Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. 8: 285-298. With 2 plates and 2 figures
December 1976
From Theophrastus and Dioscorides to Sibthorp
and Smith: the background and origin of the
Flora Graeca*
WILLIAM T. STEARN
Department of Botany, British Museum (Natural History), London
Received for publication July 1976
The chain of events leading from ancient Greek herbalism t o modern
taxonomic investigation of the Greek flora manifests that continuity of
learning which must be kept in mind if science is to be esteemed as a cultural
activity and not simply as a basis for technology. By over-emphasis on
originality within a narrow field of enquiry an elitist body tends t o ignore how
much one person’s achievements are rooted in the work of his predecessors and
supported by traditional disciplines. To remind working scientists of this debt
should be a duty of historical scholarship and, however much that may be out
of favour elsewhere, especially if associated with taxonomy, I trust it will
continue to be encouraged by the Linnean Society with its catholicity of
biological interests .
The ten folio volumes of Sibthorp and Smith’s Flora Graeca were published
in London between 1806 and 1840. They contain 966 superb hand-coloured
illustrations of plants of the East Mediterranean region which formed Magna
Graecia, together with a few from Italy, and remain of fundamental importance
for their study. They record the richness and diversity of the plants of Greece
but they are much more than a tribute to that. They are the fine fruit of a
cultural heritage going back to Ancient Greece and belong to the West
European philhellenism which made possible the political independence of
modern Greece.
To understand how and why it came about that an Oxford professor of
botany, John Sibthorp (1758-1796), together with the first president of the
Linnean Society, Sir James E. Smith (1759-1828), another great East Anglian
botanist, John Lindley (1 799-1865), an Austrian botanical artist, Ferdinand
Bauer (1760-1 826), a many-sided Cornish gentleman, John Hawkins
Text of a lecture given at the end of the Anniversary Meeting of the Linnean Society on 24 May
1976 after the author had received the Gold Medal of the society. It incorporates information from earlier
publications of the author (Steam, 1954, 1960, 1967, 1976). (The spoken version was recorded on a tape
now in the archives of the Society.)
20
285
286
W. T. STEARN
(1758-1841) and some of the best engravers, colourists and printers working in
England should have laboured collectively for over fifty years to produce, at
fantastic expense, one of the finest books ever printed, the Flora Graeca, t o
understand all this one must begin some 2000 years or more earlier.
which did
The word ‘Botany’ comes from the ancient Greek bdtane (Po~avq)
not refer to the science of botany as we know it, but simply to grass or fodder
for grazing cattle, then later also herbs used in medicine; bdtanizd ( P O T ~ U L { W )
was to root up weeds. The science of botany had thus a very practical
beginning, no matter how esoteric some of its modern aspects may seem. It
grew out of herbalism, i.e. the knowledge of herbs for medical purposes. When
drugs reach us in tubes, packages or bottles, it is easy to forget that many have
come from plants and that the Floru Graeca is a product of the same school of
enquiry.
lhough the knowledge of medicinal herbs possessed by the Ancient Greeks
was extensive, one must not think that they, any more than any other
Mediterranean people, discovered it all for themselves. A Jewish historian of
science, Charles Singer, has described the Ancient Greeks as ‘the spoilt darlings
of history’. One of their talents was to take over the discoveries and inventions
of others, including the pre-Hellenic inhabitants of Greece and the more
advanced Hittite and Semitic peoples of Western Asia, and to incorporate all
this into a distinctive culture endowed with a rich flexible language which
greatly impressed their Roman conquerors, and so passed to the Latin peoples
of the West and the Arabs of the East, but was most fully preserved within the
Byzantine Empire. The indebtedness of the Greeks to other people is evident in
their plant names. Thus hyacinthds ( h w O o c ) , t~r‘rl/binth~s(7~p€puleoc),
rninte
( p d q ) etc. are pre-Hellenic, an8rnGnF ( d u ~ p w uand
~ ) tzyssOpt5s (Gaownoc) are
of Semitic origin and their most important anaesthetic and pain-killer
rnandragdras ( p v 6 p q o p a c ) has a name corrupted apparently from an Assyrian
name nnin fa ira meaning the ‘male drug [i.e. the strong drug] of the plague
god Nanitar’.
One may usefully distinguish two main lines within ancient and indeed
modern botany, namely the philosophical and the practical, now called pure
and applied. The work of Theophrastus (370-c.285 B.C.), the disciple and heir
of Aristotle, exemplifies the former. He developed the art of plant description
to an astonishing degree, as the studies in particular of Gustav Senn (see Stearn,
Botanical Latin 49, for a list) have made evident, but he also dealt with some
fundamental botanical questions such as the distinction between root and
shoot and differences in the geographical distribution of plants. During his
lifetime Greek armies under Alexander marched across Western Asia to India,
and a Greek fleet under Nearchus explored the Persian Gulf. They encountered
strange tropical plants which raised many questions. Alexander’s officers
included acute, trained observers, who sent detailed reports to Athens. These
have been lost but fragments of them survive, like fragments of Greek and
Roman masonry incorporated into mediaeval walls, in the writings of
Theophrastus and others (cf. Stearn, 1976).
