The Vienna Dioscorides and 1,500 Years of Legacy

Most books written in the first century AD are lost. Many survive only as quotations in later authors, or as a few damaged pages. De Materia Medica, the book on medicines from plants, animals and minerals that the Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides wrote between about 50 and 70 AD, had a very different fate. It was copied by hand for more than fourteen centuries, painted in luxurious picture books for princesses, translated into Syriac, Arabic, Latin, Italian, Spanish and English, printed within a generation of the first printing presses, and buried under ever larger commentaries by Renaissance physicians. Historians describe it as one of the most widely read medical books of all time, consulted for some 1,500 years.

This page follows the book rather than the man. It tells the story of the famous Vienna Dioscorides, a manuscript made around 512 AD for a Byzantine noblewoman and still kept in Vienna today; of its sister manuscript in Naples and the later copies; of the translators in Baghdad and the medieval Latin versions; of the first printed editions and the great Renaissance herbals; of the Englishman who translated it in the 1650s and the Oxford botanist who went looking for its plants in Greece; of a monk still using a manuscript Dioscorides on Mount Athos in 1934; and of the researchers who, in the twenty-first century, use the text as data. The plants themselves, the life of Dioscorides and the method of the book each have their own page in this wing.

Table of Contents

  1. A Book That Never Disappeared
  2. The Vienna Dioscorides (About 512)
  3. Anicia Juliana and the Painted Plants
  4. The Naples Codex and Later Copies
  5. Into Syriac and Arabic
  6. Print, Mattioli and the Renaissance Herbals
  7. Goodyer, Sibthorp and the Flora Graeca
  8. A Monk on Mount Athos (1934)
  9. From Materia Medica to Pharmacognosy
  10. Dioscorides in Twenty-First-Century Research
  11. Key Research Papers
  12. Connections
  13. Featured Videos

1. A Book That Never Disappeared

A common way of telling the history of ancient science runs like this: the classical texts were forgotten in the “Dark Ages” and rediscovered in the Renaissance. For De Materia Medica that story does not fit. Historians of the book stress that it never left circulation. At every point between the Roman Empire and the age of printing, somebody somewhere was copying it, reading it, translating it or using it to identify a plant.

Several things made it so durable. It was practical: each entry told a reader what a plant was called, what it looked like, where it grew, what it did and how to recognise a fake. It was organised for use rather than for literary display. It covered a huge range — about 600 plants, together with animal products, wines and minerals, and roughly a thousand medicines made from them. And it was written in Greek, which remained the language of learned medicine in the eastern Mediterranean for centuries after the Western Roman Empire fell. In the Byzantine world, which continued the Eastern Roman Empire from its capital at Constantinople, Dioscorides was a standard authority.

The text also changed as it travelled. Copyists rearranged it, abridged it, added pictures, added new plants and inserted notes in the margins. One important reorganisation put the entries into alphabetical order — ironically, the very arrangement Dioscorides had rejected in his preface (see the page on the book and its method). Later writers also attached his name to texts he never wrote. So the “Dioscorides” that a reader held in the year 600, 1100 or 1550 was rarely identical to what he wrote in the first century, but it was recognisably the same book, carrying the same plants and much of the same wording.

The historian Alain Touwaide and his colleagues, writing about remedies for the kidneys, summed up this long reach: in their account De Materia Medica had a deep influence on the centuries that followed, right up to the birth of modern pharmaceutical chemistry. The rest of this page follows the most important stages of that journey.

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2. The Vienna Dioscorides (About 512)

The single most famous copy of the book is a manuscript known as the Vienna Dioscorides, also called the Juliana Anicia Codex. Its library shelf-mark is Codex Vindobonensis med. gr. 1 — “medical Greek manuscript number one” in the collection of the Austrian National Library in Vienna. It was made in Constantinople at the start of the sixth century. Sources give its date slightly differently — 512 or 513, about 512 to 515, or simply the start of the 500s — and “about 512” is the date most often quoted.

A very large book

It is a big, heavy object: 491 leaves of vellum (prepared animal skin), each about 37 by 30 centimetres. Its fame rests on its pictures. It contains 383 surviving full-page paintings of plants, out of an original 435; some leaves have been lost over the centuries. The text inside is an alphabetical version of Dioscorides, with each plant’s painting facing or accompanying its description, so that a reader could match the written account to an image.

