Dioscorides: Life and Times

Pedanius Dioscorides wrote one of the most widely read medical books in history, yet almost nothing is known about the man himself. He lived in the first century AD, roughly between 40 and 90 AD, in the age of the Roman emperors Nero and Vespasian. The exact years of his birth and death are unknown. His book, De Materia Medica (“On Medical Material”), described about 600 plants and around a thousand medicines made from plants, animals and minerals, and it was read and copied for some 1,500 years. Historians often call him the father of pharmacognosy, the study of medicines that come from nature.

Nearly everything we can say about his life comes from a single source: the short preface he wrote to his own book, addressed to a friend named Areius. This page follows the little evidence there is — his birthplace in Roman Cilicia, the Greek medical tradition he grew up in, the probable years of study at Tarsus, his Roman name, the famous line “as you know, I was a soldier”, his travels and his habit of questioning local people — and it marks clearly where the evidence stops and later tradition begins. The book itself, its plants and its long afterlife have their own pages in this wing.

Table of Contents

  1. Anazarbus in Roman Cilicia
  2. The Greek Medical World He Inherited
  3. Tarsus and the Study of Drugs
  4. A Greek with a Roman Name
  5. ‘As You Know, I Was a Soldier’
  6. Areius and the Dedication
  7. Travels and Questions for Local People
  8. Dioscorides and Pliny the Elder
  9. What Remains Unknown
  10. How Historians Reconstruct His Life
  11. Key Research Papers
  12. Connections
  13. Featured Videos

1. Anazarbus in Roman Cilicia

Dioscorides came from Anazarbus (also written Anazarbos), a town in Cilicia, a region on the southern coast of Asia Minor in what is now southern Turkey. “Dioscorides of Anazarbus” is how he has been known since antiquity, and the place name is part of his traditional title. In his lifetime Cilicia was a province of the Roman Empire, but its towns spoke and wrote Greek. Rome governed the eastern Mediterranean; Greek remained the language of its learning, its philosophy and, above all, its medicine.

Cilicia was a crossroads. It lay between the Taurus Mountains and the sea, on the land routes that joined Syria and the Levant to the Aegean world. A boy growing up there would have met traders, soldiers and travellers from many peoples, and the countryside around him held a rich flora of Mediterranean herbs, shrubs and trees. Nothing survives to tell us about his family, his childhood or how he first became interested in medicines. He tells us only that the interest started early: “From my youth,” he wrote, in Osbaldeston’s English translation, “I have had an unceasing inquisitiveness regarding knowledge of this subject.”

His life dates are an estimate. Most reference works give about 40 to 90 AD, the range used in a short 1996 biographical note in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry. Other scholars give slightly different spans, and some prefer to give only the years when he was active. What is reasonably secure is that he wrote his book in the middle of the first century AD, most likely between about 50 and 70 AD.

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2. The Greek Medical World He Inherited

Dioscorides did not start from nothing. By his time Greek medicine already had a long written tradition. The collection of texts known as the Hippocratic writings, produced by many authors from the fifth and fourth centuries BC onward, had set out the idea that disease has natural causes and can be studied by careful observation. These texts mention many plant remedies, though they never gathered them into a single orderly reference book.

The study of plants for their own sake had begun with Theophrastus, the pupil of Aristotle, whose works on plants described their parts, their growth and their uses, including medicinal ones. A review of the origins of Western herbal medicine for kidney disease by Alain Touwaide and colleagues places De Materia Medica in this line of Hippocratic and Aristotelian predecessors, and describes the book as having “a deep influence on the subsequent centuries, up to the birth of modern pharmacochemistry”.

Alongside the philosophers and physicians there was a more practical tradition: the rhizotomoi, or “root-cutters”, who gathered and sold medicinal plants. One of the best known of these writers was Crateuas, and Dioscorides names him in his preface, together with “Andreas the physician”, as an author who was better informed than most. He was far less kind to others. He criticised a writer called Niger, who had described aloe as “a mineral found in Judea”, for taking his information “from erroneous gossip, not from personal experience”.