Theophrastus himself made use not only of this information but also that of
the rhizotomoi, the herb gatherers, who obviously included both unlettered
peasant women and educated men who would now be called scientific
pharmacists. For European and also Arabic medicine, the most important of
FLORA GRAECA
287
these learned herbalists was a later Greek from Asia Minor named Pedianos
Dioscorides (fl.A.D. 50-70), who evidently travelled widely and was probably a
military doctor. He compiled an encyclopaedia of muteria medicu which
became the most widely used, copied, extended and translated work on
medicinal plants during 16 centuries. I t exists in various codices, the
interrelationships of which have been represented diagrammatically by Singer
(1927), and, from comparison of these, the original text has been reconstructed
with reasonable certainty, notably by Max Wellmann, though no manuscript of
Dioscorides’s time has survived, and there are only copies of copies of copies.
The copyists themselves were, of course, not primarily interested in preserving
the original text intact for posterity. They needed the work for practical use
and they added other material and left some out.
Although he drew upon his own observations and experience, Dioscorides,
like other compilers of encyclopaedias, also copied from earlier writings. Thus
his Greek text contains various passages essentially the same as some in the
Latin text of his Roman contemporary Pliny, though neither can have copied
from the other. Both obtained the same information from the same earlier
source now lost, apparently a work by Quintus Sextius Niger (cf. Wellmann,
18891, whom Dioscorides cites. He also refers to another earlier herbalist
(rhizotomist) named Crataevus (Krateuas) who seems t o have been an excellent
artist; Pliny (Book 25 iv.) mentions him, together with Dionysius and
Metrodorus, as having painted the likenesses of plants and written their
properties under these illustrations. Nothing of his work survives directly but
some Byzantine illustrations exist (see below) which appear to have been
copied from it.
The Byzantine Empire has had a bad press from its enemies in the Latin West
who barbarously despoiled and weakened it and then left it open to conquest
by the Ottoman Turks. The extent to which modern Greek people are
descended from the Ancient Greeks has been a matter of dispute since the
German historian Fallmerayer asserted in 1830-36, on the basis of the many
Slavonic place-names in Greece, that they are hellenized Slavs. One thing,
however, is certain. Despite the emigration and dispersal of the Ancient Greeks
during the Roman Empire, enough of them remained together to impose their
language, presumably through intermarriage, upon the Slavonic and Albanian
tribes who overran Greece and were incorporated into the Byzantine Empire
ruled from Constantinople (ancient Byzantium, modern Istanbul). To the
scholars of that empire the world owes the survival of the Ancient Greek
literature and language. As Gibbon said, ‘in their lowest servitude and
depression, the subjects of the Byzantine throne were possessed of a golden key
that could unlock the treasures of antiquity’. Those classical scholars today
who, like the Bavarians of King Otto’s time, have eyes only for the monuments
of ancient Greece and stomachs only for the tavernas of modern Greece, forget
that, between these important expressions of national vitality, people in Greece
have been living, fighting, cutting down trees, causing erosion, building
churches and castles and creating the life, culture and difficulties of modern
Greece, and that for most of this long period they formed part of the
Byzantine Empire. Patrick Leigh Fermor, in his entertaining travel book of
light-hearted but well-based scholarship Muni ( 1 958), has rightly emphasized
that ‘the whole approach, the arbitrary singling out of one century from its
288
W. T. STEARN
provenance and sequel, the failure to regard history as a continuum, is wrong,
and to this faulty attitude, on a wider scale, most Western misconceptions
about Greece are due’. Its memories are of medieval Constantinople, not
ancient Athens.
One of the most precious legacies of Byzantine scholarship is a copy of
Dioscorides’s encyclopaedia made in the 6th century at Constantinople for a
princess, Juliana Anicia, and known as the Codex Aniciae Julianae nunc
Vindobonensis or Vienna Codex (Codex Vindobonensis). This is illustrated by
479 paintings in colour on parchment. The first portrays Dioscorides himself
receiving from the nymph of discovery Euresis the gift of a mandrake root.
This very interesting picture could appropriately become the subject of a whole
lecture. From the root of the mandrake (Mandragora) hangs a dead dog.
Connected with the mandrake there are many legends or, in the 1597 words of
John Gerard, ‘many ridiculous tales brought up of this plant, whether of olde
wives or some runnagate surgeons or physickmongers, I know not * * * all which
dreames and old wives tales, you shall from hencefoorth cast out of your books
and memories, knowing this that they are all and every part of them false and
most untrue’. They arose not only because of the genuine medicinal value of
the mandrake root and the supposed aphrodisiacal properties of its fruits but
also because the root, when forked and then having some resemblance to the
human form, could have some human reactions attributed to it. If you were
comfortably asleep in the nude and covered with sand and were then suddenly
and rudely dragged up by the hair or neck, you would certainly scream. Thus,
when the mandrake was pulled out of the soil, it was reputed to scream so
terrifyingly as to strike dead or madden the person uprooting it. Obviously this
would have been a terribly embarrassing experience for a shy she-mandrake (cf.