A working book, not only a treasure

Although it was made as a luxury gift, the Vienna Dioscorides did not sit untouched in a palace. According to its modern custodians and historians, it was used for centuries in Constantinople as a textbook in a hospital — a reference that physicians and students actually consulted. By the early fifteenth century it was worn. In 1406 a notary named John Chortasmenos restored and rebound it, for a monk-physician named Nathanael. Its pages have also attracted scholars interested in the history of scholia — the explanatory notes that Byzantine readers wrote into the margins of texts — a subject the classicist Nigel Wilson discussed in a short 1971 note on the Vienna manuscript.

From Constantinople to Vienna

After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the manuscript remained in the city. In the sixteenth century it belonged to Moses Hamon, a physician to the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. The Flemish diplomat Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, who served as ambassador of the Habsburg emperor at the Ottoman court, saw the book in 1562 and arranged its purchase. It reached the imperial library in Vienna about seven years later, around 1569, and it has been in Vienna ever since. According to the translator Tess Anne Osbaldeston, Busbecq also lent it to the Italian physician Pietro Andrea Mattioli, whose commentaries on Dioscorides are described below.

World heritage

In 1997 the Vienna Dioscorides was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register, the programme that records documentary heritage of world significance. The Austrian Commission for UNESCO keeps a public page about the manuscript, listed under Further Reading below.

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3. Anicia Juliana and the Painted Plants

The woman for whom the book was made, Anicia Juliana, was one of the richest and most aristocratic figures of her day. She was the daughter of Anicius Olybrius, who had briefly been emperor in the West in 472, and she was a great builder and patron of churches in Constantinople. The manuscript was presented to her as a thank-you gift for paying for a church. Wikipedia’s account places it in a suburb of Constantinople; Osbaldeston names the donors as the citizens of Honoratae and the church as St Polyeuktos, one of the grandest churches of the city before Hagia Sophia.

The oldest dedication portrait

Near the front of the book is a full-page painting of Anicia Juliana herself. Art historians describe it as the oldest surviving dedication portrait — a picture of the patron to whom a book is dedicated — and it is one reason the manuscript matters to historians of art as much as to historians of medicine.

Dioscorides and the mandrake

Another frontispiece shows Dioscorides himself at work. A female figure, Epinoia (“Thought” or “Intelligence”), holds up a mandrake root, while a painter copies it onto a board and Dioscorides writes its description. The scene is a small manifesto of the book’s method: look at the real plant, draw it accurately, describe it in words. Accounts of who the painter is differ — Osbaldeston identifies him as the earlier herbal illustrator Crateuas, while other descriptions leave him unnamed. The Italian anaesthesia historian Vincenzo Peduto built a whole study around this mandrake picture and the Vienna manuscript, because the mandrake root was the ancient world’s best-known pain-numbing plant (its story is told on the remedies page).

Why the paintings matter

The paintings are the reason later botanists, from the sixteenth century to the present, have kept returning to the manuscript to work out which real species Dioscorides meant. A painted plant solved a problem that words alone could not: plant names varied from region to region, but a recognisable picture could be carried across languages. For a reader in Constantinople in the sixth century, or in Vienna in the sixteenth, the image was a bridge to the plant Dioscorides had meant.

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4. The Naples Codex and Later Copies

The Vienna manuscript is not alone. A second early illustrated Greek copy, the Codex Neapolitanus Graecus 1, is kept in the National Library in Naples. The horticultural historians Jules Janick and John Stolarczyk date it to the late sixth or early seventh century. It contains 406 plant images on 172 leaves. The two manuscripts are closely related. Janick and Stolarczyk counted 352 illustrations that the two books share and concluded that both probably go back to a common source — an earlier illustrated Dioscorides that no longer survives.

The Naples manuscript is still being studied plant by plant. In 2015 Eleftherios Evergetis and Serkos Haroutounian published a detailed identification of the members of the carrot family (Umbelliferae, now called Apiaceae) annotated in the Naples codex, matching its pictures and descriptions to modern botanical species. That family includes many plants that appear in kitchens as well as old pharmacies, such as fennel, dill, coriander and anise.

