode of Circe and of the calling up of the dead from Hades, of which magic is the sole theme. And in later times nobody has explained how ever it reached Telmesus, a city given up to superstition, or when it passed over to the Thessalian matrons, whose surname a was long proverbial in our part of the world, although magic was a craft repugnant to the Thessalian people, who were content, at any rate in the Trojan period, with the medicines of Chiron, and with the War God as the only wielder of the thunderbolt? I am indeed surprised that the people over whom Achilles once ruled had a reputation for magic so lasting that actually Menander, a man with an unrivalled gift for sound literary taste, gave the name 'Thessala' to his comedy, which deals fully with the tricks of the women for calling down the moon. I would believe that Orpheus was the first to carry the craft to his near neighbours, and that his superstition grew from medicine, if the whole of Thrace, the home of Orpheus, had not been untainted by magic. The first man, so far as I can discover, to write a still-extant treatise on magic was Osthanes, who accompanied the Persian King Xerxes in his invasion of Greece, and sowed what I may call the seeds of this monstrous craft, infecting the whole world by the way at every stage of their travels. A little before Osthanes, the more careful inquirers place another Zoroaster, a native of Proconnesus. One thing is certain; it was this Osthanes who chiefly roused among the Greek peoples not so much an eager appetite for his science as a sheer mania. And yet I notice that of old, in fact almost always, the highest literary distinction and renown have been sought from that science. Certainly Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus and Plato went overseas to learn it, going into exile rather than on a journey, taught it openly on their return, and considered it one of their most treasured secrets. Democritus expounded Apollobex the Copt and Dardanus the Phoenician, entering the latter's tomb to obtain his works and basing his own on their doctrines. That these were accepted by any human beings and transmitted by memory is the most extraordinary phenomenon in history; so utterly are they lacking in credibility and decency that those who like the other works of Democritus deny that the magical books are his. But it is all to no purpose, for it is certain that Democritus especially instilled into men's minds the sweets of magic. Another extraordinary thing is that both these arts, medicine I mean and magic, flourished together, Democritus expounding magic in the same age as Hippocrates expounded medicine, about the time of the Peloponnesian War, which was waged in Greece from the three-hundredth year of our city. There is yet another branch of magic, derived from Moses, Jannes [an Egyptian magician], Lotapes [Iotape/Yahweh], and the Jews, but living many thousand years after Zoroaster. So much more recent is the branch in Cyprus. In the time too of Alexander the Great, no slight addition was made to the influence of the profession by a second Osthanes, who, honoured by his attendance on Alexander, travelled certainly without the slightest doubt all over the world.

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§ 30.3.1  Among Italian tribes also there still certainly exist traces of magic in the Twelve Tables, as is proved by my own and the other evidence set forth in an earlier Book? It was not until the 657th year of the City [97BC] that in the consulship of Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus and Publius Licinius Crassus there was passed a resolution of the Senate forbidding human sacrifice; so that down to that date it is manifest that such abominable rites were practised.

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§ 30.4.1  Magic certainly found a home in the two Gallic provinces, and that down to living memory. For the principate of Tiberius Caesar did away with their Druids and this tribe of seers and medicine men. But why should I speak of these things when the craft has even crossed the Ocean and reached the empty voids of Nature? Even today Britain practises magic in awe, with such grand ritual that it might seem that she gave it to the Persians. So universal is the cult of magic throughout the world. although its nations disagree or are unknown to each other. It is beyond calculation how great is the debt owed to the Romans, who swept away the monstrous rites, in which to kill a man was the highest religious duty and for him to be eaten a passport to health.

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§ 30.5.1  As Osthanes said, there are several forms of magic; he professes to divine from water, globes, air, stars, lamps, basins and axes, and by many other methods, and besides to converse with ghosts and those in the underworld. All of these in our generation the Emperor Nero discovered to be lies and frauds. In fact his passion for the lyre and tragic song was no greater than his passion for magic; his elevation to the greatest height of human fortune aroused desire in the vicious depths of his mind; his greatest wish was to issue commands to the gods, and he could rise to no nobler ambition. No other of the arts ever had a more enthusiastic patron. Every means were his to gratify his desire — wealth, strength, aptitude for learning — and what else did the world not allow! That the craft is a fraud there could be no greater or more indisputable proof than that Nero abandoned it; but would that he had consulted about his suspicions the powers of Hell and any other gods whatsoever, instead of entrusting these researches to pimps and harlots. Of a surety no ceremony, outlandish and savage though the rites may be, would not have been gentler than Nero's thoughts; more cruelly behaving than any did Nero thus fill our Rome with ghosts.

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§ 30.6.1  The Magi have certain means of evasion; for example that the gods neither obey those with freckles nor are seen by them. Was this perhaps their objection to Nero? But his body was without blemish; he was free to choose the fixed days, could easily obtain perfectly black sheep, and as for human sacrifice, he took the greatest delight in it. Mithridates the Magus had come to him bringing a retinue for the Annenian triumph over himself, thereby laying a heavy burden on the provinces. He had refused to travel by sea, for the Magi hold it sin to spit into the sea or wrong that element by other necessary functions of mortal creatures. He had brought Magi with him, had initiated Nero into their banquets; yet the man giving him a kingdom was unable to acquire from him the magic art. Therefore let us be convinced by this that magic is detestable, vain, and idle; and though it has what I might call shadows of truth, their power comes from the art of the poisoner, not of the Magi. One might well ask what were the lies of the old Magi, when as a youth I saw Apion the grammarian, who told me that the herb cynocephalia, called in Egypt osiritis, was an instrument of divination and a protection from all kinds of sorcery, but if it were uprooted altogether the digger would die at once, and that he had called up ghosts to inquire from Homer his native country and the name of his parents, but did not dare to repeat the answers which he said were given.

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§ 30.7.1  It should be unique evidence of fraud that they look upon the mole of all living creatures with the greatest awe, although it is cursed by Nature with so many defects, being permanently blind, sunk in other darkness also, and resembling the buried dead. In no entrails is placed such faith; to no creature do they attribute more supernatural properties; so that if anyone eats its heart, fresh and still beating, they promise powers of divination and of foretelling the issue of matters in hand. They declare that a tooth, extracted from a living mole and attached as an amulet, cures toothache. The rest of their beliefs about this animal I will relate in the appropriate places. But of all they say nothing will be found more likely than that the mole is an antidote for the bite of the shrewmouse, seeing that an antidote for it, as I have said, is even earth that has been depressed by cart wheels.

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§ 30.8.1  Toothache is also cured, the Magi tell us, by the ash of the burnt heads without any flesh of dogs that have died of madness, which must be dropped in cyprus oil through the ear on the side where the pain is; also by the left eye-tooth of a dog, the aching tooth being scraped round with it; by one of the vertebrae of the draco or of the enhydris, the serpent being a white male. With this eye-tooth they serape all round the painful one, or they make an amulet of two upper teeth, when the pain is in the upper jaw, using lower teeth for the lower jaw. With its fat they rub hunters of the crocodile. They also scrape teeth with bones extracted from the forehead of a lizard at a full moon, without their touching the earth. They rinse the mouth with a decoction of dogs' teeth in wine, boiled down to one-half. The ash of these teeth with honey helps children who are slow in teething. A dentifrice also is made with the same ingredients. Hollow teeth are stuffed with the ash of mouse dung or with dried lizards' liver. A snake's heart, eaten or worn as an amulet, is considered efficacious. There are among them some who recommend a mouse to be chewed up twice a month to prevent aches. Earthworms, boiled down in oil and poured into the ear on the side where there is pain, afford relief. These also, reduced to ash and plugged into decayed teeth, force them to fall out easily, and applied to sound teeth relieve any pain in them. They should be burnt, however, in an earthen pot. They also benefit if boiled down in squill vinegar with the root of a mulberry tree, so as to make a wash for the teeth. The maggot also, which is found on the plant called Venus' Bath, plugged into hollow teeth, is wonderfully good. But they fall out at the touch of the cabbage caterpillar, and the bugs from the mallow are poured into the ears with rose oil. The little grains of sand, that are found in the horns of snails, if put into hollow teeth, free them at once from pain. Empty snail shells, reduced to ash and myrrh added, are good for the gums, as is the ash of a serpent burnt with salt in an earthen pot, poured with rose oil into the opposite ear, or the slough of a snake with oil and pitch-pine resin warmed and poured into either ear — some add frankincense and rose oil — and if put into hollow teeth it also makes them fall out without trouble. I think it an idle talc that white snakes cast their slough about the rising of the Dog-star, since the casting has been seen in Italy before the rising, and in warm regions it is much less probable for sloughing to be so late. But they say that this slough, even when dry, combined with wax forces out teeth very quickly. A snake's tooth also, worn as an amulet, relieves toothache. There are some who think that a spider also is beneficial, the animal itself, caught with the left hand, beaten up in rose oil, and poured into the ear on the side of the pain. The little bones of hens have been kept hanging on the wall of a room with the gullet intact; if a tooth is touched, or the gum scraped, and the bone thrown away, they assure us that the pain at once disappears, as it does if a raven's dung, wrapped in wool, is worn as an amulet, or if sparrows' dung is warmed with oil and poured into the ear nearer the pain. This however causes unbearable itching, and so it is better to rub the part with vinegar and the ash of a sparrow's nestlings burnt on twigs.

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§ 30.9.1  They assert that the taste in the mouth is made agreeable if the teeth are rubbed with the ash of burnt mice mixed with honey; some add fennel root. If the teeth are picked with a vulture's feather, they make the breath sour. To pick them with a porcupine's quill conduces to their firmness. Sores on the tongue or lips are healed by a decoction of swallows in honey wine; chaps on them by goose grease or hen's grease, by oesypum with gall nut, by white webs of spiders, or by the small webs spun on rafters. If the mouth has been scalded by over-hot things, bitch's milk will give an immediate cure.

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§ 30.10.1  Spots on the face are removed by oesypum with Corsican honey, which is considered the most acrid; scurf on the skin of the face by the same with rose oil on a piece of fleece; some add also butter. If however there is psoriasis, dog's gall is applied to the spots, which are first pricked with a needle; to livid spots and bruises rams' or sheep's lungs are applied hot and cut into thin slices, or else pigeon's dung. The skin of the face is preserved by goose grease or hen's. To lichen is also applied mouse dung in vinegar, or ash of the hedgehog in oil; for this treatment they prescribe that the face should first be fomented with soda and vinegar. Facial troubles are also removed by the ash with honey of the broad but small snails that are found everywhere. The ash indeed of all snails, such is its detergent property, thickens and warms; for that reason it is an ingredient of caustic preparations and used as a liniment for itch, leprous sores, and freckles. I find also that there are ants called Herculanean, which beaten up and with the addition of a little salt cure facial troubles. The buprestis is a creature rarely found in Italy, and very similar to a long-legged beetle. Oxen at pasture are very apt not to see it — hence too its name — and should it be swallowed it causes such inflammation on reaching the gall that it bursts the animal. This insect applied with he-goat suet removes lichen from the face by its corrosive property, as I have already said. Vulture's blood, beaten up with cedar resin and the root of the white chamaeleon, a plant I have already mentioned, and covered with a cabbage leaf, heals leprous sores, as do the legs of locusts beaten up with he-goat suet. Pimples are cured by poultry fat kneaded with onion. Very useful too for the face is honey in which bees have died, but the best thing for clearing the complexion and removing wrinkles is swan's fat. Branded marks are removed by pigeon's dung in vinegar.

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§ 30.11.1  I find that a heavy cold clears up if the sufferer kisses a mule's muzzle. Pain in the uvula and in the throat is relieved by the dung, dried in shade, of lambs that have not yet eaten grass, uvula pain by applying the juice of a snail transfixed by a needle, so that the snail itself may be hung up in the smoke, and by the ash of swallows with honey. This also gives relief to affections of the tonsils. Gargling with ewe's milk is a help to tonsils and throat, as is a multipede beaten up, gargling with pigeon's dung and raisin wine, and also an external application of it with dried fig and soda. Sore throat and a running cold are relieved by snails — they should be boiled unwashed and with only the earth taken off crushed and given to drink in raisin wine; some hold that the snails of Astypalaea are the most efficacious — by their ash, and also by rubbing with a cricket or if anybody touches the tonsils with hands that have crushed a cricket.

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§ 30.12.1  In quinsy very speedy relief is afforded by goose gall with elaterium and honey, by the brain of an owl, and by the ash of a swallow taken in hot water. The last prescription is on the authority of the poet Ovid. But more efficacious for all ailments for which swallows are prescribed are the young of wild swallows, which are recognised by the shape of their nests, but by far the most efficacious are the young of sand martins, for so are called the swallows that build their nests in holes on river banks. Many hold that a young swallow of any kind should be eaten to banish the fear of quinsy for a whole year. They wring their necks, burn them blood and all in a vessel, and give the ash with bread or in drink. Some add also to the prescription an equal quantity of weasel ash. These preparations are given daily in drink for scrofula and for epilepsy. Preserved in salt also swallows are taken for quinsy in drachma doses, for which complaint their nest also, taken in drink, is said to be a cure. It is thought that an application of millipedes is very efficacious for quinsy; some think that twenty, beaten up in a hemina of hydromel, should be given through a reed, because if the teeth are touched the draught is thought to be useless. They also tell us that a mouse, well boiled with vervain, makes a broth that is a remedy, as does a thong of dog leather wrapped three times round the neck, or dove's dung thoroughly mixed with wine and oil. For neck-sinews and opisthotonus a twig of agnus castus taken from the nest of a kite and worn as an amulet, is said to help, for ulcerated scrofula a weasel's blood, or the weasel itself boiled down in wine, but it is not applied to sores that have been lanced. They say also that eating weasel in food has the same effect, or the animal burned over twigs and the ash mixed with axle grease. A green lizard is attached as an amulet; after thirty days the weasel should be changed for another. Some keep a weasel's heart in a small silver vessel for scrofula in woman or man. An ointment is made of snails pounded with their shells, especially those that cling to shrubs, or there is applied the ash of asps with bull suet, snake's fat mixed with oil, or an ointment of snake's ash in oil or with wax. To eat also the middle part of a snake after cutting off either end is good for scrofula, as is to take in drink the ash of this middle burnt in new earthenware, with much greater benefit if the snakes have been killed between two wheel-ruts. They recommend also the application of a cricket dug up with its earth, also the application of dove's dung by itself, or with barley meal or oatmeal in vinegar, or of mole ash with honey. Some make an ointment of a mole's liver crushed between the hands, and do not wash it off for three days. They also assure us that the right foot of the animal is a remedy for scrofula. Others cut off the head, pound it with the earth of a mole-hill, work into lozenges in a pewter box, and use for all swellings, for what are called apostemata, and for affections of the neck; during the treatment the eating of pork is forbidden. There are earth beetles like ticks that are called 'bulls' — a name given because of their little horns — and by some 'earth lice.' These too throw up earth that is applied to scrofulous and similar sores, and also to gouty parts, not being washed off for three days. The efficacy of this treatment lasts for a year. To these creatures are assigned all the properties I have mentioned when speaking of crickets. Some also use for this purpose the earth thrown up by ants, others tie as an amulet as many earth worms as there are sores, which dry up as the worms shrivel. Others about the time of the Dog-star cut off, as I have said, the ends of a viper, then burn the middle part and give a three-finger pinch of the ash to be taken in drink for thrice seven days, treating scrofulous sores in this way; some however do so by tying round them a linen thread by which a viper has been suspended by the neck until it died. They also use millipedes with a fourth part of terebinth resin, a medicament which they recommend for the treatment of all apostemata.

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§ 30.13.1  Good treatment for pains in the shoulder is weasel ash and wax. Rubbing with ants' eggs prevents hair in the armpits of children, and dealers, to delay growth of downy hair on adolescents, use blood that comes from the testicles of lambs when they are castrated. Applications of this blood after the hair has been pulled out also do away with the rank smell of the armpits.

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§ 30.14.1  Praecordia is a comprehensive name we use for the vital organs of the human body. When any one of them is in pain, the application of a sucking puppy pressed close to that part is said to transfer the malady to it; they add that, if the organs of the puppy are taken out and washed with wine, by the diseased aspect of those organs can be detected the source of the patient's pain; but the burial of an animal so used is an essential part of the ritual. Those puppies too that we call Melitaean relieve stomachache if laid frequently across the abdomen. That the disease is transferred to the puppy is seen by its sickening, usually even by its death. Lung complaints are also cured by mice, especially African; they are skinned, boiled down in oil and salt, and taken in food. The same preparation is also a cure for expectoration of pus or blood.

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§ 30.15.1  The best medicine, however, for the stomach is a diet of snails. They should be gently boiled in water, African snails by preference, with their bodies whole, then with nothing added grilled over a coal fire, and so taken in wine and garum. Recently this treatment has been found to benefit very many sufferers, who are also careful that the number of the snails taken is odd. Their rank juice, however, makes the breath foul. Pounded without their shells and taken in water they are also good for the spitting of blood. The most prized snails are the African, especially those of Iol, those of Astypalaea, moderate sized Sicilian (for the large are hard, and without juice), and those of the Baliaric islands, called cavaticae because they breed in caverns. Those from the islands and of Capreae are prized, but none whether preserved or fresh make pleasant eating. River snails and white snails have a rank taste; wood snails are not good for the stomach, relaxing the bowels, and so with all small snails. On the other hand sea snails are rather beneficial for the stomach, but of the prized snails the most efficacious for stomach-ache are said to be all that are swallowed alive in vinegar. Moreover, there are some snails called άκέρατοι, which are broad, and breed in many places; of these I shall speak in the appropriate places. The skin of the crop of poultry, sprinkled into the drink when dried, or roasted if fresh, relieves chest catarrhs and moist coughs. A cough is relieved by pounded raw snails swallowed in three cyathi of tepid water, running colds also by a piece of dog skin put round any finger. Partridge broth acts as a tonic on the stomach.

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§ 30.16.1  Pains in the liver are treated by the wild weasel, or its liver, taken in food, also by a ferret roasted as is a sucking pig; asthma by thrice seven multipedes, soaked in Attic honey and sucked through a reed, for every vessel they touch they turn black. Some roast a sextarius of them in a pan until they turn white, then they mix them with honey and recommend giving them in warm water. Snails in food have been given to those subject to fainting, aberration of the mind, or vertigo, a dose being one snail in three cyathi of raisin wine, pounded with the shell, warmed, and taken in drink for nine days at most; some have given one on the first day, two on the next, three on the third, two on the fourth, and one on the fifth. This treatment is also good for asthma and abscesses. Some hold that there is a creature like a locust, but without wings, called trixallis in Greek but without a name in Latin; some, and not a few authorities, maintain that it is what is called in Latin gryllus (cricket); twenty of these they recommend to be roasted and taken in honey wine for orthopnoea. A cure for spitting of blood are snails, if the patient pours protropum on them unwashed, or if he boils them down in seawater, and takes them in food, or if pounded with their shells they are taken with protropum; these preparations also cure a cough. Specific for abscesses is honey in which bees have died. For coughing up blood a vulture's lung burnt over vine wood, with half as much pomegranate blossom and the same quantity of quince blossom and of lilies, taken morning and evening in wine, if there is no fever, otherwise in water in which quinces have been boiled.

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§ 30.17.1  The fresh spleen of a sheep is placed, by a Magian prescription, over the painful spleen of a patient, the attendant saying that he is providing a remedy for the spleen. After this the Magi prescribe that it should be plastered into the wall of the patient's bedroom, sealed with a ring thrice nine times and the same words repeated. If a dog's spleen is cut out of the living animal and taken in food it cures splenic complaints; some bind it when fresh over the affected part. Others without the patient's knowledge give in squill vinegar the spleen of a two-days-old puppy, or that of a hedgehog, also the ash of snails with linseed, nettle seed, and honey, until there is a complete cure. Another remedy is a live green-lizard, hung up in a pot before the door of the bedroom of the patient, that he may touch it with his hand on going out and coming in, the ash of a horned owl's head with an unguent, honey in which bees have died, or a spider, especially that called 'wolf.'

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§ 30.18.1  The heart of a hoopoe is a prized remedy for pains in the side, as is the ash of snails boiled down in barley water; these are also used by themselves as a liniment. The skull of a mad dog is reduced to ash and sprinkled in drink. For lumbago an overseas spotted lizard, with head and intestines removed, is boiled down in wine with half an ounce by weight of black poppy, and this broth is drunk. Green lizards, with feet and head cut off, are taken in food, or three snails, beaten up with their shells and boiled down in wine with fifteen peppercorns. They break off, in the opposite way to the joint, the feet of an eagle, so that the right foot is attached as an amulet for pains in the right side, the left foot for those in the left side. The multipede too, that I have called oniscos, is another remedy, the dose being a denarius by weight taken in two cyathi of wine. The Magi prescribe that an earthworm should be placed upon a wooden plate that has been split beforehand and mended with a piece of iron, soaked in water that has been taken up in the dish, and buried in the place from which it was dug out. Then the water in the plate is to be drunk, which they say is a wonderful remedy for sciatica.

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§ 30.19.1  Dysentery is relieved by a leg of mutton boiled down with linseed, the broth of which is drunk, by old cheese made with ewe's milk, and by mutton suet boiled down in a dry wine. By this are also benefited ileos and chronic cough, and dysentery by a spotted lizard from overseas, boiled down with its intestines, head, feet, and skin removed — it is as efficacious in food also as decocted — by two snails with egg, each beaten up with its shell, allowed to simmer in a new vessel with salt, two cyathi of raisin wine or date juice, and three cyathi of water; this preparation is taken in drink. Snails are also beneficial when burnt, and their ash taken in wine with a small piece of resin. Snails without shells, about which I have spoken they are found chiefly in Africa — are very useful in dysentery; five are burnt and taken with half a denarius by weight of gum acacia; of this ash two spoonfuls are given in myrtle wine or any dry wine with an equal quantity of hot water. Some, using all African snails, administer according to this recipe; others prefer to inject the same number of African snails or broad snails, adding if the flux is severe gum acacia of the size of a bean. The cast slough of snakes is boiled down with rose oil for dysentery and tenesmus in a pewter vessel; if in any other kind of vessel, the application must be made with the help of pewter. Chicken broth is good for these two complaints, but broth made with an old cock, thoroughly salted, is purgative. A hen's crop, roasted and given in oil and salt, soothes the pains of coeliac troubles — but previously hen and patient must both abstain from cereals as does dove's dung roasted and taken in drink. The flesh of a wood-pigeon boiled in vinegar is good for dysentery and for coeliac troubles; for dysentery too a thrush roasted with myrtle berries, so are blackbirds and honey in which bees have died.

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§ 30.20.1  The most serious disease of the abdomen is ileos. It may be combated, they say, by tearing a bat apart and drinking its blood; it is also a help to rub the belly with it. Looseness of the bowels is checked by a snail prepared according to my prescription for asthma, and also by the ash, taken in a dry wine, of snails that have been burnt alive. Other remedies are: the roasted liver of cocks or the skin of their crop, usually thrown away, mixed with poppy juice if dried, while some roast it fresh to be given in wine, partridge broth and its crop pounded by itself in dark wine, also wild wood-pigeon boiled down in vinegar and water, spleen of a sheep roasted and beaten up in wine, pigeon's dung applied with honey, the gizzard of an osprey dried and taken in drink, very beneficial to those who cannot digest their food, even if they only hold it in their hand while eating. Some use it as an amulet for this purpose, but it must not be so used continuously, for it makes the body thin. Looseness is also checked by the blood of drakes. Flatulence is dispersed by a diet of snails, griping by the spleen of sheep, roasted and taken in wine, wild wood-pigeon boiled down in vinegar and water, the fat of a bustard in wine, the ash of an ibis burnt without the feathers and taken in drink. Another prescription for griping is of a marvellous character: it is said that if a duck is laid on the belly, the disease is transferred to the duck, which dies. Good for griping is also boiled honey in which bees have died. Colic is effectively cured by a crested lark, roasted and taken in food. Some recommend that it should be burnt with the feathers in a new vessel, ground to dust and taken in water, three spoonfuls daily for four days, others that a lark's heart should be tied as an amulet to the patient's thigh, and others that it should be swallowed while fresh and still warm. The Asprenates are a consular family in which one of two brothers was cured of colic by this bird taken in food and its heart worn in a golden bracelet, the other by performing a certain sacrifice in a shrine of unbaked bricks built in the shape of an oven, and when a certain rite was over blocking it up. The osprey has only one gut, which through its wonderful character digests everything that the bird eats; the end of it attached as an amulet is well known to be excellent for colic. There are some obscure diseases of the intestines, for which is prescribed a wonderful cure. If, before they can see, puppies are applied for three days especially to the stomach and chest of a patient, and suck milk from his mouth, the power of the disease is transferred to them; finally they die and dissection makes clear the patient's trouble; the puppies must be buried in the earth. The Magi indeed tell us that if the belly is touched with a bat's blood there is protection from colic for a whole year; should there be pain, it is sufficient if the patient can bring himself to drink the water in which he washes his feet.

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§ 30.21.1  Mouse dung rubbed on the belly is good for stone in the bladder. The flesh of a hedgehog is said to be pleasant to eat if it is killed by one blow on the head before it can void its urine on itself. The flesh of hedgehogs killed in this manner is a remedy for obstruction to the urine; another is fumigation with the same animal. Should however it have voided its urine on itself those who have eaten the flesh are said to be attacked by strangury. It is also recommended, in order to break up stone, to take earthworms in wine or raisin wine, or snails boiled down as for asthma; three snails taken from their shells, pounded, and given in a cyathus of wine, on the next day two, and on the third day one, for removing difficulty of urination; but the ash of the empty shells for expelling stone; the liver of a water snake or the ash of scorpions to be taken in drink or in bread, the grits to be found in the gizzard of poultry or in the crop of wood-pigeons to be crushed and sprinkled on drink, also the skin of the crop of poultry. When dried, or roasted when fresh, the dung too of wood-pigeons to be taken in beans for stone and other bladder trouble; the ash too of wild wood-pigeon's feathers in oxymel, three spoonful-doses of their intestines reduced to ash, a bit of earth from a swallow's nest diluted with warm water, the crop of an osprey dried, dung of a turtle-dove boiled down in honey wine, or the broth of the bird itself. To eat thrushes also with myrtle berries is good for the urine, cicadas roasted in a shallow pan, to take in drink the millipede oniscos, and for pains in the bladder the broth of lambs' trotters. Chicken broth too is laxative and softens acridities, laxative too is the dung of swallows with honey used as a suppository.

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§ 30.22.1  For complaints of the anus very efficacious are wool grease — some add pompholyx and rose oil — dog's head reduced to ash, a serpent's slough in vinegar, if there are chaps, the ash of white dog's-dung with rose oil — it is said to have been a discovery of Aesculapius, removing warts also very efficaciously — ash of mouse dung, fat of a swan, fat of a boa. Prolapsus there is reduced by an application of snail juice extracted by pricks. Chafings are relieved by the ash of a field mouse with honey, the gall of a hedgehog with the brain of a bat and bitch's milk, by goose grease with goose brain, alum and wool grease, and by pigeon dung with honey; specific for condylomata is a spider rubbed on the place when the head and feet have been removed; to prevent the smart from acrid juices, apply goose grease with Punic wax, white lead, rose oil, and swan fat. This fat is said also to cure haemorrhoids. They say that beneficial for sciatica are raw snails, pounded with Aminnean wine and pepper and taken in drink, a green lizard taken in food, but with feet, bowels and head removed, also so treated a spotted lizard with the addition of three oboli of black poppy for ruptures and sprains, sheep's gall with woman's milk. Itching eruptions and warts on the privates are treated with the gravy from the roasted lung of a ram, other genital affections by the ash, applied with water, of raw, even unwashed, ram's wool, by the suet from the cad of a sheep, especially that of the kidneys, mixed with salt and the ash of pumice, by greasy wool in cold water, by the burnt flesh of sheep in water, by the ash of a she-mule's hoofs, by the tooth of a horse, ground to powder and dusted on the parts, and complaints of the testicles by the bones of a horse's head ground to powder without the flesh. If either testicle hangs down, we are told that a remedy is found in applying the slime of snails. Foul and running ulcers on these parts are relieved by the fresh ashes of a dog's head, by the small broad kind of snail beaten up in vinegar, by the slough of a snake or its ash in vinegar, by honey in which bees have died mixed with resin, by the shell-less kind of snail, which I have said a breeds in Africa, beaten up with powdered frankincense and white of eggs; the application is removed on the thirtieth day, and some add a bulb instead of frankincense. Hydrocele, they tell us, is wonderfully benefited by the spotted lizard: head, feet, and bowels are removed, and the rest of the body is roasted — frequent doses are given in food — in food too for incontinence of urine they prescribe dog fat with split alum in doses the size of a bean, African snails burnt with their flesh and shell, the ash being taken in drink, three roasted geese tongues taken in food. Sponsor for this treatment is Anaxilaus. But superficial abscesses are opened by mutton suet and roasted salt; they are dispersed by mouse dung mixed with powdered frankincense and sandarach, by ash of a lizard or the lizard itself, split and applied, also by multipedes pounded and mixed with one third part of terebinth resin — some add also red ochre of Sinope — by crushed snails by themselves, or by the ash of empty snail-shells mixed with wax. Power to disperse is possessed by pigeon's dung, applied by itself or with barley meal or with oatmeal. Cantharides mixed with lime remove superficial abscesses as well as the lancet; swelling of the groin is relieved by an application of small snails with honey.

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§ 30.23.1  To prevent varicose veins the legs of children are rubbed with lizard's blood, but both gout patient and rubber must be fasting. Gouty pains are soothed by ocsypum with woman's milk and white lead, by the dung of sheep that they pass liquid, by lungs of sheep, by ram's gall with ram's suet, by mice split and laid on the parts, by blood of a weasel applied with plantain and the ash of a weasel burnt alive with vinegar and rose oil — the remedy should be applied with a feather even a if wax and oil are made ingredients — by dog's gall, which must not be touched by hand but applied with a feather, by dung of hens, by ash of earthworms with honey, taken off on the third day. Some prefer to apply the worms in water, others prefer to rub the feet first with rose oil and then to apply without water an acetabulum of worms with three cyathi of honey. Snails of the broad kind taken in drink are said to banish pains of the feet and joints; the dose is two pounded in wine. They are also applied with juice of the plant helxine; some are content to beat them up in vinegar. Salt, burnt with a viper in a new jar and taken frequently, frees they say from gout, adding that it is also beneficial to rub the feet with viper fat. They assure us also that the kite is a remedy; it is dried, pounded, and a three-finger pinch taken in water, or the feet are rubbed with its blood. To the feet is also applied the blood of pigeons a with nettles, or their feathers may be used when they are just sprouting, beaten up with nettles. Moreover their dung is applied to painful joints, also the ash of a weasel or of snails, and with starch or tragacanth. Bruised joints are treated very effectively with spider's web; some prefer to use the ash of it, or else that of pigeon's dung with pearl barley and white wine. For dislocations a sovereign remedy is mutton suet with ash of woman's hair. For chilblains too is applied mutton suet with alum, or the ash of a dog's head or of mouse dung. But if they are clean, ulcers are brought to cicatrize by these with the addition of wax, or by the warm ash in oil of burnt dormice, also by that of field mice with honey, and by that of earthworms also with old oil and the snails that are found without shells. All sores of the feet are healed by the ash of those snails that have been burnt alive, by the ash of hens' dung, and ulcerations by the ash of pigeon's dung in oil. Chafings caused by foot-wear are healed by the ash of an old shoe, by the lung of a lamb and of a ram; for whitlows is specific a horse's tooth ground to powder; chafings under the feet of man or beast are healed by applying a green lizard's blood, corns on the feet by applying the urine of a mule, male or female, with the mud made by it, by the dung of sheep, by the liver or blood of a green lizard laid on a piece of wool, by earthworms in oil, by the head of a spotted lizard with an equal quantity of agnus castus beaten up in oil, by pigeon's dung boiled down in vinegar; all kinds of warts are cured by fresh dog's urine applied with its mud, by the ash of dog's dung with wax, by the dung of sheep, by the application of fresh mouse-blood, or of a mouse itself torn asunder, by the gall of a hedgehog, by the head or blood of a lizard or the ash of the whole creature, by the slough of snakes, or by the dung of a hen with oil and soda. Cantharides beaten up with Taminian grapes eat away warts, but when corroded in this way they must be treated by the other remedies I have prescribed for the complete healing of ulcers.

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§ 30.24.1  Now I will turn to those ills that threaten the whole body. The Magi say that the gall of a black male dog, if a house is fumigated or purified with it, acts as a talisman protecting all of it from sorcerers' potions; it is the same if the inner walls are sprinkled with the dog's blood or his genital organ is buried under the threshold of the front door. Those would wonder less at this who know how highly the Magi extol that very loathsome animal the tick, on the ground that it is the only creature that has no vent for its gorging, nor yet any end save at death, living longer if it starves; they tell us that so it lasts for seven days, but if they eat to satiety they burst in a shorter time. They add that a tick from the left ear of a dog, worn as an amulet, relieves all pains. They also consider the tick a prognostication of life or death, for if the patient at the beginning of his illness makes reply when he who has brought in with him a tick, standing at his feet inquires about the illness, there is sure hope of recovery; should no reply be made the patient will die. They add that the tick must be taken from the left ear of a dog that is completely black all over. Nigidius has left it in writing that dogs run away for a whole day from the sight of one who has caught a tick on a pig. Again, the Magi tell us that sprinkling with mole's blood restores to their senses the delirious, while those who are haunted by night ghosts and goblins are freed from their terrors if tongue, eyes, gall, and intestines of a python are boiled down in wine and oil, cooled by night in the open air, and used as embrocation night and morning.

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§ 30.25.1  For feverish chills Nicander gives as a remedy a dead serpent, the amphisbaena, worn as an amulet, or even its skin; nay, he says that, if it is fastened to a tree that is being felled, the fellers feel no cold and do their business more easily. So much does this, alone of serpents, stand up to the cold, being the first of all serpents to make its appearance, even before the cry of the cuckoo. One wonderful thing about the cuckoo is, that if, on the spot where that bird is heard for the first time, the print of the right foot is marked round aud the earth dug out, no fleas breed wherever it is sprinkled.

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§ 30.26.1  For those warding off paralysis the fats of decocted dormice and shrew mice are said to be very beneficial, as also millipedes taken in drink as I have prescribed for quinsy; for consumptives a green lizard boiled down in three sextarii of wine to one cyathus, the daily dose being one spoonful until convalescence, or the ash of snails taken in wine;

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§ 30.27.1  for epilepsy wool-grease with a morsel of myrrh, diluted with two cyathi of wine, a piece the size of a hazel nut being taken in drink, after the bath, or the testicles of a ram dried and pounded, half a denarius by weight being taken in a hemina of water or of ass's milk; to drink wine is forbidden for five days before and after. Very highly praised also is the blood of sheep, taken by the mouth, the gall of sheep, especially of a lamb, with honey, sucking puppy taken in wine and myrrh after the head and feet have been cut off, the excrescence on the leg of a she-mule taken in three cyathi of oxymel, the ash of a spotted lizard from overseas taken in vinegar, the coat of a spotted lizard, which it casts in the same way as a snake, taken in drink. Some have also given in drink the lizard itself, gutted with a reed and dried, others in food the lizard roasted on wooden spits. It is worth while knowing how, when cast, the winter skin is hastily taken from the lizard, which otherwise devours it, for no living creature, they say, shows greater spite in cheating man, for which reason its name has been turned into a term of abuse. They note in the summer time its nest, which is in the cornices over doors and windows, or in vaults or tombs. Over against the nest in the beginning of spring they place cages like weels woven with split reeds, the narrow neck of which gives the creature actual delight, as thereby it casts off more easily the encumbrance of its covering, but when this has been left no return is possible. No remedy for epilepsy is preferred to this. A good one too is a weasel's brain dried and taken in drink, or a weasel's liver, testicles, uterus, or paunch, dried with coriander, as I have said; likewise its ash, or a wild weasel taken whole in food. All the same good qualities are praised in the ferret. A green lizard, with seasonings to banish any nausea, the feet and head being taken off, and an application of snails, reduced to ash, with linseed, nettle seed, and honey, are also cures. The Magi recommend the tail of a python attached as an amulet in gazelle skin by deer sinews, or the bits of stone from the crops of baby swallows fastened to the left upper arm; for swallows are said to administer a bit of stone to each chick when hatched. But if, at the first attack of epilepsy, the chick from the first egg laid is given to the patient in food, he is freed from that complaint; afterwards the treatment is swallows' blood with frankincense, or eating a fresh swallow's heart. Moreover, a little stone, taken from a swallow's nest and laid on the patient, is said to give immediate relief, and worn as an amulet permanent protection. Highly praised also is eating a kite's liver or a snake's slough, a vulture's liver pounded with its blood and taken in drink for thrice seven days, or the heart of a vulture's chick worn as an amulet. But they recommend also the vulture itself to be given in food, and that too when it has eaten its fill from a human corpse. Some are of opinion that a vulture's breast should be taken in drink in a cup made of Turkey-oak wood, or the testicles of a cock in water and milk, after abstinence from wine for five days; for this purpose the testicles are preserved. There have also been some who gave in drink twenty-one red flies, and that too from a corpse, but fewer to weak patients.

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§ 30.28.1  Jaundice is combated by dirt from the ears or teats of a sheep, the dose being a denarius by weight with a morsel of myrrh and two cyathi of wine, by the ash of a dog's head in honey wine, by a millipede in a hemina of wine, by earthworms in oxymel with myrrh, by drinking wine that has rinsed a hen's feet — they must be yellow — after they have been cleansed with water, by the brain of a partridge or eagle taken in three cyathi of wine, by the ash of the feathers or intestines of a wood-pigeon taken in honey wine up to three spoonfuls, or by the ash of sparrows burnt over twigs taken in two spoonfuls of hydromel. There is a bird called 'jaundice' from its colour. If one with jaundice looks at it, he is cured, we are told, of that complaint and the bird dies. I think that this bird is the one called in Latin 'galgulus.'

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§ 30.29.1  For brain-fever appears to be beneficial, a sheep's lung wrapped warm round the patient's head. But who could give to one delirious the brain of a mouse to be taken in water, or the ash of a weasel, or even the dried flesh of a hedgehog, even if the treatment were bound to be successful? As for the eyes of the horned owl reduced to ash, I should be inclined to count this remedy as one of the frauds with which magicians mock mankind, and it is especially in fevers that true medicine is opposed to the doctrines of these quacks. For they have actually divided the art according to the passing of the sun, and also that of the moon, through the twelve signs of the Zodiac. That the whole theory should be rejected I will show by a few examples. If the sun is passing through Gemini, they recommend the sick to be rubbed with the combs, ears, and claws of cocks, burnt and pounded with oil; if it is the moon, the cocks' spurs and wattles must be used. If either sun or moon is passing through Virgo, grains of barley must be used; if through Sagittarius, a bat's wings; if the moon is passing through Leo, leaves of tamarisk, and they add that it must be the cultivated shrub; if through Aquarius, boxwood charcoal, pounded. Of these remedies I shall include only those recognised, or at least thought probable: for example, to rouse the victims of lethargus by pungent smells, among which perhaps I would put the dried testicles of a weasel or the fumes of his burnt liver. For these patients also they consider it useful to wrap round the head the warm lung of a sheep.

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§ 30.30.1  In quartans ordinary medicines are practically useless; for which reason I shall include several of the magicians' remedies, and in the first place the amulets they recommend: the dust in which a hawk has rolled himself tied in a linen cloth by a red thread, or the longest tooth of a black dog. The wasp they call pseudosphex, that flies about by itself, they catch with the left hand and hang under the chin, and others use the first wasp seen in that year; a severed viper's head attached in a linen cloth, or the heart taken from the creature while still alive; the snout and ear tips of a mouse, wrapped in red cloth, the mouse itself being allowed to go free; the right eye gouged out of a living lizard; a fly in a bit of goat skin, with its head cut off; or the beetle that rolls little pellets. Because of this beetle the greater part of Egypt worships the beetle as one of its deities. Apion gives an erudite explanation: he infers that this creature resembles the sun and its revolutions, seeking to find an excuse for the religious customs of his race. But the Magi also make amulets of other beetles. There is one with bent-back little horns, which they take up in the left hand; a third kind, called fullo, with white spots, they cut in two and wear as an amulet on either upper arm; all the rest are worn on the left arm; the heart, taken out 'with the left hand from a living snake; four joints of a scorpion's tail, with the sting, wrapped in black cloth, care being taken that the sick man does not see, for three days, either the scorpion when set free or him who attaches the amulet; after the third paroxysm he must hide it away. They tie a thread three times round a caterpillar in a linen cloth, and with three knots, the ministering attendant saying at each knot the reason for so doing. Other amulets are: a slug in a piece of skin, or four slugs' heads cut off with a reed, a multipede wrapped up in wool, the grubs from which gadflies are born, before they develop wings, or other hairy grubs found on thorny bushes. Some shut up four of these grubs in a walnut shell and attach as an amulet. Snails that are found without shells, or a spotted lizard shut up in a little box, they place under the patient's head and let out when the fever goes down. They also recommend the heart of a sea-diver, cut out without iron, dried and pounded, to be taken in warm water, or the hearts of swallows with honey; others swallows' dung in doses of one drachma in three cyathi of goat's or sheep's milk or in raisin wine, to be taken before the parozysms. Some hold that the entire swallow should be taken. An asp's skin, in doses of one sixth of a denarius by weight with an equal quantity of pepper, is taken by Parthian tribes as a cure for a quartan. Chrysippus the philosopher has told us that wearing a phryganion as an amulet is a cure for quartans: but what the animal is Chrysippus has left no account, and I have met nobody who knew. Yet a statement made by so great an authority it was necessary to mention, in case somebody's research should meet with better success. To eat the flesh of a crow or to apply its nest as a friction they think very beneficial in chronic diseases. In tertians too it may be worth while to try whether there is any benefit (so much does suffering delight in hoping against hope) in the spider called lycos (wolf) applied with its web in a small plaster of resin and the wax to both temples and to the forehead, or in the spider itself attached as an amulet in a reed, in which form it is also said to be beneficial for other fevers. A green lizard too may be tried, attached alive, in a vessel just large enough to contain it; by which method we are assured that recurrent fevers also are often banished.

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§ 30.31.1  For dropsy is given in drink wool grease in wine mixed with a little myrrh, in doses the size of a hazel nut. Some also add goose grease in myrtle-wine. The dirt from the udders of sheep has the same effect, as has the dried flesh of a hedgehog taken by the mouth. An application too of dogs vomit to the abdomen brings away, we are assured, the dropsical fluid.

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§ 30.32.1  Erysipelas is benefited by wool grease with pompholyx and rose oil, by the blood of a tick, by earth-worms applied in vinegar, by a cricket crushed between the hands — he who succeeds in doing this before the complaint shows itself is protected from an attack for the whole of that year, but the cricket must be lifted with iron along with the earth of its hole — by goose grease, by the head of a viper, kept till dry, burnt, and then applied in vinegar, a serpent's slough applied in water with bitumen and lamb suet after a bath.

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§ 30.33.1  A carbuncle is removed by pigeon's dung, applied by itself or with linseed in oxymel, also by bees that have died in honey, applied and sprinkled with pearl barley. If a carbuncle or other sore is on the privates, the remedy is wool grease with lead scales in honey, and sheep dung for incipient carbuncles. Hard swellings and whatever needs to be softened are treated very efficaciously with goose grease, and equally good results are also given by the grease of cranes.

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§ 30.34.1  Boils are said to be cured by a spider, applied before its name has been mentioned and taken off on the third day, by a shrewmouse, killed and hung up so that it does not touch earth after death, and passed three times round the boil, both the attendant and the patient spitting the same number of times, by the red part of poultry dung, best applied fresh in vinegar, by a stork's crop boiled down in wine, by an odd number of flies rubbed on with the medical finger by dirt from the ears of sheep, by stale mutton suet with the ash of woman's hair, and by ram's suet with ash of burnt pumice and an equal quantity of salt.

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§ 30.35.1  Burns are treated with ash of a dog's head, the ash of dormice and oil, sheep dung and wax, the the ash of mice; with the ash of snails so well that not even a scar is to be seen, with viper fat, and with the ash of pigeon's dung applied in oil.

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§ 30.36.1  Hard lumps in the sinews are treated with the ash of a viper's head in cyprus oil, and by an application of earthworms and honey. Pains in the sinews are soothed by fat, by a dead amphisbaena attached as an amulet, by vulture's fat with its crop, dried and pounded with stale pig's fat, by the ash of a horned-owl's head taken in honey wine with the root of a lily, if we believe the Magi. For cramp in the sinews woodpigeon's flesh dried and taken in the food, for cramping spasms hedgehog's flesh, also the ash of a weasel — a serpent's slough attached as an amulet in a piece of bull's leather prevents such spasms for opisthotonic tetanus the dried liver of a kite, the dose being three oboli taken in three cyathi of hydromel.

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§ 30.37.1  Hangnails and whitlows that form on the fingers are removed by the ash of a dog's head, or by the uterus boiled down in oil, with a layer on top of butter from ewe's milk with honey, as also by the gall bladder of any animal; roughness of the nails by cantharides and pitch, taken off on the third day, or by locusts fried with he-goat suet, and by mutton suet. Some mix with the ingredients mistletoe and purslane, others flowers of copper and mistletoe, but remove the application on the third day. Bleeding in the nostrils is arrested by inserting suet from the caul of a sheep, also by its rennet in water, especially by lamb's rennet, snuffed up or injected, even if other remedies do no good, by goose grease with an equal quantity of butter worked up into lozenges, by the earth off snails, but also by the actual snails themselves, taken from their shells; but when there is severe epistaxis it is stayed by snails beaten up and applied to the forehead, and also by spider's web; by the brain or blood of a cock are arrested fluxes from the brain, also by pigeon's blood; it is stored and congealed for this purpose.

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§ 30.38.1  If however there is violent haemorrhage from a wound, it is wonderfully arrested by an application of the ash of horse-dung burnt with egg shells.

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§ 30.39.1  Ulcers are healed by wool grease, barley ash, and copper rust, in equal parts; this is also equally efficacious for carcinomata and spreading sores. It cauterizes too the edges of ulcers, and levels out excrescences in the flesh; it also fills up hollows and forms scars. There is also great power to heal carcinomata in the ash of sheep's dung with soda added, or in the ash of a lamb's thigh bones, especially when ulcers refuse to cicatrize. There is great power too in the lungs, especially those of rams, which flatten out very efficaciously excrescences of flesh on ulcers; ewe dung too by itself, warmed under an earthen jar and kneaded, reduces swollen wounds, and cleans and heals fistulas and epinyctides. The greatest power, however, is in the ash of a dog's head, which cauterizes and thoroughly heals all excrescences as well as does spodium. These are cauterized too by mouse dung, and also by the ash of weasel's dung. Indurations in deep-seated ulcers and carcinomata are penetrated by multipedes pounded and mixed with terebinth resin and earth of Sinope. The same remedies are very useful for those ulcers that are threatened by worms. Moreover, the various kinds of worms themselves have wonderful uses. The larvae that breed in wood heal all ulcers; and nomae too if burnt with an equal weight of anise and applied in oil. Fresh wounds are united so well by earth worms that there is a general conviction that even severed sinews are by applying them made whole by the seventh day; accordingly it is thought that they should be preserved in honey. Their ash with liquid pitch or symphytum and honey removes too-hard edges of ulcers. Some dry them in the sun, use in vinegar to treat wounds, and do not take them off without an interval of two days. Used in the same way the earth too off snails is beneficial, and snails taken out whole, beaten up, and applied, unite fresh wounds and arrest nomae. There is also an insect called by the Greeks herpes, which is specific for all creeping ulcers. Snails also are good for them, beaten up with their shells; with myrrh indeed and frankincense they are said to heal even severed sinews. The fat of a python also, dried in the sun, is of great benefit, as is a cock's brain for fresh wounds. By viper's salt taken in food we are told that ulcers become more amenable to treatment and heal more rapidly. Indeed the physician Antonius after operating on ulcers without success gave vipers as food to bring about complete cures with wonderful rapidity. The ash of the trixallis with honey removes hard edges on ulcers, as does ash of pigeon's dung with arsenic and honey; these also remove all that needs a cautery. The brain of a horned owl with goose grease is said to unite wounds wonderfully, as, with woman's milk, does the ash of a ram's thighs the ulcers called malignant, but the cloths must be first carefully washed, or the screech owl boiled in oil, with which when melted down are mixed ewe butter and honey. The lips of ulcers that are too hard are softened by bees that have died in honey, and elephantiasis by the blood and ash of a weasel. Wounds and weals made by the scourge are removed by an application of fresh sheepskin.

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§ 30.40.1  For fractures of the joints a specific is the ash of a sheep's thighs with wax — this medicament is more efficacious if there are burnt with the thighs the sheep's jawbones and a deer's horn, and the wax is softened with rose oil — specific for broken bones is a dog's brain, spread on a linen cloth, over which is placed wool, occasionally moistened underneath (with oil). In about fourteen days it unites the broken parts, as does quite as quickly the ash of a field-mouse with honey, or that of earthworms, which also extracts fragments of bone.

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§ 30.41.1  Scars are restored to the natural colour by the lungs of sheep, particularly of rams, by their suet in soda, by the ash of a green lizard, by a snake's slough boiled down in wine, and by pigeon's dung with honey; the last in wine does the same for both kinds a of white vitiligo; for vitiligo cantharides also with two parts of rue leaves. These must be kept on in the sun until the skin is violently irritated; then there must be fomentation and rubbing with oil, followed by another application. This treatment should be repeated for several days, but deep ulceration must be guarded against. For vitiligo of all kinds they also recommend the application of flies with root of eupatoria, or the white part of hens' dung kept in old oil in a horn box, or bat's blood, or hedgehog's gall in water. Itch scab however is relieved by the brain of a horned owl with saltpetre, but best of all by dog's blood, and pruritus by the small, broad, kind of snail, crushed and applied.

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§ 30.42.1  Arrows, weapons, and everything that must be extracted from the flesh, are withdrawn by a mouse split and laid on the wound, but especially by a split lizard, or even its head only, crushed and laid on the wound with salt, by the snails that attack leaves in clusters, crushed and similarly laid on with the shells, and edible snails without them, but most efficaciously by the bones of snakes with hare's rennet. These bones also, with the rennet of any quadruped, show a good result by the third day. Cantharides too are highly recommended, beaten up and applied with barley meal.

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§ 30.43.1  For women's complaints the afterbirth of an ewe is of service, as I said when speaking of goats. The dung too of sheep has the same medicinal uses. Fumigation with lobsters is of the greatest help in strangury in women. If occasionally after conception a woman eats the testicles of a cock, males are said to be formed in the uterus. The foetus is retained by taking in drink the ash of porcupines, brought to maturity by drinking bitch's milk, and withdrawn by the afterbirth of a bitch, which must not touch the earth, laid on the loins of the woman in childbed. Mouse dung diluted with rain water reduces the breasts of women swollen after childbirth. Rubbing the woman all over with the ash of hedgehogs and oil prevents miscarriage. The delivery of those is easier who have swallowed goose a with two cyathi of water, or the liquids that flow from a weasel's uterus through its genitals. Applying earthworms prevents pains in the sinews of neck and shoulders, and taken in raisin wine bring away a sluggish afterbirth. These worms laid by themselves on the breasts also mature suppurations there, open them, draw out the pus, and make them cicatrize. Taken with honey wine they stimulate the flow of milk. There are also little worms found n grass; these, tied round the neck as an amulet, prevent a miscarriage, but they are taken off just before the birth, otherwise they prevent delivery, Care too must be taken not to lay them on the earth. Further, to cause conception five or seven at a time are given in drink. Snails taken in food hasten delivery, and conception too if applied with saffron. An application of snails in starch and tragacanth arrests fluxes. They are also good for menstruation if taken in food, and correct with deer's marrow displacements of the uterus; to one snail should be added a denarius by weight of marrow and cyprus oil. Inflation too of the uterus is dispersed by snails taken out of their shells and beaten up with rose oil. For these purposes the most preferred are snails of Astypalaea. African snails are prepared in a different way; doses of two are beaten up with a three-finger pinch of fenugreek, four spoonfuls of honey added, and the whole applied after rubbing the abdomen with iris juice. There are also found straying everywhere small snails with a white corslet. Dried in the sun on tiles, crushed to powder, and mixed with an equal quantity of bean meal, these impart both whiteness and smoothness to the skin. The desire to scratch is removed by the small, broad snails with pearl barley. If a woman with child step across a viper she will miscarry; similarly if she cross an amphisbaena, a dead one at least, but those that carry on their persons a live one in a box step across with impunity; even if it is a dead one and preserved it makes childbirth easy. In the case of a dead one, wonderful to relate, no harm is done should a pregnant woman cross it without a preserved one, if she at once crosses a preserved one. Fumigation with a dried snake assists menstruation.

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§ 30.44.1  A snake's slough, tied to the loins as an amulet, makes childbirth easier, but it must be taken off immediately after delivery. They also give it in wine to be taken with frankincense; in any other way it causes miscarriage. A stick with which a frog has been shaken from a snake helps lying-in women, and the ash of the trixallis, applied with honey, helps menstruation, as does a spider that is spinning a thread from a height. It should be caught in the hollow of the hand, crushed? and applied; but if it is caught as it ascends again, the same treatment will arrest menstruation. The stone aetites, found in the eagle's nest, protects a foetus from all plots to cause abortion. A vulture's feather, placed under their feet, helps lying-in women. It is certain that pregnant women must avoid a raven's egg, since if they step over it they will miscarry through the mouth. A hawk's dung taken in honey wine seems to make women fertile. Indurations and abscesses of the uterus are softened by goose grease or by swan's grease.

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§ 30.45.1  The breasts after delivery are safeguarded by goose grease with rose oil and a spider's web. The Phrygians and Lycaonians have found that the fat of bustards is beneficial for teats disordered by childbirth. For uterine suffocation beetles also are applied. Ash of partridge eggshells mixed with cadmia and wax keeps the breasts firm. They also think that breasts do not droop if circles are traced round them three times with the egg of partridge or quail, and that if this egg is swallowed it also produces fertility and an abundant supply of milk as well, that it lessens pains in the breasts if they are rubbed with it and goose grease, that it breaks up moles in the uterus, and that uterine itch is relieved if it is applied with crushed bugs.

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§ 30.46.1  Bats' blood is a depilatory, but an application to the armpits of boys is not enough unless copper rust or hemlock seed is spread over it afterwards; this treatment either removes the hair altogether or reduces it to down. They think that a bat's brain is equally efficacious — this brain is double, red and white asome adding the bat's blood and liver. Others in three heminae of oil thoroughly boil a viper after taking out the bones, using the decoction as a depilatory after first plucking out the hairs they do not wish to grow again. The gall of a hedgehog is a depilatory, especially when mixed with a bat's brain and goat's milk, as is also the ash by itself. Parts rubbed with the milk of a bitch with her first litter, when the hairs have been plucked out or not yet grown, do not grow hair again. The same result is said to be produced by the blood of a tick plucked from a dog, by the blood or gall of a swallow, or by the eggs of ants. They say that eyebrows are made black by crushed flies; if however it is desired that the eyes of babies should be black, the expectant mother must eat a shrewmouse; hair is prevented from turning grey by the ash of earth-worms mixed with oil.

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§ 30.47.1  Babies that are troubled with curdled milk have a preventative in lamb's rennet taken in water or if the trouble has occurred with milk already curdled it is dispersed by this rennet given in vinegar. For dentition the brain of a sheep is very beneficial. The inflammation of babies called siriasis is cured by the bones found in dog's dung worn as an amulet, and hernia in babies by bringing a green lizard to bite them when asleep. Afterwards they fasten the lizard to a reed and hang it in smoke, and they say that as it dies the baby recovers. The slime of snails applied to the eyes of babies straightens the eyelashes and makes them grow. Hernia is cured by the ash of snails applied for thirty days with frankincense in white of egg. There are found in the little horns of snails sandy grits; worn as an amulet these make dentition easy. The ash of snail shells mixed with wax checks procidence of the end of the bowel, but the ash should be mixed with the discharge that exudes when the snails are pricked. A viper's brain tied on with a piece of his skin helps dentition. The same effect have also the largest teeth of serpents. The dung of a raven attached with wool as an amulet cures babies' coughs. Certain details can scarcely be included as serious items, but I must not omit them, since they have been put on record. As a remedy for hernia in babies they recommend a lizard; there should be taken a male, which can be recognised by its having one vent beneath the tail. The necessary ritual is: that it must bite the lesion through a gold or silver barrier; then it must be fastened in an unused cup and placed in smoke. Incontinence of urine in babies is checked by giving in their food boiled mice. The tall, indented horns of the beetle, fastened to babies, serves as an amulet. In the head of the boa is said to be a little stone, which is spit out by it when in fear of violent death; they add that dentition is wonderfully aided if the creature's head is cut off unawares, the stone extracted and worn as an amulet. The brain too of the same creature they recommend to be worn for the same purpose, or the stone or little bone found on the back of a slug. A splendid help also is the brain of a ewe rubbed on the gums, as for the ears is goose grease put in them with juice of ocimum. On prickly plants are grubs which are rough and downy. These worn by babies as an amulet are said to effect an immediate recovery when part of their food sticks in the throat.

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§ 30.48.1  Sleep is induced by wool grease with a morsel of myrrh diluted in two cyathi of wine, or else with goose grease and myrtle wine, by the cuckoo bird in a piece of hare's fur worn as an amulet or by a heron's beak worn as an amulet on the forehead in a piece of ass's hide. It is thought too that the beak of the heron by itself rinsed in wide has the same effect. Sleep is kept away, on the contrary, by a dried bat's head worn as an amulet.

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§ 30.49.1  A lizard drowned in a man's urine is antaphrodisiac to him who passed it, but the Magi claim that it is a love-philtre. Antaphrodisiac too are snails, and pigeon's dung taken with oil and wine. Aphrodisiac for men are the right parts of a vulture's lung, worn as an amulet in a piece of crane's skin; aphrodisiac also are the yolks of five pigeons' eggs mixed with a denarius by weight of pig fat and swallowed in honey, sparrows or their eggs in food, or the right testicle of a cock worn as an amulet in a piece of ram's-skin. They say that rubbing with ibis ash, goose grease and iris oil prevent miscarriage when there has been conception; that desire on the contrary is inhibited if a fighting cock's testicles are rubbed with goose grease and worn as an amulet in a ram s skin, as it also is if with a cock's blood any cock's testicles are placed under the bed. Women unwilling to conceive are forced to do so by hairs from the tail of a she-mule, pulled out during the animal copulation and entwined during the human. A man who passes his urine on a dog's is said to become Less sexually active. A wonderful thing again (if it is true) is told about the ash of the spotted lizard: if wrapped in a linen cloth and held in the left hand it is aphrodisiac; if transferred to the right hand it is antaphrodisiac. Another wonder: the blood of a bat, collected on a flock of wool and placed under the head of women, moves them to lust, as does the tongue of a goose, taken either in food or in drink.

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§ 30.50.1  The lice of phthiriasis even of the whole body are destroyed in three days by taking in drink the maggots, east slough of a snake, or by drinking, with a little salt, whey after the cheese has been taken out. They say that if the brain of a weasel is added to rennet, cheeses neither go rotten through age nor are touched by mice. If the ash too of a weasel is given to poultry or pigeons in their mash, they are said to be safe from weasels. Pains of draught animals in making urine are ended by a bat put on them as an amulet, and hots by a woodpigeon carried three times round their middle. Wonderful to relate, the woodpigeon on being set free dies, while the animal is at once freed from pain.

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§ 30.51.1  The eggs of an owl, given for three days in wine to drunkards, produce distaste for it. Drunkenness is kept away by taking early the roasted lung of sheep. A swallow's beak reduced to ash, beaten up with myrrh, and sprinkled on the wine that will be drunk, will free drinkers from fear of becoming tipsy. This is a discovery of Orus, king of Assyria.

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§ 30.52.1  In addition to all this there are some notable things about the animals that belong to this Book: the gromphena, a bird spoken of in Sardinia as like a crane, but now, I think, unknown even to the Sardinians. In the same province we have the ophion, a creature like deer only in its hair, and found nowhere else. The same authorities say that there is a creature called siralugum, but they have not told us what kind of an animal it is or where it is found. I do not indeed doubt that it once existed, since even medicines from it have been prescribed. Marcus Cicero tells us that there are animals called biuri which gnaw the vines in Campania.

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§ 30.53.1  There are still some wonders in the animals that I have mentioned: that a dog does not bark at a person having on him the membrane from the afterbirth of a bitch, or holding the dung or hair of a hare; included among gnats are mullones, which live only for a day; those taking honey from hives are not stung by the bees if they have on them the beak of a woodpecker; pigs follow those from whom they have received in their mash the brain of a raven; the dust in which a she-mule has wallowed, sprinkled on the body, lessens the fires of love. Shrew mice are put to flight if one of them is castrated and let go free; if a snake's skin, salt, emmer wheat, and wild thyme are pounded together and with wine poured down the throat of oxen when the grapes are ripening, they enjoy good health for a whole year, or if three young swallows are given at three meals in their mash; if dust is gathered from the track of a snake and sprinkled on bees, these return to their hives; if the right testicle of a ram is tied up he begets ewes only; those are not wearied by any toil who have on them sinews from the wings and legs of a crane; she-mules do not kick if they have drunk wine. The hoofs of she-mules are the only material discovered that is not rotted by the poisonous water of Styx, a notable fact discovered by Aristotle, to his great infamy, when Antipater sent a draught of it to Alexander the Great. Now I will pass to things found in water.

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§ 31.1.1  THERE follow the medicinal benefits obtained from aquatic animals; Nature the Creator is not idle even among them, but puts forth her tireless strength on waves, billows, ebb and flow of tides, and the rapid currents of rivers; and nowhere with greater might, if we will but admit the truth, seeing that this element is lord over all the others. Water swallows up the land, destroys flames, climbs aloft claiming the sovereignty even of the sky, and by a blanket of clouds chokes the life-giving spirit, so forcing out thunderbolts, the world waging civil war with itself. What can be more wonderful than water seated in the sky? But as though it were a little thing to reach this great height, water sucks up thither with itself shoals of fish, and often even stones, carrying up aloft a weight other than its own. This element also falls again to become the source of all things that spring from the earth. Right wonderful action this on the part of Nature, if one considers it: in order that crops may grow, and that trees and shrubs may live, water soars to the sky and brings down thence even to plants the breath of life, so we are forced to admit that all the powers of earth too are part of the beneficence of water. Wherefore I shall first of all give examples of the might of water, for what mortal man could count them all?

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§ 31.2.1  Everywhere in many lands gush forth beneficent waters, here cold, there hot, there both, as among the Tarbelli, an Aquitanian tribe, and in the Pyrenees, with only a short distance separating the two, in some places tepid and lukewarm, promising relief to the sick and bursting forth to help only men of all the animals. Water adds to the number of the gods by its various names, and founds cities, such as Puteoli in Campania, Statiellae in Liguria, and Sextiae in the province of Narbonensis. Nowhere however is water more bountiful than in the Bay of Baiae, or with more variety of relief: some has the virtue of sulphur, some of alum, some of salt, some of soda, some of bitumen, some are even acid and salt in combination; of some the mere steam is beneficial, of which the power a is so great that it heats baths and even makes cold water boil in the tubs. The water called Posidian in the region of Baiae, getting its name from a freedman of Claudius Caesar, cooks thoroughly even meat. In the sea itself too, steam rises from the water that belonged to Licinius Crassus, and there comes something valuable to health in the very midst of the billows.

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§ 31.3.1  To come now to the classes of water: some waters are good for sinews or feet, or for sciatica; others for dislocations or fractures; they purge the bowels; heal wounds; are specific for head, or for ears; while the Ciceronian are so for the eyes. It is worth while recording that there is a country seat on the coast as you go from Lake Avernus to Puteoli, with a famous portico and grove, which lvi. Cicero, copying Athens, called Academia. There he wrote the volumes called Academica, and in it he also erected memorials to himself, as though indeed he had not done so throughout the whole world. In the front part of this estate, when the owner was Antistius Vetus, a short time after Cicero's demise there burst out hot springs, very beneficial for eye complaints, which have been made famous by a poem of Laurea Tullus, who was one of Cicero's freedmen. From it we at once realize that even his servants drew inspiration from that mighty genius. For I will quote the actual poem, which deserves to be read, not only on this site, but everywhere.

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§ 31.3.2  'O famous champion of our Latin tongue, where grows with a fairer green the grove you bade rise, and the villa, honoured by the name of Academe, Vetus keeps in repair under a more careful tendance, here are also to be seen waters not revealed before, which with drops infused relieve wearied eyes. For indeed the site itself gave this gift as an honour to Cicero its master, when it disclosed springs with this healing power, so that, since he is read throughout the whole world, there may be more waters to give sight to eyes.'

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§ 31.4.1  In Campania too are the waters of Sinuessa, which are said to cure barrenness in women and insanity in men.

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§ 31.5.1  The waters in the island of Aenaria are said to cure stone in the bladder, as does also the water called Acidula — it is a cold one — four miles from Teanum Sidicinum, that at Stabiae called Dimidia, and the water of Venafrum from the spring Acidulus. The same result comes from drinking the water of Lake Velia, also of the Syrian spring near Mount Taurus, according to Marcus Varro, and of the Phrygian river Gallus, according to Callimachus. But here moderation is necessary in drinking lest it drive people to madness, which Ctesias writes those suffer from who drink of the Red Spring in Ethiopia.

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§ 31.6.1  Near Rome the waters of Albula heal wounds. These are lukewarm, but those of Cutilia of the Sabines are very cold, penetrating the body with a sort of suction, so that they might seem almost to bite, being very healthful to the stomach, the sinews, and the whole body.

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§ 31.7.1  The spring at Thespiae causes women to conceive, as does the river Elatum in Arcadia, and the spring Linus, also in Arcadia, guards the embryo and prevents miscarriage. The river in Pyrrha, on the contrary, that is called Aphrodisium, causes barrenness.

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§ 31.8.1  The water of Lake Alphins removes psoriasis, Varro tells us, adding that Titius, an ex-praetor, as a result of this complaint had a face like that of a marble statue. The Cydnus, a river of Cilicia, cures gout, as appears from a letter of Cassius of Parma to M. Antonius. On the other hand, it is the fault of the water in Troezen that everyone there suffers from diseases of the feet. The Tungri, a state of Gaul, has a remarkable spring that sparkles with innumerable bubbles, with a taste of iron rust, which yet cannot be detected until the water has been drunk. It is a purgative, and cures tertian agues and stone in the bladder. This water also, if fire is brought near it, becomes turbid, and finally turns red. White Earth Springs, between Puteoli and Naples, is good for complaints of the eyes and for wounds. Cicero in his Book of Marvels alleges that only by marsh water of Reate are the hoofs of draught cattle hardened.

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§ 31.9.1  Eudicus tells us that in Hestiaeotis are two springs: Cerona, which makes black the sheep that drink of it, and Neleus, which makes them white, while they are mottled if they drink of each. Theophrastus says that at Thurii the Crathis makes oxen and sheep white, and the Sybaris makes them black.

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§ 31.10.1  He adds that men too are affected by this difference: that those who drink of the Sybaris are darker and more hardy, and with curly hair, while those who drink of the Crathis are fair, softer, and with straight hair. He also says that in Macedonia those who wish white young to be born lead their beasts to the Haliacmon, but to the Axius if they wish the young to be black or dark. The same authority adds that in certain places all produce grows to be dark, even grain and vegetables, as among the Messapii, and that in a certain spring at Lusi in Arcadia land mice live and dwell. At Erythrae the river Axios makes hair grow on the body.

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§ 31.11.1  In Boeotia by the temple of Trophonius near the river Hercynnus are two springs; one brings remembrance, the other forgetfulness; hence the names that have been given them.

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§ 31.12.1  In Cilicia near the town Cescum flows the river Nuus. Those that drink of it become, says Marcus Varro, of keener perception, but on the island of Cea there is a spring that makes men dull, and at Zama in Africa is one that gives the drinkers a tuneful voice.

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§ 31.13.1  Disgust at wine, says Eudoxus, comes upon those who have drunk of Lake Clitorius, but Theopompus says that drunkenness is caused by the springs that I have mentioned, and Mucianus that at Andros, from the spring of Father Liber, on fixed seven-day festivals of this god, flows wine, but if its water is carried out of sight of the temple the taste turns to that of water.

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§ 31.14.1  Polyclitus says that with the river Liparis near Soli in Cilicia people are anointed, Theophrastus says this of a spring with the same name in Ethiopia, and Lycos that among the Oratae of India is a spring the water of which keeps lamps burning bright. The same is said of one at Ecbatana. Theopompus says that among the people of Scotussa is a lake that heals wounds. Juba says that among the Trogodytae is a lake called Insanus, so named from its evil character, for three times a day and three times each night it becomes bitter, and then again fresh, full of white serpents twenty cubits long; he also says that in Arabia is a spring that bursts forth with such violence that it throws out everything, no matter how heavy, that is heaved into it.

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§ 31.16.1  Theophrastus tells us that a spring of Marsyas in Phrygia, near the town of Celaenae, casts out rocks. Not far from it are two springs, named Claeon and Gelon, so called from the force of their Greek names. A spring at Cyzicus is called Cupid's Spring; those who drink of it, Mucianus believes, lose their amorous desires.

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§ 31.17.1  In Crannon is a hot spring which just falls short of boiling, the water of which with wine added remains in vessels a hot drink for three days. There are also in Germany across the Rhine the hot springs of Mattiaion, a draught from which is boiling hot for three days; around the borders indeed the water forms pumice.

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§ 31.18.1  But if anybody thinks that some of these statements are incredible, he has to learn that in no sphere does Nature show greater marvels, although in the early parts of my work I have mentioned plenty of examples. Ctesias tells us that there is in India standing water called Silasp in which nothing floats but everything sinks to the bottom; Coelius says in our Avernus even leaves sink, and Varro that the birds that fly to it die. On the other hand, in the African lake Apuscidamus everything floats and nothing sinks; similarly in the Sicilian spring Phinthia, as Apion tells us, and among the Medes in the lake and well of Saturn. Again, the source of the river Limyra often crosses to neighbouring districts, indicating some portent, and a wonderful thing is that the fish cross with it. The inhabitants seek responses from them, offering food. To give a favourable answer the fish snap it up; but for an unfavourable one, they knock it away with their tails. The river Alcas in Bithynia flows by Bryazus — this is the name both of a god and of his temple — the current of which perjured persons are said to be unable to endure, as it burns like a flame. In Cantabria the springs of the Tamaris are supposed to be prophetic. Three in number they are eight feet apart, uniting in one channel to form a vast river. Each one dries up for periods of twelve, occasionally of twenty days, without the slightest trace of water, although there is a copious spring near them that never dries up. It is an evil portent if those wishing to look at them find them not flowing, as recently Larcius Licinius, a legate pro-praetore discovered after seven days. In Judea is a stream that dries up every Sabbath.

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§ 31.19.1  On the other hand some other marvels are deadly. Ctesias writes that in Armenia is a spring in which are dark fish that, eaten as food, bring instant death, as I have heard do the fish also from the water around the rising of the Danube, until a spring is reached close to the main channel, where the fish of this sort go no further. At this point, therefore, report says is the real source of that river. They tell us that this same phenomenon occurs in Lydia in the marsh of the Nymphs. In Arcadia near the Pheneus there flows from the rocks a stream called Styx, which I have said proves instantly fatal to life, but Theophrastus tells us that in it are small fish equally deadly; no other kind of poisonous spring is like this. Theopompus also says that near Cychri in Thrace are deadly waters, Lycos that at Leontini is water that kills on the third day after drinking, and Varro that on Soracte is poisonous water in a spring four feet wide. At sunrise, he adds, this bubbles out as though it boiled, and birds that have tasted it lie dead close by. For certain waters have also this insidious property, that the very prospect is attractive; as at Nonacris in Arcadia, which has nothing at all about it to serve as a warning. They think that this water harms by its excessive cold, seeing that as it flows it itself turns to stone. It is otherwise around Tempe in Thessaly, for its poison is a terror to everyone, and they tell us that by the water there even bronze and iron are corroded. It flows, as I have pointed out, for only a short distance, and a marvellous thing is related of this spring: it is embraced by the roots of a wild carob always bearing purple blossom. And a unique kind of herb flourishes on the margins of the spring. In Macedonia, not far from the tomb of the poet Euripides, two streams join, one very wholesome to drink, the other a deadly poison.

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§ 31.20.1  At Perperena is a spring that turns to stone whatever land it irrigates, as do also the hot waters at Aedepsus in Euboea, for, whatever rocks the stream reaches increase in height. At Eurymenae chaplets, thrown into a spring, turn to stone. At Colossae is a river, and bricks when cast into it are of stone when taken out. In Scyros in the mine all the trees watered by the river are turned to rock, branches and all. Drops too dripping from the stone harden in certain caves, and hence these are concave in shape. But at Mieza in Macedonia the drops actually hang from the arched roofs, while in the Corinthian cave they petrify after falling; in certain caverns the stone forms in both ways and makes pillars, as at Phausia in the Chersonesus opposite to Rhodes in a huge cave, where the pillars are actually of different colours to look at. These examples must be enough for the present.

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§ 31.21.1  It is a question debated by the physicians what kinds of water are most beneficial. They rightly condemn stagnant and sluggish waters, holding that running water is more beneficial, as it is made finer and more healthy by the mere agitation of the current. For this reason I am surprised that some physicians recommend highly water from cisterns. But these physicians put forward a reason; the lightest water, they say, is rainwater, seeing that it has been able to rise and to be suspended in the atmosphere. Therefore they also prefer snow and ice even more than snow, as though its texture were rarefied to the utmost; for, they say, snow and ice are lighter than water, and ice much lighter. To refute this view is a matter that is important to all men. For first of all, this lightness of water can be discovered with difficulty except by sensation, as the kinds of water differ practically nothing in weight. Nor is it proof of the lightness of rain water that it rose to the sky, since even stones are seen to do the same, and as it falls it is infected with exhalations from the earth. Hence it comes about that rainwater is found to be full of dirt, for which reason this water becomes hot very quickly. That snow indeed and ice should be considered the finest form of that element makes me wonder, when I have before me the evidence of hailstones, to drink the water of which it is agreed is most unwholesome. Not a few physicians however themselves maintain that hail and snow on the contrary make very unhealthy drink, since there has been taken from it what was its thinnest part. Certainly it is found that every liquid becomes smaller when frozen, that too much dew brings blight, and hoar frost blast, effects caused by snow also being akin. Rainwater, it is agreed, becomes putrid very quickly, and it is the worst water to stand a voyage. Epigenes, however, says that water which has become putrid and been purified seven times becomes putrid no more. But cistern water even physicians admit is harmful to the bowels and throat because of its hardness, and no other water contains more slime or disgusting insects. Yet it must be admitted, they hold, that river water is not ipso facto the most wholesome, nor yet that of any torrent whatsoever, while there are very many lakes that are wholesome. What water then, and of what kind, is the best? It varies with the locality. The kings of Parthia drink only of the Choaspes and the Eulaeus; water from these rivers is taken with them even into distant regions. But it is clear that the water of these rivers does not find favour just because they are rivers, for the kings do not drink from the Tigris, Euphrates, or many other rivers.

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§ 31.22.1  Slime in water is bad. If however the same river is full of eels, it is held to be a sign of wholesomeness, as it is of coldness for worms to breed in a spring. But before all are condemned bitter waters, and those that give a full feeling immediately after drinking, as does the water at Troezen. But the nitrous and salty-acid streams that in the desert flow to the Red Sea are made sweet within two hours if pearl barley is added, and the barley itself they eat. Especially are condemned waters that have mud at their source, and those that give a bad colour to those who drink of them. It also makes a difference if water stains bronze vessels, or if it cooks greens slowly, if when gently filtered out it leaves a sediment of earth, or when boiled thickly encrusts the vessel. Not only too is fetid water bad, but also that which tastes of anything at all, though the taste may be pleasant and agreeable, or, as often happens, approaching that of milk. Wholesome water ought to be very like air. In the whole world one spring of water only is said to have a pleasant smell, and that is at Chabura in Mesopotamia; a reason is sought in the legend that with it Juno was bathed. Apart from this wholesome water should have no sort of taste or smell.

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§ 31.23.1  Some judge the wholesomeness of water by means of the balance. This is wasted carefulness, for it is very rare for one water to be lighter than another. A more reliable and a delicate test is that, other things being equal, a water is better that becomes warm and cool more quickly. Moreover we are told that if drawn in vessels [without being weighed, or without being warmed by the hand] and placed on the ground, the better water becomes warm. From what source then shall we obtain the most commendable water? From wells surely, as I see they are generally used in towns, but they should be those the water of which by frequent withdrawals is kept in constant motion, and those where due thinness is obtained by filtering through the earth. For wholesomeness so much suffices; for coolness both shade is necessary and that the well should be open to the air. One point above all must be observed — and this is also important for a continuous flow — well water should issue from the bottom, not the sides. But coolness to the touch can also be obtained artificially, if the water is forced aloft or let fall from a height, beating and absorbing the air. In swimming indeed the same water is felt to be cooler by those who hold their breath. It was a discovery of the Emperor Nero to boil water and cool it in a glass vessel by thrusting it into snow. In this way is obtained a pleasant coolness without the injurious qualities of snow. At any rate it is agreed that all water is more serviceable when boiled, and that water which has been heated can be cooled to a greater degree — a most clever discovery. It purifies bad water to boil it down to one half. Cold water taken internally checks bleeding, and to hold it in the mouth prevents overheating in the bath. Water that is very cold to swallow is not always so to the touch; this good quality alternates as many find out by personal experience.

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§ 31.24.1  The first prize for the coolest and most wholesome water in the whole world has been awarded by the voice of Rome to the Aqua Marcia, one of the gods' gifts to our city. This was once called the Aqua Aufeia, and the source itself Aqua Pitonia. It rises at the extreme end of the Paelignian range, crosses the country of the Marsi and the Fucine lake, plainly making straight for Rome. Next it sinks into the underground caves near Tibur, reappearing and completing its journey of nine more miles along an aqueduct. The first to begin the bringing of this water to Rome was one of the kings, Ancus Marcius; later, repairs were carried out by Quintus Marcius Rex in his praetorship, and again by Marcus Agrippa.

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§ 31.25.1  The same Agrippa also brought the Aqua Virgo to Rome from the byroad, eight miles away, that extends two miles along the road to Praeneste. Nearby is the stream of Hercules, and because the Aqua Virgo runs away from this it was so named. A comparison of these rivers illustrates the difference mentioned above; for the Aqua Marcia is as much superior to swallow as the Aqua Virgo is cool to touch. And yet Rome has long since lost the delights of each, for love of display and greed have diverted these means of public health to country seats and suburbs.

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§ 31.26.1  It would be pertinent to add the method of searching for water. It is found mostly in enclosed valleys, and what may be called the hinge of converging slopes, or at the foot of mountains. Many have thought that everywhere the northern are the watery slopes. On this matter it would be well to point out the variableness of Nature. In the Hyrcanian mountains it does not rain on the southern slope, and so only on the north side are there woods. But Olympus, Ossa, Parnassus, the Apennines, and the Alps, are everywhere covered with trees and watered by rivers; others are so only on the south side, as are the White Mountains in Crete. So in this matter there will be no unvarying rule to follow.

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§ 31.27.1  Signs of the presence of water are rushes, the plant about which I have spoken, and frogs squatting on their chest in great numbers for any one place. For wild willow, alder, vitex, reed, or ivy, which grow spontaneously and where there is a settling of rainwater flowing from higher regions to one lower down, are deceptive indications; one much more reliable is a misty steam, visible from a distance before sunrise, for which some water-finders watch from a height, lying prone with their chin touching the earth. There is also a special sign, known only to experts, which they look for in the hottest season and in the most blazing heat of the day, the nature of the reflection that shines from each locality. For if one spot looks moister while the earth around is parching, that is an infallible sign. But so great is the necessary strain on the eyes that pain results. To avoid this strain they have recourse to other tests. They dig a hole to the depth of five feet, covering it with jars of unbaked potters' clay, or else with a well-oiled bronze basin, and also a burning lamp arched over with foliage and earth on top; if the clay is found to be wet or broken, or if moisture covers the bronze, or the lamp goes out without any failure of oil, or perchance a flock of wool is wet, then the finding of water is assured. Some also light a fire first and dry the hole, making yet more conclusive the evidence of the vessels.