The great medical centre of the Greek world was Alexandria in Egypt, with its famous library. Osbaldeston, the modern translator, writes that Dioscorides “had access to the library at Alexandria”, and Touwaide’s review raises the possibility of an Alexandrian research background. Both are suggestions rather than documented facts. What is clear from the preface is that Dioscorides had read his predecessors closely and thought many of them had relied on hearsay or arranged their material badly.

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3. Tarsus and the Study of Drugs

Tarsus, the leading city of Cilicia, lay only a short distance from Anazarbus. In the first century it was a lively centre of Greek learning. Historians describe Tarsus as having a school of medicine with a particular interest in drugs, and it is widely thought that Dioscorides studied there. Osbaldeston’s wording is careful: the translator says Dioscorides “may have studied at Tarsus”. No document records his enrolment, his teachers or the length of his studies, so the Tarsus years remain a reasonable inference rather than a known fact.

The strongest clue is the dedication of his book. The friend he wrote to, Areius, was a physician connected with Tarsus, and Dioscorides speaks of him with warmth and respect. A Greek medical writer naming a respected Tarsian physician as his patron and friend fits well with training in that city’s medical circle.

Whatever the details of his education, the result is plain from the book. Dioscorides was not a philosopher writing about plants in general; he was a practical student of drugs — the plants, animal products and minerals that physicians actually used. A 2019 review of drugs for mental illness in ancient Greek medicine describes him as having “dedicated his lifetime’s work to the synthesis of ancient drugs”. That focus, on what a remedy is, where it grows, how to recognise it and what it does, is the mark of the Tarsus-style pharmacology that historians associate with him.

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4. A Greek with a Roman Name

“Dioscorides” is a Greek name. “Pedanius”, the first part of his full name, is Roman — a Roman family name. Under Roman custom, a provincial who received Roman citizenship often took the family name of the Roman who sponsored or granted it. Historians therefore suggest that a Roman named Pedanius may have sponsored Dioscorides (or perhaps his father) for citizenship. This is a scholarly inference from the name itself; no record names the sponsor or the date.

The name tells us something about his world. Dioscorides was culturally Greek: he wrote in Greek, cited Greek authors and recorded Greek plant names first. Yet he lived as a subject, and probably a citizen, of Rome. People like him moved easily between the two cultures. Greek doctors practised across the Roman Empire, including in Rome itself, and Roman citizenship opened doors — in public life and, quite possibly, in the army.

His name has outlived the empire in another way. In the eighteenth century the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus named the plant genus Dioscorea, the yams, in his honour — one of many signs of the respect botanists kept for him long after the Roman world was gone.

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5. ‘As You Know, I Was a Soldier’

The single most quoted line about Dioscorides’ life comes from his preface. In Osbaldeston’s translation it reads: “From my youth I have had an unceasing inquisitiveness regarding knowledge of this subject, and I have travelled widely (as you know, I was a soldier).” Other translators render the Greek phrase as a “soldier’s life” or a “soldier-like life”. That short parenthesis is the only first-hand evidence for any military career at all.

The tradition

From this line grew a long and attractive tradition: that Dioscorides served as a doctor with the Roman legions, marching with the armies and studying plants wherever the campaigns took him. Osbaldeston’s introduction says he “saw service with the Roman legions in Greece, Italy, Asia Minor, and Provence”. The anaesthesia historian Vincenzo Peduto writes that he “served as a surgeon in Nero’s army”. Popular histories repeat the army-surgeon story almost as fact.

What the evidence supports

These details — the rank of surgeon, the service under Nero, the list of provinces — are later reconstructions; they are not stated by Dioscorides. Some historians read the Greek phrase more loosely, as describing a hard, travelling, soldier-like way of life rather than formal service. Others note a telling pattern in the book itself: the plants he describes from his own knowledge come almost entirely from the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean. One widely used summary concludes that this makes it “likely that he served in campaigns, or travelled in a civilian capacity, less widely than supposed”.

