Theophrastus (370–285 BCE)
Born in the year of Hippocrates’ death, Theophrastus was a Greek scholar who was a student of Plato and Aristotle, and is often regarded as the ‘father of botany’ because of his pioneering work on plants.
Most of what we know about him comes from Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers, written sometime in the first half of the third century CE. Theophrastus is actually a nickname given to him by Aristotle, meaning ‘divine phrase’ on account of the skill and rich beauty of his conversation; his formal name was Tyrtamus. After Aristotle’s departure, he took over as head of the Lyceum in Athens and its ‘Peripatetic School’ of philosophers (a large school of some 2,000 students), staying in that position for thirty-six years. (It was called the Peripatetic School because of Aristotle’s charming habit of walking while he was giving lectures, presumably in groups smaller than 2,000.) The remains of the Lyceum were discovered as recently as 1996 in a park near the modern Hellenic Parliament building, though it was originally outside of Athens’ city wall, and is now open to the public.Aristotle and Theophrastus were firstly both students of Plato, Aristotle being some fifteen years older – not a huge age difference – and they appear to have been close friends. When Aristotle died, he bequeathed his books and his garden in the grounds of the Lyceum to his old friend. Like his mentor, Theophrastus was a prolific writer – Diogenes credited him with 227 works, most of which have sadly been lost or are only fragmentary. His work covered a very wide variety of subjects – politics, philosophy, botany, mathematics, rhetoric, law, astronomy, logic, geology, history, physics – in other words he was a true polymath. His greatest contributions, however, were in natural history, and the two main botanical works, which are almost complete, are the nine books of Enquiry into Plants and the six books of On the Causes of Plants.
Apart from being friends with Aristotle and Plato, Theophrastus also lived in the same era as Philip of Macedon and his son, Alexander the Great. Aristotle was appointed tutor to Alexander in 343 BCE and so would have been known to Theophrastus. The significance of these relationships is that when Alexander marched on the East, he took with him trained observers and the results were available to Aristotle and Theophrastus.16 So, the exotic spices later described by Theophrastus would have been either brought back to Greece, or their descriptions brought back, to be included in his botanical treatises.
As regards the main botanical works, he was the first to attempt a classification of plants, his main groups being trees, shrubs, under-shrubs and herbs. He described about 500 species. That may not sound like many given that there are now estimated to be over 390,000 species known globally, but at that period in history it was a huge undertaking. It also stood the test of time: it was to be another 1,800 years before any significant botanical advances were made. He described many important spices: alexanders, asafoetida, cardamom, cassia, cinnamon, coriander, cumin, dill, fenugreek, frankincense, galingale, ginger grass, juniper, liquorice, mustard, parsley, pepper, saffron, sesame, silphium, spikenard, sumac and tamarind. Of these, several were from the tropical East (cardamom, cassia, cinnamon, galingale, pepper and spikenard) and must have been collected or traded by Alexander’s armies or reached Greece via ancient overland trade routes. The descriptions of cinnamon and cassia, for example, are clearly second-hand, with ‘various accounts’ given of their occurrence, at least one of which he acknowledged as implausible.17
Theophrastus lived a long and productive life, finally dying around the age of 85. He is purported to have lamented, ‘We die just when we are beginning to live.’18