Fig. 1). This ancient belief concerning ‘shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the
earth, That living mortals hearing them run mad’, survived to Shakespeare’s
time. The asserted procedure was accordingly to starve a dog, tie a rope round
its neck and the other end t o the top of the plant, at midnight, and put some
meat out of the dog’s reach. The hungry dog pulled and pulled, up came the
screaming mandrake, the dog fell dead, and the herb-gatherer had for sale a fine
fat root chock-full of pain-killing and soporific solanaceous alkaloids, hyoscyamine, hyoscine, atropine and cuscohygrine (cf. Staub, 1962; Jackson & Berry,
1973). The uprooting of the mandrake with the suicidal aid of a dog is
portrayed or indicated in many ancient manuscripts (cf. Thompson, 1934;
Vandewiele, 1962, and Fig. 2) and the literature relating t o it fills many pages
(6.Randolph, 1905; Bouquet, 1936: Papamichael, 1975).
Dioscorides distinguished two kinds of mandrake, probably corresponding to
the two closely related species Mandragora officinarum L. (M. vernalis Bertol.),
the Italian mandragora maschia, and M . autumnalis Bertol., the Italian
mandragora femmina, designated metaphorically as male and female in
accordance with the time-honoured custom of thus naming two related species.
Medieval herbalists applied these names more literally, calling the root male or
female according t o its form and apparently using a knife t o make the
resemblance more realistic! They would have undoubtedly classed as male the
root of M . autumnalis depicted by Ferdinand Bauer as Atropa mandragora
(Plate 1) in the Flora Graeca 3: t.232 (1819).
This widely believed myth about the shrieking mandrake is so far-fetched
FLORA GR A ECA
289
Figure 1. Male and female mandrakes as protrayed in the Ortus Scmitatis, the lower pair from the 1497
Strasbourg edition, and the upper pair from the 1 5 11 Venice edition.
2 90
W. T. STEARN
NOMEN HERBAF MANDRAGORA
Figure 2. Mandrake with dog as portrayed in Herbarium Apulei Plaronici (Rome 1481).
that there must be good reason for its propagation and persistence. The
Ancient Greeks were sensible people. Those who dug up mandrake roots knew
as well as John Gerard did that it was untrue but, unlike him, they had a
commercial interest in making other people believe it. Obviously a plant
obtained at such risk merited a high price. The possibility of danger also
preserved the stock of mandrake plants from excessive exploitation such as
later destroyed the Silphion of Cirenaica (cf. Moldenke 8c Moldenke, 1951).
There is a lesson here for modern Greeks who should seek to preserve the
tourist attraction of their anemones, tulips etc. by not uprooting them
excessively in easily reached places.
The illustrations in the Vienna Codex vary greatly in quality and have
obviously come from different sources, at least three being detectable. Some
are quite naturalistic, such as these of Silene, Physalis, Sonchus, Consolida,
Cerinthe, h u l a , Rubus, Geranium etc. The making of such illustrations direct
from the plants themselves in A.D. 500 is out of keeping with Byzantine art of
this period. They must have originated at a much earlier period and may well
have been derived from the lost herbal of Crataevus in the 1st century B.C.
They thus provide visual evidence as to the ancient traditional application of
many Greek plant names now established in modern botanical nomenclature.
The plants figured are mostly common Mediterranean species. Emmanuel
FLORA GRAECA
29 1
(1912), Buberl(l937), Killermann (195 5 ) and Gerstinger (1970) have provided
scientific names for the plants of the Vienna Codex but their identifications
and nomenclature require revision in the light of more recent work on the
floras of the Balkan Peninsula and Asia Minor. The Codex was made available
to scholars in 1906 by the publication of a black-and-white photographic
facsimile in two massive volumes very awkward indeed t o handle; here, as
stated in a review of a recent book on the heralds of England, ‘heavy paper,
wide margins and large type have produced a handsome victory of weight over
convenience’. Small but very useful outline copies of its figures are given in
Gunther’s edition (1934, reprinted 1959) of a translation into English made
between 1652 and 1659 by John Goodyer. More recently (1966-1970) a
superb facsimile in colour made from the carefully renovated Codex (cf.
Waechter, 1963) has been published in Graz with a commentary by Gerstinger.
The text in the Codex accompanying the illustrations reflects its chequered
history. The Greek text of Dioscorides in Greek majuscules has been
supplemented by names (cf. Stadler, 1898, 1900; Vaczy, 1968-72) derived
from a later work, by an additional text in Greek minuscules and by glosses in
Arabic. The book itself came into Frankish hands at the sack of Constantinople
in 1204 by the Crusaders, but later passed into the keeping of a monastery and
was well known to learned travellers before the fall of Constantinople to the
Turks in 1453. A copy made before 1453 is in the British Museum (Natural
History) and contains at least one illustration missing from the Vienna Codex.
After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Codex disappeared but luckily
it fell into good Jewish hands. In 1562 the Ambassador of the Holy Roman
Empire, Augier Ghiselain de Busbecq (1521-1592)*, found it in the possession
of a son of a Jewish physician at Constantinople, hence the glosses in Arabic
which Wessely (1905) has listed. Busbecq had Willem Quakelbeen (1527-1561)
as his companion and physician and they noted that it might contain some
fragments of Crataevus. Realizing the importance of the Codex, Busbecq
petitioned the Emperor to buy it; for the price, one hundred ducats, frightened
him, ‘a sum which would suit the Emperor’s purse better than mine. I shall not
cease to urge the Emperor to ransom so noble an author from such slavery. The
manuscript, owing to its age; is a bad state, being externally so worm-eaten that
scarcely anyone if he saw it lying in the road would bother to pick it up’. The
Codex was purchased later and taken to Vienna, where it still is, a treasure of
the Austrian National Library.