Morgan 652

A third illustrated manuscript, now in the Morgan Library in New York under the number M.652, was made in Constantinople in the tenth century — Janick and colleagues date it between 927 and 985. Comparing the order and form of the pictures across the three books, they found that the Morgan manuscript drew on both the Vienna and the Naples traditions. Together these three illustrated copies show how a sixth-century picture-herbal tradition was preserved, recombined and handed on.

Many plainer copies

Beside the luxury manuscripts were many plainer working copies, in Greek and in translation, without lavish paintings. These are less famous, but they are the reason the text stayed in everyday medical use: they were the books physicians, monks and apothecaries actually owned.

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5. Into Syriac and Arabic

In the ninth century, Baghdad was the centre of a remarkable translation movement in which Greek science and medicine were turned into Arabic, often by way of Syriac, the written language of many Christian scholars of the Near East. De Materia Medica was one of the books translated. The work is associated with the great translator Hunayn ibn Ishaq and with Stephanus son of Basil, between about 847 and 861. That Arabic version was revised in 990–991, as Arabic-speaking scholars worked to match Dioscorides’ Greek plant names with the plants they knew.

Plant names were the hardest part of the work: a Greek name that meant something clear in first-century Asia Minor had to be matched to a plant known to readers in a different land and language. Among the surviving Arabic manuscripts is a copy dated 1083, now in Leiden in the Netherlands.

Through Arabic, Dioscorides became part of the foundation of medicine in the Islamic world, and knowledge built on it later travelled back into Europe. One example from the history of anaesthesia: according to Chidiac and colleagues, physicians in the Arab world developed the “sleeping sponge” (spongia somnifera), soaked in plant extracts including mandrake, which was used in Europe until ether arrived in the nineteenth century.

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Medieval Latin versions

In the Latin-speaking West, versions of Dioscorides circulated from the early Middle Ages. Some were translations, some heavily altered, and some carried his name without being his work at all. The historian John Riddle studied one such text, the Ex herbis femininis (“On female herbs”), an early medieval Latin herbal attributed to Dioscorides but actually a later compilation — scholars call its author “Pseudo-Dioscorides”. Riddle showed how texts like this carried Dioscoridean plant lore into the medical botany of early medieval Europe.

The first printed editions

When printing arrived, Dioscorides was among the early medical books to be set in type. According to Osbaldeston, the first printed Latin edition appeared at Colle, near Siena in Italy, in 1478. The first printed edition of the original Greek came from the famous Venetian printer Aldus Manutius in 1499. A new Latin translation by the French physician Jean Ruel followed in 1516. Printing fixed the text and spread identical copies across Europe for the first time.

Mattioli’s commentaries

The most influential Renaissance Dioscorides was the work of Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1500–1577), an Italian physician. He published an Italian translation in 1544 and, in 1554, Latin commentaries illustrated with 562 woodcuts. His commentaries went through a great many editions — Osbaldeston reports that they were said to run to forty. Over time Mattioli’s own notes grew until they overwhelmed the ancient text: Osbaldeston gives the example of the entry on acorus (sweet flag), where Dioscorides wrote seven lines and Mattioli added 140. Mattioli’s editions remain important today; the 2016 modern count of Dioscorides’ herbal drugs described in section 10 was made from Mattioli’s edition of 1568.

Laguna and the Spanish Dioscorides

In 1555 the Spanish physician Andrés Laguna published a Spanish translation with commentary at Antwerp. The historian Vicente Peset wrote about this Spanish version in 1954. Laguna’s Dioscorides became a standard reference in the Spanish-speaking world.

The great herbals

The illustrated herbals of the sixteenth century — by Leonhart Fuchs in Germany, Rembert Dodoens and Carolus Clusius in the Low Countries, William Turner and John Gerard in England — were built on Dioscorides. Their authors measured their plants against his, argued over which modern plant matched which of his names, and gradually added the many species of northern Europe and the Americas that he had never seen. In this way, arguing with Dioscorides became one of the routes by which modern botany was born.