So the fair statement is this: Dioscorides himself says he lived a soldier’s life and travelled widely, and many historians believe he served with the Roman army in some medical role. The specific picture of a legionary surgeon on campaign in Gaul or Italy is a tradition, not a documented fact. A name sometimes attached to his supposed service, the Roman commander Licinius Bassus, appears in the preface only as an admirer of Areius, not as Dioscorides’ commander.

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6. Areius and the Dedication

Ancient authors often addressed a book to a patron or friend, and Dioscorides addressed his to Areius — identified by scholars as Laecanius Arius, a physician of Tarsus. The preface opens with the words “Dearest Areius”, and Dioscorides thanks him for his friendship and hospitality. He also mentions “that wonderful man Licinius Bassus”, presenting him as someone who loved Areius — a glimpse of a circle of educated men around the Tarsian physician.

The preface is far more than a polite dedication. It is a short essay on method, and it is the closest thing we have to Dioscorides’ own voice. The historians John Scarborough and Vivian Nutton published an English translation of the preface with a full commentary in 1982, and their edition remains a key source for anyone trying to understand the man behind the book. In it Dioscorides explains why he wrote: earlier authors had relied on hearsay or had organised their material in ways that made it hard to learn.

He also explains what he will do differently. He sets out the conditions that change a plant’s strength — the season of gathering, the weather, the place it grows — and stresses that a plant has to be watched through every stage of its life to be known properly. Those principles belong to the story of the book, told on the De Materia Medica page. For his biography, the preface matters because it shows a man who wanted to be judged on the quality of his first-hand knowledge.

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7. Travels and Questions for Local People

Dioscorides tells Areius that he has travelled widely, and he describes how he gathered his knowledge. In Osbaldeston’s translation: “since I know many plants personally, and others from previous writings that are generally approved of — and patiently inquiring (by questioning the local inhabitants) about each type of plant, I will attempt a different classification.”

That sentence describes three sources of knowledge. First, plants he had seen and handled himself. Second, written works that were well regarded. Third, conversations with ordinary people — the farmers, herb-gatherers and healers of each place he visited. In modern terms, this is something close to field work. It explains one of the most distinctive features of his book: he records the names of plants in many languages, including Egyptian, Roman and Dacian names. Some of those words survive nowhere else.

Where exactly he went is uncertain. His first-hand descriptions point mainly to the Greek-speaking East — Asia Minor, the Aegean, the Levant and Egypt — while plants from farther away, such as India and Arabia, come to him through trade and earlier writers. The exact itinerary is unknown, but the habit is clear: wherever he went, he looked, asked and compared.

Modern researchers have counted the result. A 2016 survey by Staub, Casu and Leonti, working from a sixteenth-century edition of the book, found 5,314 distinct therapeutic uses for 536 plant taxa and 924 herbal drugs — an enormous body of knowledge for one person to assemble, whether by travel, reading or patient questioning.

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8. Dioscorides and Pliny the Elder

Dioscorides had a famous contemporary: the Roman writer and commander Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD), whose encyclopaedia, the Natural History, also gives long accounts of medicinal plants. The two men lived at the same time, both served the Roman state, and both wrote about the same remedies. It is natural to wonder whether they knew each other or borrowed from each other.

The answer, as far as the evidence goes, is that there is no sign they did. Osbaldeston sums it up: “There is no evidence that they met, and Pliny may not have read Dioscorides’ work.” The similarities between them are best explained by shared older sources — both drew on the same Greek writers on plants and drugs.

A 1997 study in the American Journal of Nephrology tested the question in one area. Touwaide, Pollio, Aliotta, Piomelli and De Santo compared the remedies for kidney and urinary disease in the two authors — Dioscorides lists about 200 plants for these complaints — and concluded that the comparison “does not support the thesis of a close relationship between De Materia Medica and the Naturalis Historia”.

