144 AsTER History ; DioscortpeEs 
chapter contained the lines originally than that the description of 
Viola did so. 
On the other hand, Saracenus deemed their source the Violet, 
because the lines in question occur in Pliny, not under Aster but 
under Viola; and so in Galen and Avicenna who seem here to 
have simply copied Pliny. But Serapion attributes these properties’ 
to both Aster and Viola. 
Violet early a composite term. There is another way to explain 
the repetition. /oz may have been not a single entity but a com- 
posite term. To some of the Greeks this purple Aster may have 
been known as “purple violet,” zov zopgupodv. The Greeks used 
ton for as widely different a flower as our snowdrop (Leucojum), 
their /ewco-ion ; their purple violet as understood by Pliny included 
probably a number of widely different flowers, one of them still 
retaining the name of Violet in its compound name Dame’s Violet, 
Hesperis matronalis L. The Romans thus called a number of 
violet-colored flowers by the name violet, and this is presumptive 
evidence that the Greeks had done so. Mediaeval and Renais- 
sance usage did so to a surprising extent,—see 7fra, under Ar- 
nald; and the tendency is still strong to-day, observable not only 
among colored people on the Potomac, who habitually call bluets 
‘violets,’ but among botanical works, which still print Erythro- 
nium as ‘‘dog-tooth-violet.”’ 
Purple Violet sometimes a synonym for Aster 
My suggestion is therefore this: that some among the Greeks 
called Aster Amellus by the name ¢ov Topgupovy, purple violet, by 
extension of the name to other flowers having the color of the 
violet ; that some * among the multitudinous medical writers noW 
lost, wrote out its reputed properties, calling the plant roy 
zopgueody, from which Pliny copied the statements under discus- 
sion ; and from him Galen and Avicenna derived theirs. Mean- 
while Dioscorides, knowing the plant as Aster Atticus, inserted 
all these reputed properties under that name; and some scribe 
copying his MS, observing them given under Viola by others, 
inserted them there also in the Dioscoridean text. 
: ite g imagine Andreas of Carystus in Euboea doing so, a writer whose early 
life was in the Aster-region, and from whom Pliny and Dioscorides quoted inde- 
pendently, ‘ 
