and in order to see them in their native lands he accompanied the Roman armies through Greece, Italy, and Asia Minor. This was the easiest method of visiting foreign countries in those days. It is not unlikely that he went as assistant to a physician, perhaps to the one to whom he dedicated his book. That is to say, he may have been an army compounder. Suidas says of him that he was nicknamed Phocas, because his face was covered with stains of the shape of lentils.
In his treatise on materia medica, "Peri Ules Iatrikes," or, according to Photius, originally "Peri Ules," On Matter, only, he describes some six hundred plants, limiting himself to those which had or were supposed to have medicinal virtues. He mentions, besides, the therapeutic properties of many animal substances. Among these are roasted grasshoppers, for bladder disorders; the liver of an ass for epilepsy; seven bugs enclosed in the skin of a bean to be taken in intermittent fever; and a spider applied to the temples for headache.
Dioscorides also gives a formula for the Sal Viperum, which was a noted remedy in his time and for long afterwards. His process was to roast a viper alive in a new earthen pot with some figs, common salt, and honey, reducing the whole to ashes. A little spikenard was added to the ashes. Pliny only adds fennel and frankincense to the viper, but Galen and later authors make the salt a much more complicated mixture.
His botany is very defective. He classifies plants in the crudest way; often only by a similarity of names. Of many his only description is that it is "well-known," a habit which has got him into much trouble with