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§ 31.28.1  The earth however itself guarantees water by white spots or by being green all over. For in black earth the springs are generally not permanent. Potters clay always dashes hopes of water, and further well-digging ceases when it is observed that the earth's strata begin with black and go down in the order given above. Water in clay is always sweet, but cooler in tufa. For tufa too is commended, for it makes water sweet and very light; acting as a strainer it keeps back any dirt. Loam indicates scanty trickles with shine, gravel intermittent springs but of a good flavour, male loam or carbunculus-sand; continuous streams, steady and wholesome; red rock points to the certain presence of excellent water; the rocky bases of mountains, or flint, point to the same kind of water, with great coolness in addition. But as the diggers go deeper, the clods should prove continually moister, and the spades cut down more easily. When wells have been sunk deep, the well-diggers are killed if they meet with sulphurous or aluminous fumes. A test for this danger is to let down a lighted lamp and see if it goes out. If it does, vent-holes are sunk at the side of the well, on the right and on the left, to take off the oppressive gas. Apart from these injurious substances, mere depth makes the air oppressive; it is dissipated by continuous fanning with linen cloths. When water has been reached, walls are built from the bottom no cement being used lest the springs be dammed up. Some water, the source of which is not at a height, is cooler right from the beginning of spring — for it is made up of winter rain — some is cooler after the rising of the Dog-star; in Macedonia at Pella are both kinds. For before the town there is a marsh stream that is cold at the beginning of summer; then in the higher parts of the town the water is very cold even in the height of summer. A similar phenomenon occurs in Chios also, the relative position of harbour and town being the same. At Athens, Enneacrunos in a cloudy summer is cooler than the well in the Garden of Juppiter, while this latter is very cold during summer droughts. Wells however generally run dry about Arcturus, not in the actual summer, and all sink low during the four days of its rising. Moreover many wells fail throughout the winter, as those around Olynthus, the water returning first in the spring. In Sicily indeed, in the region of Messana and Mylae, springs in winter dry up altogether, but in the actual summer overflow and form rivers. At Apollonia in Pontus a spring near the sea is flooded only in summer, and especially about the rising of the Dog-star, but less so if the summer is colder than usual. Certain lands become drier in rainy weather, as the region of Narnia; Marcus Cicero included this in his Marvels, saying that drought brings mud, and rain dust.

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§ 31.29.1  All water is sweeter in winter, in summer less so, in autumn least, and less during droughts. The taste of rivers is usually variable, owing to the great difference in river beds. For waters vary with the land over which they flow, and with the juices of the plants they wash. Therefore the same rivers are found in some parts to be unwholesome. Tributaries too alter the flavour of a river, as do those of the Borysthenes, and being absorbed are diluted. Some rivers indeed are also changed by rain. Three times it has happened in the Bosphorus that salt rains fell and ruined the crops, and three times rains have made bitter the inundations of the Nile, a great plague for Egypt.

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§ 31.30.1  Springs arise often when woods have been cut down, being used up before as sustenance for the trees; this happened when Cassander was besieging the Gauls after the woods on Mount Haemus had been felled by them to make a rampart. Often indeed devastating torrents unite when from hills has been cut away the wood that used to hold the rains and absorbs them. It also improves the water supply for the earth to he dug and tilled, and for the hard surface crust to be broken up. It is at any rate reported that in Crete, when a town called Arcadia had been stormed, the many springs and rivers of that region went dry, and six years afterwards, when the town was rebuilt, they reappeared, as each piece of land came under cultivation. Earthquakes too make water break out or swallow it up, for example, as is well known, around Pheneus in Arcadia this has happened five times. Thus too on Mount Coryeus a river burst out, but afterwards came to be tilled ground. Any change is startling when no obvious reason for it is to be seen. In Magnesia for instance hot water became cold but its salty flavour remained unaltered; while in Caria, where the temple of Neptune is, a river which before had been sweet was changed to salt. The following phenomena too are very wonderful: the Arethusa at Syracuse smells of dung during the Olympian games, a likely thing, for the Alpheus crosses to that island under the bed of the seas. A spring in the Rhodian Chersonesus pours out refuse every ninth year. The colour too of water changes, for example at Babylon a lake in summer has red water for eleven days, and the Borysthenes at fixed intervals flows with a blue colour, although of all waters it is the thinnest, and for that reason flows above the Hypanis. Wherein is another marvel: when south winds blow the Hypanis goes above. But other evidence for the thinness of the Borysthenes is that it gives out no exhalation, not to say no mist. Those who wish to be thought careful enquirers into these matters say that water becomes heavier after the winter solstice.

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§ 31.31.1  For the rest, the best way for water to be brought from a spring is in earthenware pipes two fingers thick, the joints boxed together so that the upper pipe fits into the lower, and smoothed with quicklime and oil. The gradient of the water should be at least a quarter of an inch every hundred feet; should it come in a tunnel, there must be vent holes every two actus. When water is required to form a jet, it should come in lead pipes. Water rises as high as its source. If it comes from a long distance, the pipe should frequently go up and down, so that no momentum may be lost. The usual length for a piece of piping is ten feet; five-finger lengths should weigh 60 pounds, eight-finger lengths 100 pounds, ten-finger lengths 120 pounds, and so on in proportion. A ten-finger pipe is so called when the breadth of the strip before bending is ten fingers, and one half as large a five-finger pipe. At every bend of a hill where the momentum must be controlled, it is necessary to use a five-finger pipe; reservoirs must be made according as circumstances require.

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§ 31.32.1  I wonder that Homer made no mention of hot springs, and that though he frequently speaks of hot baths, the reason being that modern hydropathie treatment was not then a part of medicine. Sulphur waters, however, are good for the sinews, alum waters for paralysis and similar cases of collapse, waters containing bitumen and soda, such as that of Cutilia, are good for drinking and as a purge. Many people make a matter of boasting the great number of hours they can endure the heat of these sulphur waters — a very injurious practice, for one should remain in them a little longer than in the bath, afterwards rinse in cool, fresh water, and not go away without a rubbing with oil. The common people find these details irksome, and so there is no greater risk to health than this treatment, because an overpowering smell goes to the head, which sweats and is seized with chill, while the rest of the body is immersed. Those make a like mistake who boast of the great quantity they can drink. I have seen some already swollen with drinking to such an extent that their rings were covered by skin, since they could not void the vast amount of water they had swallowed. So it is not good to drink these waters without a frequent taste of salt. The mud too of medicinal springs is used with advantage, but the application should be dried in the sun. We must not think, however, that all hot waters are medicinal; for there are those at Segesta in Sicily, at Larisa in the Troad, at Magnesia, in Melos and Lipara. Nor is the discoloration of bronze or silver a proof, as many have thought, of medicinal properties, since there are none in the springs of Patavium. Between medicinal and other water there is not even a difference of smell to be detected.

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§ 31.33.1  The same method of treatment will also apply to sea water, which is used hot for pains in the sinews, for joining fractured bones, and for bruised bones; also for drying the body, in which treatment cold sea water is also employed. There are besides many other uses, the chief however being a sea voyage for those attacked by consumption, as I have said, and for haemoptysis, such as quite recently within our memory was taken by Annaeus Gallio after his consulship. Egypt is not chosen for its own sake, but because of the length of the voyage. Moreover the mere seasickness caused by rolling and pitching are good for very many ailments of the head, eyes, and chest, as well as for all complaints for which hellebore is given. Sea water indeed by itself physicians think to be more efficacious for dispersing tumours, if with it a decoction is made of barley meal for parotid swellings. It is also an ingredient of plasters, especially white plasters and poultices. It is beneficially used too when poured over in frequent douches. It is also drunk, though not without harm to the stomach, for purging the body and for getting rid of black bile or clotted blood by vomit or stool. Some have also given it to be drunk in quartan agues, in tenesmus, and for diseased joints, keeping it for this purpose, for age takes away its injurious qualities. Some boil it; all draw it up out at sea, use it unspoiled by any addition of fresh water, and in using this remedy prefer that an emetic should precede the draught. Then also they mix with the water vinegar or wine. Those who have given it pure, recommend to eat afterwards radishes with oxymel to provoke further vomiting. Sea water warmed is also injected as an enema. Nothing is preferred to it for fomenting swollen testicles, or for bad chilblains before ulceration; similarly for itching, psoriasis, and the treatment of lichen. Nits too and foul vermin on the head are treated with sea water. It also restores the natural colour to livid patches. In this treatment it is of very great advantage to foment with hot vinegar after the sea water. It is moreover known to be healing for poisonous stings, as of spiders and scorpions, and for persons wetted by the spittle of the asp, but for these purposes it is employed hot. Steam from sea water and vinegar is beneficial for headaches. Colic too and cholera are relieved by warm enemas of seawater. Things warmed by it are harder to cool thoroughly. Swollen breasts, the viscera, and emaciation, are rectified by sea baths, deafness and headache by the vapour of boiling sea water and vinegar. Sea water removes very quickly rust from iron, heals too scab on sheep, and softens wool.

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§ 31.34.1  I am well aware that to inland dwellers these remarks may appear superfluous, but research has provided for this also by discovering a method whereby every man may make sea water for himself. In this method there is one strange feature: if more than a sextarius of salt is dropped into four sextarii of water, the water is overpowered, and the salt does not dissolve. However, a sextarius of salt and four sextarii of water give the strength and properties of the saltest sea. But it is thought that the most reasonable proportion is to compound the measure of water given above with eight cyathi of salt. This mixture warms the sinews without chafing the skin.

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§ 31.35.1  What is called thalassomeli is a mixture, kept till old, of sea water, honey, and rain water in equal proportions. For this purpose too the water is brought from out at sea, and the mixture is stored in an earthenware vessel lined with pitch. It is good especially for purges, does not disturb the stomach, and has a pleasant flavour and smell.

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§ 31.36.1  Hydromel too is a mixture once prepared from pure rainwater and honey, to be given as a less injurious drink to patients who craved for wine. It has been condemned now for many years a as having all the faults of wine with none of its advantages.

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§ 31.37.1  Because those at sea often suffer from the failure of fresh water, I shall describe ways meeting this difficulty. If spread around a ship, fleeces become moist by absorption of evaporated sea water, and from them can be squeezed water which is fresh. Again, hollow wax balls, let down into the sea in nets, or empty vessels with their mouth sealed, collect fresh water inside. But on land sea water is made fresh by filtering through clay. Dislocated limbs of both man and quadrupeds are very easily reset by swimming in any kind of water. Travellers too are sometimes afraid lest unknown water should endanger their health. A precaution against this danger is to drink the suspected water cold immediately on leaving the bath.

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§ 31.38.1  An application of moss that has grown in water is good for gout, and mixed with oil for painful and swollen ankles. Rubbing with foam of water removes warts, as does also sand of the sea shores, especially fine sand whitened by the sun; it is used in medicine as a covering for drying the bodies of patients suffering from dropsy or catarrhs. So much for waters; now for the products of water. I shall begin, as elsewhere, with the chief of them, that is, with salts and sponge.

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§ 31.39.1  All salt is artificial or native; each is formed in several ways, but there are two agencies, condensation or drying up of water. It is dried out of the Tarentine lake by summer sun, when the whole pool turns into salt, although it is always shallow, never exceeding knee height, likewise in Sicily from a lake, called Cocanicus, and from another near Gela. Of these the edges only dry up; in Phrygia, Cappadocia, and at Aspendus, the evaporation is wider, in fact right to the centre. There is yet another wonderful thing about it: the same amount is restored during the night as is taken away during the day. All salt from pools is fine powder, and not in blocks. Another kind produced from sea water spontaneously is foam left on the edge of the shore and on rocks. All this is condensation from drift, and that found on rocks has the sharper taste. There are also three different kinds of native salt; for in Bactra are two vast lakes, one facing the Scythians, the other the Arii, which exude salt, while at Citium in Cyprus and around Memphis salt is taken out of a lake and then dried in the sun. But the surface too of rivers may condense into salt, the rest of the stream flowing as it were under ice, as near the Caspian Gates are what are called 'rivers of salt,' also around the Mardi and the Armenians. Moreover, in Bactria too the rivers place id='371683WOch'>Ochus and Oxus bring down scrapings of salt from nearby mountains. There are also lakes in Africa, and that muddy ones, which carry salt. Indeed hot springs too carry it, such as those at Pagasae. So much for the different kinds of salt which come, as natural products, from waters. There are also mountains of natural salt, salt. such as Oromenus in India, where it is cut out like blocks of stone from a quarry, and ever replaces itself, bringing greater revenues to the rajahs than those from gold and pearls. It is also dug out of the earth in Cappadocia, being evidently formed by condensation of moisture. Here indeed it is split into sheets like mica; the blocks are very heavy, nicknamed by the people 'grains.' At Gerra, a town of Arabia, the walls and houses are made of blocks of salt cemented with water. Near Pelusium too King Ptolemy found salt when he was making a camp. This led afterwards to the discovery of salt by digging away the sand even in the rough tracts between Egypt and Arabia, as it is also found as far as the oracle of Hammon through the parched deserts of Africa, where at night it increases as the moon waxes. But the region of Cyrenaica too is famous for Hammoniac salt, itself so called because it is found under the sand. It is in colour like the alum called schiston, consisting of long opaque slabs, of an unpleasant flavour, but useful in medicine. That is most valued which is most transparent and splits into straight flakes. A remarkable feature is reported of it: of very little weight in its underground pits, when brought into the light of day it becomes incredibly heavy. The reason is obvious; the damp breath of the pits helps the workers by supporting the weight as does water. It is adulterated by the Sicilian salt I have said comes from the lake Cocanicus, as well as by Cyprian salt, which is wonderfully like it. In Hither Spain too at Egelesta salt is cut into almost transparent blocks; to this for some time past most physicians have given the first place among all kinds of salt. Every region in which salt is found is barren, and nothing will grow there. To speak generally, these remarks about the various kinds of native salt are comprehensive. Of artificial salt there are various kinds. The usual one, and the most plentiful, is made in salt pools by running into them sea water not without streams of fresh water, but rain helps very much, and above all much warm sunshine, without which it does not dry out. In Africa around Utica are formed heaps of salt like hills; when they have hardened under sun and moon, they are not melted by any moisture, and even iron cuts them with difficulty. It is also however made in Crete without fresh water by letting the sea flow into the pools, and around Egypt by the sea itself, which penetrates the soil, soaked as I believe it is, by the Nile. Salt is also made by pouring water from wells into salt pools. At Babylon the first condensation solidifies into a liquid bitumen like oil, which is also used in lamps. When this is taken away, salt is underneath. In Cappadocia too they bring water into salt pools from wells and a spring. In Chaonia there is a spring, from which they boil water, and on cooling obtain a salt that is insipid and not white. In the provinces of Gaul and Germany they pour salt water on burning logs.

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§ 31.40.1  (In one part of the provinces of Spain they draw the brine from wells and call it maria.) The former indeed think that the wood used also makes a difference. The best is oak, for its pure ash by itself has the properties of salt; in some places hazel finds favour. So when brine is poured on it even wood turns into salt. Whenever wood is used in its making salt is dark. I find in Theophrastus that the Umbrians were wont to boil down in water the ash of reeds and rushes, until only a very little liquid remained. Moreover, from the liquor of salted foods salt is recovered by reboiling, and when evaporation is complete its saline character is regained. It is generally thought that the salt obtained from sardine brine is the most pleasant.

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§ 31.41.1  Of sea salt the most in favour comes from Salamis in Cyprus, of pool salt that from Tarentum and that from Phrygia which is called Tattaean. The last two are useful for the eyes. The salt imported from Cappadocia in little bricks is said to impart a gloss to the skin. But the salt I have said comes from Citium a smoothes the skin better, and so after childbirth it is applied with melanthium to the abdomen. The saltest salt is the driest, the most agreeable and whitest of all is the Tarentine; for the rest, it is the whitest that is the most friable. All salt is made sweet by rainwater, more agreeable, however, by dew, but plentiful by gusts of north wind. It does not form under a south wind. Flower of salt forms only with north winds. Tragasaean salt and Acanthian, so named after towns, neither crackles nor sputters in a fire, nor does froth of any salt, or scrapings, or powder. Salt of Agrigentum submits to fire and sputters in water. The colour too of salt varies: blushing red at Memphis, tawny red near the Oxus, purple at Centuripae, it is of such brightness near Gela (also in Sicily) that it reflects an image. In Cappadoeia salt is quarried of a saffron colour, transparent, and very fragrant. For medicinal purposes the ancients used to favour most highly Tarentine salt, next, all kinds of sea salt, and of these especially that from foam, while for the eyes of draught animals and cattle salt of Tragasa and Baetica. To season meats and foods the most useful otter one melts easily and is rather moist, for it is less bitter, such as that of Attica and Euboea. For preserving meat the more suitable salt is sharp and dry, like that of Megara. A conserve too is made with fragrant additions, which is used as a relish, creating and sharpening an appetite for every kind of food, so that in innumerable seasonings it is the taste of salt that predominates, and it is looked for when we eat garum. Moreover sheep, cattle, and draught animals are encouraged to pasture in particular by salt; the supply of milk is much more copious, and there is even a far more pleasing quality in the cheese. Therefore, Heaven knows, a civilized life is impossible without salt, and so necessary is this basic substance that its name is applied metaphorically even to intense mental pleasures. We call them sales (wit); all the humour of life, its supreme joyousness, and relaxation after toil, are expressed by this word more than by any other. It has a place in magistracies also and on service abroad, from which comes the term 'salary' (salt money); it had great importance among the men of old, as is clear from the name of the Salarian Way, since by it, according to agreement, salt was imported to the Sabines. King Ancus Marcius gave a largess to the people of 6,000 bushels of salt, and was the first to construct salt pools. Varro too is our authority that the men of old used salt as a relish, and that they ate salt with their bread is clear from a proverb! But the clearest proof of its importance lies in the fact that no sacrifice is carried out without the mola salsa (salted meal).

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§ 31.42.1  Salt-pools have reached their highest degree of purity in what may be called embers of salt, which is the lightest and whitest of its kind. 'Flower of salt' is also a name given to an entirely different thing, with a moister nature and a saffron or red colour, a kind of salt rust; it has an unpleasant smell, like that of garum, and is different from salt, not only from foam salt. Egypt discovered it, and it appears to be brought down by the Nile. It also however floats on the surface of certain springs. The best kind of it yields a sort of oily fat, for there is, surprising as it may seem, a fat even in salt. It is adulterated too and coloured by red ochre, or usually by ground crockery; this sham is detected by water, which washes out the artificial colour, while the genuine is only removed by oil, and perfumers use it very commonly because of its colour. In vessels the whiteness is seen on the surface, but the inner part, as I have said, is moister. The nature of flower of salt is acrid, heating, bad for the stomach, sudorific, aperient when taken in wine and water, and useful for anodynes and detergents. It also removes hair from eyelids. The sediment is shaken up in order to restore the saffron colour. Besides these salines there is also what is called at the salt-pools salpugo, or sometimes salsilago. It is entirely liquid, differing from sea brine by its more salty character.

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§ 31.43.1  There is yet another kind of choice liquor, called garum, consisting of the guts of fish and the other parts that would otherwise be considered refuse; these are soaked in salt, so that garum is really liquor from the putrefaction of these matters. Once this used to be made from a fish that the Greeks called garos; they showed that by fumigation with its burning head the afterbirth was brought away. Today the most popular garum is made from the scomber in the fisheries of Carthago Spartaria — it is called garum of the allies — one thousand sesterces being exchanged for about two congii of the fish. Scarcely any other liquid except unguents has come to be more highly valued, bringing fame even to the nations that make it. The scomber is caught also in Mauretania and at Carteia in Baetica; the scomber enters the Mediterranean from the Atlantic, but it is used only for making garum. Clazomenae too is famous for garum, and so are Pompeii and Leptis, just as Antipolis and Thurii are for muria, and today too also Delmatia.

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§ 31.44.1  Allex is sediment of garum, the dregs, neither whole nor strained. It has, however, also begun to be made separately from a tiny fish, otherwise of no use. The Romans call it apua, the Greeks aphye, because this tiny fish is bred out of rain. The people of Forum Julii call lupus (wolf) the fish from which they make garum. Then allex became a luxury, and its various kinds have come to be innumerable; garum for instance has been blended to the colour of old honey wine, and to a taste so pleasant that it can be drunk. But another kind of garum is devoted to superstitious sex-abstinence and Jewish rites, and is made from fish without scales. Thus allex has come to be made from oysters, sea urchins, sea anemones, and mullet's liver, and salt to be corrupted in numberless ways so as to suit all palates. These incidental remarks must suffice for the luxurious tastes of civilized man. Allen however itself is of some use in healing. For allex both cures itch in sheep, being poured into an incision in the skin, and is a good antidote for the bites of dog or sea draco; it is applied on pieces of lint. By garum too are fresh burns healed, if it is poured over them without mentioning garum. It is also good for dog-bites and especially those of the crocodile, and for spreading or foul ulcers. For ulcers too or pains in mouth or ears it is wonderfully good. Muria too or the salsugo I spoke of is astringent, biting, reducing and drying, useful for dysentery, even if there is ulceration of the bowels. It is injected for sciatica and chronic coeliac disease. Among inland peoples it also takes the place of sea water for fomentations.

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§ 31.45.1  The nature of salt is of itself fiery, and yet it is hostile to fires, fleeing from them, corroding all things, but astringent to the body, drying it and binding, preserving corpses also from corruption so that they last for ages; in medicine however it is mordent, caustic, cleansing, reducing, and resolvent, injurious only to the stomach except in so far as it stimulates the appetite. For the bites of serpents it is used with origanum, honey, and hyssop, for the cerastes with origanum and cedar resin, or pitch, or honey. It is helpful for bite of the scolopendra if taken internally with vinegar, for scorpion stings if applied in oil or vinegar with a fourth part of linseed, but for hornets, wasps, and similar creatures, in vinegar only, for migraine, ulcers on the head, blisters, pimples, and incipient warts, with veal suet. It is also used in eye remedies, for excrescences of flesh there, and for pterygia anywhere on the body, but especially on the eyes, and so it is an ingredient of eye salves and plasters; for these purposes Tattaean salt or that of Cannus is the most approved. For eyes bloodshot from a blow, however, and for bruised eyes, it is used with an equal weight of myrrh and with honey, or with hyssop in warm water, and the eyes should be fomented with salsugo. For these purposes Spanish salt is chosen. For cataract it is ground in a little stone mortar with milk; for bruises a specific is salt wrapped in linen, dipped frequently in boiling water, and applied; for running ulcers in the mouth it is applied in lint; it is rubbed on swollen gums, and for roughness of the tongue it is broken and ground up fine. They say that teeth neither rot nor decay if one daily while fasting in the morning keeps a piece of salt under the tongue until it melts. It also cures leprous sores, boils, lichen and psoriasis, used with stoned raisons, beef suet origanum, and leaven or bread; for these purposes and for pruritus Theban salt is mostly chosen. For diseased tonsils and uvula salt with honey is beneficial. For quinsy any salt is good, but all the more when oil and vinegar are added, while at the same time salt and liquid pitch are applied externally to the throat. Mixed with wine salt also softens the belly, and taken in wine drives out harmlessly the various kinds of worms. Placed under the tongue salt enables convalescents to endure the heat of the bath. Pains of the sinews, especially in the region of the shoulders and kidneys, are relieved by salt in bags, kept hot by frequent dipping into boiling water; colitis, griping and sciatica by taking salt in drink and by hot applications in the same kind of bags; gout by salt pounded with flour, honey, and oil. Herein is especially applicable the saying that for the whole body nothing is more beneficial than salt and sun. Accordingly we see that the bodies of fishermen are horny, but the above remark should be applied especially to gout. It also removes corns on the feet and chilblains. It is applied to burns in oil or chewed. It cheeks blisters, but for erysipelas and for creeping ulcers vinegar or hyssop is added, for carcinomata taminian grapes, while for phagedaenic ulcers it is roasted with barley meal, a linen cloth being placed on top, soaked in wine. Sufferers from jaundice are helped by rubbing with salt, oil, and vinegar before a fire until they sweat; this relieves the itching caused by this disease. Oil should be used in cases of fatigue. Many have treated dropsy too with salt, rubbed with salt and oil hot feverish patients, stayed a chronic cough by licking it, injected salt enemas into sufferers from sciatica, applied it to swollen or festering ulcers, and treated crocodile bites by salt and vinegar in lint cloths, taking care first to flog 'the sores with them. Salt is taken in oxymel for poisoning by poppy-juice, with flour and honey it is applied to dislocations, and also to tumours. Fomenting with salt and vinegar, or an application of salt and resin, is good for toothache. But for all purposes foam of salt is more pleasant and more beneficial. Salt however of any kind is added to anodynes for a warming effect, also to detergents for stretching and smoothing the skin. An application of salt removes itch-scab in sheep and oxen; salt is also given to be licked, and it is spit into the eyes of draught animals. This must suffice for my account of salt.

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§ 31.46.1  I must not put off describing the character of soda, which is very similar to salt; a more careful account must be given because it is plain that the physicians who have written about it were ignorant of its character, and that nobody has given a more careful description than Theophrastus. A little is formed in Media in valleys that are white through drought; they call it halmyrax. It is also found in Thrace near Philippi, but in less quantities and contaminated with earth; it is called agrium. But soda from burnt oak-wood was never made in large quantities, and the method has long been altogether abandoned. Alkaline water, however, is found in very many places, but the soda is not concentrated enough to solidify. At Clitae in Macedonia is found in abundance the best, called soda of Chalestra, white and pure, very like salt. There is an alkaline lake there with a little spring of fresh water rising up in the centre. Soda forms in it about the rising of the Dog-star for nine days, ceases for nine days, comes to the top again and then ceases. This shows that it is the character of the soil that produces soda, since it has been discovered that, when it ceases, neither sunshine is of any help at all nor yet rain. Another wonderful thing about the lake is that although the spring is always bubbling up it neither gets larger nor overflows. But if, on those days on which soda forms, has been rain, it makes the soda more salty, while north winds on those days, by stirring up the mud too vigorously, makes it inferior. This soda is natural, but in Egypt it is made artificially, in much greater abundance but of inferior quality, for it is dark and stony. It is made in almost the same manner as is salt, except that they pour seawater into the salt-beds but the Nile into the soda-beds. The latter as the Nile rises become dry; as it falls they are moist with liquid soda for forty days on end, and not as in Macedonia during fixed periods. If rain also has fallen, they add less river water, and gather at once the soda that has begun to solidify, lest it should melt back into the soda-bed. Thus too oily matter forms among the soda, useful for itch-scab on animals. Soda however, stored in heaps, lasts a long time. A wonder of Lake Ascanius and of certain springs around Chalcis is that the surface water is sweet and drinkable but underneath is alkaline. Of soda the best is the finest, and therefore froth of soda is superior, but for some purposes the impure is good, for example colouring purple cloths and all kinds of dyeing. Soda is of great use in the making of glass, as will be described in its proper place. The soda-beds of Egypt used to be confined to the regions around Naucratis and Memphis, the beds around Memphis being inferior. For the soda becomes stone-like in heaps there, and many of the soda piles there are for the same reason quite rocky. From these they make vessels, and frequently by baking melted soda with sulphur. For the bodies too that they wish to embalm this is the soda they use. In this region are soda-beds from which red soda also is taken owing to the colour of the earth. Foam of soda, which is very highly prized, the ancients said was formed only when dew had fallen on beds teeming with soda but not yet bringing it forth; accordingly, even if dew fell, soda did not form on beds in agitated action. Others have thought that foam is produced by fermentation of the heaps. The last generation of physicians said that in Asia was gathered aphronitrum oozing in soft caves — they are called colligae — and then dried in the sun. The best is thought to be Lydian. The tests are that it should be the least heavy and the most friable, and of an almost purple colour. The last kind is imported in lozenges, but the Egyptian in vessels lined with pitch, lest it melt. These vessels too are finished off by being dried in the sun. The tests of soda are that it should be very fine and as spongy and full of holes as possible. In Egypt it is adulterated with lime, which is detected by the taste; for pure soda melts at once, but adulterated soda stings because of the lime, and gives out a strong odour. It is burnt in an earthen jar with a lid, lest it should crackle out; otherwise soda does not crackle in fire; it produces nothing and nourishes nothing, whereas in salt-pits grow plants, and in the sea so many animals and so much seaweed. But that the pungency of soda is greater is shown not only by this evidence but also by the fact that soda-beds at once consume shoes, but are otherwise healthful and good for clearness of vision. In the soda-beds nobody has ophthalmia; sores brought there heal very quickly, but those that form there heal slowly. Soda and oil also make to sweat those who are rubbed with the mixture, which softens the flesh. They use Chalestran soda for bread instead of salt, Egyptian soda for radishes; it makes them more tender, but meats white and inferior and vegetables greener. In medicine soda warms, alleviates, stings, braces, dries, and clears away ulcers, and is useful for conditions where there must be withdrawal, dispersal, and gentle stinging and alleviation, as with pimples and blisters. Some for this purpose set it on fire and put it out with a dry wine, and use it so prepared and ground in the bath without oil. Excessive sweats are checked by soda with dried iris and the addition of green oil; it also improves scars on the eyes and roughness of the lids if applied with fig, or boiled down to one half in raisin wine, a preparation too which is used for white ulcers and inflamed swellings on the eyes. Boiled down with raisin wine in a pomegranate rind, and applied with honey, it improves vision. Soda is good for toothache if a mouthwash is made by adding pepper and wine. Boiled down too with leek, and burnt to make a dentifrice, it restores the colour of blackening teeth. Insects and nits on the head it kills if applied in oil with Samian earth. Dissolved in wine it is poured into purulent ears; wax in the same organ it eats away in vinegar; noises and singing it stops if added dry. Applied in sunshine with vinegar and an equal weight of Cimolian chalk it cures the white kinds of psoriasis. It brings to a head boils, either mixed with resin or with white raisins, the pips being ground up with them. With axle-grease it combats inflammation of the testicles, and also outbursts of phlegm on the whole body; it is applied with vinegar, resin being added, to dog-bites. This preparation is used for snake bites; for phagedaenic, creeping, or festering ulcers, with lime and vinegar; for dropsy it is pounded with figs and administered by the mouth and externally. Griping pains too it allays if there is taken a drachma by weight boiled down with rue or dill or cummin. The pains of fatigue are removed by rubbing all over with soda, oil, and vinegar, while for chills and shivers it is of advantage to rub the hands and feet thoroughly with soda and oil. It also checks the itch of jaundice, especially when administered with vinegar while the patient is sweating. Taken in vinegar and water soda is beneficial against the poisons of fungi; if a buprestris has been swallowed it is taken in water; it is also a good emetic. It is given in laser to those who have drunk bull's blood. Ulcerations also on the face it heals with honey and cow's milk. It is applied to burns roasted until it turns black and crushed to powder. It is injected for pain in the and kidneys, or for rigors of the body, or for pains of the sinews. For paralysis of the tongue it is applied there with bread, and for asthma it is taken in barley gruel. Chronic cough is cured by flower of soda with galbanum mixed with terebrinth resin, all equal in weight, but the piece to be swallowed must be of the size of a bean. Soda, boiled and then combined with liquid pitch, is given to be swallowed by patients with quinsy. Flower of soda with oil of cyprus is also soothing if applied in the sun for pains in the joints. Jaundice also it alleviates taken in a draught of wine; this remedy relieves flatulence. It checks epistaxis if inhaled in the steam from boiling water. By soda mixed with alum is removed scurf, rank smell of the armpits by daily fomentation with soda and water, sores due to nose-running by soda mixed with wax — a mixture also good for the sinews — and it is injected for the coeliac affection. Many have prescribed complete rubbing with soda and oil before the chills of fever come on, and so to use it for leprons sores and freckles; and they prescribe its use in the bath for gouty people. Soda baths are good for consnmptives, and for the victims of opisthotonus and other forms of tetanus. Salt and soda, when heated with sulphur, turn to stone.

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§ 31.47.1  Of the kinds of sponges I have spoken when describing the nature of marine creatures. Certain authorities classify them thus: some sponges, the males, have little holes, and are more compact and very absorbent; they are also dyed for the luxurious, sometimes even with purple; others, the females, have larger and uninterrupted holes; others, harder than the males, called tragi, have very small holes that are very close together. Sponges are whitened artificially. Fresh sponges, of the softest kind, are soaked in foam of salt throughout the summer, and then laid open to the moon and hoar-frosts upside down, that is, with the side uppermost that adhered to the rocks, so that they may drink in whiteness. I have said that sponges are animal, being even lined with a coating of blood. Some also declare that they are guided by a sense of hearing, and contract at a noise, sending out a great quantity of moisture; that they cannot be torn from the rocks, and therefore are cut off, bleeding sanies. Moreover, those growing exposed to the north-east they prefer to others, and physicians declare that nowhere else does their breath last for a longer time. Such too, they say, are beneficial to the human body, because they mix their breath with ours; therefore fresh sponges are the more beneficial, as are also the moist, but less beneficial are those soaked in hot water, or those that are oily, or laid on oily bodies, while compact sponges are less adhesive. The softest kind of sponge is that used for bandage-rolls. Applied in honey wine these relieve swollen eyes. They are also good for wiping away the rheum of ophthalmia, which they do most efficiently with water. They should be very fine and very soft. Sponges themselves are applied in vinegar and water for eye-fluxes, and in warm vinegar for headaches. For the rest, fresh sponges are dispersive, soothing, and emollient; old sponges do not close wounds. The uses of sponges are to be detergent, to foment, and after fomentation to cover until something else is applied. Applied also to wet ulcers of senile persons, sponges dry them, and they foment with the greatest benefit fractures and wounds. In surgery sponges quickly absorb the blood, so that treatment can easily be observed. Sponges themselves are applied to inflamed wounds, sometimes dry, at other times moistened with vinegar, or wine, or cold water; applied indeed in rainwater to fresh incisions they prevent their swelling. They are also laid on parts that are whole, but suffering from a hidden flux that has to be dispersed, and also on what are called apostemata, after rubbing them with boiled honey; on joints also, sometimes moistened with salted vinegar, sometimes with vinegar and water; should the complaint be attended with fever, water alone is to be used. With salt and water sponges are also applied to callosities, but with vinegar to scorpion stings. In the treatment of wounds sponges with salt and water also act as a substitute for greasy wool; the difference is that wools soften, but sponges are astringent and absorb quickly the diseased humours of ulcers. They are also bound round dropsical parts, either dry or with warm water or vinegar and water, whenever there is need to soothe, or cover a the skin, or dry it. They are applied also for such diseases as need a steamy heat, steeped in boiling water, and pressed between two boards. So applied they are also good for the stomach, and for the excessive burnings of fever; but for the spleen with vinegar and water, while for erysipelas they are with vinegar more efficacious than anything; they should be so placed that there is ample covering for the healthy parts. With vinegar or cold water they arrest haemorrhage, with hot salt and water, often changed, they remove fresh bruises caused by a blow, and with vinegar and water they cure swollen and painful testicles. For dog-bite are applied beneficially with vinegar, cold water, or honey, cut-off pieces of sponge, which must be thoroughly moistened every now and then. The ash of the African sponge, swallowed with the juice of cut-leek, is good for spitting of blood; for other complaints it should be taken in cold water. This ash also, applied to the forehead with oil or vinegar, cures tertian agues. African sponges are specific with vinegar and water for reducing swellings, and the ash of all sponges burnt with pitch arrest haemorrhage from wounds; for this purpose some burn with pitch only sponges of loose texture. For eye remedies sponges are burnt in an unbaked earthenware pot, this ash being very efficacious indeed for roughness or excrescences of the eyelids, and for any complaint in the region of the eyes that needs a remedy detergent, astringent, or expletive, but for this treatment it is better to rinse the ash. They also furnish a substitute for scrapers and towels when the body is diseased. Sponges protect also efficiently the head against the sun. In their ignorance physicians have reduced sponges to two classes: the African, which are firmer and harder, and the Ithodian, which are softer for fomentations. Today however a very soft sponges are found around the walls of Antiphellus. Trogus informs us that around Lycia very soft tent-sponges grow out at sea, in places where sponges have been taken away; Polybius that hung over a sick man these give more peaceful nights. Now I shall turn my attention to the creatures of the sea.

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§ 32.1.1  THE course of my subject has brought me to the greatest of Nature's works, and I am actually met by such an unsought and overwhelming proof of hidden power that inquiry should really be pursued no further, and nothing equal or similar can be found, Nature surpassing herself, and that in numberless ways. For what is more violent than sea, winds, whirlwinds, and storms? By what greater skill of man has Nature been aided in any part of herself than by mils and oars? Let there be added to these the indescribable force of tidal ebb and flow, the whole sea being turned into a river. All these, however, although acting in the same direction, are checked by a single specimen of the sucking fish, a very small fish. Bales may blow and storms may rage; this fish rules their fury, restrains their mighty strength, and brings vessels to a stop, a thing no cables can do, nor yet anchors of unmanageable weight that have been cast. It cheeks their attacks and tames the madness of the Universe with no toil of its own, not by resistance, or in any way except by adhesion. This little creature suffices in the face of all these forces to prevent vessels from moving. But armoured fleets bear aloft on their decks a rampart of towers, so that fighting may like place even at sea as from the walls of a fortress. How futile a creature is man, seeing that those rams, armed for striking with bronze and iron, can be checked and held fast by a little fish six inches long! It is said that at the battle of Actium the fish stopped the flagship of Antonius, who was hastening to go round and encourage his men, until he changed his ship for another one, and so the fleet of Caesar at once made a more violent attack. Within our memory the fish stayed the ship of the Emperor Gaius as he was sailing back from Astura to Antium. As it turned out, the little fish also proved ominous, because very soon after that Emperor's return to Rome on this occasion he was stabbed by his own men. This delay caused no long surprise, for the reason was immediately discovered; of the whole fleet the quinquereme alone making no progress, men at once dived and swam round the ship to trace the cause. They found this fish sticking to the rudder and showed it to Gaius, who was furious that it had been such a thing that was keeping him back and vetoing the obedience to himself of four hundred rowers. It was agreed that what astonished him in particular was how the fish had stopped him by sticking to the outside, yet when inside the ship it had not the same power. Those who saw the fish then or afterwards say that it is like a large slug. I have given the views of the majority in my account of water creatures, where I discussed the fish, and I do not doubt all this kind of fish have the same power, since there is a famous and even divinely sanctioned example in the temple of the Cnidian Venus, where snails too, we are forced to believe, have the same potency. Of the Roman authorities some have given this fish the Latin name of mora, and a marvel is told by some Greeks, who have related, as I have said, that worn as an amulet it arrests miscarriage, and by reducing procidence of the uterus allows the foetus to reach maturity; others say that preserved in salt and worn as an amulet it delivers pregnant women, this being the reason why another name, odiaolytes, is given to it. However these things may be, would anybody after this instance of staying a ship's course entertain doubts about any power, force, and efficacy of nature, to be found in remedies from things that grow spontaneously?

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§ 32.2.1  But surely, even without this example, evidence enough by itself could be found in the electric-ray, which also is a sea creature. Even at a distance, and that a long distance, or if it is touched with a spear or rod, to think that the strongest arms are numbed, feet as swift in racing as you like are paralysed. But if this example forces us to confess that there is a force which by smell alone, and by what I may call the breath from the creature's body, so affects our limbs, what limits are there to our hopes based on the potency of all remedies?

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§ 32.3.1  No less wonderful things are related of the sea-hare. To some it is poison if given in drink or food, to others if merely seen, since pregnant women, if they have but looked at one, the female, that is, of the species, at once feel nausea, show by regurgitation signs of a disordered stomach, and then miscarry. The remedy is a male specimen, specially hardened for this purpose with salt, to be worn in a bracelet. In the sea, however, it does not hurt, even by touch. There feeds on it without being killed one creature only, red mullet, which merely becomes flabby, more insipid, and coarser. Struck by it a human being smells of fish; this is the first symptom by which such poisoning is detected. Furthermore, the victims die in the same number of days as the hare has lived, and Licinius Macer is authority for saying that this poison has variable periods for its action. They say that in India a the sea-hare is never caught alive; and that inversely man is there poisonous to the hare that even a mere touch of a human finger in the sea is fatal to it; but that like all other animals the Indian variety is far larger.

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§ 32.4.1  In those volumes about Arabia which he dedicated to Gaius Caesar, the son of Augustus, Juba related that there are mussels there with shells holding three heminae; that a whale 600 feet long and 360 feet broad entered a river of Arabia; that merchants did a trade with its blubber; and that camels in that district are rubbed all over with the fat of any fish, so that gadflies may be kept away by the smell.

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§ 32.5.1  Wonderful too appear to me the characters of fishes given by Ovid in his book entitled Halieuticon: how the scarus, caught in a weel, does not burst out to the front, or thrust his head through the osiers that imprison him, but turns round, widens the gaps with repeated blows of his tail, and so creeps backwards. If by chance his struggles are seen by another scarus outside, he seizing the other's tail with his teeth helps the efforts to burst out. The basse, he says, when surrounded by a net, ploughs a hole in the sand with his tail, and so is buried until the net passes over him. He says too that the murena, knowing that his back is rounded and slippery, attacks the meshes themselves, and then by involved wriggling widens them until he escapes; that the polypus attacks the hook, grips it with his tentacles, not teeth, and does not let it go before he has nibbled round the bait, or been lifted out of the water by the rod. The mugil too knows that in the bait is a hook, and is quite aware of the trap; his greed however is so great that by lashing with his tail he knocks off the food. The basse has less cunning insight, but great strength when he realizes his mistake. For when caught on the hook he dashes about wildly, widening the wounds until the snare is torn out. The murena swallows more than the hook, applies the line to his teeth, and so gnaws it through. Ovid also relates that the anthias, when the hook catches, turns over, since on his back is a spine with a knife-edge, with which he cuts through the line.

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§ 32.5.2  Licinius Macer relates that the murena is female only, and conceives out of serpents, as I have said, and that therefore fishermen whistle in imitation of a serpent's call, and so catch the fish, and ... grow fat; that a club hurled at them does not kill, but fennel-giant kills at once. It is certain that the seat of life is in their tail, for if this is struck they very quickly die, but it is difficult to kill them by blows on the head. Those touched by the razor-fish smell of iron. It is a well-known fact that the hardest fish is the orbis, which is round, without scales, and all head?

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§ 32.6.1  Trebius Niger tells us that the xiphias, that is the swordfish, has a pointed beak, by which ships are pierced and sunk; in the open sea, off the place in Mauretania called Cottae, not far from the river Lixus, the same authority tells us that the lolligo flies out of the water in such numbers as to sink a vessel. Whenever the lolligo, he says, is seen flying out of the water a change of weather occurs.

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§ 32.7.1  In several country seats indeed of the Emperor fish eat out of the hand, but — what our old writers have recorded with wonder as occurring in natural pools, not fishponds — at Helorus, a fortress of Sicily not far from Syracuse, and likewise in the spring of Jupiter of Labraunda, the eels even wear earrings, as do the fishes in Chios near the Shrine of the Old Men, and in the spring Chabura also in Mesopotamia, about which I have spoken.

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§ 32.8.1  But at Myra in Lycia in the spring of Apollo called Curium, when summoned three times by the pipe the fishes come to give oracular responses. For the fish to snap at the meat thrown to them is a happy augury for enquirers, to cast it aside with their tails an augury of disaster. At Hieropolis in Syria the fish in the pond of Venus obey the voice of the temple ministers; they come at their call adorned with gold, fawning to be scratched, and offer gaping mouths to receive their hands. At Stabiae in Campania at the Rock of Hercules the melanuri in the sea seize the bread thrown to them, but they will not go near any food in which is a hook.

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§ 32.9.1  Nor are these the last among the marvels we know of fishes: that they are bitter near the island of Pele and near Clazomenae, over against the rock of Sicily, Leptis in Africa, Euboea, and Dyrrhachium; and again, so salt that they might be thought pickled, off Cephallania, Ampelos, Paros and the rocks of Delos; while in the harbour of Delos they are sweet. These differences depend without a doubt on the food. Apion tells us that the largest of the fishes is the pig-fish, which the Lacedemonians call onhagoriscus, saying that it grunts when it is caught. That this accident of nature, however (to increase our wonder), is also met with in certain localities, is suggested by a ready example, seeing that salted foods of every kind, as is well known, at Beneventum in Italy have to be resalted.

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§ 32.10.1  That sea fish were commonly eaten immediately after the foundation of Rome is told us by Cassius Hemina, whose very words on the subject I will quote here. Numa ordained that scaleless fish should not be provided at sacrificial meals, being induced by reasons of economy, so that provision could be more easily made for public and private banquets and for feasts of the gods, to prevent caterers on those sacred occasions from being extravagant and buying up the market.

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§ 32.11.1  Coral is as valuable among the Indians as Indian pearls, about which I have spoken in their proper place, are among the Romans, for cost varies with the demand of any particular people. Coral is also found in the Red Sea, but this is of a darker colour; also in the Persian Gulf — this is called lace — the most valued is in the Gallic Gulf around the Stoechades Islands, in the Sicilian Gulf around the Aeolian Islands, and around Drepana. Coral also grows at Graviseae and before Naples in Campania; but that at Erythrae, which is very red indeed, is soft and therefore thought worthless.

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§ 32.11.2  In shape coral is like a shrub, and its colour is green. Its berries are white under the water and soft; when taken out they immediately harden and grow red, being like, in appearance and size, to those of cultivated cornel. It is said that at a touch it immediately petrifies, if it lives; and that therefore it is quickly seized and pulled away in nets or cut off by a sharp iron instrument. In this way they explain its name 'coral.' The most valued coral is the reddest and most branchy, without being rough or stony, or again empty and hollow. Coral berries are no less valued by Indian men than are large Indian pearls by Roman women. Indian soothsayers and seers think that coral is a very powerful amulet for warding off dangers. Accordingly they take pleasure in it both as a thing of beauty and as a thing of religious power. Before the Indian love of coral became known, the Gauls used to ornament with coral their swords, shields, and helmets. At the present day it has become so scarce because of the price it will fetch that it is very rarely to be seen in the countries where it grows. Branches of coral, worn as an amulet by babies, are believed to be protective, and reduced to powder by fire and taken with water are helpful in gripings, bladder trouble and stone; similarly, taken in wine, or, if fever is present, in water, coral is soporific. Coral resists fire for a long time, but they say also that taken in drink repeatedly as medicine it consumes the spleen. The ash of coral branches is good treatment for bringing up or spitting of blood. It is a component of eye salves, for it is astringent and cooling, fills up the hollows of ulcers, and smoothes out scars.

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§ 32.12.1  As to the hostility between things, which the Greeks call antipathia, there is nowhere anything more venomous than the stingray in the sea, since we have said that by its ray trees are killed. The galeos however chases the stingray, and also indeed other fishes, but the sting-ray in particular, just as on land the weasel chases serpents, so great is its greed for the very poison itself. Those however stung by the sting-ray find good treatment in the galeos, as well as in red mullet and laser.

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§ 32.13.1  Equally remarkable is the might of Nature in those creatures also which are amphibious, such as the beaver, which they call castor and its testes castoreum. Sextius, a very careful inquirer into medical subjects, denies that the beaver himself bites off his own testes when it is being captured; he says that on the contrary these are small, tightly knit, attached to the spine, and not to be taken away without destroying the creature's life. Castoreum (beaver-oil) he says is however adulterated by beaver's kidneys, which are large, while the real testes are found to be very small. Moreover, they cannot even be the creature's bladders, for they are twin, and no animal has two bladders. In these pouches (he goes on) is found a liquid, which is preserved in salt. Accordingly one of the tests of fraud is whether two pouches hang down from one connection, while the liquid itself is adulterated by adding to it cummin and beaver blood or ammoniacum, because the testes ought to be of the colour of ammoniacum, coated with a liquid like waxy honey, with a strong smell, a bitter taste, and friable. The most efficacious castoreum comes from Pontus and Galatia, the next best from Africa. Doctors cause sneezing by its smell. It is soporific if the head is rubbed all over with beaver oil, rose oil, and peucedanum, or if by itself it is taken in water, for which reason it is useful in brain fever. It also arouses, by the smell of fumigation, sufferers from coma and hysterical, fainting women, the latter also by a pessary; it is an emmenagogue and brings away the afterbirth if two drachmae are taken in water with pennyroyal. It is also a remedy for vertigo, opisthotonus, palsied tremors, cramps, sinew pains, sciatica, stomach troubles, and paralysis; in all cases by rubbing all over, or ground to the consistency of honey with seed of vitex in vinegar and rose oil. In this form it is taken for epilepsy, but in drink for flatulence, griping and poisons. The only difference in its use for the various poisons lies in the ingredients with which it is mixed. For scorpion bites it is taken in wine; for the phalangium and other spiders in honey wine if it is to be vomited back or with rue if it is to be retained; for the chalcis a with myrtle wine; for the homed asp and prester with panaces or rue in wine; for the bites of other serpents with wine. Two drachmae are a sufficient dose, of the other ingredients one drachma. It is specific in vinegar for mistletoe poisoning, in milk or water for poisoning by aconite, for white hellebore in oxymel and soda. It also cures toothache if pounded with oil; it is poured into the ear on the side of the pain; for earache it is better mixed with poppy juice. Added to Attic honey and used as an ointment it improves the vision. In vinegar it checks hiccoughs. Beaver urine, too, counteracts poisons, and therefore is added to antidotes. It is however best preserved, as some think, in the beaver's bladder.

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§ 32.14.1  Like the beaver the tortoise is amphibious, and of the same medical properties, distinguished by the high price given for its use, and by its peculiar shape. So there are various kinds: tortoises that live on land, in the sea, in muddy water, and in fresh water. The last are called by some Greeks emydes.

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§ 32.14.2  The flesh of the land tortoise is reported to be especially useful for fumigations, to keep off magical tricks, and to counteract poisons. It is most common in Africa. There the flesh of this tortoise, with its head and feet cut off, is said to be given as an antidote, and taken in its broth as food to disperse scrofulous sores, to reduce the spleen, and to cure epilepsy. The blood clarifies the vision and arrests cataract. For the poisons of all serpents, spiders and similar creatures, and of frogs, it is of service; the blood is preserved in flour, made up into pills, and given in wine when necessary. It is beneficial to use the gall of tortoises with Attic honey as an eyewash for opaqueness of the lens, and to drop it into the wounds made by scorpions. The shell, reduced to ash and kneaded with wine and oil, heals chaps and sores on the feet. Shavings from the top of the shell and given in drink are antaphrodisiac. This is all the more surprising because the whole shell, reduced to powder, is said to incite to lust. The urine of this tortoise, I believe, is found only in the bladder of dissected animals, and this is one of the substances to which the Magi give supernatural virtues as being specific for the bites of asps; a more efficacious one, however, they say, if bugs are added. The eggs are applied hard boiled to scrofulous sores, frost bites and burns. They are swallowed for pains in the stomach.

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§ 32.14.3  The flesh of sea tortoises mixed with that of frogs is an excellent remedy for salamander bites, and nothing is more opposed to the salamander than the tortoise. Its blood is good treatment for the bare patches of mange, for dandruff, and for all sores on the head; it should be allowed to dry and then gently washed off. With woman's milk it is poured by drops into aching ears. For epilepsy it is taken with wheaten flour, but three heminae of blood are diluted with one hemina of vinegar. It is also given for asthma, but with a hemina of wine added; for this purpose also with barley flour, vinegar too being added, so that the dose to be swallowed is the size of a bean. One of these doses is given morning and evening; then after a few days a double dose is given in the evening. The mouths of epileptics are opened and the blood poured by drops into them; to those seized with a slight convulsion is given an enema of the blood and beaver oil. If teeth are rinsed with tortoise blood three times a year a they will become immune to toothache. It is a remedy too for shortness of breath and for what is called orthopnoea; when so used it is administered in pearl barley. Tortoise gall gives clearness of vision, effaces sears, relieves sore tonsils, quinsy, and all diseases of the mouth, being specific for malignant sores there and on the testicles. If the nostrils are smeared with it, epileptics are roused and made to stand up. The gall too with snakes' slough and vinegar is also a sovereign remedy for pus in the ears. Some mix ox gall with the broth of boiled tortoise-flesh, adding the same amount of snakes' slough, but they boil the tortoise in wine. An application of the gall with honey cures especially all affections of the eyes; cataract is also cured by the gall of sea tortoise with the blood of river tortoise and milk. Woman's hair is dyed by the gall. For salamander bites it is enough merely to drink the broth of a decoction.

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§ 32.14.4  A third kind of tortoise lives in mud and marshes. These have a level width, like that across the breast, over the back also; this is not rounded into a cup-like convexity — indeed an unpleasant sight. Yet from this creature also a few remedies are obtained. For three are together thrown on burning brushwood, and when the shells separate they are at once taken off; the flesh is then torn away and boiled in a congius of water with a little salt added. The broth is boiled down to one third and taken for paralysis and diseases of the joints. The gall of this creature carries off phlegms and vitiated blood. This remedy taken in cold water acts astringently on the bowels.

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§ 32.14.5  There is a fourth kind of tortoise, which lives in rivers. The shells being torn off, the fats are beaten up with houseleek mixed with unguent and lily seed. If of a patient all the body except the head is rubbed with this preparation before the paroxysms come on, and he is then wrapped up and drinks hot water, he is cured, it is said, of quartan ague. This tortoise, they say, should be killed on the fifteenth of the moon, so that more fats may be obtained from it, but the patient should be rubbed on the sixteenth. The blood too of this kind of tortoise, poured in drops on the skull, relieves headache as well as scrofulous sores. There are some a who recommend tortoises to be laid on their backs, their heads chopped off with a bronze knife, and the blood caught in new earthenware; this blood is to be used as embrocation for all kinds of erysipelas, running sores on the head, and warts. The same authorities assure us that the dung of all tortoises disperses superficial abscesses; and others tell us (an incredible remark) that vessels travel more slowly if the right foot of a tortoise is on board.

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§ 32.15.1  From now on I will arrange water creatures according to diseases, not that I do not know that a complete account of each living thing is more attractive and more wonderful, but it is more useful to mankind to have remedies grouped into classes, since they vary with individuals, and are more easily found in one place than in another.

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§ 32.16.1  I have already said where poisonous honey is found. A remedy is the gilthead fish taken in food. But if pure honey should cause nausea, or indigestion that becomes very acute, an antidote is, according to Pelops, the decoction of a tortoise with the feet, head, and tail cut off; according to Apelles, a similar decoction of a scincus; I have said what a scincus is. Several times moreover I have said how poisonous is the menstrual fluid of women; against all forms of it, as I have said, the red mullet is a help, as it is against the stingray, land- and sea-scorpions, the weever fish, and poisonous spiders. It may be applied locally or taken in food. A fresh red mullet's head, reduced to ash, is an antidote to all poisons, being specific against poisonous fungi. They say that noxious charms cannot enter, or at least cannot harm, homes where a starfish, smeared with the blood of a fox, has been fastened to the upper lintel or to the door with a bronze nail.

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§ 32.17.1  By an application of tortoise flesh are healed the stings of weever fish, of scorpions, and also the bites of spiders. To sum up: the gravy of tortoise meat., that is, the broth obtained by boiling it down, is considered to be a most efficacious antidote for all poisons, whether conveyed in drink, by sting, or by bite. There are also remedies from preserved fish; to eat salted fish is good for the bites of snakes and of other venomous creatures, but now and then should be drunk enough neat wine to bring back by vomiting even the food whole; a the remedy is specially good for those bitten by the chalcis lizard, horned viper, what is called seps, elops, or dipsas. For scorpion stings a bigger dose of salted fish is beneficial, but not enough to cause the vomiting, or intolerable thirst; it is also good to lay salted fish on the wounds. Against the bites of crocodiles nothing else is considered to be a more sovereign remedy. The sarda is specific against the bite of the prester. Salted fish is also applied to the bite of a mad dog; even if the wound has not been cauterised with a hot iron, and the bowels emptied with a clyster, the fish by itself is enough. Salted fish is also applied with vinegar to the wound given by the weever fish. The tunny too has the same property. The weever fish indeed, if itself, or the whole of its brain, if applied to the poisoned wound caused by a blow of his own spine, makes a good remedy.

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§ 32.18.1  A decoction of sea frogs boiled down in wine and vinegar is drunk to counteract poisons, also that of the bramble toad and salamander; if the flesh of river frogs is eaten, or the broth drunk after boiling them down, it counteracts the poison of the sea-hare, of the snakes mentioned above, and of scorpions if wine is used in the preparation. Democritus indeed tells us that if the tongue, with no other flesh adhering, is extracted from a living frog, and after the frog has been set free into water, placed over the beating heart of a sleeping woman, she will give true answers to all questions.

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§ 32.18.2  The Magi add also other details, and if there is any truth in them, frogs should be considered more beneficial than laws to the life of mankind. They say that if frogs are pierced with a reed from the genitals through the mouth, and if the husband plants a shoot in his wife's menstrual discharge she conceives an aversion to adulterous lovers. It is certain that frogs' flesh placed in weds or on a hook makes excellent bait for the purple-fish. It is said that the liver of a frog is double, and should be thrown in the way of ants; that the part the ants attack is an antidote for all poisons. Some frogs there are that live only in brambles, and so they are called bramble-toads, as I have said, and by the Greeks φρύνοι. These are the largest of all frogs, have as it were a pair of horns, and are full of poison. Our authorities vie with one another in relating marvellous stories about the toad: that when brought into a meeting of the people silence reigns; that if the little bone found in its right side is let fall into boiling water, the vessel cools, and does not afterwards boil unless the bone is taken out; that it is found when a frog has been thrown to ants and the flesh gnawed away; that one at a time these bones are put into oil; that there is in a frog's left side a bone called 'dog's bane,' which dropped into oil gives the appearance of boiling; by it the attacks of dogs are repelled, and if it is put in drink love and quarrels brought about; that worn as an amulet it acts as an aphrodisiac; that the bone again on the right side cools boiling liquids; cures quartan and other fevers, but love is hat worn in fresh lamb's skin as an amulet this bone restrained. The spleen of these frogs is also a remedy for the poisons that come from them, while their liver is even more efficacious.

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§ 32.19.1  There is a snake, a colubra, that lives in the water. It is said that, if they have its fat or gall on their persons, crocodile hunters are helped wonderfully, as the brute dares not attack it at all; it is still more efficacious when combined with the plant potamogiton. Fresh river-crabs pounded and taken in water, their ash preserved, are good for all poisons, being specific for scorpion stings, if taken with asses milk, or failing that with goat's or any other milk; wine too should be added. Pounded with basil and applied to scorpions, river-crabs kill them. Their property avails also against the bites of all venomous creatures, being specific against the scytale, snakes, sea-hare, and bramble toad. Their ash preserved is good for those threatened with hydrophobia from the bite of a mad dog. Some add gentian and administer in wine, and if hydrophobia has already set in, prescribe lozenges made with the ash and wine to be swallowed. The Magi indeed assert that if ten crabs with a handful of basil are tied together, all the scorpions of the district will collect to the spot, and to those wounded by scorpions they apply with basil either crabs themselves or else their ash. For all these purposes sea crabs are less efficacious. Thrasyllus avows that no antidote for snakebite is as good as crabs; that pigs, when bitten, cure themselves by taking crabs as food; and that when the sun is in Cancer snakes are in torture. The stings of scorpions are counteracted also by the flesh of river snails, raw or cooked. Some too keep them for this purpose preserved in salt. They also apply them to the wounds themselves. Though the fish called coracini are peculiar to the Nile, I am giving this information for the benefit of all lands. Application of their flesh is good for scorpion stings. Among poisonous parts of fishes are the prickles on the back of the sea-pig, a wound from which causes severe torture. A remedy is the slime from the liquid part of the body of these fishes.

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§ 32.20.1  When the bite of a mad dog causes a dread of drink they rub the face with the fat of a seal, with more effect if there are mixed with it the marrow of a hyena, mastic oil, and wax. The bites of the murry are healed by the head of the murry itself, reduced to ash. For the wound of the stingray a remedy is the ash, of the same ray itself or of any other specimen, applied locally in vinegar. When the fish is used as food there should be taken from its back whatever is like saffron, and the whole head removed, while the ray, and all shell fish, when used as food, should not be over-washed, as to do so spoils the flavour. The poison of the sea-hare is counteracted by the seahorse taken in drink. Sea-urchins are very good as an antidote to dorycnium, as they are also for those who have drunk juice of carpathium, especially if they are taken in their broth. Effective against dorycnium is also considered a decoction of sea-crab, and indeed specific for the poison of the sea-hare.

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§ 32.21.1  The same poisons are counteracted also by oysters. About these it cannot appear that enough has been said, seeing that they have long been considered the prize delicacy of our tables. Oysters love fresh water, and where there is an inflow from many rivers; wherefore deep-sea oysters are small and far between. They also breed, however, in rocky districts and places where no fresh water in comes, such as around Grynium and Myrina. Their growth corresponds very closely to the increase of the moon, as I said a when dealing with water-creatures, but they grow most about the beginning of summer, and where sunshine makes its way into shallows, for then they swell with copious, milky, juice. This appears to be the reason why oysters found in deep water are rather small; darkness hinders their growth, and their gloom robs them of appetite.

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§ 32.21.2  Oysters vary in colour; red in Spain they are tawny in Illyricum, and black, both flesh and shell, in Circeii. In every country, however, those are most prized that are compact, not greasy with their own slime, remarkable for thickness rather than breadth, taken from water neither muddy nor sandy, but from that with a hard bottom, those whose meat is short and not fleshy, those without fringed edges, and lying wholly in the hollow of the shell.

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§ 32.21.3  Experts add a mark of distinction: if a purple line encircle the beard, they consider such oysters to be of a nobler type, and call them 'beautifully eye-browed.' Oysters like to travel and be moved into strange waters. And so oysters of Brundisium that have fed in Lake Avernus are believed to retain their own flavour as well as acquire that of the oysters of Lake Lucrinus.

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§ 32.21.4  So much for their bodies. I will now speak of the countries that breed oysters, lest the shores should be cheated of their proper fame; but I shall do so in the words of another, one who was the greatest connoisseur of such matters in our time. These then are the words of Mucianus, which I will quote. Oysters of Cyzicus are larger than those of Lake Lucrinus, fresher than the British, sweeter than those of Medullae, sharper than the Ephesian, fuller than those of Ilici, less slimy than those of Coryphas, softer than those of Histria, whiter than those of Circeii.

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§ 32.21.5  It is agreed, however, that none are fresher or softer than the last. The writers of Alexander's expedition tell us that in the Indian Sea are found oysters a foot long, and among ourselves a spendthrift has invented the nickname tridacna, wishing it to be used of oysters so large that they require three bites.

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§ 32.21.6  I shall give all their medical virtues at this point. Oysters are specific for settling the stomach, they restore lost appetite, and luxury has added coolness by burying them in snow, thus wedding the tops of the mountains to the bottom of the sea. They are a gentle laxative. They also, if boiled with honey wine, cure tenesmus if there is no ulceration. They also clean an ulcerated bladder. Boiled, unopened as gathered, in their shells, they are wonderfully good for streaming colds. Reduced to ash and mixed with honey oyster shells relieve troubles of the uvula and tonsils, similarly parotid swellings, superficial abscesses and indurations of the breasts. Applied with water the ash cures sores on the head and smoothes the skin of women. It is sprinkled on burns and is popular as a dentifrice. Applied also with vinegar it cures itch and eruptions of phlegm. The purple-fish too is a good antidote to poisons. Beaten up raw, oysters cure scrofulous sores and chilblains on the feet.

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§ 32.22.1  Seaweed too is said by Nicander to be an antidote. There are many kinds of it, as I have one with a long, red leaf, another with a broader leaf, and a third with a curly one. The most prized is the one growing near the ground in the island of Crete among the rocks, for this dyes even wool with a colour so fixed that it cannot be washed out afterwards. Nicander recommends it to be given in wine.

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§ 32.23.1  Hair lost through mange is restored by ashes of the sea-horse, either mixed with soda and pig's lard, or else by itself in vinegar; the skin however must be prepared for medicaments by the rind of the sepia cuttlefish ground to powder. It is restored also by the ash of the sea-mouse with oil, by that of the sea-urchin burnt with its flesh, by the gall of the sea-scorpion, also by the ash of three frogs with honey, better with liquid pitch, but the frogs must be burnt together alive in a jar. Leeches blacken the hair if they have rotted for forty days in a red wine. Others recommend that for the same number of days a sextarius of leeches be allowed to rot in a leaden vessel containing two sextarii of vinegar, and that then they should be applied in the sun. Sornatius tells us that they have such power that unless those who are going to dye keep oil in the mouth, the extract from the leeches blackens the teeth as well. To sores on the head are applied with honey beneficially shells of murex or purple-fish, reduced to ash; those of any shell-fish, ground to powder if not burned, and applied in water, are also beneficial. For headache use beaver-oil with pencedanum and rose-oil.

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§ 32.24.1  Of all fish, river or sea, the fats, melted in the sun and mixed with honey, are very good for clearness of vision, and so is beaver oil and honey. The gall of the star-gazer heals scars, and removes superfluous flesh about the eyes. No other fish has a greater abundance of gall; this opinion, Menander too expresses in his comedies. This fish is also called uranoscopos, from the eye which it has in its head. The gall of the coracinus too improves vision, and that of the red sea-scorpion with old oil and Attic honey disperses incipient cataract; it should be applied as ointment three times, once every other day. The same treatment removes albugo from the eyes. A diet of mullet is said to dull the eyesight. Though the sea-hare itself is poisonous, yet reduced to ash it prevents from growing again superfluous hair on the eyelids that has been plucked out. For this purpose the most useful specimens are the smallest; also small scallops, salted and pounded with cedar resin, frogs called diopetae or calamitae; their blood, with vine tear-gum, should be rubbed on the lids after plucking out the hair. Swellings and redness of the eyes are soothed by an application of sepia bone with woman's milk, and by itself it is good for roughness of the lids. In this cure they turn up the lids, taking off the ointment after a little time, treat the part with rose-oil and soothe with a bread-poultice. The bone is also good treatment for night-blindness, if ground to powder and applied in vinegar. Reduced to ash it brings away scales; with honey it heals scars on the eyes; with salt and cadmia, a drachma of each, it heals inflammatory swellings, and also albugo in cattle. They say that eyelids, if rubbed by its small bone, are healed. Urchins in vinegar remove night rashes. The Magi recommend the same to be burnt with vipers' skins and frogs, and the ash to be sprinkled into drinks; they assure us that clearer vision will result. Ichthyocolla is the name of a fish that has a sticky skin; the same name is given to the glue of the fish; this disperses night rashes. Some say that ichthyocolla is made from the belly and not from the skin, just as is bull glue. Pontic ichthyocolla is popular, being white, free from veins and scales, and melting very quickly. It ought, however, to be cut up and soaked in water or vinegar for a night and a day, and then to be pounded by sea-pebbles, to make it melt more readily. They assure us that it is useful both for headache and for all tetanus. The right eye of a frog hung round the neck in a piece of undyed cloth cures ophthalmia in the right eye; the left eye similarly tied cures ophthalmia in the left. But if the frog's eyes are gouged out when the moon is in conjunction, and worn similarly by the patient, enclosed in an egg-shell, it will also cure albugo. The rest of the flesh, if applied, quickly takes away bruises. An amulet of crabs' eyes also, worn on the neck, are said to cure ophthalmia. There is a small frog, found living especially in reed-beds and grasses, deaf, without a croak, and green, which, if it by chance is swallowed, swells up the bellies of oxen. They say that the fluid of its body, scraped off with a spatula and applied to the eyes, improves vision. The flesh by itself is placed over painful eyes. Some put together into a new earthen jar fifteen frogs, piercing them with rushes; to the fluid that thus exudes they add the gum of the white vine, and so treat eyelids; superfluous hairs are plucked out, and the mixture dropped with a needle into the holes made by the plucked-out hairs. Meges used to make a depilatory for the eyelids by killing frogs in vinegar and letting them putrefy; for this purpose he used the many spotted frogs that breed in the autumn rains. The same effect is thought to be produced by leeches reduced to ash and applied in vinegar; they must be burnt in a new vessel. The same effects too by the dried liver of a tunny, in doses of four denarii added to cedar oil and applied to the hairs for nine months.

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§ 32.25.1  Most beneficial to the ears is the fresh gall of the skate, but also when preserved in wine, the gall of grey mullet, which some call mizyene, and also that of the star-gazer with rose-oil poured into the ears, or beaver oil poured into the ears with poppy juice. There is a creature called the sea-louse, and they recommend sea-lice to be crushed and dropped into the ears in vinegar. Wool, both by itself and dyed with the purple fish, is very good for ear troubles; some moisten it with vinegar and soda. Some there are who recommend as a sovereign remedy for all ear troubles a cyathus of first-grade gamin, half as much again honey, with a cyathus of vinegar, to be boiled down in a new cup over a slow fire, every now and then wiping away the froth with feathers, and when the mixture has ceased to froth, to pour it into the ears when tepid. Should the ears be swollen, the same authorities prescribe that the swellings should be first reduced with juice of coriander. Frog fat dropped into the ears immediately takes away pains. The juice of river crabs with barley flour is most beneficial for wounds of the ears. The ash of murex shell with honey, or that of other shell-fish in honey wine, is good treatment for parotid swellings.

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§ 32.26.1  Toothache is relieved by scraping the gums with the bones of the weever fish, or by the brain of a Dogfish boiled down in oil and kept, so that the teeth may be washed with it once every year. To scrape the gums too with the ray of the stingray is very beneficial for toothache. This ray if pounded and applied with white hellebore brings out teeth without any distress. Salted fish also, reduced to ash in an earthen vessel and mixed with powdered marble, is another remedy. Old slices of tunny rinsed in a new vessel and then beaten up, are good for toothaches. Equally good are said to be the backbones of any salted fish, burnt, pounded, and applied. A single frog is boiled down in one hemina of vinegar, so that the teeth may be rinsed with the juice, which should be held in the mouth. Should the nasty taste be an objection, Sallustius Dionysius used to hang frogs by their hind legs so that the fluid from their mouths might drop into boiling vinegar, and that from several flogs. For stronger stomachs he prescribed the frogs themselves, to be eaten with their broth. It is thought that double teeth yield best to this treatment, when loose indeed the vinegar spoken of above is thought to make them firm. For the purpose some cut off the feet of two frogs and soak the bodies in a hemina of wine, and recommend loose teeth to be rinsed with the liquid. Some tie whole frogs on the jaws as an amulet; others have boiled down ten frogs in three sextarii of vinegar to one third the volume, in order to strengthen loose teeth. Furthermore they have boiled the hearts of 46 frogs under a copper vessel in one sextarius of old oil, to be poured into the ear on the side of the aching jaw. Others have boiled the liver of a frog, beaten it up with honey, and placed it on the teeth. All the above prescriptions are more efficacious if the sea frog is used. If the teeth are decayed and foul, they recommend whale's flesh to be dried for a night in a furnace, and then the same amount of salt to be added and the whole to be used as a dentifrice. The enhydris is a snake so-called by the Greeks and living in water. With four upper teeth of this creature they scrape the upper gums, when there is aching of the upper teeth, and with four lower teeth the lower gums when there is aching in the lower teeth. Some are content to use the canine tooth only of these creatures. They also use the ash of crabs, but the ash of the murex makes a dentifrice.

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§ 32.27.1  Lichens and leprous sores are removed by the fat of the seal, the ash of menae with three oboli of honey, the liver of the stingray boiled in oil, or the ash of the seahorse or dolphin applied with water. Ulceration should be followed by treatment, which results in a scar. Some roast dolphin fat a in an earthen jar until it flows like oil; this they use as ointment. The shell of murex or other shell-fish reduced to ash clears spots from the faces of women, remove wrinkles, and fill out the skin, if applied with honey for seven days, but on the eighth day there should be fomentation with white of egg. To the class murex belong the shell-fish called by the Greeks coluthia, by others coryphia, equally conical but smaller and much more efficacious, and they also keep the breath sweet. Fish-glue removes wrinkles and fills out the skin; prepared by boiling down in water for four hours and then kneading until liquid like honey. After being thus prepared it is stored away in a new vessel, and when used four drachmae of it, two of sulphur, two of alkanet, eight of litharge, are mixed, sprinkled with water, and pounded together. Applied to the face this mixture is washed off after four hours. Freckles too and the other facial affections are treated by the calcined bones of cuttlefish; they also remove excrescences of flesh and running sores. Itch-scab is removed by the decoction of a frog in five heminae of seawater: the boiling should continue until the consistency is that of honey. In the sea is found a substance called alcyoneum, some think out of the nests of the alcyon and the ceyx, others out of clotted sea-foam, others from the slime of the sea or from what might be called its down. There are four kinds of it: the first is ash-coloured, compact, and of a pungent smell; the second is milder in smell, which is almost that of seaweed; the third is in shape like a whitish grub; the fourth is rather like pumice, resembling rotten sponge. The best is almost purple, and is also called Milesian. The whiter alcyoneum is the less valuable it is. The property of alcyoneum is to ulcerate and to cleanse. When used it is parched, and applied without oil. With lupins and two oboli of sulphur it removes wonderfully well leprous sores, lichens, and freckles. It is also used for scars on the eyes. Andreas used for leprous sores crabs reduced to ash and applied with oil, Attalus the fresh fat of the tunny.

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§ 32.28.1  Ulcers in the mouth are healed by the brine of menae, and by their heads reduced to ash and applied with honey. For scrofulous sores it is good to prick them, but not causing a wound, with the little bone from the tail of the fish called the sea-frog. This should be done daily, until the cure is complete. The same property is possessed by the sting of the stingray and by the sea-hare, but the application must be quickly removed, with the shells of the urchin crushed and applied in vinegar, by the sea-scolopendra too applied in honey, and by river-crabs, crushed or burnt and applied in honey. Wonderfully good too are the bones of cuttlefish crushed with old axle-grease and applied. The same prescription is used for parotid swellings as well, as is the liver of the horse-mackerel, and even the crushed pieces of a jar in which fish have been salted, applied with old axle-grease; the ash of the murex is applied with oil for parotid swellings and scrofulous sores.

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§ 32.28.2  A stiff neck is softened by what are called sea-lice, the dose being a drachma taken in drink, by beaver oil mixed with pepper and taken in honey-wine, and by frogs boiled down in oil and salt for the liquor to be swallowed. This prescription is treatment for opisthotonus and tetanus. For spasms, however, pepper is added. Quinsy is cured by an application in honey of the heads of salted menae, and by the liquor of frogs boiled down in vinegar, which last is also good for diseased tonsils. River crabs pounded one by one in a hemina of water make a healing gargle for quinsy, or they may be taken in wine and warm water. Garum, placed beneath the uvula with a spoon, is good treatment for it. Fresh or salted silurus taken as food improve the voice.

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§ 32.29.1  Red mullet, preserved, crushed and taken in drink, is an emetic. For asthma is very beneficial beaver oil taken fasting in oxymel with a small quantity of sal ammoniac. This draught also calms stomach spasms when taken in warm oxymel. A cough is said to be cured by frogs boiled down in a pan as are fish in their own liquor. A prescription is: the frogs to be hung up by the feet, their saliva allowed to drip into a pan, and then, after being gutted, they are preserved after the entrails have been cast aside. There is a small frog that climbs trees and croaks loudly out of them. If a person with a cough spits into the mouth of one of these and lets it go, he is said to be cured of the complaint. For a cough with spitting of blood is prescribed the raw flesh of a snail beaten up and taken in warm water.

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§ 32.30.1  For liver pains are good: ... a sea scorpion drowned in wine, so that the liquor may be drunk, or the flesh of the long mussel taken in honey wine with an equal quantity of water, or if there is fever in hydromel. Pains in the side are relieved by eating the flesh of the sea-horse roasted, or the tethea, which resembles the oyster, taken in the food; sciatica is relieved by the brine of the silurus, injected as an enema. Mussels too are given for fifteen days in doses of three oboli soaked in two sextarii of wine.

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§ 32.31.1  The bowels are relaxed by the silurus, taken with its broth, by the torpedo, taken in food, by the sea-cabbage, which is like the cultivated kind — it is bad for the stomach but readily purges the bowels, and owing to its pungency is boiled with fat meat — and by the liquor of any boiled fish; the last is also diuretic, especially when taken in wine. The best is from the sea-scorpion, the wrasse, and the rock-fish, which are neither of a rank taste nor fatty. They should be boiled with dill, parsley, coriander, leeks, and with oil added and salt. Purgative too is stale tunny sliced, and it is specific for bringing away undigested food, phlegm and bile.

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§ 32.31.2  The myax also is purgative, and in this place shall be set forth all its characteristics. These animals form clusters, as does the murex, and live where seaweed lies thick, for which reason they are most delicious in autumn, and from regions where much fresh water mingles with salt, for which reason it is in Egypt that they are most esteemed. As the winter advances, they contract a bitter taste, and a red colour. Their liquor is said to be a thorough purge of belly and bladder, cleanses the intestines, is a universal aperient, purges the kidneys, and reduces blood and fat. Hence these shell-fish are very beneficial for dropsy, menstruation, jaundice, diseases of the joints, flatulence, obesity also, bilious phlegm, affections of lungs, liver, and spleen, and for catarrhs, Their only drawback is that they harm the throat and obstruct the voice. Ulcers that are creeping or need cleansing they heal, and also, if burnt as is the murex, malignant growths. With honey added they heal the bites of dogs and men, leprous sores, and freckles. Their ash, washed, is good for dim vision, roughness and white ulcers of the eyes, affections of the gums and teeth and outbursts of phlegm. Against dorycnium and opocarpathum they serve as an antidote. There are two inferior kinds: the mitulus, with a salty, strong taste; the myisca, different in its roundness, rather smaller and hairy, with thinner shell and sweeter flesh. The mitulus too like the murex has a caustic ash good for leprous sores, freckles, and spots. They are washed a also as is lead for thick eyelids, white ulcers, dim vision, dirty ulcers in other parts and pustules on the head. Their flesh makes an application for dog bites.

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§ 32.31.3  But clams relax the bowels, as does beaver oil in hydromel, the dose being two drachmae. Those who wish to use a more drastic laxative add a drachma of dried root of cultivated cucumber and two drachmae of saltpetre. Tethea cures griping and flatulence. It is found as a parasite on sea plants, more a kind of fungus rather than a fish. They also cure tenesmus and affections of the kidneys. There also grows in the sea apsinthium, which some call seriphum, found chiefly around Taposiris in Egypt, and is more slender than the land variety, it relaxes the bowels and brings away harmful creatures from the intestines. The cuttlefish too is a laxative. The apsinthium is given in food, being boiled with oil, salt, and flour. Salted menae applied to the navel with bull's gall relax the bowels. The liquor of fish boiled in a pan with lettuce cures tenesmus. River crabs beaten up and taken in water are constipating but diuretic in a white wine. If their legs are taken off they bring away stone, the dose being three oboli with a drachma each of myrrh and iris; iliac colic and flatulence are cured by beaver oil with daucus seed and of rock parsley as much as can be picked up in three fingers, taken in four cyathi of warm honey-wine; while for griping it should be taken with a mixture of dill and wine. The erythinus taken in food is constipating. Dysentery can be treated by frogs boiled with squills to make lozenges, or by their heart beaten up with honey, as Niceratus prescribes, jaundice by salted fish with pepper, but the patient must abstain from all other meat.

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§ 32.32.1  Splenic trouble is treated by the application of the fish sole, of the torpedo, or of the turbot, but the fish is then put back living into the sea. Bladder troubles and stone are cured by the sea scorpion killed in wine, by the stone which is found in the tail of the sea-scorpion, the dose being an obolus, taken in drink, by the liver of the enhydris, and by the ash of the blenny with rue. There are found too in the head of the fish bacchus as it were pebbles; these taken in water are excellent treatment for stone. It is said that the sea-nettle taken in wine is also good for it, and likewise the pulmo marinus boiled down in water. The eggs of the cuttlefish are diuretic and bring away phlegms from the kidneys. Ruptures and sprains are healed by river-crabs beaten up in milk, by preference asses' stone, however by sea-urchins, spines and all, crushed in wine and taken in doses of a hemina to each urchin, this amount being drunk until benefit is apparent; urchins are also beneficial generally for stone when taken as food. The bladder is cleansed by a diet of scallops. The male scallops are called by some σόνακες (reeds), by others αύλοί (pipes); the female they call όνυχες (nails). The males are diuretic; the females are sweeter and of a uniform colour. [The eggs of the cuttlefish also are diuretic and cleanse the kidneys.]

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§ 32.33.1  For intestinal hernia is applied sea-hare beaten up with honey. The liver of the water-coluber, likewise that of the water-snake, beaten up and taken in drink, is good for stone. Sciatica is cured by the brine of pickled silurus, injected as an enema, after previous thorough cleansing of the bowels; chafing of the seat by the head of grey or red mullet reduced to ash. The fish are burnt in an earthen vessel and should be applied with honey. The heads too of menae, reduced to ash, are useful for chaps and condylomata, just as the heads of salted pelatnids, or sliced tunny, reduced to ash and applied with honey. An application of the torpedo to the intestinal region reduces a morbid procidence there. The ash of river-crabs in oil and wax heals cracks in that part; sea-crabs too have the same healing property.

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§ 32.34.1  The pickle of the coracinus disperses superficial abscesses, as do the burnt intestines and scales of the sciaena, or the sea-scorpion boiled down in wine for fomentation with that decoction. But the shells of sea-urchins crushed and applied with water are a remedy for these abscesses when incipient; the murex or purple-fish reduced to ash is beneficial for either purpose, whether it is necessary to disperse incipient abscesses or to mature them and make them discharge. Some make up the following prescription: wax and frankincense twenty drachmae, litharge forty drachmae, ash of the murex ten drachmae, old oil one hemina. By themselves are beneficial boiled salted-fish, and pounded river-crabs. For a pustules on the pudenda, ash of the head of menae, likewise their flesh boiled down and applied, similarly the ash of the head of salted perch, with honey added, ash of pelamids' heads, or the skin of burnt squatina. This skin is the one used, as I have said, to polish wood, for from the sea too come useful things for our craftsmen. Zmarides also are beneficial when applied, likewise with honey the shells of the murex or purple-fish reduced to ash, more effectively if burnt with their flesh. Boiled salted fish are specific for reducing carbuncles on the pudenda. It is recommended, if a testicle hangs down, that the froth of snails be applied.

