BOOK XXV. III. 6-iv. 8 



they lived on poison ; addressed to him were treatises, I 



still extant, VTitten by the famous physician Asclepi- 

 ades, who when urgently invited to come from Rome 

 sent instructions instead ; Mithridates alone of men is 

 definitely known to have spoken twenty-two langu- 

 ages, 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 brilhant intellect and wide interests, was an 

 especially diHgent student of medicine, and col- 

 lected 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 i 



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 hfe as it was to the 

 State. 



IV. Besides these the subject has been treated G^^fT^ 

 by Greek writers, whom we have mentioned in their thu'^)^! 

 proper places ; of these, Crateuas, Dionysius and 

 Metrodorus adopted a most attractive method, 

 though one which makes clear httle else except the 

 difficulty of employing it. For they painted Hke- 

 nesses of the plants and then wrote under them 

 their properties. But not only is a picture mis- 

 leading when the coloui's 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 Hfe, since it alters its appearance with the 

 fourfold changes of the year. 



141 



