Dioscorides’ Etruscan Herbs

makes some interesting points regarding the manuscript traditions that include alternative names for the plants and herbs in Dioscorides’ Materia medica.1 It was beyond the scope of Johnson’s brief introductory note, however, and hence it is the goal of this article, to sug-gest how and why these synonyms, not included by Dioscorides in his original work,2 enter the manuscript history, and more impor-tantly, why these names might indicate a par-ticularly Etruscan herbalism. The synonym-lists were compiled separate-ly by lexicographers, collectors of words in what we would call “dictionaries ” on dis-parate subjects, including the vocabularies of medicine and related disciplines.3 As scribes copied and re-copied the Materia medica, sometimes rearranging Dioscorides ’ original format (called by Riddle a “drug affinity sys-tem”),4 those scribes attached portions of the separate synonym-lists to the text itself, and over the centuries the alternative names fre-quently wandered into the body of the work itself. With the advent of printed editions in the Renaissance, a number of the earliest printed versions simply replicated the com-posite Greek texts (or the Latin translations of those manuscripts) so that medical students and professors of pharmacology in the Renaissance universities often learned all of the names as if they had been part of the orig