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§ 32.35.1  Incontinence of urine is remedied by the sea-horse, roasted and taken often as food, by the ophidion, a little fish like the couger, with lily-root added, and by the tiny fish in the belly of the fish that has swallowed them, taken out and burnt for their ash to be taken in water. They also recommend African snails to be burnt with their flesh, and the ash to be given in Signian wine.

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§ 32.36.1  For gouty pains and for diseases of the joints oil is useful in which the intestines of frogs have been boiled down, and also the ash of bramble-toads mixed with stale grease. There are some who add to these also barley ash, taking equal weights of three ingredients. They recommend too a gouty foot to be rubbed with a fresh sea-hare, and the patient also to be shod with beaver skin, by preference that of the Pontic beaver, or else with seal skin, seal fat also being good for gout. Good also is bryon, about which I have spoken, a plant like the lettuce, but with more wrinkled leaves and without a stem. Its nature is styptic, and applied to the painful part it soothes the paroxysms of gout. Seaweed too is good, about which by itself also I have spoken. Care is taken with seaweed, not to apply it dry. An application of pulmo marinus is a cure for chilblains, and so is the ash of a sea-crab in oil, river-crabs too pounded and burnt, the ash also being kneaded with oil, and the fat of the silurus. In diseases of the joints paroxysms are soothed by applying fresh frogs every now and then; some recommend them to be cut up before being applied. Flesh is put on by the liquid of mussels and of shell-fish generally.

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§ 32.37.1  Epilepsy, as I have said, is treated by doses of seals' rennet with mares' or asses' milk, or with pomegranate juice; some prescribe it in oxymel. Some too swallow the rennet by itself, made up into pills. Beaver oil in three cyathi of oxymel is given on an empty stomach; those however frequently attacked are benefited wonderfully by a clyster; of the beaver oil there should be two drachmae, of honey and oil a sextarius, and the same quantity of water. If indeed persons have a momentary seizure it is beneficial to give the patients beaver oil and vinegar to smell. There is also given the liver of the sea-weasel, or of the sea-mouse, or the blood of tortoises.

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§ 32.38.1  Recurrent fevers are cured by a dolphin's liver, taken before the paroxysms. Seahorses are killed in rose-oil, to make ointment for those sick of chill fevers, and seahorses themselves are worn as an amulet by the patients. The little stones also that at a full moon are found in the head of the fish asellus, are tied on the patient in a linen cloth. Quartans are cured by the longest tooth of the river fish phagrus, tied with a hair on the patient as an amulet, but the patient must not discern the person who attached it for five days; also by rubbing with the grease of frogs boiled in oil at a place where three roads meet, the flesh being first thrown away. Some drown frogs in oil, attach secretly as an amulet, and rub the patient thoroughly with the oil. The heart of frogs attached as an amulet, and the oil in which their entrails have been boiled, relieve the chills of fevers. The best cure for quartans, however, is a frog, worn as an amulet with its claws taken off, or a bramble-toad, if its liver or heart is worn as an amulet in a piece of ash-coloured cloth. River-crabs, pounded in oil and water and thoroughly rubbed over the patient before the paroxysms, are beneficial in fevers; some add pepper also. Others prescribe them for quartans boiled down to a quarter in wine, to be taken after leaving the bath; some, however, the left eye to be swallowed. The Magi assure us that tertian fevers are driven away by crabs' eyes, attached as an amulet before sunrise to the patient, but the blinded crabs must be set free into water. The Magi also teach that crabs' eyes, tied on with the flesh of a nightingale in deer skin, drive away sleep and cause watchfulness. For those sinking into lethargus they prescribe that the patient smell the rennet of the whale or that of the seal. Others use as embrocation for lethargus the blood of a tortoise? It is also said that tertians are treated successfully by the vertebra of a perch worn as an amulet; quartans by fresh river snails taken as food. Some preserve them in salt for this purpose, to administer them, beaten up, in a draught.

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§ 32.39.1  Strombi rotted in vinegar rouse by the smell the victims of lethargus. They are also good for those with stomach complaints. Those in a decline, with a body seriously wasting away, find beneficial tethea with rue and honey. Dropsy is treated with melted dolphin fat taken with wine. The nauseating taste is neutralised by touching the nostrils with unguent or scents, or plugging them in any suitable way. The flesh of the strombus also, pounded and given in three heminae of honey wine and an equal measure of water, or should there be fever, in hydromel, benefit the dropsical; likewise the juice of river crabs with honey; water frogs too are boiled down in old wine and emmer wheat, and then taken as food but out of the same vessel as cooked; a tortoise a with feet, head, tail, and entrails taken out, the remaining flesh being so seasoned that it can be taken without nausea. River crabs taken in their juice are also reported to be beneficial to consumptives.

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§ 32.40.1  Burns are healed by the ash in oil of a sea crab or river crab; by fish glue, or by the ash of frogs, the scalds caused by boiling water; this treatment also restores the lost hair. They think that the ash of river crabs should be used with wax and bear's grease. Beneficial also is the ash of beaver pelts. Erysipelas disappears under the application of the bellies of live frogs; they recommend the frogs to be tied on upside down by their hind legs, so that their rapid breathing may be of benefit. They also use the ash in vinegar of the heads of salted siluri. Pruritus and itch-scab in quadrupeds as well as in man are relieved with great efficacy by the liver of the stingray boiled down in oil.

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§ 32.41.1  The hard operculum, with which the purple-fish shuts its body from view, when beaten up, unites cut sinews even when severed. Patients with tetanus are relieved by an obolus by weight of seal's rennet taken in wine; also by fish glue. The palsied obtain benefit from beaver oil, if they are thoroughly rubbed with it and olive oil. I find that red mullet as a food is injurious to the sinews.

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§ 32.42.1  They think that to eat fish causes bleeding, but that haemorrhage is stopped by crushing and applying the polypus, about which are current the following reports. It of itself gives out of itself brine, and therefore none should be added in cooking; it should be cut with a reed, for iron spoils it and leaves a taint, as the natures of the two quarrel. To stop bleeding they also apply the ash of frogs or their dried blood. Some recommend the blood or ash to come from the frog called by the Greeks calamites, because it lives among reeds and shrubs, the smallest and greenest of all frogs; some that the ash of frogs at their birth in water, while still tadpoles with a tail, and calcined in a new earthen vessel, should be stuffed into the nostrils of those with epistaxis. Opposite is the use of leeches, called sanguisugae, which are employed to extract blood. For these are supposed to have the same purpose as that of cupping-glasses, to relieve the body of blood and to open the pores of the skin; but an objection is that once applied they create a craving for the same treatment every year at about the same time. Many have been of opinion that leeches should be applied also for gout. When gorged leeches fall off, detached by the mere weight. of blood or by a sprinkle of salt; sometimes however they leave their heads stuck fast in the flesh, thus causing incurable wounds that have often proved fatal. An instance is Messalinus, a patrician of consular rank, who applied leeches to his knee, and the remedy turned to a virulent poison. It is especially red leeches that are so dreaded; so they cut them off with scissors while they are sucking, and the blood runs down as it were through tubes; as they die their heads little by little contract, and are not left in the bite. The nature of leeches is adverse to that of bugs, which are killed if fumigated with leeches. Beaver skins, burnt with liquid pitch and softened with leek juice, arrest discharges from the nostrils.

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§ 32.43.1  Weapons sticking in the flesh are drawn out by the ash in water of the shell of the cuttlefish, also of the shell of the purple-fish, by the flesh of salted fish, by river-crabs beaten up, by an application of the flesh of the river silurus (which is found in other rivers besides the Nile), whether fresh or preserved in salt. The ash of the same fish draws out sharp bodies; its fat and the ash of its backbone take the place of spodium.

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§ 32.44.1  Creeping ulcers and the excrescences that form in them are checked by ash of menae or of the silurus, carcinomata by heads of salted perch, with more effect if with their ash are mixed salt and headed cunila, and the whole kneaded with oil. The ash of a sea crab that has been burnt with lead checks carcinomata. For this purpose river crab too suffices with honey and fine lint. Some prefer to mix alum and honey with the ash. Phagedaenic ulcers are healed by silurus kept till stale and beaten up with sandarach; malignant ulcers, corrosive ulcers, and festering sores by old tunny sliced; the maggots that breed in them are removed by frogs' gall. Fistulas are opened and dried up by salted fish inserted with lint; within two days such fish remove all callus, festering sores, and creeping ulcers, if kneaded up as for a plaster and applied. Allex also applied in strips of lint cleans sores; likewise the shell of sea-urchins, reduced to ash. Carbuncles are dispersed if treated with salted coracinus. likewise with the ash of salted red mullet — some use the head only with honey — or with the flesh of coracinus. Ash of murex with oil removes swellings, and the gall of the sea scorpion sears.

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§ 32.45.1  Warts are removed by an application of the liver of the glanus, of menae ash beaten up with garlic — for thymion warts they use the materials raw — by the gall of the red sea scorpion, by zmarides beaten up and applied, and by allex thoroughly boiled. Rough nails are smoothed by the ash of menae heads.

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§ 32.46.1  Milk in women is made plentiful by glauciscus taken with its liquor, by zmarides taken with barley water or boiled down with fennel. The breasts themselves are treated efficaciously by shells of murex or purple fish reduced to ash and combined with honey; by crabs too, river or sea, applied locally. The flesh of the murex if applied removes hair growing on the breasts. Squatinae applied prevent their swelling. Lint, smeared with dolphin's fat and then set alight, arouse women suffering from hysterical suffocations; likewise strombi rotted in vinegar. The ash of the heads of perch or menae, mixed with salt, cunsla, and oil, is healing to the uterus; by fumigation also it brings away the afterbirth. The fat of the seal melted in the fire is inserted into the nostrils of women swooning from hysterical suffocation, or else seal's rennet used as a pessary in a piece of fleece. The pulmo marinus, tied on, is an excellent promoter of menstruation, which is checked by living sea urchins pounded up and taken in a sweet wine or by river crabs beaten up and so taken. Siluri also, especially the African, are said to make easier the birth of children, crabs taken in water to arrest menstruation, taken in hyssop to promote it. If birth causes choking, the same medicament taken in drink is a help. Crabs, fresh or dried, are taken in drink to prevent miscarriage. Hippocrates a uses them to promote menstruation and to withdraw a dead foetus; five crabs, root of lapathum and of rue, with some soot, are beaten up, and given to drink in honey wine. Crabs, boiled in their liquor with lapathum and celery, hasten on the monthly flow and produce a plentiful supply of milk; in fever accompanied by pains in the head and palpitation of the eyes, are said to be good for women when given in a dry wine. Beaver oil taken in honey wine is good for menstruation, as also for troubles of the uterus if given to smell with vinegar and pitch, or made into tablets for a pessary. To bring away the afterbirth it is also useful to use beaver oil with panaces in four cyathi of wine, and three-obol doses for those suffering from chill. If, however, a pregnant woman steps over beaver oil or a beaver, it is said to cause a miscarriage, and a dangerous confinement if it is carried over her. What I find about the torpedo is also wonderful: that, if it is caught when the moon is in Libra and kept for three days in the open, it makes parturition easy every time afterwards that it is brought into the room. It is thought to be helpful too if the sting of the stingray is worn as an amulet on the navel, but it must be taken from a living fish, which itself must be cast into the sea. I find in some writers that there is a substance called ostraceum, called by some onyx that this by fumigation wonderfully counteracts severe pains of the uterus; that it has the smell of beaver oil, and is more efficacious if burnt with it; that the ash also of the same substance cures chronic or malignant ulcers. But carbuncles and cancerous sores on a woman's privates have, they say, a sovereign remedy in a female crab crushed up with flower of salt a after a full moon and applied in water.

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§ 32.47.1  Superfluous hair is removed by blood, gall, and liver of the tunny, whether fresh or preserved, by the liver too when beaten up, mixed with cedar oil, and stored in a leaden box. In this way slave boys were prepared for market by Salpe the midwife. The same property is found in the pulmo marinus, in the blood and gall of the sea hare, or this hare itself killed in oil. There is also used the ash of the crab or of the sea scolopendra with oil, the sea anemone beaten up in squill vinegar, or the brain of the torpedo applied with alum on the sixteenth day of the moon. The blood-like matter (sanies) given out by the small frog, that we have spoken of in the treatment of the eyes, is a most efficacious depilatory if applied fresh; and so is the frog itself, dried and pounded up, and then boiled down to one third in three heminae, or boiled down in oil in brazen vessels. Others make a depilatory out of fifteen frogs treated with the same proportions of liquid, as we mentioned when treating of the eyes. Leeches also, roasted in an earthen vessel and applied with vinegar, have the same effect in extracting hair. The fumes that come from those burning the leeches kill bugs. There are also found those who have used for several days as a depilatory rubbing with beaver oil and honey. Before using however any depilatory the hairs must first be pulled out.

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§ 32.48.1  The gums and the teething of infants are helped very much by a dolphin's teeth reduced to ash and added to honey, and also if the gums are touched with a tooth itself. As an amulet a dolphin's tooth removes a child's sudden terrors. The same also is the effect of a tooth of the canicula. The sores however that form in the ears or on any part of the body are cured by the juice of river crabs with barley meal. The other diseases too are relieved if the patients are thoroughly rubbed with river crabs pounded in oil. For siriasis in babies a very efficacious cure is a frog tied as an amulet back to front on the infant's skull moistened with a cold sponge. The sponge is said to be found dry afterwards.

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§ 32.49.1  Red mullet killed in wine, or the fish rubellio, or two eels, also a sea grape rotted in wine, brings a distaste for wine to those who have drunk of the liquor.

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§ 32.50.1  Antaphrodisiac are the echeneis, hide from the left side of the forehead of a hippopotamus attached as an amulet in lamb skin, or the gall of the torpedo, while it is still alive, applied to the genitals. Aphrodisiac is the flesh of river snails preserved in salt and given to drink in wine, erythini taken as food, the liver of the frog diopetes or calamites, attached as an amulet in a little piece of crane's skin, or the maxillary tooth of a crocodile tied to the forearm, or the hippocampus, or the sinews of a bramble toad worn as an amulet on the right upper arm. Love is killed by a bramble toad worn as an amulet in a fresh piece of sheep's skin.

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§ 32.51.1  Itch scab in horses is relieved by frogs boiled down in water until they can he used as ointment. It is said that a horse so treated is never attacked again afterwards. Salpe says that dogs do not bark a if a live frog has been put into their mess.

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§ 32.52.1  Among water creatures ought also to be mentioned calamochnus, the Latin name of which is adarca. It collects around thin reeds from the foam forming where fresh and sea water mingle. It has a caustic property, and is therefore useful for tonic pills and to cure cold shiverings. It also removes freckles on the face of women. At the same time reeds should be spoken of. The root of phragmites, pounded fresh, cures dislocations, and applied with vinegar pains in the spine; the Cyprian reed indeed, also called donax, has a bark which when calcined cures mange and chronic ulcers, and its leaves extract things embedded in the flesh, and help erysipelas. The flower of the reed panicula causes complete deafness if it has entered the ears. The ink of the cuttlefish has so great power that Anaxilaus reports that poured into a lamp the former light utterly vanishes, and people appear as black as Ethiopians. A bramble toad thoroughly boiled in water and given to drink cures pigs' diseases, as does the ash of any frog or toad. If wood is thoroughly rubbed with pulmo marinus it seems to be on fire, so much so that a walking-stick, so treated, throws a light forward.

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§ 32.53.1  Now that I have completed my account of the natural qualities of aquatic plants and animals, it seems to me not foreign to my purpose to point out that, throughout all the seas which are so numerous and spacious and come flooding into the landmass over so many miles and surround it outside to an extent which might be thought of as almost equal to that of the world itself — there are one hundred and forty-four species in all; and that they can be included each under its own name, a thing which, in the case of creatures of the land and those which fly, cannot be done. For in fact we do not know all the wild animals and flying creatures of India and Ethiopia and Syria; while even of mankind itself the varieties which we have been able to discover are the greatest in number by far. Add to this Ceylon and various other islands of the ocean about which fabulous tales are told. Surely it will be agreed that not all the species can be brought under one general view for our consideration. On the other hand, upon my solemn word, in the sea, vast though it is, and in the ocean, the number of animals produced is known; and — we may well wonder at this — we are better acquainted with the things which nature has sunk down in the deep.

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§ 32.53.2  To begin with large beasts, there are 'sea-trees,' blower-whales, other whales, saw-fish, Tritons, Nereids, walruses (?) so-called 'men of the sea,' 'wheels,' grampuses, 'sea-rams,' whalebone whales, and others having the shape of fishes, dolphins, and seals well known to Homer, tortoises on the other hand well known to luxury, beavers to medical people (of the class of beavers we have never found record, speaking as we are of marine animals, that otters anywhere frequent the sea); also sharks, 'drinones,' horned rays (?), sword-fish, saw-fish; hippopotamuses and crocodiles common to land, sea, and river; and, common to river and sea only, tunnies, other tunnies, 'shun,' 'coracini,' and perches.

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§ 32.53.3  Belonging to the sea only are sturgeon, gilt-head, 'asellus,' 'acharne,' small fry, thresher-shark, eel, weever-fish, bogue, skate, grey mullet, angler-fish, garfish? — fish which we call thorny, sea-acorn, 'sea-crow,' 'cithari' the worst esteemed of the turbot kind, shad (?), goby, 'callarias' of the 'aselli' kind were it not smaller, Spanish mackerel also known as the Parian and as Sexitan from its native land Baetica, the smallest of the mackerels, cybium (this is the name given, when it has been sliced, to the young tunny which returns from the Black Sea into Lake Maeotis after forty days), 'cordyla' (this too is a very small young tunny; it has this name when it goes out from Lake Maeotis into the Black Sea), black bream, the 'callionymus' or 'uranoscopus,' 'cinaedi'-wrasse — the only fishes which are yellow, sea-anemone, which we call nettle, species of crab, furrowed clams, smooth clams, clams of the kind 'peloris,' differing in variety of roundness of their shells, 'glycymarides'-clams, which are larger than 'pelorides,' 'coluthia" or 'coryphia,' species of bivalves amongst which are also the pearl-bearers, 'cochloe' (to the class of these belong the 'five-fingered,' also 'helices' called by others 'actinophorae'), whose rays give a singing sound (outside these there are round shells used in dealing with oil), sea-cucumber, 'cynops,' shrimps, 'dog's right-hand,' weever-fish; (certain people want the 'little weever' to be regarded as a different animal; in fact it is like a large 'gerricula,' and has on its gills prickles which look towards the tail; and when it is lifted in the hand, it inflicts a wound like a scorpion), 'erythrinus,' sucking-fish, sea-urchin, black 'elephants' of the lobster kind, having four forked legs (they also have two arms, each with double joints and a single pair of pincers having a toothed edge), 'fabri' or 'zaei,' 'glauciseus,' catfish, conger eel, 'girres,' dogfish, 'garos,' runner-crab (?) 'horsetail,' flying-fish, jellyfish, seahorse, 'hepar,' flying gurnard (?), rainbow-wrasse (?) species of mackerel, fluttering squid, crawfishes, 'lantern-fish,' 'lelepris,' 'lamirns,' sea-hare, 'lion'-lobsters, whose arms are like crabs' and the rest is like the crawfish, red mullet, a wrasse highly praised amongst rock-fish, grey mullet, 'black-tail,' 'mena,' 'maeotes,' murry, 'mys'-mussel, mussel, bearded mussel (?), purple-mollusc, 'eyed' fish, eel (?), species of bivalves, sea-ear, large tunny (this is the largest of the pelamys kind and it never comes back to Lake Maeotis; it is like the 'tritomum' and is best in its old age), globe-fish, 'orthagoriscus' 'phager,' 'phycis' one of the rock-fish, 'pelamys'-tunny, of which kind the largest is called 'choice piece,' tougher than the 'tritomus,' 'pig'-fish, sea-louse, plaice (?), stingray, species of octopus, scallops (the very large ones, and, among these, those which are very black in summer time, being the most highly esteemed; moreover, these are found at Mytilene, Tyndaris, Salonae, Altinum, the island of Chios, and Alexandria in Egypt), small scallops, purple-molluscs, 'pegrides'(?), pinna, hermit crab (or pinas-guard crab), angel-fish which we call 'squatus,' turbot, parrot-wrasse, which is of first rank today, sole, sargue, prawn (or shrimp), 'sarda' (this is the name given to an elongated pelamy-tunny which comes from the Ocean), mackerel, saupe, 'sorus,' two kinds of sculpin, two kinds of maigre, scolopendra-worm, 'smyrus,' cuttlefish, spiral molluscs, razor-shells variously called 'solen,' 'aulos', 'donax,' 'onyx,' and 'dactylus'; thorny oysters, picarels, starfishes, sponges, 'turdus,' wrasse famous amongst rock-fish, tunny, thranis which others call swordfish, 'thrissa,' electric ray, sea-squirt, 'tritomum' ('three-cut') belong to a large kind of tunny, from each of which three 'cybia' can be cut, 'veneria,' cuttle-egg (?) swordfish.

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§ 32.54.1  We will add to these some animals mentioned by Ovid, which are found in no other writer but which are perhaps native to the Black Sea where he began that unfinished book in the last days of his life: horned ray, 'cercyrus' which lives amongst rocks, 'orphus,' and red 'errthinus,' 'iulus,' tinted sea-breams and gilt-head of golden colour; and, besides these, perch, 'tragus,' black-tail with pretty tail, 'epodes' of the flat kind. Besides these remarkable kinds of fishes he records: that the sea-perch conceives of herself, that the 'glaucus' never appears in summer; and he mentions the pilot-fish as always accompanying ships on their course, and the 'chronlis' which makes its nest in the waves. He says that the 'helops' is unknown to our waters: from which it is clear that those who have believed that acipenser (sturgeon) is the same are in error. Many people have given the first prize for taste to the helops among all fish.

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§ 32.54.2  Moreover, there are some fish named by no author. There is one barracuda called 'sudis' in Latin, 'sphyraena' in Greek, in its muzzle resembling its name ('stake'); it is in size amongst the largest; it is uncommon, and does not degenerate by interbreeding. There are also shells (pinnas) of a kind for which the name 'perna' is given; they are abundant round the Pontiac islands.. They stand like pigs' hams fixed bolt upright in the sand; and, gaping not less than a foot wide where there is broad enough space, they lie in wait for food. They have, all round the edges of the shells, teeth set thick like those of a comb; inside is a large fleshy muscle. I once saw also a 'hyena'-fish (puntarzo) which was taken in the island Aenaria.

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§ 32.54.3  Besides all these creatures, certain off-scourings also come out of the sea; they are not worth a description and are to be counted amongst seaweeds and not amongst living creatures.

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§ 33.1.1  OUR topic now will be metals, and the actual resources employed to pay for commodities — resources diligently sought for in the bowels of the earth in a variety of ways. For in some places the earth is dug into for riches, when life demands gold, silver, silver-gold and copper, and in other places for luxury, when gems and colours for tinting walls and beams are demanded, and in other places for rash valour, when the demand is for iron, which amid warfare and slaughter is even more prized than gold. We trace out all the fibres of the earth, and live above the hollows we have made in her, marvelling that occasionally she gapes open or begins to tremble — as if forsooth it were not possible that this may be an expression of the indignation of our holy parent. We penetrate her inner parts and seek for riches in the abode of the spirits of the departed, as though the part where we tread upon her were not sufficiently bounteous and fertile. And amid all this the smallest object of our searching is for the sake of remedies for illness, for with what fraction of mankind is medicine the object of this delving? Although medicines also earth bestows upon us on her surface, as she bestows corn, bountiful and generous as she is in all things for our benefit! The things that she has concealed and hidden underground, those that do not quickly come to birth, are the things that destroy us and drive us to the depths below; so that suddenly the mind soars aloft into the void and ponders what finally will be the end of draining her dry in all the ages, what will be the point to which avarice will penetrate. How innocent, how blissful, nay even how luxurious life might be, if it coveted nothing from any source but the surface of the earth, and, to speak briefly, nothing but what lies ready to her hand!

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§ 33.2.1  Gold is dug out of the earth and in proximity to it gold-solder, which still retains in Greek a name derived from gold, so as to make it appear more precious. It was not enough to have discovered one bane to plague life, without setting value even on the corrupt humours of gold! Avarice was seeking for silver, but counted it a gain to have discovered cinnabar by the way, and devised a use to make of red earth. Alas for the prodigality of our inventiveness! In how many ways have we raised the prices of objects! The art of painting has come in addition, and we have made gold and silver dearer by means of engraving! Man has learnt to challenge nature in competition! The enticements of the vices have augmented even art: it has pleased us to engrave scenes of licence upon our goblets, and to drink through the midst of obscenities. Afterwards these were flung aside and began to be held of no account, when there was an excess of gold and silver. Out of the same earth we dug supplies of fluorspar and crystal, things which their mere fragility rendered costly. It came to be deemed the proof of wealth, the true glory of luxury, to possess something that might be absolutely destroyed in a moment. Nor was this enough: we drink out of a crowd of precious stones, and set our cups with emeralds, we take delight in holding India for the purpose of tippling, and gold is now a mere accessory.

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§ 33.3.1  And would that it could be entirely banished from life, reviled and abused as it is by all the worthiest people, and only discovered for the ruin of human life — how far happier was the period when goods themselves were interchanged by barter, as it is agreed we must take it from Homer to have been the custom even in the days of Troy. That in my view was the way in which trade was discovered, to procure the necessities of life. Homer relates how some people used to make their purchases with ox-hides, others with iron and captives, and consequently, although even Homer himself was already an admirer of gold, he reckoned the value of goods in cattle, saying that Glaucus exchanged gold armour worth 100 beeves with that of Diomedes worth 9 beeves. And as a result of this custom even at Rome a fine under the old laws is priced in cattle.

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§ 33.4.1  The worst crime against man's life was committed by the person who first put gold on his fingers, though it is not recorded who did this, for I deem the whole story of Prometheus mythical, although antiquity assigned to him also an iron ring, and intended this to be understood as a fetter, not an ornament. As for the story of Midas's ring, which when turned round made its wearer invisible, who would not admit this to be more mythical still? It was the hand and what is more the left a hand, that first won for gold such high esteem; not indeed a Roman hand, whose custom it was to wear an iron ring as an emblem of warlike valour.

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§ 33.4.2  As to the Roman kings I find it hard to make a statement. The statue of Romulus in the Capitol has nothing, nor has any other king's statue excepting those of Numa and Servius Tullius, and not even that of Lucius Brutus. I am especially surprised at this in the case of the Tarquins, who came originally from Greece, the country from which this fashion in rings came, although an iron ring is worn in Sparta even at the present day. But of all, Tarquinius Priscus, it is well known, first presented his son with a golden amulet when while still of an age to wear the bordered robe he had killed an enemy in battle; and from that time on the custom of the amulet has continued as a distinction to be worn by the sons of those who have served in the cavalry, the sons of all others only wearing a leather strap. Owing to this I am surprised that the statue of that Tarquin has no ring. All the same, I notice that there is a difference of opinion even about the actual word for a ring. The Greek name for it is derived from the word meaning a finger; with ourselves, in early days it was called 'ungulus,' but afterwards both our people and the Greeks give it the name of 'symbolum.' For a long period indeed, it is quite clear, not even members of the Roman senate had gold rings, inasmuch as rings were bestowed officially on men about to go as envoys to foreign nations, and on them only, the reason no doubt being that the most highly honoured foreigners were recognized in this way. Nor was it the custom for any others to wear a gold ring than those on whom one had been officially bestowed for the reason stated; and customarily Roman generals went in triumph without one, and although a Tuscan crown of gold was held over the victor's head from behind, nevertheless he wore an iron ring on his finger when going in triumph, just the same as the slave holding the crown in front of himself. This was the way in which Gaius Marius celebrated his triumph over Jugurtha, and it is recorded that he did not assume Jan.1, a gold ring till his third tenure of the consulship. Those moreover who had been given gold rings because they were going on an embassy only wore them in public, but in their homes wore iron rings; this is the reason why even now an iron ring and what is more a ring without any stone in it is sent a as a gift to a woman when betrothed. Indeed I do not find that any rings were worn in the Trojan period; at all events Homer nowhere mentions them, although he shows that tablets used to be sent to and fro in place of letters, and that clothes and gold and silver vessels were stored away in chests and were tied up with signet-knots, not sealed with signet-rings. Also he records the chiefs as casting lots about meeting a challenge from the enemy without using signet-rings; and he also says that the god of handicraft in the original period frequently made brooches and other articles of feminine finery like earrings — without mentioning finger-rings. And whoever first introduced them did so with hesitation, and put them on the left hand, which is generally hidden by the clothes, whereas it would have been shown off on the right hand if it had been an assured distinction. And if this might possibly have been thought to involve some interference with the use of the right hand, there is the proof of more modern custom; it would have also been more inconvenient to wear it on the left hand, which holds the shield. Indeed it is also stated, by Homer again, that men wore gold plaited in their hair and consequently I cannot say whether the use of gold originated from women.

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§ 33.5.1  At Rome for a long time gold was actually not to be found at all except in very small amounts. At all events when peace had to be purchased after the capture of the City by the Gauls, not more than [390 B.C.] a thousand pounds' weight of gold could be produced. I am aware of the fact that in Pompey's third consulship [52 BC] there was lost from the throne of Jupiter of the Capitol two thousand pounds' weight of gold that had been stored there by Camillus, which led to a general belief that 2000 pounds was the amount that had been accumulated. But really the additional sum was part of the booty taken from the Gauls, and it had been stripped by them from the temples in the part of the city which they had captured — the case of Torquatus shows that the Gauls were in the habit of wearing gold ornaments in battle; therefore it appears that the gold belonging to the Gauls and that belonging to the temples did not amount to more than that total; and this in fact was taken to be the meaning contained in the augury, when Jupiter the God of the Capitol had repaid twofold.

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§ 33.5.2  Also, as we began on this topic from the subject of rings, it is suitable incidentally to point out that the official in charge of the temple of Jupiter of the Capitol when he was arrested broke the stone of his ring between his teeth and at once expired, so putting an end to any possibility of proving the theft. It follows that there was only 2,000 lbs. weight of gold at the outside when Rome was captured in its 364th year, although the census showed there were already 152,573 free citizens. From the same city 307 years later the gold that Gaius Marius the younger [82 BC] had conveyed to Praeneste from the conflagration of the temple of the Capitol and from all the other shrines amounted to 14,000 lbs., which with a placard above it to that effect was carried along in his triumphal procession by Sulla, as well as [81BC] 6,000 lbs. weight of silver. Sulla had likewise on the previous day carried in procession 15,000 lbs. of gold and 115,000 lbs. of silver as the proceeds of all the rest of his victories.

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§ 33.6.1  It does not appear that rings were in more common use before the time of Gnaeus Flavius son of Annius. It was he who first published the dates for legal proceedings, which it had been customary for the general public to ascertain by daily enquiry from a few of the leading citizens; and this won him such great popularity with the common people — he was also the son of a liberated slave and himself a clerk to Appius Caecus, at whose request he had by dint of natural shrewdness through continual observation picked out those days and published them — that he was appointed a curule aedile as a colleague of Quintus Anicius of Praeneste, who a few years previously had been an enemy at war with Rome, while Gaius Poetilius and Domitius, whose fathers had been consuls, were passed over. Flavius had the additional advantage of being tribune of the plebs at the same time. This caused such an outburst of blazing indignation that we find in the oldest annals 'rings were laid aside.' The common belief that the Order of Knighthood also did the same on this occasion is erroneous, inasmuch as the following words were also added: 'but also harness-bosses were put aside as well'; and it is because of this clause that the name of the Knights has been added; and the entry in the annals is that the rings were laid aside by the nobility, not by the entire Senate. This occurrence took place in the consulship of Publius Sempronius [305 BC] and Lucius Sulpicius. Flavius made a vow to erect a temple to Concord if he succeeded in effecting a reconciliation between the privileged orders and the people; and as money was not allotted for this purpose from public funds, he drew on the fine-money collected from persons convicted of practising usury to erect a small shrine made of bronze on the Graecostasis which at that date stood above the Comitium, and put on it an inscription engraved on a bronze tablet that the shrine had been constructed 204 years after the consecration of the Capitoline temple. This event took place in the 449th year from the foundation of the city, and [305 B.C.] is the earliest evidence to be found of the use of rings. There is however a second piece of evidence for their being commonly worn at the time of the Second Punic War, as had this not been the ease it would not have been possible for the three peeks of rings as recorded to have been sent by Hannibal to Carthage. Also it was from a ring put up for sale by auction that the quarrel between Caepio and Drusus began which was the primary cause of the war with the allies and the disasters that sprang from it. Not even at that period did all members of the senate possess gold rings, seeing that in the memory of our grandfathers many men who had even held the office of prietor wore an iron ring to the end of their lives — for instance, as recorded by Fenestella, Calpurnius and Manilius, the latter having been lieutenant-general under Gaius Marius in the war [112-106 BC] with Jugurtha, and, according to many authorities, the Lucius Fufidius to whom Scaurus dedicated his Autobiography — while another piece of evidence is that in the family of the Quintii it was not even customary for the women to have a gold ring, and that the greater part of the races of mankind, and even of the people who live under our empire and at the present day, possess no gold rings at all. The East and Egypt do not seal documents even now, but are content with a written signature.

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§ 33.6.2  This fashion like everything else luxury has diversified in numerous ways, by adding to rings gems of exquisite brilliance, and by loading the fingers with a wealthy revenue (as we shall mention in our book on gems) and then by engraving on them a variety of devices, so that in one case the craftsmanship and in another the material constitutes the value. Then again with other gems luxury has deemed it sacrilege for them to undergo violation, and has caused them to be worn whole, to prevent anybody's imagining that people's finger-rings were intended for sealing documents! Some gems indeed luxury has left showing in the gold even of the side of the ring that is hidden by the finger, and has cheapened the gold with collars of little pebbles. But on the contrary many people do not allow any gems in a signet-ring, and seal with the gold itself; this was a fashion invented when Claudius Caesar was emperor. [AD. 41-5] Moreover even slaves nowadays encircle the iron of their rings with gold (other articles all over them they decorate with pure gold), an extravagance the origin of which is shown by its actual name to have been instituted in Samothrace.

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§ 33.6.3  It had originally been the custom to wear rings on one finger only, the one next the little finger; that is how we see them on the statues of Numa and Servius Tullius. Afterwards people put them on the finger next the thumb, even in the case of statues of the gods, and next it pleased them to give the little finger also a ring. The Gallic Provinces and the British Islands are said to have used the middle finger. At the present day this is the only finger exempted, while all the others bear the burden, and even each finger-joint has another smaller ring of its own. Some people put all their rings on their little finger only, while others wear only one ring even on that finger, and use it to seal up their signet ring, which is kept stored away as a rarity not deserving the insult of common use, and is brought out from its cabinet as from a sanctuary; thus even wearing a single ring on the little finger may advertise the possession of a costlier piece of apparatus put away in store. Some again show off the weight of their rings; others count it hard work to wear more than one; and others consider that filling the gold tinsel of the circle with a lighter material, in case of their dropping, is a safer precaution for their anxiety about their gems; others enclose poisons underneath the stones in their rings, as did Demosthenes, the greatest orator of Greece, and they wear their rings as a means of taking their own lives. Finally, a very great number of the crimes connected with money are carried out by means of rings. To think what life was in the days of old, and what innocence existed when nothing was sealed! Whereas nowadays even articles of food and drink have to be protected against theft by means of a ring: this is the progress achieved by our legions of slaves — a foreign rabble in one's home, so that an attendant to tell people's names now has to be employed even in the case of one's slaves! This was not the way with bygone generations, when a single servant for each master, a member of his master's clan, Marcius's boy or Lucius's boy, took all his meals with the family in common, nor was there any need of precautions in the home to keep watch on the domestics. Nowadays we acquire sumptuous viands only to be pilfered and at the same time acquire people to pilfer them, and it is not enough to keep our keys themselves under seal: while we are fast asleep or on our death-beds, our rings are slipped off our fingers; and the prevailing system of our lives has begun to centre round that portable chattel, though when this began is doubtful. Still it seems we can realize the importance this article possesses abroad in the case of the tyrant of Samos, Polycrates, who flung his favourite ring into the sea and had it brought back to him inside a fish which had been caught: Polycrates himself was put to death about the 230th year of the city of Rome. Still the [523 BC] employment of a signet-ring must have begun to be much more frequent with the introduction of usury. This is proved by the custom of the lower classes, among whom even at the present day a ring is whipped out when a contract is being made; the habit comes down from the time when there was as yet no speedier method of guaranteeing a bargain, so we can safely assert that with us money began first and signet-rings came in afterwards. About money we shall speak rather later.

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§ 33.7.1  As soon as rings began to be commonly worn, they distinguished the second order from the commons, just as a tunic distinguished the senate from those who wore the ring, although this distinction also was only introduced at a late date, and we find that a wider purple stripe on the tunic was commonly worn even by heralds, for instance the father of Lucius Aelius Stilo Praeconinus, who received his surname from his father's office. But wearing rings clearly introduced a third order, intermediate between the commons and the senate, and the title that had previously been conferred by the possession of a war-horse is now assigned by money rates. This however is only a recent introduction: when his late lamented Majesty Augustus made regulations for the judicial panels the majority of the judges belonged to the iron ring class, and these used to be designated not Knights but Justices; the title of Knights remained with the cavalry squadrons mounted at the public charge. Of the Justices also there were at the first only four panels, and in each panel scarcely a thousand names were to be found, as the provinces had not yet been admitted to this duty; and the regulation has survived to the present day that nobody newly admitted to citizenship shall serve as a justice on one of the panels. The panels themselves also were distinguished by various designations, as consisting of Tribunes of the Money, Selected Members and Justices. Moreover beside these there were those styled the Nine Hundred, selected from the whole body as keepers of the ballot-boxes at elections. And the proud adoption of titles had made divisions in this order also, one person styling himself a member of the Nine Hundred, another one of the Select, another a Tribune.

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§ 33.8.1  Finally in the ninth year in office of the Emperor Tiberius the Order of Knights was united [AD. 14-37] into a single body; and in the Consulship of Gaius [AD. 22]. Asinius Pollio and Gaius Antistius Vetus, in the 775th year since the foundation of Rome, a regulation was established authorizing who should wear rings; the motive for this, a thing that may surprise us, was virtually the futile reason that Gaius Sulpicius Galba had made a youthful effort to curry favour with the emperor by enacting penalties for keeping eating-houses and had made a complaint in the senate that peddling tradesmen when charged with that offence commonly protected themselves by means of their rings. Consequently a rule was made that nobody should have this right except one who was himself a free-born man whose father and father's father had been free-born also, and who had been rated as the owner of 400,000 sesterces and had been entitled under the Julian law as to the theatre to sit in the fourteen front rows of seats. Subsequently people began to apply in crowds for this mark of rank; and in consequence of the disputes thus occasioned the Emperor Gaius Caligula added [AD. 37-41] a fifth panel, and so much conceit has this occasioned that the panels which under his late lamented Majesty Augustus it had not been possible cases of men who are actually liberated slaves making to fill will not hold that order, and there are frequent a leap over to these distinctions, a thing that previously never occurred, since the iron ring was the distinguishing mark even of knights and judges.

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§ 33.8.2  And the thing began to be so common that during the censorship of the Emperor Claudius a member [AD 48] of the Order of Knighthood named Flavius Proculus laid before him information against 400 persons on this ground, so that an order intended to distinguish the holder from other men of free birth has been shared with slaves. It was the Gracchi who first instituted the name of Justices or Judges as the distinguishing name of that order of knights — seditiously currying favour with the people in order to humiliate the senate; but subsequently the importance of the title of Knight was swamped by the shifting currents of faction, and came down to be attached to the farmers of public revenues, and for some time these revenue officers constituted the third rank in the state. Finally Marcus Cicero, thanks to the Catilinarian affair, during his consulship [63 BC] put the title of knighthood on a firm footing, boasting that he himself sprang from that order, and winning its powerful support by methods of securing popularity that were entirely his own. From that time onward the Knighthood definitely became a third element in the state, and the name of the Equestrian Order came to be added to the formula 'The Senate and People of Rome.' This is the reason why it is even now written after 'People,' because it was the latest addition introduced.

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§ 33.9.1  Indeed the very name of the Knights has itself frequently been altered, even in the case of those who derived the title from the fact of their serving as cavalry. Under Romulus and the Kings they were called the Celeres, then the Flexuntes and afterwards the Trossuli, because of their having without any assistance from infantry captured a town of that name in Etruria nine miles this side of Volsinii; and the name survived till after the time of Gaius Gracehus. At all events in the writings left by Junius, who owing to his friendship with Gaius Gracchus was called Gracehanus, these words occur: 'So far as concerns the Equestrian Order they were previously called the Trossuli, but are now simply designated the Cavalry, because people do not know what the word Trossuli means and many of them are ashamed of being called by that name.' He goes on to explain the reason above indicated, and says that they were even in his time still called Trossuli, though they did not wish to be.

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§ 33.10.1  There are some additional particulars in regard to gold which must not be omitted. For instance our authorities actually bestowed gold necklaces on foreign soldiers, but only awarded silver ones to Roman citizens, and what is more they gave bracelets to citizens, which it was not their custom to give to foreigners.

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§ 33.11.1  But at the same time, as is even more surprising, they gave crowns of gold even to citizens. Who was the first person to receive one I have not myself been able to ascertain, but Lucius Piso records who was the first person to bestow one, namely the dictator Aulus Postumius, who when the camp of the Latins at Lake Regillus had been [497 BC] taken by storm awarded a gold crown to the soldier who had been chiefly responsible for taking the place. In this case the crown which he bestowed was made of gold taken from the booty captured, and weighed two pounds. Also Lucius Lentulus as consul awarded a gold crown to Servius Cornelius Merenda after the taking of a town belonging to the Samnites, but Servius's crown weighed five pounds; while Piso Frugi bestowed on his son one weighing three pounds out of his personal resources, leaving it to him by will as a specific legacy.

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§ 33.12.1  As a mark of honour to the gods at sacrifices no other means has been devised but to gild the horns of the victims to be immolated, at all events of full-grown animals. But in military service also this form of luxury has grown to such dimensions that we find a letter of Marcus Brutus sent from the Plains of Philippi expressing his indignation at the brooches made of gold that were worn by the tribunes. Really I must protest! Why, even you, Brutus, did not mention the gold worn on their feet by women, and we accuse of crime the man who first conferred dignity on gold by using gold rings! Let even men nowadays wear gold bracelets — called 'Dardania' because the fashion came from the Dardani — the Celtic name for them is 'viriolae' and the Celtiberian 'viriae'; let women have gold in their bracelets and covering their fingers and on their neck, ears and tresses, let gold chains run at random round their waists; and let little bags of pearls hang invisible suspended by gold chains from their lady owners' neck, so that even in their sleep they may retain the consciousness of possessing gems: but are even their feet to be shod with gold, and shall gold create this female Order of Knighthood, intermediate between the matron's robe and the common people? Much more becomingly do we men bestow this on our page-boys, and the wealthy show these lads make has quite transformed the public baths! But nowadays even men are beginning to wear on their fingers a representation of Harpocrates and figures of Egyptian deities. In the time of the Emperor Claudius there was also [AD 41-54] another unusual distinction, belonging to those whose rights of free access to the presence had given them the privilege of wearing a gold likeness of the emperor on a ring, this affording a great opportunity for informations; but all of this was however entirely abolished by the opportune rise to power of the Emperor Vespasian, by making the [AD 69-79] emperor equally accessible to all. Let this suffice for a discussion of the subject of gold rings and their employment.

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§ 33.13.1  Next in degree was the crime committed by the person who first coined a gold denarius, a crime which itself also is hidden and its author unknown. The Roman nation did not even use a stamped silver coinage before the conquest of King [275 BC] Pyrrhus. The as weighed one pound — hence the term still in use, 'little pound' and 'two pounder'; this is the reason why a fine is specified in 'heavy bronze,' and why in book-keeping outlay is still designated as 'sums weighed out,' and likewise interest as 'weighed on account' and paying as 'weighing down,' and moreover it explains the terms 'soldiers' stipend,' which means 'weights of heaped money,' and the words for accountants and paymasters that mean 'weighers' and 'pound-weighers,' and owing to this custom in purchases that deal with all larger personal property, even at the present day, an actual pair of 'pound'-scales is introduced. King Servius was the first to stamp a design on bronze; previously, according to Timaeus, at Rome they used raw metal. The design stamped on the metal was an ox or a sheep, pecus, which is the origin of the term 'pecunia.' The highest assessment of one man's property in the reign of Servius was 120,000 as-pieces, and consequently that amount of property was the standard of the first class of citizens.

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§ 33.13.2  Silver was first coined in the 485th year of the city. [269-8 BC] in the consulship of Quintus Ogulnius and Gaius Fabius, five years before the first Punic War. It was decided that the value of a denarius should be ten pounds of bronze, that of a half-denarius five pounds, that of a sesterce two pounds and a half. The weight of a standard pound of bronze was however reduced during the first Punic War, when the state could not meet its expenditure, and it was enacted that the as should be struck weighing two ounces. This effected a saving of five sixths, and the national debt was liquidated. The design of this bronze coin was on one side a Janus facing both ways and on the other the ram of a battleship; the third of an as and the quarter as had a ship. The had previously been called a teruncius, as weighing three ounces. Subsequently when the presence of Hannibal was being felt, in the dictator [217 BC] ship of Quintus Fabius Maximus, asses of one ounce weight were coined, and it was enacted that the exchange-value of the denarius should be sixteen asses, of the half-denarius eight and of the quarter-denarius four; by this measure the state made a clear gain of one half. But nevertheless in the pay of soldiers one denarius has always been given for ten asses. The designs on silver were a two-horse and a four-horse chariot, and consequently the coins were called a pair of horses and a four-in-hand.

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§ 33.1.3  Next according to a law of Papirius asses [89 B.C.] weighing half an ounce were struck. Livius Drusus when holding the office of tribune of the plebs alloyed the silver with one-eighth part of bronze. The coin now named the victory coin was struck under the law of Clodius; previously a coin [c. 104 B.C.] of this name was imported from Illyria and was looked on as an article of trade. The design on it was a figure of Victory, which gives it its name. The first gold coin was struck 51 years later than [217 B.C.] the silver coinage, a scruple of gold having the value of twenty sesterces; this was done at 400 to the pound of silver, at the then rating of the sesterce. It was afterwards decided to coin denarii at the rate [49 B.C.] of 40 from a pound of gold, and the emperors gradually reduced the weight of the gold denarius, and most recently Nero brought it down to 45 denarii to [AD 54-68] the pound.

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§ 33.14.1  But from the invention of money came the original source of avarice when usury was devised, and a profitable life of idleness; by rapid stages what was no longer mere avarice but a positive hunger for gold flared up with a sort of frenzy, inasmuch as the friend of Gaius Gracchus, Septumuleius, a price having been set on Gracchus's head to the amount of its weight in gold, when Gracchus's head had been cut off, brought it to Opimius, after adding to his unnatural murder by putting lead in the mouth of the corpse, and so cheated the state in addition. Nor was it now some Roman citizen, but King Mithridates who disgraced the whole name of Roman when he poured molten gold into the mouth of the General Aquilius whom he had taken prisoner? These are the things that the lust for possessions engenders! One is ashamed to see the new-fangled names that are invented every now and then from the Greek to denote silver vessels filigreed or inlaid with gold, niceties which make gilded plate fetch a higher price than gold plate, when we know that Spartacus issued an order to his camp forbidding anybody to possess gold or silver: so much more spirit was there then in our runaway slaves! The orator Messala has told us that the triumvir Antony used vessels of gold in satisfying all the indecent necessities, an enormity that even Cleopatra would have been so ashamed of. Till then the record in extravagance had lain with foreigners — King Philip sleeping with a gold goblet under his pillows and Alexander the Great's prefect Hagnon of Teos having his sandals soled with gold nails; but Antony alone cheapened gold by this contumely of nature. How he deserved to be proscribed! but proscribed by Spartacus!

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§ 33.15.1  It does indeed surprise me that the Roman nation always imposed a tribute of silver, not of gold, on races that it conquered, for instance on Carthage when conquered together with Hannibal, 800,000 [202 BC] pounds weight of silver in yearly instalments of 16,000 pounds spread over 50 years, but no gold. Nor can it be considered that this was due to the world's poverty. Midas and Croesus had already possessed wealth without limit, and Cyrus had already on conquering Asia Minor found booty consisting of 24,000 [546-5 BC] pounds weight of gold, besides vessels and articles made of gold, including a throne, a plane-tree and a vine. And by this victory he carried off 500,000 talents of silver and the wine-bowl of Semiramis the weight of which came to 15 talents. The Egyptian talent according to Marcus Varro amounts to 80 pounds of gold. Saulaces the descendant of Aeetes had already reigned in Colchis, who is said to have come on a tract of virgin soil in the country of the Suani and elsewhere and to have dug up from it a great quantity of gold and silver, his realm being moreover famous for Golden Fleeces. We are also told of his gold-vaulted ceilings and silver beams and columns and pilasters, belonging to Sesostris King of Egypt whom Saulaces conquered, so proud a monarch that he is reported to have been in the habit every year of harnessing to his chariot individual kings selected by lot from among his vassals and so going in triumphal procession.

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§ 33.16.1  We too have done things to be deemed mythical by those who come after us. Caesar, the future dictator, was the first person in the office of aedile to use nothing but silver for the appointments of the arena — it was at the funeral games presented in honour of his father; and this was the first occasion on which criminals made to fight with wild animals had all their equipment made of silver, a practice nowadays rivalled even in our municipal towns. Gaius Antonius gave plays on a silver stage, and so did Lucius Murena; and the emperor Gaius Caligula brought on a scaffolding is in the [AD. 37-41] circus which had on it 124,000 pounds weight of silver. His successor Claudius when celebrating a triumph after the conquest of Britain, advertised by placards [AD. 43] that among the gold coronets there was one having a weight of 7000 pounds contributed by Hither Spain and one of 9000 from Gallia Comata. His immediate successor Nero covered the theatre of Pompey with gold for one day's purpose, when he was to display it to Tiridates King of Armenia. Yet how small was the theatre in comparison with Nero's Golden Palace which goes all round the city!

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§ 33.17.1  The gold contained in the national treasury of Rome in the consulship of Sextus Julius and Lucius Aurelius, seven years before the third Punic War, amounted to 17,410 lbs., the silver to 22,070 lbs., and in specie there was 6,135,400 sesterces; in the consulship of Sextus Julius and Lucius Marcius, that is to say, at the beginning of the war with the allies, there was ... lbs. of gold and 1,620,831 lbs. of silver. Gaius Julius Caesar, on first entering Rome during the civil war that bears [49 BC] his name, drew from the treasury 15,000 gold ingots, 30,000 silver ingots, and 30,000,000 sesterces in coin; at no other periods was the state more wealthy. Aemilius Paulus also after the defeat of King Perseus paid in to the treasury from the booty won in Macedonia 300 million sesterces; and from that date onward the Roman nation left off paying the citizens' property-tax.

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§ 33.18.1  At the present day we see ceilings covered with gold even in private houses, but they were first gilded in the Capitol during the censorship of Lucius Mummius after the fall of Carthage. [146 B.C.] From ceilings the use of gilding passed over also to vaulted roofs and walls, these too being now gilded like pieces of plate, whereas a variety of judgements were passed on Catulus by his contemporaries for having gilded the brass tilings of the Capitol.

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§ 33.19.1  We have already said in Book 7 who were the people who first discovered gold, and almost all of the metals likewise. I think that the chief popularity of this substance has been won not by its colour, that of silver being brighter and more like daylight, which is the reason why it is in more common use for military ensigns because its brilliance is visible at a greater distance; those persons who think that it is the colour of starlight in gold that has won it favour being clearly mistaken because in the case of gems and other things with the same tint it does not hold an outstanding place. Nor is it its weight or its malleability that has led to its being preferred to all the rest of the metals, since in both qualities it yields the first place to lead, but because gold is the only thing that loses no substance by the action of fire, but even in conflagrations and on funeral pyres receives no damage. Indeed as a matter of fact it improves in quality the more often it is fired, and fire serves as a test of it goodness, making it assume a similar red hue and itself becomes the colour of fire; this process is called assaying. The first proof of quality in gold is however its being affected by fire with extreme difficulty; beside that, it is remarkable that though invincible to live coal made of the hardest wood it is very quickly made red hot by a fire of chaff, and that for the purpose of purifying it it is roasted with lead.

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§ 33.19.2  Another more important reason for its value is that it gets extremely little worn by use; whereas, with silver, copper and lead, lines may be drawn, and stuff that comes off them dirties the hand. Nor is any other material more malleable or able to be divided into more portions, seeing that an ounce of gold can be beaten out into 750 or more leaves 4 inches square. The thickest kind of gold leaf is called Praeneste leaf, still bearing the name taken from the faithfully gilded statue of Fortune in that place. The foil next in thickness is styled Quaestorian leaf. In Spain tiny pieces of gold are called scrapers. Gold more than all other metals is found unalloyed in nuggets or in the form of detritus. Whereas all other metals when found in the mines are brought into a finished condition by means of fire, gold is gold straight away and has its substance in a perfect state at once, when it is obtained by mining. This is the natural way of getting it, while another which we shall describe is artificial. More than any other substance gold is immune from rust or verdigris or anything else emanating from it that wastes its goodness or reduces its weight. Moreover in steady resistance to the overpowering effect of the juices of salt and vinegar it surpasses all things, and over and above that it can be spun into thread and woven into a fabric like wool, even without an addition of wool. Verrius informs us that Tarquinius Priscus celebrated a triumph wearing a golden tunic. We have in our own times seen the Emperor Claudius's wife Agrippina, at a show at which he was exhibiting a naval battle, seated at his side wearing a military cloak made entirely of cloth of gold. For a long period gold has been woven into the fabric called cloth of Attalus, an invention of Kings of Asia.

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§ 33.20.1  On marble and other materials incapable of being raised to a white heat gold is laid with white of egg; on wood it is laid with glue according to a formula; it is called leucophorum, white-bearing; what this is and how it is made we will explain in its proper place. The regular way to gild copper would be to use natural or at all events artificial quicksilver, concerning which a method of adulteration has been devised, as we shall relate in describing the nature of those substances. The copper is first subjected to the violence of fire; then, when it is red hot, it is quenched with a mixture of brine, vinegar, and alum, and afterwards put to a test, its brilliance of colour showing whether it has been sufficiently heated; then it is again dried in the fire, so that, after a thorough polishing with a mixture of pumice and alum, it is able to take the gold-leaf laid on with quicksilver. Alum has the same cleansing property here that we said is found in lead.

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§ 33.21.1  Gold in our part of the world — not to speak of the Indian gold obtained from ants or the gold dug up by griffins in Scythia obtained in three ways: in the detritus of rivers, for instance in the Tagus in Spain, the Padus in Italy, the Hebrus in Thrace, the Pactolus in Asia Minor and the Ganges in India; and there is no gold that is in a more perfect state, as it is thoroughly polished by the mere friction of the current. Another method is by sinking shafts; or it is sought for in the fallen debris of mountains. Each of these methods must be described.

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§ 33.21.2  People seeking for gold begin by getting up segellum — that is the name for earth that indicates the presence of gold. This is a pocket of sand, which is washed, and from the sediment left an estimate of the vein is made. Sometimes by a rare piece of luck a pocket is found immediately, on the surface of the earth, as occurred recently in Dalmatia when Nero was emperor, one yielding fifty pounds weight of gold a day. Gold found in this way in the surface crust is called talutium if there is also auriferous earth underneath. The otherwise dry, barren mountains of the Spanish provinces which produce nothing else whatever are forced into fertility in regard to this commodity.

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§ 33.21.3  Gold dug up from shafts is called 'channelled' or 'trenched' gold; it is found sticking to the grit of marble, not in the way in which it gleams in the lapis lazuli of the East and the stone of Thebes and in other precious stones, but sparkling in the folds of the marble. These channels of veins wander to and fro along the sides of the shafts, which gives the gold its name; and the earth is held up by wooden props. The substance dug out is crushed, washed, fired and pound to a soft powder. The powder from the mortar is called the 'scudes' and the silver that comes out from the furnace the 'sweat'; the dirt thrown out of the smelting-furnace in the case of every metal is called 'scoria,' slag. In the case of gold the scoria is pounded and fired a second time; the crucibles for this are made of tasconium, which is a white earth resembling clay. No other earth can stand the blast of air, the fire, or the intensely hot material.

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§ 33.21.4  The third method will have outdone the achievements of the Giants. By means of galleries driven for long distances the mountains are mined by the light of lamps — the spells of work are also measured by lamps, and the miners do not see daylight for many months.

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§ 33.21.5  The name for this class of mines is arrugiae; also cracks give way suddenly and crush the men who have been at work, so that it actually seems less venturesome to try to get pearls and purple-fishes out of the depth of the sea: so much more dangerous have we made the earth! Consequently arches are left at frequent intervals to support the weight of the mountain above. In both kinds of mining masses of flint are encountered, which are burst asunder by means of fire and vinegar, though more often, as this method makes the tunnels suffocating through heat and smoke, they are broken to pieces with crushing-machines carrying 150 lbs. of iron, and the men carry the stuff out on their shoulders, working night and day, each man passing them on to the next man in the dark, while only those at the end of the line see daylight. If the bed of flint seems too long, the miner follows along the side of it and goes round it. And yet flint is considered to involve comparatively easy work, as there is a kind of earth consisting of a sort of potter's clay mixed with gravel, called gangadia, which it is almost impossible to overcome. They attack it with iron wedges and the hammer-machines mentioned above; and it is thought to be the hardest thing that exists, except greed for gold, which is the most stubborn of all things. When the work is completely finished, beginning with the last, they cut through, at the tops, the supports of the arched roofs. A crack gives warning of a crash, and the only person who notices it is the sentinel on a pinnacle of the mountain. He by shout and gesture gives the order for the workmen to be called out and himself at the same moment flies down from his pinnacle. The fractured mountain falls asunder in a wide gap, with a crash which it is impossible for human imagination to conceive, and likewise with an incredibly violent blast of air. The miners gaze as conquerors upon the collapse of Nature. And nevertheless even now there is no gold so far, nor did they positively know there was any when they began to dig; the mere hope of obtaining their coveted object was a sufficient inducement for encountering such great dangers and expenses.

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§ 33.21.6  Another equally laborious task involving even greater expense is the incidental operation of previously bringing streams along mountain-heights frequently a distance of 100 miles for the purpose of washing away the debris of this collapse; the channels made for this purpose are called corrugi, a term derived I believe from conrivatio, a uniting of streams of water. This also involves a thousand tasks; the dip of the fall must be steep, to cause a rush rather than a flow of water, and consequently it is brought from very high altitudes. Gorges and crevasses are bridged by aqueducts carried on masonry; at other places impassable rocks are hewn away and compelled to provide a position for hollowed troughs of timber. The workman hewing the rock hangs suspended with ropes, so that spectators viewing the operations from a distance seem to see not so much a swarm of strange animals as a flight of birds. In the majority of cases they hang suspended in this way while taking the levels and marking out the lines for the route, and rivers are led by man's agency to run where there is no place for a man to plant his footsteps. It spoils the operation of washing if the current of the stream carries mud along with it: an earthy sediment of this kind is called urium. Consequently they guide the flow over flint stones and pebbles, and avoid urium. At the head of the waterfall on the brow of the mountains reservoirs are excavated measuring 200 ft. each way and 10 ft. deep. In these there are left five sluices with apertures measuring about a yard each way, in order that when the reservoir is full the stopping-barriers may be struck away and the torrent may burst out with such violence as to sweep forward the broken rock? There is also yet another task to perform on the level ground. Trenches are excavated for the water to flow through — the Greek name for them means 'leads'; and these, which descend by steps, are floored with gorse — this is a plant resembling rosemary, which is rough and holds back the gold. The sides are closed in with planks, and the channels are carried on arches over steep pitches. Thus the earth carried along in the stream slides down into the sea and the shattered mountain is washed away; and by this time the land of Spain owing to these causes has encroached a long way into the sea. The material drawn out at such enormous labour in the former kind of mining is in this latter process washed out, so as not to fill up the shafts. The gold obtained by means of an arrugia does not have to be melted, but is pure gold straight away. In this process nuggets are found and also in the shafts, even weighing more than ten pounds. They are called palagae or else palacurnae, and also the gold in very small grains baluce. The gorse is dried and burnt and its ash is washed on a bed of grassy turf so that the gold is deposited on it. According to some accounts Asturia and Callaecia and Lusitania produce in this way 20,000 lbs. weight of gold a year, Asturia supplying the largest amount. Nor has there been in any other part of the world such a continuous production of gold for so many centuries. We have stated that by an old prohibiting decree of the senate Italy is protected from exploitation; otherwise no country would have been more productive in metals, as well as in crops. There is extant a ruling of the censors relating to the gold mines of Victumulae in the territory of Vercellae which prohibited the farmers of public revenues from having more than 5000 men engaged in the work.

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§ 33.22.1  There is moreover one method of making gold out of orpiment which is dug up in Syria for use by painters; it is found on the surface of the earth, and is of a gold colour, but is easily broken, like looking-glass stone. Hopes inspired by it had attracted the Emperor Gaius Caligula, who was extremely covetous for gold, and who consequently gave orders for a great weight of it to be smelted; and as a matter of fact it did produce excellent gold, but so small a weight of it that he found himself a loser by his experiment that was prompted by avarice, although orpiment sold for 4 denarii a pound; and no one afterwards has repeated the experiment.

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§ 33.23.1  All gold contains silver in various proportions, a tenth part in some cases, an eighth in others. In one mine only, that of Callaecia called the Albucrara mine, the proportion of silver found is one thirty-sixth, and consequently this one is more valuable than all the others. Wherever the proportion of silver is one-fifth, the ore is called electrum; grains of this are found in 'channelled' gold. An artificial electrum is also made by adding silver to gold. If the proportion of silver exceeds one-fifth, the metal produced offers no resistance on the anvil. Electrum also held a high position in old times, as is evidenced by Homer who represents the palace of Menelaus as resplendent with gold, electrum, silver and ivory. There is a temple of Athena at Lindus of the island of Rhodes in which there is a goblet made of electrum, dedicated by Helen; history further relates that it has the same measurement as her breast. A quality of electrum is that it shines more brightly than silver in lamp-light. Natural electrum also has the property of detecting poisons; for semicircles resembling rainbows run over the surface in poisoned goblets and emit a crackling noise like fire, and so advertise the presence of poison in a twofold manner.

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§ 33.24.1  The first gold statue of all that was made of solid metal and even before any was made of bronze, of the kind called 'made of solid beaten metal,' is said to have been erected in the temple of Anaitis, in the region of the earth where we have designated this name, that goddess' deity being held in the highest reverence by those races. This statue was taken as booty during the campaigns of [c. 36 B.C.] Antonius in Parthia, and a story is told of a witty saying of one of the veterans of our army who was being entertained as a guest at dinner by his late lamented Majesty Augustus at Bononia. He was asked whether it was true that the man who was the first to commit this sacrilege against that deity was struck blind and paralysed and so expired. His answer was that the emperor was at that very moment eating his dinner off one of the goddess's legs, and that he himself was the perpetrator of the sacrilege and owed his entire fortune to that piece of plunder. The first solid gold statue of a human being was one of himself set up by Gorgias of Leontini in the temple at Delphi about the 70th Olympiad. So great were the profits to be made by teaching the art of oratory!

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§ 33.25.1  Gold is efficacious as a remedy in a variety of ways, and is used as an amulet for wounded people and for infants to render less harmful poisonous charms that may be directed against them. Gold has itself however a maleficent effect if carried over the head, in the case of chickens and the young of cattle as well as human beings. As a remedy it is smeared on, then washed off and sprinkled on the persons you wish to cure. Gold is also heated with twice its weight of salt and three times its weight of copper pyrites, and again with two portions of salt and one of the stone called splittable. Treated in this way it draws poison out, when the other substances have been burnt up with it in an earthenware crucible while it remains pure and uncorrupted itself. The ash remaining is kept in an earthenware jar, and eruptions on the face may well be cleansed away by being smeared with this lotion from the jar. It also cures fistulas and what are called haemorrhoids. With the addition of ground pumice-stone it relieves putrid and foul-smelling ulcers, while boiled down in honey and git, and applied as a liniment to the navel it acts as a gentle aperient. According to Marcus Varro gold is a cure for warts.

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§ 33.26.1  Gold-solder is a liquid found in the shafts we spoke of, flowing down along a vein of gold, solder. with a slime that is solidified by the cold of winter even to the hardness of pumice-stone. A more highly spoken of variety of the same metal has been ascertained to be formed in copper mines, and the next best in silver-mines. A less valuable sort also with an element of gold is also found in lead mines. In all these mines however an artificial variety is produced that is much inferior to the natural kind referred to; the method is to introduce a gentle flow of water into the vein all winter and go on till the beginning of June and then to dry it off in June and July, clearly showing that gold-solder is nothing else than the putrefaction of a vein of metal. Natural gold-solder, known as 'grape,' differs very greatly from the artificial in hardness, and nevertheless it also takes a dye from the plant called yellow-weed. It is of a substance that absorbs moisture, like flax or wool. It is pounded in a mortar and then passed through a fine sieve, and afterwards milled and then sifted again with a finer sieve, everything that does not pass through the sieve being again treated in the mortar and then milled again. The powder is all along separated off into bowls and steeped in vinegar so as to dissolve all hardness, and then is pounded again and then rinsed in shells and left to dry. Then it is dyed by means of splittable alum and the plant above mentioned and so given a colour before it serves as a colour itself. It is important how absorbent it is and ready to take the dye; for if it does not at once catch the colour, scytanum and turbistum must be added as well — those being the names of two drugs producing absorption.

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§ 33.27.1  When painters have dyed gold-solder, they call it orobitis, vetch-like, and distinguish two kinds, the purified which is kept for a cosmetic, and the liquid, in which the little balls are made into a paste with a liquid. Both of these kinds are made in Cyprus, but the most highly valued is in Armenia and the second best in Macedonia, while the greatest quantity is produced in Spain, the highest recommendation in the latter being the quality of reproducing as closely as possible the colour in a bright green blade of corn. We have before now seen at the shows given by the emperor Nero the sand of the circus sprinkled with gold-solder when the emperor in person was going to give an exhibition of chariot-driving wearing a coat of that colour. The unlearned multitude of artisans distinguish three varieties of the substance, the rough, which is valued at 7 denarii a pound, the middling, which is 5 denarii, and the crushed, also called the grass-green kind, 3 denarii. Before applying the sandy variety they put on a preliminary coating of black dye and pure white chalk: these serve to hold the gold-solder and give a softness of colour. As the pure chalk is of a very unctuous consistency and extremely tenacious owing to its smoothness, it is sprinkled with a coat of black, to prevent the extreme whiteness of the chalk from imparting a pale hue to the gold-solder. The yellow gold-solder is thought to derive its name from the plant yellow-weed, which is itself often pounded up with steel-blue and applied for painting instead of' gold-solder, making a very inferior and counterfeit kind of colour.

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§ 33.28.1  Gold-solder is also used in medicine, mixed with wax and olive oil, for cleansing wounds; likewise applied dry by itself it dries wounds and draws them together. It is also given in cases of quinsy or asthma, to be taken as an electuary with honey. It acts as an emetic, and also is used as an ingredient in salves for sores in the eyes and in green plasters for relieving pains, and drawing together scars. This kind of gold-solder is called by medical men remedial solder, and is not the same as orobitis.

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§ 33.29.1  The goldsmiths also use a special gold-solder of their own for soldering gold, and according to them it is from this that all the other substances with a similar green colour take the name. The mixture is made with Cyprian copper verdigris and the urine of a boy who has not reached puberty with the addition of soda; this is ground with a pestle made of Cyprian copper in mortars of the same metal, and the Latin name for the mixture is santerna. It is in this way used in soldering the gold called silvery-gold; a sign of its having been so treated is if the application of borax gives it brilliance. On the other hand coppery gold shrinks in size and becomes dull, and is difficult to solder; for this purpose a solder is made by adding some gold and one seventh as much silver to the materials above specified, and grinding them up together.

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§ 33.30.1  While speaking of this it will be well to annex the remaining particulars, so as to occasion all-round admiration for Nature. The proper solder for gold is the one described; for iron, potter's clay; for copper in masses, cadmea; for copper in sheets, alum; for lead and marble, resin. Black lead, however, is joined by means of white lead, and white lead to white lead by using oil; stagnum likewise with copper filings, and silver with stagnum. For smelting copper and iron pine-wood makes the best fuel, though Egyptian papyrus can also be used; gold is best smelted with a fire made of chaff. Water sets fire to quicklime and Thracian stone, and olive-oil puts it out; fire however is most readily quenched by vinegar, mistletoe and eggs. Earth it is quite impossible to ignite, but charcoal gives a more powerful heat if it is burned till it goes out and then catches fire again.

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§ 33.31.1  After these details let us speak about the varieties of silver ore, the next madness of mankind. Silver is only found in deep shafts, and raises no hopes of its existence by any signs, giving off no shining sparkles such as are seen in the case of gold.

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§ 33.31.2  The ore is sometimes red, sometimes ash-coloured. It cannot be smelted except when combined with lead or with the vein of lead, called galena, lead ore, which is usually found running near veins of silver ore. Also when submitted to the same process of firing, part of the ore precipitates as lead while the silver floats on the surface, like oil on water.

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§ 33.31.3  Silver is found in almost all the provinces, but the finest is in Spain, where it, as well as gold, occurs in sterile ground and even in the mountains; and wherever one vein is found another is afterwards found not far away. This indeed also occurs in the ease of almost every metal, and accounts it seems for the word metals used by the Greeks. It is a remarkable fact that the shafts initiated by Hannibal all over the Spanish provinces are still in existence; they are named from the persons who discovered them; one of these mines, now called after Baebelo, furnished Hannibal with 300 pounds weight of silver a day, the tunnelling having been carried a mile and a half into the mountain. Along the whole of this distance watermen are posted who all night and day in spells measured by lanterns bale out the water and make a stream. The vein of silver nearest the surface is called the 'raw.' In early days the excavations used to stop when they found alum, and no further search made; but recently the discovery of a vein of copper under the alum has removed all limit to men's hopes. The exhalations from silver mines are dangerous to all animals, but specially to dogs. Gold and silver are more beautiful the softer they are. It surprises most people that silver traces black lines.

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§ 33.32.1  There is also a mineral found in these veins of silver which contains a humour, in round drops, that is always liquid, and is called quicksilver. It acts as a poison on everything, and breaks vessels by penetrating them with malignant corruption. All substances float on its surface except gold, which is the only thing that it attracts to itself; consequently it is also excellent for refining gold, as if it is briskly shaken in earthen vessels it rejects all the impurities contained in it. When these blemishes have been thus expelled, to separate the quicksilver itself from the gold it is poured out on to hides that have been well dressed, and exudes through them like a kind of perspiration and leaves the gold behind in a pure state. Consequently when also things made of copper are gilded, a coat of quicksilver is applied underneath the gold leaf and keeps it in its place with the greatest tenacity: but if the gold-leaf is put on in one layer or is very thin it reveals the quicksilver by its pale colour. Consequently persons intending this fraud adulterated the quicksilver used for this purpose with white of egg; and later they falsified also hydrargyrum or artificial quicksilver, which we shall speak about in its proper place. Otherwise quicksilver is not to be found in any large quantity.

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§ 33.33.1  In the same mines as silver there is found what is properly to be described as a stone, made of white and shiny but not transparent froth; several names are used for it, stirni, stibi, alabastrum and sometimes larbasis. It is of two kinds, male and female. The female variety is preferred, the male being more uneven and rougher to the touch, as well as lighter in weight, not so brilliant, and more gritty; the female on the contrary is bright and friable and splits in thin layers and not in globules.

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§ 33.34.1  Antimony has astringent and cooling properties, but it is chiefly used for the eyes, since this is why even a majority of people have given it a Greek name meaning 'wide-eye,' because in beauty-washes for women's eyebrows it has the property of magnifying the eyes. Made into a powder with powdered frankincense and an admixture of gum it checks fluxes and ulcerations of the eyes. It also arrests discharge of blood from the brain, and is also extremely effective with a sprinkling of its powder against new wounds and old dog-bites and against burns if mixed with fat and litharge of silver, or lead acetate and wax. It is prepared by being smeared round with lumps of ox and burnt in ovens, and then cooled down with women's milk and mixed with rain water and pounded in mortars. And next the turbid part is poured off into a copper vessel after being purified with soda. The lees are recognized by being full of lead, and they settle to the bottom of the mortars and art thrown away. Then the vessel into which the turbid part was poured off is covered with a cloth and left for a night, and the next day anything floating on the surface is poured off or removed with a sponge. The sediment on the bottom is considered the choicest part and is covered with a linen cloth and put to dry in the sun but not allowed to become very dry, and is ground up a second time in the mortar and divided into small tablets. But it is above all essential to limit the amount of heat applied to it, so that it may not be turned into lead. Some people do not employ dung in boiling it but fat. Others pound it in water and strain it through three thicknesses of linen cloth and throw away the dregs, and pour off the liquor that comes through, collecting all the deposit at the bottom, and this they use as an ingredient in plasters and eyewashes.

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§ 33.35.1  The slag in silver is called by the Greeks the 'draw-off.' It has an astringent and cooling effect on the body, and like sulphuret of lead, of which we shall speak in dealing with lead, it has healing properties as an ingredient in plasters, being extremely effective in causing wounds to close-up, and when injected by means of syringes, together with myrtle-oil, as a remedy for straining of the bowels and dysentery. It is also used as an ingredient in the remedies called emollient plasters used for proud flesh of gathering sores, or sores caused by chafing or running ulcers on the head.

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§ 33.35.2  The same mines also produce the mineral called scum of silver. Of this there are three kinds, with Greek names meaning respectively golden, silvery and leaden; and for the most part all these colours are found in the same ingots. The Attic kind is the most approved, next the Spanish. The golden scum is obtained from the actual vein, the silvery from silver, and the leaden from smelting the actual lead, which is done at Pozzuoli, from which place it takes its name. Each kind however is made by heating its raw material till it melts, when it flows down from an upper vessel into a lower one and is lifted out of that with small iron spits and then twisted round on a spit in the actual flame, in order to make it of moderate weight. Really, as may be inferred from its name, it is the scum of a substance in a state of fusion and in process of production. It differs from dross in the way in which the scum of a liquid may differ from the lees, one being a blemish excreted by the material when purifying itself and the other a blemish in the metal when purified. Some people make two classes of scum of silver which they call 'scirerytis' and 'peumene,' and a third, leaden scum which we shall speak of under the head of lead.

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§ 33.35.3  To make the scum available for use it is boiled a second time after the ingots have been broken up into pieces the size of finger-rings. Thus after being heated up with the bellows to separate the cinders and ashes from it it is washed with vinegar or wine, and cooled down in the process. In the case of the silvery kind, in order to give it brilliance the instructions are to break it into pieces the size of a bean and boil it in water in an earthenware pot with the addition of wheat and barley wrapped in new linen cloths, until the silvery scum is cleaned of impurities. Afterwards they grind it in mortars for six days, three times daily washing it with cold water and, when they have ceased operations, with hot, and adding salt from a salt-mine, an obol weight to a pound of scum. Then on the last day they store it in a lead vessel. Some boil it with white beans and pearl-barley and dry it in the sun, and others boil it with beans in a white woollen cloth till it ceases to discolour the wool; and then they add salt from a salt-mine, changing the water from time to time, and put it out to dry on the 40 hottest days of summer. They also boil it in a sow's paunch in water, and when they take it out rub it with soda, and grind it in mortars with salt as above. In some cases people do not boil it but grind it up with salt and then add water and rinse it. It is used to make an eyewash and for women's skins to remove ugly scars and spots and as a hair-wash. Its effect is to dry, to soften, to cool, to act as a gentle purge, to fill up cavities caused by ulcers, and to soften tumours; it is used as an ingredient in plasters serving these purposes, and for the emollient plasters mentioned above. Mixed with rue and myrtle and vinegar, it also removes erysipelas, and likewise chilblains if mixed with myrtle and wax.

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§ 33.36.1  Minium or cinnabar also is found in silver mines; it is of great importance among pigments at the present day, and also in old times it not only had the highest importance but even sacred associations among the Romans. Verrius gives a list of writers of unquestionable authority who say that on holidays it was the custom for the face of the statue of Jupiter himself to be coloured with cinnabar. as well as the bodies of persons going in a triumphal procession, and that Camillus was so coloured in his triumph, and that under the same ritual it was usual even in their day for cinnabar to be added to the unguents used at a banquet in honour of a triumph, and that one of the first duties of the Censors was to place a contract for painting Jupiter with cinnabar. For my own part I am quite at a loss to explain the origin of this custom, although at the present day the pigment in question is known to be in demand among the nations of Ethiopia whose chiefs colour themselves all over with it, and with whom the statues of the gods are of that colour. On that account we will investigate all the facts concerning it more carefully.

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§ 33.37.1  Theophrastus states that cinnabar was discovered by an Athenian named Callias, 90 years before the archonship of Praxibulus at [405 B.C.] Athens — this date works out at the 349th year of our city, and that Callias was hoping that gold could by firing be extracted from the red sand found in silver mines; and that this was the origin of cinnabar, although cinnabar was being found even at that time in Spain, but a hard and sandy kind, and likewise in the country of the Colchi on a certain inaccessible rock from which the natives dislodged it by shooting javelins, but that this is cinnabar of an impure quality whereas the best is found in the Cilbian territory beyond Ephesus, where the sand is of the scarlet colour of the kermes-insect; and that this is ground up and then the powder is washed and the sediment that sinks to the bottom is washed again; and that there is a difference of skill, some people producing cinnabar at the first washing while with others this is rather weak and the product of the second washing is the best.

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§ 33.38.1  I am not surprised that the colour had an important rank, for as far back as Trojan times red ochre was highly valued, as evidenced by Homer, who speaks of it as a distinguished colour for ships, although otherwise he rarely alludes to colours and paintings. The Greek name for it is 'miltos,' and they call minium 'cinnabar.' This gave rise to a mistake owing to the name 'Indian cinnabar,' for that is the name the Greeks give to the gore of a snake crushed by the weight of dying elephants, when the blood of each animal gets mixed together, as we have said; and there is no other colour that properly represents blood in a picture. That kind of cinnabar is extremely useful for antidotes and medicaments. But our doctors, I swear, because they give the name of cinnabar to minium also, employ this minium, which as we shall soon show is a poison.

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§ 33.39.1  In old times 'dragon's-blood' cinnabar was used for painting the pictures that are still called monochromes, 'in one colour.' Cinnabar from Ephesus was also used for painting, but this has been given up because pictures in that colour were a great amount of trouble to preserve. Moreover both colours were thought excessively harsh; consequently painters have gone over to red-ochre and Sinopic ochre, pigments about which I shall speak in the proper places. Cinnabar is adulterated with goat's blood or with crushed service-berries. The price of genuine cinnabar is 50 sesterces a pound.

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§ 33.40.1  Juba reports that cinnabar is also produced in Carmania, and Timagenes says it is found in Ethiopia as well, but from neither place is it exported to us, and from hardly any other either except from Spain, the most famous cinnabar mine for the revenues of the Roman nation being that of Sisaponensis in the Baetica region, no item being more carefully safeguarded: it is not allowed to smelt and refine the ore upon the spot, but as much as about 2000 lbs. per annum is delivered to Rome in the crude state under seal, and is purified at Rome, the price in selling it being fixed by law established at 70 sesterces a pound, to prevent its going beyond limit. But it is adulterated in many ways, which is a source of plunder for the company. For there is in fact another kind a of minium, found in almost all silver-mines, and likewise lead-mines, which is made by smelting a stone that has veins of metal running through it, and not obtained from the stone the round drops of which we have designated quicksilver — for that stone also if fired yields quicksilver — but from other stones found at the same time. These have no quicksilver and are detected only by their leaden colour, and only when they turn red in the furnaces, and after being thoroughly smelted they are pulverized by hammering. This gives a minium of second rate quality, which is known to very few people, and is much inferior to the natural sands we have mentioned. It is this then that is used for adulterating real minium in the factories of the company, but a cheaper kind is adulterated with Syrian: the preparation of the latter will be described in the proper place; but the process of giving cinnabar and red-lead a treatment of Syrian is detected by calculation when the one is weighed against the other. Cinnabar also, with red-lead, affords an opportunity for pilfering by painters in another way, if they wash out their brushes immediately when full of paint; the cinnabar or the red-lead settles at the bottom of the water and stays there for the pilferers. Pure cinnabar ought to have the brilliant colour of the scarlet kermes-insect, while the shine of that of the second quality when used on wall-paintings is affected by rust, although this is itself a sort of metallic rust. In the cinnabar mines of Sisaponensis the vein of sand is pure, without silver. It is melted like gold; it is assayed by means of gold made red hot, as if it has been adulterated it turns black, but if genuine it keeps its colour. I find that it is also adulterated with lime, and this can be detected in a similar way with a sheet of red-hot iron if there is no gold available. A surface painted with cinnabar is damaged by the action of sunlight and moonlight. The way to prevent this is to let the wall dry and then to coat it with Punic wax melted with olive oil and applied by means of brushes of bristles while it is still hot, and then this wax coating must be again heated by bringing near to it burning charcoal made of plant-galls, till it exudes drops of perspiration, and afterwards smoothed down with waxed rollers and then with clean linen cloths, in the way in which marble is given a shine. Persons polishing cinnabar in workshops tie on their face loose masks of bladder-skin, to prevent their inhaling the dust in breathing, which is very pernicious, and nevertheless to allow them to see over the bladders. Cinnabar is also used in writing books, and it makes a brighter lettering for inscriptions on a wall or on marble even in tombs.