To understand the significance of the transfer of this Dioscorides Codex
from Constantinople to Vienna, one must turn away from Greece to central
and western Europe in the 16th century, where modern botany originated.
Here, as part of the intellectual ferment associated with a return t o direct
observation of nature, there was renewed interest in medicinal plants and,
consequently, in other plants, out of which grew modern medicine, modern
pharmacy and modern botany. The text of Dioscorides was relatively well
known, as Latin translations had been available for centuries, but it was
difficult to be sure about the identity of the plants to which he referred. A
‘Diplomatist, traveller, linguist, scholar, antiquarian, zoologist and botanist, Busbecq was one of
those manysided men who touch no department of human knowledge without making valuable contributions to it’ (Forster, 1927).
29 2
W. T. STEARN
practical motive lay behind the efforts of botanical scholars and medical men
to interpret his encyclopaedia of materia medica. I t was t o make available to
modern medicine the herb-lore of Ancient Greece which had been lost or
misinterpreted during the Middle Ages. As herbalists north of the Alps had few
or no ideas then about the geographical differentiation of plants, they tried to
make the plants of central and western Europe fit a text based on plants of
Greece and Asia Minor. This did not work satisfactorily but it led t o the
discovery and recording of many northern plants that had never been properly
recorded and illustrated before.
As already mentioned, the illustrations of the Codex provided a means of
ascertaining the traditional application of the Ancient Greek plant names and
this remains their primary importance, but to consult the Codex an enquirer
had to go to Vienna. One who did this was John Sibthorp. His visit to Vienna
in 1784 to study the Codex led to the Flora Graeca, that masterpiece of
botanical illustration.
At this point it may be useful to say a little about the botanical significance
of the 16th century and about the distinction between flower-painting and
botanical illustration. A primary need of 16th-century medical men and
herbalists was the provision of illustrations good enough to enable plants to be
recognized. The corrupted and stylized medieval Pseudo-Apuleius drawings
printed about 1481 in the Herbarium Apttleii Platortici were useless for this
purpose. The year 1542, which can be taken as the end of the Middle Ages in
science, saw the publication of the first of the great new printed herbals,
Leonhart Fuchs’s De Historia Stirpium, with magnificent newly drawn
woodcut illustrations taken from nature. The aim of these was educational, to
portray accurately the characters of plants in order to serve medicine, of which
botany was then a part, by faithful recording. The aim of flower-painting, on
the other hand, is t o produce an aesthetic effect of using flowers as ingredients
in a pleasing composition. Both aims are legitimate.
The supreme master of plant portrayal is one who, without sacrifice of
botanical detail and accuracy, can nevertheless produce a picture which is also
aesthetically satisfying. Such a master was Ferdinand Bauer who illustrated the
Flora Grueca and who died 150 years ago. He would nevertheless have had no
opportunity to develop his supreme talent in the service of Greek botany, and
later of Australian botany, but for the chain of events outlined above. The
compilation of Dioscorides’s original text in the 1st century A.D., the creation
of the Vienna Codex in the 6th century, its acquisition in the 16th century
through appreciation of Dioscorides, its removal and safe deposit in Vienna and
its availability in that city during the 18th century, when Ferdinand Bauer was
a young artist working there, these together make a succession without which
Bauer’s career would not have become entwined with that of an Oxford
professor anxious t o revive the herb-lore of Ancient Greece as recorded by
Dioscorides, and without which Bauer would probably not have sailed with
Robert Brown on Flinders’s voyage t o Australia in 1801.
John Sibthorp (1758-1796) was born only two years before Ferdinand Bauer
(1760-1826). He belonged to a wealthy English land-owning family and was
thus a member of possibly the most accomplished and cultured aristocracy that
the world has ever known, the English landed gentry of the 18th century. Men
of this class were educated in the classics of Ancient Greece and Rome; some of
FLORA C RAECA
29 3
them contributed much t o modern Greece, notably Sibthorp, Lord Byron,
Lord Guilford and Admiral Codrington. John Sibthorp’s father was Humphrey
Sibthorp (1713-1797), professor of botany at Oxford from 1747 t o 1783, a
period of 36 years during which he is said to have delivered only one lecture:
Linnaeus named the genus Sibthorpia in his honour. Sibthorpia ertropaea is a
little creeping plant with flowers so small as hardly t o be noticeable,
corresponding therefore, in a sense, t o the achievements of Humphrey
Sibthorp. Academically, matters were not much better in Cambridge. Those
were the days in which professors enjoyed real unrestrained academic freedom!
Luckily, in Edinburgh, thanks t o the education of so many of its professors at
the Dutch university of Leiden, medicine and botany were well taught and
much studied there, as also in Montpellier.
John Sibthorp studied at the universities of Oxford, Edinburgh and
Montpellier. He became thoroughly versed in the methods and classification of
Linnaeus and died before they had been superseded. This explains why the
Flora Graeca is arranged according to the Linnaean ‘Sexual System’ which had
been abandoned elsewhere by the time that publication of the Flora Graeca
was completed. Sibthorp himself realized that t o identify correctly the plants
of Dioscorides, one had to go to the region where Dioscorides had gathered
them, i.e. t o Greece, Asia Minor and Cyprus. Sibthorp decided t o obtain this
first-hand acquaintance with them.
