122 AsTER History; CRATEVAS 
tevas (which he had found “in the midst of some alchemic Greek 
MSS.” in the Paris Library) ‘which seems,” he says, ‘to have 
escaped the attention of the erudite.” 
More was lost than mere plant-lore, however, in losing Cra- 
tevas ; for he was flower-painter as well as writer, and the botanist 
has probably lost in his picture of Aster the first one of which the 
past will unveil the name of the painter. There were three rhi- 
zotomists, says Pliny,* or herbalists, or lovers of plants for their 
own sake—however we may paraphrase it—and they were Cra- 
tevas, Dionysius + and Metrodorus. t Their habit was to paint a 
figure of each plant they considered in their writings, adding a 
description of the properties which the plant possessed. Since 
Cratevas wrote of the Aster the inference follows that he also 
painted it. Pliny indicates that the method of these Greek plant- 
illustrators was to paint the original figure, expecting this original 
to be continuously copied by scribes at the same time with the 
description ; each copy should become a hand-illuminated manu- 
script with figures and text ; but Pliny states that the figures were 
apt to degenerate in the process, from-unskillful copyists. Galen, 
apparently annoyed at the lack of a plant diagnosis for each species, 
complains § that the descriptions of plants which he found in Cra- 
tevas could not be understood without the figures (‘‘sine aspectu’’). 
It may well be that many copies of Cratevas’ figures were still pre- 
served, however, and were still being repeated ; some of which 
* Pliny, Nat. Hist., 25, 4. 
t Dionysius—one of over a hundred Greeks of this name enumerated by Fabricius 
—was probably Dionysius Itykaos (2. ¢., of Utica, and also called Dionysius Uticensis), 
author of a lost Rhizotomica (mentioned by a scholiast on Nicander’s Theriaca, 520)» 
who was probably the same as the Cassius Dionysius Uticensis, a writer of 
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Possibly coeval but of minor importance, Pliny, 8, 84, and 10, 98, is supposed to refer 
to the same Dionysius as ‘the translator of Mago,’’ the Carthaginian (the Father of 
Agriculture, says Columella) from the Punic into Greek, in 28 books condensed by 
Dionysius into 20, and dedicated 
a date for Dionysius of 40 B,C. 
by Diophanes of Bithynia (as Pliny states, 8, 84 and to. 98) and dedicated to King 
Deiotarus of Galatia (who died shortly after B.C. 42), 
odorus was probably, says Haller, that Metrodorus, who was a disciple of 
des (who came to Rome B.C. 89 and founded an - 
Wellmann dates Metrodorus “in the reign of Augustus: 
4 Galen, de Antidot. 