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§ 33.41.1  Of secondary importance a is the fact that experience has also discovered a way of getting hydrargyrum or artificial quicksilver as a substitute for real quicksilver; we postponed the description of this a little previously. It is made in two ways, not by pounding red-lead in vinegar with a copper pestle in a copper mortar, or it is put in an iron shell in flat earthenware pans, and covered with a convex lid smeared on with clay, and then a fire is lit under the pans and kept constantly burning by means of bellows, and so the surface moisture (with the colour of silver and the fluidity of water) which forms on the lid is wiped off it. This moisture is also easily divided into drops and rains down freely with slippery fluidity. And as cinnabar and red-lead are admitted to be poisons, all the current instructions on the subject of its employment for medicinal purposes are in my opinion decidedly risky, except perhaps that its application to the head or stomach arrests haemorrhage, provided that it does not find access to the vital organs or come in contact with a lesion. In any other way for my own part I would not recommend its employment.

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§ 33.42.1  At the present time silver is almost the only substance that is gilded with artificial quicksilver, though really a similar method ought to be used in coating copper. But the same fraudulence which is so extremely ingenious in every department of life has devised an inferior material, as we have shown.

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§ 33.43.1  With the mention of gold and silver goes a description of the stone called the touch stone, formerly according to Theophrastus not usually found anywhere but in the river Tmolus, but now found in various places. Some people call it Heraclian stone and others Lydian. The pieces are of a moderate size, not exceeding four inches in length and two in breadth. The part of these pieces that has been exposed to the sun is better than the part on the ground. When experts using this touchstone, like a file, have taken with it a scraping from an ore, they can say at once how much gold it contains and how much silver or copper, to a difference of a scruple, their marvellous calculation not leading them astray.

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§ 33.44.1  There are two points in which silver shows a variation. A shaving that remains perfectly white when placed on white-hot iron shovels is passed as good, while if it turns red it is of the next quality, and if black it has no value at all. But fraud has found its way even into this test; if the shovels are kept in men's urine the silver shaving is stained by it during the process of being burnt, and counterfeits whiteness. There is also one way of testing polished silver in a man's breath — if it at once forms surface moisture and dissipates the vapour.

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§ 33.45.1  It has been believed that only the best silver is capable of being beaten out into plates and producing an image. This was formerly a sound test, but nowadays this too is spoiled by fraud. Still, the property of reflecting images is marvellous; it is generally agreed that it takes place owing to the repercussion of the air which is thrown back into the eyes. In a similar way, owing to the same force, in employing a mirror if the thickness of the metal has been polished and beaten out into a slightly concave shape the size of the objects reflected is enormously magnified: such a difference does it make whether the surface welcomes the air in question or flings it back. Moreover bowls can be made of such a shape, with a number of looking-glasses so to speak beaten outward inside them, that if only a single person is looking into them a crowd of images is formed of the same number as the facets in question. Ingenuity even devises vessels that do conjuring tricks, for instance those deposited as votive offerings in the temple at Smyrna: this is brought about by the shape of the material, and it makes a very great difference whether the vessels are concave and shaped like a bowl or convex like a Thracian shield, whether their centre is recessed or projecting, whether the oval is horizontal or oblique, laid flat or placed upright, as the quality of the shape receiving the shadows twists them as they come: for in fact the image in a mirror is merely the shadow arranged by the brilliance of the material receiving it. And in order to complete the whole subject of mirrors in this place, the best of those known in old days were those made at Brindisi of a mixture of stagnum and copper. Silver mirrors have come to be preferred; they were first made by Pasiteles in the period of Pompey the Great. But it has recently come to be believed that a more reliable reflection is given by applying a layer of gold to the back of glass.

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§ 33.46.1  The people of Egypt stain their silver so as to see portraits of their god Anubis in their vessels; and they do not engrave but paint their silver. The use of that material thence passed over even to our triumphal statues, and, wonderful to relate, its price rises with the dimming of its brilliance. The method adopted is as follows: with the silver is mixed one third its amount of the very line Cyprus copper called chaplet-copper and the same amount of live sulphur as of silver, and then they are melted in an earthenware vessel smeared round with potter's clay; the heating goes on till the lids of the vessels open of theft own accord. Silver is also turned black by means of the yolk of a hard-boiled egg, although the black can be rubbed off with vinegar and chalk.

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§ 33.46.2  The triumvir Antony alloyed the silver denarius with iron, and forgers put an alloy of copper in silver coins, while others also reduce the weight, the proper coinage being 84 denarii from a pound of silver. Consequently a method was devised of assaying the denarius, under a law that was so popular that the common people unanimously district by district voted statues to Marius Gratidianus. And it is a remarkable thing that in this alone among arts spurious methods are objects of study, and a sample of a forged denarius is carefully examined and the adulterated coin is bought for more than genuine ones.

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§ 33.47.1  In old days there was no number standing for more than 100,000, and accordingly even today we reckon by multiples of that number, using the expression times 'ten times one hundred thousand' or larger multiples. This was due to usury and to the introduction of coined money, and also on the same lines we still speak of money owed as 'somebody else's copper.' Afterwards 'Dives,' 'Rich,' became a family surname, though it must be stated that the man who first received this name ran through his creditors' money and went bankrupt. Afterwards Marcus Crassus, who was a member of the Rich family, used to say that nobody was a wealthy man except one who could maintain a legion of troops on his yearly income. He owned landed property worth two hundred million sesterces, being the richest Roman citizen after Sulla. Nor was he satisfied without getting possession of the whole of the Parthians' gold as well; and although it is true he was the first to win lasting reputation for wealth — it is a pleasant task to stigmatize insatiable covetousness of that sort — we have known subsequently of many liberated slaves who have been wealthier, and three at the same time not long before our own days in the period of the emperor Claudius, namely Callistus, Pallas and Narcissus. And to omit these persons, as if they were still in sovereign power, there is Gaius Caecilius Isidorus, the freedman of Gaius Caecilius who in the consulship of Gaius Asinius Gallus and Gaius Marcius Censorinus executed a will dated January 27 in which he declared that in spite of heavy losses in the civil war he nevertheless left 4116 slaves, 3600 pairs of oxen, 257,000 head of other cattle, and 60 million sesterces in cash, and he gave instructions for 1,100,000 to be spent on his funeral. But let them amass uncountable riches, yet what fraction will they be of the riches of the Ptolemy who is recorded by Varro, at the time when Pompey was campaigning in the regions adjoining Judea, to have maintained 6000 horse at his own charges, to have given a lavish feast to a thousand guests, with 1,000 gold goblets, which were changed at every course; and then what fraction would his own estate have been (for I am not speaking about kings) of that of the Bithynian Pythes, who presented the famous gold plane tree and vine to King Darius, and gave a banquet to the forces of Xerxes, that is 788,000 men, with a promise of five months' pay and corn on condition that one at least of his five children when drawn for service should be left to cheer his old age? Also let anyone compare even Pythes himself with King Croesus! What madness it is (damn it all!), to covet a thing in our lifetime that has either fallen to the lot even of slaves or has reached no limit even in the desires of Kings!

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§ 33.48.1  The Roman nation began lavishing donations in the consulship of Spurius Postumius and Quintus Marcius: so abundant was money at that date that they contributed funds for Lucius Scipio to defray the cost of games which he celebrated. As for the national contribution of one-sixth of an as per head for the funeral of Menenius Agrippa, I should consider this as a mark of respect and also a measure rendered necessary by Agrippa's poverty, and not a matter of lavish generosity.

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§ 33.49.1  Fashions in silver plate undergo marvellous variations owing to the vagaries of human taste, no kind of workmanship remaining long in favour. At one time Furnian plate is in demand, at another Clodian, at another Gratian — for we make even the factories feel at home at our tables — at another time the demand is for embossed plate and rough surfaces, where the metal has been cut out along the painted lines of the designs, while now we even fit removable shelves on our sideboards to carry the viands, and other pieces of plate we decorate with filigree, so that the file may have wasted as much silver as possible. The orator Calvus complainingly cries that cooking-pots are made of silver; but it is we who invented decorating carriages with chased silver, and it was in our day that the emperor Nero's wife Poppaea had the idea of even having her favourite mules shod with gold.

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§ 33.50.1  The younger Africanus left his heir thirty-two pounds weight of silver, and the same person paraded 4370 pounds of silver in his triumphal procession after the conquest of Carthage. This was the amount of silver owned by the whole of Carthage, Rome's rival for the empire of the world, yet subsequently beaten in the show of plate on how many dinner-tables! Indeed after totally destroying Numantia the same Africanus at his triumph gave a largess of seven denarii a head to his troops — warriors not unworthy of such a general who were satisfied with that amount! His brother Allobrogicus was the first person who ever owned 1000 lbs. weight of silver, whereas Livius Drusus when tribune of the people had 10,000 lbs. For that an old warrior, honoured with a triumphal procession, incurred the notice of the censors for possessing ten pounds weight of silver — that nowadays seems legendary, and the same as to Catus Aelius's not accepting the silver plate presented to him by the envoys from Aitolia who during his consulship had found him eating his lunch off earthenware, and as to his never till the last day of his life having owned any other silver but the two bowls given to him by his wife's father Lucius Paulus in recognition of his valour at the time when King Perseus was conquered. We read that the Carthaginian ambassadors declared that no race of mankind lived on more amicable terms with one another than the Romans, inasmuch as in a round of banquets they had found the same service of plate in use at every house! But, good heavens, Pompeius Paulinus the son of a Knight of Rome at Arelate and descended on his father's side from a tribe that went about clad in skins, to our knowledge had 12,000 lbs. weight of silver plate with him when on service with an army confronted by tribes of the greatest ferocity;

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§ 33.51.1  while we know that ladies' bedsteads have for a long time now been entirely covered with silver plating, and so for long have banqueting-couches also. It is recorded that Carvilius Pollio, Knight of Rome, was the first person who had silver put on these latter, though not so as to plate them all over or make them to the Delos pattern, but in the Carthaginian style. In this latter style he also had bedsteads made of gold, and not long afterwards silver bedsteads were made, in imitation of those of Delos. All this extravagance however was expiated by the civil war of Sulla.

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§ 33.52.1  In fact it was shortly before this period that silver dishes were made weighing a hundred pounds, and it is well-known that there were at that date over 150 of those at Rome, and that many people were sentenced to outlawry a because of them, by the intrigues of people who coveted them. History which has held vices such as these to be responsible for that civil war may blush with shame, but our generation has gone one better. Under the Emperor Claudius his slave Drusillanus, who bore [AD. 41-54] the name of Rotundus, the Emperor's steward of Nearer Spain, possessed a silver dish weighing 500 lbs., for the manufacture of which a workshop had first been specially built, and eight others of 250 lbs. went with it as side-dishes, so that how many of his fellow-slaves, I ask, were to bring them in or who were to dine off them? Cornelius Nepos records that before the victory won by Sulla there were only two silver dinner-couches at Rome, and that silver began to be used for decorating sideboards within his own recollection. And Fenestella who died towards the end of the principate of Tiberius says that tortoiseshell sideboards also came into fashion at that time, but a little before his day they had been solid round structures of wood, and not much larger than tables; but that even in his boyhood they began to be made square and of planks mortised together and veneered either with maple or citrus wood, while later silver was laid on at the corners and along the lines marking the joins, and when he was a young man they were called 'drums,' and then also the dishes for which the old name had been magides came to be called basins from their resemblance to the scales of a balance.

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§ 33.53.1  Yet it is not only for quantities of silver that there is such a rage among mankind but there is an almost more violent passion for works of fine handicraft; and this goes back a long time, so that we of today may excuse ourselves from blame.

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§ 33.53.2  Gaius Gracchus had some figures of dolphins for which he paid 5000 sesterces per pound, while the orator Lucius Crassus had a pair of chased goblets, [140-91 BC] the work of the artist Mentor, that cost 100,000; yet admittedly he was too ashamed ever to use them. It is known to us that he likewise owned some vessels that he bought for 6000 sesterces per pound. It was the conquest of Asia that first introduced luxury into Italy, inasmuch as Lucius Scipio carried in procession at his triumph 1400 lbs. of chased silverware and vessels of gold weighing 1500 lbs: this was in the 565th year from the foundation of the city of Rome. But receiving Asia also as a gift [189 BC] dealt a much more serious blow to our morals, and the bequest of it that came to us on the death of King Attalus was more disadvantageous than the victory of Scipio. For on that occasion all scruples entirely disappeared in regard to buying these articles at the auctions of the king's effects at Rome — the date was the 622nd year of the city, and in the interval of 57 years our community had learnt not merely to admire but also to covet foreign opulence; an impetus having also been given to manners by the enormous shock of the conquest of Achaia, that victory itself also having during this interval of time introduced the statues and pictures won in the 608th year of the city. That nothing might be lacking, luxury came into being simultaneously, with the downfall of Carthage, a fatal coincidence that gave us at one and the same time a taste for the vices and an opportunity for indulging in them. Some of the older generation also sought to gain esteem from these sources. It is recorded that Gaius Marius after his victory over the Cimbrians drank from Bacchic tankards, in imitation of Father Liber — he, the ploughman of Arpino who rose to the position of general from the ranks!

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§ 33.54.1  The view is held that the extension of the use of silver to statues was made in the case of statues of his late lamented Majesty Augustus, owing to the sycophancy of the period, but this is erroneous. We find that previously a silver statue of Pharnaces the First, King of Pontus, was carried in the triumphal procession of Pompey the Great, as well as one of Mithridates Eupator, and also chariots of gold and silver were used. Likewise silver has at some periods even supplanted gold, female luxury among the plebeians having its shoe buckles made of silver, as wearing gold buckles would be prohibited by the more common fashion. We have ourselves seen Arellius Fuscus (who was expelled from the Equestrian order on a singularly grave charge) wearing silver rings when he sought to acquire celebrity for his school for youths. But what is the point of collecting these instances, when our soldiers' sword hilts are made of chased silver, even ivory not being thought good enough; and when their scabbards jingle with little silver chains and their belts with silver tabs, nay nowadays our schools for pages lust at the point of adolescence wear silver badges as a safeguard, and women use silver to wash in and scorn sitting-baths not made of silver, and the same substance does service both for our viands and for our baser needs? If only Fabricius could see these displays of luxury — women's bathrooms with floors of silver, leaving nowhere to set your feet — and the women bathing in company with men — if only Fabricius, who forbade gallant generals to possess more than a dish and a saltcellar of silver, could see how nowadays the rewards of valour are made from the utensils of luxury, or else are broken up to make them! Alas for our present manners — Fabricius makes us blush!

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§ 33.55.1  It is a remarkable fact that the art of chasing gold has not brought celebrity to anyone, whereas persons celebrated for chasing silver are numerous. The most famous however is Mentor of whom we spoke above. Four pairs of goblets were all that he ever made, but it is said that none of them now survive, owing to the burning of the Temple of Artemis of Ephesus and of the Capitol. Varro says in his writings that he also possessed a bronze statue by this sculptor. Next to Mentor the artists most admired were Acragas, Boethus and Mys. Works by all of these exist at the present day in the island of Rhodes — one by Boethus in the temple of Athena at Lindus, some goblets engraved with Centaurs and Bacchants by Acragas in the temple of Father Liber or Dionysus in Rhodes itself, goblets with Sileni and Cupids by Mys in the same temple. Hunting scenes by Acragas on goblets also had a great reputation. After these in celebrity is Calamis, and Diodorus who was said to have placed in a condition of heavy sleep rather than engraved on a bowl a Slumbering Satyr for Antipater. Next praise is awarded to Stratonicus of Cyzicus, Tauriscus, also Ariston and Eunicus of Mitylene, and Hecataeus, and, around the period of Pompey the Great, Pasiteles, Posidonius of Ephesus, Hedystracides [or Hedys, Thracides] who engraved battle scenes and men in armour, and Zopyrus who engraved the Athenian Council of Areopagus and the Trial of Orestes on two goblets valued at 12,000 sesterces. There was also Pytheas, one of whose works sold at the price of 10,000 denarii for two ounces: it consisted of an embossed base of a bowl representing Odysseus and Diomedes in the act of stealing the Palladium. The same artist also carved some very small drinking cups in the shape of cooks known as 'The Chefs in Miniature,' which it was not allowed even to reproduce by casts, so liable to damage was the fineness of the work. Also Teucer the artist in embossed work attained celebrity, and all of a sudden this art so declined that it is now only valued in old specimens, and authority attaches to engravings worn with use even if the very design is invisible.

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§ 33.55.2  Silver becomes tarnished by contact with water from springs containing minerals and by the salt breezes, as happens also even in the interior regions of Spain.

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§ 33.56.1  In gold and silver mines also are formed the pigments yellow ochre and blue. Yellow ochre is strictly speaking a slime. The best kind comes from what is called Attic slime; its price is two denarii a pound. The next best is marbled ochre, which costs half the price of Attic. The third kind is dark ochre, which other people call Scyric ochre, as it comes from the island of Scyros, and nowadays also from Achaia, which they use for the shadows of a painting, price two sesterces a pound, while that called clear ochre, coming from Gaul, costs two asses less. This and the Attic kind they use for painting different kinds of light, but only marbled ochre for squared panel designs, because the marble in it resists the acridity of the lime. This ochre is also dug up in the mountains 20 miles from Rome. It is afterwards burnt, and by some people it is adulterated and passed off as dark ochre; but the fact that it is not genuine and has been burnt is shown by its acridity and by its crumbling into dust.

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§ 33.56.2  The custom of using yellow ochre for painting was first introduced by Polygnotus and Micon, but they only used the kind from Attica. The following period employed this for representing lights but ochre from Scyros and Lydia for shadows. Lydian ochre used to be sold at Sardis, but now it has quite gone out.

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§ 33.57.1  The blue pigment is a sand. In old days there were three varieties: the Egyptian is thought most highly of; next the Scythian mixes easily with water, and changes into four colours when ground, lighter or darker and coarser or finer; to this blue the Cyprian is now preferred. To these were added the Pozzuoli blue, and the Spanish blue, when blue sand-deposits began to be worked in those places. Every kind however undergoes a dyeing process, being boiled with a special plant and absorbing its juice; but the remainder of the process of manufacture is the same as with gold-solder.

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§ 33.57.2  From blue is made the substance called blue wash, which is produced by washing and grinding it. Blue wash is of a paler colour than blue, and it costs 10 denarii per pound, while blue costs 5 denarii. Blue is used on a surface of clay, as it will not stand lime. A recent addition has been Vestorian blue, called after the man Vestorius who invented it; it is made from the finest part of Egyptian blue, and costs 11 denarii per pound. Pozzuoli blue is employed in the same way, and also near windows; it is called cyanos. Not long ago Indian blue or indigo began to be imported, its price being 7 denarii; painters use it for dividing-lines, that is, for separating shadows from light. There is also a blue wash of a very inferior kind, called ground blue, valued at 5 asses.

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§ 33.57.3  The test of genuine Indian blue is that when laid on burning coal it should blaze; it is adulterated by boiling dried violets in water and straining the liquor through linen on to Eretrian earth. Its use as a medicament is to clean out ulcers; consequently it is employed as an ingredient in plasters, and also in cauteries, but it is extremely difficult to pound up. Yellow ochre used as a drug has a gently mordant and astringent effect, and fills up ulcers. To make it beneficial it is burnt in earthenware vessels.

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§ 33.57.4  We are not unaware that the prices of articles which we have stated at various points differ in different places and alter nearly every year, according to the shipping costs or the terms on which a particular merchant has bought them, or as some dealer dominating the market may whip up the selling price; we have not forgotten that, under the emperor Nero, Demetrius was prosecuted before the [AD. 54-68] Consuls by the entire Seplasia. Nevertheless I have found it necessary to state the prices usual at Rome, in order to give an idea of a standard value of commodities.

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§ 34.1.1  LET our next subject be ores, etc., of copper and bronze the metals which in point of utility have the next value; in fact Corinthian bronze is valued before silver and almost even before gold; and bronze is also the standard of payments in money as we have said: hence it is embodied in the terms denoting the pay of soldiers, the treasury paymasters and the public treasury, persons held in debt, and soldiers whose pay is stopped. We have pointed out for what a long time the Roman nation used no coinage except bronze; and by another fact antiquity shows that the importance of bronze is as old as the city — the fact that the third corporation established by King Numa was the Guild of Coppersmiths.

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§ 34.2.1  The method followed in mining deposits of copper and purifying the ore by firing is that which has been stated. The metal is also got from a coppery stone called by a Greek name cadmea, a kind in high repute coming from overseas and also formerly found in Campania and at the present day in the territory of Bergomum on the farthest confines of Italy; and it is also reported to have been recently found in the province of Germany. In Cyprus, where copper was first discovered, it is also obtained from another stone also, called chalcitis, copper ore; this was however afterwards of exceptionally low value when a better copper was found in other countries, and especially gold — copper, which long maintained an outstanding quality and popularity, but which for a long time now has not been found, the ground being exhausted. The next in quality was the Sallustius copper, occurring in the Alpine region of Haute Savoic, though this also only lasted a short time; and after it came the Livia copper in Gaul: each was named from the owners of the mines, the former from the friend of Augustus and the latter from his wife. Livia copper also quickly gave out: at all events it is found in very small quantity. The highest reputation has now gone to the Marius copper, also called Cordova copper; next to the Livia variety this kind most readily absorbs cadmea and reproduces the excellence of gold-copper in making sesterces and double-as pieces, the single as having to be content with its proper Cyprus copper. That is the extent of the high quality contained in natural bronze and copper.

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§ 34.3.1  The remaining kinds are made artificially, and will be described in their proper places, the most distinguished sorts being indicated first of all. Formerly copper used to be blended with a mixture of gold and silver, and nevertheless artistry was valued more highly than the metal; but nowadays it is a doubtful point whether the workmanship or the material is worse, and it is a surprising thing that, though the prices paid for these works of art have grown beyond all limit, the importance attached to this craftsmanship of working in metals has quite disappeared. For this, which formerly used to be practised for the sake of glory — consequently it was even attributed to the workmanship of gods, and the leading men of all the nations used to seek for reputation by this method also — has now, like everything else, begun to be practised for the sake of gain; and the method of casting costly works of art in bronze has so gone out that for a long time now not even luck in this matter has had the privilege of producing art.

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§ 34.3.2  Of the bronze which was renowned in early days, the Corinthian is the most highly praised. This is a compound that was produced by accident, when Corinth was burned at the time of its capture; and there has been a wonderful mania among many people for possessing this metal — in fact it is recorded that Verres, whose conviction Marcus Cicero had procured, was, together with Cicero, proscribed by Antony for no other reason than because he had refused to give up to Antony some pieces of Corinthian ware; and to me the majority of these collectors seem only to make a pretence of being connoisseurs, so as to separate themselves from the multitude, rather than to have any exceptionally refined insight in this matter; and this I will briefly show. Corinth was taken in the third year of the 158th Olympiad, which was the 608th year [146 BC] of our city, when for ages there had no longer been any famous artists in metalwork; yet these persons designate all the specimens of their work as Corinthian bronzes. In order therefore to refute them we will state the periods to which these artists belong; of course it will be easy to turn the Olympiads into the years since the foundation of our city by referring to the two corresponding dates given above. The only genuine Corinthian vessels are then those which your connoisseurs sometimes convert into dishes for food and sometimes into lamps or even washing basins, without nice regard for decency. There are three kinds of this sort of bronze: a white variety, coming very near to silver in brilliance, in which the alloy of silver predominates; a second kind, in which the yellow quality of gold predominates, and a third kind in which all the metals were blended in equal proportions. Besides these there is another mixture the formula for which cannot be given, although it is man's handiwork; but the bronze valued in portrait statues and others for its peculiar colour, approaching the appearance of liver and consequently called by a Greek name 'hepatizon' meaning 'liverish,' is a blend produced by luck; it is far behind the Corinthian blend, yet a long way in front of the bronze of Aigina and that of Delos which long held the first rank.

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§ 34.4.1  The Delian bronze was the earliest to become famous, the whole world thronging the markets in Delos; and hence the attention paid to the processes of making it. It was at Delos that bronze first came into prominence as a material used for the feet and framework of dining-couches, and later it came to be employed also for images of the gods and statues of men and other living things.

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§ 34.5.1  The next most famous bronze was the Aiginetan; and the island of Aigina itself became celebrated for it, though not because the metal copper was mined there but because of the compounding done in the workshops. A bronze ox looted from Aigina stands in the cattle-market at Rome, and will serve as a specimen of Aigina bronze, while that of Delos is seen in the Zeus or Jupiter in the temple of Jupiter the Thunderer on the Capitol. Aigina bronze was used by Myron and that from Delos by Polyclitus, who were contemporaries and fellow-pupils; thus there was rivalry between them even in their choice of materials.

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§ 34.6.1  Aigina specialized in producing only the upper parts of chandeliers, and similarly Taranto made only the stems, and consequently credit for manufacture is, in the matter of these articles, shared between these two localities. Nor are people ashamed to buy these at a price equal to the pay of a military tribune, although they clearly take even their name from the lighted candles they carry. At the sale of a chandelier of this sort by the instructions of the auctioneer (named Theon) selling it there was thrown in as part of the bargain the fuller Clesippus a humpback and also of a hideous appearance in other respects besides, the lot being bought by a woman named Gegania for 50,000 sesterces. This woman gave a party to show off her purchases, and for the mockery of the guests the man appeared with no clothes on: his mistress conceiving an outrageous passion for him admitted him to her bed and later gave him a place in her will. Thus becoming excessively rich he worshipped the lamp-stand in question as a divinity and so caused this story to be attached to Corinthian lampstands in general, though the claims of morality were vindicated by his erecting a noble tombstone to perpetuate throughout the living world for all time the memory of Gegania's shame. But although it is admitted that there are no lampstands made of Corinthian metal, yet this name specially is commonly attached to them, because although Mummius's victory destroyed Corinth, it caused the dispersal of bronzes from a number of the towns of Achaia at the same time.

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§ 34.7.1  In early times the lintels and folding doors of temples as well were commonly made of bronze. I find that also Gnaeus Octavius, who was granted a triumph after a sea-fight against King Perseus, constructed the double colonnade at the Flaminian circus which owing to the bronze capitals of its columns has received the name of the Corinthian portico, and that a resolution was passed that even the temple of Vesta should have its roof covered with an outer coating of Syracusan metal. The capitals of the pillars in the Pantheon which were put up by Marcus [21 B.C.] Agrippa are of Syracusan metal. Moreover even private opulence has been employed in similar uses: one of the charges brought against Camillus [391 B.C.] by the quaestor Spurius Carvilius was that in his house he had doors covered with bronze.

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§ 34.8.1  Again, according to Lucius Piso dinner-couches and panelled sideboards and one-leg tables decorated with bronze were first introduced by Gnaeus Manlius at the triumph which he celebrated [187 B.C.] in the 567th year of the city after the conquest of Asia; and as a matter of fact Antias states that the heirs of Lucius Crassus the orator also sold a number of dinner couches decorated with bronze. It was even customary for bronze to be used for making the cauldrons on tripods called Delphic cauldrons because they used to be chiefly dedicated as gifts to Apollo of Delphi; also lamp-holders were popular suspended from the ceiling, in temples or with their lights arranged to look like apples hanging on trees, like the specimen in the temple of Apollo of the Palatine which had been part of the booty taken by Alexander the Great at the storming of Thebes and dedicated by him to the same deity at Cyme.

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§ 34.9.1  But after a time this art in all places came to be usually devoted to statues of gods. I find that the first image of a god made of bronze at Rome was that dedicated to Ceres and paid for out of the property of Spurius Cassius who was put to death [485 BC] by his own father when trying to make himself king. The practice passed over from the gods to statues and representations of human beings also, in various forms. In early days people used to stain statues with bitumen, which makes it the more remarkable that they afterwards became fond of covering them with gold. This was perhaps a Roman invention, but it certainly has a name of no long standing at Rome. It was not customary to make effigies of human beings unless they deserved lasting commemoration for some distinguished reason, in the first case victory in the sacred contests and particularly those at Olympia, where it was the custom to dedicate statues of all who had won a competition; these statues, in the case of those who had been victorious there three times, were modelled as exact personal likenesses of the winners — what are called iconicae, portrait statues. I rather believe that the first portrait statues officially erected at Athens were those of the tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton. This happened in the same year [510 BC] as that in which the Kings were also driven out at Rome. The practice of erecting statues from a most civilized sense of rivalry was afterwards taken up by the whole of the world, and the custom proceeded to arise of having statues adorning the public places of all municipal towns and of perpetuating the memory of human beings and of inscribing lists of honours on the bases to be read for all time, so that such records should not be read on their tombs only. Soon after a publicity centre was established even in private houses and in our own halls: the respect felt by clients inaugurated this method of doing honour to their patrons.

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§ 34.10.1  In old days the statues dedicated were simply clad in the toga. Also naked figures holding spears, made from models of Greek young men from the gymnasiums — what are called figures of Achilles — became popular. The Greek practice is to leave the figure entirely nude, whereas Roman and military statuary adds a breastplate: indeed the dictator Caesar gave permission for a statue wearing a cuirass to be erected in his honour in his Forum. As for the statues in the garb of the Luperci, they are modern innovations, lust as much as the portrait-statues dressed in cloaks that have recently appeared. Mancinus set up a statue of himself in the dress that he had worn when surrendered to the enemy. It has been remarked by writers that the poet Lucius Accius also set up a very tall statue of himself in the shrine of the Latin Muses, although he was a very short man. Assuredly equestrian statues are popular at Rome, the fashion for them having no doubt been derived from Greece; but the Greeks used only to erect statues of winners of races on horseback at their sacred contests, although subsequently they also erected statues of winners with two-horse or four-horse chariots; and this is the origin of our chariot-groups in honour of those who have celebrated a triumphal procession. But this belongs to a late date, and among those monuments it was not till the time of his late lamented Majesty Augustus that chariots with six horses occurred, and likewise elephants.

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§ 34.11.1  The custom of erecting memorial chariots with two horses in the case of those who held the office of praetor and had ridden round the Circus in a chariot is not an old one; that of statues on pillars is of earlier date, for instance the statue of honour of Gaius Maenius who had vanquished the Old Latins to whom the Roman nation gave by treaty a third part of the booty won from them. It was in the same consulship that the nation, after defeating the people of Antium, had fixed on the Rostra the beaked prows of ships taken in the victory over the people of Antium, in the 416th year of the city of Rome; and similarly the statue to Gaius Duillius, who was the first to obtain a naval triumph over the [260 BC] Carthaginians — this statue still stands in the forum and likewise that in honour of the prefect of markets Lucius Minucius outside the Porta Trigemina, defrayed by a tax of one-twelfth of an as per head. I rather think this was the first time that an honour of this nature came from the whole people; previously it had been bestowed by the senate: it would be a very distinguished honour had it not originated on such unimportant occasions. In fact also the statue of Attus Navius stood in front of the senate-house — when the senate-house was set on fire at the funeral of Publius Clodius the base of the statue was burnt with it; and the statue of Hermodorus of Ephesus the interpreter of the laws drafted by the decemvirs, [451-450 BC] dedicated at the public cost, stood in the Comitium of Rome. There was different motive and another reason — an important one — for the statue of Marcus Horatius Codes, which has survived even to the present day; it was erected because he had single-handed barred the enemy's passage of the Bridge on Piles. Also, it does not at all surprise me that statues of the Sibyl stand near the Beaked Rostra though there are three of them — one restored by Sextus Pacuvius Taurus, aedile of the plebs, and two by Marcus Messalla. I should think these statues and that of Attus Navius, all erected in the period of Tarquinius Priscus, were the first, [616-579 BC] if it were not for the statues on the Capitol of the kings who reigned before him, among them the figures of Romulus and Tatius without the tunic, as also that of Camillus on the Rostra. Also there was in front of the temple of the Castors an equestrian statue of Quintus Marcius Tremulus, wearing a toga; he had twice vanquished the Samnites, and by taking Anagnia delivered the nation from payment of war-tax. Among the very old statues are also those at the Rostra of Tullus Cloelius, Lucius Roscius, Spurius Nautius, and Gaius Pulcinius, all assassinated by the people of Fidenae when on an embassy to them. It was the custom for the state to confer this honour on those who had been wrongfully put to death, as among others Publius Junius and Titus Coruncanius, who had been killed by Teuta the Queen of the Illyrians. It would seem not to be proper to omit the fact noted by the annals that the statues of these persons, erected in the forum, were three feet in height, showing that this was the scale of these marks of honour in those days. I will not pass over the case of Gnaeus Octavius also, because of a single word that occurs in a Decree of the Senate. When King Antiochus 4 said he intended to answer him, Octavius with the stick he happened to be holding in his hand drew a line all round him and compelled him to give his answer before he stepped out of the circle. And as Octavius was killed while on this embassy, the senate ordered a statue to be erected to him 'in the spot most eyed' and that statue stands on the Rostra. We also find that a decree was passed to erect a statue to a Vestal Virgin named Taracia Gaia or Fufetia 'to be placed where she wished,' an addition that is as great a compliment as the fact that a statue was decreed in honour of a woman. For the Vestal's merits I will quote the actual words of the Annals: 'because she had made a gratuitous present to the nation of the field by the Tiber.'

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§ 34.12.1  I also find that statues were erected to Pythagoras and to Alcibiades, in the corners of the Place of Assembly, when during one of our Samnite Wars Pythian Apollo had commanded the erection in some conspicuous position of an effigy of the bravest man of the Greek race, and likewise, one of the wisest man; these remained until Sulla the dictator made the Senate-house on the site. It is surprising that those illustrious senators of ours rated Pythagoras above Socrates, whom the same deity had put above all the rest of mankind in respect of wisdom, or rated Alcibiades above so many other men in manly virtue, or anybody above Themistocles for wisdom and manly virtue combined.

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§ 34.12.2  The purport of placing statues of men on columns was to elevate them above all other mortals; which is also the meaning conveyed by the new invention of arches. Nevertheless the honour originally began with the Greeks, and I do not think that any person ever had more statues erected to him than Demetrius of Phalerum had at Athens, inasmuch as they set up 360, at a period when the year did not yet exceed that number of days, statues however the Athenians soon shattered in pieces. At Rome also the tribes in all the districts set up statues to Marius Gratidianus, as we have stated, and likewise threw them down again at the entrance of Sulla.

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§ 34.13.1  Statues of persons on foot undoubtedly held the field at Rome for a long time; equestrian statues also however are of considerable antiquity, and this distinction was actually extended to women with the equestrian statue of Cloelia, as if it were not enough for her to be clad in a toga, although statues were not voted to Lucretia and Brutus, who had driven out the kings owing to whom Cloelia had been handed over with others as a hostage should have held the view that her statue and that of Codes were the first erected at the public expense — for it is probable that the monuments to Attus and the Sibyl were erected by Tarquin and those of the kings by themselves — were it not for the statement of Piso that the statue of Cloelia also was erected by the persons who had been hostages with her, when they were given back by Porsena, as a mark of honour to her; whereas on the other hand Annius Fetialis states that an equestrian figure which once stood opposite the temple of Jupiter Stator in the forecourt of Tarquinius Superbus's palace was the statue of Valeria, daughter of Publicola, the consul, and that she alone had escaped and had swum across the Tiber, the other hostages who were being sent to Porsena having been made away with by a stratagem of Tarquin.

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§ 34.14.1  Lucius Piso has recorded that, in the second consulship of Marcus Aemilius and Gaius Popilius, the censors Publius Cornelius Scipio and Marcus Popilius caused all the statues round the forum of men who had held office as magistrates to be removed excepting those that had been set up by a resolution of the people or the Senate, while the statue which Spurius Cassius, who had aspired to monarchy, had erected in his own honour before the temple of Tellus was actually melted down by censors: obviously the men of those days took precautions against ambition in the matter of statues also. Some declamatory utterances made by Cato during his censorship are extant protesting against the erection in the Roman provinces of statues to women; yet all the same he was powerless to prevent this being done at Rome also: for instance there is the statue of Cornelia the mother of the Gracchi and daughter of the elder Scipio Africanus. This represents her in a sitting position and is remarkable because there are no straps to the shoes; it stood in the public colonnade of Metellus, but is now in Octavia's works.

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§ 34.15.1  The first statue publicly erected at Rome by foreigners was that in honour of the tribune of the people Gaius Aelius, for having introduced a law against Sthennius Stallius the Lucanian who had twice made an attack upon Thurii; for this the inhabitants of that place presented Aelius with a statue and a crown of gold. The same people afterwards presented Fabricius with a statue for having rescued them from a state of siege; and various races successively in some such way placed themselves under Roman patronage, and all discrimination was so completely abrogated that even a statue of Hannibal may be seen in three places in the city within the walls of which he alone of its national foes had hurled a spear.

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§ 34.16.1  That the art of statuary was familiar to Italian Italy also and of long standing there is indicated by the statue of Hercules in the Forum Boarium said to have been dedicated by Evander, which is called 'Hercules Triumphant,' and on the occasion of triumphal processions is arrayed in triumphal vestments; and also by the two-faced Janus, dedicated by King Numa, which is worshipped as indicating war and peace, the fingers of the statue being so arranged as to indicate the 355 days of the year, and to betoken that Janus is the god of the duration of time. Also there is no doubt that the so-called Tuscanic images scattered all over the world were regularly made in Etruria. I should have supposed these to have been statues of deities only, were it not that Metrodorus of Scepsis, who received his surname from his hatred of the very name of Rome, reproached us with having taken by storm the city of Volsinii for the sake of the 2000 statues which it contained. And it seems to me surprising that although the initiation of statuary in Italy dates so far back, the images of the gods dedicated in the shrines should have been more usually of wood or terracotta right down to the conquest of Asia which introduced luxury here. What was the first origin of representing likenesses in the round will be more suitably discussed when we are dealing with the art for which the Greek term is plastic, as that was earlier than the art of bronze statuary. But the latter has flourished to an extent passing all limit and offers a subject that would occupy many volumes if one wanted to give a rather extensive account of it — for as for a completely exhaustive account, who could achieve that?

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§ 34.17.1  In the aedileship of Marcus Scaurus there were 3000 statues on the stage in what was only a temporary theatre. Mummius after conquering Achaia filled the city with statues, though destined not to leave enough at his death to provide a dowry for his daughter — for why not mention this as well as the fact that excuses it? A great many were also imported by the Luculli. Yet it is stated by Mucianus who was three times consul that there are still 3000 statues at Rhodes, and no smaller number are believed still to exist at Athens, Olympia and Delphi. What mortal man could recapitulate them all, or what value can be felt in such information? Still it may give pleasure just to allude to the most remarkable and to name the artists of celebrity, though it would be impossible to enumerate the total number of the works of each, inasmuch as Lysippus is said to have executed 1500 works of art, all of them so skilful that each of them by itself might have made him famous; the number is said to have been discovered after his decease, when his heir broke open his coffers, it having been his practice to put aside a coin of the value of one gold denarius out of what he got as reward for his handicraft for each statue.

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§ 34.17.2  The art rose to incredible heights in success and afterwards in boldness of design. To prove its success I will adduce one instance, and that not of a representation of either a god or a man: our own generation saw on the Capitol, before it last went up in flames burnt at the hands of the adherents of Vitellius, in the shrine of Juno, a bronze figure of a hound licking its wound, the miraculous excellence and absolute truth to life of which is shown not only by the fact of its dedication in that place but also by the method taken for insuring it; for as no sum of money seemed to equal its value, the government enacted that its custodians should be answerable for its safety with their lives.

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§ 34.18.1  Of boldness of design the examples are innumerable. We see enormously huge statues devised, what are called Colossi, as large as towers. Such is the Apollo on the Capitol, brought over by Marcus Lucullus from Apollonia, a city of Pontus, 45 ft. high, which cost 500 talents to make; or the Jupiter which the Emperor Claudius dedicated in the Campus Martius, which is dwarfed by the proximity of the theatre of Pompey; or the 60 ft. high statue at Taranto made by Lysippus. The remarkable thing in the case of the last is that though it can be moved by the hand, it is so nicely balanced, so it is said, that it is not dislodged from its place by any storms. This indeed, it is said, the artist himself provided against by erecting a column a short distance from it to shelter it on the side where it was most necessary to break the force of the wind. Accordingly, because of its size, and the difficulty of moving it with great labour, Fabius Verrucosus left it alone when he transferred the Heracles from that place to the Capitol where it now stands. But calling for admiration before all others was the colossal Statue of the Sun at Rhodes made by Chares of Lindus, the pupil of Lysippus mentioned above. This statue was 105 ft. high; and, 66 years after its erection, was overthrown by an earthquake, but even lying on the ground it is a marvel. Few people can make their arms meet round the thumb of the figure, and the fingers are larger than most statues; and where the limbs have been broken off enormous cavities yawn, while inside are seen great masses of rock with the weight of which the artist steadied it when he erected it. It is recorded that it took twelve years to complete and cost 300 talents, money realized from the engines of war belonging to King Demetrius which he had abandoned when he got tired of the protracted siege of Rhodes. There are a hundred other colossal statues in the same city, which though smaller than this one would have each of them brought fame to any place where it might have stood alone; and besides these there were five colossal statues of gods, made by Bryaxis.

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§ 34.18.2  Italy also was fond of making colossal statues. At all events we see the Tuscanic Apollo in the library of the Temple of Augustus, 50 ft. in height measuring from the toe; and it is a question whether it is more remarkable for the quality of the bronze or for the beauty of the work. Spurius Carvilius also made the Jupiter that stands in the Capitol, after defeating the Samnites in the war which they fought under a most solemn oath; the metal was obtained from their breastplates, greaves and helmets, and the size of the figure is so great that it can be seen from the temple of Jupiter Latiaris. Out of the bronze filings left over Carvilius made the statue of himself that stands at the feet of the statue of Jupiter. The Capitol also contains two much admired heads dedicated by the consul Publius Lentulus, one made by Chares above-mentioned and the other by Prodicus, who is so outdone by comparison as to seem the poorest of artists. But all the gigantic statues of this class have been beaten in our period by Zenodorus with the Hermes or Mercury which he made in the community of the Arverni in Gaul; it took him ten years and the sum paid for its making was 40,000,000 sesterces. Having given sufficient proof of his artistic skill in Gaul he was summoned to Rome by Nero, and there made the colossal statue, 106 1/2 ft. high, intended to represent that emperor but now, dedicated to the sun after the condemnation of that emperor's crimes, it is an object of awe. In his studio we used not only to admire the remarkable likeness of the clay model but also to marvel at the frame of quite small timbers which constituted the first stage of the work put in hand. This statue has shown that skill in bronze-founding has perished, since Nero was quite ready to provide gold and silver, and also Zenodorus was counted inferior to none of the artists of old in his knowledge of modelling and chasing. When he was making the statue for the Arverni, when the governor of the province was Dubius Avitus, he produced facsimiles of two chased cups, the handiwork of Calamis, which Germanicus Caesar had prized highly and had presented to his tutor Cassius Salanus, Avitus's uncle; the copies were so skilfully made that there was scarcely any difference in artistry between them and the originals. The greater was the eminence of Zenodorus, the more we realize how the art of working bronze has deteriorated.

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§ 34.18.3  Owners of the figurines called Corinthian are usually so enamoured of them that they carry them about with them; for instance the orator Hortensius was never parted from the sphinx which he had got out of Verres when on trial; this explains Cicero's retort when Hortensius in the course of an altercation at the trial in question said he was not good at riddles. 'You ought to be,' said Cicero, 'as you keep a figurine in your pocket.' The emperor Nero also used to carry about with him an Amazon which we shall describe later, and a little before Nero, the ex-consul Gaius Cestius used to go about with a sphinx, which he had with him even on the battlefield. It is also said that the tent of Alexander the Great was regularly erected with four statues as tent-poles, two of which have now been dedicated to stand in front of the temple of Mars the Avenger and two in front of the Royal Palace.

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§ 34.19.1  An almost innumerable multitude of artists have been rendered famous by statues and figures of smaller size; but before them all stands the Athenian Pheidias, celebrated for the statue of Olympian Zeus, which in fact was made of ivory and gold, although he also made figures of bronze. He flourished in the 83rd Olympiad [448 BCE], about the 300th year of our city, at which same period his rivals were Alcamenes, Critias, Nesiotes and Hegias; and later, in the 87th Olympiad [432 BCE] there were Hagelades, Callon and the Spartan Gorgias, and again in the 90th Olympiad [420 BCE] Polycleitus, Phradmon, Myron, Pythagoras, Scopas and Perellus. Of these Polycleitus had as pupils Argius, Asopodorus, Alexis, Aristides, Phryno, Dino, Athenodorus, and Demeas of Clitor; and Myron had Lycius. In the 95th Olympiad [400 BCE] flourished Naucydes, Dinomenes, Canachus and Patroclus; and in the 102nd [372 BCE] Polycles, Cephisodotus, Leochares and Hypatodorus; in the 104th [364 BCE] Praxiteles and Euphranor; in the 107th [352 BCE] Aetion and Therimachus. Lysippus was in the 113th [328 BCE], the period of Alexander the Great, and likewise his brother Lysistratus, Sthennis, Euphron, Sophocles, Sostratus, Ion and Silanion — a remarkable fact in the case of the last named being that he became famous without having had any teacher; he himself had Zeuxiades as his pupil — and in the 121st [296 BCE] Eutychides, Euthycrates, Laippus, Cephisodotus, Timarchus and Pyromachus. After that the art languished, and it revived again in the 156th Olympiad [156 BCE], when there were the following, far inferior it is true to those mentioned above, but nevertheless artists of repute: Antaeus, Callistratus, Polycles of Athens, Callixenus, Pythocles, Pythias and Timocles.

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§ 34.19.2  After thus defining the periods of the most famous artists, I will hastily run through those of outstanding distinction, throwing in the rest of the throng here and there under various heads. The most celebrated have also come into competition with each other, although born at different periods, because they had made statues of Amazons; when these were dedicated in the Temple of Artemis of Ephesus, it was agreed that the best one should be selected by the vote of the artists themselves who were present; and it then became evident that the best was the one which all the artists judged to be the next best after their own: this is the Amazon by Polycleitus, while next to it came that of Pheidias, third Cresilas's, fourth Cydon's and fifth Phradmon's.

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§ 34.19.3  Pheidias, besides the Olympian Zeus, which nobody has ever rivalled, executed in ivory and gold the statue of Athene that stands erect in the Parthenon at Athens, and in bronze, besides the Amazon mentioned above, an Athene of such exquisite beauty that it has been surnamed the 'Fair.' He also made the Lady with the Keys, and another Athene which Aemilius Paulus dedicated in Rome at the temple of Today's Fortune, and likewise a work consisting of two statues wearing cloaks which Catulus erected in the same temple, and another work, a colossal statue undraped; and Pheidias is deservedly deemed to have first revealed the capabilities and indicated the methods of statuary.

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§ 34.19.4  Polycleitus of Sikyon, a pupil of Hagelades, made a statue of the 'Diadumenos' or Binding his Hair — a youth, but soft-looking — famous for having cost 100 talents, and also the 'Doryphoros' or Carrying a Spear — a boy, but manly-looking. He also made what artists call a 'Canon' or Model Statue, as they draw their artistic outlines from it as from a sort of standard; and he alone of mankind is deemed by means of one work of art to have created the art itself! He also made the statue of the Man using a Body-scraper ('Apoxyomenos') and, in the nude, the Man Attacking with Spear, and the Two Boys Playing Knucklebones, likewise in the nude, known by the Greek name of Astragalizontes and now standing in the forecourt of the Emperor Titus — this is generally considered to be the most perfect work of art in existence — and likewise the Hermes that was once at Lysimachea; Heracles; the Leader Donning his Armour, which is at Rome; and Artemon, called the Man in the Litter. Polycleitus is deemed to have perfected this science of statuary and to have refined the art of carving sculpture, just as Pheidias is considered to have revealed it. A discovery that was entirely his own is the art of making statues throwing their weight on one leg, although Varro says these figures are of a square build and almost all made on one model.

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§ 34.19.5  Myron, who was born at Eleutherae, was himself also a pupil of Hagelades; he was specially famous for his statue of a heifer, celebrated in some well-known sets of verses — inasmuch as most men owe their reputation more to someone else's talent than to their own. His other works include Ladas and a 'Discobolos' or Man Throwing a Discus, and Perseus, and The Sawyers, and The Satyr Marvelling at the Flute and Athene, Competitors in the Five Bouts at Delphi, the All-round Fighters, the Heracles now in the house of Pompey the Great at the Circus Maximus. Erinna in her poems indicates that he even made a memorial statue of a tree-cricket and a locust. He also made an Apollo which was taken from the people of Ephesus by Antonius the Triumvir but restored to them by his late lamented Majesty Augustus in obedience to a warning given him in a dream. Myron is the first sculptor who appears to have enlarged the scope of realism, having more rhythms in his art than Polycleitus and being more careful in his proportions. Yet he himself so far as surface configuration goes attained great finish, but he does not seem to have given expression to the feelings of the mind, and moreover he has not treated the hair and the pubes with any more accuracy than had been achieved by the rude work of olden days.

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§ 34.19.6  Myron was defeated by the Italian Pythagoras of Reggio with his All-round Fighter which stands at Delphi, with which he also defeated Leontiscus; Pythagoras also did the runner Astylos which is on show at Olympia; and, in the same place, the Libyan as a boy holding a tablet; and the nude Man Holding Apples, while at Syracuse there is his Lame Man, which actually makes people looking at it feel a pain from his ulcer in their own leg, and also Apollo shooting the Python with his Arrows, a Man a playing the Harp, that has the Greek name of The Honest Man given it because when Alexander took Thebes a fugitive successfully hid in its bosom a sum of gold. Pythagoras of Reggio was the first sculptor to show the sinews and veins, and to represent the hair more carefully.

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§ 34.19.7  There was also another Pythagoras, a Samian, who began as a painter; his seven nude statues now at the temple of Today's Fortune and one of an old man are highly spoken of. He is recorded to have resembled the above mentioned Pythagoras so closely that even their features were indistinguishable; but we are told that Sostratus was a pupil of Pythagoras of Reggio and a son of this Pythagoras' sister.

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§ 34.19.8  Lysippus of Sikyon is said by Duris not to have been the pupil of anybody, but to have been originally a copper-smith and to have first got the idea of venturing on sculpture from the reply given by the painter Eupompus when asked which of his predecessors he took for his model; he pointed to a crowd of people and said that it was Nature herself, not an artist, whom one ought to imitate. Lysippus as we have said was a most prolific artist and made more statues than any other sculptor, among them the Man using a Body-scraper which Marcus Agrippa gave to be set up in front of his Warm Baths and of which the emperor Tiberius was remarkably fond. Tiberius, although at the beginning of his principate he kept some control of himself, in this case could not resist the temptation, and had the statue removed to his bedchamber, putting another one in its place at the baths; but the public were so obstinately opposed to this that they raised an outcry at the theatre, shouting 'Give us back the Apoxyomenos' — Man using a Body-scraper — and the Emperor, although he had fallen quite in love with the statue, had to restore it. Lysippus is also famous for his Tipsy Girl playing the Flute, and his Hounds and Huntsmen in Pursuit of Game, but most of all for his Chariot with the Sun belonging to Rhodes. He also executed a series of statues of Alexander the Great, beginning with one in Alexander's boyhood. The emperor Nero was so delighted by this statue of the young Alexander that he ordered it to be gilt; but this addition to its money value so diminished its artistic attraction that afterwards the gold was removed, and in that condition the statue was considered yet more valuable, even though still retaining scars from the work done on it and incisions in which the gold had been fastened. The same sculptor did Alexander the Great's friend Hephaestion, a statue which some people ascribe to Polycleitus, although his date is about a hundred years earlier; and also Alexander's Hunt, dedicated at Delphi, a Satyr now at Athens, and Alexander's Squadron of Horse, in which the sculptor introduced portraits of Alexander's friends consummately lifelike in every ease. After the conquest of Macedonia this was removed to Rome by Metellus; he also executed Four-horse Chariots of various kinds. Lysippus is said to have contributed greatly to the art of bronze statuary by representing the details of the hair and by making his heads smaller than the old sculptors used to do, and his bodies more slender and firm, to give his statues the appearance of greater height. He scrupulously preserved the quality of 'symmetry' (for which there is no word in Latin) by the new and hitherto untried method of modifying the squareness of the figure of the old sculptors, and he used commonly to say that whereas his predecessors had made men as they really were, he made them as they appeared to be. A peculiarity of this sculptor's work seems to be the minute finish maintained in even the smallest details.

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§ 34.19.9  Lysippus left three sons who were his pupils, the celebrated artists Laippus, Boedas and Euthycrates, the last pre-eminent, although he copied the harmony rather than the elegance of his father, preferring to win favour in the severely correct more than in the agreeable style. Accordingly his Heracles, at Delphi, and his Alexander Hunting, at Thespiae, his group of Thespiades, and his Cavalry in Action are works of extreme finish, and so are his statue of Trophonius at the oracular shrine of that deity, a number of Four-horse Chariots, a Horse with Baskets and a Pack of Hounds. Moreover Tisicrates, another native of Sikyon, was a pupil of Euthycrates, but closer to the school of Lysippus — indeed many of his statues cannot be distinguished from Lysippus's work, for instance his Old Man of Thebes, his King Demetrius (Poliorcetes), and his Peucestes, the man who saved the life of Alexander the Great and so deserved the honour of this commemoration.

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§ 34.19.10  Artists who have composed treatises recording these matters speak with marvellously high praise of Telephanes of Phocis, who is otherwise unknown, since he lived at ... in Thessaly where his works have remained in concealment, although these writers' own testimony puts him on a level with Polycleitus, Myron and Pythagoras. They praise his Larisa, his Spintharus the Five-bout Champion, and his Apollo. Others however are of opinion that the cause of his lack of celebrity is not the reason mentioned but his having devoted himself entirely to the studios established by King Xerxes and King Darius.

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§ 34.19.11  Praxiteles although more successful and therefore more celebrated in marble, nevertheless also made some very beautiful works in bronze: the Rape of Persephone, also The Girl Spinning, and a Father Liber or Dionysus, with a figure of Drunkenness and also the famous Satyr, known by the Greek title Periboetos meaning 'Celebrated,' and the statues that used to be in front of the Temple of Felicitas, and the Aphrodite, which was destroyed by fire when the temple of that goddess was burnt down in the reign of Claudius, and which rivalled the famous Aphrodite, in marble, that is known all over the world; also A Woman Bestowing a Wreath, A Woman Putting a Bracelet on her Arm, Autumn, Harmodius and Aristogeiton who slew the tyrant the last piece carried off by Xerxes King of the Persians but restored to the Athenians by Alexander [331 BC] the Great after his conquest of Persia. Praxiteles also made a youthful Apollo called in Greek the Lizard-Slayer because he is waiting with an arrow for a lizard creeping towards him. Also two of his statues expressing opposite emotions are admired, his Matron Weeping and his Merry Courtesan. The latter is believed to have been Phryne and connoisseurs detect in the figure the artist's love of her and the reward promised him by the expression on the courtesan's face. The kindness also of Praxiteles is represented in sculpture, as in the Chariot and Four of Calamis he contributed the charioteer, in order that the sculptor might not be thought to have failed in the human figure although more successful in representing horses. Calamis himself also made other chariots, some with four horses and some with two, and in executing the horses he is invariably unrivalled: but — that it may not be supposed that he was inferior in his human figures — his Alcmena is as famous as that of any other sculptor.

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§ 34.19.12  Alcamenes a pupil of Pheidias made marble figures, and also in bronze a Winner of the Five Bouts, known by the Greek term meaning Highly Commended, but Polycleitus's pupil Aristides made four-horse and pair-horse chariots. Amphicrates is praised for his Leaena; she was a harlot, admitted to the friendship of Harmodius and Aristogeiton because of her skill as a harpist, who though put to the torture by the tyrants till she died refused to betray their plot to assassinate them. Consequently the Athenians wishing to do her honour and yet unwilling to have made a harlot famous, had a statue made of a lioness, as that was her name, and to indicate the reason for the honour paid her instructed the artist to represent the animal as having no tongue.

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§ 34.19.13  Bryaxis made statues of Asclepius and Seleucus, Boedas, a Man Praying, Baton, an Apollo and a Hera, both now in the Temple of Concord at Rome. Cresilas did a Man Fainting from Wounds, the expression of which indicates how little life remains, and the Olympian Pericles, a figure worthy of its title; indeed it is a marvellous thing about the art of sculpture that it has added celebrity to men already celebrated. Cephisodorus made the wonderful Athene at the harbour of Athens and the almost unrivalled altar at the temple of Zeus the Deliverer at the same harbour, Canachus the naked Apollo, surnamed Philesius, at Didyma, made of bronze compounded at Aigina; and with it he made a stag so lightly poised in its footprints as to allow of a thread being passed underneath its feet, the 'heel' and the 'toes' holding to the base with alternate contacts, the whole hoof being so jointed in either part that it springs back from the impact. He also made a Boys Riding on Racehorses. Chaereas did Alexander the Great and his father Philip, Ctesilaus a Man with a Spear and a Wounded Amazon, Demetrius Lysimache who was a priestess of Athene for 64 years, and also the Athene called the Murmuring Athene — the dragons on her Gorgon's head sound with a tinkling note when a harp is struck; he likewise did the mounted statue of Simon who wrote the first treatise on horsemanship. Daedalus (also famous as a modeller in clay) made Two Boys using a Body-Scraper, and Dinomenes did a Protesilaus and the wrestler Pythodemus. The statue of Alexander Paris is by Euphranor; it is praised because it conveys all the characteristics of Paris in combination — the judge of the goddesses, the lover of Helen and yet the slayer of Achilles. The Athene, called at Rome the Catuliana, which stands below the Capitol and was dedicated by Quintus Lutatius Catulus, is Euphranor's, and so is the figure of Success, holding a dish in the right hand and in the left an ear of corn and some poppies, and also in the temple of Concord a Leto as Nursing Mother, with the infants Apollo and Artemis in her arms. He also made four-horse and two-horse chariots, and an exceptionally beautiful Lady with the Keys, and two colossal statues, one of Virtue and one of Greece, a Woman Wondering and Worshipping, and also an Alexander and a Philip in four-horse chariots. Eutychides did a Eurotas, in which it has frequently been said that the work of the artist seems clearer than the water of the real river. The Athene and the King Pyrrhus of Hegias are praised, and his Boys Riding on Racehorses, and his Castor and Pollux that stand before the temple of Jupiter the Thunderer; and so are Hagesias's Heracles in our colony of Parium, and Isidotus's Man Sacrificing an Ox. Lycius who was a pupil of Myron did a Boy Blowing a Dying Fire that is worthy of his instructor, also a group of the Argonauts; Leochares an Eagle carrying off Ganymede in which the bird is aware of what his burden is and for whom he is carrying it, and is careful not to let his claws hurt the boy even through his clothes, and Autolycus Winner of the All-round Bout, being also the athlete in whose honour Xenophon wrote his Banquet and the famous Zeus the Thunderer now on the Capitol, of quite unrivalled merit, also an Apollo crowned with a Diadem; also Lyciscus, the Slave-dealer, and a Boy, with the crafty cringing look of a household slave. Lycius also did a Boy Burning Perfumes. There is a Bull-calf by Menaechmus, on which a man is pressing his knee as he bends its neck back; Menaechmus has written a treatise about his own work. The reputation of Naucydes rests on his Hermes and Man throwing a Disc and Man Sacrificing a Ram, that of Naucerus on his Wrestler Winded, that of Niceratus on his Asclepius and his Goddess of Health, which are in the Temple of Concord at Rome. Pyromachus has an Alcibiades Driving a Chariot and Four; Polycles made a famous Hermaphrodite, Pyrrhus, a Goddess of Health and Athene, Phanis, who was a pupil of Lysippus, a Woman Sacrificing. Styppax of Cyprus is known for a single statue, his Man Cooking Tripe, which represented a domestic slave of the Olympian Pericles roasting inwards and puffing out his cheeks as he kindles the fire with his breath; Silanion cast a metal figure of Apollodorus, who was himself a modeller, and indeed one of quite unrivalled devotion to the art and a severe critic of his own work, who often broke his statues in pieces after he had finished them, his intense passion for his art making him unable to be satisfied, and consequently he was given the surname of the Madman — this quality he brought out in his statue, the Madman, which represented in bronze not a human being but anger personified. Silanion also made a famous Achilles, and also a Superintendent Exercising Athletes; Strongylion made an Amazon, which from the remarkable beauty of the legs is called the Eucnemon, and which consequently the emperor Nero caused to be carried in his retinue on his journeys. The same sculptor made the figure rendered famous by Brutus under the name of Brutus's Boy because it represented a favourite of the hero of the battles at Philippi. Theodorus, who constructed the Labyrinth at Samos, cast a statue of himself in bronze. Besides its remarkable celebrity as a likeness, it is famous for its very minute workmanship; the right hand holds a file, and three fingers of the left hand originally held a little model of a chariot and four, but this has been taken away to Praeneste as a marvel of smallness: if the team were reproduced in a picture with the chariot and the charioteer, the model of a fly, which was made by the artist at the same time, would cover it with its wings. Xenocrates, who was a pupil of Tisicrates, or by other accounts of Euthycrates, surpassed both of the last mentioned in the number of his statues; and he also wrote books about his art.

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§ 34.19.14  Several artists have represented the battles of Attalus and Eumenes against the Gauls, Isigonus, Pyromachus, Stratonicus and Antigonus, who wrote books about his art. Boethus did a Child Strangling a Goose by hugging it, although he is better in silver. And among the list of works I have referred to all the most celebrated have now been dedicated by the emperor Vespasian in the Temple of Peace and his [AD. 75] other public buildings; they had been looted by Nero, who conveyed them all to Rome and arranged them in the sitting-rooms of his Golden Mansion.

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§ 34.19.15  Besides these, artists on the same level of merit but of no outstanding excellence in any of their works are: Ariston, who often also practised chasing silver, Callides, Ctesias, Cantharus of Sikyon, Dionysius, Diodorus the pupil of Critias, Deliades, Euphorion, Eunicus and Hecataeus the silver chasers, Lesbocles, Prodorus, Pythodieus, Polygnotus, who was also one of the most famous among painters, similarly Stratonicus among chasers, and Critias's pupil Scymnus.

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§ 34.19.16  I will now run through the artists who have made works of the same class, such as Apollodorus, Androbulus and Asclepiodorus, Aleuas, who have done philosophers, and Apellas also women donning their ornaments, and Antignotus also Man using a Body-scraper and the Men that Slew the Tyrant, above-mentioned, Antimachus, Athenodorus who made splendid figures of women, Aristodemus who also did Wrestlers, and Chariot and Pair with Driver, figures of philosophers, of old women, and King Seleucus; Aristodemus's Man holding Spear is also popular. There were two artists named Cephisodotus; the Hermes Nursing Father Liber or Dionysos when an Infant belongs to the elder, who also did a Man Haranguing with Hand Uplifted — whom it represents is uncertain. The later Cephisodotus did philosophers. Colotes who had co-operated with Pheidias in the Olympian Zeus made statues of philosophers, as also did Cleon and Cenchramis and Callicles and Cepis; Chalcosthenes also did actors in comedy and athletes; Daippus a Man using a Scraper; Daiphron, Damocritus and Daemon statues of philosophers. Epigonus, who copied others in almost all the subjects already mentioned, took the lead with his Trumpet-player and his Weeping Infant pitifully caressing its Murdered Mother. Praise is given to Eubulus's Woman in Admiration and to Eubulides' Person Counting on the Fingers. Micon is noticed for his athletes and Menogenes for his chariots and four. Niceratus, who likewise attempted all the subjects employed by any other sculptor, did a statue of Alcibiades and one of his mother Demarate, represented as performing a sacrifice by torch-light. Tisicrates did a pair-horse chariot in which Piston afterwards placed a woman; the latter also made an Ares and a Hermes now in the Temple of Concord at Rome. No one should praise Perillus, who was more cruel than the tyrant Phalaris, for whom he made a bull, guaranteeing that if a man were shut up inside it and a fire lit underneath the man would do the bellowing; and he was himself the first to experience this torture — a cruelty more just than the one he proposed. Such were the depths to which the sculptor had diverted this most humane of arts from images of gods and men! All the founders of the art had only toiled so that it should be employed for making implements of torture! Consequently this sculptor's works are preserved for one purpose only, so that whoever sees them may hate the hands that made them. Sthennis did a Demeter, a Zeus and an Athene that are in the Temple of Concord at Rome, and also Weeping Matrons and Matrons at Prayer and Offering a Sacrifice. Simon made a Dog and an Archer, the famous engraver Stratonicus some philosophers and each of these artists made figures of hostesses of inns. The following have made figures of athletes, armed men, hunters and men offering sacrifice: Baton, Euchir, Glaucides, Heliodorus, Hicanus, Jophon, Lyson, Leon, Menodorus, Myagrus, Polycrates, Polyidus, Pythocritus, Protogenes (who was also, as we shall say later, one of the most famous painters), Patrocles, Pollis and Posidonius (the last also a distinguished silver chaser, native of Ephesus), Periclymenus, Philo, Symenus, Timotheus, Theomnestus, Tiniarchides, Timon, Tisias, Thraso.

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§ 34.19.17  But of all Callimachus is the most remarkable, because of the surname attached to him: he was always unfairly critical of his own work, and was an artist of never-ending assiduity, and consequently he was called the Niggler, and is a notable warning of the duty of observing moderation even in taking pains. To him belongs the Laconian Women Dancing, a very finished work but one in which assiduity has destroyed all charm. Callimachus is reported to have also been a painter. Cato in his expedition to Cyprus sold all the statues found there except one of Zeno; it was not the value of the bronze nor the artistic merit that attracted him, but its being the statue of a philosopher: I mention this by the way, to introduce this distinguished instance also.

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§ 34.19.18  In mentioning statues — there is also one we must not pass over in spite of the sculptor's not being known — the figure, next to the Rostra, of Heracles in the Tunic, the only one in Rome that shows him in that dress; the countenance is stern and the statue expresses the feeling of the final agony of the tunic. On this statue there are three inscriptions, one stating that it had been part of the booty taken by the general Lucius Lucullus, and another saying that it was dedicated, in pursuance of a decree of the Senate, by Lucullus's son while still a ward, and the third, that Titus Septimius Sabinus as curule aedile had caused it to be restored to the public from private ownership. So many were the rivalries connected with this statue and so highly was it valued.

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§ 34.20.1  But we will now turn our attention particularly to the various forms of copper, and its blends. In the case of the copper of Cyprus 'chaplet copper' is made into thin leaves, and when dyed with ox-gall gives the appearance of gilding on theatrical property coronets; and the same material mixed with gold in the proportion of six scruples of gold to the ounce makes a very thin plate called pyropus, 'fire-coloured' and acquires the colour of fire. Bar copper also is produced in other mines, and likewise fused copper. The difference between them is that the latter can only be fused, as it breaks under the hammer, whereas bar copper, otherwise called ductile copper, is malleable, which is the case with all Cyprus copper. But also in the other mines, this difference of bar copper from fused copper is produced by treatment; for all copper after impurities have been rather carefully removed by fire and melted out of it becomes bar copper. Among the remaining kinds of copper the palm goes to bronze of Campania, which is most esteemed for utensils. There are several ways of preparing it. At Capua it is smelted in a fire of wood, not of charcoal, and then poured into cold water and cleaned in a sieve made of oak, and this process of smelting is repeated several times, at the last stage Spanish silver lead being added to it in the proportion of ten pounds to one hundred pounds of copper: this treatment renders it pliable and gives it an agreeable colour of a kind imparted to other sorts of copper and bronze by means of oil and salt. Bronze resembling the Campanian is produced in many parts of Italy and the provinces, but there they add only eight pounds of lead, and do additional smelting with charcoal because of their shortage of wood. The difference produced by this is noticed specially in Gaul, where the metal is smelted between stones heated red hot, as this roasting scorches it and renders it black and friable. Moreover they only smelt it again once whereas to repeat this several times contributes a great deal to the quality. It is also not out of place to notice that all copper and bronze fuses better in very cold weather.

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§ 34.20.2  The proper blend for making statues is as follows, and the same for tablets: at the outset the ore is melted, and then there is added to the melted metal a third part of scrap copper, that is copper or bronze that has been bought up after use. This contains a peculiar seasoned quality of brilliance that has been subdued by friction and so to speak tamed by habitual use. Silver-lead is also mixed with it in the proportion of twelve and a half pounds to every hundred pounds of the fused metal. There is also in addition what is called the mould-blend of bronze of a very delicate consistency, because a tenth part of black lead is added and a twentieth of silver-lead; and this is the best way to give it the colour called Graecanic. The last kind is that called pot-bronze, taking its name from the vessels made of it; it is a blend of three or four pounds of silver-lead with every hundred pounds of copper. The addition of lead to Cyprus copper produces the purple colour seen in the bordered robes of statues.

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§ 34.21.1  Things made of copper or bronze get covered with copper-rust more quickly when they are kept rubbed clean than when they are neglected, unless they are well greased with oil. It is said that the best way of preserving them is to give them a coating of liquid vegetable pitch. The employment of bronze was a long time ago applied to securing the perpetuity of monuments, by means of bronze tablets on which records of official enactments are made.

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§ 34.22.1  Copper ores and mines supply medicaments in a variety of ways: inasmuch as in their neighbourhood all kinds of ulcers are healed with the greatest rapidity; yet the most beneficial is cadmea. This is certainly also produced in furnaces where silver is smelted, this kind being whiter and not so heavy, but it is by no means to be compared with that from copper. There are however several varieties; for while the mineral itself from which the metal is made is called cadmea, which is necessary for the fusing process but is of no use for medicine, so again another kind is found in furnaces, which is given a name indicating its origin. It is produced by the thinnest part of the substance being separated out by the flames and the blast and becoming attached in proportion to its degree of lightness to the roof-chambers and side-walls of the furnaces, the thinnest being at the very mouth of the furnace, which the flames have belched out; it is called 'smoky cadmea' from its burnt appearance and because it resembles hot white ash in its extreme lightness. The part inside is best, hanging from the vaults of the roof-chamber, and this consequently is designated 'grape-cluster cadmea,' this is heavier than the preceding kind but lighter than those that follow — it is of two colours, the inferior kind being the colour of ash and the better the colour of pumice — and it is friable, and extremely useful for making medicaments for the eyes. A third sort is deposited on the sides of furnaces, not having been able to reach the vaults because of its weight; this is called in Greek 'plaeitis,' 'caked residue,' in this case by reason of its flatness, as it is more of a crust than pumice, and is mottled inside; it is more useful for itch-scabs and for making wounds draw together into a scar. Of this kind are formed two other varieties, onychitis which is almost blue outside but inside like the spots of an onyx or layered quartz, and ostracitis shell-like residue which is all black and the dirtiest of any of the kinds; this is extremely useful for wounds. All kinds of cadmea (the best coming from the furnaces of Cyprus) for use in medicine are heated again on a fire of pure charcoal and, when it has been reduced to ash, if being prepared for plasters it is quenched with Aminean wine, but if intended for itch-scabs with vinegar. Some people pound it and then burn it in earthenware pots, wash it in mortars and afterwards dry it. Nymphodorus's process is to burn on hot coals the most heavy dense piece of cadmea that can be obtained, and when it is thoroughly burnt to quench it with Chian wine, and pound it, and then to sift it through a linen cloth and grind it in a mortar, and then macerate it in rainwater and again grind the sediment that sinks to the bottom till it becomes like white lead and offers no grittiness to the teeth. Iollas' method is the same, but he selects the purest specimens of native cadmea.

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§ 34.23.1  The effect of cadmea is to dry moisture, to heal lesions, to stop discharges, to cleanse inflamed swellings and foul sores in the eyes, to remove eruptions, and to do everything that we shall specify in dealing with the effect of lead.

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§ 34.23.2  Copper itself is roasted to use for all the same purposes and for white-spots and scars in the eyes besides, and mixed with milk it also heals ulcers in the eyes; and consequently people in Egypt make a kind of eye-salve by grinding it in small mortars. Taken with honey it also acts as an emetic, but for this Cyprian copper with an equal weight of sulphur is roasted in pots of unbaked earthenware, the mouth of the vessels being smeared round with oil; and then left in the furnace till the vessels themselves are completely baked. Certain persons also add salt, and some use alum instead of sulphur, while others add nothing at all, but only sprinkle the copper with vinegar. When burnt it is pounded in a mortar of Theban stone, washed with rainwater, and then again pounded with the addition of a larger quantity of water, and left till it settles, and this process is repeated several times, till it is reduced to the appearance of cinnabar; then it is dried in the sun and put to keep in a copper box.

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§ 34.24.1  The slag of copper is also washed in the same way, but it is less efficacious than copper itself. The flower of copper also is useful as a medicine. It is made by fusing copper and then transferring it to other furnaces, where a faster use of the bellows makes the metal give off layers like scales of millet, which are called the flower. Also when the sheets of copper are cooled off in water they shed off other scales of copper of a similar red hue — this scale is called by the Greek word meaning husk and by this process the flower is adulterated, so that the scale is sold as a substitute for it — the genuine flower is a scale of copper forcibly knocked off with bolts into which are welded cakes of the metal, specially in the factories of Cyprus. The whole difference is that the scale is detached from the cakes by successive hammerings, whereas the flower falls off of its own accord. This another finer kind of scale, the one knocked off from the down-like surface of the metal, the name for which is 'stomoma.'

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§ 34.25.1  But of all these facts the doctors, if they will permit me to say so, are ignorant — they are governed by names: so detached they are from the process of making up drugs, which used to be the special business of the medical profession. Nowadays whenever they come on books of prescriptions, wanting to make up some medicines out of them, which means to make trial of the ingredients in the prescriptions at the expense of their unhappy patients, they rely on Seplasia [the street of unguent sellers in Capua] which spoil everything with fraudulent adulterations, and for a long time they have been buying plasters and eye-salves ready made; and thus is deteriorated rubbish of commodities and the fraud of the druggists' trade put on show.

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§ 34.25.2  Both scale however and flower of copper are burnt in earthenware or copper pans and then washed, as described above, to be applied to the same purposes; the scale also in addition removes fleshy troubles in the nostrils and also in the anus and dullness of hearing if forcibly blown into the ears through a tube, and, when applied in the form of powder, removes swellings of the uvula, and, mixed with honey, swellings of the tonsils. There is a scale from white copper that is far less efficacious than the scale from Cyprus; and moreover some people steep the bolts and cakes of copper beforehand in a boy's urine when they are going to detach the scale, and pound them and wash them with rainwater. It is also given to dropsical patients in doses of two drams in half a sextarius of honey-wine; and mixed with fine flour it is applied as a liniment.

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§ 34.26.1  Great use is also made of verdigris. There are several ways of making it; it is scraped off the stone from which copper is smelted, or by drilling holes in white copper and hanging it up in casks over strong vinegar which is stopped with a lid; the verdigris is of much better quality if the same process is performed with scales of copper. Some people put the actual vessels, made of white copper, into vinegar in earthenware jars, and nine days later scrape them. Others cover the vessels with grape-skins and scrape them after the same interval, others sprinkle copper filings with vinegar and several times a day turn them over with spattles till the copper is completely dissolved. Others prefer to grind copper filings mixed with vinegar in copper mortars. But the quickest result is obtained by adding to the vinegar shavings of coronet copper. Rhodian verdigris is adulterated chiefly with pounded marble, though others use pumice-stone or gum. But the adulteration of verdigris that is the most difficult to detect is done with shoemakers' black, the other adulterations being detected by the teeth as they crackle when chewed. Verdigris can be tested on a hot fire-shovel, as a specimen that is pure keeps its colour, but what is mixed with shoemakers' black turns red. It is also detected by means of papyrus previously steeped in an infusion of plant-gall, as this when smeared with genuine verdigris at once turns black. It can also be detected by the eye, as it has an evil green colour. But whether pure or adulterated, the best way is to wash it and when it is dry to burn it on a new pan and keep turning it over till it becomes glowing ashes; and afterwards it is crushed and put away in store. Some people burn it in raw earthenware vessels till the earthenware is baked through; some mix in also some male frankincense. Verdigris is washed in the same way as cadmea. Its powerfulness is very well suited for eye-salves and its mordant action makes it able to produce watering at the eyes; but it is essential to wash it off with swabs and hot water till its bite ceases to be felt.

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§ 34.27.1  Hierax's Salve is the name given to an eye-salve chiefly composed of verdigris. It is made by mixing together four ounces of gum Hammoniac, two of Cyprian verdigris, two of the copperas called flower of copper, one of misy and six of saffron; all these ingredients are pounded in Thasian vinegar and made up into pills, that are an outstanding specific against incipient glaucoma and cataract, and also against films on the eyes or roughnesses and white ulcerations in the eye and affections of the eyelids. Verdigris in a crude state is used as an ingredient in plasters for wounds also. In combination with oil it is a marvellous cure for ulcerations of the mouth and gums and for sore lips, and if wax is also added to the mixture it cleanses them and makes them form a cicatrix. Verdigris also eats away the callosity of fistulas and of sores round the anus, either applied by itself or with gum of Ilammon, or inserted into the fistula in the manner of a salve. Verdigris kneaded up with a third part of turpentine also removes leprosy.

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§ 34.28.1  There is also another kind of verdigris called from the Greek worm-like verdigris, made by grinding up in a mortar of true cyprian copper with a pestle of the same metal equal weights of alum and salt or soda with the very strongest white vinegar. This preparation is only made on the very hottest days of the year, about the rising of the Dog-star. The mixture is ground up until it becomes of a green colour and shrivels into what looks like a cluster of small worms, whence its name. To remedy any that is blemished, the urine of a young boy to twice the quantity of vinegar that was used is added to the mixture. Used as a drug, worm-verdigris has the same effect as santerna which we spoke of as used for soldering gold; both of them have the same properties as verdigris. Native worm-verdigris is also obtained by scraping a copper ore of which we shall now speak.

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§ 34.29.1  Chalcitis, copper-stone, is the name of an ore, that from which copper also, besides cadmea, is obtained by smelting. It differs from cadmea because the latter is quarried above ground, from rocks exposed to the air, whereas chalcitis is obtained from underground beds, and also because chalcitis becomes immediately friable, being of a soft nature, so as to have the appearance of congealed down. There is also another difference in that chalcitis contains three kinds of mineral, copper, and sori, each of which we shall describe in its place; and the veins of copper in it are of an oblong shape.

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§ 34.29.2  The approved variety of chalcitis is honey coloured, and streaked with fine veins, and is friable and not stony. It is also thought to be more useful when fresh, as when old it turns into sori. It is used for growths in ulcers, for arresting haemorrhage and, in the form of a powder, for acting as an astringent on the gums, uvula and tonsils. and, applied in wool, as a pessary for affections of the uterus, while with leek juice it is employed in plasters for the genitals. It is steeped for forty days in vinegar in an earthenware jar, covered with dung, and then assumes the colour of saffron; then an equal weight of cadmea is mixed with it and this produces the drug called psoricon or cure for itch. If two parts of chalcitis are mixed with one of cadmea this makes a stronger form of the same drug, and moreover it is more violent if it is mixed in vinegar than if in wine; and when roasted it becomes more effective for all the same purposes.

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§ 34.30.1  Egyptian sori is most highly commended, being far superior to that of Cyprus and Spain and Africa, although some people think that Cyprus sori is more useful for treatment of the eyes; but whatever its provenance the best is that which has the most pungent odour, and which when ground up takes a greasy, black colour and becomes spongy. It is a substance that goes against the stomach so violently that with some people the mere smell of it causes vomiting. This is a description of the sori of Egypt. That from other sources when ground up turns a bright colour like misy, and it is harder; however, if it is held in the cavities and used plentifully as a mouthwash it is good for toothache and for serious and creeping ulcers of the mouth. It is burnt on charcoal, like chalcitis.

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§ 34.31.1  Some people have reported that misy is made by burning mineral in trenches, its fine yellow powder mixing itself with the ash of the pine wood burnt; but as a matter of fact though got from the mineral above mentioned, it is part of its substance and separated from it by force, the best kind being obtained in the copper-factories of Cyprus, its marks being that when broken it sparkles like gold and when it is ground it has a sandy appearance, without earth, unlike chalcitis. A mixture of misy is employed in the magical purification of gold. Mixed with oil of roses it makes a useful infusion for suppurating ears and applied on wool a serviceable plaster for ulcers of the head. It also reduces chronic roughness of the eyelids, and is especially useful for the tonsils and against quinsy and suppurations. The method is to boil 16 drams of it in a twelfth of a pint of vinegar with honey added till it becomes of a viscous consistency: this makes a useful preparation for the purposes above mentioned. When it is necessary to make it softer, honey is sprinkled on it. It also removes the callosity of fistulous ulcers when the patients use it with vinegar as a fomentation; and it is used as an ingredient in eye-salves, arrests haemorrhage and creeping or putrid ulcers, and reduces fleshy excrescences. It is particularly useful for troubles in the sexual organs in the male, and it checks menstruation.

