Antonius Castor (First Century CE)
Castor was an eminent Roman botanist who was known for his huge botanical garden. Pliny refers to him several times, and he was one of Pliny’s sources on botanical matters. Pliny on Castor:
Nor is this a kind of knowledge by any means difficult to obtain; at all events, so far as regards myself, with the exception of a very few, it has been my good fortune to examine them all, aided by the scientific researches of Antonius Castor, who in our time enjoyed the highest reputation for an intimate acquaintance with this branch of knowledge.
I had the opportunity of visiting his garden, in which, though he had passed his hundredth year, he cultivated vast numbers of plants with the greatest care. Though he had reached this great age, he had never experienced any bodily ailment, and neither his memory nor his natural vigour had been the least impaired by the lapse of time.28
A nineteenth-century reconstruction of Strabo’s world map. (Edward Bunbury, 1883) The Mediterranean area and parts of the Middle East are quite recognisable today, but the distortion of the known world is very marked at its peripheries.29
Ptolemy’s world map, redrawn in the fifteenth century but based on a late thirteenth-century rediscovery of Ptolemy’s work. (British Library Harley MS 7182)