Travel in the east Mediterranean region was then hazardous. There were few
roads, many brigands, few comforts, much piracy and much risk of disease.
Sibthorp set himself a heroic task. Having been appointed professor of botany
at Oxford in March 1784, he had no scruples about leaving his department for a
few years abroad; and he left England later in the year, going first to Vienna t o
study the Dioscorides Codex, more especially the illustrations. He was the first
Englishman on record to have done so and no Englishman, t o the best of my
knowledge, handled it again until I went to Vienna in 1935 to determine the
original application of some Dioscoridean names.
There, in Vienna, Sibthorp met the Austrian artist Ferdinand Bauer, aged 24.
He engaged Bauer as ‘my painter’ and the two set off on their travels together
in 1785. They travelled in Sibthorp’s coach through Italy to Naples, then
voyaged t o Crete and Cyprus. The genial John Hawkins joined them and,
despite sailing risks in the Aegean region, they chartered a small sailing boat
with four rowers and cruised from island to island of the archipelago, landing
and collecting on this cruise, together with a voyage from Cyprus to Athens, on
the islands of Amorgos, Euboea (Ewia), Cimolus (Kimolos), Melos (Milos),
Naxos, Paros, Patmos, Rhodes, Samos and Serifos. They also visited, among
other places, Athens, then little more than a large village, together with the
nearby Hymettus (Imitos) mountain, Corinth, Mount Helicon (Elikon), Mount
Parnassos, Delphi, Patras, Mount Athos, Thessaloniki, Constantinople (Istanbul), Smyrna (Izmir), Bursa and the Bithynian Olyrnpus. Near Livadia in 1787
Sibthorp met a shepherd boy who ‘surprised me not a little by his
nomenclature. I traced the names of Dioscorides and Theophrastus corrupted
indeed somewhat by the pronunciation and by the long series aiznoruni which
had elapsed since the time of these philosophers, but many of them were
unmutilated and faithfully represented in some degree the oral traditions of the
country’ (cf. Bruce, 1970). The material used for the later Flora Graeca thus
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W. T. STEARN
came from a wide area; owing to the confusion of Sibthorp’s notes and his
failure to annotate his specimens, the localities given in the Flora Graeca may
not be correct. In December 1787 they returned to England, laden with notes,
specimens and Bauer’s drawings. Sibthorp then set Bauer the task of making
finished drawings of the plants and took up the duties of his professorship with
zeal surprising for the period. In 1794 Sibthorp revisited Greece and Asia
Minor, but without Bauer who had found him too unpleasant and inconsiderate
a master on the first journey.
Unfortunately Sibthorp, who had been weakened by malaria on his first
journey, contracted tuberculosis on his second. He returned t o England in 1795
and died at Bath in 1796, like Byron a sacrifice through disease to Greece. Like
Byron, moreover, he left behind an enduring memorial of service to Greece for
which he too deserves gratitude. The monument to Sibthorp in Bath Abbey
was carved by the celebrated sculptor John Flaxman. His more enduring
monument is, nevertheless, the Flora Graeca, which owes its permanent value
to the artist Ferdinand Bauer.
Ferdinand Bauer ’s origin and circumstances were very different from those
of Sibthorp. His father, a religious painter at Feldsberg in Lower Austria, died
in 1761, leaving three boys born between 1756 and 1760. He bequeathed
nothing t o these children but inborn artistic talent. Luckily a very remarkable
local priest, Norbert Boccius, abbot, doctor, and connoisseur of art and natural
history, later took care of the three orphans and encouraged them in botanical
drawing. About 1780 they moved to Vienna and were employed by the Dutch
botanist Nikolaus von Jacquin. Under him they learned the essentials of
scientific draughtsmanship, since Jacquin himself was a skilled artist as well as
an eminent botanist. He recognized the outstanding talent of the brothers
Franz and Ferdinand, and from him they became familiar with the diversity of
plants; their eyes were trained to minute observation and they learned to
appreciate the need t o understand the objects portrayed; they established their
superb techniques. It was obviously Jacquin who brought Ferdinand Bauer to
Sibthorp’s notice.
On their travels Bauer worked fantastically hard. He made nearly 1000
coloured illustrations of plants which later formed the basis of the Flora
Graeca, plus 363 of birds and other animals, and 1 3 1 landscapes (Plate 2).
After returning to Oxford, Sibthorp started work on his notes while Bauer
completed drawings and began to engrave them for reproduction. When
Sibthorp died in 1796, unmarried, he bequeathed his estate to the University of
Oxford, directing that all the profits and rents from it should be applied t o
‘publication of a work for which I have collected the material, t o be entitled
Flora Grueca and to consist of ten folio volumes, each volume t o consist of 100
plates, also a small octavo edition without plates entitled Prodromus Florae
Graecae’ (cf. Appendix).