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§ 34.32.1  The Greeks by their name for shoemakers'-black have made out an affinity between it and copper: they call it chalcanthon, 'flower of copper'; and there is no substance that has an equally remarkable nature. It occurs in Spain in wells or pools that contain that sort of water. This water is boiled with an equal quantity of pure water and poured into wooden tanks. Over these are firmly fixed cross-beams from which hang cords held taut by stones, and the kind clinging to the cords in a cluster of glassy drops has somewhat the appearance of a bunch of grapes. It is taken off and then left for thirty days to dry. Its colour is an extremely brilliant blue, and it is often taken for glass; when dissolved it makes a black dye used for colouring leather. It is also made in several other ways: earth of the kind indicated is hollowed into trenches, droppings from the sides of which form icicles in a winter frost which are called drop-flower of copper, and this is the purest kind. Bat some of it, violet with a touch of white, is called lonchotoa, 'lance-headed.' It is also made in pans hollowed in the rocks, into which the slime is carried by rainwater and freezes, and it also forms in the same way as salt when very hot sunshine evaporates the fresh water let in with it. Consequently some people distinguish in twofold fashion between the mined flower of copper and the manufactured, the latter paler than the former and as much inferior in quality as in colour. That which comes from Cyprus is most highly approved for medical employment. It is taken to remove intestinal worms, the dose being one dram mixed with honey. Diluted and injected as drops into the nostrils it clears the head, and likewise taken with honey or honey-water it purges the stomach. It is given as a medicine for roughness of the eyes, pain and mistiness in the eyes, and ulceration of the mouth. It stops bleeding from the nostrils, and also haemorrhoidal bleeding. Mixed with henbane seed it draws out splinters of broken bones; applied to the forehead with a swab it arrests running of the eyes; also used in plasters it is efficacious for cleansing wounds and gatherings of ulcers. A mere touch of a decoction of it removes swellings of the uvula, and it is laid with linseed on plasters used for relieving pains. The whitish part of it is preferred to the violet kinds for one purpose, that of being blown through tubes into the ears to relieve ear-trouble. Applied by itself as a liniment it heals wounds, but it leaves a discoloration in the scats. There has lately been discovered a plan of sprinkling it on the mouths of bears and lions in the arena, and its astringent action is so powerful that they are unable to bite.

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§ 34.33.1  The substances called by Greek names meaning 'bubble' and 'ash' are also found in the furnaces of copper works. The difference between them is that bubble is disengaged by washing but ash is not washed out. Some people have given the name of 'bubble' to the substance that is white and very light in weight, and have said that it is the ashes of copper and cadmea, but that ash is darker and heavier, being scraped off the walls of furnaces, mixed with sparks from the ore and sometimes also with charcoal. This material when vinegar is applied to it gives off a smell of copper, and if touched with the tongue has a horrible taste. It is a suitable ingredient for eye medicines, remedying all troubles whatever, and for all the purposes for which 'ash' is used; its only difference is that its action is less violent. It is also used as an ingredient for plasters employed to produce a gentle cooling and drying effect. It is more efficacious for all purposes when it is moistened with wine.

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§ 34.34.1  Cyprus ash is the best. It is produced when cadmea and copper ore are melted. The ash in question is the lightest part of the whole substance produced by blasting, and it flies out of the furnaces and adheres to the roof, being distinguished from soot by its white colour. Such part of it as is less white is an indication of inadequate firing; it is this that some people call 'bubble.' But the redder part selected from it has a keener force, and is so corrosive that if while it is being washed it touches the eyes it causes blindness. There is also an ash of the colour of honey, which is understood to indicate that it contains a large amount of copper. But any kind is made more serviceable by washing; it is first purified with a strainer of cloth and then given a more substantial washing, and the rough portions are picked out by the fingers. When it is washed with wine it is particularly powerful. There is also some difference in the kind of wine used, as when it is washed with weak wine it is thought to be less serviceable for eye-salves, and at the same time more efficacious for running ulcers or for ulcers of the mouth that are always wet and more useful for all the antidotes for gangrene. An ash called Lanriotis is also produced in furnaces in which silver is smelted; but the kind said to be most serviceable for the eyes is that which is formed in smelting gold. Nor is there any other department in which the ingenuities of life are more to be admired, inasmuch as to avoid the need of searching for metals experience has devised the same utilities by means of the commonest things.

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§ 34.35.1  The substance called in Greek antispodos, substitute ash, is the ash of the leaves of the fig-tree or wild fig or myrtle together with the tenderest parts of the branches, or of the wild olive or cultivated olive or quince or mastic and also ash obtained from unripe, that is still pale, mulberries, dried in the sun, or from the foliage of the box or mock-gladiolus, or bramble or turpentine-tree or oenanthe. The same virtues have also been found in the ash of bull-glue or of linen fabrics. All of these are burnt in a pot of raw earth heated in a furnace until the earthenware is thoroughly baked.

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§ 34.36.1  Also 'smegma' is made in copper forges by adding additional charcoal when the copper has already been melted, and thoroughly fused, and gradually kindling it; and suddenly when a stronger blast is applied a sort of chaff of copper spurts out. The floor on which it is received ought to be strewn with charcoal-dust.

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§ 34.37.1  Distinguished from smegma is the substance in the same forges called by the Greeks diphryx, from its being twice roasted. It comes from three different sources. It is said to be obtained from a mineral pyrites which is heated in furnaces till it is smelted into a red earth. It is also made in Cyprus from mud obtained from a certain cavern, which is first dried and then gradually has burning brushwood put round it. A third way of producing it is from the residue that falls to the bottom in copper furnaces; the difference is that the copper itself runs down into crucibles and the slag forms outside the furnace and the flower floats on the top, but the supplies of diphryx remain behind. Some people say that certain globules of stone that is being smelted in the furnaces become soldered together and round this the copper gets red hot, but the stone itself is not fused unless it is transferred into other furnaces, and that it is a sort of kernel of the substance, and that what is called diphryx is the residue left from the smelting. Its use in medicine is similar to that of the substances already described; to dry up moisture and remove excrescent growths and act as a detergent. It can be tested by the tongue — contact with it ought immediately to have a parching effect and impart a flavour of copper.

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§ 34.38.1  We will not omit one further remarkable thing about copper. The Servilian family, famous in our annals, possesses a bronze as piece which it feeds with gold and silver and which consumes them both. Its origin and nature are unknown to me, but I will put down the actual words of the elder Messala on the subject. The family of the Servilii has a holy coin to which every year they perform sacrifices with the greatest devotion and splendour; and they say that this coin seems to have on some occasions grown bigger and on other occasions smaller, and that thereby it portends either the advancement or the decadence of the family.

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§ 34.39.1  Next an account must be given of the mines and ores of iron. Iron serves as the best and the worst part of the apparatus of life, inasmuch as with it we plough the ground, plant trees, trim the trees that prop our vines, force the vines to renew their youth yearly by ridding them of decrepit growth; with it we build houses and quarry rocks, and we employ it for all other useful purposes, but we likewise use it for wars and slaughter and brigandage, and not only in hand-to-hand encounters but as a winged missile, now projected from catapults, now hurled by the arm, and now actually equipped with feathery wings, which I deem the most criminal artifice of man's genius, inasmuch as to enable death to reach human beings more quickly we have taught iron how to fly and have given wings to it. Let us therefore debit the blame not to Nature, but to man. A number of attempts have been made to enable iron to be innocent. We find it an express provision included in the treaty granted by Porsena to the Roman nation after the expulsion of the kings that they should only use iron for purposes of agriculture; and our oldest authors have recorded that in those days it was customary to write with a bone pen. There is extent an edict of Pompey the Great dated in his third consulship at the time of the disorders accompanying the death of Clodius, prohibiting the possession of any weapon in the city.

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§ 34.40.1  Further, the art of former days did not fail to provide a more humane function even for iron. When the artist Aristonidas desired to represent the madness of Athamas subsiding in repentance after he had hurled his son Learchus from the rock, he made a blend of copper and iron, in order that the blush of shame should be represented by rust of the iron shining through the brilliant surface of the copper; this statue is still standing at Rhodes. There is also in the same city an iron figure of Heracles, which was made by Alcon, prompted by the endurance displayed by the god in his labours. We also see at Rome goblets of iron dedicated in the temple of Mars the Avenger. The same benevolence of nature has limited the power of iron itself by inflicting on it the penalty of rust, and the same foresight by making nothing in the world more mortal than that which is most hostile to mortality.

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§ 34.41.1  Deposits of iron are found almost everywhere, and they are formed even now in the Italian island of Elba, and there is very little difficulty in recognizing them as they are indicated by the actual colour of the earth. The method of melting out the veins is the same as in the case of copper. In Cappadocia alone it is merely a question whether the presence of iron is to be credited to water or to earth, as that region supplies iron from the furnaces when the earth has been flooded by the river Cerasus but not otherwise. There are numerous varieties of iron; the first difference depending on the kind of soil or of climate — some lands only yield a soft iron closely allied to lead, others a brittle and coppery kind that is specially to be avoided for the requirements of wheels and for nails, for which purpose the former quality is suitable; another variety of iron finds favour in short lengths and in nails for soldiers' boots; another variety experiences rust more quickly. All of these are called stricturae, 'edging ores,' a term not used in the case of other metals; it is, as assigned to these ores, derived from stringere aciem, 'to draw out a sharp edge.' There is also a great difference between smelting works, and a certain knurl of iron is smelted in them to give hardness to a blade, and by another process to giving solidity to anvils or the heads of hammers. But the chief difference depends on the water in which at intervals the red hot metal is plunged; the water in some districts is more serviceable than in others, and has made places famous for the celebrity of their iron, for instance Bambola and Tarragona in Spain and Como in Italy, although there are no iron mines in those places. But of all varieties of iron the palm goes to the Seric, sent us by the Seres with their fabrics and skins. The second prize goes to Parthian iron; and indeed no other kinds of iron are forged from pore metal, as all the rest have a softer alloy welded with them. In our part of the world, in some places the lode supplies this good quality, as for instance in the country of the Norici, in other places it is due to the method of working, as at Sulmona, and in others, as we have said, it is due to the water; inasmuch as for giving an edge there is a great difference between oil whetstones and water whetstones, and a finer edge is produced by oil. It is the custom to quench smaller iron forgings with oil, for fear that water might harden them and make them brittle. And it is remarkable that when a vein of ore is fused the iron becomes liquid like water and afterwards acquires a spongy and brittle texture. Human blood takes its revenge from iron, as if iron has come into contact with it, it becomes the more quickly liable to rust.

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§ 34.42.1  We will speak in the appropriate place about the lodestone and the sympathy which it has with iron. Iron is the only substance that catches the infection of that stone and retains it for a long period, taking hold of other iron, so that we may sometimes see a chain of rings; the ignorant lower classes call this 'live iron,' and wounds inflicted with it are more severe. This sort of stone forms in Biscaya also not in a continuous rocky stratum like the genuine lodestone alluded to but in a scattered pebbly formation or 'bubbling' — that is what they call it. I do not know whether it is equally useful for glass founding, as no one has hitherto tested it, but it certainly imparts the same magnetic property to iron. The architect Timochares had begun to use lodestone for constructing the vaulting in the Temple of Arsinoe at Alexandria, so that the iron statue contained in it might have the appearance of being suspended in mid air; but the project was interrupted by his own death and that of King Ptolemy who had ordered the work to be done in honour of his sister.

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§ 34.43.1  Iron ore is found in the greatest abundance of all metals. In the coastal part of Biscaya washed by the Atlantic there is a very high mountain which, marvellous to relate, consists entirely of that mineral, as we stated in our account of the lands bordering on the Ocean.

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§ 34.43.2  Iron that has been heated by fire is spoiled unless it is hardened by blows of the hammer. It is not suitable for hammering while it is red hot, nor before it begins to turn pale. If vinegar or alum is sprinkled on it it assumes the appearance of copper. It can be protected from rust by means of lead acetate, gypsum and vegetable pitch; rust is called by the Greeks 'antipathia,' natural opposite to iron. It is indeed said that the same result may also be produced by a religious ceremony, and that in the city called Zeugma on the river Euphrates there is an iron chain that was used by Alexander the Great in making the bridge at that place, the links of which [331 BC] that are new replacements are attacked by rust although the original links are free from it.

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§ 34.44.1  Iron supplies another medicinal service besides its use in surgery. It is beneficial both for adults and infants against noxious drugs for a circle to be drawn round them with iron or for a pointed iron weapon to be carried round them; and to have a fence of nails that have been extracted from tombs driven in in front of the threshold is a protection against attacks of nightmare, and a light prick made with the point of a weapon with which a man has been wounded is beneficial against sudden pains which bring a pricking sensation in the side and chest. Some maladies are cured by cauterization, but particularly the bite of a mad dog, inasmuch as even when the disease is getting the upper hand and when the patients show symptoms of hydrophobia they are relieved at once if the wound is cauterized. In many disorders, but especially in dysenteric cases, drinking water is heated with red-hot iron.

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§ 34.45.1  The list of remedies even includes rust itself, and this is the way in which Achilles is stated to have cured Telephus, whether he did it by means of a copper javelin or an iron one; at all events Achilles is so represented in painting, knocking the rust off a javelin with his sword. Rust of iron is obtained by scraping it off old nails with an iron tool dipped in water. The effect of rust is to unite wounds and dry them and staunch them, and applied as a liniment it relieves fox-mange. They also use it with wax and oil of myrtle for scabbiness of the eyelids and pimples in all parts of the body, but dipped in vinegar for erysipelas and also for scab, and, applied on pieces of cloth, for hangnails on the fingers and whitlows. Applied on wool it arrests women's discharges and for recent wounds it is useful diluted with wine and kneaded with myrrh, and for swellings round the anus dipped in vinegar. Used as a liniment it also relieves gout.

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§ 34.46.1  Scale of iron, obtained from a sharp edge or point, is also employed, and has an effect extremely like that of rust only more active, for which reason it is employed even for running at the eyes. It arrests haemorrhage, though it is with iron that wounds are chiefly made! And it also arrests female discharges. It is also applied against troubles of the spleen, and it cheeks haemorrhoidal swellings and creeping ulcers. Applied for a brief period in the form of a powder it is good for the eyelids. But its chief recommendation is its use in a wet plaster for cleaning wounds and fistulas and for eating out every kind of callosity and making new flesh on bones that have been denuded. The following are the ingredients: six obols of bee-glue, six drams of Cimolo earth, two drams of pounded copper, two of scale of iron, ten of wax and a pint of oil. When it is desired to cleanse or fill up wounds, wax plaster is added to these ingredients.

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§ 34.47.1  The next topic is the nature of lead, of which there are two kinds, black and white. White lead (tin) is the most valuable; the Greeks applied to it the name cassheros, and there was a legendary story of their going to islands of the Atlantic ocean to fetch it and importing it in platted vessels made of osiers and covered with stitched hides. It is now known that it is a product of Lusitania and Gallaecia found in the surface-strata of the ground which is sandy and of a black colour. It is only detected by its weight, and also tiny pebbles of it occasionally appear, especially in dry beds of torrents. The miners wash this sand and heat the deposit in furnaces. It is also found in the goldmines called 'alutiae,' through which a stream of water is passed that washes out black pebbles of tin mottled with small white spots, and of the same weight as gold, and consequently they remain with the gold in the bowls in which it is collected, and afterwards are separated in the furnaces, and fused and melted into white lead. Black lead does not occur in Gallaecia, although the neighbouring country of Biscaya has large quantities of black lead only; and white lead yields no silver, although it is obtained from black lead. Black lead cannot be soldered with black without a layer of white lead, nor can white be soldered to black without oil, nor can even white lead be soldered with white without some black lead. Homer testifies that white lead or tin had a high position even in the Trojan period, he giving it the name of cassiteros. There are two different sources of black lead, as it is either found in a vein of its own and produces no other substance mixed with it, or it forms together with silver, and is smelted with the two veins mixed together. Of this substance the liquid that melts first in the furnaces is called stagnum; the second liquid is argentiferous lead, and the residue left in the furnaces is impure lead which forms a third part of the vein originally put in; when this is again fused it gives black lead, having lost two-ninths in bulk.

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§ 34.48.1  When copper vessels are coated with stagnum the contents have a more agreeable taste and the formation of destructive verdigris is prevented, and, what is remarkable, the weight is not increased. Also, as we have said, it used to be employed at Brindisi as a material for making mirrors which were very celebrated, until even servant-maids began to use silver ones. At the present day a counterfeit stagnum is made by adding one part of white copper to two parts of white lead; and it is also made in another way by mixing together equal weights of white and black lead: the latter compound some people now call 'silver mixture.' The same people also give the name of tertiary to a compound containing two portions of black lead and one of white; its price is 20 denarii a pound. It is used for soldering pipes. More dishonest makers add to tertiary an equal amount of white lead and call it 'silver mixture,' and use it melted for plating by immersion any articles they wish. They put the price of this last at 70 denarii for 1 lb: the price of pure white lead without alloy is 80 denarii, and of black lead 7 denarii.

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§ 34.48.2  The substance of white lead has more dryness, whereas that of black lead is entirely moist. Consequently white lead cannot be used for anything without an admixture of another metal, nor can it be employed for soldering silver, because the silver melts before the white lead. And it is asserted that if a smaller quantity of black lead than is necessary is mixed with the white, it corrodes the silver. A method discovered in the Gallic provinces is to plate bronze articles with white lead so as to make them almost indistinguishable from silver; articles thus treated are called 'incoctilia.' Later they also proceeded in the town Alesia to plate with silver in a similar manner, particularly ornaments for horses and pack animals and yokes of oxen; the distinction of developing this method belongs to Bordeaux. Then they proceeded to decorate two-wheeled war-chariots, chaises and four-wheeled carriages in a similar manner, a luxurious practice that has now got to using not only silver but even gold statuettes, and it is now called good taste to subject to wear and tear on carriages ornaments that it was once thought extravagant to see on a goblet!

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§ 34.48.3  It is a test of white lead when melted and poured on papyrus to seem to have burst the paper by its weight and not by its heat. India possesses neither copper nor lead, and procures them in exchange for her precious stones and pearls.

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§ 34.49.1  Black lead which we use to make pipes and sheets is excavated with considerable labour in Spain and through the whole of the Gallic provinces, but in Britain it is found in the surface-stratum of the earth in such abundance that there is a law prohibiting the production of more than a certain amount. The various kinds of black lead have the following names — Oviedo lead, Capraria lead, Oleastrum lead, though there is no difference between them provided the slag has been carefully smelted away. It is a remarkable fact in the case of these mines only that when they have been abandoned they replenish themselves and become more productive. This seems to be due to the air infusing itself to saturation through the open orifices, just as a miscarriage seems to make some women more prolific. This was recently observed in the Salutariensian mine in Baetica, which used to be let at a rent of 200,000 denarii a year, but which was then abandoned, and subsequently let for 255,000. Likewise the Antonian mine in the same province from the same rent has reached a return of 400,000 sesterces. It is also remarkable that vessels made of lead will not melt if they have water put in them, but if to the water a pebble or quarter-as coin is added, the fire burns through the vessel.

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§ 34.50.1  In medicine lead is used by itself to remove scars, and leaden plates are applied to the region of the loins and kidneys for their comparative chilly nature to check the attacks of venereal passions, and the libidinous dreams that cause spontaneous emissions to the extent of constituting a kind of disease. It is recorded that the pleader Calvus used these plates to control himself and to preserve his bodily strength for laborious study. Nero, whom heaven was pleased to make emperor, used to have a plate of lead on his chest when singing songs fartissimo, thus showing a method for preserving the voice. For medical purposes lead is melted in earthen vessels, a layer of finely powdered sulphur being put underneath it; on this thin plates are laid and covered with sulphur and stirred up with an iron spit. While it is being melted, the breathing passages should be protected during the operation, otherwise the noxious and deadly vapour of the lead furnace is inhaled: it is hurtful to dogs with special rapidity, but the vapour of all metals is so to flies and gnats, owing to which those annoyances are not found in mines.

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§ 34.50.2  Some people during the process of smelting mix lead-filings with the sulphur, and others use lead acetate in preference to sulphur. Another use of lead is to make a wash — it is employed in medicine — pieces of lead with rainwater added being ground against themselves in leaden mortars till the whole assumes a thick consistency, and then water floating on the top is removed with sponges and the very thick sediment left when dry is divided into tablets. Some people grind up lead filings in this way and some also mix in some lead ore; but others use vinegar, others wine, others grease, others oil of roses. Some prefer to grind the lead with a stone pestle in a stone mortar, and especially one made of Thebes stone, and this process produces a drug of a whiter colour. Calcined lead is washed like antimony and cadmea. It has the property of acting as an astringent and arresting haemorrhage and of promoting cicatrisation. It is of the same utility also in medicines for the eyes, especially as preventing their procidence, and for the cavities or excrescences left by ulcers and for fissures of the anus or haemorrhoids and swellings of the anus. For these purposes lead lotion is extremely efficient, while for creeping or foul ulcers ash of calcined lead is useful; and the benefit they produce is on the same lines as in the case of sheets of papyrus. The lead is burnt in small sheets mixed with sulphur, in shallow vessels, being stirred with iron rods or fennel stalks till the molten metal is reduced to ashes; then after being cooled off it is ground into powder. Another process is to boil lead filings in a vessel of raw earth in furnaces till the earthenware is completely baked. Some mix with it an equal amount of lead acetate or of barley and grind this mixture, in the way stated in the case of raw lead, and prefer the lead treated in this way to the Cyprus slag.

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§ 34.51.1  The dross of lead is also utilized. The best is that which approximates in colour most closely to yellow, containing no remnants of lead or sulphur, and does not look earthy. This is broken up into small fragments and washed in mortars till the water assumes a yellow colour, and poured off into a clean vessel, and the process is repeated several times till the most valuable part settles as a sediment at the bottom. Lead dross has the same effects as lead, but to a more active degree. This suggests a remark on the marvellous efficacy of human experiment, which has not left even the dregs of substances and the foulest refuse untested in such numerous ways!

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§ 34.52.1  Slag is also made from lead in the same way as from Cyprus copper; it is washed with rain water in linen sheets of fine texture and the earthy particles are got rid of by rinsing, and the residue is sifted and then ground. Some prefer to separate the powder with a feather, and to grind it up with aromatic wine.

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§ 34.53.1  There is also molybdaeaa (which in another place we have called galena); it is a mineral compound of silver and lead. It is better the more golden its colour and the less leaden: it is friable and of moderate weight. When boiled with oil it acquires the colour of liver. It is also found adhering to furnaces in which gold and silver are smelted; in this case it is called metallic sulphide of lead. The kind most highly esteemed is produced at Zephyrium. Varieties with the smallest admixture of earth and of stone are approved of; they are melted and washed like dross. It is used in preparing a particular emollient plaster for soothing and cooling ulcers and in plasters which are not applied with bandages but which they use as a liniment to promote cicatrisation on the bodies of delicate persons and on the more tender parts. It is a composition of three pounds of sulphide of lead and one of wax with half a pint of oil, which is added with solid lees of olives in the case of an elderly patient. Also combined with scum of silver and dross of lead it is applied warm for fomenting dysentery and constipation.

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§ 34.54.1  'Psimithium' also, that is cerussa or lead of acetate, is produced at lead-works. The most highly spoken of is in Rhodes. It is made from very fine shavings of lead placed over a vessel of very sour vinegar and so made to drip down. What falls from the lead into the actual vinegar is dried and then ground and sifted, and then again mixed with vinegar and divided into tablets and dried in the sun, in summertime. There is also another way of making it, by putting the lead into jars of vinegar kept sealed up for ten days and then scraping off the sort of decayed metal on it and putting it back in the vinegar, till the whole of it is used up. The stuff scraped off is ground up and sifted and heated in shallow vessels and stirred with small rods till it turns red and becomes like sandarach, realgar. Then it is washed with fresh water till all the cloudy impurities have been removed. Afterwards it is dried in a similar way and divided into tablets. Its properties are the same as those of the substances mentioned above, only it is the mildest of them all, and beside that, it is useful for giving women a fair complexion; but like scum of silver, it is a deadly poison. The lead acetate itself if afterwards melted becomes red.

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§ 34.55.1  Of realgar also the properties have been almost completely described. It is found both in goldmines and silver-mines; the redder it is and the more it gives off a poisonous scent of sulphur and the purer and more friable it is, the better it is. It acts as a cleanser, as a check to bleeding, as a calorific and a caustic, being most remarkable for its corrosive property; used as a liniment with vinegar it removes fox-mange; it forms an ingredient in eyewashes, and taken with honey it cleans out the throat. It also produces a clear and melodious voice, and mixed with turpentine and taken in the food, is an agreeable remedy for asthma and cough; its vapour also remedies the same complaints if merely used as a fumigation with cedar wood.

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§ 34.56.1  Orpiment also is obtained from the same substance. The best is of a colour of even the finest-coloured gold, but the paler sort or what resembles sandarach is judged inferior. There is also a third class which combines the colours of gold and of sandarach. Both of the latter are scaly, but the other is dry and pure, and divided in a delicate tracery of veins. Its properties are the same as mentioned above, but more active. Accordingly it is used as an ingredient in cauteries and depilatories. It also removes overgrowths of flesh on to the nails, and pimples in the nostrils and swellings of the anus and all excrescences. To increase its efficacy it is heated in a new earthenware pot till it changes its colour.

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§ 35.1.1  WE have now practically indicated the nature of metals, in which wealth consists, and of the substances related to them, connecting the facts in such a way as to indicate at the same time the enormous topic of medicine and the mysteries of the manufactories and the fastidious subtlety of the processes of carving and modelling and dyeing. There remain the various kinds of earth and of stones, forming an even more extensive series, each of which has been treated in many whole volumes, especially by Greeks. For our part in these topics we shall adhere to the brevity suitable to our plan, yet omitting nothing that is necessary or follows a law of Nature. And first we shall say what remains to be said about painting, an art that was formerly illustrious, at the time when it was in high demand with kings and nations and when it ennobled others whom it deigned to transmit to posterity. But at the present time it has been entirely ousted by marbles, and indeed finally also by gold, and not only to the point that whole party-walls are covered — we have also marble engraved with designs and embossed marble slabs carved in wriggling lines to represent objects and animals. We are no longer content with panels nor with surfaces displaying broadly a range of mountains in a bedchamber; we have begun even to paint on the masonry. This was invented in the principate of Claudius, while in the time of Nero a plan was discovered to give variety to uniformity by inserting markings that were not present in the embossed marble surface, so that Numidian stone might show oval lines and Synnadic marble be picked out with purple, just as fastidious luxury would have liked them to be by nature. These are our resources to supplement the mountains when they fail us, and luxury is always busy in the effort to secure that if a fire occurs it may lose as much as possible.

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§ 35.2.1  The painting of portraits, used to transmit through the ages extremely correct likenesses of persons, has entirely gone out. Bronze shields are now set up as monuments with a design in silver, with a dim outline of men's figures; heads of statues are exchanged for others about which before now actually sarcastic epigrams have been current: so universally is a display of material preferred to a recognizable likeness of one's own self. And in the midst of all this, people tapestry the walls of their picture-galleries with old pictures, and they prize likenesses of strangers, while as for themselves they imagine that the honour only consists in the price, for their heir to break up the statue and haul it out of the house with a noose. Consequently nobody's likeness lives and they leave behind them portraits that represent their money, not themselves. The same people decorate even their own anointing-rooms with portraits of athletes of the wrestling-ring, and display all round their bedrooms and carry about with them likenesses of Epicurus; they offer sacrifices on his birthday, and keep his festival, which they call the eikas on the 20th day of every month — these of all people, whose desire it is not to be known even when alive! That is exactly how things are: indolence has destroyed the arts, and since our minds cannot be portrayed, our bodily features are also neglected. In the halls of our ancestors it was otherwise; portraits were the objects displayed to be looked at, not statues by foreign artists, nor bronzes nor marbles, but wax models of faces were set out each on a separate sideboard, to furnish likenesses to be carded in procession at a funeral in the clan, and always when some member of it passed away the entire company of his house that had ever existed was present. The pedigrees too were traced in a spread of lines running near the several painted portraits. The archive-rooms were kept filled with books of records and with written memorials of official careers. Outside the houses and round the doorways there were other presentations of those mighty spirits, with spoils taken from the enemy fastened to them, which even one who bought the house was not permitted to unfasten, and the mansions eternally celebrated a triumph even though they changed their masters. This acted as a mighty incentive, when every day the very walls reproached an unwarlike owner with intruding on the triumphs of another! There is extant an indignant speech by the pleader Messala protesting against the insertion among the likenesses of his family of a bust not belonging to them but to the family of the Laevini. similar reason extracted from old Messala the volumes he composed 'On Families,' because when passing through the hall of Scipio Pomponianus he had observed the Salvittones that was their former surname — in consequence of an act of adoption by will creeping into others' preserves, to the discredit of the Scipios called Africanus. But the Messala family must excuse me if I say that even to lay a false claim to the portraits of famous men showed some love for their virtues, and was much more honourable than to entail by one's conduct that nobody should seek to obtain one's own portraits!

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§ 35.2.2  We must not pass over a novelty that has also been invented, in that likenesses made, if not of gold or statues in silver, yet at all events of bronze are set up in the libraries in honour of those whose immortal spirits speak to us in the same places, nay more, even imaginary likenesses are modelled and our affection gives birth to countenances that have not been handed down to us, as occurs in the case of Homer. At any rate in my view at all events there is no greater kind of happiness than that all people for all time should desire to know what kind of a man a person was. At Rome this practice originated with Asinius Pollio, who first by founding a library made works of genius the property of the public.

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§ 35.2.3  Whether this practice began earlier, with the Kings of Alexandria and of Pergamum, between whom there had been such a keen competition in founding libraries, I cannot readily say. The existence of a strong passion for portraits in former days is evidenced by Atticus the friend of Cicero in the volume he published on the subject and by the most benevolent invention of Marcus Varro, who actually by some means inserted in a prolific output of volumes portraits of seven hundred famous people, not allowing their likenesses to disappear or the lapse of ages to prevail against immortality in men. Herein Varro was the inventor of a benefit that even the gods might envy, since he not only bestowed immortality but despatched it all over the world, enabling his subjects to be ubiquitous, like the gods. This was a service Varro rendered to strangers.

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§ 35.3.1  But the first person to institute the custom of privately dedicating the shields with portraits in a temple or public place, I find, was Appius Claudius, the consul with Publius Servilius in the 259th year of the city. He set up his ancestors in the temple of Bellona, and desired them to be in full view on an elevated spot, and the inscriptions stating their honours to be read. This is a seemly device, especially if miniature likenesses of a swarm of children at the sides display a sort of brood of nestlings; shields of this description everybody views with pleasure and approval.

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§ 35.4.1  After him Marcus Aemilius, Quintus Lutatius's colleague in the consulship, set up portrait-shields not only in the Basilica Aemilia but also in his own home, and in doing this he was following a truly warlike example; for the shields which contained the likenesses resembled those employed in the fighting at Troy; and this indeed gave them their name of clupei which is not derived from the word meaning 'to be celebrated,' as the misguided ingenuity of scholars has made out. It is a copious inspiration of valour for there to be a representation on a shield of the countenance of him who once used it. The Carthaginians habitually made both shields and statues of gold, and carried these with them: at all events Marcius, who took vengeance for the Scipios in Spain, found a shield of this kind that belonged to Hasdrubal, in that general's camp when he captured it, and this shield was hung above the portals of the temple on the Capitol till the first fire. Indeed it is [83 B.C.] noticed that our ancestors felt so little anxiety about this matter that in the 575th year of the city, when the consuls were Lucius Maulius and Quintus Fulvius, the person who contracted for the safety of the Capitol, Marcus Aufidius, informed the Senate that the shields which for a good many censorship periods past had been scheduled as made of bronze were really silver.

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§ 35.5.1  The question as to the origin of the art of painting is uncertain and it does not belong to the plan of this work. The Egyptians declare that it was invented among themselves six thousand years ago before it passed over into Greece — which is clearly an idle assertion. As to the Greeks, some of them say it was discovered at Sikyon, others in Corinth, but all agree that it began with tracing an outline round a man's shadow and consequently that pictures were originally done in this wax, but the second stage when a more elaborate method had been invented was done in a single colour and called monochrome, a method still in use at the present day. Line-drawing was invented by the Egyptian Philocles or by the Corinthian Cleanthes, but it was first practised by the Corinthian Aridices and the Sikyonian Telephanes — these were at that stage not using any colour, yet already adding lines here and there to the interior of the outlines; hence it became their custom to write on the pictures the names of the persons represented. Ecphantus of Corinth is said to have been the first to daub these drawings with a pigment made of powdered earthenware. We shall show below that this was another person, bearing the same name, not the one recorded by Cornelius Nepos to have followed into Italy Demaratus the father of the Roman king Tarquinius Priscus when he fled from Corinth to escape the violence of the tyrant Cypselus.

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§ 35.6.1  For the art of painting had already been brought to perfection even in Italy. At all events there survive even today in the temples at Ardea paintings that are older than the city of Rome, which to me at all events are incomparably remarkable, surviving for so long a period as though freshly painted, although unprotected by a roof. Similarly at Lanuvium, where there are an Atalanta and a Helena close together, nude figures, painted by the same artist, each of outstanding beauty (the former shown as a virgin), and not damaged even by the collapse of the temple. The Emperor Caligula from lustful motives attempted to remove them, but the consistency of the plaster would not allow this to be done. There are pictures surviving at Caere that are even older. And whoever carefully judges these works will admit that none of the arts reached full perfection more quickly, inasmuch as it is clear that painting did not exist in the Trojan period.

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§ 35.7.1  In Rome also honour was fully attained by this art at an early date, inasmuch as a very distinguished clan of the Fabii derived from it their surname of Pictor, 'Painter,' and the first holder of the name himself painted the Temple of Health in the year 450 from the foundation of the City: the work survived down to our own period, when the temple was destroyed by fire in the principate of Claudius. Next in celebrity was a painting by the poet Pacuvius in the temple of Hercules in the Forum Boarium. Pacuvius was the son of a sister of Ennius, and he added distinction to the art of painting at Rome by reason of his fame as a playwright. After Pacuvius, painting was not esteemed as handiwork for persons of station, unless one chooses to recall a knight of Rome named Turpilius, from Venetia, in our own generation, because of his beautiful works still surviving at Verona. Turpilius painted with his left hand, a thing recorded of no preceding artist. Titedius Labeo, a man of praetorian rank who had actually held the office of Proconsul of the Province of Narbonne, and who died lately in extreme old age, used to be proud of his miniatures, but this was laughed at and actually damaged his reputation. There was also a celebrated debate on the subject of painting held between some men of eminence which must not be omitted, when the former consul and winner of a triumph Quintus Pedius, who was appointed by the Dictator Caesar as his joint heir with Augustus, had a grandson Quintus Pedius who was born dumb; in this debate the orator Messala, of whose family the boy's grandmother had been a member, gave the advice that the boy should have lessons in painting, and his late lamented Majesty Augustus also approved of the plan. The child made great progress in the art, but died before he grew up. But painting chiefly derived its rise to esteem at Rome, in my judgement, from Manius Valerius Maximus Messala, who in the year 490 after the foundation of the city first showed a picture in public on a side wall of the Curia Hostilia: the subject being the battle in Sicily in which he had defeated the Carthaginians and hero. The same thing was also done by Lucius Scipio, who put up in the Capitol a picture of his Asiatic victory; this is said to have annoyed his brother Africanus, not without reason, as his son had been taken prisoner in that battle. Also Lucius Hostilius Mancinus who had been the first to force an entrance into Carthage incurred a very similar offence with Aemilianus by displaying in the forum a picture of the plan of the city and of the attacks upon it and by himself standing by it and describing to the public looking on the details of the siege, a piece of popularity-hunting which won him the consulship at the next election. Also the stage erected for the shows given by Claudius Pulcher won great admiration for its painting, as crows were seen trying to alight on the roof tiles represented on the scenery, quite taken in by its realism.

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§ 35.8.1  The high esteem attached officially to foreign paintings at Rome originated from Lucius Mummius who from his victory received the surname of Achaicus. At the sale of booty captured King Attalus bought for 600,000 denarii a picture of Father Liber or Dionysus by Aristides, but the price surprised Mummius, who suspecting there must be some merit in the picture of which he was himself unaware had the picture called back, in spite of Attalus's strong protests, and placed it in the Shrine of Ceres: the first instance, I believe, of a foreign picture becoming state-property at Rome. After this I see that they were commonly placed even in the forum: to this is due the famous witticism df the pleader Crassus, when appearing in a case below The Old Shops; a witness called kept asking him: 'Now tell me, Crassus, what sort of a person do you take me to be?' 'That sort of a person,' said Crassus, pointing to a picture of a Gaul putting out his tongue in a very unbecoming fashion. It was also in the forum that there was the picture of the Old Shepherd with his Staff, about which the Teuton envoy when asked what he thought was the value of it said that he would rather not have even the living original as a gift!

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§ 35.9.1  But it was the Dictator Caesar who gave outstanding public importance to pictures by dedicating paintings of Ajax and Medea in front of the temple of Venus Genetrix; and after him Marcus Agrippa, a man who stood nearer to rustic simplicity than to refinements. At all events there is preserved a speech of Agrippa, lofty in tone and worthy of the greatest of the citizens, on the question of making all pictures and statues national property, a procedure which would have been preferable to banishing them to country houses. However, that same severe spirit paid the city of Cyzicus 1,200,000 sesterces for two pictures, an Ajax and an Aphrodite; he had also had small paintings let into the marble even in the warmest part of his hot baths; which were removed a short time ago when the Baths were being repaired.

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§ 35.10.1  His late lamented Majesty Augustus went beyond all others, in placing two pictures in the most frequented part of his Forum, one with a likeness of War and Triumph, and one with the Castors and Victory. He also erected in the Temple of his father Caesar pictures we shall specify in giving the names of artists. He likewise let into a wall in the curia which he was dedicating in the Comitium: a Nemea seated on a lion, holding a palm-branch in her hand, and standing at her side an old man leaning on a stick and with a picture of a two-horse chariot hung up over his head, on which there was an inscription saying that it was an encaustic design — such is the term which he employed — by Nicias. The second picture is remarkable for displaying the close family likeness between a son in the prime of life and an elderly father, allowing for the difference of age: above them soars an eagle with a snake in its claws; Philochares has stated this work to be by him showing the immeasurable power exercised by art if one merely considers this picture alone, inasmuch as thanks to Philochares two otherwise quite obscure persons Glaucio and his son Aristippus after all these centuries have passed still stand in the view of the senate of the Roman nation! The most ungracious emperor Tiberius also placed pictures in the temple of Augustus himself which we shall soon mention. Thus much for the dignity of this now expiring art.

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§ 35.11.1  We stated what were the various single colours used by the first painters when we were discussing while on the subject of metals the pigments called monochromes from the class of painting for which they are used. Subsequent a inventions and their authors and dates we shall specify in enumerating the artists, because a prior motive for the work now in hand is to indicate the nature of colours. Eventually art differentiated itself, and discovered light and shade, contrast of colours heightening their effect reciprocally. Then came the final adjunct of shine, quite a different thing from light. The opposition between shine and light on the one hand and shade on the other was called contrast, while the juxtaposition of colours and their passage one into another was termed attunement.

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§ 35.12.1  Some colours are sombre and some brilliant, the difference being due to the nature of the substances or to their mixture. The brilliant colours, which the patron supplies at his own expense to the painter, are cinnabar, Armenium, dragon's blood, gold-solder, indigo, bright purple; the rest are sombre. Of the whole list some are natural colours and some artificial. Natural colours are sinopis, ruddle, Paraetonium, Melinum, Eretrian earth and orpiment; all the rest are artificial, and first of all those which we specified among minerals, and moreover among the commoner kinds yellow ochre, burnt lead acetate, realgar, sandyx, Syrian colour and black.

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§ 35.13.1  Sinopis was first discovered in Pontus, and hence takes its name from the city of Sinope. It is also produced in Egypt, the Balearic Islands and Africa, but the best is what is extracted from the caverns of Lemnos and Cappadocia, the part found adhering to the rock being rated highest. The lumps of it are self-coloured, but speckled on the outside. It was employed in old times to give a glow. There are three kinds of Sinopis, the red, the faintly red and the intermediate. The price of the best is 2 denarii a pound: this is used for painting with a brush or else for colouring wood; the kind imported from Africa costs 8 as-pieces a pound, and is called chick-pea colour; it is of a deeper red than the other kinds, and more useful for panels. The same price is charged for the kind called 'low toned' which is of a very dusky colour. It is employed for the lower parts of panelling; but used as a drug it has a soothing effect in lozenges and plasters and poultices, mixing easily either dry or moistened, as a remedy for ulcers in the humid parts of the body such as the mouth and the anus. Used in an enema it arrests diarrhoea, and taken through the mouth in doses of one denarius weight it checks menstruation. Applied in a burnt state, particularly with wine, it dries roughnesses of the eyes.

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§ 35.14.1  Some persons have wished to make out that Sinopis only consists in a kind of red-ochre of inferior quality, as they gave the palm to the red ochre of Lemnos. This last approximates very closely to cinnabar and it was very famous in old days, together with the island that produces it; it used only to be sold in sealed packages, from which it got the name of 'seal red-ochre.' It is used to supply an undercoating to cinnabar and also for adulterating cinnabar. In medicine it is a substance ranked very highly. Used as a liniment round the eyes it relieves defluxions and pains, and checks the discharge from eye-tumours; it is given in vinegar as a draught in cases of vomiting or spitting blood. It is also taken as a draught for troubles of the spleen and kidneys and for excessive menstruation; and likewise as a remedy for poisons and snake bites and the sting of sea serpents; hence it is in common use for all antidotes.

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§ 35.15.1  Among the remaining kinds of red ochre the most useful for builders are the Egyptian and the African varieties, as they are most thoroughly absorbed by plaster. Red ochre is also found in a native state in iron mines.

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§ 35.16.1  It is also manufactured by burning ochre in new earthen pots lined with clay. The more completely it is calcined in the furnaces the better its quality. All kinds of red ochre have a drying property, and consequently will be found suitable in plasters even for erysipelas.

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§ 35.17.1  Half a pound of sinopis from Pontus, ten pounds of bright yellow ochre and two pounds of Greek earth of Melos mixed together and pounded up for twelve successive days make 'leucophorum,' a cement used in applying gold-leaf to wood.

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§ 35.18.1  Paraetonium is called after the place of that name in Egypt. It is said to be sea-foam hardened with mud, and this is why tiny shells are found in it. It also occurs in the island of Crete and in Cyrene. At Rome it is adulterated with Cimolian clay which has been boiled and thickened. The price of the best quality is 50 denarii per 6 lbs. It is the most greasy of all the white colours and makes the most tenacious for plasters because of its smoothness.

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§ 35.19.1  Melinum also is a white colour, the best occurring in the island of Melos. It is found in Samos also, but the Samian is not used by painters, because it is excessively greasy. It is dug up in Samos by people lying on the ground and searching for a vein among the rocks. It has the same use in medicine as earth of Eretria; it also dries the tongue by contact, and acts as a depilatory, with a cleansing effect. It costs a sesterce a pound.

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§ 35.19.2  The third of the white pigments is ceruse or lead acetate, the nature of which we have stated in speaking of the ores of lead. There was also once a native ceruse found on the estate of Theodotus at Smyrna, which was employed in old days for painting ships. At the present time all ceruse is manufactured from lead and vinegar, as we said.

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§ 35.20.1  Burnt ceruse (usta) was discovered by accident, when some was burnt up in jars in a fire at Piraeus. It was first employed by Nicias above mentioned. Asiatic ceruse is now thought the best; it is also called purple ceruse and it costs 6 denarii per lb. It is also made at Rome by calcining yellow ochre which is as hard as marble and quenching it with vinegar. Burnt ceruse is indispensable for representing shadows.

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§ 35.21.1  Eretrian earth is named from the country that produces it. It was employed by Nicomachus and Parrhasius. It has cooling and emollient effects and fills lip wounds; if boiled it is prescribed as a desiccative, and is useful for pains in the head and for detecting internal suppurations, as these are shown to be present if when it is applied with water it immediately dries up.

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§ 35.22.1  According to Juba sandarach or realgar and ochre are products of the island of Topazus in the Red Sea, but they are not imported from those parts to us. We have stated the method of making sandarach. An adulterated sandarach is also made from ceruse boiled in a furnace. It ought to be flame-coloured. Its price is 5 asses per lb.

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§ 35.23.1  If ceruse is mixed with red ochre in equal quantities and burnt, it produces sandyx or vermilion — though it is true that I observe Virgil held the view that sandyx is a plant, from the line: Sandyx self-grown shall clothe the pasturing lambs. Its cost per lb. is half that of sandarach. No other colours weigh heavier than these.

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§ 35.24.1  Among the artificial colours is also Syrian colour, which as we said is used as an undercoating for cinnabar and red lead. It is made by mixing sinopis and sandyx together.

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§ 35.25.1  Black pigment will also be classed among the artificial colours, although it is also derived from earth in two ways; it either exudes from the earth like the brine in salt pits, or actual earth of a sulphur colour is approved for the purpose. Painters have been known to dig up charred remains from graves thus violated to supply it. All these plans are troublesome and new-fangled; for black paint can he made in a variety of ways from the soot produced by burning resin or pitch, owing to which factories have actually been built with no exit for the smoke produced by this process. The most esteemed black paint is obtained in the same way from the wood of the pitch-pine. It is adulterated by mixing it with the soot of furnaces and baths, which is used as a material for writing. Some people calcine dried wine-lees, and declare that if the lees from a good wine are used this ink has the appearance of Indian ink. The very celebrated painters Polygnotus and Micon at Athens made black paint from the skins of grapes, and called it grape-lees ink. Apelles invented the method of making black from burnt ivory; the Greek name for this is elephantinon. There is also an Indian black, imported from India, the composition of which I have not yet discovered. A black is also produced with dyes from the black florescence which adheres to bronze pans. One is also made by burning logs of pitch-pine and pounding the charcoal in a mortar. The cuttlefish has, a remarkable property in forming a black secretion, but no colour is made from this. The preparation of all black is completed by exposure to the sun, black for writing ink receiving an admixture of gum and black for painting walls an admixture of glue. Black pigment that has been dissolved in vinegar is difficult to wash out.

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§ 35.26.1  Among the remaining colours which because of their high cost, as we said, are supplied by patrons, dark purple holds the first place. It is produced by dipping silversmiths' earth along with purple cloth and in like manner, the earth absorbing the colour more quickly than the wool. The best is that which being the first formed in the boiling cauldron becomes saturated with the dyes in their primary state, and the next best produced when white earth is added to the same liquor after the first has been removed; and every time this is done the quality deteriorates, the liquid becoming more diluted at each stage. The reason why the dark purple of Pozzuoli is more highly praised than that of Tyre or Gaetulia or Laconia, places which produce the most costly purples, is that it combines most easily with hysginum and madder which cannot help absorbing it. The cheapest comes from Canusium. The price is from one to thirty denarii per lb. Painters using it put a coat of sandyx underneath and then add a coat of dark purple mixed with egg, and so produce the brilliance of cinnabar; if they wish instead to produce the glow of purple, they lay a coat of blue underneath, and then cover this with dark purple mixed with egg.

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§ 35.27.1  Of next greatest importance after this is indigo, a product of India, being a slime that adheres to the scum upon reeds. When it is sifted out it is black, but in dilution it yields a marvellous mixture of purple and blue. There is another kind of it that floats on the surface of the pans in the purple dye-shops, and this is the 'scum of purple.' People who adulterate it stain pigeons' droppings with genuine indigo, or else colour earth of Selinus or ring-earth with woad. It can be tested by means of a live coal, as if genuine it gives off a brilliant purple flame and a smell of the sea while it smokes; on this account some people think that it is collected from rocks on the coast. The price of indigo is 20 denarii per pound. Used medicinally it allays cramps and fits and dries up sores.

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§ 35.28.1  Armenia sends us the substance Azarite, etc. named after it Armenian. This also is a mineral that is dyed like malachite, and the best is that which most closely approximates to that substance, the colour partaking also of dark blue. Its price used to be rated at 300 sesterces per pound. A sand has been found all over the Spanish provinces that admits of similar preparation, and accordingly the price has dropped to as low as six denarii. It differs from dark blue by a light white glow which renders this blue colour thinner in comparison. It is only used in medicine to give nourishment to the hair, and especially the eyelashes.

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§ 35.29.1  There are also two colours of a very cheap class that have been recently discovered: one is the green called Appiah, which counterfeits malachite; just as if there were too few spurious varieties of it already! It is made from a green earth and is valued at a sesterce per pound.

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§ 35.30.1  The other colour is that called 'ring-white,' which is used to give brilliance of complexion in paintings of women. This itself also is made from white earth mixed with glass stones from the rings of the lower classes, which accounts for the name 'ring-white.'

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§ 35.31.1  Of all the colours those which love a dry surface of white clay, and refuse to be applied to a damp plaster, are purple, indigo, blue, Melian, orpiment, Appian and ceruse. Wax is stained with these same colours for encaustic paintings, a sort of process which cannot be applied to walls but is common for ships of the navy, and indeed nowadays also for cargo vessels, since we even decorate vehicles with paintings, so that no one need be surprised that even logs for funeral pyres are painted; and we like gladiators going into the fray to ride in splendour to the scene of their death or at all events of carnage. Thus to contemplate all these numbers and great variety of colours prompts us to marvel at former generations.

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§ 35.32.1  Four colours only were used by the illustrious painters Apelles, Aetion, Melanthius and Nicomachus to execute their immortal works — of whites, Melinum; of yellow ochres, Attic; of reds, Pontic Sinopis; of blacks, atramentum — although their pictures each sold for the wealth of a whole town. Nowadays when purple finds its way even on to party-walls and when India contributes the mud of her rivers and the gore of her snakes and elephants, there is no such thing as high-class painting. Everything in fact was superior in the days when resources were scantier. The reason for this is that, as we said before, it is values of material and not of genius that people are now on the lookout for.

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§ 35.33.1  One folly of our generation also in the matter of painting I will not leave out. The Emperor Nero had ordered his portrait to be painted on a colossal scale, on linen 120 ft. high, a thing unknown hitherto; this picture when finished, in the Gardens of Maius, was struck by lightning and destroyed by fire, together with the best part of the Gardens. When a freedman of Nero was giving at Antium a gladiatorial show, the public porticoes were covered with paintings, so we are told, containing life-like portraits of all the gladiators and assistants. This portraiture of gladiators has been the highest interest in art for many generations now; but it was Gaius Terentius Lucanus who began the practice of having pictures made of gladiatorial shows and exhibited in public; in honour of his grandfather who had adopted him he provided thirty pairs of gladiators in the forum for three consecutive days, and exhibited a picture of their matches in the Grove of Diana.

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§ 35.34.1  I will now run through as briefly as possible the artists eminent in painting; and it is not consistent with the plan of this work to go into such detail; and accordingly it will be enough just to give the names of some of them even in passing and in course of mentioning others, with the exception of the famous works of art which whether still extant or now lost it will be proper to particularize.

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§ 35.34.2  In this department the exactitude of the Greeks is inconsistent, in placing the painters many Olympiads after the sculptors in bronze and chasers in metal, and putting the first in the 90th Olympiad, although it is said that even Pheidias himself was a painter to begin with, and that there was a shield at Athens that had been painted by him; and although moreover it is universally admitted that his brother Panaenus came in the 83rd Olympiad, who painted the inner surface of a shield of Athene at Elis made by Colotes, Pheidias's pupil and assistant in making the statue of Olympian Zeus. And then, is it not equally admitted that Candaules, the last King of Lydia of the Heraclid line, who was also commonly known by the name of Myrsilus, gave its weight in gold for a picture of the painter Bularchus representing a battle 'with the Magnetes.' So high was the value already set on the art of painting. This must have occurred at about the time of Romulus, since Candaules died in the 18th Olympiad, or, according to some accounts, in the same year as Romulus, making it clear, if I am not mistaken, and that the art had already achieved celebrity, and in fact a perfection. And if we are bound to accept this conclusion, it becomes clear at the same time that the first stages were at a much earlier date and that the painters in monochrome, whose date is not handed down to us, came considerably earlier — Hygiaenon, Dinias, Charmadas and Eumarus of Athens, the last being the earliest artist to distinguish the male from the female sex in painting, and venturing to reproduce every sort of figure; and Cimon of Kleonai who improved on the inventions of Eumarus. It was Cimon who first invented 'catagrapha,' that is, images in 'three-quarter,' and who varied the aspect of the features, representing them as looking backward or upward or downward; he showed the attachments of the limbs, displayed the veins, and moreover introduced wrinkles and folds in the drapery. Indeed the brother of Pheidias, Panaenus, even painted the battle at Marathon between the Athenians and Persians; so widely established had the employment of colour now become and such perfection of art had been attained that he is said to have introduced actual portraits of the generals who commanded in that battle, Miltiades, Callimachus and Cynaegirus on the Athenian side and Datis and Artaphernes on that of the barbarians.

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§ 35.35.1  Nay more, during the time that Panaenus flourished competitions in painting were actually instituted at Corinth and at Delphi, and on the first occasion of all Panaenus competed against Timagoras of Chalcis, being defeated by him, at the Pythian games, a fact clearly shown by an ancient poem of Timagoras himself, the chronicles undoubtedly being in error.

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§ 35.35.2  After those and before the 90th Olympiad there were other celebrated painters also, such as Polygnotus of Thasos who first represented women in transparent draperies and showed their heads and covered with a parti-coloured headdress; and he first contributed many improvements to the art of painting, as he introduced showing the mouth wide open and displaying the teeth and giving expression to the countenance in place of the primitive rigidity. There is a picture by this artist in the Portico of Pompeius which formerly hung in front of the Curia which he built, in which it is doubtful whether the figure of a man with a shield is painted as going up or as coming down. Polygnotus painted the temple at Delphi and the colonnade at Athens called Painted Portico, doing his work gratuitously, although a part of the work was painted by Micon who received a fee. Indeed Polygnotus was held in higher esteem, as the Amphictyones, who are a General Council of Greece, voted him entertainment at the public expense. There was also another Micon, distinguished from the first by the surname of the Younger, whose daughter Timarete also painted.

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§ 35.36.1  In the 90th Olympiad lived Aglaophon, Cephisodorus, Erillus, and Evenor the father and teacher of Parrhasius, a very great painter (about Parrhasius we shall have to speak when we come to his period). All these are now artists of note, yet not figures over which our discourse should linger in its haste to arrive at the luminaries of the art; first among whom shone out Apollodorus of Athens, in the 93rd Olympiad. Apollodorus was the first artist to give realistic presentation of objects, and the first to confer glory as of right upon the paint brush. His are the Priest at Prayer and Ajax struck by Lightning, the latter to be seen at Pergamum at the present day. There is no painting now on view by any artist before Apollodorus that arrests the attention of the eyes.

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§ 35.36.2  The gates of art having been now thrown open by Apollodorus they were entered by Zeuxis of Heraclea in the 4th year of the 95th Olympiad, who led forward the already not unadventurous paintbrush — for this is what we are still speaking of — to great glory. Some writers erroneously place Zeuxis in the 89th Olympiad, when Demophilus of Himera and Neseus of Thasos must have been his contemporaries, as of one of them, it is uncertain which, he was a pupil. Of Zeuxis, Apollodorus above recorded wrote an epigram in a line of poetry to the effect that 'Zeuxis robbed his masters of their art and carried it off with him.' Also he acquired such great wealth that he advertised it at Olympia by displaying his own name embroidered in gold lettering on the checked pattern of his robes. Afterwards he set about giving away his works as presents, saying that it was impossible for them to be sold at any price adequate to their value: for instance he presented his Alcmena to the city of Akragas and his Pan to Archelaus. He also did a Penelope in which the picture seems to portray morality, and an Athlete, in the latter case being so pleased with his own work that he wrote below it a line of verse which has hence become famous, to the effect that it would be easier for someone to carp at him than to copy him. His Zeus seated on a throne with the gods standing by in attendance is also a magnificent work, and so is the Infant Heracles throttling two snakes in the presence of his mother Alcmena, looking on in alarm, and of Amphitryon. Nevertheless Zeuxis is criticized for making the heads and joints of his figures too large in proportion, albeit he was so scrupulously careful that when he was going to produce a picture for the city of Akragas to dedicate at the public cost in the temple of Lacinian Hera he held an inspection of maidens of the place paraded naked and chose five, for the purpose of reproducing in the picture the most admirable points in the form of each. He also painted monochromes in white. His contemporaries and rivals were Timanthes, Androcydes, Eupompus and Parrhasius. This last, it is recorded, entered into a competition with Zeuxis, who produced a picture of grapes so successfully represented that birds flew up to the stage-buildings; whereupon Parrhasius himself produced such a realistic picture of a curtain that Zeuxis, proud of the verdict of the birds, requested that the curtain should now be drawn and the picture displayed; and when he realized his mistake, with a modesty that did him honour he yielded up the prize, saying that whereas he had deceived birds Parrhasius had deceived him, an artist. It is said that Zeuxis also subsequently painted a Child Carrying Grapes, and when birds flew to the fruit with the same frankness as before he strode up to the picture in anger with it and said, I have painted the grapes better than the child, as if I had made a success of that as well, the birds would inevitably have been afraid of it. He also executed works in clay, the only works of art that were left at Ambracia when Fulvius Nobilior removed the statues of the Muses from that place to Rome. There is at Rome a Helena by Zeuxis in the Porticoes of Philippus, and a Marsyas Bound, in the Shrine of Concord.

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§ 35.36.3  Parrhasius also, a native of Ephesus contributed much to painting, he was the first to give proportions to painting and the first to give vivacity to the expression of the countenance, elegance of the hair and beauty of the mouth; indeed it is admitted by artists that he won the palm in the drawing of outlines. This in painting is the high-water mark of refinement; to paint bulk and the surface within the outlines, though no doubt a great achievement, is one in which many have won distinction, but to give the contour of the figures, and make a satisfactory boundary where the painting within finishes, is rarely attained in successful artistry. For the contour ought to round itself off and so terminate as to suggest the presence of other parts behind it also, and disclose even what it hides. This is the distinction conceded to Parrhasius by Antigonus and Xenocrates who have written on the art of painting, and they do not merely admit it but actually advertise it. And there are many other pen-sketches a still extant among his panels and parchments, from which it is said that artists derive profit. Nevertheless he seems to fall below his own level in giving expression to the surface of the body inside the outline. His picture of the People of Athens also shows ingenuity in treating the subject, since he displayed them as fickle, choleric, unjust and variable, but also placable and merciful and compassionate, boastful and ...., lofty and humble, fierce and timid — and all these at the same time. He also painted a Theseus which was once in the Capitol at Rome, and a Naval Commander in a Cuirass, and in a single picture now at Rhodes figures of Meleager, Heracles and Perseus. This last picture has been three times struck by lightning at Rhodes without being effaced, a circumstance which in itself enhances the wonder felt for it. He also painted a High Priest of Cybele, a picture for which the Emperor Tiberius conceived an affection and kept it shut up in his bedchamber, the price at which it was valued according to Deculo being 6,000,000 sesterces. He also painted a Thracian Nurse with an Infant in her Arms, a Philiscus, and a Father Liber or Dionysus attended by Virtue, and Two Children in which the carefree simplicity of childhood is clearly displayed, and also a Priest attended by Boy with Incense-box and Chaplet. There are also two very famous pictures by him, a Runner in the Race in Full Armour who actually seems to sweat with his efforts, and the other a Runner in Full Armour Taking off his Arms, so lifelike that he can be perceived to be panting for breath. His Aeneas, Castor and Pollux (Polydeuces), all in the same picture, are also highly praised, and likewise his group of Telephus with Achilles, Agamemnon and Odysseus. Parrhasius was a prolific artist, but one who enjoyed the glory of his art with unparalleled arrogance, for he actually adopted certain surnames, calling himself the 'Bon Viveur,' and in some other verses 'Prince of Painters,' who had brought the art to perfection, and above all saying he was sprung from the lineage of Apollo and that his picture of Heracles at Lindos presented the hero as he had often appeared to him in his dreams. Consequently when defeated by Timanthes at Samos by a large majority of votes, the subject of the pictures being Ajax and the Award of the Arms, he used to declare in the name of his hero that he was indignant at having been defeated a second time by an unworthy opponent. He also painted some smaller pictures of an immodest nature, taking his recreation in this sort of wanton amusement.

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§ 35.36.4  To return to Timanthes — he had a very high degree of genius. Orators have sung the praises of his Iphigenia, who stands at the altar awaiting her doom; the artist has shown all present full of sorrow, and especially her uncle, and has exhausted all the indications of grief, yet has veiled the countenance of her father himself whom he was unable adequately to portray. There are also other examples of his genius, for instance a quite small panel of a Sleeping Cyclops, whose gigantic stature he aimed at representing even on that scale by painting at his side some Satyrs measuring the size of his thumb with a wand. Indeed Timanthes is the only artist in whose works more is always implied than is depicted, and whose execution, though consummate, is always surpassed by his genius. He painted a hero which is a work of supreme perfection, in which he has included the whole art of painting male figures; this work is now in the Temple of Peace in Rome.

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§ 35.36.5  It was at this period that Euxinidas had as his pupil the famous artist Aristides, that Eupompus taught Pamphilus who was the instructor of Apelles.

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§ 35.36.6  A work of Eupompus is a Winner in a Gymnastic Contest holding a Palm branch. Eupompus's own influence was so powerful that he made a fresh division of painting; it had previously been divided into two schools, called the Helladic or Grecian and the Asiatic, but because of Eupompus, who was a Sikyonian, the Grecian school was subdivided into three groups, the Ionic, Sikyonian and Attic. To Pamphilus belong Family Group, and a Battle at Phlious and a Victory of the Athenians, and also Odysseus on his Raft. He was himself a Macedonian by birth, but was brought up at Sikyon, and was the first painter highly educated in all branches of learning, especially arithmetic and geometry, without the aid of which he maintained art could not attain perfection. He took no pupils at a lower fee than a talent, at the rate of 500 drachmae per annum, and this was paid him by both Apelles and Melanthius. It was brought about by his influence, first at Sikyon and then in the whole of Greece as well, that children of free birth were given lessons in drawing on boxwood, which had not been included hitherto, and that this art was accepted into the front rank of the liberal sciences. And it has always consistently had the honour of being practised by people of free birth, and later on by persons of station, it having always been forbidden that slaves should be instructed in it. Hence it is that neither in painting nor in the art of statuary a are there any famous works that were executed by any person who was a slave.

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§ 35.36.7  In the 107th Olympiad Aetion and Therimachus also attained outstanding distinction. Famous paintings by Aetion are a Father Liber or Dionysus, Tragedy and Comedy and Semiramis the Slave Girl Rising to a Throne; and the Old Woman carrying Torches, with a Newly Married Bride, remarkable for her air of modesty.

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§ 35.36.8  But it was Apelles of Cos who surpassed all the painters that preceded and all who were to come after him; he dates in the 112th Olympiad. He is singly contributed almost more to painting than all the other artists put together, also publishing volumes containing the principles of painting. His art was unrivalled for graceful charm, although other very great painters were his contemporaries. Although he admired their works and gave high praise to all of them, he used to say that they lacked the glamour that his work possessed, the quality denoted by the Greek word charis, and that although they had every other merit, in that alone no one was his rival. He also asserted another claim to distinction when he expressed his admiration for the immensely laborious and infinitely meticulous work of Protogenes; for he said that in all respects his achievements and those of Protogenes were on a level, or those of Protogenes were superior, but that in one respect he stood higher. that he knew when to take his hand away from a picture aa noteworthy warning of the frequently evil effects of excessive diligence. The candour of Apelles was however equal to his artistic skill: he used to acknowledge his inferiority to Melanthius in grouping, and to Asclepiodorus in nicety of measurement, that is in the proper space to be left between one object and another.

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§ 35.36.9  A clever incident took place between Protogenes and Apelles. Protogenes lived at Rhodes, and Apelles made the voyage there from a desire to make himself acquainted with Protogenes's works, as that artist was hitherto only known to him by reputation. He went at once to his studio. The artist was not there but there was a panel of considerable size on the easel prepared for painting, which was in the charge of a single old woman. In answer to his enquiry, she told him that Protogenes was not at home, and asked who it was she should report as having wished to see him. 'Say it was this person,' said Apelles, and taking up a brush he painted in colour across the panel an extremely fine line; and when Protogenes returned the old woman showed him what had taken place. The story goes that the artist, after looking closely at the finish of this, said that the new arrival was Apelles, as so perfect a piece of work tallied with nobody else; and he himself, using another colour, drew a still finer line exactly on the top of the first one, and leaving the room told the attendant to show it to the visitor if he returned and add that this was the person he was in search; and so it happened; for Apelles came back, and, ashamed to be beaten, cut a the lines with another in a third colour, leaving no room for any further display of minute work. Hereupon Protogenes admitted he was defeated, and flew down to the harbour to look for the visitor; and he decided that the panel should be handed on to posterity as it was, to be admired as a marvel by everybody, but particularly by artists. I am informed that it was burnt in the first fire which occurred in Caesar's palace on the Palatine; it had been previously much admired by us, on its vast surface containing nothing else than the almost invisible lines, so that among the outstanding works of many artists it looked like a blank space, and by that very fact attracted attention and was more esteemed than every masterpiece there.

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§ 35.36.10  Moreover it was a regular custom with Apelles never to let a day of business to be so fully occupied that he did not practise his art by drawing a line, which has passed from him into a proverb. Another habit of his was when he had finished his works to place them in a gallery in the view of passers by, and he himself stood out of sight behind the picture and listened to hear what faults were noticed, rating the public as a more observant critic than himself. And it is said that he was found fault with by a shoemaker because in drawing a subject's sandals he had represented the loops in them as one too few, and the next day the same critic was so proud of the artist's correcting the fault indicated by his previous objection that he found fault with the leg, but Apelles indignantly looked out from behind the picture and rebuked him, saying that a shoemaker in his criticism must not go beyond the sandal — a remark that has also passed into a proverb. In fact he also possessed great courtesy of manners, which made him more agreeable to Alexander the Great, who frequently visited his studio — for, as we have said, Alexander had published an edict forbidding any other artist to paint his portrait; but in the studio Alexander used to talk a great deal about painting without any real knowledge of it, and Apelles would politely advise him to drop the subject, saying that the boys engaged in grinding the colours were laughing at him: so much power did his authority exercise over a King who was otherwise of an irascible temper. And yet Alexander conferred honour on him in a most conspicuous instance; he had such an admiration for the beauty of his favourite mistress, named Pancaspe, that he gave orders that she should be painted in the nude by Apelles, and then discovering that the artist while executing the commission had fallen in love with the woman, he presented her to him, great minded as he was and still greater owing to his control of himself, and of a greatness proved by this action as much as by any other victory: because he conquered himself, and presented not only his bedmate but his affection also to the artist, and was not even influenced by regard for the feelings of his favourite in having been recently the mistress of a monarch and now belonged to a painter. Some persons believe that she was the model from which the Aphrodite Anadyomene (Rising from the Sea) was painted. It was Apelles also who, kindly among his rivals, first established the reputation of Protogenes at Rhodes. Protogenes was held in low esteem by his fellow-countrymen, as is usual with home products, and, when Apelles asked him what price he set on some works he had finished, he had mentioned some small sum, but Apelles made him an offer of fifty talents for them, and spread it about that he was buying them with the intention of selling them as works of his own. This device aroused the people of Rhodes to appreciate the artist, and Apelles only parted with the pictures to them at an enhanced price.

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§ 35.36.11  He also painted portraits so absolutely lifelike that, incredible as it sounds, the grammarian Apio has left it on record that one of those persons called 'physiognomists,' who prophesy people's future by their countenance, pronounced from their portraits either the year of the subjects' deaths hereafter or the number of years they had already lived. Apelles had been on bad terms with Ptolemy in Alexander's retinue. When this Ptolemy was King of Egypt, Apelles on a voyage had been driven by a violent storm into Alexandria. His rivals maliciously suborned the King's jester to convey to him an invitation to dinner, to which he came. Ptolemy was very indignant, and paraded his hospitality-stewards for Apelles to say which of them had given him the invitation. Apelles picked up a piece of extinguished charcoal from the hearth and drew a likeness on the wall, the King recognizing the features of the jester as soon as he began the sketch. He also painted a portrait of King Antigonus who was blind in one eye, and devised an original method of concealing the defect, for he did the likeness in 'three-quarter,' so that the feature that was lacking in the subject might be thought instead to be absent in the picture, and he only showed the part of the face which he was able to display as unmutilated. Among his works there are also pictures of persons at the point of death. But it is not easy to say which of his productions are of the highest rank. His Aphrodite emerging from the Sea was dedicated by his late lamented Majesty Augustus in the Shrine of his father Caesar; it is known as the Anadyomene; this like other works is eclipsed yet made famous by the Greek verses which sing its praises; the lower part of the picture having become damaged nobody could be found to restore it, but the actual injury contributed to the glory of the artist. This picture however suffered from age and rot, and Nero when emperor substituted another for it, a work by Dorotheus. Apelles had also begun on another Aphrodite at Cos, which was to surpass even his famous earlier one; but death grudged him the work when only partly finished, nor could anybody be found to carry on the task, in conformity with the outlines of the sketches prepared. He also painted Alexander the Great holding a Thunderbolt, in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, for a fee of twenty talents in gold. The fingers have the appearance of projecting from the surface and the thunderbolt seems to stand out from the picture — readers must remember that all these effects were produced by four colours; the artist received the price of this picture in gold coin measured by weighty not counted. He also painted a Procession of the Magabyzus, the priest of Artemis of Ephesus, a Clitus with Horse hastening into battle; and an armour-bearer handing someone a helmet at his command. How many times he painted Alexander and Philip it would be superfluous to recount. His Habron at Samos is much admired, as is his Menander, King of Caria, at Rhodes, likewise his Antaeus, and at Alexandria his Gorgosthenes the Tragic Actor, and at Rome his Castor and Pollux with Victory and Alexander the Great, and also his figure of Ware with the Hands Tied behind, with Alexander riding in Triumph in his Chariot. Both of these pictures his late lamented Majesty Augustus with restrained good taste had dedicated in the most frequented parts of his forum; the emperor Claudius however thought it more advisable to cut out the face of Alexander from both works and substitute portraits of Augustus. The Heracles with Face Averted in the temple of Diana is also believed to be by his hand — so drawn that the picture more truly displays Heracles' face than merely suggests it to the imagination — a very difficult achievement. He also painted a Nude Hero, a picture with which he challenged Nature herself. There is, or was, a picture of a Horse by him, painted in a competition, by which he carried his appeal for judgement from mankind to the dumb quadrupeds; for perceiving that his rivals were getting the better of him by intrigue, he had some horses brought and showed them their pictures one by one; and the horses only began to neigh when they saw the horse painted by Apelles; and this always happened subsequently, showing it to be a sound. test of artistic skill. He also did a Neoptolemus on Horseback fighting against the Persians, an Archelaus with his Wife and Daughter, and an Antigonus with a Breastplate marching with his horse at his side. Connoisseurs put at the head of all his works the portrait of the same king seated on horseback, and his Artemis in the midst of a band of Maidens offering a Sacrifice, a work by which he may be thought to have surpassed Homer's verses describing the same subject. He even painted things that cannot be represented in pictures — thunder, lightning and thunderbolts, the pictures known respectively under the Greek titles of Bronte, Astrape and Ceraunobolia.

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§ 35.36.12  His inventions in the art of painting have been useful to all other painters as well, but there was one which nobody was able to imitate: when his works were finished he used to cover them over with a black varnish of such thinness that its very presence, while its reflexion threw up the brilliance of all the colours and preserved them from dust and dirt, was only visible to anyone who looked at it close up, but also employing great calculation of lights, so that the brilliance of the colours should not offend the sight when people looked at them as if through muscovy-glass and so that the same device from a distance might invisibly give sombreness to colours that were too brilliant.

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§ 35.36.13  Contemporary with Apelles was Aristides of Thebes. He was the first of all painters who depicted the mind and expressed the feelings of a human being, what the Greeks term ethe, and also the emotions; he was a little too hard in his colours. His works include on the capture of a town, showing an infant creeping to the breast of its mother who is dying of a wound; it is felt that the mother is aware of the child and is afraid that as her milk is exhausted by death it may suck blood; this picture had been removed by Alexander the Great to his native place, Pella. The same artist painted a battle with the Persians, a panel that contains a hundred human figures, which he parted with to Mnason the tyrant of Elatea on the terms of ten minae per man. He also painted a Four-horse Chariots Racing, a Suppliant, who almost appeared to speak, Huntsmen with Quarry, Leontion Epicurus's mistress, and Woman At Rest through love of her Brother; and likewise the Dionysus and Ariadne once on view in the Temple of Ceres at Rome, and the Tragic Actor and Boy in the Temple of Apollo, a picture of which the beauty has perished owing to the lack of skill of a painter commissioned by Marcus Junius as praetor to clean it in readiness for the festival of the Games of Apollo. There has also been on view in the Temple of Faith in the Capitol his picture of an Old Man with a Lyre giving lessons to a Boy. He also painted a Sick Man which has received unlimited praise; and he was so able an artist that King Attalus is said to have bought a single picture of his for a hundred talents.

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§ 35.36.14  Protogenes also flourished at the same time, as has been said. He was born at Caunus, in a community that was under the dominion of Rhodes. At the outset he was extremely poor, and extremely devoted to his art and consequently not very productive.

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§ 35.36.15  Who his teacher was is believed to be unrecorded. Some people say that until the age of fifty he was also a ship-painter, and that this is proved by the fact that when he was decorating with paintings, on a very famous site at Athens, the propylon of the sanctuary of Athene, where he depicted his famous Paralus and Hammonias, which is by some people called the Nausicaa, he added some small drawings of battleships in what painters call the 'side-pieces,' in order to show from what commencement his work had arrived at the pinnacle of glorious display. Among his pictures the palm is held by his Ialysus, which is consecrated in the Temple of Peace in Rome. It is said that while painting this he lived on soaked lupins, because he thus at the same time both sustained his hunger and thirst and avoided blunting his sensibilities by too luxurious a diet. For this picture he used four coats of paint, to serve as three protections against injury and old age, so that when the upper coat disappeared the one below it would take its place. In the picture there is a dog marvellously executed, so as to appear to have been painted by art and good fortune jointly: the artist's own opinion was that he did not fully show in it the foam of the panting dog, although in all the remaining details he had satisfied himself, which was very difficult. But the actual art displayed displeased him, nor was he able to diminish it, and he thought it was excessive and departed too far from reality — the foam appeared to be painted, not to be the natural product of the animal's mouth; vexed and tormented, as he wanted his picture to contain the truth and not merely a near-truth, he had several times rubbed off the paint and used another brush, quite unable to satisfy himself. Finally he fell into a rage with his art because it was perceptible, and dashed a sponge against the place in the picture that offended him, and the sponge restored the colours he had removed, in the way that his anxiety had wished them to appear, and chance produced the effect of nature in the picture!

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§ 35.36.16  It is said that Nealces also following this example of his achieved a similar success in representing a horse's foam by dashing a sponge on the picture in a similar manner, in a representation of a man clucking in his cheek to soothe a horse he was holding. Thus did Protogenes indicate the possibilities of a stroke of luck also.

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§ 35.36.17  It was on account of this Ialysus that King Demetrius, in order to avoid burning a picture, abstained from setting fire to Rhodes when the city could only be taken from the side where the picture was stored, and through consideration for the safety of a picture lost the chance of a victory! Protogenes at the time was in his little garden on the outskirts of the city, that is in the middle of the Camp of Demetrius, and would not be interrupted by the battles going on, or on any account suspend the works he had begun, had he not been summoned by the King, who asked him what gave him the assurance to continue outside the walls. He replied that he knew the King was waging war with the Rhodians, not with the arts. The King, delighted to be able to safeguard the hands which he had spared, placed guardposts to protect him, and, to avoid repeatedly calling him from his work, actually though an enemy came to pay him visits, and quitting his aspirations for his own victory, in the thick of battles and the battering down of walls, looked on at the work of an artist. And even to this day the story is attached to a picture of that date that Protogenes painted it with a sword hanging over him. The picture is the one of a Satyr, called the Satyr Reposing, and to give a final touch to the sense of security felt at the time, the figure holds a pair of flutes.

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§ 35.36.18  Other works of Protogenes were a Cydippe, Tlepolemus, a Philiscus the Tragic Poet in Meditation, an Athlete, a portrait of King Antigonus, and one of the Mother of Aristotle the philosopher. Aristotle used to advise the artist to paint the achievements of Alexander the Great, as belonging to history for all time. The impulse of his mind however and a certain artistic capriciousness led him rather to the subjects mentioned. His latest works were pictures of Alexander and of Pan. He also made bronze statues, as we have said.

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§ 35.36.19  In the same period there was also Asclepiodorus, who was admired by Apelles for his proportions. For a picture of the Twelve Gods the tyrant Mnaso paid him three hundred minae per god. The same patron paid Theomnestus twenty minae for each of the heroes in a picture.

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§ 35.36.20  To the list of these artists must also be added Nicomachus son and pupil of Aristides. He painted a Rape of Persephone, a picture formerly in the Shrine of Minerva on the Capitol, just above the Chapel of Youth; and there was also in the Capitol, where it was placed by General Plancus, his Victory hurrying her Chariot aloft. He was the first painter who represented Odysseus wearing a felt skull-cap. He also painted an Apollo and Artemis, and the Mother of the Gods seated on a Lion, and likewise a fine picture of Bacchants with Satyrs prowling towards them, and a Scylla that is now in the Temple of Peace in Rome. No other painter was ever a more rapid worker. Indeed it is recorded that he accepted a commission from the tyrant of Sikyon Aristratus to paint by a given date a monument that he was erecting to the poet Telestes, and that he only arrived not long before the date; the wrathful tyrant threatened to punish him, but in a few days he finished the work with a speed and an artistic skill that were both remarkable. Among his pupils were his brother Ariston and his son Aristides and Philoxenus of Eretria, who painted for King Cassander a picture that holds the highest rank, containing a battle between Alexander and Darius. He also painted a picture with a wanton subject showing three Sileni at their revels. Imitating the rapidity of his master he introduced some shorthand methods of painting, executed with still more rapidity of technique.

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§ 35.36.21  With these artists is also reckoned Nicophanes, an elegant and finished painter with whom few can be compared for gracefulness, but who for tragic feeling and weight of style is far from Zeuxis and Apelles. Perseus, the pupil to whom Apelles dedicated his volumes on the art of painting, had belonged to the same period. Aristides of Thebes also had as his pupils his sons Niceros and Ariston, the latter the painter of a Satyr Crowned with a Wreath and Holding a Goblet; and other pupils of Aristides were Antorides and Euphranor about the latter we shall speak later on.

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§ 35.37.1  For it is proper to append the artists famous with the brush in a minor style of painting. Among these was Piraeicus, to be ranked below few painters in skill; it is possible that he won distinction by his choice of subjects, inasmuch as although adopting a humble line he attained in that field the height of glory. He painted barbers' shops and cobblers' stalls, asses, viands and the like, consequently receiving a Greek name meaning 'painter of sordid subjects'; in these however he gives exquisite pleasure, and indeed they fetched bigger prices than the largest works of many masters. On the other hand 'a picture by Serapio,' says Varro, 'covered the whole of the Maenian Balconies at the place Beneath the Old Shops.' Serapio was a most successful scene-painter, but he could not paint a human being. On the contrary, Dionysius painted nothing else but people, and consequently has a Greek name meaning 'Painter of Human Beings.' Callicles also made small pictures, and so did Calates of subjects taken from comedy; both classes were painted by Antiphilus, who executed the famous picture of Hesione and an Alexander and a Philip with Athene which are now in the school in Octavia's Porticoes, and in Philippus' Portico a Father Liber or Dionysus, a Young Alexander, Hippolytus alarmed by the Bull rushing upon him, and in Pompey's Portico a Cadmus and Europa. He also painted a figure in an absurd costume known by the joking name of Gryllus, the name consequently applied to every picture of that sort. He was himself born in Egypt and a pupil of Ctesidemus.

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§ 35.37.2  It is proper also not to pass over the painter of the temple at Ardea, especially as he was granted the citizenship of that place and honoured with an inscription on the picture, consisting in the following verses: 3
One Marcus Plautius, a worthy man,
Adorned, with paintings worthy of this place,
The shrine of Juno, Queen of Spouse supreme,
This Marcus Plautius, as men know, was born
In Asia wide. Now, and hereafter always,
Ardea applauds him for this work of art.

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§ 35.37.4  These lines are written in the antique Latin script. Nor must Spurius Tadius also, of the period of his late lamented Majesty Augustus, be cheated of his due, who first introduced the most attractive fashion of painting walls with pictures of country houses and porticoes and landscape gardens, groves, woods, hills, fish-ponds, canals, rivers, coasts, and whatever anybody could desire, together with various sketches of people going for a stroll or sailing in a boat or on land going to country houses riding on asses or in carriages, and also people fishing and fowling or hunting or even gathering the vintage. His works include splendid villas approached by roads across marshes men tottering and staggering along carrying women on their shoulders for a bargain, and a number of humorous drawings of that sort besides, extremely wittily designed. He also introduced using pictures of seaside cities to decorate uncovered terraces, giving a most pleasing effect and at a very small expense.

