Aristotle's successor writes the oldest surviving Greek account of medicinal plants, and passes on what the root-cutters told him: draw three circles around a mandrake with a sword, and cut it facing west.
Press this book. Your gift commissions the Great Library’s word-by-word interlinear Enquiry into Plants, and the day it is made, it is free for everyone, forever. You are not buying a copy; you are paying for it to exist.
Give what you like. A few dollars helps, or fund the whole of Book 9: drugs and the root-cutters and become its Founder. Every contribution presses it closer to real.
This is how every Great Library book reads, word beneath word. Enquiry into Plants’s own first lines appear here the day its pilot is pressed.
Theophrastus took over Aristotle's school in Athens and wrote the first great botany. Its ninth and last book turns from how plants grow to what people get from them: frankincense, myrrh and the other saps and resins, roots that heal and roots that kill, and drugs that drive people mad. He reports the professional root-cutters' rules for digging, and says plainly which ones he thinks are nonsense. The press starts with Book 9. Nothing is readable here yet; support it and it will be.
Theophrastus was born on Lesbos around 371 BC, studied with Aristotle, and ran the Lyceum for some thirty-five years after Aristotle left Athens. He wrote the Enquiry into Plants there around 300 BC. He is often called the father of botany.
Book 9 gives a dosing chart for 'mad' nightshade: one drachm of the root makes a man playful and pleased with himself, twice that brings delusions, three times leaves him mad for good, and four times kills. Theophrastus also tells how Thrasyas of Mantinea mixed hemlock with poppy juice for a quick and painless death.
Making an interlinear Enquiry into Plants is real work: freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, Book 9: drugs and the root-cutters gets made, and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
This isn’t a purchase. It’s a commission. You’re not buying a copy; you’re paying for the thing to exist, and putting your name (if you like) on the first true Enquiry into Plants that anyone can read for free.
Leave your email and we’ll write to you the day the Enquiry into Plants opens. No other mail, ever.
Read our finished collection · the library · The Great Library Project
Reading is always free. Patrons and founders are the ones who keep it that way.