188. Aster History; CoLUMELLA 
wrote, however, that the wine used be that of Aminea ; and pictures 
the Amellusas first of wild plants after the thyme in attractiveness to 
bees. His calling it a yellow shrub with purple flowers has been 
criticised as heedlessness, but he may actually have written “ of 
this shrub the flowers are yellow and purple.” 
D1oscORIDEAN PER1op—IJX. DioscoRIDES 
The one comparatively full description of Aster which an- 
tiquity has bequeathed us is that of Dioscorides Anazarbeus, of 
about 65 A. D.; in that age of contrasts, while Rome put forth 
her worst in Nero and her best in Seneca. Then, almost in a mo- 
ment, came the great blossoming time of natural history and medi- 
cine, in the works of Pliny, Dioscorides and Aretaeus, of dates 
perhaps about 77, 65 and 55 A. D. 
Aretaeus of Cappadocia, “the most important Greek medical 
writer since Hippocrates’ (Kuhn), wrote in Ionic about 55 A. D., 
his extant writings being De causis and De curatione morborum, 
each in four books; a book De re pharmaceutis is lost, in which 
references to Aster Atticus should be sought. The Aster men- 
tioned * in his extant works, dotyo Asvxdc, is a white earth of great 
repute in ancient medicine as an astringent; see supra, p. 83- 
contemporaries and for the husbandmen for whose use they were meant they were the 
roughest of reading,—ad legendum asperrimi.”’ 
sidorus Hispatensis, about 600 A. D., calls Columelia ‘insignis orator, qui totum 
corpus disciplinae ejusdem complexus est.” 
Col 
copy of Vergil’s Georgics and says, ‘he held Vergil’s poems in delight from his youth. 
Ribbeck, the textual critic of V ergil, claims that Columella in quoting Vergil, 
mixed his quotations as if by inexact memory, fitting in bits of the poem into his ow® 
wiitings as they came to his mind. Becher, printing the parallel passages, does not 
agree with Ribbeck’s implied charge of ‘*beplastering his writings with fragments § 
Vergil,’’ but thinks Columella planned to make quotations of sense with altered words, 
and occasionally to quote a line from a copy he had, which was however a copy wit 
interpolations, and does not supply the authentic text. 
* Aretaeus, edn, Kuhn, bk. 2, c. 
2. 