Sibthorp chose his executors wisely. One was John Hawkins (1758-1841),
also a member of the cultured English landed gentry. Like Sibthorp, Hawkins
was a keen botanist and classical scholar, also a mineralogist and metallurgist,
with a Cornishman’s interest in mining which he had studied in Germany. He is
known t o have travelled in Germany, Hungary, Italy, Crete and the islands and
mainland of Greece and Turkey. He was a good linguist who knew both ancient
and modern Greek. For Sibthorp he was a steady, well-informed, tolerant and
FLORA G R AECA
295
genial travelling companion, while Bauer obviously liked him better than the
autocratic milord Sibthorp, whose relation with Bauer was too evidently that
of master and servant. Hawkins proved to be a conscientious and faithful
executor, as did Thomas Platt, whose own copy of the Flora Gruecu, together
with the documents relating to costs etc., were bought by the Greek diplomat
Joannes Gennadius for E l 0 0 in 1883 but sold by him in 1895 and later
acquired by George Claridge Druce. These now belong to the University of
Oxford.
The first task of the executors was t o find someone to write the text. They
appointed James Edward Smith (1759-1828), a friend of Sibthorp and
undoubtedly the most industrious British botanist of the period, agreeing to
pay him an annual salary of E l 50 for 1 1 years. They put all Sibthorp’s notes,
specimens, journals and Bauer’s drawings at his disposal. The task of reducing
this material t o order was difficult, time-absorbing, and, for the methodical
Smith, often exasperating. Sibthorp’s handwriting was almost illegible and his
notes confused and lacking in essential information for correlating the notes
with the specimens. As Hawkins wrote to Smith in 1800, ‘it is certainly a pity
that Dr Sibthorp did not mark all his specimens, but he trusted t o his memory
and dreamed not of dying’. Smith began work in 1799 and the first volume
appeared in November 1806. It was a grand publication. The illustrations of the
plants were engraved by the Sowerby family and faithfully hand-coloured. For
this and for each subsequent volume Bauer provided a delightful title-page with
the wording encircled by a wreath of flowers depicted in the volume and a
landscape below this.
Smith died in 1828, by which time volumes 1-6 had been published, and the
executors then had to find a successor. They chose John Lindley (1799-1865),
a botanist even more industrious than Smith, being at the same time professor
of botany, editor of a horticultural journal, author of large excellently written
text-books, secretary of the Horticultural Society and the world’s leading
expert on orchids. If you want a job done, choose a busy man t o d o it! In spite
of his other preoccupations and of difficulties with the Sowerby family over
the engraving and colouring of the plates, Lindley completed the Flora Graecu,
the last volume (vol. 10) appearing in November 1840 (see Appendix).
The plan had originally been t o print as many copies as had been ordered in
advance by subscribers. These had originally been 30 but only 25 sets were
completed. By December 1840 the executors had spent E15,572 and 6
shillings. The subscription price of each set was E239 and 8 shillings, though
each had cost E620 t o produce, the deficit being met from Sibthorp’s estate.
There remained at the end many unsewn extra pages of plates and text. An
enterprising bookseller and publisher, Henry Bohn, bought these from the
University of Oxford, reprinted missing pages and plates, where necessary to fill
gaps, and had additional plates coloured, thus permitting 40 more sets to be
made up. He sold these for the extremely low price of E63, though this was still
too high for most botanists; the watermarks ‘1845’ or ‘1847’ occur on many
plates of Bohn’s issue. A copy of this second and slightly inferior issue which
belonged to Arpad Plesch was sold for E22,000 at a Sotheby sale by auction in
1976. The Linnean Society may be justifiably proud of possessing a copy of
the original issue.
Only 65 copies of the complete work have thus existed, and only two men
296
W. T. STEARN
who saw the beginning lived to see the end. These were Sibthorp’s executors,
Hawkins and Platt. For over 40 years they faithfully performed the task which
Sibthorp had bequeathed them, supervising production, paying bills, overcoming legal difficulties etc., and to them no less than to Sibthorp, Smith,
Bauer and Lindley we owe its completion. A year after that, Hawkins died.
Thus a winding path of learning over two thousand years led from the works
of Theophrastus and Dioscorides to those of Sibthorp, Smith and Lindley.
Such a chronicle of events at times frailly linked prompts reflection on the role
of chance in the development of science. For the above sequence the
astonishing survival of the Vienna Codex of Dioscorides was crucial. In 1204
the Frankish warriors of the Fourth Crusade looted Constantinople but spared
this book. It is astonishing that in 1453 it again escaped, to quote Gibbon, ‘the
loss of the Byzantine libraries, which were destroyed or scattered in the general
confusion: one hundred and twenty thousand volumes are said t o have
disappeared: ten volumes might be purchased for a single ducat; and the same
ignominious price, too high perhaps for a shelf of theology, included the whole
works of Aristotle and Homer’. Its survival then was presumably a matter of
chance, as was Busbecq’s purchase of it later. But for these happenings,
Sibthorp would probably never have met Ferdinand Bauer and there would
have been no superb Flora Graeca. The development of science is, however, a
collective activity dependent upon the predilections and resources of a given
time and can be only temporarily retarded or advanced by the acts of an
individual emphasizing one course rather than another. Thus had Sibthorp
never visited Greece, the plants of Greece would nevertheless have been
investigated later by others, though without such a magnificent foundation.