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§ 35.37.5  But among artists great fame has been confined to painters of pictures only a fact which shows the wisdom of early times to be the more worthy of respect, for they did not decorate walls, merely for owners of property, or houses, which would remain in one place and which could not be rescued from a fire. Protogenes was content with a cottage in his little garden; Apelles had no wall-frescoes in his house; it was not yet the fashion to colour the whole of the walls. With all these artists their art was on the alert for the benefit of cities, and a painter was the common property of the world.

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§ 35.37.6  A little before the period of the Divine Augustus, Arellius also was in high esteem at Rome, had he not prostituted his art by a notorious outrage, by always paying court to any woman he happened to fall in love with, and consequently painting goddesses, but in the likeness of his mistresses; and so his pictures included a number of portraits of harlots. Another recent painter was Famulus, a dignified and severe but also very florid artist; to him belonged a Minerva who faced the spectator at whatever angle she was looked at. Famulus used to spend only a few hours a day in painting, and also took his work very seriously, as he always wore a toga, even when in the midst of his easels. The Golden House was the prison that contained his productions, and this is why other examples of his work are not extant to any considerable extent. After him in esteem were Cornelius Pinus and Attius Priscus, who painted the temples of Honour and Virtue for the Emperor Vespasian's restoration of them; Priscus was nearer in style to the artists of old days.

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§ 35.38.1  In speaking of painting one must not omit the famous story about Lepidus. During his Triumvirate, when entertained by the magistrates of a certain place, he was given lodging in a house buried in trees; and the next day he complained to them in threatening language that he had been robbed of sleep by the singing of the birds. However the authorities had a picture of a large snake made on an extremely long strip of parchment and fixed it up round the wood, and the story goes that this at once frightened the birds into silence, and that subsequently it was possible to keep them in check.

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§ 35.39.1  It is not agreed who was the inventor of painting in wax and of designs in encaustic. Some people think it was a discovery of Aristides, subsequently brought to perfection by Praxiteles, but there were encaustic paintings in existence at a considerably earlier date, for instance those of Polygnotus, and Nicanor and Mnasilaus of Paros. Also Elasippus of Aigina has inscribed on a picture enekaen ('burnt in'), which he would not have done if the art of encaustic painting-had not been invented.

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§ 35.40.1  It is recorded also that Pamphilus, the teacher of Apelles, not only painted in encaustic but also taught it to Pausias of Sikyon, the first artist who became famous in this style. Pausias was the son of Bryetes, and started as his father's pupil. He himself also did some wall-painting with the brush at Thespiae, when some old paintings by Polygnotus were being restored, and he was deemed to come off very second best in comparison with the original artist, having entered into competition in what was not really his line. Pausias also first introduced the painting of panelled ceilings, and it was not customary before him to decorate arched roofs in this way. He used to paint miniatures, and especially children. His rivals explained this practice as being due to the slow pace of his work in painting; and consequently to give his work also the reputation of speed he finished a picture in a single day, a picture of a boy which was called in Greek Hemeresios, meaning One-day Boy. In his youth he fell in love with a fellow-townswoman named Glycera, who invented chaplets of flowers, and by imitating her in rivalry he advanced the art of encaustic painting so as to reproduce an extremely numerous variety of flowers. Finally he painted a portrait of the woman herself, seated and wearing a wreath, which is one of the very finest of pictures; it is called in Greek Stephanoplocos, Girl making Wreaths, or by others Stephanopolis, Girl selling Wreaths, because Glycera had supported her poverty by that trade. A copy (in Greek apographoa) of this picture was bought by Lucius Lucullus at Athens for two talents; it had been made by Dionysius at Athens. But Pausias also did large pictures, for instance the Sacrifice of Oxen which formerly was to be seen in Pompey's Portico. He first invented a method of painting which has afterwards been copied by many people but equalled by no one; the chief point was that although he wanted to show the long body of an ox he painted the animal facing the spectator and not standing sideways, and its great size is fully conveyed. Next, whereas all painters ordinarily execute in light colour the parts they wish to appear prominent and in dark those they wish to keep less obvious, this artist has made the whole ox of a black colour and has given substance to the shadow from the shadow itself, with quite remarkable skill that shows the shapes standing out on a level surface and a uniform solidity on a broken ground. Pausias also passed his life at Sikyon, which was for a long period a native place of painting. But all the pictures there had to be sold to meet a debt of the community, and were removed from the ownership of the state to Rome by Scaurus as aedile.

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§ 35.40.2  After Pausias, Euphranor the Isthmian distinguished himself far before all others, in the 104th Olympiad; he has also appeared in our account of statuaries. His works included colossal statues, works in marble, and reliefs, as he was exceptionally studious and diligent, excelling in every field and never falling below his own level. This artist seems to have been the first fully to represent the lofty qualities of heroes, and to have achieved good proportions, but he was too slight in his structure of the whole body and too large in his heads and joints. He also wrote books about proportions and about colours. Works of his are a Cavalry Battle, the Twelve Gods, and a Theseus, in respect of which he said that Parrhasius's Theseus had lived on a diet of roses, but his was a beef-eater. There is a celebrated picture by him at Ephesus, Odysseus Feigning Madness and yoking an ox with a horse, with men in cloaks reflecting, and the leader sheathing his sword.

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§ 35.40.3  Contemporaries of Euphranor were Cydias, for whose picture of the Argonauts the orator Hortensius [114-50 BC] paid 144,000 sesterces, and made a shrine for its reception at his villa at Tusculum. Euphranor's pupil was Antidotus. Works by the latter are a Combatant with a Shield at Athens and a Wrestler and a Trumpeter which has been exceptionally praised. Antidotus himself was more careful in his work than prolific, and severe in his use of colours; his chief distinction was being the teacher of the Athenian Nicias, who was an extremely careful painter of female portraits. Nicias kept a strict watch on light and shade, and took the greatest pains to make his paintings stand out from the panels. Works of his are: a Nemea, brought to Rome from Asia by Silanus and deposited in the Senate-house as we have said, and also the Father Liber or Dionysus in the Shrine of Concord, a Hyacinthus with which Caesar Augustus was so delighted that when he took Alexandria he brought it back with him — and consequently Tiberius Caesar dedicated this picture in the Temple of Augustus — and a Danae; while at Ephesus there is the tomb of a megabyzus or priest of Diana of Ephesus, and at Athens there is a Necyomantea of Homer. The last the artist refused to sell to King Attalus for 60 talents, and preferred to present it to his native place, as he was a wealthy man. He also executed some large pictures, among them a Calypso, an Io and an Andromeda; and also the very fine Alexander in Pompey's Portico and a Seated Calypso are assigned to him.

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§ 35.40.4  In drawings of animals he was most successful with dogs. It is this Nicias of whom Praxiteles used to say, when asked which of his own works in marble he placed highest, 'The ones to which Nicias has set his hand' — so much value did he assign to his colouring of surfaces. It is not quite clear whether it is another artist of the same name or this Nicias whom some people put in the 112th Olympiad. [332-329 BC].

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§ 35.40.5  With Nicias is compared Athenion of Maronea, and sometimes to the disadvantage of the former. Athenion was a pupil of Glaucion of Corinth; he is more sombre in his colour than Nicias and yet therewithal more pleasing, so that his extensive knowledge shines out in his actual painting. He painted a Cavalry Captain in the temple at Eleusis and at Athens the group of figures which has been called the Family Group, and also an Achilles Disguised in Female Dress detected by Odysseus, a group of six figures in a single picture, and a Groom with a Horse, which has specially contributed to his fame. If he had not died in youth, there would have been nobody to compare with him.

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§ 35.40.6  Heraclides of Macedon is also a painter of note. He began by painting ships, and after the capture of King Perseus he migrated to Athens, where at the same period was the painter Metrodorus, who was also a philosopher and a great authority in both fields. Accordingly when Lucius Paulus after conquering Perseus requested the Athenians to send him their most esteemed philosopher to educate his children, and also a painter to embellish his triumphal procession, the Athenians selected Metrodorus, stating that he was most distinguished in both of these requirements alike, as to which Paulus also held the same view. Timomachus of Byzantium the period of Caesar's dictatorship painted an Ajax and a Medea, placed by Caesar in the temple of Venus Genetrix, having been bought at the price of 80 talents (Marcus Varro rates the Attic talent at 6000 denarii). Equal praise is given to Timomachus's Orestes, his Iphigenia among the Tauri and his Gymnastic-Master Lecythion; also his Noble Family and his Two Men wearing the Pallium, whom he has represented as about to converse; one is a standing figure and the other seated. It is in his painting of a Gorgon however that his art seems to have given him most success.

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§ 35.40.7  Pausias's son and pupil Aristolaus was one of the painters of the very severe style; to him belong an Epaminondas, a Pericles, a Medea, a Virtue, a Theseus, a figure representing the Athenian People, and a Sacrifice of Oxen. Some persons also admire Nicophanes, who was likewise a pupil of Pausias, for his careful accuracy which only artists can appreciate, though apart from that he is hard in his colouring and lavish in his use of ochre. As for Socrates he is justly a universal favourite; popular pictures by him are his group of Asclepius with his daughters Health, Brightness, All-Heal and Remedy, and his Sluggard, bearing the Greek name of Ocnos, Laziness, and represented as twisting a rope of broom which an ass is nibbling.

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§ 35.40.8  Having so far pointed out the chief painters in both branches, we will also mention those of the rank next to the first: Aristoclides who decorated the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, Antiphilus who is praised for his Boy Blowing a Fire, and for the apartment, beautiful in itself, lit by the reflection from the fire and the light thrown on the boy's face; and likewise for his Spinning-room, in which all the women are busily plying their tasks, and his Ptolemy Hunting, but, most famous of all, his Satyr with Leopard's Skin, called in Greek the Man Shading his Eyes. Aristophon did an Ancaeus Wounded by the Boar, with Astypale sharing his grief, and a picture crowded with figures, among them Priam, Helen, Credulity, Odysseus, Deiphobus, Craft. Androbius painted a Scyllus Cutting the Anchor-ropes of the Persian Fleet, Artemon a Danae admired by the Robbers, a Queen Stratonice, and a Heracles and Deianira; but the finest of all his works, now in Octavia's Buildings, are his Heracles Ascending to Heaven with the consent of the Gods after his mortal remains were burnt on Mount Oita in Doris, and the story of Laomedon in the matter of Heracles and Poseidon. Alcimachus painted Dioxippus, who won the All-round Bout at Olympia 'without raising any dust,' akoniti as the Greek word is. Coenus painted pedigrees.

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§ 35.40.9  Ctesilochus a pupil of Apelles became famous for a saucy burlesque painting which showed Zeus in labour with Dionysus, wearing a woman's nightcap and crying like a woman, while goddesses act as midwives; Cleon for his Cadmus, Ctesidemus for his Storming of Oichalia and his Laodamia. Ctesicles won notoriety by the insult he offered to Queen Stratonice, because as she did not give him an honourable reception he painted a picture of her romping with a fisherman with whom gossip said she was in love, and put it on exhibition at Ephesus Harbour, himself making a hurried escape on shipboard. The Queen would not allow the picture to be removed, the likeness of the two figures being admirably expressed. Cratinus painted the Comic Actors in the Processional Building at Athens, Eutychides a Chariot and Pair driven by Victory. Eudorus is famous for a scene-painting — he also made bronze statues — and Hippys for his Poseidon and his Victory. Habron painted a Friendship and a Harmony and figures of gods, Leontiscus an Aratus with the Trophies of Victory, and a Harpist Girl, Leon a Sappho, Nearchus Aphrodite among the Graces and the Cupids, and a Heracles in Sorrow Repenting his Madness, Nealces an Aphrodite. This Nealces was a talented and clever artist, inasmuch as when he painted a picture of a naval battle between the Persians and the Egyptians, which he desired to be understood as taking place on the river Nile, the water of which resembles the sea, he suggested by inference what could not be shown by art: he painted an ass standing on the shore drinking, and a crocodile lying in wait for it. Oinias has done a Family Group, Philiscus a Painter's Studio with a boy blowing the fire, Phalerion a Scylla, Simonides an Agatharchus and a Mnemosyne, Simus a Young Man Reposing, a Fuller's Shop Celebrating the Quinquatrus, and also a Nemesis of great merit; Theorus a Man Anointing Himself, and also Orestes killing his Mother and Aegisthus, and the Trojan War in a series of pictures now in Philippus' Porticoes at Rome and a Cassandra, in the Shrine of Concord, a Leontion of Epicurus in Contemplation, a King Demetrius; Theon a Madness of Orestes, a Thamyras the Harper; Tauriscus a Man throwing a Quoit, a Clytaemnestra, a Young Pan, a Polynices Claiming the Sovereignty, and a Capaneus.

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§ 35.40.10  Among these artists the following remarkable case is not to be left out; the man who ground the colours for the painter Nealces, Erigonus, attained such proficiency on his own account that he actually left behind him a famous pupil, Pasias, the brother of the painter Aiginetas. It is also a very unusual and memorable fact that the last works of artists and their unfinished pictures such as the Iris of Aristides, the Tyndarus' Children of Nicomachus, the Medea of Timomachus and the Aphrodite of Apelles which we have mentioned, are more admired than those which they finished, because in them are seen the preliminary drawings left visible and the artists' actual thoughts, and in the midst of approval's beguilement we feel regret that the artist's hand while engaged in the work was removed by death.

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§ 35.40.11  There are still some artists who are not undistinguished but who only need be mentioned in passing — Aristocydes, Anaxander, Aristobulus of Syria, Arcesilas son of Tisicrates, Coroebus the pupil of Nicomachus, Charmantides, the pupil of Euphranor, Dionysodorus of Colophon, Dicaeogenes resident at the court of King Demetrius, Euthymides, the Macedonian Heraclides and Milon of Soli, pupils of Pyromachus, the sculptor of the human figure, Mnasitheus of Sikyon, Mnasitimus the son and pupil of Aristonides, Nessus son of Habron, Polemo of Alexandria, Theodorus of Samos and <:prn id="Q40211854">Stadius, both pupils of Nicosthenes, Xenon of Sikyon, pupil of Neocles.

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§ 35.40.12  There have also been women artists — Timarete the daughter of Micon who painted the extremely archaic panel picture of Artemis at Ephesus, Irene daughter and pupil of the painter Cratinus who did the Maiden at Eleusis, a Calypso, an Old Man and Theodorus the Juggler, and painted also Alcisthenes the Dancer; Aristarete the daughter and pupil of Nearchus, who painted an Asclepius.

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§ 35.40.13  When Marcus Varro was a young man, Iaia of Cyzicus, who never married, painted pictures with the brush at Rome (and also drew with the cestrum or graver on ivory), chiefly portraits of women, as well as a large picture on wood of an Old Woman at Naples, and also a portrait of herself, done with a looking-glass. No one else had a quicker hand in painting, while her artistic skill was such that in the prices she obtained she far outdid the most celebrated portrait painters of the same period, Sopolis and Dionysius, whose pictures fill the galleries. A certain Olympias also painted; the only fact recorded about her is that Autobulus was her pupil.

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§ 35.41.1  In early days there were two kinds of encaustic painting, with wax and on ivory with a graver or cestrum (that is a small pointed graver); but later the practice came in of decorating battleships. This added a third method, that of employing a brush, when wax has been melted by fire; this process of painting ships is not spoilt by the action of the sun nor by salt water or winds.

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§ 35.42.1  In Egypt they also colour cloth by an exceptionally remarkable kind of process. They first thoroughly rub white fabrics and then smear them not with colours but with chemicals that absorb colour. When this has been done, the fabrics show no sign of the treatment, but after being plunged into a cauldron of boiling dye they are drawn out a moment later dyed. And the remarkable thing is that although the cauldron contains only one colour, it produces a series of different colours in the fabric, the hue changing with the quality of the chemical employed, and it cannot afterwards be washed out. Thus the cauldron which, if dyed fabrics were put into it, would undoubtedly blend the colours together, produces several colours out of one, and dyes the material in the process of being boiled; and the dress fabrics when submitted to heat become stronger for wear than they would be if not so heated.

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§ 35.43.1  Enough and more than enough has now been said about painting. It may be suitable to append to these remarks something about the plastic art. It was through the service of that same earth that modelling portraits from clay was first invented by Butades, a potter of Sikyon, at Corinth. He did this owing to his daughter, who was in love with a young man; and she, when he was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by a lamp. Her father pressed clay on this and made a relief, which he hardened by exposure to fire with the rest of his pottery; and it is said that this likeness was preserved in the Shrine of the Nymphs until the destruction of Corinth by Mummius. Some authorities state that the plastic art was first invented by Rhoecus and Theodorus at Samos, long before the expulsion of the Bacchiadae from Corinth, but that when Damaratus, who in Etruria became the father of Tarquin king of the Roman people, was banished from the same city, [578 B.C.] he was accompanied by the modellers Euchir, Diopus and Eugrammus, and they introduced modelling to Italy. The method of adding red earth to the material or else modelling out of red chalk, was an invention of Butades, and he first placed masks as fronts to the outer gutter-tiles on roofs; these at the first stage he called prostypa, but afterwards he likewise made ectypa. It was from these that the ornaments on the pediments of temples originated. Because of Butades modellers get their Greek name of piastae.

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§ 35.44.1  The first person who modelled a likeness in plaster of a human being from the living face itself, and established the method of pouring wax into this plaster mould and then making final corrections on the wax cast, was Lysistratus of Sikyon, the brother of Lysippus of whom we have spoken. Indeed he introduced the practice of giving likenesses, the object aimed at previously having been to make as handsome a face as possible. The same artist also invented taking casts from statues, and this method advanced to such an extent that no figures or statues were made without a clay model. This shows that the knowledge of modelling in clay was older than that of casting bronze.

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§ 35.45.1  Most highly praised modellers were Damophilus and Gorgasus, who were also painters they had decorated the Shrine of Ceres in the Circus Maximus at Rome with both kinds of their art, and there is an inscription on the building in Greek verse in which they indicated that the decorations on the right hand side were the work of Damophilus and those on the left were by Gorgasus. Varro states that before this Shrine was built everything in the temples was Tuscanic work; and that when this shrine was undergoing restoration the embossed work of the walls was cut out and enclosed in framed panels; and that the figures also were taken from the pediment and dispersed. Chalcosthenes also executed at Athens some works in unbaked clay, at the place named the Ceramicus, Potters Quarter, after his workshop. Marcus Varro records that he knew at Rome an artist named Possis who made fruit and grapes in such a way that nobody could tell by sight from the real things. Varro also speaks very highly of Arcesilaus, who was on terms of intimacy with Lucius Lucullus, and says that his sketch-models of clay used to sell for more, among artists themselves, than the finished works of others; and that this artist made the statue of Venus Genetrix in Caesar's Forum and that it was erected before it was finished as there was a great haste to dedicate it; and that the same artist had contracted with Lucullus to make a statue of Felicitas for 1,000,000 sesterces, which was prevented by the death of both parties; and that when a Knight of Rome Octavius desired him to make a wine-bowl he made him a model in plaster for the price of a talent. He also praises Pasiteles, who said that modelling was the mother of chasing and of bronze statuary and sculpture, and who, although he was eminent in all these arts, never made anything before he had made a clay model. He also states that this art had already been brought to perfection by Italy and especially by Etruria; that Vulca was summoned from Veii to receive the contract from Tarquinius Priscus for a statue of Jupiter to be consecrated in the Capitol, and that this Jupiter was made of clay and consequently was regularly painted with cinnabar; and that the four-horse chariots about which we spoke above on the pediment of the temple were modelled in clay; and that the figure of Hercules, which even today retains in the city the name of the material it is made of, was the work of the same artist. For these were the most splendid images of gods at that time; and we are not ashamed of those ancestors of ours for worshipping them in that material. For they used not formerly to work up silver and gold even for gods.

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§ 35.46.1  Statues of this kind are still to be found at various places. In fact even at Rome and in the Municipal Towns there are many pediments of temples, remarkable for their carving and artistic merit and intrinsic durability, more deserving of respect than gold, and certainly less baneful. At the present day indeed, even in the midst of our present rich resources the preliminary libation is made at sacrifices not from fluorspar or crystal vessels but with small ladles of earthenware, thanks to the ineffable kindness of Mother Earth, if one considers her gifts in detail, even though we omit her blessings in the various kinds of corn, wine. fruit, herbs and shrubs, drugs and metals, all the things that we have so far mentioned. Nor do our products even in pottery satisfy our needs with their unfailing supply, with jars invented for our wine, and pipes for water, conduits for baths, tiles for our roofs, baked bricks for our house-walls and foundations, or things that are made on a wheel, because of which King Numa established a seventh Guild, the Potters. Indeed moreover many people have preferred to be buried in earthenware coffins, for instance Marcus Varro who was interred in the Pythagorean style, in leaves of myrtle, olive and as black poplar; the majority of mankind employs earthenware receptacles for this purpose. Among table services Samian pottery is still spoken highly of; this reputation is also retained by Arezzo in Italy, and, merely for cups, Sorrento, Asti, and Pollentia, and by Saguntum in Spain and Pergamum in Asia Minor. Also Tralles in Asia Minor and Modena in Italy have their respective products, since even this brings nations fame, and their products also, so distinguished are the workshops of the potter's wheel, are carried to and fro across land and sea. In a temple at Erythrae even today are on view two wine-jars which were dedicated on account of their fine material, owing to a competition between a master potter and his apprentice as to which would make thinner earthenware. The pottery of Cos is most famous for this, but that of Adria is most substantial; while there are also some instances of severity also in relation to pottery. We find that Quintus Coponius was found guilty of bribery because he made a present of a jar of wine to a person who had the right to a vote. And so that luxury also may contribute some importance to earthenware, the name of a service of three dishes, we are told by Fenestella, used to denote the most luxurious possible banquet: one dish was of lamprey, a second of pike and a third of a mixture of fish. Clearly manners were already on the decline, though nevertheless we can still prefer them even to those of the philosophers of Greece, inasmuch as it is recorded that at the auction held by the heirs of Aristotle seventy earthenware dishes were sold. We have already stated when on the subject of birds that a single dish cost the tragic actor Aesop 100,000 sesterces, and I have no doubt that readers felt indignant; but, good heavens, Vitellius when emperor had a dish made that cost 1,000,000 sesterces, and to make which a special furnace was constructed out in open country, as luxury has reached a point when even earthenware costs more than vessels of fluorspar. It was owing to this dish that Mucianus in his second consulship, in a protest [AD. 70] which he delivered, reproached the memory of Vitellius for dishes as broad as marshes, although this particular dish was not more disgraceful than the poisoned one by which Cassius Severus when prosecuting Asprenas charged him with having caused the death of 130 guests. Artistic pottery also confers fame on towns, for instance Reggio and Cumae. The priests of the Mother of the Gods called Galli castrate themselves, if we accept the account of Marcus Caelius, with a piece of Samian pottery, the only way of avoiding dangerous results; and Cacius proposed as a penalty for an abominable offence that the guilty person should have his tongue cut out in the same way, just as if he were already himself inveighing against the same Vitellius in anticipation. What is there that experience cannot devise? For it employs even broken crockery, making it more solid and durable by pounding it up and adding what is called Signia lime, a kind of material used in a method which experience has also invented for making pavements.

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§ 35.47.1  But there are other inventions also that belong to Earth herself. For who could sufficiently marvel at the fact that the most inferior portion of the earth's substance, which is in consequence designated dust, on the hills of Pozzuoli, encounters the waves of the sea and as soon as it is submerged turns into a single mass of stone that withstands the attacks of the waves and becomes stronger every day, especially if it mixed with broken quarry-stone from Cumae? In the Cyzicus district also the nature of the earth is the same, but there not dust but the earth itself is cut out in blocks of any size wanted and plunged into the sea; and when drawn out, it is of the consistency of stone. The same is said to take place in the neighbourhood of Cassandreae and it is stated that in a fresh water spring at Cnidus earth becomes petrified in less than eight months. Or the coast from Oropus to Aulis all the earth that the sea touches is turned into rocks. The finest portion of the sand from the Nile is not very different from the dust of Pozzuoli, not to be used for an embankment against the sea and to act as a breakwater against waves, but for the purpose of subduing men's bodies for the exercises of the wrestling school. At all events it used to be imported from there for Patrobius, a freedman of the emperor Nero, and moreover I also find that this sand was carried with other military commodities for Alexander the Great's generals Craterus, Leonnatus and Meleager, though I shall not say more about this part of the subject any more than, by heaven, I shall mention the use of earth in making ointments, employed by our young men while ruining their vigour of mind by exercising their muscles.

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§ 35.48.1  Moreover, are there not in Africa and Spain walls made of earth that are called framed walls, because they are made by packing in a frame enclosed between two boards, one on each side, and so are stuffed in rather than built, and do they not last for ages, undamaged by rain, wind and fire, and stronger than any quarry-stone? Spain still sees the watchtowers of Hannibal and turrets of earth placed on the mountain ridges. From the same source is also obtained the substantial sods of earth suitable for the fortifications of our camps and for embankments against the violent flooding of rivers. At all events everybody knows that party-walls can be made by coating hurdles with clay, and are thus built up as if with raw bricks.

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§ 35.49.1  Bricks should not be made from a sandy or gravelly soil and far less from a stony one, but from a marly and white soil or else from a red earth; or even with the aid of sand, at all events if coarse male sand is used. The best time for making bricks is in spring, as at midsummer they tend to crack. For buildings, only bricks two years old are recommended; moreover the material for them when it has been pounded should be well soaked before they are moulded.

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§ 35.49.2  Three kinds of bricks are made: the 'didoron,' the one employed by us, eighteen inches long and a foot wide, second the 'tetradoron' and third the 'pentadoron,' doron being an old Greek word meaning the palm of the hand from which comes doron, meaning a gift, because a gift was given by the hand. Consequently the bricks get their names from four or five palms' length as the case may be. Their breadth is in all cases the same. In Greece the smaller kind is used for private structures and the larger in public buildings. At Pitana in Asia Minor as also in the city states of Maxima and Callet in Further Spain bricks are made which when dried will not sink in water, being made of pumice-like earth, which is an extremely useful material when it is capable of being worked. The Greeks preferred brick walls except in places permitting of a stone structure, as brick walls last for ever if built exactly perpendicular. Consequently that was how they built both public works and kings' palaces — the wall at Athens that faces towards Mount Hymettus, at Patrae the Shrines of Zeus and of Heracles (although the columns and architraves with which they surrounded these were of stone), and the royal palace of Attalus at Tralles and likewise the palace of Croesus at Sardis, which they converted into a house of elders, and that of Mausolus at Halicarnassus, buildings still standing. Murena and Varro in their aedileship had some plaster work on brick walls at Sparta cut away, and because of the excellence of its painting had it enclosed in wooden frames and brought to Rome to decorate the Comitium. It was in itself a wonderful piece of work, yet its transfer caused even more admiration. In Italy also there is a brick wall at Arezzo and at Mevania. Structures of this sort are not erected in Rome, because an eighteen inch wall will only carry a single storey, and there is a regulation forbidding any partition exceeding that thickness: nor does the system used for party-walls permit of it.

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§ 35.50.1  Let this be what we say about bricks. Among the other kinds of earth the one with the most remarkable properties is sulphur, which exercises a great power over a great many other substances. Sulphur occurs in the Aeolian Islands between Sicily and Italy, which we have said are volcanic, but the most famous is on the island of Melos. It is also found in Italy, in the territory of Naples and Campania, on the hills called the Leucogaei. It is there dug out of mineshafts and dressed with fire. There are four kinds: live sulphur, the Greek name for which means 'untouched by fire,' which alone forms as a solid mass — for all the other sorts consist of liquid and are prepared by boiling in oil; live sulphur is dug up, and it is translucent and of a green colour; it is the only one of all the kinds that is employed by doctors. The second kind is called 'clod-sulphur,' and is commonly found only in fullers' workshops. The third kind also is only employed for one purpose, for smoking woollens from beneath, as it bestows whiteness and softness; this sort is called egula. The fourth kind is specially used for making lamp-wicks. For the rest, sulphur is so potent that when put on the fire it detects epilepsy by its smell. Anaxilaus even made a sport with it by putting some in a cup of wine and placing a hot coal underneath and handing it round at dinner-parties, when by its reflection it threw on their faces a dreadful pallor as though they were dead. Its property is calorific and concoctive, but it also disperses abscesses on the body, and consequently is used as an ingredient in plasters and poultices for such cases. It is also remarkably beneficial for the kidneys and loins if in cases of pain it is applied to them with grease. In combination with turpentine it also removes lichenous growths on the face and leprosy; so it is called harpax, owing to the speed with which it has to be applied, which is caused by the need for immediate removal. Used as an electuary it is good for cases of asthma, and also purulent expectoration after coughing and as a remedy for the sting of scorpions. Live sulphur mixed with soda and pounded in vinegar and used as a liniment removes cutaneous eruptions, and also eggs of lice, and in combination with vinegar mixed with realgar it is useful on the eyelids. Sulphur also has a place in religious ceremonies, for the purpose of purifying houses by fumigation. Its potency is also perceptible in hot springs of water, and no other substance is more easily ignited, showing that it contains a powerful abundance of fire. Thunderbolts and lightning also have a smell of sulphur, and their actual light has a sulphurous quality.

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§ 35.51.1  Near to the nature of sulphur is also that of bitumen. In some places it is a slime and others an earth, the slime being emitted, as we have said, from the lake of Judea and the earth being found in the neighbourhood of the seaside town of Sidon in Syria. Both of these varieties get thickened and solidify into a dense consistency. But there is also a liquid sort of bitumen, for instance that of Zacynthus and the kind imported from Babylon; at the latter place indeed it also occurs with a white colour. The bitumen from Apollonia also is liquid, and all of these varieties are called by the Greeks pissasphalt, from its likeness to vegetable-pitch and bitumen. There is also an unctuous bitumen, of the consistency of oil, found in Sicily, in a spring at Akragas, the stream from which is tainted by it. The inhabitants collect it on tufts of reeds, as it very quickly adheres to them, and they use it instead of oil for burning in lamps, and also as a cure for scab in beasts of burden. Some authorities also include among the varieties of bitumen naphtha about which we spoke in Book 2, but its burning property and liability to ignition is far removed from any practical use. The test of bitumen is that it should be extremely brilliant, and that it should be massive, with an oppressive smell; when quite black, its brilliance is moderate, as it is commonly adulterated with vegetable pitch. Its medical effect is that of sulphur, as it is astringent, dispersive, contractive, and agglutinating. Ignited it drives away snakes by us smell. Babylonian bitumen is said to be serviceable for cataract and film in the eye, and also for leprosy lichen and itch. It is also used as a liniment for gout; while all varieties of it are used to fold back eyelashes that get in the way of sight, and also to cure toothache, when smeared on with soda. Taken as a draught with wine it alleviates an inveterate cough and shortness of breath; and it is also given in the same way in cases of dysentery, and arrests diarrhoea. Drunk however with vinegar it dissolves and brings away coagulated blood. It reduces pains in the loins and also in the joints, and applied with barley-meal it makes a special kind of plaster that bears its name. It stops a flow of blood, closes up wounds, and unites severed muscles. It is employed also for quartan fevers, the dose being a dram of bitumen and an equal weight of wild mint pounded up with a sixth of a dram of myrrh. Burnt bitumen detects cases of epilepsy, and mixed with wine and beaver-oil its scent dissipates suffocations of the womb; its smoke when applied from beneath relieves prolapsus of the womb; and drunk in wine it hastens menstruation. Among other uses of it, it is applied as a coating to copper and bronze vessels to make them fireproof.

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§ 35.51.2  We have stated that it also used to be the practice to employ it for staining copper and bronze and coating statues. It has also been used as a substitute for lime, the walls of Babylon being cemented with it. In smithies also it is in favour for varnishing iron and the heads of nails and many other uses.

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§ 35.52.1  Not less important or very different is the use made of alum, by which is meant a salt exudation from the earth. There are several varieties of it. In Cyprus there is a white alum and another sort of a darker colour, though the difference of colour is only slight; nevertheless the use made of them is very different, as the white and liquid kind is most useful for dying woollens a bright colour whereas the black kind is best for dark or sombre hues. Black alum is also used in cleaning gold. All alum is produced from water and slime, that is, a substance exuded by the earth; this collects naturally in a hollow in winter and its maturity by crystallisation is completed by the sunshine of summer; the part of it that separates earliest is whiter in colour. It occurs in Spain, Egypt, Armenia, Macedonia, Pontus, Africa, and the islands Sardinia, Melos, Lipari and Stromboli; the most highly valued is in Egypt and the next best in Melos. The alum of Melos also is of two kinds, fluid and dense. The test of the fluid kind is that it should be of a limpid, milky consistency, free from grit when rubbed between the fingers, and giving a slight glow of colour; this kind is called in Greek 'phorimon' in the sense of 'abundant.' Its adulteration can be detected by means of the juice of a pomegranate, as this mixed with it does not turn it black if it is pure. The other kind is the pale rough alum which may be stained with oak-gall also, and consequently this is called 'paraphoron,' perverted or adulterated alum. Liquid alum has an astringent, hardening and corrosive property. Mixed with honey it cures ulcers in the mouth, pimples and eruptions; this treatment is carried out in baths containing two parts of honey to one of alum. It reduces odour from the armpits and perspiration. It is taken in pills against disorders of the spleen and discharge of blood in the urine. Mixed with soda and chamomile it is also a remedy for scabies.

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§ 35.52.2  One kind of solid alum which is called in Greek schiston, 'splittable,' splits into a sort of filament of a whitish colour, owing to which some people have preferred to give it in Greek the name of trichitis, 'hairy alum.' This is produced from the same ore as copper, known as copperstone, a sort of sweat from that mineral, coagulated into foam. This kind of alum has less drying effect and serves less to arrest the detrimental humours of the body, but it is extremely beneficial as an ear-wash, or as a liniment also for ulcers of the mouth and for the teeth, and if it is retained in the mouth with saliva; or it forms a suitable ingredient in medicines for the eyes and for the genital organs of either sex. It is roasted in crucibles until it has quite lost its liquidity. There is another alum of a less active kind, called in Greek strongyle, 'round alum.' Of this also there are two varieties, the fungous which dissolves easily in any liquid and which is rejected as entirely worthless, and a better kind which is porous and pierced with small holes like a sponge and of a round formation, nearer white in colour, possessing a certain quality of unctuousness, free from grit, friable, and not apt to cause a black stain. This is roasted by itself on clean hot coals till it is reduced to ash. The best a of all kinds is that called Melos alum, after the island of that name, as we said; no other kind has a greater power of acting as an astringent, giving a black stain and hardening, and none other has a closer consistency. It removes granulations of the eyes, and is still more efficacious in arresting defluxions when calcined, and in that state also it is applied to itchings on the body. Taken as a draft or applied externally it also arrests haemorrhage. It is applied in vinegar to parts from which the hair has been removed and changes into soft down the hair that grows in its place. The chief property of all kinds of alum is their astringent effect, which gives it its name in Greek. This makes them extremely suitable for eye troubles, and effective in arresting haemorrhage. Mixed with lard it checks the spread of putrid ulcers — so applied it also dries ulcers in infants and eruptions in cases of dropsy — and, mixed with pomegranate juice, it checks ear troubles and malformations of the nails and hardening of scars, and flesh growing over the nails, and chilblains. Calcined with vinegar or gallnuts to an equal weight it heals gangrenous ulcers, and, if mixed with cabbage juice, pruritus, or if with twice the quantity of salt, serpiginous eruptions, and if thoroughly mixed with water, it kills eggs of lice and other insects that infest the hair. Used in the same way it is also good for burns, and mixed with watery fluid from vegetable pitch for scurf on the body. It is also used as an injection for dysentery, and taken in the mouth it reduces swellings of the uvula and tonsils. It must be understood that for all the purposes which we have mentioned in the case of the other kinds the alum imported from Melos is more efficacious. It has been indicated how important it is for the other requirements of life in giving a finish to hides and woollens.

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§ 35.53.1  Next to these we will deal with the various kinds of earth which are connected with medicine. There are two sorts of Samos earth, called collyrium, 'eye-salve,' and star-earth. The recommendation of the former is that it must be fresh and very soft and sticky to the tongue; the second is more lumpy; both are white in colour. The process is to calcine them and then to wash them. Some people prefer the former kind. They are beneficial for people spitting blood, and for plasters made up for drying purposes, and they are also used as an ingredient in medicines for the eyes.

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§ 35.54.1  Earth of Eretria has the same number of varieties, as one is white and one ash-coloured, the latter preferred in medicine. It is tested by its softness and by its leaving a violet tint if rubbed on copper. Its efficacy and the method of using it as a medicine have been spoken of among the pigments.

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§ 35.55.1  All these earths — we will mention it in this place — are washed by having water poured over them and dried in the sun, and then after being put in water again ground up and left to stand, till they settle down and can be divided into tablets. They are boiled in cups that are repeatedly well shaken.

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§ 35.56.1  White earth of Chios is also among medicaments; its effect is the same as that of Samos earth. It is specially used as a cosmetic for the skin of women, and Selinunte earth is used in the same way. The latter is of the colour of milk, and it dissolves very quickly in water, and likewise dissolved in milk it is used for touching up the whitewash on plastered walls. Pnigitis, or suffocating earth closely resembles that of Eretria, only it is in larger lumps and is sticky. It produces the same effect as Cimolian earth, although it is less powerful. Arnpelitis or vine earth is very like bitumen. The test for it is whether it dissolves when oil is put in it, like wax, and whether when roasted it retains a blackish colour. It is used for an emollient and dissipant, and is added to drugs for these purposes, especially in the case of eyelash beautifiers and for hair dyes.

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§ 35.57.1  There are several sorts of white earth. Among them there are two sorts of Cimolian earth that concern doctors one bright white and one inclining to purple. Either is effective for dispelling tumours, and, with vinegar added, for stopping fluxes. They also check swellings and inflammation of the parotid glands, and applied as a liniment, troubles of the spleen and pimples; while if foam-soda and oil of cypros and vinegar are added, they cure swollen feet, provided the treatment is applied in the sun, and the application is washed off again with salt water six hours later. A mixture of this earth with oil of cypros and wax is good for swellings of the testicles. Cretaceous earth also possesses cooling properties, and applied in a liniment it stops immoderate sweating, and likewise taken in wine while in a bath it removes pimples. The kind from Thessaly is most esteemed, but it is also found in the neighbourhood of Bubo in Lycia. Another use also made of Cimolus earth is in regard to cloth. The kind called Sarda, which is brought from Sardinia, is only used for white fabrics, and is of no use for cloths of various colours; it is the cheapest of all the Cimolus kinds; more valuable are the Umbrian and the one called 'rock.' The peculiarity of the latter is that it increases in size when it is steeped in liquid; consequently it is sold by weight, whereas Umbrian is sold by measure. Umbrian earth is only employed for giving lustre to cloths. It will not be out of place to touch on this part of the subject also, as a Metilian law referring to fullers still stands, the law which Gaius Flamiuius and Lucius Aemilius as censors put forward to be carried in parliament: so careful about everything were our ancestors. The process then is this: the cloth is first washed with earth of Sardinia, and then it is fumigated with sulphur, and afterwards scoured with Cimolian earth provided that the dye is fast; if it is coloured with bad dye it is detected and turns black and its colour is spread by the action of the sulphur; whereas genuine and valuable colours are softened and brightened up with a sort of brilliance by Cimolian earth when they have been made sombre by the sulphur. The 'rock' kind is more serviceable for white garments, after the application of sulphur, but it is very detrimental to colour. In Greece they use Tymphaea gypsum instead of Cimolian earth.

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§ 35.58.1  There is another cretaceous earth called silversmiths' powder as used for polishing silver; but the most inferior kind is the one which our ancestors made it the practice to use for tracing the line indicating victory in circus-races and for marking the feet of slaves on sale that had been imported from overseas; instances of these being Publilius of Antioch the founder of our mimic stage and his cousin Manilius Antiochus the originator of our astronomy, and likewise Staberius Eros our first grammarian, all of whom our ancestors saw brought over in the same ship. But why need anybody mention these men, recommended to notice as they are by their literary honours? Other instances that have been seen on the stand in the slave market are Chrysogonus, freedman of Sulla, Amphion, freedman of Quintus Catulus, Hector, freedman of Lucius Lucullus, Demetrius, freedman of Pompey, and Auge, freedwoman of Demetrius, although she herself also was believed to have belonged to Pompey; Hipparchus freedman of Mark Antony, Menas and Menecrates freedmen of Sextus Pompeius, and a list of others whom this is not the occasion to enumerate, who have enriched themselves by the bloodshed of Roman citizens and by the licence of the proscriptions. Such is the mark set on these herds of slaves for sale, and the disgrace attached to us by capricious fortune persons whom even we have seen risen to such power that we actually beheld the honour of the praetorship awarded to them by decree of the Senate at the bidding of Claudius Caesar's wife Agrippina and all but sent back with the rods of office wreathed in laurels to the places from which they came to Rome with their feet whitened with white earth.

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§ 35.59.1  Moreover there are other kinds of earth with a special property of their own about which we have spoken already, but the nature of which must again be stated here: soil taken from the island of Galata and in the neighbourhood of Clupea in Africa kills scorpions, and that of the Balearic Islands and Iviza is fatal to snakes.

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§ 36.1.1  IT remains for us to deal with the nature of stones, or, in other words, the prime folly in our behaviour, to be considered as such even though no reference be made to gems, amber and vessels of rock-crystal and fluorspar. For everything that we have investigated up to the present volume may be deemed to have been created for the benefit of mankind. Mountains, however, were made by Nature for herself to serve as a kind of framework for holding firmly together the inner parts of the earth, and at the same time to enable her to subdue the violence of rivers, to break the force of heavy seas and so to curb her most restless elements with the hardest material of which she is made. We quarry these mountains and haul them away for a mere whim; and yet there was a time when it seemed remarkable even to have succeeded in crossing them. Our forefathers considered the scaling of the Alps by Hannibal and later by the Cimbri to be almost unnatural. Now these selfsame Alps are quarried into marble of a thousand varieties.

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§ 36.1.2  Headlands are laid open to the sea, and nature is flattened. We remove the barriers created to serve as the boundaries of nations, and ships are built specially for marble. And so, over the waves of the sea, Nature's wildest element, mountain ranges are transported to and fro, and even then with greater justification than we can find for climbing to the clouds in search of vessels to keep our drinks cool, and for hollowing out rocks that almost reach the heavens, so that we may drink from ice. When we hear of the prices paid for these vessels, when we see the masses of marble that are being conveyed or hauled, we should each of us reflect, and at the same time think how much more happily many people live without them. That men should do such things, or rather endure them, for no purpose or pleasure except to lie amid spotted marbles, just as if these delights were not taken from us by the darkness of night, which is half our life's span!

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§ 36.2.1  When we think of these things we feel ourselves blushing prodigiously with shame even for the men of former times. There exist the laws passed by Claudius in his censorship forbidding dormice and other trifles too insignificant to mention to be served at dinner. But no law was ever passed forbidding us to import marble and to traverse the seas for its sake. Perhaps it may be said 'Of course not. No marbles were being imported.' That suggestion at least is untrue. In the aedileship of Marcus Scaurus there was the spectacle of 360 columns being taken to the stage of an improvised theatre that was intended to be used barely for a month, and the laws were silent. Of course, it was the official pleasures of the community for which some allowance was being made by our laws. But why should this, of all excuses, have been made? Or what route is more commonly taken by vices in their surreptitious approach than the official one? How else have ivory, gold and precious stones come to be used in private life? Or what have we left entirely to the gods? Very well; some allowance was being made for the pleasures of the community. Were not the laws silent also when the largest of those columns, which were each fully 38 feet long and of Lucullean marble, were placed in the hall of Scaurus' house?

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§ 36.2.2  And there was no secrecy or concealment. A sewer contractor forced Scaurus to give him security against possible damage to the drains when the columns were being hauled to the Palatine. Would it not have been more expedient, therefore, when so harmful a precedent was being set, to afford some security for our morals? The laws were still silent when these great masses of marble were dragged to a private house past the earthenware pediments of temples!

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§ 36.3.1  Nor can we suppose that Scaurus surprised with an elementary lesson in vice a community that was untutored and unable to foresee the consequences of the mischief. It was before this that during a quarrel the orator Lucius Crassus, having been the first to install, also on the Palatine, columns of foreign marble, columns which were after all merely of Hymettus marble and not more than six in number or more than 12 feet each in length, was in consequence nicknamed by Marcus Brutus the Palatine Venus. Of course these matters were disregarded because morals had already lost the battle; and when it was seen that there was no effective way of banning what had been expressly forbidden, it seemed preferable to have no laws at all rather than laws that were of no avail. These events and those that have followed them in our time will show that we are better men. For who nowadays possesses a hall equipped with such large columns? However, before we speak of marbles, I am of the opinion that we should display the merits of the men who have worked in this material. First, then, we shall make a survey of artists.

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§ 36.4.1  The very first men to make a name as sculptors in marble were Dipoenus and Scyllis, who were born in the island of Crete while Media was still a great power and Cyrus had not yet come to the throne of Persia. Their date falls approximately in the 50th Olympiad. They made their way to Sikyon, which was for long the motherland of all such industries. The men of Sikyon had given them a contract in the name of the state for making statues of gods; but before these were finished the artists complained that they had been wronged and went away to Aitolia. Sikyon was instantly stricken with famine, barrenness and fearful affliction. When the people begged the oracle for relief, Apollo of Delphi replied that relief would come 'if Dipoenus and Scyllis completed the images of the gods.' This they were prevailed upon to do thanks to the payment of high fees and high compliments. The statues, incidentally, were those of Apollo, Diana, Hercules and Minerva, the last of which was later struck by lightning.

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§ 36.4.2  Before the time of Dipoenus and Scyllis there had already lived in the island of Chios a sculptor Melas, who was succeeded by his son Micciades and his grandson Archermus; and the sons of Archermus, named Bupalus and Athenis, were quite the most eminent masters of the art at the time of the poet Hipponax, who is known to have been alive in the 60th Olympiad. Now if we trace their lineage back to the time of their great-grandfather, we find that the beginnings of this art coincide in time with the 1st Olympiad. Hipponax had a notoriously ugly face; and because of this they made impudent jokes much to the amusement of the groups of companions to whom they exhibited his likeness. This angered Hipponax, who rebuked them so violently in his mordant lampoons that he is believed by some to have driven them to hang themselves. But this is untrue because later they made several statues in neighbouring islands, for example in Delos; and to their pedestals they attached verses to the effect that 'Chios is esteemed not merely for its vines, but also for the works of the sons of Archermus.' Moreover the people of Iasos proudly display a Diana made by them. In Chios itself there is stated to be a face of Diana which is their work. It is set in a lofty position, and people entering the building imagine that her expression is stern, but when they leave they fancy that it has become cheerful. At Rome there are statues by them on the angles of the pediment of the temple of Apollo on the Palatine and on almost all the buildings for which the emperor Augustus of revered memory was responsible. There were works by their father too at Delos and in the island of Lesbos. As for Dipoenus, Ambracia, Argos and Kleonai were full of his productions.

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§ 36.4.3  All these artists used only white marble from the island of Paros, a stone which they proceeded to call 'lychnites,' since, according to Varro, it was quarried in galleries by the light of oil lamps. However, many whiter varieties have been discovered since their time, some indeed only recently, as is the case with the Luna quarries. As for the quarries of Paros, there is an extraordinary tradition that once, when the stone-breakers split a single block with their wedges, a likeness of Silenus was found inside.

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§ 36.4.4  We should not forget to mention that this art is much older than that of painting or of bronze statuary, both of which arose with Pheidias in the 83rd Olympiad, that is, about 332 years later. It is reported that Pheidias himself carved in marble and that the exceptionally beautiful Venus in Octavia's Buildings at Rome is his. What is certain is that a pupil of his was the Athenian Alcamenes, a particularly famous sculptor, several of whose works are to be seen at Athens in the temples, while outside the walls there is the celebrated statue of Venus, which in Greek is known as Aphrodite of the Gardens. Pheidias himself is said to have put the finishing touches to this. Another of his pupils was Agoracritus of Paros, who pleased him, moreover, because of his youthful good looks, and consequently Pheidias is said to have allowed him to pass as the author of several of his own works. However that may be, the two pupils competed with each other in making a Venus, and Alcamenes won the contest, not indeed through his skill, but through the votes of his fellow-citizens, who supported their kinsman at the expense of his foreign rival. Consequently, Agoracritus is reported to have sold his statue under a proviso that it should not remain in Athens, and to have called it Nemesis. It was set up within Attica in the deme of Rhamnus, and Marcus Varro preferred it to any other statue. In the same township there is also a work by Agoracritus in the shrine of the Great Mother. That Pheidias is the most famous sculptor among all peoples who appreciate the fame of his Olympian Jupiter is beyond doubt, but in order that even those who have not seen his works may be assured that his praises are well-earned shall produce evidence that is insignificant in itself and sufficient only to prove his inventiveness. To do so, I shall not appeal to the beauty of his Olympian Jupiter or to the size of his Minerva [in the Parthenon ] at Athens, even though this statue, made of ivory and gold, is 26 cubits in height. But rather, I shall mention her shield, on the convex border of which he engraved a Battle of the Amazons, and on the hollow side Combats of Gods and Giants; and her sandals, on which he depicted Combats of Lapiths and Centaurs. So truly did every detail lend itself to his art. On the pedestal there is carved what is entitled in Greek the Birth of Pandora, with twenty gods assisting at the birth. Although the figure of Victory is especially remarkable, connoisseurs admire also the snake, as well as the bronze sphinx that crouches just beneath her spear. These are things which should be stated in passing with regard to an artist who has never been praised enough. At the same time, they make us realize that the grandeur of his notions was maintained even in small matters. Praxiteles is an artist whose date I have mentioned among those of the makers of bronze statues, but in the fame of his work in marble he surpassed even himself. There are works by him at Athens in the Cerameicus; and yet superior to anything not merely by Praxiteles, but in the whole world, is the Venus, which many people have sailed to Cnidus to see. He had made two figures, which he put up for sale together. One of them was draped and for this reason was preferred by the people of Cos, who had an option on the sale, although he offered it at the same price as the other. This they considered to be the only decent and dignified course of action. The statue which they refused was purchased by the people of Cnidus and achieved an immeasurably greater reputation. Later King Nicomedes was anxious to buy it from them, promising so to discharge all the state's vast debts. The Cnidians, however, preferred to suffer anything but this, and rightly so; for with this statue Praxiteles made Cnidus a famous city. The shrine in which it stands is entirely open so as to allow the image of the goddess to be viewed from every side, and it is believed to have been made in this way with the blessing of the goddess herself. The statue is equally admirable from every angle. There is a story that a man once fell in love with it and hiding by night embraced it, and that a stain betrays this lustful act. In Cnidus there are also other marble figures by notable artists, a Father Liber by Bryaxis, a Father Liber and a Minerva by Scopas; but there is no greater proof of the excellence of Praxiteles' Venus than the fact that amidst these works it alone receives mention. To Praxiteles belongs also a Cupid, with which Cicero taunted Verres, the famous Cupid for the sake of which men visited Thespiae, and which now stands in Octavia's Rooms. To him belongs, moreover, another Cupid, which is naked, at Parium, the colony on the Propontis, a work that matches the Venus of Cnidus in its renown, as well as in the outrageous treatment which it suffered. For Alcetas, a man from Rhodes, fell in love with it and left upon it a similar mark of his passion. At Rome the works of Praxiteles are a Flora, a Triptolemus and a Ceres in the Servilian Gardens, images of Success and Good Fortune on the Capitol, and likewise the Maenads, the so-called Thyiads and Caryatids and the Sileni in the Collection of Asinius Pollio, as well as an Apollo and a Neptune. The son of Praxiteles, Cephisodotus, inherited also his skill. His Persons Grappling at Pergamum is highly praised, being notable for the fingers, which seem genuinely to sink into living flesh rather than into dead marble. At Rome his works are the Latona in the temple of the Palatine Apollo, a Venus in the Collection of Asinius Pollio, and the Aesculapius and Diana in the temple of Juno within the Portico of Octavia.

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§ 36.4.5  These artists are rivalled in merit by Scopas. He made a Venus and a figure of Pothos (Desire), which are worshipped with the most solemn rites in Samothrace. He was responsible also for the Apollo on the Palatine and the much praised Seated Vesta in the Servilian Gardens, along with the two turning-posts on either side of her, of which there are facsimiles in the Collection of Asinius, where there is also his Girl Carrying a Sacred Basket. But most highly esteemed is his composition in the shrine built by Cn. Domitius in the Circus Flaminius. There is Neptune himself, and with him are Thetis and Achilles. There are Nereids riding on dolphins and mighty fish or on seahorses, and also Tritons, 'Phorcus' band,' swordfish and a host of other sea creatures, all by the hand of the one man, a magnificent achievement even if it had occupied his whole career. As it is, apart from the works mentioned above and those unknown to us, there is furthermore the colossal seated statue of Mars by the same artist in the temple built by Brutus Callaecus also in the Circus, as well as his naked Venus in the same place, a work that surpasses the Venus of Praxiteles and would have brought fame to any locality but Rome.

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§ 36.4.6  At Rome, indeed, the great number of works of art and again their consequent effacement from our memory, and, even more, the multitude of official functions and business activities must, after ally deter anyone from serious study, since the appreciation involved needs leisure and deep silence in our surroundings. Hence we do not know the maker even of the Venus dedicated by the emperor Vespasian [AD. 69-79] in the precincts of his Temple of Peace, although it deserves to rank with the old masters. Equally there is doubt as to whether the Dying Children of Niobe in the temple of the Sosian Apollo was the work of Scopas or of Praxiteles. Similarly, we cannot tell which of the two carved the Father Janus which was dedicated in its rightful temple by Augustus after being brought here from Egypt; and now a covering of gilt has hidden its secret still more. Equally, there is a controversy about the Cupid Holding a Thunderbolt in the Hall of Octavia. Only one thing is stated with conviction, namely that the figure is that of Alcibiades the most handsome youth of that time. In the same salon there are many pleasing works of which the authors are unknown, for example, the Four Satyrs, of whom one is carrying on his shoulders Father Liber dressed in a robe and another is likewise carrying Ariadne, while a third stops a child crying and a fourth gives a drink to another child out of a mixing-bowl; and the Two Breezes, who are spreading their cloaks like sails. There is just as much dispute as to the makers of the Olympus and Pan and the Chiron With Achilles in the Voting Enclosure, even though their fame pronounces them to be so valuable that their keepers must answer for their safety with their lives.

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§ 36.4.7  The contemporaries and rivals of Scopas were Bryaxis, Timotheus and Leochares, whom we must discuss along with him because together with him they worked on the carvings of the Mausoleum. This is the tomb that was built by Artemisia for her husband Mausolus, the viceroy of Caria, who died in the second year of the 107th Olympiad. These artists were chiefly responsible for making the structure one of the seven wonders of the work. On the north and south sides it extends for 63 feet, but the length of the facades is less, the total length of the facades and sides being 440 feet. The building rises to a height of 25 cubits and is enclosed by 36 columns. The Greek word for the surrounding colonnade is 'pteron,' a 'wing.' The east side was carved by Scopas, the north by Bryaxis, the south by Timotheus and the west by Leochares; and before they completed their task, the queen died. However, they refused to abandon the work without finishing it, since they were already of the opinion that it would be a memorial to their own glory and that of their profession; and even today they are considered to rival each other in skill. With them was associated a fifth artist. For above the colonnade there is a pyramid as high again as the lower structure and tapering in 24 stages to the top of its peak. At the summit there is a four-horse chariot of marble, and this was made by Pythis. The addition of this chariot rounds off the whole work and brings it to a height of 140 feet. There is a Diana by Timotheus at Rome in the temple of the Palatine Apollo, a statue for which a head was made as a replacement by Avianius Evander.

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§ 36.4.8  The Hercules of Menestratus is greatly admired, and so too is the Hecate in the precinct behind the temple of Diana at Ephesus. In studying this statue people are warned by the sacristans to be careful of their eyes; so intense is the glare of the marble. As highly esteemed, too, are the Graces in the Propylaion [of the Acropolis ] at Athens. These were the work of Socrates, who was not the same man as Socrates the painter, although some think that he was. As for the famous Myron, who is so highly praised for his bronzes, his Tipsy Old Woman at Smyrna is especially renowned.

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§ 36.4.9  Asinius Pollio, being an ardent enthusiast, was accordingly anxious for his collection to attract sightseers. In it are the Centaurs Carrying Nymphs by Arcesilas, the Muses of Helicon by Cleomenes, the Oceanus and Jupiter by Heniochus, the Nymphs of the Appian Water by Stephanus, the double busts of Hermes and Eros by Tauriscus (not the well-known worker in metal and ivory, but a native of Tralles), the Jupiter Patron of Strangers by Papylus, the pupil of Praxiteles, and a composition by Apollonius and Tauriscus which was brought from Rhodes, namely Zethus and Amphion, and then Dirce and the bull with its rope, all carved from the same block of stone. These two artists caused a dispute as to their parentage, declaring that their putative father was Menecrates and their real father Artemidorus. In the same galleries there is a Father Liber by Eutychides which is warmly praised, and close by the Portico of Octavia an Apollo by Philiscus of Rhodes standing in the temple of Apollo, and furthermore a Latona, a Diana, the Nine Muses, and another Apollo, which is naked. The Apollo With His Lyre in the same temple was made by Timarchides, and in the temple of Juno that stands within the Portico of Octavia the image of the goddess herself was made by Dionysius, although there is another by Polycles, while the Venus in the same place was executed by Philiscus and the other statues by Praxiteles. Polycles and Dionysius, who were the sons of Timarchides, were responsible also for the Jupiter in the adjacent temple, while in the same place the Pan and Olympus Wrestling, which is the second most famous grappling group in the world, was the work of Heliodorus, the Venus Bathing of Daedalsas, and the Venus Standing of Polycharmus. It is clear from the honour accorded to it that a work much esteemed was that of Lysias which Augustus of revered memory dedicated in honour of his father Octavius in a niche embellished with columns upon the arch on the Palatine. This work consists of a team of four horses with a chariot and Apollo with Diana all carved from one block of marble. In the Servilian Gardens I find that works much admired are the Apollo by the eminent engraver Calamis, the Boxers by Dercylides, and the historian Callisthenes by Amphistratus. Beyond these men, there are not a great many more that are famous. The reputation of some, distinguished though their work may be, has been obscured by the number of artists engaged with them on a single task, because no individual monopolizes the credit nor again can several of them be named on equal terms. This is the case with the Laocoon in the palace of the emperor Titus, a work superior to any painting and any bronze. Laocoon, his children and the wonderful clasping coils of the snakes were caned from a single block in accordance with an agreed plan by those eminent craftsmen Hagesander, Polydorus and Athenodorus, all of Rhodes. Similarly, the imperial mansions on the Palatine were filled with excellent statues made by pairs of artists, Craterus and Pythodorus, Polydeuces and Hermolaus, another Pythodorus and Artemon, and individually by Aphrodisius of Tralles. The Pantheon of Agrippa was embellished by Diogenes of Athens; and among the supporting members of this temple there are Caryatids that are almost in a class of their own, and the same is true of the figures on the angles of the pediment, which are, however, not so well known because of their lofty position. A work that is without honour and stands in no temple is the Hercules, before which the Carthaginians were wont to perform human sacrifices every year. This stands at ground-level in front of the entrance to the Portico of the Nations. Formerly too there were statues of the Thespiads (Muses) by the temple of Felicitas, and a Roman knight, Junius Pisciculus, fell in love with one of them, according to Varro, who incidentally was an admirer of Pasiteles, a sculptor who was also the author of a treatise in five volumes on the World's Famous Masterpieces. He was a native of Magna Graecia and received Roman citizenship along with the communities of that region. The ivory Jupiter in the temple of Metellus at the approaches to the Campus Martius is his work. Once, he was at the docks, where there were wild beasts from Africa, and was making a relief of a lion, peering as he did so into the cage at his model, when it so happened that a leopard broke out of another cage and caused serious danger to this most conscientious of artists. He is said to have executed a number of works but their titles are not recorded. Arcesilaus, highly praised by Varro, who states that he once possessed a work of his, namely Winged Cupids Playing with a Lioness, of whom some were holding it with cords, some were making it drink from a horn, and some were putting slippers on its feet, all the figures having been carved from one block. Varro relates also that it was Coponius who was responsible for the fourteen figures of Nations that stand around the Pompeium. I find that Canachus, who was much admired as a maker of bronzes, also executed figures in marble. Nor should we forget Sauras and Batrachus, who built the temples that are enclosed by the Porticoes of Octavia. They were mere natives of Sparta. And yet, some people actually suppose that they were very rich and erected the temples at their own expense because they hoped to be honoured by an inscription; and the story is that, although this was refused, they attained their object in another way. At any rate, on the moulded bases of the columns there are still in existence carvings of a lizard and a frog in token of their names. One of these temples is that of Jupiter, in which the subjects of the paintings and of all the other embellishments are concerned with women. For it had been intended as the temple of Juno; but, according to the tradition, the porters interchanged the cult-images when they were installing them, and this arrangement was preserved as a matter of religious scruple, in the belief that the gods themselves had allotted their dwelling-places in this way. Similarly, therefore, the embellishments in the temple of Juno are those that were destined for the temple of Jupiter.

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§ 36.4.10  Fame has been won in the making also of marble miniatures, namely by Myrmecides, whose Four-horse Chariot and Driver were covered by the wings of a fly, and by Callicratides, whose ants have feet and other parts too small to be discerned.

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§ 36.5.1  So much for the sculptors in marble and the artists who have achieved the greatest fame. In discussing this subject, however, I am reminded that in those times no value was attached to marble with markings. Apart from the marble of the Cyclades, sculptors worked in that of Thasos, which rivals it, and of Lesbos, which has a slightly more bluish tinge. Markings of various colours and decorations of marble in general are first mentioned by that most accurate exponent of the details of high living, Menander, and even he rarely alludes to them. Marble columns were certainly used in temples, not, however, as an embellishment, since embellishments as such were not yet appreciated, but merely because there was no way of erecting stronger columns. Thus they are a feature of the unfinished temple of Jupiter Olympius at Athens, from which Sulla brought columns to be used for temples on the Capitol. However, ordinary stone and marble were distinguished already in Homer, for he speaks of a man being struck by a piece of marble; but this is as far as he goes. He decorates even his royal palaces, however sumptuously, only with ivory, apart from metals — bronze, gold, electrum and silver. In my opinion, the first specimens of our favourite marbles with their parti-coloured markings appeared from the quarries of Chios when the people of that island were building their walls. Hence the witty remark made at the expense of this work by Cicero. It was their practice to show it as a splendid structure to all their visitors; and his remark to them was 'I should be much more amazed if you had made it of stone from Tibur.' And, heaven knows, painting would not have been valued at all, let alone so highly, had marbles enjoyed any considerable prestige.

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§ 36.6.1  The art of cutting marble into thin slabs may possibly have been invented in Caria. The earliest instance, so far as I can discover, is that of the palace of Mausolus at Halicarnassus, the brick walls of which were decorated with Proconnesian marble. He died in the second year of the 107th Olympiad and in the 403rd year after the founding of Rome.

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§ 36.7.1  The first man in Rome to cover with marble veneer whole walls in his house, which was on the Caelian Hill, was, according to Cornelius Nepos, Mamurra, a Roman Knight and a native of Formiae, who was Gaius Caesar's chief engineer in Gaul. That such a man should have sponsored the invention is enough to make it utterly improper. For this is the Mamurra who was reviled by Catullus of Verona in his poems, the Mamurra whose house, as a matter of fact, proclaims more clearly than Catullus himself that he 'possesses all that Shaggy Gaul possessed.' Incidentally Nepos adds also that he was the first to have only marble columns in his whole house and that these were all solid columns of Carystus or Luna marble.

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§ 36.8.1  Marcus Lepidus, who was consul with Quintus Catulus, was the very first to lay down door-sills of Numidian marble in his house; and for this he was sharply criticized. He was consul in the 676th year after the founding of the city. This is the first indication that I can find of the importing of Numidian marble. The marble, however, was not in the form of columns or slabs, like that of Carystus mentioned above, but came in blocks to be used in the most sordid manner — as door-sills! Four years after the consulship of this Lepidus came that of Lucius Lucullus, who gave his name, as is evident from the facts, to Lucullean marble. He took a great delight in this marble and introduced it to Rome, although it is in general black and all other marbles are favoured because of their markings or colours. It is found in the island of Chios and is almost the only marble to have derived its name from that of a devotee. Of these men, it was Marcus Scaurus, in my opinion, whose stage was the first structure to have marble walls, though I am not prepared to say whether these were of veneer or of solid polished blocks, as, for instance, is the case today with the walls of the temple of Jupiter the Thunderer on the Capitol. For I find no evidence of marble veneer in Italy that is as early as this.

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§ 36.9.1  But whoever first discovered how to cut marble and carve up luxury into many portions was a man of misplaced ingenuity. The cutting of the marble is effected apparently by iron, but actually by sand, for the saw merely presses the sand upon a very thinly traced line, and then the passage of the instrument, owing to the rapid movement to and fro, is in itself enough to cut the stone. The Ethiopian variety of this sand is the most highly esteemed; for, to make matters worse, material for cutting marble is sought from as far afield as Ethiopia; and, moreover, men go in search of it even to India, which it was once an affront to strict morality to visit even for pearls. The Indian is the next most highly praised, but the Ethiopian is finer and cuts without leaving any roughness. The Indian does not give the stone such a smooth surface. However, people engaged in polishing marble are strongly recommended to rub marble with it when it has been calcined. There is a similar fault in the Naxian sand and in that of Coptos, which is known as the Egyptian variety. These were the kinds used for cutting marble in early times. Later there was discovered an equally valuable sand from a sandbank in the Adriatic which is uncovered only at low tide. Consequently, its position is not easy to mark. Now also fraudulent craftsmen dare to cut slabs with any kind of sand from any river, a waste which very few clients perceive. For in fact the coarser the sand, the less accurate the sections it grinds, the more marble it wears away, and owing to the rough surfaces produced, the more work it leaves for those responsible for polishing the slabs. Hence the cut slabs are made thinner. Again, for polishing marble, sand from the Thebaid is suitable, as well as powder made from limestone or pumice.

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§ 36.10.1  For smoothing marble statues and also for en-paving and filing down gems the Naxian stone was for long the favourite. This is the name given to the whetstones found in the island referred to above. Later, those imported from Armenia were preferred.

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§ 36.11.1  It is not important to mention the colours and species of marbles when they are so well known, nor is it easy to list them when they are so numerous.

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§ 36.11.2  For there are few places for which a characteristic marble is not found to exist. Even so, the most famous kinds have already been mentioned, along with the peoples whose names they bear, in the course of our circuit of the world. Not all of them occur in quarries, but many are found scattered also beneath the earth's surface, some indeed being very valuable, like the green Lacedemonian, which is brighter than any other marble, or the Augustean and, more recently, the Tiberian, which were found in Egypt for the first time during the principates of Augustus and act — a Tiberius respectively! From serpentine, the markings of which resemble snakes — hence its name — these stones differ in that their markings are grouped differently. Those of the Augustean curl over like waves so as to form coils, while the Tiberian has scattered greyish-white spots which are not rolled into coils. Another difference is that only quite small columns made of serpentine are to be found. It has two varieties: one is soft and white, the other hard and dark. When worn as amulets, both are said to relieve headaches and snakebites. Some authorities recommend the white variety as an amulet to be worn by sufferers from delirium or a coma. But as an antidote to snakebites some praise particularly the variety of serpentine known as 'tephrias' from its ashen colour. Another stone, named from its place of origin, is the Memphis stone, which is like a gem. The method of using this is to grind it to powder and to smear it mixed with vinegar on places which need to be cauterized or lanced; thus the body is numbed and feels no severe pain. In Egypt too there is red porphyry, of which a variety mottled with white dots is known as 'leptopsephos.' The quarries supply masses of any size to be cut away. Statues of this stone were brought from Egypt to the emperor Claudius in Rome by his official agent Vitrasius Pollio, an innovation that did not meet with much approval. No one at least has since followed his example. The Egyptians also discovered in Ethiopia what is called 'basanites,' a stone which in colour and hardness resembles iron: hence the name they have given it. No large specimen of this stone has ever been found than that dedicated by the emperor Vespasian in the Temple of Peace, the subject of which is the Nile, with sixteen of the river-god's children playing around him, these denoting the number of cubits reached by the river in flood at its highest desirable level. Not unlike this, we are told, is the block in the shine of Serapis at Thebes chosen for a statue of what is supposed to be Memnon; and this is said to creak every day at dawn as soon as the sun's rays reach it.

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§ 36.12.1  Onyx marble was supposed by our old authorities to occur in the mountains of Arabia and nowhere else. Sudines, however, thought that it occurred in Carmania. At first only drinking-vessels were made of it, and then the feet of couches and the frames of chairs. Cornelius Nepos records that it was considered quite extraordinary when Publius Lentulus Spinther exhibited wine jars of onyx marble big enough to hold 9 Chian gallons, but that only five years later he himself saw columns 32 feet long. There were striking changes in the history of the stone even after this, for the four small columns placed by Cornelius Balbus in his theatre caused a sensation, whereas I have seen thirty quite large ones in the dining-room which the emperor Claudius' freedman, the notoriously powerful Callistus, built for himself. This stone is sometimes called 'alabastrites,' for it is hollowed out to be used also as unguent jars because it is said to be the best means of keeping unguents fresh. It is suitable too, when burnt, for plasters. It occurs in the neighbourhood of Thebes in Egypt and of Damascus in Syria. The latter variety is whiter than the rest, but that of Carmania is the most excellent. Next comes the Indian, and then of course there is that of Syria and the province of Asia, while the least valuable is the Cappadocian, which has no lustre whatsoever. The specimens most warmly recommended are the honey-coloured, marked with spirals, and opaque. A colour resembling that of horn, or else gleaming white, and any suggestion of a glassy look are serious faults in onyx marble.

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§ 36.13.1  Many people consider that for the preservation of unguents there is little to choose between onyx marble and the 'lygdinus,' which is found in Paros in pieces no larger than a dish or mixing bowl, although in earlier times it was normally imported only from Arabia. It is of an exceptionally brilliant whiteness. Two stones of a directly opposed character are also greatly esteemed. There is the coral stone found in the province of Asia in sizes not exceeding two cubits, with a white colour close to that of ivory and a certain resemblance to it in appearance. On the other hand, the stone named after Alabanda, its place of origin, although it occurs also at Miletus, is black. In appearance, however, this stone tends rather to have a reddish tinge. It can, moreover, be melted by fire and fused to serve as glass. The Thebaie stone mottled with gold spots is found in a part of Africa that has been assigned to Egypt and is naturally well adapted for use as stones on which to grind eye-salves. The granite of Syene is found in the neighbourhood of Syene in the Thebaid and in earlier times was known as pyrrhopoecilos.

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§ 36.14.1  Monoliths of this granite were made by the kings, to some extent in rivalry with one another. They called them obelisks and dedicated them to the Sun-god. An obelisk is a symbolic representation of the sun's rays, and this is the meaning of the Egyptian word for it. [Tekhen/sunbeam/obelisk] The first of all the kings to undertake such a task was Mesphres [Menes? ], who ruled at Heliopolis, the city of the Sun, and was commanded to do so in a dream. This very fact is inscribed on the obelisk; for those carvings and symbols that we see are Egyptian letters. Later, other kings also cut obelisks. Sesothes set up four of them in the city just mentioned, these being 48 cubits in height, while Rameses, who ruled at the time of the capture of Troy, erected one of 140 cubits. Rameses also erected another at the exit from the precinct where the palace of Mnevis once stood, and this is 120 cubits high, but abnormally thick, each side measuring 11 cubits. The completion of this work is said to have required 120,000 men. When the obelisk was about to be erected, the king feared that the scaffolding would not be strong enough for the weight, and in order to force an even greater danger upon the attention of the workmen, he himself tied his son to the pinnacle, intending that the stone should share the benefit of his deliverance at the hands of the labourers. This work was so greatly admired that when Cambyses was storming the city and the conflagration had reached the base of the obelisk, he ordered the fires to be put out, thus showing his respect for the mighty block when he had felt none for the city itself. There are also two other obelisks here, one set up by Zmarres, and the other by Phius: a both lack inscriptions and are 48 cubits in height. At Alexandria Ptolemy Philadelphus erected one of 80 cubits. This had been hewn uninscribed by King Neethebis, and it proved to be a greater achievement to carry it down the river and erect it than to have quarried it. According to some authorities, it was carried downstream by the engineer Satyrus on a raft; but according to Callixenus it was conveyed by Phoenix, who by digging a canal brought the waters of the Nile right up to the place where the obelisk lay. Two very broad ships were loaded with cubes of the same granite as that of the obelisk, each cube measuring one foot, until calculations showed that the total weight of the blocks was double that of the obelisk, since their total cubic capacity was twice as great. In this way, the ships were able to come beneath the obelisk, which was suspended by its ends from both banks of the canal. Then the blocks were unloaded and the ships, riding high, took the weight of the obelisk. It was erected on six stone baulks from the same quarries, and the deviser of the scheme received 50 talents for his services. The obelisk was once in the Arsinoeum, having been placed there by the king to whom we previously referred as a tribute to his affection for his wife and sister Arsinoe. From there, because it was in the way of the dockyards, it was moved to the market-place by a certain Maximus, a governor of Egypt, who cut off the point, intending to add a gilt pinnacle in its place, a plan which he later abandoned. There are two other obelisks at Alexandria in the precinct of the temple of Caesar near the harbour. These were cut by King Mesphres and measure 42 cubits.

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§ 36.14.2  Above all, there came also the difficult task of transporting obelisks to Rome by sea. The ships used attracted much attention from sightseers. That which carried the first of two obelisks was solemnly laid up by Augustus of revered memory in a permanent dock at Pozzuoli to celebrate the remarkable achievement; but later it was destroyed by fire. The ship used by the Emperor Gaius for bringing a third was carefully preserved for several years by Claudius of revered memory, for it was the most amazing thing that had ever been seen at sea. Then caissons made of cement were erected in its hull at Pozzuoli; whereupon it was towed to Ostia and sunk there by order of the emperor, so to contribute to his harbour-works. Then there is another problem, that of providing ships that can carry obelisks up the Tiber; and the successful experiment shows that the river has just as deep a channel as the Nile. The obelisk placed by Augustus of revered memory in the Circus Maximus was cut by King Psemetnepserphreus, who was reigning when Pythagoras was in Egypt, and measures 85 feet and 9 inches, apart from its base, which forms part of the same stone. The obelisk in the Campus Martius, however, which is 9 feet less, was cut by Sesothis. Both have inscriptions comprising an account of natural science according to the theories of the Egyptian sages.

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§ 36.15.1  The one in the Campus was put to use in a remarkable way by Augustus of revered memory so as to mark the sun's shadow and thereby the lengths of days and nights. A pavement was laid down for a distance appropriate to the height of the obelisk so that the shadow cast at noon on the shortest day of the year might exactly coincide with it. Bronze rods let into the pavement were meant to measure the shadow day by day as it gradually became shorter and then lengthened again. This device deserves to be carefully studied, and was contrived by the mathematician Novius Facundus. He placed on the pinnacle a gilt ball, at the top of which the shadow would be concentrated, for otherwise the shadow cast by the tip of the obelisk would have lacked definition. He is said to have understood the principle from observing the shadow cast by the human head. The readings thus given have for about thirty years past failed to correspond to the calendar, either because the course of the sun itself is anomalous and has been altered by some change in the behaviour of the heavens or because the whole earth has shifted slightly from its central position, a phenomenon which, I hear, has been detected also in other places. Or else earth-tremors in the city may have brought about a purely local displacement of the shaft or floods from the Tiber may have caused the mass to settle, even though the foundations are said to have been sunk to a depth equal to the height of the load they have to carry. The third obelisk in Rome stands in the Vatican Circus that was built by the emperors Gaius and Nero. It was the only one of the three that was broken during its removal. It was made by Nencoreus, the son of Sesosis; and there still exists another that belongs to him: it is 100 cubits in height and was dedicated by him to the Sun-god in accordance with an oracle after he had been stricken with blindness and had then regained his sight.

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§ 36.16.1  In Egypt too are the pyramids, which must be mentioned, if only cursorily. They rank as a superfluous and foolish display of wealth on the part of the kings, since it is generally recorded that their motive for building them was to avoid providing funds for their successors or for rivals who wished to plot against them, or else to keep the common folk occupied. Much vanity was shown by these kings in regard to such enterprises, and the remains of several unfinished pyramids are still in existence. There is one in the nome of Arsinoe, and there are two in that of Memphis, not far from the labyrinth, a work which also will be described. Two more stand in a position once occupied by Lake Moeris, which is merely a vast excavation, but is nevertheless recorded by the Egyptians as one of their remarkable and memorable achievements. The points of these pyramids are said to tower above the surface of the water. The other three pyramids, the fame of which has reached every part of the world, are of course visible to travellers approaching by river from any direction. They stand on a rocky hill in the desert on the African side of the river between the city of Memphis and what, as we have already explained, is known as the Delta, at a point less than 4 miles from the Nile, and 7 1/2 miles from Memphis. Close by is a village called Busiris, where there are people who are used to climbing these pyramids.

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§ 36.17.1  In front of them is the Sphinx, which rite deserves to be described even more than they, and yet the Egyptians have passed it over in silence. The inhabitants of the region regard it as a deity. They are of the opinion that a King Harmais is buried inside it and try to make out that it was brought to the spot: it is in fact carefully fashioned from the native rock. The face of the monstrous creature is painted with ruddle as a sign of reverence. The circumference of the head when measured across the forehead amounts to 102 feet, the length is 243 feet, and the height from the paunch to the top of the asp on its head is 61 1/2 feet.

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§ 36.17.2  The largest pyramid is made of stone from stone from the Arabian quarries. It is said that 360,000 men took 20 years to build it. The time taken to build all three was 88 years and 4 months. The authors who have written about them, namely Herodotus, Euhemerus, Duris of Samos, Aristagoras, Dionysius, Artemidorus, Alexander Polyhistor, Butoridas, Antisthenes, Demetrius, Demoteles and Apion, are not all agreed as to which kings were responsible for their construction, since chance, with the greatest justice, has caused those who inspired such a mighty display of vanity to be forgotten. Some of the writers mentioned record that 1600 talents were spent on radishes, garlic and onions alone. The largest pyramid covers an area of nearly 5 acres. Each of the four sides has an equal measurement from corner to corner of 783 feet; the height from ground-level to the pinnacle amounts to 725 feet, while the circumference of the pinnacle is 164 feet. As for the second pyramid, each of its sides from corner to corner totals 7574 feet. The third is smaller than those already mentioned, but on the other hand is far more splendid, with its Ethiopian stoned towering to a height of 363 feet along its sloping sides between the corners. No traces of the building operations survive. All around far and wide there is merely sand shaped like lentils, such as is found in most of Africa? The crucial problem is to know how the masonry was laid to such a great height. Some think that ramps of soda and salt were piled against the structure as it was raised; and that after its completion these were flooded and dissolved by water from the river. Others hold that bridges were built of mud bricks and that when the work was finished the bricks were allotted to individuals for building their own houses. For it is considered impossible that the Nile, flowing at a far lower level, could have flooded the site. Within the largest pyramid is a well 86 cubits deep, into which water from the river is supposed to have been brought by a channel. The method of measuring the height of the pyramids and of taking any similar measurement was devised by Thales of Miletus, the procedure being to measure the shadow at the hour at which its length is expected to be equal to the height of the body that is throwing it. Such are the wonders of the pyramids; and the last and greatest of these wonders, which forbids us to marvel at the wealth of kings, is that the smallest but most greatly admired of these pyramids was built by Rhodopis, a mere prostitute. She was once the fellow-slave and concubine of Aesop, the sage who composed the Fables; and our amazement is all the greater when we reflect that such wealth was acquired through prostitution.

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§ 36.18.1  Another towering structure built by a king is also extolled, namely the one that stands on Pharos, the island that commands the harbour at Alexandria. The tower is said to have cost 800 talents. We should not fail to mention the generous spirit shown by King Ptolemy, whereby he allowed the name of the architect, Sostratus of Cnidos, to be inscribed on the very fabric of the building. It serves, in connection with the movements of ships at night, to show a beacon so as to give warning of shoals and indicate the entrance to the harbour. Similar beacons now burn brightly in several places, for instance at Ostia and Ravenna. The danger lies in the uninterrupted burning of the beacon, in case it should be mistaken for a star, the appearance of the fire from a distance being similar. The same architect is said to have been the very first to build a promenade supported on piers: this he did at Cnidos.

