XI
MASTERS IN PHARMACY
We are guilty, we hope, of no irreverence towards those great
nations to which the human race owes art, science, taste, civil and
intellectual freedom, when we say that the stock bequeathed by
them to us has been so carefully improved that the accumulated
interest now exceeds the principal.
Macaulay: "Essay on Lord Bacon" (1837).
Dioscorides.
It has been a subject of lively dispute whether Dioscorides lived before or after Pliny. It seems certain that one of these authors copied from the other on particular matters, and in neither case is credit given. Pliny was born A.D. 23 and died A.D. 79, and would therefore have lived under the Emperors Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian. Suidas, the historian, who probably wrote in the tenth century, dates Dioscorides as contemporary with Antony and Cleopatra, about B.C. 40, and some Arab authorities say he wrote at the time of Ptolemy VII, which would be still a hundred years earlier. But Dioscorides dedicates his great work on materia medica to Areus Asclepiades, who is otherwise unknown, but mentions as a friend of his patron the consul Licinius Bassus. There was a consul Lecanius Bassus in the
