The Thêriaka and Alexipharmaka, by the Greek writer Nicander of Colophon (who lived in the second century BC) are about venoms and poisons, respectively. They are intriguing pieces, as they treat toxicology as a poetic matter and are written in Homeric verse. In spite of the many questions that this treatment of toxicology raises, the two poems have had an extraordinary fortuna in Western scholarship. A close examination of the poems and a comparison to the toxicological literature of antiquity help us better understand the two works. It appears that they might be better classified as literature rather than toxicological treatises, and that they might be somewhat related to the toxicological experiments of Attalus III, the king of Pergamum in the late second century, to whom Nicander dedicated another of his works.
Keywords
- Venoms;
- poisons;
- Pergamum;
- literature;
- ancient Greece
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