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§ 36.19.1  We must mention also the labyrinths, quite the most abnormal achievement on which man has spent his resources, but by no means a fictitious one, as might well be supposed. One still exists in Egypt, in the nome of Heracleopolis. This, the first ever to be constructed, was built, according to tradition, 3600 years ago by King Petesuchis or King Tithoes, although Herodotus attributes the whole work to the 'twelve kings,' the last of whom was Psammetichus. Various reasons are suggested for its construction. Demoteles supposes it to have been the palace of Moteris, and Lyceas the tomb of Moeris, while many writers state that it was erected as a temple to the Sun-god, and this is the general belief. Whatever the truth may be, there is no doubt that Daedalus adopted it as the model for the labyrinth built by him in Crete but that he reproduced only a hundredth part of it containing passages that wind, advance and retreat in a bewilderingly intricate manner. It is not just a narrow strip of ground comprising many miles 'walks' or 'rides,' such as we see exemplified in our tessellated floors or in the ceremonial game played by our boys in the Campus Martius but doors are let into the walls at frequent intervals to suggest deceptively the way ahead and to force the visitor to go back upon the very same tracks that he has already followed in his wanderings. This Cretan labyrinth was the next in succession after the Egyptian, and there was a third in Lemnos and a fourth in Italy, all alike being roofed with vaults of carefully worked stone. There is a feature of the Egyptian labyrinth which I for my me part find surprising, namely an entrance and columns made of Parian marble. The rest of the structure is of Syene granite, the great blocks of which have been laid in such a way that even the lapse of centuries cannot destroy them. Their preservation has been aided by the people of Heracleopolis, who have shown remarkable respect for an achievement that they detest.

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§ 36.19.2  The ground-plan and the individual parts of this building cannot be fully described because it is divided among the regions or administrative districts known as nomes, of which there are 21, each having a vast hail allotted to it by name. Besides these halls, it contains temples of all the Egyptian gods; and, furthermore, Nemesis placed within the 40 shrines several pyramids, each with a height of 40 cubits and an area at the base of 4 acres. It is when he is already exhausted with walking that the visitor reaches the bewildering maze of passages. Moreover, there are rooms in lofty upper storeys reached by inclines, and porches from which flights of 90 stairs lead down to the ground. Inside are columns of imperial porphyry, images of gods, statues of kings and figures of monsters. Some of the halls are laid out in such a way that when the doors open there is a terrifying rumble of thunder within: incidentally, most of the building has to be traversed in darkness. Again, there are other massive structures outside the wall of the labyrinth: the Greek term for these is 'pteron,' or a 'wing.' Then there are other halls that have been made by digging galleries underground. The few repairs that have been made there were carried out by one man alone, Chaeremon, the eunuch of King Necthebis 500 years before the time of Alexander the Great. There is a further tradition that he used beams of acacia boiled in oil to serve as supports while square blocks of stone were being lifted into the vaults.

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§ 36.19.3  What has already been said must suffice for the Cretan labyrinth likewise. The Lemnian which was similar to it, was more noteworthy only in virtue of its 150 columns, the drums of which were so well balanced as they hung in the workshop that a child was able to turn them on the lathe. The architects were Zmilis, Rhoecus and Theodorus, all natives of Lemnos. There still exist remains of this labyrinth, although no traces of the Cretan or the Italian now survive. For it is appropriate to call 'Italian,' as well as 'Etruscan,' the labyrinth made by King Porsena of Etruria to serve as his tomb, with the result at the same time that even the vanity of foreign kings is surpassed by those of Italy. But since irresponsible story-telling here exceeds all bounds, I shall in describing the building make use of the very words of Marcus Varro himself: 'He is buried close to the city of Clusium, in a place where he has left a square monument built of squared blocks of stone, each side being 300 feet long and 50 feet high Inside this square pedestal there is a tangled labyrinth, which no one must enter without a ball of thread if he is to find his way out. On this square pedestal stand five pyramids, four at the corners and one at the centre, each of them being 75 feet broad at the base and 150 feet high. They taper in such a manner that on top of the whole group there rests a single bronze disk together with a conical cupola, from which hang bells fastened with chains: when these are set in motion by the wind, their sound carries to a great distance, as was formerly the case at Dodona. On this disk stand four more pyramids, each 100 feet high, and above these, on a single platform, five more.' The height of these last pyramids was a detail that Varro was ashamed to add to his account; but the Etruscan stories relate that it was equal to that of the whole work up to their level, insane folly as it was to have courted fame by spending for the benefit of none and to have exhausted furthermore the resources of a kingdom; and the result, after all, was more honour for the designer than for the sponsor.

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§ 36.20.1  We read also of a hanging garden, and, more than this, of a whole hanging town, Thebes in Egypt. The kings used to lead forth their armies in full array beneath it without being detected by any of the inhabitants. Even so, this is less remarkable than would have been the ease had a river flowed through the middle of the town. If any of this had been true, Homer would certainly have mentioned it when he spoke so emphatically of the hundred gates at Thebes.

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§ 36.21.1  Of grandeur as conceived by the Greeks a real and remarkable example still survives, namely the temple of Diana at Ephesus, the building of which occupied all Asia Minor for 120 years. It was built on marshy soil so that it might not be subject to earthquakes or be threatened by subsidences. On the other hand, to ensure that the foundations of so massive a building would not be laid on shifting, unstable ground, they were underpinned with a layer of closely trodden charcoal, and then with another of sheepskins with their fleeces unshorn. The length of the temple overall is 425 feet, and its breadth 225 feet. There are 127 columns, each constructed by a different king and 60 feet in height. Of these, 36 were carved with reliefs, one of them by Scopas. The architect in charge of the work was Chersiphron. The crowning marvel was his success in lifting the architraves of this massive building into place. This he achieved by filling bags of plaited reed with sand and constructing a gently graded ramp which reached the upper surfaces of the capitals of the columns. Then, little by little, he emptied the lowest layer of bags, so that the fabric gradually settled into its right position. But the greatest difficulty was encountered with the lintel itself when he was trying to place it over the door; for this was the largest block, and it would not settle on its bed. The architect was in anguish as he debated whether suicide should be his final decision. The story goes that in the course of his reflections he became weary, and that while he slept at night he saw before him the goddess for whom the temple was being built: she was urging him to live because, as she said, she herself had laid the stone. And on the next day this was seen to be the case. The stone appeared to have been adjusted merely by dint of its own weight. The other embellishments of the building are enough to fill many volumes, since they are in no way related to natural forms.

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§ 36.22.1  At Cyzicus too there survives a temple; and here a small gold tube was inserted into every vertical joint of the dressed stonework by the architect, who was to place within the shrine an ivory statue of Jupiter with a marble Apollo crowning him. Consequently very fine filaments of light shine through the interstices and a gentle refreshing breeze plays on the statues. Apart from the ingenuity of the architect, the very material of his device, hidden though it may be, is appreciated as enhancing the value of the whole work.

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§ 36.23.1  In the same city is the so-called Runaway Stone (lapis fugitivus), which the Argonauts used as an anchor and left there. This has frequently strayed from the prytaneum (this being the name of the place where it is kept), and so it has been fastened with lead. In this city too, close to the so-called Thracian Gate, there are seven towers that repeat with numerous reverberations any sounds that strike upon them. The Greek term for this remarkable phenomenon is 'Echo.' It is caused of course by the configuration of the landscape and generally of deep valleys; but at Cyzicus it occurs by pure chance, while at Olympia it is produced artificially in a remarkable manner within the portico known as 'The Heptaphonon [seven voices],' so called because the same sound re-echoes seven times. At Cyzicus, moreover, there is a large building called the Bouleuterium, the rafters of which have no iron nails and are so arranged that beams can be removed and replaced without scaffolding. This is the case also with the Sublician Bridge in Rome, where there has been a solemn ban on the use of nails ever since it was torn down with such difficulty while Horatius Cocles was defending it.

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§ 36.24.1  But this is indeed the moment for us to pass on to the wonders of our own city, to review the resources derived from the experiences of 800 years, and to show that here too in our buildings we have vanquished the world; and the frequency of this occurrence will be proved to match within a little the number of marvels that we shall describe. If we imagine the whole agglomeration of our buildings massed together and placed on one great heap, we shall see such grandeur towering above us as to make us think that some other world were being described, all concentrated in one single place. Even if we are not to include among our great achievements the Circus Maximus built by Julius Caesar, three furlongs in length and one in breadth, but with nearly three acres of buildings and seats for 250,000, should we not mention among our truly noble buildings the Basilica of Paulus, so remarkable for its columns from Phrygia, or the Forum of Augustus of revered memory or the Temple of Peace built by his Imperial Majesty the Emperor Vespasian, buildings the most beautiful the world has ever seen? Should we not mention also the roof of Agrippa's Ballot Office, although at Rome long before this the architect Valerius of Ostia had roofed a whole theatre for Libo's games? We admire the pyramids of kings when Julius Caesar gave 100,000,000 sesterces merely for the ground on which his forum was to be built, and Clodius, who was killed by Milo, paid 14,800,000 sesterces (if references to expenditure can impress anyone now that miserliness has become an obsession) just for the house in which he lived. This amazes me for my part just as much as the mad schemes of kings; and therefore I regard the fact that Milo himself incurred debts amounting to 70,000,000 sesterces as one of the oddest manifestations of the human character. But at that time elderly men still admired the vast dimensions of the Rampart, the substructures of the Capitol and, furthermore, the city sewers, the most noteworthy achievement of all, seeing that hills were tunnelled and Rome, as we mentioned a little earlier, became a hanging city, beneath which men travelled in boats during Marcus Agrippa's term as aedile after his consulship. Through the city there flow seven rivers meeting in one channel. These, rushing downwards like mountain torrents, are constrained to sweep away and remove everything in their path, and when they are thrust forward by an additional volume of rain water, they batter the bottom and sides of the sewers. Sometimes the backwash of the Tiber floods the sewers and makes its way along them upstream. Then the raging flood waters meet head on within the sewers, and even so the unyielding strength of the fabric resists the strain. In the streets above, massive blocks of stone are dragged along, and yet the tunnels do not cave in. They are pounded by falling buildings, which collapse of their own accord or are brought crashing to the ground by fire. The ground is shaken by earth tremors; but in spite of all, for 700 years from the time of Tarquinius Priscus, the channels have remained well-nigh impregnable. We should not fail to mention an occasion that is all the more worthy of record because the best-known historians have overlooked it. Tarquinius Priscus was carrying out the work using the common folk as his labourers, and it became doubtful whether the toil was to be more notable for its intensity or for its duration. Since the citizens were seeking to escape from their exhaustion by committing suicide wholesale, the king devised a strange remedy that was never contrived except on that one occasion. He crucified the bodies of all who had died by their own hands, leaving them to be gazed at by their fellow-citizens and also torn to pieces by beasts and birds of prey. Consequently, the sense of shame, which is so characteristic of the Romans as a nation and has so often restored a desperate situation on the battlefield, then too came to their aid; but this time it imposed upon them at the very moment when they blushed for their honour, since they felt ashamed while alive under the illusion that they would feel equally ashamed when dead. Tarquin is said to have made the tunnels large enough to allow the passage of a waggon fully loaded with hay.

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§ 36.24.2  The works that we have so far mentioned amount in all to little; and before we touch upon fresh topics we will show that just one marvel by itself bears comparison with them all. Our most scrupulous authorities are agreed that in the consulship of Marcus Lepidus and Quintus Catulus as fine a house as any in Rome was that of Lepidus himself; but, I swear, within 35 years the same house was not among the first hundred. Confronted by this assessment, anyone who so wishes may count the cost of the masses of marble, the paintings, the regal budgets, the cost, in fact, of a hundred houses, each of which rivalled one that had been the finest and the most highly appreciated in its time, houses that were themselves to be surpassed by countless others right up to the present day. Fires, we may be sure, are punishments inflicted upon us for our extravagance; and even so, human nature cannot be made to understand that there are things more mortal than man himself.

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§ 36.24.3  However, all these houses were surpassed by two. Twice have we seen the whole city girdled by imperial palaces, those of Gaius and Nero, the latter's palace, to crown all, being indeed a House of Gold. Such, doubtless, were the dwellings of those who made this empire great, who went straight from plough or hearth to conquer nations and win triumphs, whose very lands occupied a smaller space than those emperors' sitting-rooms! Indeed, one begins to reflect how small in comparison with those palaces were the building-sites formally granted by the state to invincible generals for their private houses. The highest distinction that these houses displayed was one accorded, for example, after his many services to Publius Valerius Publicola, the first of our consuls along with Lucius Brutus, and to his brother, who — also as consul — inflicted two crushing defeats on the Sabines. I refer to the additional decree which provided that the doors of their houses should be made to open outwards so that the portals could be flung open on to the public highway. This was the most notable mark of distinction in the houses even of men who had celebrated a triumph.

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§ 36.24.4  I shall not allow these two birds of a feather, two Gaiuses or two Neros as you please, to enjoy unchallenged even renown such as this; and so I shall show that even their madness was outdone by the resources of a private individual, Marcus Scaurus, whose aedileship may perhaps have done more than anything to undermine morality, and whose powerful ascendancy may have been a more mischievous achievement on the part of his stepfather Sulla than the killing by proscription of so many thousands of people. As aedile he constructed the greatest of all the works ever made by man, a work that surpassed not merely those erected for a limited period but even those intended to last for ever. This was his theatre, which had a stage arranged in three storeys with 360 columns; and this, if you please, in a community that had not tolerated the presence of six columns of Hymettus marble without reviling a leading citizen. The lowest storey of the stage was of marble, and the middle one of glass (an extravagance unparalleled even in later times), while the top storey was made of gilded planks. The columns of the lowest storey were, as I have stated, each 38 feet high. The bronze statues in the spaces between the columns numbered 3000, as I mentioned earlier. As for the auditorium, it accommodated 80,000; and yet that of Pompey's theatre amply meets all requirements with seats for 40,000 even though the city is so many times larger and the population so much more numerous than it was at that time. The rest of the equipment, with dresses of cloth of gold, scene paintings and other properties was on so lavish a scale that when the surplus knick-knacks that could be put to ordinary use were taken to Scaurus' villa at Tusculum and the villa itself set on fire and burnt down by the indignant servants, the loss was estimated at 30,000,000 sesterces.

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§ 36.24.5  Thoughts of this wasteful behaviour distract our attention and force us to leave our intended course, since with this theatre they cause us to associate another, even more frenzied, fantasy in wood. Gaius Curio, who died during the Civil War while fighting on Caesar's side, could not hope, in the entertainment which he provided in honour of his father's funeral, to outstrip Scaurus in the matter of costly embellishments. For where was he to find a stepfather like Sulla or a mother like Metella, who speculated by buying up the property of the proscribed, or a father like Marcus Scaurus, who was for so long a leader in the government and acted for Marius and his cronies as their receiver of goods plundered from the provinces? Even Scaurus himself could no longer have matched his own achievement, for since he had collected his material from all parts of the world, he gained at any rate one advantage from that fire, namely that it was impossible in the future for anyone to emulate his madness. Curio, therefore, had to use his wits and devise some ingenious scheme. It is worth our while to be acquainted with his discovery, and so to be thankful for our modern code of morality and call ourselves 'elders and betters,' reversing the usual meaning of the term. He built close to each other two very large wooden theatres, each poised and balanced on a revolving pivot. During the forenoon, a performance of a play was given in both of them and they faced in opposite directions so that the two casts should not drown each other's words. Then all of a sudden the theatres revolved (and it is agreed that after the first few days they did so with some of the spectators actually remaining in their seats), their corners met, and thus Curio provided an amphitheatre in which he produced fights between gladiators, though they were less in chancery than the Roman people itself as it was whirled around by Curio. Truly, what should first astonish one in this, the inventor or the invention, the designer or the sponsor, the fact that a man dared to plan the work, or to undertake it, or to commission it? What will prove to be more amazing than anything is the madness of a people that was bold enough to take its place in such treacherous, rickety seats. Here we have the nation that has conquered the earth, that has subdued the whole world, that distributes tribes and kingdoms, that despatches its dictates to foreign peoples, that is heaven's representative, so to speak, among mankind, swaying on a contraption and applauding its own danger! What a contempt for life this showed! What force now have our complaints of the lives lost at Cannae! What a disaster it could have been! When the earth yawns and cities are engulfed, whole communities grieve. Here the entire Roman people, as if on board two frail boats, was supported by a couple of pivots, and was entertained with the spectacle of its very self risking its life in the fighting arena, doomed, as it was, to perish at some moment or other if the framework were wrenched out of place. And the aim, after all, was merely to win favour for the speeches that Curio would make as tribune, so that he might continue to agitate the swaying voters, since on the speaker's platform he would shrink from nothing in addressing men whom he had persuaded to submit to such treatment. For, if we must confess the truth, it was the whole Roman people that struggled for its life in the arena at the funeral games held at his father's tomb. When the pivots of the theatres were worn and displaced he altered this ostentatious display of his. He kept to the shape of the amphitheatre, and on the final day gave athletic displays on the two stages as they stood back to back across the middle of the arena. Then suddenly the platforms were swept away on either side, and during the same day he brought on those of his gladiators who had won their earlier contests. And Curio was not a king nor an emperor nor, indeed, was he particularly rich, seeing that his only financial asset was the feud that had arisen between the heads of state.

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§ 36.24.6  But we must go on to describe marvels which are unsurpassed in virtue of their genuine value. Quintus Marcius Rex, having been ordered by the senate to repair the conduits of the Aqua Appia, the Anio, and the Tepula, drove underground passages through the mountains and brought to Rome a new water-supply called by his own name and completed within the period of his praetorship. Agrippa, moreover, as aedile added to these the Aqua Virgo, repaired the channels of the others and put them in order, and constructed 700 basins, not to speak of 500 fountains and 130 distribution-reservoirs, many of the latter being richly decorated. He erected on these works 300 bronze or marble statues and 400 marble pillars; and all of this he carried out in a year. He himself in the memoirs of his aedileship adds that in celebration games lasting for 59 days were held, and the bathing establishments were thrown open to the public free of charge, all 170 of them, a number which at Rome has now been infinitely increased. But all previous aqueducts have been surpassed by the most recent and very costly work inaugurated by the Emperor Gaius and completed by Claudius, inasmuch as the Curtian and Caerulean Springs, as well as the Anio Novus, were made to flow into Rome from the 40th milestone at such a high level as to supply water to all the seven hills of the city, the sum spent on the work amounting to 350,000,000 sesterces. If we take into careful consideration the abundant supplies of water in public buildings, baths, pools, open channels, private houses, gardens and country estates near the city; if we consider the distances traversed by the water before it arrives, the raising of arches, the tunnelling of mountains and the building of level routes across deep valleys, we shall readily admit that there has never been anything more remarkable in the whole world. One of the most remarkable achievements of the same emperor, Claudius, neglected, though it was, by his malicious successor, is, in my opinion at least, the channel that he dug through a mountain to drain the Fucine Lake. This, I need hardly say, entailed the expenditure of an indescribably large sum of money and the employment for many years of a horde of workers because, where earth formed the interior of the mountain, the water channel had to be cleared by lifting the spoil to the top of the shafts on hoists and everywhere else solid rock had to be cut away, and operations underground (and how vast they were!) had to be carried out in darkness, operations which only those who witnessed them can envisage and no human utterance can describe. Incidentally, I must forbear to mention the harbour works at Ostia, and likewise the roads driven through hills in cuttings, the moles that were built to separate the Tyrrhenian sea from the Lucrine Lake, and all the bridges erected at such great cost. Among the many marvels of Italy itself is one for which the accomplished natural scientist Papirius Fabianus vouches, namely that marble actually grows in its quarries; and the quarrymen, moreover, assert that the scars on the mountain sides fill up of their own accord. If this is true, there is reason to hope that there will always be marble sufficient to satisfy luxury's demands.

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§ 36.25.1  As we pass from marble to the other remarkable varieties of stone, no one can doubt that it is the magnet that first of all comes to mind. For what is more strange than this stone? In what field has Nature displayed a more perverse wilfulness? She has given to rocks a voice which, as I have explained, echoes that of Man, or rather interrupts it as well. What is more impassive than the stiffness of stone? And yet we see that she has endowed the magnet with senses and hands. What is more recalcitrant than the hardness of iron? We see that she has bestowed on it feet and instincts. For iron is attracted by the magnet, and the substance that vanquishes all other things rushes into a kind of vacuum and, as it approaches the magnet, it leaps towards it and is held by it and clasped in its embrace. And so the magnet is called by the Greeks by another name, the 'iron stone,' and by some of them the 'stone of Heracles.' According to Nicander, it was called 'magnes' from the name of its discover, who found it on Mount Ida. Incidentally, it is to be found in many places, including Spain. However, the story goes that Magnes discovered the stone when the nails of his sandals and the tip of his staff stuck to it as he was pasturing his herds. Sotacus describes five kinds of magnet: an Ethiopian; another from Magnesia, which borders on Macedonia and is on the traveller's right as he makes for Iolcus from Boebe; a third from Hyettus in Boeotia; a fourth from the neighbourhood of Alexandria in the Troad; and a fifth from Magnesia in Asia Minor. The most important distinction is between the male and female varieties, while the next lies in their colour. Those found in the Magnesia that is close to Macedonia are red and black, whereas the Boeotian have more red than black in them. Those found in the Troad are black and female, and therefore exert no force, while the most worthless kind is that of Magnesia in Asia Minor, which is white, has no power of attracting iron and resembles pumice. It has been ascertained that, the bluer a magnet is, the better it is. The palm goes to the Ethiopian variety, which in the market is worth its weight in silver. It is found in the sandy district of Ethiopia known as Zmiris. There, too, is found the haematite magnet, which is blood-red in colour and, when ground, produces not only blood-red but also saffron-yellow powder. But haematite has not the same property of attracting iron as the magnet. The test of an Ethiopian magnet is its ability to attract another magnet to itself. All magnets, incidentally, are useful for making up eye-salves if each is used in its correct quantity, and are particularly effective in stopping acute watering of the eyes. They also cure burns when ground and calcined. Also in Ethiopia and at no great distance is another mountain, (the ore from) which on the contrary repels and rejects all iron. Both of these properties have already been discussed by me on several occasions.

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§ 36.26.1  It is said that a stone from the island of Syros floats on the waves, but that it sinks when it has been broken into small pieces.

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§ 36.27.1  At Assos in the Troad we find the Sarcophagus stone, which splits along a line of cleavage. It is well known that corpses buried in it are consumed within a period of forty days, except for the teeth: Mucianus vouches for the fact that mirrors, scrapers, clothes and shoes placed upon the dead bodies are turned to stone as well. There are similar stones both in Lycia and in the East; and these, when attached even to living persons, eat away their bodies.

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§ 36.28.1  However, there are stones that are gentler in their effects in that they preserve a body without consuming it, for example, the 'chernites,' which closely resembles ivory and is said to be the material of which the coin of Darius is said to have been made, and, again, a stone called 'porus,' which is similar to Parian marble in whiteness and hardness, only not so heavy. Theophrastus is our authority also for a translucent Egyptian stone said by him to be similar to Chian marble. Such a stone may have existed in his time: stones cease to be found and new ones are discovered in turn.

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§ 36.28.2  The stone of Assos, which has a salty taste, relieves gout if the feet are plunged into a vessel hollowed out of it. Moreover, all affections of the legs are cured in the quarries where it is hewn, whereas in all mines the legs are attacked by ailments. Belonging to the same stone is what is called the efflorescence, which is soft enough to form powder and is just as effective as the stone for certain purposes. It looks, incidentally, like reddish pumice. Combined with Cyprian wax it cures affections of the breasts, and, if mixed with pitch or resin, disperses scrofulous sores and superficial abscesses. Taken as an electuary it is also good for consumption. When blended with honey, it causes scars to form over chronic sores, reduces excrescences of flesh and dries up matter discharging from a bite when it will not yield to other treatment. In cases of gout a plaster is made of it with an admixture of bean-meal.

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§ 36.29.1  Theophrastus, again, and Mucianus express the opinion that there are certain stones that give birth to other stones. Theophrastus states also that fossil ivory coloured black and white is found, that bones are produced from the earth and that stones resembling bones come to light.

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§ 36.29.2  In the neighbourhood of Munda in Spain, the place where Julius Caesar defeated Cn. Pompeius, occur stones containing the likeness of a palm branch, which appears whenever they are broken. There are also black stones, like that of Taenarum, that have come to be esteemed as much as any marble. Varro states that black stones from Africa are harder than the Italian, but that, on the other hand, the white stone of Cora is harder than that of Paros. He mentions too that Carrara stone can be cut with a saw, that Tusculan stone is split by fire and that the dark Sabine variety actually becomes bright if oil is poured on it. Varro also assures us that rotary querns have been found at Bolsena; and we find in records of miraculous occurrences that some querns have even moved of their own accord.

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§ 36.30.1  Nowhere are more serviceable millstones to be found than in Italy, for here they are proper stones and not lumps of rock. In certain provinces, however, they are not found at all. Some stones of this kind are quite soft and can be smoothed also with a whetstone, so that from a distance they may be mistaken for serpentine. No other stones are more durable than millstones; for, as with wood, it is characteristic of stones of one sort or another to be unable to stand rain, sun or wintry weather. Some are affected even by the moon, while others acquire a patina in course of time or lose their white colour when treated with oil.

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§ 36.30.2  Some people call a millstone 'pyrites,' or 'fire-stone,' because there is a great amount of fire in it. However, there is another 'pyrites' which is similar, only more porous, and yet another which resembles copper. It is claimed that in the mines near Acamas in Cyprus two kinds of pyrites are found, one having the colour of silver and the other of gold. There are several ways of roasting the mineral. Some roast it two or three times with honey until the moisture is consumed, whereas others roast it first on hot coals and then with honey. Afterwards, it is washed like copper. The varieties of pyrites are used in pharmacy for their warming, drying, dispersing and reducing effects, and also to cause indurations to discharge their matter. They are also used raw, in the form of powder, for treating scrofulous sores and boils. Some writers class as 'pyrites' yet another kind of stone that contains a great quantity of fire. Stones known as 'live stones' are extremely heavy and are indispensable to reconnaissance parties preparing a camp-site. When struck with a nail or another stone they give off a spark, and if this is caught on sulphur or else on dry fungi or leaves it produces a flame instantaneously.

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§ 36.31.1  The 'ostracites,' or 'potsherd stone,' resembles a potsherd and is used instead of pumice as a depilatory. Taken as a draught it arrests bleeding and applied as an ointment with honey cures sores and pains in the breasts. 'Amiantus,' which looks carysotne like alum, is quite indestructible by fire. It affords protection against all spells, especially those of the Magi.

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§ 36.32.1  Geodes receive their name in token of their earthy character, since earth is enclosed within them. They are of great use as ingredients of eye-salves and also in treating affections of the breasts and testicles.

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§ 36.33.1  The 'melitinus' stone exudes a liquid that is sweet and is like honey. When pounded and mixed with wax it cures acute catarrh, spots on the skin and sore throats, and removes sores on the eyelids; and if applied on a wool dressing it causes pains in the uterus to disappear.

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§ 36.34.1  Jet derives its name from a district and a river in Lycia known as Gages. It is said also to be washed up by the sea on the promontory of Leucolla and to be gathered at places up to a distance of a mile and a half. Jet is black, smooth, porous, light, not very different from wood, and brittle, and has an unpleasant smell when rubbed. Anything inscribed in it on earthenware is indelible. When it is burnt it gives off a smell like that of sulphur. What is remarkable is that it is ignited by water and quenched by oil. The kindling of jet drives off snakes and relieves suffocation of the uterus. Its fumes detect attempts to simulate a disabling illness or a state of virginity. Moreover, when thoroughly boiled with wine it cures toothache and, if combined with wax, scrofulous tumours. The Magi are said to make use of it in what they call divination by axes and they assert it will not burn away completely if a wish is destined to come true.

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§ 36.35.1  Sponge stones are found in sponges, and therefore belong to the sea. They are sometimes called in Greek stone-solvents because they cure affections of the bladder and break up stone in it if they are taken in wine.

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§ 36.36.1  Phrygian stone is so called from the people of that name and occurs as porous lumps. After being soaked in wine it is roasted, and bellows are used to fan it until it turns red, whereupon it is quenched with sweet wine, and the process is repeated three times on each occasion. It is of use only in dyeing garments.

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§ 36.37.1  'Schistos' and haematite are closely related. Haematite is found in mines, and when roasted reproduces the colour of red-lead. It is roasted in the same way as the Phrygian stone, except that it is not quenched with wine. It can be counterfeited, but genuine haematite is distinguished by its occurrence as red veins and by its friable character. It is extraordinarily good for bloodshot eyes, and checks excessive menstruation if it is taken as a draught. It is drunk also, with pomegranate juice added, by patients who have brought up blood. A draught of it is an effective remedy for bladder trouble; moreover, if it is taken in wine it is an antidote for snakebites. All these properties exist, but in a weaker form, in the substance known as 'schistos.' Among its varieties, the more suitable is like saffron in colour. Mixed with human milk it is a specific for filling cavities left by sores. It is also admirable for reducing protruding eyes. Such is the consensus of opinion among the most recent writers.

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§ 36.38.1  Among the oldest authorities Sotacus records five kinds of haematite, apart from the magnet. Of these, the Ethiopian receives from him the first place, a variety which is very useful for making up eye-salves and what the Greeks call 'universal remedies,' as well as being effective for burns. The second is, according to him, known as man-tamer, black in colour and exceptionally heavy and hard: hence its name. It is found mainly in Africa and attracts silver, copper and iron. The method of testing it is to rub it on a whetstone of slate, when, if genuine, it gives off a blood-red smear. It is a capital remedy for affections of the liver. The third kind, according to Sotacus' reckoning, is the Arabian, which is similarly hard and produces scarcely any smear on a hone used with water although on occasion there is a saffron-coloured smear. The fourth kind, so he says, is known as 'liver ore' in its natural state, and as 'ruddle ore' when it is roasted. It is useful for treating burns and more useful than ruddle for any purpose. The fifth is 'schistos,' and this when taken as a draught reduces piles. Sotacus goes on to say that three drachms of any haematite pounded in oil should be swallowed on an empty stomach to counteract blood ailments. He also describes a 'schistos' different in kind from the haematite 'schistos' and known as anthracite. He states that it is a black stone found in Africa and that, when it is rubbed on a water hone, what was originally the lower end produces a black mark and the other end a saffron-coloured one. According to him, it is useful by itself for making up eye-salves.

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§ 36.39.1  Eagle stones have acquired a reputation owing to the associations aroused by the term. As I have already stated in Book X, they are found in eagles' nests. It is said that they are found in pairs, a male and a female, and that without them the eagles in question cannot produce young: hence there is only a pair of stones. There are four kinds of eagle stones. One kind found in Africa is small and soft, and carries inside it, as though in a womb, a pleasing white clay. The stone itself is liable to crumble and is considered to be female, while a kind that occurs in Arabia and is hard, coloured like an oak gall or else reddish in appearance and containing a hard stone in its hollow centre, is regarded as a male. A third kind found in Cyprus is similar in colour to those of Africa, but is larger and elongated, the shape of all other kinds being spherical. It carries inside it an agreeable kind of sand and small nodules, while the stone itself is soft enough to be crumbled merely with one's fingers. The fourth kind, known as the Taphiusian, occurs not far from the island of Leucas in Taphiusa, a district that lies to the right as one sails to Leucas from Ithaca. It is found as a white, round stone in streams. In its hollow centre is a stone known as the 'callimus,' but no trace of earthy matter. Eagle stones, wrapped in the skins of animals that have been sacrificed, are worn as amulets by women or four-footed creatures during pregnancy so as to prevent a miscarriage. They must not be removed except at the moment of delivery: otherwise, there will be a prolapse of the uterus. On the other hand, if they were not removed during delivery no birth would take place.

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§ 36.40.1  There is also the stone of Samos, found in the island of that name, the earth from which we have already had occasion to praise. The stone is useful as a gold polish, while in pharmacy, if it is mixed with milk in the manner described above, it is good for ophthalmic ulcers and chronic watering of the eyes. When taken as a draught it also counteracts stomach ailments, relieves giddiness and corrects disturbances of the mind. Some doctors hold that it can be administered with benefit in cases of epilepsy and strangury. Moreover, it is mixed with other ingredients in embrocations to relieve fatigue. The test of its genuineness is based upon its weight and white colour. Worn as an amulet, it is claimed to prevent a miscarriage.

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§ 36.41.1  The Arabian stone, which resembles ivory, can, if calcined, be suitably used as a tooth powder. But, in particular, it cures piles if combined with lint or placed on a linen dressing locally applied.

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§ 36.42.1  We must not forget to discuss also the Pumice. characteristics of pumice. This name, of course, is given to the hollowed rocks in the buildings called by the Greeks Homes of the Muses, where such rocks hang from the ceilings so as to create an artificial imitation of a cave. But as for the pumice which is used as a depilatory for women, and nowadays also for men, and moreover, as Catullus reminds us, for books, the finest quality occurs in Melos, Nisyros, and the Aeolian Islands. The test of its quality is that it should be white, very light in weight, extremely porous and dry, and easy to grind, without being sandy when rubbed. In pharmacy it has a reducing and drying effect. It is calcined three times in a fire of pure charcoal and quenched the same number of times in white wine. It is then washed like cadmea, and having been dried is stored in a place as free from damp as possible. The powder is used mostly for eye-salves, since it gently cleanses ophthalmic ulcers and heals them, and removes the scars. Incidentally, some pharmacists, after calcining the pumice three times, prefer to let it cool rather than quench it, and then to pound it mixed with wine. It is added also to poultices, and is then most useful for treating sores on the head or the private parts. Tooth powders, too, are prepared from it. Theophrastus assures us that topers competing in drinking contests first take a dose of the powder, but states that they run a grave risk unless they fill themselves with wine at a single draught. He adds that the cooling properties of pumice are so powerful that new wine stops bubbling when pumice is added to it.

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§ 36.43.1  Our authorities have been interested also in stones used for making mortars; and I do not mean merely mortars used for pounding drugs or grinding pigments. Among such stones, they give the first place to the Etesian and the second to that of the Thebaid which I have already cited as the 'pyrrhopoecilos,' or 'the stone with the red spots,' and some people call 'psaros,' 'the speckled stone'.

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§ 36.43.2  The third place they award to the touchstone of rock resembling hail, or for medical purposes to one of siliceous slate. For this latter stone yields nothing from its own substance. Stones which produce a smear are considered to be useful for making up eye-salves: hence the Ethiopian is most highly valued for this purpose. The stone of Taenarum, the Phoenician stone and haematite are said to be good for preparing prescriptions that contain saffron. But mortars made of another stone from Taenarum, a black marble, or of Parian marble are not so useful to doctors, so we are told, better ones being made of onyx marble from Egypt or of white serpentine. For there is such a species of serpentine, and vessels and boxes also are made of it.

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§ 36.44.1  In the island of Siphnos there is a stone that is hollowed out and turned on the lathe so as to form cooking utensils or tableware; and this I myself know to be the case also with the green stone of Como in Italy. The Siphnian stone, however, has a peculiarity of its own in that when thoroughly heated with oil it becomes black and hard, whereas naturally it is very soft. Such are the divers properties to be found in one substance. Incidentally, exceptional instances of soft stones occur beyond the Alps. In the province of Belgic Gaul a white stone is said to be cut with a saw, just like wood, only even more easily, so as to serve as ordinary roof tiles and as rain tiles or, if so desired, as the kind of roofing known as 'peacock-style.'

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§ 36.45.1  These stones, then, can be cut with a saw. However, the specular stone (for even this substance ranks as a stone) has a far more amenable character which allows it to be split into plates as thin as may be wished. Formerly it was produced only in Hither Spain, and even then not in the whole of the province, but merely within an area of a hundred miles around the city of Priego. Nowadays supplies come too from Cyprus, Cappadocia, Sicily and, a recent discovery, from Africa. However, all these kinds are inferior to that of Spain: Cappadocia produces the largest pieces, but they lack transparency. Moreover, in the region of Bononia in Italy small streaks occur tightly embedded within hard rock; and yet they are large enough for their essential similarity to the rest to be unmistakable. In Spain the specular stone is dug at a great depth by means of shafts; and it is found too just beneath the surface enclosed in rock, in which case it has to be torn away or cut out; but for the most part its formation allows it to be dug, since it occurs in isolation as rough blocks. No piece exceeding five feet in length has hitherto been discovered. It is palpably obvious that we have here a liquid which, like rock-crystal, has been frozen and petrified by an exhalation in the earth, because when wild animals fall down the shafts just mentioned the marrow in their bones after a single winter takes on the appearance of this selfsame stone. On occasion a black variety of the stone is also found, but it is the bright kind, notoriously soft though it may be, that has a remarkable property of withstanding the effects of hot and cold weather. Moreover, provided that it escapes abuse, it does not deteriorate, although this is apt to happen even with blocks of many varieties of stone. A further use has been devised for the specular stone in the shape of the shavings and flakes strewn on the surface of the Circus Maximus during the Games to produce an attractively bright effect.

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§ 36.46.1  During Nero's principate there was discovered in Cappadocia a stone as hard as marble, white and, even where deep-yellow veins occurred, translucent. In token of its appearance it was called 'phengites' or the 'Luminary Stone.' Of this stone Nero rebuilt the temple of Fortune, known as the shrine of Sejanus, but originally consecrated by King Servius Tullius and incorporated by Nero in his Golden House. Thanks to this stone, in the daytime it was as light as day in the temple, even when the doors were shut; but the effect was not that of windows of specular stone, since the light was, so to speak, trapped within rather than allowed to penetrate from without. According to Juba, there exists in Arabia too a stone that is transparent like glass, and is used as window panes.

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§ 36.47.1  It is now high time to pass on to stones used in industry, and first of all to whetstones intended for sharpening iron. Of these there are many varieties. Cretan whetstones for long enjoyed the highest reputation, the second place being held by the Laconian from Mount Taygetus. Both kinds need to be lubricated with oil. Among those used with water the Naxian came first in merit, and then the Armenian, both of which were mentioned earlier. Cilician whetstones are effective if used with oil and water mixed, and those of Arsinoe if used with water alone. In Italy too there have been discovered whetstones which, when used with water, extract a sharp edge and operate most keenly, as well as beyond the Alps, where they are known as 'passernices.' The fourth method of operation is that adopted for the hones which are so useful in barbers' shops — lubrication by means of human saliva from Hither Spain are outstanding in this class.

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§ 36.48.1  Of the numerous stones that remain to be considered, tufa is unsuitable for building construction because of its short life and its softness. However, some localities, for example Carthage in Africa have no other stone to offer. It is eaten away by evaporation from the sea, rubbed by wind. and lashed and scarred by rain. But the Carthaginians are careful to protect their house walls by coating them with pitch; for lime plaster is another thing that erodes tufa. Hence the witty remark that people there treat their buildings with pitch and their wine with lime, since that is how they temper their new wine. Other soft varieties are found near Rome in the neighbourhood of Fidenae and Alba. In Umbria and Venetia, moreover, there is a white stone that can be cut with a toothed saw. These stones, besides being easy to work, can also bear a heavy load, provided that they are under cover. When exposed to spray, frost or rime they break up into slabs, nor do they show much resistance to sea breezes. Travertine is split by heat, although it stands up to all other forces.

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§ 36.49.1  The best silexa is the black variety, although in certain localities it is the red that is best, and in several places even the white, as in the Anician quarries round Lake Bolsena near Trachina or, again, in the neighbourhood of Statonia, the stone from these two places being immune even to fire. The same two varieties are, moreover, used for sculpture on monuments, where they offer the added advantage of remaining untouched by the ravages of time. Of these stones are made the moulds in which bronze implements are cast. There is also a green stone that strongly resists fire, but it is nowhere plentiful and, where it is found, occurs in pieces and not in a mass. Of the remaining varieties, the pale silex can only occasionally be used for rough walling, while the rounded kind stands up to hard abuse, but is unreliable for building purposes unless it is bonded with large quantities of mortar. The silex found in rivers is no more reliable, always giving the impression of being thoroughly damp.

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§ 36.50.1  When stone is of doubtful quality the remedy is to quarry it in the summer and to lay it only after it has been subjected to weathering for at least two years. Those stones of this class that have been damaged by such treatment may be more profitably incorporated in masonry lying below ground-level, while those that have withstood weathering can be safely exposed even to the sky.

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§ 36.51.1  The Greeks build house-walls, as though they were using brick, of hard stone or silex dressed to a uniform thickness. When they follow this procedure the style of masonry is what they call 'isodomos,' or 'masonry with equal courses.' When the courses laid are of varying thickness the style is known as 'pseudisodomos' a spurious variety of the former. A third style is the 'emplectos' or 'interwoven,' in which only the faces are dressed, the rest of the material being laid at random. It is essential that joints should be made to alternate in such a way that the middle of a stone covers the vertical joint in the course last laid. This should be done even in the core of the wall if circumstances permit, and failing this, at least on the faces. When the core of the wall is packed with rubble, the style is 'diatonieos,' 'with single stones stretching from face to face.' 'Network masonry,' which is very commonly used in buildings at Rome, is liable to crack. All masonry should be laid to rule and level, and should be absolutely perpendicular when tested with a plummet.

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§ 36.52.1  Cisterns should be made of five parts of clean, coarse sand to two of the hottest possible quicklime, together with pieces of silex each weighing not more than a pound. The floor and walls built of this material should all alike be beaten with iron bars. It is better to build cisterns in pairs so that impurities may settle in the first, and water pass through a filter purified into the adjoining one.

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§ 36.53.1  As for lime, Cato the censor disapproves of preparing it from variegated limestone, for white limestone produces a better quality. Lime made from a hard stone is more effective for walling, while that made from porous limestone is more suitable for plastering. Lime manufactured from silex is condemned for both purposes. Again, it is more serviceable if it is produced from quarried stone than from stones collected on the banks of rivers. A superior kind is made from stones used for querns, for they have a certain unctuous character. Lime possesses one remarkable quality: once it has been burnt, its heat is increased by water.

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§ 36.54.1  Of sand, there are three varieties: there is quarry sand, to which has to be added one-quarter of its weight in lime; and river or alternatively sea sand, to which must be added one-third. If one-third of crushed potsherds also is added, the material will be improved. No quarry sand is found from the Apennines as far as the Po, nor does it occur overseas.

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§ 36.55.1  The chief reason for the collapse of buildings in Rome is the purloining of lime, as the result of which the rough stones are laid on each other without any proper mortar. It is also a fact that the slurry improves with keeping. In the old building laws is to be found a regulation that no contractor is to use a slurry that is less than three years old. Consequently, old plaster work was never disfigured by cracks. Stucco never possesses the required brilliance unless three coats of sand mortar and two of marble stucco are laid on. Buildings exposed to damp or erected in a locality where they may be affected by moisture from the sea may with profit be given an undercoat of plaster made from pounded potsherds. In Greece sand mortar for plaster work is, furthermore, worked up in a trough with wooden poles before it is spread. The test for ascertaining that marble stucco has been worked to the correct consistency is that it should no longer stick to the trowel, while in whitewashing the test is that the slaked lime should stick like glue. Slaking should always be carried out when the lime is in lumps. At Elis there is a temple of Minerva in which, it is said, Panaenus, the brother of Pheidias, applied plaster that had been worked with milk and saffron. The result is that even today, if one wets one's thumb with saliva and rubs it on the plaster, the latter still gives off the smell and taste of saffron.

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§ 36.56.1  As for columns, identical ones appear to increase in thickness merely by being placed more closely together. There are four kinds of columns. Columns the height of which is six times their lower diameter are the so-called Doric. Those in which the height is nine times the lower diameter are the Ionic; and those in which it is seven times the Tuscan. Corinthian columns have the same proportions as the Ionic except that the height of the Corinthian capitals equals the lower diameter, so that they appear to be more slender than the Ionic, where the height of the capital is a third of the lower diameter. In ancient times a proportion observed was that the breadth of a temple should be three times the height of the columns. It was in the earlier temple of Diana at Ephesus that columns were for the first time mounted on moulded bases and crowned with capitals, and it was decided that the lower diameter of the columns should be one-eighth of their height, that the height of the moulded bases should be one-half of the lower diameter and that the lower diameter should exceed the upper diameter by a seventh. Another kind of column is that known as the Attic, which is quadrangular and equilateral.

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§ 36.57.1  Lime is commonly used also in pharmacy, preferably when freshly calcined and unslaked. It has caustic, dispersive and drawing effects, and checks an onset of ulcers which shows signs of spreading quickly. It brings about the formation of scars when it is mixed as a liniment with vinegar and rose oil and is later blended with wax and rose oil. It is a cure also for dislocations when applied with liquid resin or pork fat mixed with honey, and the same mixture, moreover, cures scrofulous sores.

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§ 36.58.1  Maltha is prepared from freshly calcined lime, a lump of which is slaked in wine and then pounded together with pork fat and figs, both of which are softening agents. Maltha is the most adhesive of substances and grows harder than stone. Anything that is treated with it is first thoroughly rubbed with olive oil.

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§ 36.59.1  There is an affinity between lime and gypsum, a substance of which there are several varieties. For it can be produced from a heated mineral, as in Syria and Thurii; it can be dug from the earth, as in Cyprus and Perrhaebia. There is also that of Tymphaea, which is stripped from the earth's surface. The mineral that is heated ought to be like onyx marble or crystalline limestone. In Syria the hardest stones possible are selected for the purpose and are heated along with cow dung so that the burning may be accelerated. However, it has been discovered that the best kind is prepared from specular stone a or from stone that flakes in the same way. Gypsum, when moistened, should be used instantly, since it coheres with great rapidity. However, there is nothing to prevent it from being pounded and reduced again to a fine powder. Gypsum is a serviceable whitewash and is used with pleasing effect for making moulded figures and festoons in architecture. A famous story carries with it something of a warning: we are told that Caius Proculeius, a man who could rest assured of his close friendship with the Emperor Augustus, committed suicide by swallowing gypsum when he was suffering from severe pains in the stomach.

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§ 36.60.1  Paved floors originated among the Greeks and were skilfully embellished with a kind of paint-work until this was superseded by mosaics. In this latter field the most famous exponent was Sosus, who at Pergamum laid the floor of what is known in Greek as 'the Unswept Room' because, by means of small cubes tinted in various shades, he represented on the floor refuse from the dinner table and other sweepings, making them appear as if they had been left there. A remarkable detail in the picture is a dove, which is drinking and casts the shadow of its head on the water, while others are sunning and preening themselves on the brim of a large drinking vessel.

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§ 36.61.1  The original paved floors, in my belief, were those now known to us as 'foreign' and 'indoor' floors. In Italy these were beaten with staves: at any rate, this is what the name itself may imply. At Rome the first floor with a diamond pattern was constructed in the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus after the beginning of the Third Punic War; but tessellated pavements had already become common and extremely popular before the Cimbrian War, as is shown by the famous verse from Lucilius: With paviour's skill and wavy inset stones.

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§ 36.62.1  Open-air flooring was an invention of the Greeks, who roof their houses in this way, an easy method to use in regions with a warm climate, but unreliable wherever there is heavy rainfall and frost. It is essential that two sets of joists should be laid across each other, and that their ends should be nailed down to avoid warping. To fresh rubble should be added a third of its weight in pounded potsherds; and then the rubble, mixed with two-fifths of its weight in lime, should be rammed down to a thickness of one foot. After this, a final coat 4 1/2 inches thick must be applied to the rubble and large square stones not less than 1 1/2 inches thick laid on it. A fall of 1 1/2 inches in 10 feet should be maintained and the surface carefully polished with grindstones. It is considered impracticable to lay the wood floor with oak planks, because they warp; and, furthermore, it is thought advisable to spread a layer of fern or straw below the rubble so that the worst effects of the quicklime may not reach the planks. It is essential also to lay a foundation of round pebbles under the rubble. Tiled floors with a herring-bone pattern are constructed in a similar fashion.

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§ 36.63.1  There is still one kind of floor that we must not fail to mention, namely the Graecanicum or 'Greek style.' The ground is well rammed and rubble or a layer of pounded potsherds laid on it. Then charcoal is trodden into a compact mass, and on top of this is spread a mixture of coarse sand, lime and ashes to a thickness of 6 inches. This is carefully finished to rule and level, and has the appearance of earth. But if it is smoothed with a grindstone it will pass for a black stone floor.

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§ 36.64.1  Mosaics came into use as early as Sulla's regime. At all events, there exists even today one made of very small cubes which he installed in the temple of Fortune at Praeneste. After that, ordinary tessellated floors were driven from the ground level and found a new home in vaulted ceilings, being now made of glass. Here too we have a recent invention. At any rate, Agrippa, in the baths that he built at Rome, painted the terracotta work of the hot rooms in encaustic and decorated the rest with whitewash, although he would certainly have built vaults of glass if such a device had already been invented or else had been extended from the walls of a stage, such as that of Scaurus which we have described, to vaulted ceilings. And so we must now proceed to explain also the nature of glass.

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§ 36.65.1  That part of Syria which is known as Phoenicia and borders on Judea contains a swamp called Candebia amid the lower slopes of Mount Carmel. This is supposed to be the source of the River Belus, which after traversing a distance of 5 miles flows into the sea near the colony of Ptolemais. Its current is sluggish and its waters are unwholesome to drink, although they are regarded as holy for ritual purposes. The river is muddy and flows in a deep channel, revealing its sands only when the tide ebbs. For it is not until they have been tossed by the waves and cleansed of impurities that they glisten. Moreover, it is only at that moment, when they are thought to be affected by the sharp, astringent properties of the brine, that they become fit for use. The beach stretches for not more than half a mile, and yet for many centuries the production of glass depended on this area alone. There is a story that once a ship belonging to some traders in natural soda put in here and that they scattered along the shore to prepare a meal. Since, however, no stones suitable for supporting their cauldrons were forthcoming, they rested them on lumps of soda from their cargo. When these became heated and were completely mingled with the sand on the beach a strange translucent liquid flowed forth in streams; and this, it is said, was the origin of glass.

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§ 36.66.1  Next, as was to be expected, Man's inventive skill was no longer content to mix only soda with the sand. He began to introduce the magnet stone also, since there is a belief that it attracts to itself molten glass no less than iron. Similarly, lustrous stones of many kinds came to be burnt with the melt and, then again, shells and quarry sand. Authorities state that in India glass is made also of broken rock-crystal and that for this reason no glass can compare with that of India. To resume, a fire of light, dry wood is used for preparing the melt, to which are added copper and soda, preferably Egyptian soda. Glass, like copper, is smelted in a series of furnaces, and dull black lumps are formed. Molten glass is everywhere so sharp that, before there is the least sensation, it cuts to the bone any part of the body on which it splutters. After being reduced to lumps, the glass is again fused in the workshop and is tinted. Some of it is shaped by blowing, some machined on a lathe and some chased like silver. Sidon was once famous for its glassworks, since, apart from other achievements, glass mirrors were invented there.

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§ 36.66.2  This was the old method of producing glass. Now, however, in Italy too a white sand which forms in the River Volturnus is found along 6 miles of the seashore between Cuma and Literno. Wherever it is softest, it is taken to be ground in a mortar or mill. Then it is mixed with three parts of soda, either by weight or by measure, and after being fused is taken in its molten state to other furnaces. There it forms a lump known in Greek as 'sand-soda.' This is again melted and forms pure glass, and is indeed a lump of clear colourless glass. Nowadays sand is similarly blended also in the Gallic and Spanish provinces. There is a story that in the reign of Tiberius there was invented a method of blending glass so as to render it flexible. The artist's workshop was completely destroyed for fear that the value of metals such as copper, silver and gold would otherwise be lowered. Such is the story, which, however, has for a long period been current through frequent repetition rather than authentic. But this is of little consequence, seeing that in Nero's principate there was discovered a technique of glass-making that resulted in two quite small cups of the kind then known as 'petroti' or 'stoneware' fetching a sum of 6000 sesterces.

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§ 36.67.1  In our classification of glass we include also 'obsian' ware, so named from its resemblance to the stone found by Obsius in Ethiopia. This stone is very dark in colour and sometimes translucent, but has a cloudier appearance than glass, so that when it is used for mirrors attached to walls it reflects shadows rather than images. Gems are frequently made of it, and we have seen also the solid obsidian statues of Augustus of revered memory, for the substance can yield pieces bulky enough for this purpose. Augustus himself dedicated as a curiosity four elephants of obsidian in the temple of Concord, while the Emperor Tiberius for his part restored to the cult of the Sun-god at Heliopolis an obsidian statue of Menelaus which he found included in a legacy from one Scius who had been governor of Egypt. This statue proves that the origin of the stone, which is nowadays misrepresented because of its similarity to the glass, is of an earlier date. Xenocrates records that obsidian is found in India, in Italy within the territory of the Samnites and in Spain near the shores of the Atlantic. There is also the artificial 'obsian' glass which is used as a material for tableware, this being produced by a colouring process, as is also the case with a completely red, opaque glass called in Greek blood-red ware. There is, furthermore, opaque white glass and others that reproduce the appearance of fluorspar, blue sapphires or lapis lazuli, and, indeed, glass exists in any colour. There is no other material nowadays that is more pliable or more adaptable, even to painting. However, the most highly valued glass is colourless and transparent, as closely as possible resembling rock-crystal. But although for making drinking vessels the use of glass has indeed ousted metals such as gold and silver, it cannot bear heat unless cold fluid is first poured into it; and yet glass globes containing water become so hot when they face the sun that they can set clothes on fire. Pieces of broken glass can, when heated to a moderate temperature, be stuck together, but that is all. They can never again be completely melted except into globules separate from each other, as happens in the making of the glass pebbles that are sometimes nicknamed 'eyeballs' and in some cases have a variety of colours arranged in several different patterns. Glass, when boiled with sulphur, coalesces into the consistency of stone.

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§ 36.68.1  And now that we have described everything that depends upon Man's talent for making Art reproduce Nature, we cannot help marvelling that there is almost nothing that is not brought to a finished state by means of fire. Fire takes this or that sand, and melts it, according to the locality, into glass, silver, cinnabar, lead of one kind or another, pigments or drugs. It is fire that smelts ore into copper, fire that produces iron and also tempers it, fire that purifies gold, fire that burns the stone which causes the blocks in buildings to cohere. There are other substances that may be profitably burnt several times; and the same substance can produce something different after a first, a second or a third firing. Even charcoal itself begins to acquire its special property only after it has been fired and quenched: when we presume it to be dead it is growing in vitality. Fire is a vast, unruly element, and one which causes us to doubt whether it is more a destructive or a creative force.

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§ 36.69.1  Fire even by itself has a curative power. It is well established that epidemics caused by an eclipse of the sun are alleviated in many ways by the lighting of bonfires. Empedocles and Hippocrates have proved this in various passages of their writings. 'For abdominal cramp or bruises,' states Marcus Varro, and I quote his very words, 'your hearth should be your medicine chest. Drink lye made from its ashes, and you will be cured. One can see how gladiators after a combat are helped by drinking this. Moreover, anthrax, a disease which, as I have mentioned, lately carried off two ex-consuls, may be cured by means of oak charcoal ground and mixed with honey. So true is it that there is some benefit to be found even in substances that are utterly rejected and have ceased to have any true existence, as we see here and now with charcoal and ashes.

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§ 36.70.1  I must not forget to mention one instance of a hearth that is famous in Roman literature. It is said that during the reign of Tarquinius Priscus [616-579 BC] there suddenly emerged from the ashes on his hearth a male genital organ [see Dionys. Hal. 4.2,1 and Plut. De Fortuna Romanorum 10], and that a captive girl who was sitting there, Ocresia, a maidservant of Queen Tanaquil, rose from there in a state of pregnancy. According to the story, this was how Servius Tullius, who succeeded to the throne, came to be born. Afterwards, and likewise in the king's house, it is said that flames blazed round the child's head as he slept, and that he was therefore believed to be then of the god who protected the household. Hence, we are told, he first founded the Festival of the Crossroads in honour of the gods who protect the community.

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§ 37.1.1  IN order that the work that I have undertaken may be complete, it remains for me to discuss gemstones. Here Nature's grandeur is gathered together within the narrowest limits; and in no domain of hers evokes more wonder in the minds of many who set such store by the variety, the colours, the texture and the elegance of gems that they think it a crime to tamper with certain kinds by engraving them as signets, although this is the prime reason for their use; while some they consider to be beyond price and to deft evaluation in terms of human wealth. Hence very many people find that a single gemstone alone is enough to provide them with a supreme and perfect aesthetic experience of the wonders of Nature.

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§ 37.1.2  The origin of the use of gemstones and the beginning of our present enthusiasm for them, which has blazed into so violent a passion, I have already discussed to some extent in my references to gold and to rings. According to the myths, which offer a pernicious misinterpretation of Prometheus' fetters, the wearing of rings originated on the crags of the Caucasus. It was of this rock that a fragment was for the first time enclosed in an iron bezel and placed on a finger; and this, we are told, was the first ring, and this the first gemstone.

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§ 37.2.1  Hence arose the esteem in which gemstones are held; and this soared into such a passion that to Polycrates of Samos, the overlord of islands and coasts, the voluntary sacrifice of a single gemstone seemed a sufficient atonement for his prosperity, which even he himself, the happy recipient, owned to he excessive. Thereby he hoped to settle his account with the fickleness of Fortune. Clearly he supposed that he would be fully indemnified against her ill-will if he, who was weary of unremitting happiness, suffered this one unhappy experience. Accordingly, he put out in a boat and threw the ring into deep water. The ring, however, was seized as bait by a huge fish, fit for a king, which restored the ring as an evil omen to its owner in his own kitchen, thanks to Fortune's treacherous intervention. The gem, it is agreed, was a sardonyx and is displayed in Rome (if we can believe that this is the original stone) in the temple of Concord, set in a golden horn. It was presented by the empress and is ranked almost last in a collection containing many gems that are valued more highly.

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§ 37.3.1  After this ring, the most renowned gemstone is that of another king, the famous Pyrrhus who [319-272 BC] fought a war against Rome. He is said to have possessed an agate on which could be seen the Nine Muses with Apollo holding his lyre. This was due not to any artistic intention, but to nature unaided; and the markings spread in such a way that even the individual Muses had their appropriate emblems allotted to them. Apart from these stones, my authorities can produce no gems famous enough to be specially recorded. They merely state that Ismenias the pipe-player was in the habit of wearing a large number of brilliant stones and that there is a story associated with his vanity. In Cyprus a 'smaragdus' with the figure of Amymone engraved upon it was offered for sale at a price of six gold pieces. Ismenias ordered the sum to be paid and, when two of the pieces were returned to him, he exclaimed, 'Heavens! I've been done. The stone has been robbed of much of its value.' It is Ismenias who appears to have brought in the fashion whereby all musical accomplishments came to be assessed partly in terms of this kind of lavish display. This was the case with his contemporary and rival Dionysodorus. Consequently, Ismenias seemed to be equalled through this very circumstance by a man who was only third among the musicians of the time. As for Nicomachus, he is said to have possessed merely large numbers of stones chosen without any discrimination.

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§ 37.3.2  But it is more or less accidentally that in prefacing the present volume I have quoted these instances as a criticism of those despicable people who in making such a display of their gems claim the right to show the world that their vanity and conceit is that of a piper.

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§ 37.4.1  And now to resume: the gemstone displayed as that of Polycrates is in its natural state, unmarked by engravings. In the time of Ismenias, many years later, it seems evident that it had become customary to engrave even 'smaragdi.' This impression is supported, moreover, by an edict of Alexander the Great forbidding his likeness to be engraved on this stone by anyone except Pyrgoteles, who was undoubtedly the most brilliant artist in this field. Next to him in fame have been Apollonides, Cronius and the man who made the excellent likeness of Augustus of revered memory which his successors have used as their seal, namely Dioscurides. Sulla as dictator always used a signet representing the surrender of Jugurtha. We learn from our authorities also that the native of Intercatia, whose father had been slain by Scipio Aemilianus after challenging him to single combat, used a signet representing this fight. Hence the familiar witticism made by Stilo Praeconinus, who remarked, 'What would he have done if Scipio had been killed by his father?' Augustus of revered memory at the beginning of his career used a signet engraved with a sphinx, having found among his mother's rings two such signets which were so alike as to be indistinguishable. During the Civil Wars, one of these was used by his personal advisers, whenever he himself was absent, for signing any letters and proclamations which the circumstances required to be despatched in his name. The recipients used to make a neat joke saying 'the Sphinx brings its problems.' Of course, the frog signet belonging to Maecenas was also greatly feared because of the contributions of money that it demanded. In later years Augustus, wishing to avoid insulting comments about the sphinx, signed his documents with a likeness of Alexander the Great.

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§ 37.5.1  The first Roman to own a collection of gemstones (for which we normally use the foreign term 'dactyliotheca,' or 'ring cabinet') was Sulla's stepson Scaurus. For many years there was no other until Pompey the Great dedicated in the Capitol among his other offerings a ring cabinet that had belonged to King Mithridates. This, as Varro and other authorities of the period confirm, was far inferior to that of Scaurus. Pompey's example was followed by Julius Caesar, who during his dictatorship consecrated six cabinets of gems in the temple of Venus Genetrix, and by Marcellus, Octavia's son, who dedicated one in the temple of Apollo on the Palatine.

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§ 37.6.1  However, it was this victory of Pompey over Mithridates that made fashion veer to pearls and gemstones. The victories of Lucius Scipio and of Cnaeus Manlius had done the same for chased silver, garments of cloth of gold and dining couches inlaid with bronze; and that of Mummius for Corinthian bronzes and fine paintings. To make my point clearer, I shall append statements taken directly from official records of Pompey's triumphs. Thus, Pompey's third triumph was held on his own birthday, September 29th of the year in which Marcus Piso and Marcus Messala were consuls, to celebrate his [61 B.C.] conquest of the pirates, Asia, Pontus and all the peoples and kings mentioned in the seventh volume of this work. In this triumph, then, there was carried in the procession a gaming-board complete with a set of pieces, the board being made of two precious minerals and measuring three feet broad and four feet long. And in case anyone should doubt that our natural resources have become exhausted seeing that today no gems even approach such a size, there rested on this board a golden moon weighing 30 pounds. There were also displayed three gold dining couches; enough gold vessels inlaid with gems to fill nine display stands; three gold figures of Minerva, Mars and Apollo respectively; thirty-three pearl crowns; a square mountain of gold with deer, lions and every variety of fruit on it and a golden vine entwined around it; and a grotto of pearls, on the top of which there was a sundial. Furthermore, there was Pompey's portrait rendered in pearls, that portrait so pleasing with the handsome growth of hair swept back from the forehead, the portrait of that noble head revered throughout the world — that portrait, I say, that portrait was rendered in pearls. Here it was austerity that was defeated and extravagance that more truly celebrated its triumph. Never, I think, would his surname 'the Great' have survived among the stalwarts of that age had he celebrated his first triumph in this fashion! To think that it is of pearls, Great Pompey, those wasteful things meant only for women, of pearls, which you yourself cannot and must not wear, that your portrait is made! To think that this is how you make yourself seem valuable! Is not then the trophy that you placed upon the summit of the Pyrenees a better likeness of yourself? This, to be sure, would have been a gross and foul disgrace were it not rather to be deemed a cruel omen of Heaven's wrath. That head, so ominously manifested without its body in oriental splendour, bore a meaning which even then could not be mistaken. But as for the rest of that triumph, how worthy it was of a good man and true! 200,000,000 sesterces were given to the State, 100,000,000 to the commanders and quaestors who had guarded the coasts and 6000 to each soldier. However, he merely made it easier for us to excuse the conduct of the Emperor Gaius when, apart from other effeminate articles of clothing, he wore slippers sewn with pearls, or that of the Emperor Nero, when he had sceptres, actors' masks and travelling couches adorned with pearls. Why, we seem to have lost even the right to criticize cups and other pieces of household equipment inlaid with gems or, again, rings with stones set in open bezels. For compared with Pompey's, there is no extravagance that can be considered to have been so harmful.

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§ 37.7.1  It was the same victory that brought myrrhine ware for the first time to Rome. Pompey was the first to dedicate myrrhine bowls and cups, which he set aside from the spoils of his triumphs for Jupiter of the Capitol. Such vessels immediately passed into ordinary use, and there was a demand even for display stands a and tableware. Lavish expenditure on this fashion is increasing every day ... an ex-consul, drank from a myrrhine cup for which he had given 70,000 sesterces, although it held just three pints. He was so fond of it that he would gnaw its rim; and yet the damage he thus caused only enhanced its value, and there is no other piece of myrrhine ware even today that has a higher price set upon it. The amount of money squandered by this same man upon the other articles of this material in his possession can be gauged from their number, which was so great that, when Nero took them away from the man's children and displayed them, they filled the private theatre in his gardens across the Tiber, a theatre which was large enough to satisfy even Nero's desire to sing before a full house at the time when he was rehearsing for his appearance in Pompey's theatre. It was at this time that I saw the pieces of a single broken cup included in the exhibition. It was decided that these, like the body of Alexander, should be preserved in a kind of catafalque for display, presumably as a sign of the sorrows of the age and the ill-will of Fortune. When the ex-consul Titus Petronius was facing death, he broke, to spite Nero, a myrrhine dipper that had cost him 300,000 sesterces, thereby depriving the Emperor's dining-room table of this legacy. Nero, however, as was proper for an emperor, outdid everyone by paying 1,000,000 sesterces for a single bowl. That one who was acclaimed as a victorious general and as Father of his Country should have paid so much in order to drink is a detail that we must formally record.

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§ 37.8.1  Myrrhine vessels come to us from the East. There the substance is found in several otherwise unremarkable localities, particularly within the kingdom of Parthia. It is in Carmania, however, that the finest specimens exist. The substance is thought to be a liquid which is solidified underground by heat. In size the pieces are never larger than a small display stand, while in bulk they rarely equal the drinking vessels that we have discussed. They shine, but without intensity; indeed, it would be truer to say that they glisten rather than shine. Their value lies in their varied colours: the veins, as they revolve, repeatedly vary from purple to white or a mixture of the two, the purple becoming fiery or the milk-white becoming red as though the new colour were passing through the vein. Some people particularly appreciate the edges of a piece, where colours may be reflected such as we observe in the inner part of a rainbow. Others prefer thick veins (any trace of transparency or fading is always a fault) and also specks and spots. These spots do not protrude, but are usually flattened, like warts on the body. The smell of the substance is also a merit.

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§ 37.9.1  A cause contrary to the one mentioned is responsible for creating rock-crystal, for this is hardened by excessively intense freezing. At any rate, it is found only in places where the winter snows freeze most thoroughly; and that it is a kind of ice is certain: the Greeks have named it accordingly. Rock-crystal also comes to us from the East, for that of India is preferred to any other. It is found also in Asia Minor, where a very poor variety occurs around Alabanda and Orthosia and in the neighbouring districts, and likewise in Cyprus: in Europe excellent rock-crystal occurs in the ranges of the Alps. Juba assures us that it is to be found also on an island called Necron, or Island of the Dead, in the Red Sea facing Arabia, as well as on the neighbouring one which produces peridot: here, according to him, a piece measuring a cubit in length was dug up by Ptolemy's officer Pythagoras. Cornelius Bocchus mentions, furthermore, that rock-crystal of quite exceptional weight was found in Portugal, in the Ammacensian mountains, when wells were being sunk to water-level. The surprising remark is made by Xenocrates of Ephesus that in Asia Minor and Cyprus rock-crystal is turned up by the plough, for previously it was not thought to occur in soil, but only amidst rocks. A more plausible statement made by the same Xenocrates is that it is also often carried down by torrents. Sudines maintains that it occurs only in places that face south. What is certain is that it is not found in well-watered localities, however cold the district may be, even if it is one where the rivers freeze down to the bed. The inevitable conclusion is that rock-crystal is formed of moisture from the sky falling as pure snow. For this reason, it cannot stand heat and is rejected except as a receptacle for cold drinks. Why it is formed with hexagonal faces cannot be readily explained; and any explanation is complicated by the fact that, on the one hand, its terminal points are not symmetrical and that, on the other, its faces are so perfectly smooth that no craftsmanship could achieve the same effect.

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§ 37.10.1  The largest mass of rock-crystal ever seen by us is that which was dedicated in the Capitol by Livia, the wife of Augustus: this weighs about 150 pounds. Xenocrates, just mentioned, records that as. he saw a vessel that could hold six gallons, and some authors mention one from India with a capacity of 4 pints. What I myself can unequivocally affirm is that among the rocks of the Alps it generally forms in such inaccessible places that it has to be removed by men suspended from ropes. Experts are familiar with the signs that indicate its presence. Pieces of rock-crystal are impaired by numerous defects, for example by rough, solder-like excrescences, cloudy spots, occlusions of moisture that are sometimes hidden within it, or hard yet brittle cores, and also what are known as 'salt-specks.' Some specimens display a bright red rust, and others fibres that look like flaws. These can be concealed by the engraver. Pieces, however, that have no defects are preferably left unengraved: these are known to the Greeks as 'acenteta,' or 'lacking a core,' and their colour is that of clear water, not of foam. Finally, the weight of a piece is a part of its value. I find that among doctors there is considered to be no more effective method of cauterizing parts that need such treatment than by means of a crystal ball so placed as to intercept the sun's rays. Rock-crystal provides yet another instance of a crazy addiction, for not many years ago a respectable married woman, who was by no means rich, paid 150,000 sesterces for a single dipper.

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§ 37.10.2  Nero, on receiving a message that all was lost, broke two crystal cups in a final outburst of rage by dashing them to the ground. This was the vengeance of one who wished to punish his whole generation, to make it impossible for any other man to drink from these cups. Once it has been broken, rock-crystal cannot be mended by any method whatsoever. Glass-ware has now come to resemble rock-crystal in a remarkable manner, but the effect has been to flout the laws of Nature and actually to increase the value of the former without diminishing that of the latter.

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§ 37.11.1  The next place among luxuries, although as yet it is fancied only by women, is held by amber. All the three substances now under discussion enjoy the same prestige as precious stones; but whereas there are proper reasons for this in the case of the two former substances, since rock-crystal vessels are used for cold drinks and myrrhine-ware for drinks both hot and cold, not even luxury has yet succeeded in inventing a justification for using amber.

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§ 37.11.2  Here is an opportunity for exposing the falsehoods of the Greeks. I only ask my readers to endure these with patience since it is important for mankind just to know that not all that the Greeks have recounted deserves to be admired. The story how, when Phaethon was struck by the thunderbolt, his sisters through their grief were transformed into poplar trees, and how every year by the banks of the River Eridanus, which we call the Po, they shed tears of amber, known to the Greeks as 'electrum,' since they call the sun 'Elector' or 'the Shining One' — this story has been told by numerous poets, the first of whom, I believe, were Aeschylus, Philoxenus, Euripides, Nicander and Satyrus. Italy provides clear evidence that this story is false. More conscientious Greek writers have mentioned islands in the Adriatic named the Electrides, to which, they say, amber is carried along by the Po. It is quite certain, however, that no islands of this name ever existed there, and indeed that there are no islands so situated as to be within reach of anything carried downstream by the Po. Incidentally, Aeschylus says that the Eridanus is in Iberia — that is, in Spain — and that it is also called the Rhone, while Euripides and Apollonius, for their part, assert that the Rhone and the Po meet on the coast of the Adriatic. But such statements only make it easier to pardon their ignorance of amber when their ignorance of geography is so great. More cautious but equally misguided writers have described how on inaccessible rocks at the head of the Adriatic there stand trees which at the rising of the Dog-star shed this gum. Theophrastus states that amber is dug up in Liguria, while Chares states that Phaethon died in Ethiopia on an island the Greek name of which is the Isle of Ammon, and that here is his shrine and oracle, and here the source of amber. Philemon declares that it is a mineral which is dug up in two regions of Scythia, in one of which it is of a white, waxy colour and is called 'electrum,' while in the other it is tawny and known as 'snaliternicum.' Demonstratus calls amber 'lyncurium,' or 'lynx-urine,' and alleges that it is formed of the urine of the wild beasts known as lynxes, the males producing the kind that is tawny and fiery in colour, and the females, that which is fainter and light in colour. According to him, others call it 'langurium' and state that the beasts, which live in Italy, are 'languri.' Zenothemis calls the same beasts 'langes' and assigns them a habitat on the banks of the Po, while Sudines writes that a tree which produces amber in Liguria is called 'lynx.' Metrodorus also holds the same opinion. Sotacus believes that it flows from crags in Britain called the Electrides. Pytheas speaks of an estuary of the Ocean named Metuonis and extending for 750 miles, the shores of which are inhabited by a German tribe, the Guiones. From here it is a day's sail to the Isle of Abalus, to which, he states, amber is carried in spring by currents, being an excretion consisting of solidified brine. He adds that the inhabitants of the region use it as fuel instead of wood and sell it to the neighbouring Teutones. His belief is shared by Timaeus, who, however, calls the island Basilia. Philemon denies the suggestion that amber gives off a flame. Nicias insists on explaining amber as moisture from the sun's rays, as follows: he maintains that as the sun sets in the west its rays fall more powerfully upon the earth and leave there a thick exudation, which is later cast ashore in Germany by the tides of the Ocean. He mentions that amber is formed similarly in Egypt, where it is called 'sacal,' as well as in India, where the inhabitants find it more agreeable even than frankincense; and that in Syria the women make whorls of it and call it 'harpax,' or 'the snatcher,' because it picks up leaves, straws and the fringes of garments. Theochrestus holds that it is washed up on the capes of the Pyrenees by the Ocean in turmoil, a view which is shared by Xenocrates, the most recent writer on the subject, who is still living. Asarubas records that near the Atlantic is a Lake Cephisis, called by the Moors Electrum, which, when thoroughly heated by the sun, produces from its mud amber that floats upon the surface of its waters. Mnaseas speaks of a district in Africa called Sikyon and of a River Crathis flowing into the Ocean from a lake, on the shores of which live the birds known as Meleager's Daughters or Penelope Birds. Here amber is formed in the manner described above. Theomenes tells us that close to the Greater Syrtes is the Garden of the Hesperides and a pool called Electrum, where there are poplar trees from the tops of which amber falls into the pool, and is gathered by the daughters of Hesperus. Ctesias states that in India there is a River Hypobarus, a name which indicates that it is the bringer of all blessings. It flows from the north into the eastern Ocean near a thickly wooded mountain, the trees of which produce amber. These trees are called 'psitthacorae,' a word which means 'luscious sweetness.' Mithridates writes that off the coast of Carmania there is an island called Serita covered with a kind of cedar, from which amber flows down on to the rocks. Xenocrates asserts that amber in Italy is known not only as 'sucinum,' but also as 'thium'; and in Scythia as 'sacrium,' for there too it is found. He states that others suppose that it is produced from mud in Numidia. But all these authors are surpassed by the tragic poet Sophocles, and this greatly surprises me seeing that his tragedy is so serious and, moreover, his personal reputation in general stands so high, thanks to his noble Athenian lineage, his public achievements and his leadership of an army. Sophocles tells us how amber is formed in the lands beyond India from the tears shed for Meleager by the birds known as Meleager's Daughters. Is it not amazing that he should have held this belief or have hoped to persuade others to accept it? Can one imagine, one wonders, a mind so childish and naive as to believe in birds that weep every year or that shed such large tears or that once migrated from Greece, where Meleager died, to the Indies to mourn for him? Well then, are there not many other equally fabulous stories told by the poets? Yes; but that anyone should seriously tell such a story regarding such a substance as this, a substance that every day of our lives is imported and floods the market and so confutes the liar, is a gross insult to man's intelligence and an insufferable abuse of our freedom to utter falsehoods.

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§ 37.11.3  It is well established that amber is a product of islands in the Northern Ocean, that it is known to the Germans as 'glaesum' and that, as a result, one of these islands, the native name of which is Austeravia, was nicknamed by our troops Glaesaria, or Amber Island, when Caesar Germanicus was conducting operations there with his naval squadrons. To resume, amber is formed of a liquid seeping from the interior of a species of pine, just as the gum in a cherry tree or the resin in a pine bursts forth when the liquid is excessively abundant. The exudation is hardened by frost or perhaps by moderate heat, or else by the sea, after a spring tide has carded off the pieces from the islands. At all events, the amber is washed up on the shores of the mainland, being swept along so easily that it seems to hover in the water without settling on the seabed. Even our forebears believed it to be a 'sucus,' or exudation, from a tree, and so named it 'sucinum.' That the tree to which it belongs is a species of pine is shown by the fact that it smells like a pine when it is rubbed, and burns like a pine torch, with the same strongly scented smoke, when it is kindled. It is conveyed by the Germans mostly into the province of Pannonia. From there it was first brought into prominence by the Veneti, known to the Greeks as the Enetoi, who are close neighbours of the Pannonians and live around the Adriatic. The reason for the story associated with the River Po is quite clear, for even today the peasant women of Transpadane Gaul wear pieces of amber as necklaces, chiefly as an adornment, but also because of its medicinal properties. Amber, indeed, is supposed to be a prophylactic against tonsillitis and other affections of the pharynx, for the water near the Alps has properties that harm the human throat in various ways. The distance from Carnuntum in Pannonia to the coasts of Germany from which amber is brought to us is some 600 miles, a fact which has been confirmed only recently. There is still living a Roman knight who was commissioned to procure amber by Julianus when the latter was in charge of a display of gladiators given by the Emperor Nero. This knight traversed both the trade-route and the coasts, and brought back so plentiful a supply that the nets used for keeping the beasts away from the parapet of the amphitheatre were knotted with pieces of amber. Moreover, the arms, biers and all the equipment used on one day, the display on each day being varied, had amber fittings. The heaviest lump that was brought by the knight to Rome weighed 13 pounds. It is certain that amber is to be found also in India. Archelaus, who was king of Cappadocia, relates that it is brought from India in the rough state with pine bark adhering to it, and that it is dressed by being boiled in the fat of a sucking-pig. That amber originates as a liquid exudation is shown by the presence of certain objects, such as ants, gnats and lizards, that are visible inside it. These must certainly have stuck to the fresh sap and have remained trapped inside it as it hardened.

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§ 37.12.1  There are several kinds of amber. Of these, the pale kind has the finest scent, but, like the waxy kind, it has no value. The tawny is more valuable; and still more so if it is transparent, but the colour must not be too fiery: not a fiery glare, but a mere suggestion of it, is what we admire in amber. The most highly approved specimens are the 'Palernian,' so called because they recall the colour of the wine: they are transparent and glow gently, so as to have, moreover, the agreeably mellow tint of honey that has been reduced by boiling. However, it ought to be generally known also that amber can be tinted, as desired, with kid-suet and the root of alkanet. Indeed, it is now stained even with purple dye. To resume, when rubbing with the fingers draws forth the hot exhalation, amber attracts straw, dry leaves and linden-bark, just as the magnet attracts iron. Moreover, amber chippings, when steeped in oil, burn brighter and longer than the pith of flax. Its rating among luxuries is so high that a human figurine, however small, is more expensive than a number of human beings, alive and in good health; and as a result it is quite impossible for a single rebuke to suffice. In the case of Corinthian bronzes, we are attracted by the appearance of the bronze, which is alloyed with gold and silver; and in the case of chased metalwork, by artistry and inventiveness. Vessels of fluorspar and rock-crystal have beauties which we have already described. Pearls can be carded about on the head, and gems on the finger. In short, every other substance for which we have a weakness pleases us because it lends itself either to display or to practical use, whereas amber gives us only the private satisfaction of knowing that it is a luxury. Among the other portentous events of his career is the fact that Domitius Nero bestowed this name on the hair of his wife Poppaea, even going so far as to call it in one of his poems 'sucint' or 'amber-coloured,' for no defect lacks a term that represents it as an asset. From that time, respectable women began to aspire to this as a third possible colour for their hair.

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§ 37.12.2  However, amber is found to have some use in pharmacy, although it is not for this reason that women like it. It is of benefit to babies when it is attached to them as an amulet. Callistratus says that it is good also for people of any age as a remedy for attacks of wild distraction and for strangury, both taken in liquid and worn as an amulet. This writer also introduces a fresh distinction, giving the name 'chryselectrum,' or 'gold amber,' to a kind which is golden in colour and has a most delightful appearance early in the day, but which very easily catches fire and flares up in a moment when it is close to flames. According to Callistratus, this kind of amber cures fevers and diseases when worn as an amulet on a necklace, affections of the ears when powdered and mixed with honey and rose oil, as well as weak sight if it is powdered and blended with Attic honey, and affections even of the stomach if it is either taken as a fine powder by itself or swallowed in water with mastic. Amber plays an important part also in the making of artificial transparent gems, particularly artificial amethysts, although, as I have mentioned, it can be dyed any colour.

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§ 37.13.1  It is the obstinacy of our authorities that compels me to speak next of lyncurium, since, even when they refrain from asserting that this lyncurium is amber, they still claim that it is a gemstone, stating that it is formed indeed from the urine of the lynx, but also from a particular kind of earth. They say that the creature, bearing a grudge towards mankind, immediately conceals its urine, which forms a stone in the same place. The stone is said to have the same fiery colour as amber, to be capable of being engraved and to attract not merely leaves or straws, but also shavings of copper and iron, a belief which even Theophrastus accepts on the authority of a certain Diocles. I for my part am of the opinion that the whole story is false and that no gemstone bearing this name has been seen in our time. Also false are the statements made simultaneously about its medical properties, to the effect that when it is taken in liquid it breaks up stone in the bladder, and that it relieves jaundice if it is swallowed in wine or even looked at.

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§ 37.14.1  Now I shall discuss those kinds of gemstones that are acknowledged as such, beginning with the finest. And this shall not be my only aim, but to the greater profit of mankind I shall incidentally confute the abominable falsehoods of the Magi, since in very many of their statements about gems they have gone far beyond providing an alluring substitute for medical science into the realms of the supernatural.