Sibthorp’s Dioscoridean quest was an anachronism from the medical standpoint, but a fortunate one in that he made it during the golden century of great
superbly illustrated flower books, the period of the fine folios of Jacquin,
Oeder and Curtis, the Flora Austriaca, the Flora Danica and the Flora
Londinensis, and so he thought it natural to publish the results of his travels,
the Flora Grueca, in the same grand style. Greek botany, of course, did not end
with the Flora Graeca but had rather its modern beginning. During the 400
years that Greece endured Turkish domination and for most of its first century
of independence, the study of Greek plants was mainly in the hands of
dedicated Italians, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans and Swiss. Progress in
Greece itself after independence has been spasmodic since no major Greek
national centre devoted to taxonomic study of plants has existed, despite the
efforts of Theodor von Heldreich (1822-1902) to provide one in Athens. The
late Dr Constantine Goulimis (1886-1963), for example, had to build up from
scratch a private herbarium and library for his own use. I t is accordingly
heartening that, through the inspiration of Goulimis, Greece now possesses
such a potential centre in the Goulandris Natural History Museum at Kifissia
(ancient Cephisia) on the outskirts of Athens; the museum’s herbarium is open
to all who appreciate and study the floral wealth of Greece which the Flora
Graeca of Sibthorp, Smith, Bauer and Lindley first revealed to the world.
SOME SOURCES O F FURTHER INFORMATION
BOUQUET, J ., 1936.Figures de la Mandragore. Plante dimoniaque. Paris.
BRUCE, M. R., 1970. John Sibthorp. Taxon, 19: 353-62.
FLORA GRAECA
297
BUBERL.. P... 1937. Die byzantinischen Handschriften. 1. Der Wiener Dioskurides und die Wiener Genesis.
Vienna.
EMMANUEL, E., 1912. Etude comparative sur les plantes dessinkes dans le Codex Constantinopolitanus
d e Dioscoride. Schweizerische Wochenshrift fur Chemie u. Pharmazie, 61: 45-50, 64-72.
FORSTER. E. S. (Transl.) 1927. The Turkish letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, lmperial Ambassador
at Constantinople 1554-1562. Oxford.
GERSTINGER, H., 1970. Dioscurides Codex Vindobonensis Med. Gr. 1. der Osterreichischen
Nationalbibliothek. Kommentarband zu der Facsimileausgabe. Graz.
GUNTHER, R. T. (Ed.), 1934. The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides illustrated b y a Byzantine A.D. 512.
englished b y John Goodyer A.D. 1655. Oxford.
GREUTER, W., 1975. Floristic studies in Greece. In S. M. Walters (Ed.), European floristic and
taxonomic studies: 18-37.
JACKSON, B. P. & BERRY, M. I. 1973. liydroxytropane tiglates in the roots of Mandragora species.
Phytochemistry, 12: 1 116-7.
KARABACEK, J . von (Ed.), 1906. Diosrurides. Codex Aniciae Iulianae Picturis illustratus nunc
Vindobonensis Med. Gr. I photypice editus. 2 vols. Leiden.
KILLERMANN. S., 1955. Die in den illuminierten Dioskurides-tlandschriften dargestellten Pflanzen.
Denkschriften der Regensburgischen botanischen Gesellschaft. 24: 3-64.
MOLDENKE. H. N. & MOLDENKE. A. L., 1951. T h e mysterious Silphium. Garden Journal of the N e w
York Botanical Garden, I : 140-2.
PAPAMICtIAEL, M., 1975. Birth and plant symbolism. Symbolic and magical uses of plants in
connection with birth in modern Greece. Athens.
RANDOLPH, C. B., 1905. The Mandragora of the Ancients in folk-lore and medicine. Proceedings of the
American Academy. 40: 487-537.
RIDDLE, J. M,, 1971. Dioscorides. In C. C. Gillispie (Ed.). Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 4:
119-23.
SINGER, C., 1927. The herbal in antiquity. Journal of Hellenic Studies. 47: 1-52.
STADLER, H., 1898. Lateinische Pflanzennamen im Dioskorides. Arch. Latein. Lexikogr., 10: 85-1 15.
STADLER, H.,1900. Pflanzennamen im Dioskorides. Arch. Latein. Lexikogr.. 11; 105-14.
STANNARD, J., 1966. Dioscorides and Renaissance materia medica. Anolecta Med. Hist. (Proc. Sympos.
lnt. Acad. Hist. Med., Easel, 1964), 1-2 1.
STAUB, H. 1962. u b e r die chemischen Bestandteile der Mandragorawurzel. Die Alkaloide. Helwetica
Chimica Acta, 45: 2297-2305.
STEARN, W. T., 1954. Codex Aniciae Julianae: The earliest illustrated herbal. Graphis. 1 O(S4): 322-9.
STEARN, W. T., 1960. Franz and Ferdinand Bauer, masters of botanical illustration. Endeavour. 19:
27-35.
STEARN, W. T., 1967. Sibthorp, Smith, the ‘Flora Graeca’ and the ‘Florae Graecae Prodromus’. Taxon,
16: 168-78.
STEARN, W. T., 1975. History of the British contribution to the study of the European flora. In S. M.
Walters (Ed.), European floristic and taxonomic studies: 1-17.