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7. Goodyer, Sibthorp and the Flora Graeca

John Goodyer’s English translation

The first full English translation was made by the English botanist John Goodyer, who worked on it between about 1652 and 1655. It was not printed in his lifetime. It waited until 1934, when the historian of science Robert T. Gunther published it as The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides, Englished by John Goodyer 1655. That edition gave English readers their first complete Dioscorides. A later modern English version by Tess Anne Osbaldeston (2000) was based on Goodyer’s translation, and Lily Beck published a new scholarly translation directly from the Greek in 2005; the historian John Scarborough reviewed modern work on Dioscorides in an essay of 2007.

John Sibthorp goes looking for the plants

By the eighteenth century, the old question of which real plant each Dioscorides name referred to still had no firm answer. The English botanist John Sibthorp decided to settle it in the field. He studied the Vienna manuscript and then toured Greece and the Levant in search of the plants Dioscorides had described. The result was the Flora Graeca (1806–1840), one of the most magnificent botanical books ever produced. The botanical historian William Stearn traced its origins back through Sibthorp to Dioscorides and to Theophrastus, the ancient Greek founder of botany.

Sibthorp’s project shows how a first-century pharmacy book became a scientific research programme: the attempt to identify Dioscorides’ plants pushed botanists to survey the Greek flora systematically.

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8. A Monk on Mount Athos (1934)

One small story captures how long the book stayed in use. In 1934 — the same year Goodyer’s translation finally appeared in print — Sir Arthur Hill, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, visited the monasteries of Mount Athos in northern Greece. There, according to the account repeated in histories of the book, he met a monk who was still identifying plants with the help of a manuscript copy of Dioscorides.

Mount Athos is a self-governing community of Orthodox monasteries where traditions of the Byzantine world have survived with unusual continuity. That a working herbalist there was using a Dioscorides manuscript in the twentieth century shows that the text had never become a museum piece. Almost 1,900 years after it was written, it was still doing the job it was written for: helping someone recognise a plant and know what it was used for.

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9. From Materia Medica to Pharmacognosy

The phrase “materia medica” — the materials of medicine — outlived the book that made it famous. For centuries it was the name of the subject that medical students learned: what each medicinal substance is, where it comes from, how to recognise it, what it does. The historian Paula De Vos, quoted in Wikipedia’s account of Dioscorides, writes that his book formed the core of the European pharmacopoeia through the nineteenth century. Descriptions of Dioscorides as “the father of pharmacognosy” or “the father of pharmacy” are epithets historians use; they point to his place at the head of this tradition rather than to any single discovery.

Pharmacognosy, the modern science of medicines from natural sources, grew directly out of materia medica. It kept Dioscorides’ core questions — what is this plant, is this sample genuine, which part is used — and added new tools: microscopes, chemistry and, eventually, the isolation of pure active compounds. In the nineteenth century chemists began extracting single molecules from plants that Dioscorides had described. The same willow, opium poppy and mandrake recorded in his book became the starting points for salicylates and aspirin, for morphine, and for the tropane alkaloids such as scopolamine. Those later chains are told elsewhere: willow to aspirin on the John Vane pages, and the plants themselves on the remedies page of this wing.

Several of the plants he described are still listed in some pharmacopoeias or used as flavourings and minor drugs, according to Osbaldeston’s survey: among them aloe, squill, colchicum, henbane, fennel, saffron, liquorice, myrrh and olive oil. Other entries in the book, such as amulets and “swallow stones”, were steadily dropped as experimental medicine developed.

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10. Dioscorides in Twenty-First-Century Research

Today Dioscorides is studied not only by historians but by pharmacologists and ethnobotanists, who treat the book as a large and well-dated dataset of how people used plants.

Counting the book

In 2016 Peter Staub, Laura Casu and Marco Leonti published a quantitative survey of the herbal drugs in De Materia Medica, working from Mattioli’s 1568 edition. They recorded 5,314 unique therapeutic uses of 536 plant taxa and 924 herbal drugs, and found that underground parts — roots above all — were relied on heavily as drugs. Their title, “Back to the roots”, makes the point.

The shadow of the book in folk medicine

Leonti and colleagues have also asked how much of today’s traditional plant medicine in southern Europe actually descends from Dioscorides. In 2009 they compared medicinal plant use in Sardinia and Sicily and found a core group of 170 species that was best represented in De Materia Medica; they described the islands’ folk pharmacopoeias as “shallow stereotypes of the different editions of De Materia Medica”. In 2015 a larger statistical study estimated the influence of the ancient texts of Dioscorides and Galen on present-day plant use in Campania, Sardinia and Sicily, and concluded that the ancient scripts “have exerted a strong influence”. In other words, some of what looks like independent local folk knowledge may be, in part, the book’s own legacy, passed down through printed editions and doctors.

