ROME: VITRUVIUS 39 



his works on human anatomy and physiology were 

 authoritative for the subsequent thirteen centuries. 

 It is difficult to say how much of the work and 

 credit of this practical scientist is to be given to the 

 race from which he sprang and how much to the 

 social environment of his professional career. (In 

 the ruins of Pompeii, destroyed in 79 A.D., have 

 been recovered some two hundred kinds of surgical 

 instrument, and in the later Empire certain depart- 

 ments of surgery developed to a degree not sur- 

 passed till the sixteenth century.) If it is too much 

 to say that the Roman environment is responsible 

 for Galen's achievements, we can at least say that 

 it was characteristic of the Roman people to wel- 

 come such science as his, capable of demonstrating 

 its utility. 



Dioscorides was also a Greek who, long resident 

 at Rome, applied his science in practice. He knew 

 six hundred different plants, one hundred more than 

 Theophrastus. The latter laid much stress, as we have 

 seen in the preceding chapter, on the medicinal prop- 

 erties of plants, but in this respect he was outdone 

 by Dioscorides (as well as by Pliny). Theophrastus 

 was the founder of the science of botany, Dioscor- 

 ides the founder of materia medica. 



Quintilian, born in Spain, spent the greater part 

 of his life as a teacher of rhetoric in Rome. He val- 

 ued the sciences, not on their own account, but as they 

 might subserve the purposes of the orator. Music, 

 astronomy, logic, and even theology, might be ex- 

 ploited as aids to public speech. In the time of Quin- 

 tilian (first century A.D.), as in our own, oratory was 

 considered one of the great factors in a young man's 