STEARN. W. T.. 1976. The earliest European acquaintance with tropical vegetation. Gardens’ Bulletin
Singapore. 29: 13-18.
THOMPSON, C . J .S., 1934. The mysticMandrake. London.
VACZY, C., 1968-72. Nomenclatura dacica a plantelor la Dioscorides si Pseudo-Apuleius. Acta Musei
Napocensis (Cluj). 5: 59-74 (1968), 6: , 1 5 2 9 (1969), 8: 109-33 (1971), 9: 7-17 (1972).
VANDEWIELE. L. J.. 1962. Mandragora ook in d e Nederlanden. Mededelingen wan de Koninklijke
Vlaamsche Academie van Belgie, Klasse der Wetenschappen, 24, no. 3.
WAECHTER, O., 1963. The ‘Vienna Dioskurides’and its restoration. Libri, 13: 107-11.
WELLMANN, M., 1889. Sextius Niger. Eine Quellenuntersuchung zu Dioscorides. Hermes, 24: 520-69.
WELLMANN, M. 1898. Das alteste K r h t e r b u c h der Griechen. Festgabc fur Franz Susemihl: 1-31.
WELLMANN, M. 1898. Die Pflanzennamen des Dioskurides. Hermes. 33: 360-422.
WESSELY, C., 1905. De herbarum nominibus graecis in Dioscoridis codice Constantinopolitano
Vindobonensi arabicis litteris expressis. Acres X l V Congris lnternat. Oriental. Alger, sect. 6: 1-18.
APPENDIX
k’lorae Craecae Prodromus; sive Plantarum omnium Enumeratio, quas in
Provinciis aut Insulis Graeciae invenit Johannes Sibthorp, M.D.Characteres et
Synonyma omnium cum Amotationibus elaboravit Jacobus Edvardtts Smith,
M.D. 2 vols, octavo; London.
W. T. STEARN
298
Publication was as follows:
Vol. 1
Vol.
2
part
part
part
part
1, pp. i-xvi
2
1
2
1-218
219-442
1-210
211-422
publ.
publ.
publ.
publ.
1806
1809
1813
1816
(prob. Nov.)
(prob. Nov.)
Flora Graeca: sive Plantarum rariorum Historia, yuas in Provinciis aut Insiilis
Graeciae legit, investigavit, et depingi curavit Johannes Sibthorp, M.D. His illic
etiam insertae sunt paiiculae Species quas Vir idem clarissimw. Graeciam versus
navigans, in Itinere, praesertim apud Italiam et Siciliam, invenerit. [ Vols 1-7
Characteres omnium, Descriptiones et Synonyma, elaboravit Jacobus Edvardiis
Smith, M.D. [Vols 8-10]Cliaracteres omnium. Descriptiones et Synonyma,
elaboravit Johannes Lindley. Ph.D. 10 vols, folio; London.
Publication was as follows:
fasc.
fasc.
2 fasc.
fasc.
3 fasc.
fasc.
4 fasc.
fasc.
5 fasc.
fasc.
6 fasc.
fasc.
7 fasc.
fasc.
8 fasc.
fasc.
9 fasc.
fasc.
10 fasc.
fasc.
Vol. 1
Vol.
Vol.
VOl.
Vol.
Vol.
VOl.
Vol.
Vol.
Vol.
1 pp. [il-viii,
2
1
2
1
2
1
2
1
2
1
2
1
2
1
2
1
2
1
2 li-iiil,
1-36,
37-82,
1-40,
41-83,
1-46,
47-93,
1-44,
45-88,
1-38,
39-81,
1-42,
43-80,
1-46.
47-88,
1-36,
37-75.
1-38,
39-77,
1-40,
41 - 106.
PIS 1-50
PIS 51-100
PIS 101-150
PIS 151-200
PIS 201-250
PIS 251-300
PIS 301-350
PIS 351-400
PIS 401-450
PIS 451-500
PIS 501-550
PIS 551-600
PIS 601-650
PIS 651-700
PIS 701-750
PIS 751-800
PIS 801-850
PIS 851-900
PIS 901-950
PIS 951-966
publ.
publ.
publ.
publ.
publ.
publ.
publ.
publ.
publ.
publ.
publ.
publ.
publ.
publ.
publ.
publ.
publ.
publ.
publ.
publ.
1806
1808
1813
1816
1819
1821
1823
1824
1825
1825
1827
1827
1831
1832
1833
1835
1837
1839
1840
1840
(prob. Nov.)
(prob. May)
(before Oct.)
(June)
(after Aug.)
(prob. July)
(prob. May or June)
(prob. May)
(Feb.)
(prob. July)
(Nov.)
The engraved coloured frontispiece and the title-page were issued in the first
part of each volume.
EXPLANATION O F PLATES
PLATE 1
Mandragora autumnalis Bertol. portrayed by Ferdinand Bauer in Flora Graeca, 3:
f.
232
( 1819).
PLATE 2
Athens in 1785 portrayed by Ferdinand Bauer; the surrounding area in which Mandragora then grew is
now wholly covered by buildings. (Department of Botany, Oxford, by courtesy of the Librarian.)
Plate 1
lliolo,qicnl Jorrrncrl qf
tlir
I.innerrn Society, 8 ( I 976)
Plate 2