Testing the claims

Researchers have also checked his statements against modern pharmacology. Eric Yarnell and Alain Touwaide looked at the 105 plants Dioscorides called diuretic (increasing urine). They found that 56 genera, 53.3 percent of the total, had been confirmed as diuretic in animal or human research, 5 had been shown not to be, and many had never been studied; of the genera that had been investigated, 83.6 percent were confirmed. In 2026 Leonti, Casu and Stefano Cabras published a tasting-panel study of 675 drugs from the book, and found that whether a plant drug was used internally or on the skin varied with the plant part and with its taste and smell — a clue to how ancient healers may have reasoned about plants. The details of those remedies are on the remedies page.

A living text

Nearly two thousand years after it was written, De Materia Medica is still being copied in a new form — into databases, statistical models and digitised facsimiles — and still being argued over. The Vienna manuscript, made for a princess and used in a hospital, sits in a library that is open to scholars, and its pictures of plants can be compared with the living plants that grow around the Mediterranean today.

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Key Research Papers

  1. Wilson NG. The Vienna Dioscorides and the history of scholia. Greek Roman Byz Stud (Cambridge Mass). 1971;12(4):557-8. PubMed PMID: 17393607
  2. 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
  3. Janick J, Whipkey AL, Stolarczyk J. Synteny of Images in Three Illustrated Dioscoridean Herbals: Juliana Anicia Codex, Codex Neapolitanus, and Morgan 652. Not Bot Horti Agrobot Cluj-Napoca. 2013;41(2):333. DOI: 10.15835/nbha4129242
  4. Peduto VA. [The mandrake root and the Viennese Dioscorides]. Minerva Anestesiol. 2001;67(10):751-66. PubMed PMID: 11740424
  5. Evergetis E, Haroutounian SA. The Umbelliferae (Apiaceae) of Dioscorides annotated in codex Neapolitanus Graecus #1. J Ethnopharmacol. 2015;175:549-66. PubMed PMID: 26471287
  6. Riddle JM. Pseudo-Dioscorides' Ex herbis femininis and early medieval medical botany. J Hist Biol. 1981;14(1):43-81. PubMed PMID: 11610831
  7. Peset V. A note on the Spanish version of Dioscorides' "Materia Medica". J Hist Med Allied Sci. 1954;9(1):49-58. PubMed PMID: 13118143
  8. Stearn WT. From Theophrastus and Dioscorides to Sibthorp and Smith: the background and origin of the "Flora Graeca". Biol J Linn Soc Lond. 1976;8:285-98. PubMed PMID: 11631653
  9. Scarborough J. Dioscorides of Anazarbus for moderns--an essay review. Pharm Hist. 2007;49(2):76-80. PubMed PMID: 18351270
  10. Chidiac EJ, Kaddoum RN, Fuleihan SF. Special article: mandragora: anesthetic of the ancients. Anesth Analg. 2012;115(6):1437-41. PubMed PMID: 22584550
  11. 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
  12. 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
  13. Leonti M, Casu L, Sanna F, Bonsignore L. A comparison of medicinal plant use in Sardinia and Sicily-De Materia Medica revisited? J Ethnopharmacol. 2009;121(2):255-67. PubMed PMID: 19038321
  14. Leonti M, Staub PO, Cabras S, Castellanos ME, Casu L. From cumulative cultural transmission to evidence-based medicine: evolution of medicinal plant knowledge in Southern Italy. Front Pharmacol. 2015;6:207. PubMed PMID: 26483686
  15. Yarnell E, Touwaide A. Accuracy of Dioscorides,' De materia medica (First Century C.E.), Regarding Diuretic Activity of Plants. J Altern Complement Med. 2019;25(1):107-120. PubMed PMID: 30403493
  16. Leonti M, Casu L, Cabras S. Systemic and topical use of herbal drugs vary by plant organ and chemosensory properties in De MateriaMedica. J Ethnopharmacol. 2026;370:121953. PubMed PMID: 42229620

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