The difference in style is also striking. Pliny was a compiler who gathered material from hundreds of books, sometimes with little checking. Dioscorides, by his own account, set out to test what he had read against what he had seen. Later centuries noticed the difference: for practical pharmacy, it was Dioscorides, not Pliny, whom physicians and apothecaries copied, translated and annotated.

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9. What Remains Unknown

The honest list of unknowns is long. No reliable source records:

Even the date of his great book is approximate. Osbaldeston suggests about 64 AD and notes that the scholar Pritzel proposed 77 AD; the plant historians Jules Janick and John Stolarczyk give about the year 65. The safest statement is that it was written between about 50 and 70 AD.

No portrait made in his lifetime survives. The images of Dioscorides that appear in manuscripts — most famously in the Vienna Dioscorides of about 512 AD — were painted more than four centuries after his death and show an idealised ancient scholar, not a likeness.

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10. How Historians Reconstruct His Life

With so little direct evidence, historians build Dioscorides’ biography the way detectives build a case, from a few kinds of clues:

Each generation of scholars has also produced new editions and translations — from John Goodyer’s English version of 1655 to Lily Beck’s English translation of 2005, with John Scarborough’s 2007 essay review of modern work on the text — and each has re-read the preface and refined the picture. The result is a portrait drawn with a light hand: a Greek-speaking physician from Cilicia, probably trained at Tarsus, a Roman citizen who lived a soldier’s travelling life, who looked hard at plants and asked questions of the people who used them, and who wrote it all down so well that his book outlived his empire by fifteen centuries. The story of that book continues on the De Materia Medica, Plants and Remedies and Manuscripts and Legacy pages.

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Key Research Papers

  1. Haas LF. Pedanius Dioscorides (born about AD40, died about AD90). J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry. 1996;60(4):427. PubMed PMID: 8774409
  2. Scarborough J, Nutton V. The Preface of Dioscorides' Materia Medica: introduction, translation, and commentary. Trans Stud Coll Physicians Phila. 1982;4(3):187-227. PubMed PMID: 6753260
  3. Scarborough J. Dioscorides of Anazarbus for moderns--an essay review. Pharm Hist. 2007;49(2):76-80. PubMed PMID: 18351270
  4. Touwaide A, De Santo NG, Aliotta G. The origins of Western herbal medicines for kidney diseases. Adv Chronic Kidney Dis. 2005;12(3):251-60. PubMed PMID: 16010640
  5. Touwaide A, Pollio A, Aliotta G, Piomelli D, De Santo NG. Medicinal plants for the treatment of urogenital tract pathologies according to Dioscorides' De Materia Medica. Am J Nephrol. 1997;17(3-4):241-7. PubMed PMID: 9189241
  6. Reeds K. Dioscorides unriddled. "Dioscorides on pharmacy and medicine". By John M. Riddle. Essay review. Isis. 1987;78(291):85-8. PubMed PMID: 3294735
  7. Peduto VA. [The mandrake root and the Viennese Dioscorides]. Minerva Anestesiol. 2001;67(10):751-66. PubMed PMID: 11740424
  8. Staub PO, Casu L, Leonti M. Back to the roots: A quantitative survey of herbal drugs in Dioscorides' De Materia Medica (ex Matthioli, 1568). Phytomedicine. 2016;23(10):1043-52. PubMed PMID: 27444350
  9. Laios K, Lytsikas-Sarlis P, Manes K, Kontaxaki MI, Karamanou M, Androutsos G. Drugs for mental illnesses in ancient greek medicine. Psychiatriki. 2019;30(1):58-65. PubMed PMID: 31115355
  10. Janick J, Stolarczyk J. Ancient Greek Illustrated Dioscoridean Herbals: Origins and Impact of the Juliana Anicia Codex and the Codex Neopolitanus. Not Bot Horti Agrobot Cluj-Napoca. 2012;40(1):9. DOI: 10.15835/nbha4017767

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