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§ 37.15.1  The most highly valued of human possessions, let alone gemstones, is the 'adamas,' which for long was known only to kings, and to very few of them. 'Adamas' was the name given to the 'knot of gold' found very occasionally in mines in association with gold and, so it seemed, formed only in gold. Our ancient authorities thought that it was found only in the mines of Ethiopia between the temple of Mercury and the island of Meroe, and stated that the specimens discovered were no larger than a cucumber seed and not unlike one in colour. Now, for the first time, as many as six kinds of 'adamas' are recognized. There is the Indian, which is not formed in gold and has a certain affinity with rock-crystal, which it resembles in respect of its transparency and its smooth faces meeting at six corners. It tapers to a point in two opposite directions and is all the more remarkable because it is like two whorls joined together at their broadest parts. It can be as large even as a hazel nut. Similar to the Indian, only smaller, is the Arabian, which is, moreover, formed under similar conditions. The rest have a silvery pallor and are liable to be formed only in the midst of the finest gold. All these stones can be tested upon an anvil, and they are so recalcitrant to blows that an iron hammer head may split in two and even the anvil itself be unseated. Indeed, the hardness of 'adamas' is indescribable, and so too that property whereby it conquers fire and never becomes heated. Hence it derives its name, because, according to the meaning of the term in Greek, it is the unconquerable force. One of these stones is called in Greek 'cenchros,' or millet seed, and is like a millet seed in size. A second is known as the Macedonian and is found in the goldmines of Philippi. This is equal in size to a cucumber seed. Next comes the so-called Cyprian, which is found in Cyprus and tends towards the colour of copper, but has potent medical properties, which I shall describe later. After this, there is the 'siderites,' or 'iron stone,' which shines like iron and exceeds the rest in weight, but has different properties. For it can not only be broken by hammering but also be pierced by another 'adamas.' This can happen also to the Cyprian kind, and, in a word, these stones, being untrue to their kind, possess only the prestige of the name they bear. Now throughout the whole of this work I have tried to illustrate the agreement and disagreement that exist in Nature, the Greek terms for which are respectively 'sympathia,' or 'natural affinity,' and 'antipathia,' or 'natural aversion.' Here more clearly than anywhere can these principles be discerned. For this 'unconquerable force' that defies Nature's two most powerful substances, iron and fire, can be broken up by goat's blood. But it must be steeped in blood that is fresh and still warm, and even so needs many hammer blows. Even then, it may break all but the best anvils and iron hammers. To whose researches or to what accident must we attribute this discovery? What inference could have led anyone to use the foulest of creatures for testing a priceless substance such as this? Surely it is to divinities that we must attribute such inventions and all such benefits. We must not expect to find reason anywhere in Nature, but only the evidence of will! When an 'adamas' is successfully broken it disintegrates into splinters so small as to be scarcely visible. These are much sought after by engravers of gems and are inserted by them into iron tools because they make hollows in the hardest materials without difficulty. The 'adamas' has so strong an aversion to the magnet that when it is placed close to the iron it prevents the iron from being attracted away from itself. Or again, if the magnet is moved towards the iron and seizes it, the 'adamas' snatches the iron and takes it away. 'Adamas' prevails also over poisons and renders them powerless, dispels attacks of wild distraction and drives groundless fears from the mind. For this reason the Greeks sometimes call it 'anancites,' or 'compulsive.' Metrodorus of Scepsis is alone, so far as I know from my own reading, in stating that 'adamas' is found likewise in Germany, namely on the island of Basilia, which also produces amber, and in preferring this 'adamas' to that of Arabia. There can be no doubt that this statement is untrue.

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§ 37.16.1  Next in value in our estimation come the pearls of India and Arabia, which we discussed in Book 9 [106] among the products of the sea. The third rank among gemstones is assigned for several reasons to the 'smaragdus.' Certainly, no colour has a more pleasing appearance. For although we gaze eagerly at young plants and at leaves, we look at 'smaragdi' with all the more pleasure because, compared with them, there is nothing whatsoever that is more intensely green. Moreover, they alone of gems, when we look at them intently, satisfy the eye without cloying it. Indeed, even after straining our sight by looking at another object, we can restore it to its normal state by looking at a 'smaragdus'; and engravers of gemstones find that this is the most agreeable means of refreshing theft eyes: so soothing to their feeling of fatigue is the mellow green colour of the stone. Apart from this property, 'smaragdi' appear larger when they are viewed at a distance because they reflect their colour upon the air around them? They remain the same in sunlight, shadow or lamplight, always shining gently and allowing the vision to penetrate to their further extremity owing to the ease with which light passes through them, a property that pleases us also in respect of water. 'Smaragdi' are generally concave in shape, so that they concentrate the vision. Because of these properties, mankind has decreed that 'smaragdi' must be preserved in their natural state and has forbidden them to be engraved. In any case, those of Scythia and Egypt are so hard as to be unaffected by blows. When 'smaragdi' that are tabular in shape are laid flat, they reflect objects just as mirrors do. The Emperor Nero used to watch the fights between gladiators in a reflecting 'smaragdus.'

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§ 37.17.1  There are twelve kinds of 'smaragdus.' The most notable is the Scythian, so called from the nation in whose territory it is found. No kind is deeper in colour or more free from defects: it differs as widely in quality from the other 'smaragdi' as they from the other gems. Next to this in esteem, as also in locality, is the Bactrian. These stones are said to be gathered by the natives in the fissures of rocks when the Etesians blow. For at this season the ground is uncovered and the stones glitter here and there because the sands of the desert are shifted violently by these winds. These stones, however, are said to be much smaller than the Scythian. Third in order come those of Egypt, which are dug near Coptos, a city of the Thebaid, from mines in the hills.

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§ 37.17.2  The other kinds are found in copper-mines, and so the first place among them is held by the stones of Cyprus. Their special asset is their colour, which is limpid without being at all faint. On the contrary, it combines body and clarity, and, wherever one peers through the stones, reproduces the transparency of seawater, the stones being in an equal degree translucent and brilliant. In other words, they dissipate their colour and also allow the sight to penetrate within. There is a story that in this island there stood on the burial-mound of a prince named Hermias, not far from the tunny-fisheries, the marble statue of a lion, into which had been inserted eyes made of 'smaragdus'; and these, it is said, blazed so brightly, even far below the surface of the sea, that the tunnies fled in tenor, and the fishermen were long puzzled by this strange behaviour until finally they changed the gemstones in the eye-sockets.

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§ 37.18.1  But since high prices are so freely paid for these stones, it is only right that we should point out their defects, some of which are common to every kind, while others are regional peculiarities, as with human beings. Thus the Cyprian stones show various shades of sea-green, and these may be more or less intense in different parts of the same 'smaragdus,' so that the stones do not always maintain the familiar uniform deep colour of the Scythian variety. Moreover, some stones are traversed by a 'shadow'; this makes the colour dull, and the fainter the colour, the more serious the defect. In accordance with these defects, 'smaragdi' are divided into classes, some, which are called 'blind,' being opaque, while others, instead of being transparent to translucent, are sub-opaque. Some again are variegated, and some enveloped in a 'cloud.' This differs from the 'shadow' mentioned above. 'Cloud' is a defect belonging to a stone with a whitish hue in it, when the green appearance does not pervade the whole stone, but the vision is either blocked beneath the surface or intercepted at the surface by this white inclusion. Filaments, specks like salt and inclusions resembling lead are also defects; and these are common to nearly all varieties.

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§ 37.18.2  Next in esteem to the Cyprian 'smaragdi' come the Ethiopian, which, according to Juba, are found at a distance of twenty-five days' journeying from Coptos, and are bright green, although they are rarely flawless or uniform in Democritus includes in this class the Thermiaean and Persian stones! He states that the former are massive and convex, while the Persian stones, although they are not transparent, satisfy the eye with their agreeably uniform colour without allowing it to see within. He compares them to the eyes of cats and leopards, which likewise shine without being transparent, and mentions, moreover, that the stones are dimmed in sunlight, glisten in shadow and shine farther than other stones. All these varieties have a further defect in that their colour may be that of gall or rancid oil, so that they may be bright and clear, and yet not green. These faults are particularly noticeable in the Attic stones found in the silver-mines at a place called Thoricus. They are always less massive than the others, but are more handsome when seen at a distance. These stones too are often marred by lead-like inclusions, as a result of which they resemble lead when they are seen in sunlight. One peculiarity is that some of these stones show the effects of age as their green colour gradually fades away and, moreover, are damaged by exposure to the sun. After these come the Median stones, which show a great variety of tints and on occasion are even blended to some extent with lapis lazuli. These stones have undulating bands and contain inclusions resembling various objects, for example, poppy heads, birds, the young of animals or feathers. Such stones, in spite of their varied colours, seem to be green by nature, since they may be improved by being steeped in oil and there is no variety that displays larger specimens. The 'smaragdi' of Chalcedon have perhaps completely disappeared now that the copper-mines in the district have failed; and, in any case, they were always worthless and very small. Moreover, they were brittle and of a nondescript colour, this being more or less bright according to the angle at which it was viewed, like the green feathers in a peacock's tail or on a pigeon's neck. Furthermore, they were marked with veins and were scaly. They had also a characteristic defect called 'sarcion,' that is a kind of fleshy growth on the stone. There is a mountain known as Smaragdites, or Emerald Mountain, near Chalcedon, on which they used to be gathered. Juba states that a 'smaragdus' known as 'chlora,' or 'green stone,' is used as an inlay in decorating houses in Arabia; and likewise the stone which the Egyptians call 'alabastrites.' Several of our most recent authorities mention not only Laconian 'smaragdi,' which are dug on Mount Taygetus and resemble the Median variety, but also others that are found in Sicily.

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§ 37.19.1  Among the 'smaragdi' we include also a gem that comes from Persia known as the 'tanos,' which is of an ugly shade of green and is full of flaws within and another from Cyprus, the 'chalcosmaragdna,' or 'copper smaragdus,' which is clouded by veins resembling copper. Theophrastus records that in Egyptian records are to be found statements to the effect that to one of the kings a king of Babylon once sent as a gift a 'smaragdus' measuring four cubits in length and three in breadth; and that there existed in Egypt in a temple of Jupiter an obelisk made of four 'smaragdi' and measuring forty cubits in height and four cubits in breadth at one extremity and two at the other. He states, moreover, that at the time when he was writing there existed in the temple of Hercules at Tyre a large square pillar of 'smaragdus,' unless this was rather to be regarded as a 'false smaragdus'; for, according to him, this is another variety that is found.

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§ 37.19.2  He mentions also that there was once discovered in Cyprus a stone of which half was a 'smaragdus' and half an 'iaspis,' because the liquid matter had not yet been completely transformed. Apion, surnamed Plistonices, or 'the Cantankerous,' has lately left on record the statement that there still exists in the Egyptian labyrinth a large statue of Serapis, nine cubits high, made of 'smaragdus.'

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§ 37.20.1  Many people consider the nature of beryls to be similar to, if not identical with, that of emeralds. Beryls are produced in India and are rarely found elsewhere. All of them are cut by skilled craftsmen to a smooth hexagonal shape since their colour, which is deadened by the dullness of an unbroken surface, is enhanced by the reflection from the facets. If they are cut in any other way they lack brilliance. The most highly esteemed beryls are those that reproduce the pure green of the sea, while next in value are the so-called 'chrysoberyls.' These are slightly paler, but have a vivid colour approaching that of gold. A variety closely akin to these, but still a little paler and by some regarded as a special kind is the so-called 'chrysoprasus.' Fourth in order are reckoned the 'hyacinthizontes,' or 'sapphire-blue beryls,' and fifth the so-called 'aeroides,' or 'sky-blue' variety. After these come the 'waxy' and then the 'oily' beryls, that is, beryls coloured like olive oil. Finally, there are those that resemble rock-crystal. These beryls generally contain filaments and impurities, and besides are faint in colour; and all these features like are defects. The Indians are extraordinarily fond of elongated beryls and claim that they are the only precious stones that are preferably left without a gold setting. Consequently, they pierce them and string them on elephants' bristles. They are all agreed that a stone of perfect quality should not be pierced, and in this case they merely enclose the head of the stone in a convex gold cap. They prefer to shape beryls into long prisms rather than into gems simply because length is their most attractive feature. Some people are of the opinion that they are formed from the very start as prisms and also that their appearance is improved by perforation, when a white cloudy core is removed and there is, in addition, the reflection from the gold or, in any case, the thickness of the material through which the light must penetrate is reduced. Besides those already mentioned, beryls show the same defects as 'smaragdi,' and also spots like whitlows. In our part of the world beryls, it is thought, are sometimes found in the neighbourhood of the Black Sea. The Indians have found a way of counterfeiting various precious stones, and beryls in particulars by staining rock-crystal.

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§ 37.21.1  Beryls differ very little, and also very considerably, from opals, stones which yield precedence only to the 'smaragdus.' India, likewise, is the sole producer of these stones and combining, as they do, the brilliant qualities of the most valuable gems, they above all others description. They display the more subtle fires of the 'carbunculus,' the flashing purple of the amethyst and the sea-green tint of the 'smaragdus,' all combined together in incredible brilliance. For some people the vivid colours resemble in their general effect the pigment known as azurite; for others, the flames from burning sulphur or from a fire that has been kindled with olive oil. The size of the stone is that of a hazel nut. Even among us history makes it famous, since there still exists even today a precious stone of this variety which caused Antony to outlaw a senator, Nonius, the son of the Nonius Struma who made the poet Catullus so indignant when he saw him seated in the magistrate's chair, and the grandfather of Servilius Nonianus, who was consul in my time. This Nonius, when outlawed, fled, taking with him this ring alone of all his many possessions. There is no doubt that at that time the value of the ring was 2,000,000 sesterces; but how amazing was Antony's savagery and extravagant caprice in outlawing a man for the sake of a gemstone, and, equally, how extraordinary was the obstinacy of Nonius in clinging to his 'doom,' when even wild creatures are believed to buy their safety by biting off the member which, as they know, endangers their lives, and leaving it behind for their pursuers!

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§ 37.22.1  The defects of the opal are a colour tending towards that of the flower of the plant called heliotrope, or of rock-crystal or hail, as well as the occurrence of salt-like specks or rough places or dots that distract the eye. There is no stone which is harder to distinguish from the original when it is counterfeited, in glass by a cunning craftsman. The only test is by sunlight. When a false opal is held steadily between the thumb and finger against the rays of the sun there shines through the stone one unchanging colour which is spent at its source, whereas the radiance of the genuine stone continually changes and at different times scatters its colours more intensely from different parts of the stone, shedding a bright light on the fingers where it is held. Owing to its exceptional beauty, this stone is commonly known by the Greek term 'paederos,' or 'Favourite,' but those who regard the 'paederos' as a separate variety a say that the Indian name for it is 'sangenon.' The 'paederos' is said to be found in Egypt and Arabia, in Pontus, where the quality is very poor, and also in Galatia, Thasos and Cyprus. Exceptional specimens of these latter stones have the charm of an opal, but they shine more softly and rarely lack roughness. The dominant colour of the 'paederos' is a mixture of sky-blue and purple, and the green of the 'smaragdus' is absent. Those in which the brilliance is darkened by the colour of wine are superior to those in which it is diluted with a watery tint.

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§ 37.23.1  Up to this point there is agreement as to which stones are supreme, the question having been largely settled by a decree of our Women-councillors of State. There is less certainty regarding the stones about which men too pass judgement. In the case of men, it is an individual's caprice that sets a value upon an individual stone, and, above all, the rivalry that ensues. A case in point is that of the Emperor Claudius, when he took to wearing a 'smaragdus' or a sardonyx. But according to Demostratus, the first Roman to adopt a sardonyx was the elder Africanus, and hence arose the esteem which this gemstone enjoys at Rome. And so it is to this stone that I shall award the next place after the opal.

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§ 37.23.2  Formerly, as is clear from the very name, sardonyx meant a stone with a layer of carnelian resting on a layer of white, that is, like flesh superimposed on a human fingernail, both parts of the stone being translucent. Such is the character of the Indian sardonyx according to Ismenias, Demostratus, Zenothemis and Sotacus. The last two writers call such other varieties of the stone as are opaque 'blind sardonyx.' Those stones that have now usurped the name although they lack all trace of the carncian of the Indian stones come from Arabia; and the sardonyx has come to be recognized in the guise of several colours, the base being black or else having the colour of azurite, while the 'nail' above is coloured vermilion and is banded with a thick white line, not without a suggestion of purple where the white shades into vermilion. Zenothemis writes that the sardonyx was not held in high regard by the Indians, though it might be actually large enough to be commonly made into sword hilts. Indeed, as is generally known, in India the stone is exposed to view by the mountain streams. He states that in our part of the world, however, the sardonyx was popular from the beginning because it was almost the only gemstone which, when engraved as a signet, did not carry away the sealing wax with it. Later we persuaded the Indians to share our appreciation of it. There the common folk wear it pierced on a necklace; and this perforation is now a proof of Indian origin. The Arabian stones are remarkable for their whiteness, the band being brilliant and quite thick: it does not glimmer in the depths of the stone or on its sloping side, but shines on the convex surface of the gem and is, moreover, set off by a lower layer of the deepest black. In the Indian stones we find that this layer has the colour of azure or horn. Moreover, their white band can have a kind of iridescent shimmer, while the surface is red like the shell of a crawfish. Incidentally, if the stones are coloured like honey or wine lees (the latter term in itself implying a defect) they are condemned; and again, also, if the white band is blurred instead of being defined, and similarly if it contains an intrusive patch of some other colour. For no colour must be broken by another in its own layer. There is also an Armenian sardonyx which is acceptable in every respect apart from the faintness of its (white) band.

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§ 37.24.1  I must describe too the character of the onyx proper, which shares its name with the sardonyx. Elsewhere, this name is given to a stone, but here it is that of a gem. Sudines states that in onyx one finds a white band resembling a human fingernail, as well as the colour of the 'chrysolith,' the sard and the iaspis, while Zenothemis mentions that the Indian onyx has several different colours, fiery red, black and that of horn, surrounded by a white layer as in an eye, and in some cases traversed by a slanting layer. Sotacus records also an Arabian onyx which differs from the Indian in that the latter displays a small fiery red layer surrounded by one or more white bands (the arrangement being unlike that of the Indian sardonyx, where the top red layer is a circle, and not, as in this instance, a dot). On the other hand, the Arabian onyx, according to him, is found to be black with white bands. Satyrus states that there is an Indian onyx that is flesh-coloured, with a part of it resembling the 'carbunculus,' and a part, the 'chrysolith' and the amethyst. This kind he wholly rejects as spurious, asserting that a genuine onyx has several bands of different colours combined with others that are milk-white, the colours as the bands shade into each other being quite indescribable as they are reduced to a harmonious and delightfully agreeable unity.

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§ 37.24.2  We must not, however, postpone too long our discussion of the sard, which is similarly a separate component of the name it shares with the onyx; and as we make our way to this topic, we must describe the properties of all the other fiery red gemstones.

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§ 37.25.1  The first rank among these is held by 'carbunculi,' so-called because of their fiery appearance, although they are not affected by fire and are therefore sometimes known as 'acaustoe,' or 'incombustible' stones. Two kinds of 'carbunculi' are the Indian and the Garamantic: the latter was called in Greek the Carthaginian because it was associated with the wealth of Great Carthage. To these varieties are added the Ethiopian and that of Alabanda, the latter being found, it is said, at Orthosia in Caria, but treated at Alabanda. Furthermore, in each variety there are so-called 'male' and 'female' stones, of which the former are the more brilliant, while the latter have a weaker lustre.

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§ 37.25.2  Among the male stones, moreover, are to be observed some that are clearer than usual or of an unusually dark red glare, and some that shine from deep beneath their surface and blaze with exceptional brilliance in sunlight, while the best are the 'amethyst-coloured stones,' namely those in which the fiery red shade passes at the edge into amethyst-violet, and the next best, known as 'Syrtitae,' or 'Stones of Syrtis,' have a bright feathery lustre. All these stones are said to reveal themselves in ground where sunlight is reflected most powerfully. Satyrus asserts that Indian 'carbunculi' lack brilliance and look generally flawed, with a 'parched' lustre; and that the Ethiopian stones look greasy and shed no lustre at all, but burn with a fire that is compressed within them. Callistratus holds that a 'carbunculus' ought to east a brilliant, colourless refulgence, so that when placed on a surface it enhances the lustre of other stones that are clouded at the edges, thanks to its own glowing brilliance. Hence many people call such a stone the white 'carbunculus,' and the kind that shines more faintly the 'lignyzon,' or 'murky' stone. Callistratus adds that Carthaginian 'carbunculi' are much smaller than others, and that the Indian stones can be hollowed into vessels holding as much as a pint. Archelaus writes that the Carthaginian stones have a somewhat swarthy appearance, but light up more intensely than the rest when they are viewed by firelight or sunlight, and at an angle. He mentions also that they appear purple indoors in shadow, and flame-red in the open air; that they sparkle when they are held against the sun, and that, when they are used as signets, they melt the wax, even in a very dark place. Many writers state that the Indian stones arc brighter than the Carthaginian, and that conversely they become dull when viewed at an angle. They add that the male Carthaginian stones have a blazing star inside them, while the female stones shed all their radiance externally; and that the 'carbunculi' of Alabanda are darker than the rest, and rough. Around Miletus also, the earth produces stones of the same colour, which are not at all affected by fire. Theophrastus assures us that 'carbunculi' are found both at Orchomenos in Arcadia and in Chios, the former, of which mirrors are made, being the darker. According to him, there are variegated stones, interspersed with white spots, from Troezen, and likewise from Corinth although the white in these Corinthian stones is yellowish. He mentions that 'carbuneuli' are imported also from Marseilles. Bocchus writes that they are dug up too in the neighbourhood of Olisipo, but only with great difficulty, because the soil, which is clay, is baked hard by the sun.

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§ 37.26.1  Nothing is harder than the attempt to distinguish the varieties of this stone, so great is the scope that they afford for the exercise of cunning, when craftsmen force the opaque stones to become translucent by placing foil beneath them. The duller stones, it is said, when steeped in vinegar for fourteen days shine with a lustre that persists for as many months. 'Carbunculi' are counterfeited very realistically in glass, but, as with other gems, the false ones can be detected on a grindstone, for their substance is softer and brittle. Artificial stones containing cores are detected by using grindstones and scales, stones made of glass paste being less heavy. On occasion, moreover, they contain small globules which shine like silver.

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§ 37.27.1  There is also a stone called 'anthracitis,' which is dug up in Thesprotia and resembles charcoal. Statements that it is found in Liguria I consider to be false, unless it is a fact that it was found there when the statements were made. Among these stones there are said to be some that are surrounded by a white vein. The 'anthracitis' has the fiery colour of the stones previously mentioned, but it possesses one peculiar property: when it is touched its glow dies away and disappears, but when, on the other hand, it is soaked with water it blazes forth again.

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§ 37.28.1  A stone that is closely akin to 'carbonculi' is the 'sandastros,' sometimes known also as the Garamantic stone in virtue of its character. It occurs in a part of India that hears the same name, and is found also in Southern Arabia. Its chief merit is that its fiery brilliance, displayed, as it were, in a transparent casing, glitters with golden particles that shine like stars within the stone, and always inside its structure and never upon its surface. Furthermore, there are religious associations attached to these stones, and we are told of their affinity with the stars, which exists because the starry particles with which they are embellished generally conform in their numbers and arrangement to the constellations of the Pleiades and Hyades. For this reason, they are regarded by astrologers as ritual objects. Here too, the male stones may be distinguished by their deep colour and by a certain vitality, which imparts a tint to objects placed close to them. The Indian stones, it is said, even weaken the sight. The fire of the female stones is more mellow, and glows rather than kindles. Some prefer the Arabian stones to the Indian, and compare the former to the smoky 'chrysolithus.' Ismenias declares that because of its softness the 'sandastros' cannot be polished, and so fails to fetch a high price. Some people call the stone 'sandrisites.' What is universally agreed is that, the larger the number of starry particles, the higher the price. Sometimes misunderstanding is caused by the similarity of the term 'sandaresus,' applied to a stone which Nicander calls 'sandaserion' and others 'sandaresos,' although there are certain writers who actually call this stone 'sandastros,' and our former stone 'sandaresus.' This latter stone likewise is found in India and preserves the name of its place of origin. Its colour is that of a green apple or green oil, and it is generally despised!

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§ 37.29.1  To the same class of fiery red stones belongs the 'lychnis,' so called from the kindling of lamps, because at that time it is exceptionally beautiful. It is found around Orthosia and throughout Caria and the neighbouring regions, but occurs at its finest in India. 'Mild carbuncle' is the term sometimes applied to 'lychnis' of the second grade resembling the so-called 'Flower of Jove.' I find that there are other varieties as well, one of which has a purple and the other a scarlet sheen! These, when heated in the sun or by being rubbed between the fingers, are said to attract straws and papyrus fibres.

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§ 37.30.1  It is said that the same power is exerted by the Carthaginian stone, although it is far less valuable than those previously mentioned. It is formed in the mountain country of the Nasamones by rains of divine origin, as the inhabitants like to think. The stones are found when they reflect the moonlight, particularly at full moon, and in former times were exported to Carthage. Archelaus records that brittle stones, full of veins and resembling a dying ember, are found in Egypt near Thebes. I find that drinking vessels used commonly to be made from this stone and from 'lychnis.' All these varieties, however, obstinately resist engraving and, when used as signets, retain a portion of the wax.

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§ 37.31.1  On the contrary, sard, which shares a part of its name with sardonyx, is extremely useful for this purpose. The stone itself is a common one and was first discovered at Sardis, but the most valuable specimens are found near Babylon. When certain quarries are being opened up the stones come to light adhering to the rock like heart-wood. This mineral is said to be now exhausted in Persia, but sards are found in several other localities, for example in Paros and at Assos. In India it occurs in three varieties: there are red stones, those known as 'pioniae,' or 'fatty stones,' because of their greasy lustre, and finally a third kind that is backed with silver foil. The Indian stones are translucent, whereas the Arabian are somewhat opaque. Others are found also in Epirus near Leucas and in Egypt; and these are backed with gold foil. Among sards too there are male and female stones, of which the former shine the more intensely, while the latter are less lively and have a duller lustre. In ancient times no gemstone was more commonly used than the sard — this, at any rate, is the gem that is flaunted in the plays of Menander and Philemon — and no other translucent gems lose their lustre less readily when they are covered with moisture: olive oil affects them more than any other liquid. Of these stones, the honey-coloured meet with disapproval, which is even stronger in the case of those that look like earthenware.

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§ 37.32.1  Peridot still preserves its special reputation. It is a greenish variety of its own and, when first discovered, was preferred to any other. Once some Troglodytes, or Cave-dwellers, who were pirates, came ashore, exhausted by hunger and stormy weather, on an Arabian island, the name of which was Cytis; and it so happened that, while they were digging up plants and roots, they unearthed a peridot. This, at least, is the account accepted by Archelaus. Juba states that Topazos is the name of an island situated in the Red Sea at a distance of some 35 miles from the mainland. According to him, the island is fog-bound: consequently sailors often have to search for it, and this is why it has acquired its name; for in the Troglodyte language topazin means 'to seek.' Juba records that the stone was first brought from here as a gift for Queen Berenice, the mother of Ptolemy the Second, by his governor [285-246 B.C.] Philo; and that, because the king greatly admired it, a statue 4 cubits high was later made of peridot in honour of this Ptolemy's wife, Arsinoe, and consecrated in the shrine which was named after her the Arsinoeum. Our most recent authorities assert that the stone is found also near Alabastrum, a town in the Thebaid, and divide it into two varieties, the 'prasoides,' or 'leek-like,' and the 'chrysopteros,' or 'golden-feathered,' of which the latter resembles the 'chrysoprasus.' In general, the colour tends to resemble the tints of the leek. Incidentally, the peridot is the largest of gemstones. Also, it is the only precious stone that is affected by an iron file, whereas all others have to be smoothed with Naxian stone and emery. Moreover, peridot is worn away by use.

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§ 37.33.1  With this stone is associated, but more closely in respect of similarity in appearance than of esteem, the pale-green 'callaina.' It occurs in the hinterland beyond India among the inhabitants of the Caucasus, the Hyrcani, Sacae and Dahae. It is of exceptional size, but is porous and full of flaws. A far purer and finer stone is found in Cannania. In both localities, however, 'callaina' occurs amidst inaccessible icy crags, where it is seen as an eye-shaped swelling loosely adhering to the rocks, as though it had been attached to them, rather than formed upon them. Thus tribes accustomed to riding on horseback and too lazy to use their feet find it irksome to climb in search of the stones; and they are also deterred by the risks. They, therefore, shoot at them from a distance with their slings and dislodge them, moss and all. This is the article that pays their taxes, this they acknowledge to be the most beautiful thing that can be worn on neck or fingers, from this they derive their wealth, this is their pride and joy as they boast of the number that they have shot down since their childhood, an operation in which success varies, seeing that some win fine stones with their first shot, while many reach old age without obtaining one. Such, then, is the way in which they hunt the 'callaina.' Subsequently, the stone is shaped by the drill, being in other respects an easy stone to deal with. The best stones have the colour of 'smaragdus,' so that it is obvious, after all, that their attractiveness is not their own. They are enhanced by being set in gold, and no gem sets off gold so well. The finer specimens lose their colour if they are touched by oil, unguents or even undiluted wine, whereas the less valuable ones preserve it more steadfastly. No gemstone is more easily counterfeited by means of imitations in glass. Some authorities say that 'callainae' are found in Arabia inside the nests of the birds known as 'melancoryphi,' or 'black caps.'

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§ 37.34.1  There are also many other kinds of green stones. A member of the commoner class is the prase. A second variety of this stone differs in respect of its blood-red spots, and a third, because it is sharply marked with three white streaks. Preference, however is given to the 'chrysoprasus,' or 'golden prase,' which likewise reproduces the tint of a leek, although in this case the tint veers slightly from that of peridot towards gold. This stone, moreover, may be large enough to be made even into small cups, and it is very commonly cut into cylinders.

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§ 37.35.1  India produces not only these stones, but also the 'nilios,' which differs from the 'chrysoprasus' in showing a weak lustre and one that is elusive when it is looked at closely. Sudines states that it is found also in the Siberus, a river in Attica. Its colour is that of smoky, or on occasion honey-coloured, peridot. Juba records that the stone is formed on the banks of the river known to us as the Nile, from which its name, according to him, is derived.

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§ 37.36.1  Malachite is an opaque stone of a rather deep green shade and owes its name to its colour, which is that of the mallow. It is warmly recommended because it makes an accurate impression as a signet, protects children, and has a natural property that is a prophylactic against danger.

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§ 37.37.1  A green stone that is often translucent is the 'iaspis,' which still preserves the reputation that it enjoyed in the past, even though it now yields to many others. Numerous countries produce it. India produces a variety resembling 'smaragdus,' Cyprus one that is hard and dull greyish-green in colour, and Persia one that is like the blue sky and is therefore called 'aeizusa,' or 'sky-blue.' A similar kind comes from the Caspian region. A deep-blue variety is found near the River Thermodon in Phrygia a purple one, and in Cappadocia another that is purplish-blue, sombre and without lustre. From Amisos comes a kind similar to the Indian, and from Chalcedon one that is cloudy. But it is not so important to distinguish countries of origin as excellences. The best stone is that which has a shade of purple, the next has one of rose, and the next again of 'smaragdus.' The Greeks have applied epithets to each kind in accordance with its character. The fourth variety is known among them as 'boria,' or 'north-wind iaspis,' because it is like the sky on an autumn morning. This will be identical with the kind that is called 'aerizusa.' There is also the 'terebinthizusa,' or 'turpentine iaspis,' the epithet being inappropriate, in my opinion, because the stone is, as it were, compounded of many gems of the same variety, for it is not only like a sard, but also resembles in its colour a violet. There are just as many kinds that remain to be described, but all are blue to a fault, or else are like rock-crystal or a sebesten plum. Consequently the better specimens are set in an open bezel so that they may remain exposed on both faces, with only their edges clasped by the gold. A defect found in them is their weak lustre and failure to shine at a distance, and also specks resembling salt, as well as all the faults that occur in other gemstones. They too can be counterfeited in glass, and the deception becomes obvious when the brightness of a stone is scattered abroad instead of being concentrated within. The remaining varieties are called 'sphragides,' or 'signets,' the common Greek name for a gemstone being thus bestowed on these alone because they are excellent for sealing documents. However, all the peoples of the East are said to wear them as amulets. That variety of 'iaspis' which resembles 'smaragdus' is often surrounded in the middle by a slanting white line, and is therefore called 'monogrammos,' or 'single-lined': if there are several such lines the stone is 'polygrammos,' or 'many-lined.' In passing, it gives me pleasure to refute here, as elsewhere, the falsehoods of the Magi, who tell us that this stone is helpful to public speakers. There is also an 'iaspis' combined with onyx known as 'iasponyx,' or 'jasper onyx,' a stone that has a cloudy inclusion in it and specks on it that look like snow, and is spangled with red dots. There is also an 'iaspis' that resembles Megarian salt and is stained as though with smoke: hence it is called 'capnias,' or 'smoky.' I myself have seen a figure, representing Nero in a breastplate, that was made of this stone and was 16 inches high.

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§ 37.38.1  We shall now give a separate account of 'cyanus,' for a short time ago we applied this name to an 'iaspis' owing to its blue colour. The best kind is the Scythian, then comes the Cyprian and lastly there is the Egyptian. It is very commonly counterfeited by tinting other stones, and this is a famous achievement of the kings of Egypt, whose records also mention the name of the king who first tinted stones in this way 'Cyanus,' too, is divided into male and female varieties. Sometimes inside cyanus there is a golden dust, which, however, differs from that which occurs inside lapis lazuli; for there the gold glistens as dots.

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§ 37.39.1  Lapis lazuli also is blue and is only rarely tinged with purple. The best is found in Persia, but nowhere are there any transparent stones. Moreover, they are useless for engraving, because cores like rock-crystal interfere with this. Lapis lazuli which is of the colour of azurite is regarded as a male variety.

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§ 37.40.1  Next, we shall assign to another category purple stones or those varieties that deviate from them. Here the first rank is held by the amethysts of India, although amethysts are found also in that part of Arabia, known as Petra, which borders on Syria, as well as in Lesser Armenia, Egypt and Galatia, while the most imperfect and worthless specimens occur in Thasos and Cyprus. The name 'amethyst' has been explained by the supposed fact that the brilliant colour of the stone closely approaches that of wine, but stops short of absorbing it and ends in a violet shade. Others, again, offer the explanation that the characteristic purple colour contains an element that is not quite bright red, but fades into the colour of wine. However this may be, all amethysts are transparent and are of a handsome violent tint, and all are easy to engrave. The Indian amethyst has the perfect shade of Tyrian purple at its best, and it is this stone that the dye-factories aspire to emulate. The stone, when examined, sheds a gentle, mellow colour, which does not, like that of the 'carbunculus,' dazzle the eye. A second kind of amethyst deviates towards the sapphire. Its colour is known to the Indians as 'soeos,' and the variety of gem as 'soeondios.' A fainter variety of the same stone is called 'sapenos' and also, in the districts adjacent to Arabia, 'pharanitis' after the name of a tribe. A fourth kind has the colour of red wine, while a fifth degenerates nearly into rock-crystal, since its purple fades away towards colourlessness. This is the least valuable kind, since a fine stone should, when held up to the light, display in its purple colour a rosy tint shining forth gently as though from a 'carbuneulus.' Some people prefer to call such stones 'paederotes,' or 'favourites,' others 'anterotes,' or 'love requited,' and many 'eyelid of Venus.' The Magi falsely claim that the amethyst prevents drunkenness, and that it is this property that has given it its name. Moreover, they say that, if amethysts are inscribed with the names of the sun and moon and are worn hanging from the neck along with baboons' hairs and swallows' feathers, they are a protection against spells. Again, they assert that, however they are used, amethysts will assist people who are about to approach a king as suppliants, and that they keep off hail and locusts if they are used in conjunction with an incantation which they prescribe. Moreover, they have made similar claims on behalf of the 'smaragdus,' provided that it is engraved with an eagle or a scarab beetle. I can only suppose that in committing these statements to writing they express a derisive contempt for mankind.

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§ 37.41.1  There is a considerable difference between the amethyst and the 'hyacinthus,' which, however, shows only a slight deviation from a closely related tint. The difference lies in the fact that the brilliant violet radiance that is characteristic of the amethyst is here diluted with the tint of the hyacinth flower; and although at first sight the colour is agreeable, it loses its power before we can take our fill of it and, indeed, is so far from satisfying the eye that it almost fails to strike it and droops more rapidly than the flower of the same name.

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§ 37.42.1  Besides the 'hyacinthus,' the 'chrysolithus,' a bright golden, transparent stone, comes to us from Ethiopia. Preference over this variety, however, goes to the Indian and, if the colour is uniform, to the Tibarene stones! The worst stones are the Arabian, for these are murky and mottled, with their brilliance broken up by cloudy spots. Even the clear stones that have come to light are full of a kind of powder. The best specimens are those which, placed alongside gold, make it assume a white, silvery appearance. These stones are set in an open bezel so as to remain fully transparent, while the rest are backed with brass foil.

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§ 37.43.1  Although they have now ceased to be used as gems, there are certain stones to be mentioned that are called 'chrysoelectri,' or 'golden amber.' Their colour passes into that of amber, but only in morning light. Those from Pontus are betrayed by their light weight. Some of these stones are hard and reddish, while some are soft and full of flaws. Bocchus assures us that they have been found also in Spain, in the place where, according to his previous account, rock-crystal is dug up from shafts sunk to water-level, and adds that he saw a 'chrysolithus' weighing twelve pounds.

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§ 37.44.1  There occur also 'leucochrysi,' or 'golden-white' stones, which are traversed by a bright white vein; and there is also the 'capnias,' or 'smoky stone' belonging to this class. There are, moreover, stones closely resembling those made of glass-paste, their colour being a kind of bright saffron-yellow. They can be so convincingly counterfeited in glass that the difference cannot be observed, although it may be detected by touch, since the glass-paste feels warmer.

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§ 37.45.1  In the same class is the 'melichrysus,' or 'honey-gold stone,' which looks like pure honey seen through a clear film of gold. This stone, a product of India, is brittle, although hard, but is by no means unpleasing. India produces also the 'xuthos' or 'brownish-yellow stone,' a gem regarded there as fit only for the common folk.

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§ 37.46.1  White stones are headed by the 'paederos,' or 'favourite,' although we may ask to which colour we should assign a stone bearing a name that is so often bandied about among beautiful objects of different kinds a that the mere term has become a guarantee of beauty. However, the species which the name claims as its very own likewise fulfils our great expectations. Here, indeed, with the transparency of the rock-crystal are associated a characteristic sky-green tint, along with a brilliant glint of purple and of golden wine, of which the last colour is always the last to be seen, but always has a purple halo. All these colours, both individually and collectively, seem to pervade the stone; and there is no gemstone that can match its clarity, which is delightfully agreeable to the eye. The most highly valued kind is found in India, where it is known as 'sangenon,' while the second-best occurs in Egypt, where the name used is 'tenites.' Third in order is a variety found in Arabia, but this kind is rough. Then there is the 'paederos' from Pontus, which has a weaker lustre, and the kind from Thasos, which is still weaker. Finally, there are the stones of Galatia, Thrace and Cyprus. The defects of the 'paederos' are faintness and the intrusion of uncharacteristic colours, as well as those that belong to all other gems.

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§ 37.47.1  Next among the bright colourless stones is the 'asteria,' or 'star stone,' which holds its high position owing to a natural peculiarity, in that a light is enclosed in it, stored in something resembling the pupil of the eye. This light is transmitted and, as the stone is tilted, is displayed successively in different places, as if capable of locomotion within. When it is held up to the sun the same stone reflects bright beams radiating as if from a star; and thus it has acquired its name. The stones found in India are difficult to engrave, and those from Carmania are preferred.

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§ 37.48.1  A similarly bright colourless stone is the 'astrion,' or 'little star,' which closely resembles rock-crystal, and occurs in India and on the coasts of Patalene. It has inside it at the centre a star shining brightly like the full moon. The name is sometimes explained by the fact that the stone, when held up to the stars, is supposed to catch their glitter and reflect it. It is said that the best variety is found in Carmania, and that no kind of gem is less liable to possess defects. We are told that there is also a variety known as 'ceraunia,' or 'thunder-stone,' which is inferior, and that the worst of all recalls the glimmer of a lantern.

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§ 37.49.1  Another stone that is much esteemed is the 'astriotes,' again a star stone. It is recorded that Zoroaster proclaimed the remarkable merits of this stone when used in the practice of magic.

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§ 37.50.1  The 'astolos' according to Sudines, resembles the eye of a fish and sheds brilliant white beams like the sun.

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§ 37.51.1  Among the bright colourless stones there is also the one called 'ceraunia' ('thunder-stone') which catches the glitter of the stars and, although in itself it is like rock-crystal, has a brilliant blue sheen. It is found in Carmania. Zenothemis admits that it is colourless, but describes it as 'containing a twinkling star.' He mentions that there are also to be found dull 'cerauniae' which if steeped in soda and vinegar for several days form such a star, which, however, fades away again after as many months. Sotacus distinguishes also two other varieties of the stone, a black and a red, resembling axe-heads. According to him, those among them that are black and round are supernatural objects; and he states that thanks to them cities and fleets are attacked and overcome, their name being 'baetuli,' while the elongated stones are 'cerauniae.' These writers distinguish yet another kind of 'ceraunia' which is quite rare. According to them, the Magi hunt for it zealously because it is found only in a place that has been struck by a thunderbolt.

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§ 37.52.1  The name that appears in these writers immediately after 'ceraunia' is that of the so-called 'iris,' or 'rainbow stone.' It is dug up on an island in the Red Sea 60 miles distant from the city of Berenice. In every other respect it is merely rock-crystal, and is sometimes called 'root of crystal' for this reason. It is known as 'iris' in token of its appearance, for when it is struck by the sunlight in a room it casts the appearance and colours of a rainbow on the walls near by, continually altering its tints and ever causing more and more astonishment because of its extremely changeable effects. It is agreed that it has hexagonal faces, like the rock-crystal, but some people assert that it has rough faces and unequal angles; and that in full sunlight it scatters the beams that shine upon it, and yet at the same time lights up adjacent objects by projecting a kind of gleam in front of itself. But, as I have said, it does not produce any colours except in a dark place; and even then, the effect is not as though the stone itself contained the colours, but rather as though it were forcing them to rebound from the wall. The best kind is that which produces the spectra that are the largest in size with the closest resemblance to a rainbow. There is also another 'rainbow stone,' the 'iritis,' which is similar to the former in every respect except that it is very hard. According to Orus, this when burnt and crushed to a powder cures ichneumon bites, but is actually found in Persis.

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§ 37.53.1  A stone that is similar in its appearance but different in its effects is the so-called 'leros,' or 'trifle,' in which there is a white and a black streak traversing the rock-crystal.

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§ 37.54.1  I have now discussed the principal gemstones, classifying them according to their colour, and shall proceed to describe the rest in alphabetical order.

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§ 37.54.2  The agate was once held in high esteem, but now enjoys none. It was first discovered in Sicily near the river of the same name, but was later found in many countries. Its size can be exceptional, and its varieties are very numerous. The descriptive terms applied to it vary accordingly. For example, it is given names like 'jasper-agate,' 'wax-agate,' 'emerald-agate,' 'blood-agate,' 'white agate,' 'tree-agate' (which is distinguished by marks resembling small trees), 'anti-agate' (which, when burnt, smells like myrrh) and 'coral-agate,' which is sprinkled with golden particles like those of lapis lazuli and is a variety that is very plentiful in Crete. Another name for it is 'sacred agate,' since it is thought to counteract the bites of spiders and scorpions. This I would in any ease believe to be true of the Sicilian stones, since the venom of scorpions is destroyed by a mere hint of a breeze from that province. The agates found in India are also effective in this way and have other very remarkable qualifies besides. For they exhibit the likenesses of rivers, woods and draught-animals; and from them also are made dishes, statuettes, horse-trappings and small mortars for the use of pharmacists, for merely to look at them is good for the eyes. Moreover, if placed in the mouth, they allay thirst. The Phrygian agates contain no green, while those found at Egyptian Thebes lack red and white veins, but these again are effective against scorpions. Those of Cyprus are similarly esteemed. Some people warmly approve of the transparent glassy portions of these last stones. Agates are found too in Trachis near Mount Oita, on Parnassus, in Lesbos, in Messenia (where they look like flowers on a field-path) and in Rhodes. Other differences among agates arc found in the writings of the Magi. Stones are found that resemble a lion's skin, and these, they claim, are effective against scorpions. But in Persia, according to them, the fumes from these stones, when they are burnt, avert storms and waterspouts and stop the flow of rivers, the test of a genuine stone being that it should cool the water when placed in a cauldron that is on the boil. But they insist that, if the stones are to do good, they should be tied to hairs from a lion's mane. Incidentally, when attached to hairs from a hyena's mane, they avert discord in the household. According to the Magi, there is an agate of one single colour that makes athletes invincible. The method of testing such a stone is to throw it into a pot full of oil with various pigments: when it has been heated for no more than two hours it should have reduced all the pigments to a single shade of vermilion.

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§ 37.54.3  The 'acopos,' or 'reviver,' which in colour resembles soda, is porous and spangled with gold particles. Oil heated along with this stone and applied as an embrocation dispels fatigue, or so we are led to believe.

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§ 37.54.4  'Alabastritis,' which is found at Alabastrum in Egypt and at Damascus in Syria, is a white stone interspersed with various colours. When burnt with rock salt and pounded, it is said to alleviate bad breath caused by the mouth and teeth. 'Alectoriae,' or 'cock stones,' is the name given to stones found in the gizzards of cocks. In appearance they are like rock-crystal, and in size like beans; and it is claimed that Milo of Croton owes to his use of these stones his reputation as one who was never worsted in a contest. The 'androdamas,' or 'man tamer,' has a silvery glint, like 'adamas,' and always resembles small cubes. The Magi suppose that its name has been applied to it in virtue of the fact that it subdues violence and hot temper in men. Whether the 'argyrodamas,' or 'silver tamer,' is the same, or a different, stone, is not made clear by our authorities. 'Antipathes,' or the 'contrary stone,' is black and opaque. Its genuineness is tested by boiling it in milk, to which it gives the appearance of myrrh. One might perhaps be entitled to expect something prodigious of this stone; for there are many instances of 'antipathetic' substances, and yet it has been granted exclusive possession of the name. The Magi claim that it helps to counteract witchcraft. The Arabian stone closely resembles ivory, and would pass for it if its hardness did not forbid this. According to the Magi, it helps its possessors when they have pains in their sinews. The 'aromatitis,' or 'aromatic stone,' is also found in Arabia, but likewise in Egypt near Philae. It is always stony and, since it has the colour and scent of myrrh, it is much used by queens. 'Asbestos,' which is found in the mountains of Arcadia, has the colour of iron. 'Aspisatis,' according to Democritus, occurs in Arabia and is of a fiery red colour. He recommends that sufferers from an enlarged spleen should wear it as an amulet with camel dung. However that may be, he states that it is found in the nests of Arabian birds, and that another stone bearing the same name and found in Arabia on Cape Leucopetra has a darting silvery lustre and is effective in counteracting attacks of wild distraction. The Atizoe, he writes, is found in India and on Mount Acidane in Persis. He describes it as shining brightly like silver, as being just over two inches in length with the shape of a lentil and an agreeable scent, and as being indispensable for the Magi at the installation of a king. The 'augitis' is supposed by many to be identical with the 'callaina.' 'Amphidanes' is the stone otherwise known as 'chrysocolla.' It occurs in the region of India where gold is dug up by ants. The stone is found actually in the gold, being similar to gold and having the shape of a cube. Its nature is positively stated to be the same as that of the magnet, except that, according to tradition, it also causes gold to increase. The 'aphrodisiac' stone is red mixed with white. As for the 'apsyetos,' or 'uncooled stone,' it retains its warmth for seven days if it is thoroughly heated in a fire, and is black, heavy and marked with red veins. It is thought to counteract cold. By the 'Egyptilla,' or 'little Egyptian stone,' Iaechus understands a stone in which the white layer is traversed by bands of carnelian and black, but the term is commonly applied where there is a black ground and an upper layer of blue. It is named after the country where it is found.

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§ 37.55.1  As to the 'balanites,' or 'acorn-stone,' there are two varieties, of which one is greenish and the other like Corinthian bronze in its colour. The former comes from Coptos and the latter from the Cave-dweller Country, and both are intersected through the middle by a bright red layer. The 'batrachites,' or 'frog-stone,' also comes from Coptos: one variety has a colour like that of a frog, a second is similar and also has veins, while a third is red mixed with black. The 'baptes,' or 'dipper,' has an exceptionally pleasant scent, but is otherwise an ordinary soft stone. The 'Eye of Baal' has a whitish ground surrounding a dark eye which sends out a golden gleam from its midst. Because of its appearance, the stone is consecrated to the holiest god of the Assyrians. There is another 'Baal stone,' as it is called, which, according to Democritus, is found at Arbela and is as large as a walnut, with a glassy appearance. 'Baroptenus,' also known as 'baripe,' is a black stone with blood-red and white nodules.

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§ 37.55.2  As an amulet it is rejected because it is liable to cause monstrous births. 'Botryitis,' or 'grape-cluster,' occurs in two varieties, of which one is dark and the other has the colour of a vine, and resembles a young grape. 'Bostrychitis' is the name given by Zoroaster to a stone that somewhat resembles the locks of a woman's hair. 'Bucardia,' resembling an ox-heart, is found only at Babylon. 'Brontea,' or 'thunder stone,' which is like the head of a tortoise, is supposed to fall from thunderclaps and to extinguish fires where lightning has struck, or so we are led to believe. The 'bolos,' or 'clod,' is found in the river Ebro and is like a clod of earth.

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§ 37.56.1  'Cadmitis' is identical with the so-called 'ostracitis,' except that the latter is sometimes surrounded with blue globules. 'Callais' is similar to lapis lazuli, except that its colour is lighter, like that of the sea close inshore. 'Capnitis,' or 'smoke stone,' is regarded by some as a separate variety, but many people treat it as a smoky 'iaspis,' as I have described it in the appropriate place. The 'Stone of Cappadocia' occurs there and in Phrygia, and is like ivory. The 'callaica' is so called from its colour, which is that of a clouded 'callais,' and it is said that several of these stones are always found joined together. The 'catochitis,' or 'clinging stone,' belongs to Corsica and is larger than other precious stones, and more remarkable, if the reports are true, because, if the hand rests on it the stone sticks to it like gum. The 'catoptritis,' or 'mirror-stone,' which occurs in Cappadocia, reflects images from its bright colourless surface. The 'cepitis,' also known as 'cepolatitis,' is white, with lines of veins that meet at a single point. The 'ceramitis,' or 'pottery-stone,' has the colour of earthenware. or 'cinaedus stones,' are white, oblong stones found in the brain of the fish so named. They have a remarkable effect if only we can believe the statement that they predict conditions at sea, foretelling mist or calm as the case may be. 'Ceritis' reminds us of wax, 'circos' of a hawk, 'corsoides' of grey hair, and 'coralloachates,' or 'coral-agate,' of coral. This has markings like drops of gold. The 'corallis' resembles vermilion, and occurs in India and at Syene. The 'erateritis,' or 'strong stone,' has a colour between that of yellow sapphire and of amber, and is very hard. The 'crocallis' reproduces exactly the appearance of the cells of a honeycomb. 'Cyitis,' ('pregnant stone') which is found in the neighbourhood of Coptos, is white and seems to be pregnant with another stone, the presence of which is in fact perceived by a rattling sound. The 'chalcophonos,' or 'brazen-voiced stone,' which is black, rings like bronze when it is dashed against anything; and actors of tragedies are urged to wear it. As to 'chelidoniae,' or 'swallow-stones,' there are two varieties, both of which are swallow-coloured with purple on one side, but in one variety the purple is interspersed with black markings. The 'chelonia,' Chelon, 'tortoise-stone,' is the eye of the Indian tortoise and, according to the false allegations of the Magi, is the most miraculous of all stones. For they claim that the stone, if it is placed on the tongue after the mouth has been rinsed with honey, confers powers of prophecy — at full moon or new moon, during the whole of the day; when the moon is waning, before sunrise only; and at other times, from dawn to midday. There are also tortoise-stones which are the eyes of other tortoises and resemble the tortoise-stone previously mentioned; and according to their guidance the Magi often pronounce prophetic incantations in order to cause storms to subside. The variety, however, that is sprinkled with gold drops is said by them to generate storms if it is dropped into boiling water with a scarab beetle. The 'chloritis,' or 'greenstone,' which is of a grassy colour, is said by the Magi to be found as a congenital growth in the crop of the water-wagtail. They recommend that it should be set in an iron bezel so as to produce certain of their all too familiar miracles. The 'choaspitis,' which is named after the river Choaspes, is of a brilliant gold colour mixed with green. The 'chrysolampis,' or 'golden gleam,' which found in Ethiopia, is generally pale, but fiery by night. The 'chrysopis,' or 'golden face,' looks just like gold. The 'Cetionis' is found in Aeolis at Atarneus, now a village, but once a town. It is a transparent stone of many colours. The hue is sometimes that of glass, sometimes of rock-crystal and sometimes of 'iaspis,' but even the stones with flaws in them have so brilliant a lustre that they reflect an image as if they were mirrors.

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§ 37.57.1  The 'daphnea,' or 'laurel stone,' is prescribed by Zoroaster as a cure for epilepsy. The 'diadochos,' or 'substitute,' resembles beryl. The 'diphyes' is a stone of twofold character. It is subdivided into a black and a white, a male and a female variety, each of the two varieties bearing an outline that distinctively portrays the organ of its sex. The 'Dionysias,' or 'stone of Dionysus,' a hard stone, the colour of which is black intermingled with red spots, produces the flavour of wine when it is ground to powder and mixed with water, and is supposed to be an antidote to drunkenness. The 'draconitis,' otherwise known as 'dracontias,' the 'snake stone,' is obtained from the brains of snakes, but unless the head is cut off from a live snake, the substance fails to turn into a gem, owing to the spite of the creature as it perceives that it is doomed. Consequently, the beast's head is lopped off while it is asleep. Sotacus, who writes that he saw such a gem in the possession of a king, states that those who go in search of it ride in two-horsed chariots, and that when they see the snake they scatter sleeping-drugs and so put it to sleep before they cut off its head. According to him, the stone is colourless and transparent, and cannot subsequently be polished or submitted to any other skilful process.

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§ 37.58.1  The 'encardia,' or 'heart stone,' has been given the epithet 'enaristera,' or 'left-side,' and shows the likeness of a heart in high relief on a black ground. Another variety bearing the same name displays the likeness of a heart in green, and a third in black, the rest of the stone being white. The 'enorchis' is white, and when it is split up into pieces reproduces exactly the shape of the testicles. 'Exhebenus' is, according to Zoroaster, a handsome white stone which goldsmiths use for polishing gold. 'Erythallis,' although it is white, looks red when it is tilted. The 'erotylos,' or 'love stone,' otherwise known as 'amphicomos' and 'hieromnemon,' is praised by Democritus in virtue of its use in prophecy. The 'eumeces,' or 'tall stone,' which is found in Bactria, resembles hard limestone, and, when it is placed beneath the head like a pillow, produces dreams that have the force of an oracle. The 'eumitres,' or 'fine headdress,' is held in high regard by the Assyrians as the jewel of Baal, the most holy of their gods. Its colour is that of the leek, and it is much favoured in religious observances. The 'eupetalos,' or 'leafy stone,' has four colours, blue, fiery red, shaped like an olive stone, is fluted like a seashell, vermilion, and apple-green. 'Eureos,' which is but is not so white. 'Eurotias,' or 'mouldy stone,' looks as if its black surface were covered with mildew. 'Eusebes,' or 'reverent stone,' is the kind of stone of which a seat in the temple of Hercules at Tyre is said to have been made, this seat being the one from which only the pious could rise without difficulty. 'Epimelas,' or 'black-on-top,' is an instance of a white gemstone that is overlaid with black.

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§ 37.59.1  'Galaxias,' or 'milk stone,' which is sometimes known as 'galactites,' is similar to the stones next mentioned, but is traversed by blood-red or white streaks. 'Galactitis' is entirely milk-white, and is known also as 'leucogaea' ('white earth'), 'leucographitis' ('white chalk'), and 'synechitis' ('cohesive earth'). It is noteworthy for the fact that when rubbed between the fingers it exhibits a milky smear and flavour, and in the rearing of children it ensures wet-nurses a plentiful flow of milk. Moreover, when it is tied to the necks of babies as an amulet, it is said to make their saliva flow, but we are told that when placed in the mouth it melts and also causes loss of memory. Two rivers, the Nile and the Achelous, produce this substance. Some people apply the term 'galactites' to a 'smaragdus' that is banded with white streaks. 'Gallaica' is similar to 'argyrodamas,' but is somewhat less pure. Two or three stones are found joined together. The 'gassinnades,' which comes from Media, has the colour of wild vetch and looks as if it were sprinkled with flowers. It is found also at Arbela. This is yet another gem that is said to conceive, and to betray the presence of the stone in its womb if it is shaken. The 'embryo,' we are told, takes three months to develop. 'Glossopetra,' or 'tongue stone,' which resembles the human tongue, does not, we are told, form in the ground, but falls from the sky during the waning of the moon, and is indispensable to the moon-diviner. Our scepticism with regard to this account is reinforced by the falseness of the claim made for the stone; for it is stated that it checks gales. The 'Gorgonia,' or 'Gorgon's stone,' is merely coral. The reason for its name is that it is transformed into the hardness of stone after being softened in the sea. It is said to keep off thunderbolts and whirlwinds. The 'goniaea,' or 'faceted stone,' is guaranteed just as falsely to bring about the punishment of one's private enemies.

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§ 37.60.1  The heliotrope, which is found in Ethiopia, Africa and Cyprus, is leek-green in colour, but is marked with blood-red streaks. The name is explained by the fact that, when the stone is dropped into a vessel of water and bright sunshine falls upon it, in reflecting the sunlight it changes it into the colour of blood. This is true especially of the Ethiopian variety. When it is out of water, the same stone catches the sunlight like a mirror and detects solar eclipses, showing the passage of the moon below the sun's disc. Here, moreover, we have quite the most blatant instance of effrontery on the part of the Magi, who say that when the heliotrope plant is joined to the stone and certain prayers are pronounced over them the wearer is rendered invisible. The 'Hephaestitis,' or 'Hephaestus stone,' is another that acts like a mirror in reflecting images, even though it is red. The test of its genuineness is that boiling water when poured over it should cool immediately; or, alternatively, that when placed in the sun it should immediately set fire to a parched substance. The stone is found at Corycus. The Hermuaedoeon, or 'sexual organ of Hermes,' is so called from its resemblance to the male organ, the gemstone on which the likeness appears being white or sometimes black, or pale yellow, and surrounded by a circular band of golden yellow. The 'hexecontalithos,' or 'sixty-stones-in-one,' contains many colours in a small compass, and so has appropriated its name. It is found in the Cave-dweller Country. The 'hieracitis,' or 'kite stone,' is entirely covered with feathery scales, black ones alternating with others resembling a kite's feathers. 'Hammitis,' or 'sandy stone,' resembles fish roe, and there is another kind that looks as if it were composed of soda, but is otherwise just a very hard stone. 'Hammonis cornu,' or 'horn of Ammon,' which is among the most sacred stones of Ethiopia, has a golden yellow colour and is shaped like a ram's horn. The stone is guaranteed to ensure without fail dreams that will come true. The 'hormiscion,' or 'necklace stone,' which in its appearance is among the most pleasing of gemstones, reflects beams of gold from a fiery red ground, and these gold beams carry a white gleam at their tips. 'Hyaeniae,' or 'hyena stones,' are, it is said, obtained from the eyes of the hyena, which is actually attacked for the purpose. When the stones are placed under a man's tongue, they are alleged to foretell the future, if we are foolish enough to believe such a thing. 'Haematitis' of the finest quality occurs in Ethiopia, but the stone is found also both in Arabia and in Africa. It is blood-red in colour. We must not omit to mention the claims made for it, so that we may expose the treacherous frauds perpetrated by the Magi. Zachalias of Babylon, in the volumes which he dedicates to King Mithridates, attributes man's destiny to the influence of precious stones; and as for the 'haematitis,' he is not content to credit it with curing diseases of the eyes and liver, but places it even in the hands of petitioners to the king, allows it to interfere in lawsuits and trials, and proclaims also that to be smeared with an ointment containing it is beneficial in battle. There is another stone of the same kind which is sometimes called 'menui,' and sometimes 'xuthos,' or 'brownish-yellow' stone. This is the name given by the Greeks to stones that are. light brown.

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§ 37.61.1  'Idaei dactyli,' or 'Fingers of Ida,' have the colour of iron and reproduce the shape of the human thumb. The 'icterias,' or 'jaundice stone,' is like the yellow skin of an apple, and is therefore considered to be beneficial in treating jaundice. There is also another stone of the same name, but of a more leaden colour. A third, resembling a leaf and flatter than the former varieties, is almost without weight and has dull yellow streaks. A fourth kind has dull yellow streaks spreading over a ground of a similar colour, but darker. 'Iovis gemma,' or 'Jupiter's gem,' is white, light in weight, and soft. It is known also as 'drosolithos,' or 'dew stone.' The 'Indica,' or 'Indian stone,' takes the name of its country of origin and is of a reddish hue, but when rubbed between the fingers exudes a purple liquid. Another stone of the same name is colourless and has a dusty appearance. The 'ion,' or 'violet stone,' is a violet-coloured stone found in India, but only rarely is its colour bright and deep.

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§ 37.62.1  The 'lepidotis,' or 'scaly stone,' mimics fish scales in various colours, while the 'Lesbias,' or 'stone of Lesbos,' resembles a clod of earth. It takes its name from its country of origin, but is found also in India. The 'leucophthalmos,' or 'white eye,' which is otherwise reddish, includes an eye-shaped layer which is white and black. The 'lencopoecilos,' or 'variegated white stone,' has a white ground marked with drops of vermilion mixed with gold. The 'libanochrus,' or 'colour-of-incense,' shows a resemblance to frankincense and gives off a honey-coloured streak. The 'limoniatis,' or 'meadow stone,' seems to be identical with the 'smaragdus.'

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§ 37.62.2  As for the 'liparea,' the only fact that is reported is that, when it is burnt, all beasts are flushed from their hiding-places by its fumes. The 'lysimachos' is similar to Rhodian marble with golden-yellow veins, and has to be considerably reduced in size by polishing so that its superfluous excrescences may be smoothed away. The 'leucochrysos,' or 'golden-white stone,' consists of a 'chrysolithos' interspersed with white.

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§ 37.63.1  No description of the 'Memnonia,' or 'stone of Memnon,' exists. As for the 'Media,' a black stone found by the Media who is so famous in legend, it has veins of a golden-yellow colour, exudes saffron-yellow moisture and reproduces the flavour of wine. The 'meconitis,' or 'poppy stone,' closely resembles the poppy. 'Mithrax' comes from Persia and the mountains of the Persian Gulf. It is a stone of many colours and reflects their changing tints in sunlight. 'Morochthos' is leek-green in colour and exudes milky moisture. 'Mormorion,' a very dark translucent stone from India, is also known as 'promnion'; but it is called 'Alexandrion,' or 'Alexander stone,' when the colour of garnet is mingled with it, and 'Cyprium,' when that of carnelian is present. It is found also at Tyre and in Galatia and, according to Xenocrates, occurs as well close to the Alps. These are gems which are eminently suitable for cameo-engraving. The 'myrrhitis,' or 'myrrh stone,' has the colour of myrrh and an appearance quite unlike that of a gemstone. It smells like an unguent and, when rubbed, even like spikenard. The 'black myrmecias,' or 'wart stone,' has excrescences like warts, while the 'myrsinitis,' or 'myrtle stone,' is honey-coloured and has the scent of myrtle. A stone is 'mesoleucos,' or 'white in the middle,' when a white band marks the middle of the gem; and is 'mesomelas,' or 'black in the middle,' when a black layer intersects a gem of any colour in the middle.

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§ 37.64.1  The 'Nasamonitis,' or 'stone of the Nasamones,' is blood-red with black veins. The 'nebritis,' or 'fawn stone,' which is sacred to Father Liber, derives its name from its resemblance to a fawnskin, but there is another stone of the same kind that is black and white. 'Nipparene,' which gets its name from a city and tribe of Persia, is like the tooth of a hippopotamus.

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§ 37.65.1  The stone that bears the foreign name 'oica' is a pleasing mixture of black, reddish-brown, green and white. The 'ombria' ('rain stone'), otherwise known as 'notia' ('south-wind stone'), is said to fall, like the 'ceraurila' and the 'brontea,' in company with heavy rain and thunderbolts, and to have the same properties as these stones. But in addition, so we are told, it prevents offerings from being burnt away if it is placed on an altar. 'Onocardia,' or 'ass's heart,' is like the scarlet kermes-insect in colour, but we are told nothing further. 'Oritis,' or 'mountain stone,' sometimes known also as 'sideritis,' 'iron stone,' is spherical in shape and not affected by fire. 'Ostracias,' or 'sherd stone,' otherwise known as 'ostracitis,' resembles earthenware, but is harder than 'ceramitis.' It is like agate except that the latter has a greasy appearance when it has been polished. This 'ostracias' is so hard that other gemstones are engraved with pieces of it. The 'ostritis,' or 'oyster stone,' owes its name to its resemblance to an oyster-shell. 'Ophicardelos' is the foreign name for a black stone that is encircled by two white bands. Obsidian has already been discussed by me in an earlier book. There are also found gems bearing this same name and colour not merely in Ethiopia and India but also in Samnium and, as some people think, in Spain on the shores of the Atlantic.

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§ 37.66.1  The 'panchrus,' or 'stone of all colours,' is composed of almost every colour. 'Pangonus,' or all-angles, is no longer than a finger, and it is only its more numerous plane faces that prevent it from being taken for rock-crystal. As for the 'paneros,' or 'all-love,' Metrodorus does not describe it, but he as cites quite a tasteful poem on the stone composed by Queen Timaris and dedicated to Venus. In this poem it is implied that the stone helped her to bear children. Some people call it 'panerastos,' or 'loved-by-all.' The Pontic stone occurs in several varieties. It is spangled sometimes with blood-red, sometimes with golden spots, and is regarded as a supernatural object. One variety has, instead of stars, similarly coloured lines, and another, figures recalling mountains and deep valleys. The 'phloginos,' or 'flame-coloured stone,' which is also known as 'chrysitis,' or 'gold stone,' resembles the yellow ochre of Attica and is found in Egypt. The 'phoenicitis,' or 'date-palm stone,' is so called from its resemblance to a date, and the 'phycitis,' or 'seaweed stone,' from its similarity to seaweed. A stone is 'perileucos,' or 'white-around,' when a white line descends (in a spiral) from the margin to the very base of the stone. The 'paeanis,' or 'Apollo stone,' otherwise known as 'gaeanis,' the 'earth stone,' is said to become pregnant and to give birth to another stone, and so is thought to relieve labour pains. Its birthplace is in Macedonia, near the tomb of Tiresias, and its appearance is that of ice.

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§ 37.67.1  'Solls gemma,' or 'gem of the sun,' is a bright colourless stone that sheds its beams in such a way as to resemble the sun's shining disc. 'Sagda' is the name given by the astrologers to a leek-green stone which they find, so they say, attached to ships' hulls. 'Samothrax,' or 'stone of Samothrace,' is produced in the island after which it is named, and is black, light in weight and like wood. The 'sauritis,' or 'lizard stone,' is stated to be found in the belly of a green lizard when it has been slit with a reed. The 'sarcitis,' or 'fleshy stone,' closely resembles ox-flesh. The 'selenitis,' or 'moonstone,' a transparent, colourless stone with a honey-coloured sheen, contains a likeness of the moon, and reproduces, if the report is true, the very shape of the moon as it waxes or wanes from day today. It is thought to occur in Arabia. The 'sideritis,' or 'iron stone,' resembles iron and likewise causes some people to quarrel when it is brought to a dispute. It is found in Ethiopia. The 'sideropoecilos,' or 'mottled iron stone,' is a variety of this stone, mottled with specks. 'Spongitis,' or 'sponge stone,' is absolutely true to its name. The 'synodontitis' comes from the brain of the fish known as 'synodus.' The 'Syrtitis,' or 'stone of Syrtis,' is found on the shores of the Gulf of Sidra, and indeed, moreover, in Lucania. It is honey-coloured with a saffron-yellow sheen and contains faint starry spots inside it. 'Syringitis,' or 'pipe stone,' which resembles the length of a stalk between two of its joints, is hollow, with a tube running right through it.

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§ 37.68.1  The 'trichrus,' or 'three-coloured' stone, which comes from Africa, is black, but gives off streaks of three colours, black at the base, blood-red in the middle and yellow at the top. The 'thelyrrhizos,' or 'lady root,' is ashen or red in colour and is distinguished by its white base. The 'thelycardios,' or 'lady heart,' which displays the colour of a heart, gives great pleasure to the Persians, among whom it is found. Their name for it is 'mucul.' The 'Thracia,' or 'Thracian gem,' occurs in three varieties, emerald-green or alternatively paler, while the third has blood-red spots on it. 'Tephritis,' or 'ash stone,' displays a likeness of the new moon with curving horns, but on a ground that is the colour of ash. The 'tecolithos,' or 'solvent stone,' looks like an olive stone and has no value as a gem, but when sucked breaks up and disperses stone in the bladder.

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§ 37.69.1  'Veneris crinis,' or 'the lock of Venus,' is a very dark, brilliant stone, which has an inclusion resembling a lock of red hair. The 'Veientana,' which is an Italian gemstone found at Veii, has a black ground defined by a white edge.

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§ 37.70.1  The 'zathenes,' according to Democritus, is an amber-coloured stone found in Media, and if it is ground with palm wine and saffron softens like wax and has a most agreeable smell. The 'zamilampis,' Zamilar which is found in the Euphrates, is like the marble from the island of Marmara, but is greyish-green in the centre. 'Zoraniscaea' is said to be a gem found in the river Indus and used by the Magi, but, apart from this, nothing is reported about it.

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§ 37.71.1  There is still another way of classifying precious stones, and it is one which I should like to employ, now that I have already from time to time varied my method of presenting my theme. For there are stones named after parts of the body, for example 'hepatitis' after the liver, and numerous past kinds of steatitis after the fat found in one animal or another. We find 'Adad's kidney,' 'Adad's eye' and 'Adad's finger,' Adad also being a god who is worshipped by the Syrians. Again, 'triophthalmos' is a variety of onyx that displays the likeness of three human eyes simultaneously.

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§ 37.72.1  Precious stones are named after animals; for example 'carcinias' takes its name from the colour of the crab, and 'echitis' from that of the viper. 'Scorpitis' is so named because it displays the colour or else the likeness of a scorpion, 'scaritis,' similarly, of a parrot-wrasse, and 'triglitis,' of a red mullet. 'Aegophthalmos' takes its name from a goat's eye, and another stone likewise from a pig's eye. 'Geranitis' owes its name to the crane's neck, 'hieracitis' to the kite and 'aetitis' to the colour of the white-tailed eagle. 'Myrmecitis' displays a naturally formed likeness of a crawling ant, and 'cantharias' that of scarab beetles. 'Lycophthalmos' is a stone of four colours, red mixed with blood-red, while in the middle it has black encircled by white, like a wolf's eye. 'Taos' is like a peacock; and a stone which I find bearing the name 'timictonia' similarly resembles an asp in colour.

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§ 37.73.1  A resemblance to inanimate objects is found in 'ammochrysus,' or 'sand-gold,' which looks like gold mixed with sand; in 'cenchrites,' or 'millet stone,' which looks as if it were sprinkled with grains of millet; and in 'dryites,' or 'oak stone,' which resembles the trunk of an oak. Moreover, this stone burns like wood. The 'cissitis,' or 'ivy stone,' is a transparent, colourless stone in which ivy leaves are visible, and these cover the whole stone. 'Narcissitis' is marked with veins coloured like narcissus, and has also its scent. 'Cyarnias,' or 'bean stone,' is black, but when broken produces from its interior an object resembling a bean. The 'pyren' is so called because it is like an olive stone: sometimes it looks as if it contains fish bones. The 'phoenicitis' is like a date. 'Chalazias,' or 'hail stone,' has the whiteness arid the shape of hailstones, and is as hard as 'adamas,' so that even when it is placed in a lire it is said to retain its natural coolness. 'Pyritis,' or 'fire stone,' even though it is black, scorches the fingers when it is rubbed. 'Polyzonos,' or 'many-banded stone,' is marked with a number of white bands on a black ground, while the 'astrapaea,' or 'lightning stone,' on a colourless or blue ground is traversed in the centre by beams like lightning flashes. The 'phlogitis,' or 'flame stone,' seems to have burning inside it a flame which, however, is not released, while the 'anthracitis,' or 'carbuncle stone,' appears to have sparks running in different directions through it. The 'enhygros,' or 'stone with moisture inside it,' has a white, smooth ground, and is always perfectly round. When it is shaken, liquid moves to and fro inside it, as in an egg. The 'polythrix,' or 'hairy stone,' displays hairy streaks on a green ground, but, in spite of its appearance, is said to make one's hair fall out. There are also the so-called 'lion-skin' and 'leopard-skin' stones. Colours too have lent their names to stones. 'Drosolithos,' or 'dew stone,' takes its name from its grass-green tint, 'melichrus,' of which there are several kinds, from its honey colour, 'melichlorus,' or 'honey-yellow stone,' from two tints combined, because it is partly yellow and partly honey-coloured; while 'crocias' is sprinkled as if with saffron, 'polias' with a greyish — white tint, and 'spartopolias' with markings of a greyish-white more dispersed. 'Rhoditis' is 'rose-coloured,' melitis 'apple-coloured,' 'chalcitis' copper coloured and 'sychitis' 'fig-coloured'. 'Bostrychitis' has white or blood-red leaves branching out on a black ground, while 'chernitis' presents the appearance of white hands clasping each other on stone. The 'anancitis,' or 'compulsive stone,' it is said, is used in divination by water to conjure up divine apparitions, while the 'synochitis,' or 'holding stone,' so we are told, holds the shades of the dead when they have been summoned from below. As for the white 'dendritis,' or 'tree stone,' it is said that if it is buried beneath a tree that is being felled the edges of the axes will not be blunted. There are many more stones that are even more magical; and these have received foreign names from men who have thus betrayed the fact that they are ordinary, worthless stones, and not precious stones at all. But I shall here remain content with having exposed the abominable falsehoods of the Magi.

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§ 37.74.1  New, unnamed precious stones come into existence quite unexpectedly, like one which, according to Theophrastus, was once found in the gold mines near Lampsacus and was sent to King Alexander owing to its great beauty. Moreover, 'Cochlides,' or 'shell stones,' are now very common, but are really artificial rather than natural. In Arabia they are found as huge lumps, and these are said to be boiled in honey without interruption for seven days and nights. Thus all earthy and other impurities are eliminated; and the lump, cleansed and purified, is divided into various shapes by clever craftsmen, who are careful to follow up the veins and elongated markings in such a way as to ensure the readiest sale. Formerly, these lumps were produced in such large sizes that in the East they were made into frontlets for kings' horses aud into pendants to serve as trappings for them. In general, all gems are rendered more colourful by being boiled thoroughly in honey, particularly if it is Corsican honey, which is unsuitable for any other purpose owing to its acidity. Cunning and talented artists succeed also in cutting away parts of variegated stones so as to obtain novelties; and in order that these selfsame stones may not bear their usual name, they call them 'physis,' or 'works of nature,' and offer them for sale as natural curiosities.

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§ 37.74.2  But there is no end to the names given to precious stones, and I have no intention of listing them in full, innumerable as they are, thanks to the wanton imagination of the Greeks. Now that I have mentioned the precious stones, and also some, indeed, that are common, I must be content with having given emphasis to the rarer varieties that deserve notice. One point only should be remembered, that, according to the different marks and excrescences that appear on the surface of stones, and according to the varied tracks and colours of the bands that traverse them, names are often altered when the material is commonly the same.

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§ 37.75.1  Now I shall make some general observations which concern our study of any precious stone; and here I shall adopt the notions of our authorities.

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§ 37.75.2  Concave or convex stones are considered less valuable than those with a plane surface. An elongated shape is the most valuable; then what is called the lenticular; and then a flat, round shape. Stones with sharp angles find the least favour.

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§ 37.75.3  To distinguish genuine and false gemstones is extremely difficult, particularly as men have discovered how to make genuine stones of one variety into false stones of another. For example, a sardonyx can be manufactured so convincingly by sticking three gems together that the artifice cannot be detected: a black stone is taken from one species, a white from another, and a vermilion-coloured stone from a third, all being excellent in their own way. And furthermore, there are treatises by authorities, whom I at least shall not deign to mention by name, describing how by means of dyestuffs emeralds and other transparent coloured gems are made from rock-crystal, or a sardonyx from a sard, and similarly all other gemstones from one stone or another. And there is no other trickery that is practised against society with greater profit.

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§ 37.76.1  I, on the other hand, am prepared to explain the methods of detecting false gems, since it is only fitting that even luxury should be protected against deception. Apart, then, from the details that I have given in describing the best stones of each class, it is recommended that transparent stones in general should be tested early in the morning or, if necessary, np to ten o'clock, but on no account later than this. Tests are made in many different ways: first by weight, because genuine stones are heavier; then by coolness, since genuine stones also feel colder in the mouth; and after this by structure. For artificial stones show globules deep below the surface, rough patches on the surface itself, filaments, an inconsistent lustre and a brightness that fails to strike the eye. The most effective test is to knock off a piece of the stone so that it can be baked on an iron plate, but dealers in precious stones not unnaturally object to this, and likewise to testing with a file. Flakes of obsidian will not scratch a genuine stone, but on a false stone every scratch leaves a white mark. Furthermore, there is a great difference as between one stone and another in that some cannot be engraved with an iron tool and some only with a blunt iron tool, although all can be worked with a diamond point. But what is most effective in working gemstones is the heat generated by the drill. The rivers that produce gems are the Chenab and the Ganges, and of all the lands that produce them India is the most prolific.

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§ 37.77.1  For now that I have completed my survey of Nature's works, it is right that I should make a critical assessment of her products, as well of the lands that produce them. This, then, I declare: in the whole world, wherever the Vault of heaven turns, there is no land so well adorned with all that wins Nature's crown as Italy, the ruler and second mother of the world, with her men and women, her generals and soldiers, her slaves, her pre-eminence in arts and crafts, her wealth of brilliant talent, and, again, her geographical position and her healthy, temperate climate, the easy access which she offers to all other peoples, her shores with their many harbours, and the kindly winds that blow upon her. All these benefits accrue to her from her situation — for the land juts out in the direction that is most advantageous, midway between the East and the West — and from her abundant supply of water, her healthy forests, her mountains with their passes, her harmless wild creatures, her fertile soil and her rich pastures. Nowhere are the things that man is entitled to expect more excellent — crops, wine, olive oil, wool, flax, cloth and young cattle. Even the native breed of homes is preferred to any other on the training-ground. In ores, whether of gold, silver, copper or iron, no country surpassed her so long as it was lawful to work them. Now she keeps them within her womb, and all her bounty lies in the many different liquors and the diverse savours of crops and fruits that she lavishes upon us. Next to Italy, if we leave aside the fabulous marvels of India, I would place Spain, or at least the districts where Spain is bordered by the sea. For although the country is partly rough desert, yet all its productive regions are rich in crops, oil, wine, horses and every kind of ore. So far, Gaul is Spain's equal. But it is Spain's deserts that give her the advantage; for here we find esparto grass, selenite and even luxury — in the form of pigments; here is a place where there is an incentive to toil, where slaves can be schooled, where men's bodies are hard and their hearts passionately eager.

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§ 37.78.1  However, to return to products pure and simple, the most costly product of the sea is the pearl; of the earth's surface, rock-crystal; of the earth's interior, diamonds, emeralds, gemstones and vessels of fluorspar; of the earth's increase, the scarlet kermes-insect and silphium, with spikenard and silks from leaves, citrus wood from trees, cinnamon, cassia and amomum from shrubs, amber, balsam, myrrh and frankincense, which exude from trees or shrubs, and costus from roots. As for those animals which are equipped to breathe, the most costly product found on land is the elephant's tusk, and on sea the turtle's shell. Of the hides and coats of animals, the most costly are the pelts dyed in China and the Arabian she-goat's tufted beard which we call 'ladanum.' Of creatures that belong to both land and sea, the most costly products are scarlet and purple dyes made from shell-fish. Birds are credited with no outstanding contribution except warriors' plumes and the grease of the Commagene goose. We must not forget to mention that gold, for which all mankind has so mad a passion, comes scarcely tenth in the list of valuables, while silver, with which we purchase gold, is almost as low as twentieth. Hail, Nature, mother of all creation, and mindful that I alone of the men of Rome have praised thee in all thy manifestations, be gracious unto me.

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END
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