Seven Years in Greece – Carl Fraas (1810–1875) and His Identifications of Dioscuridean Plant Names

Abstract

Between 1835 and 1842 the Bavarian Botanist Carl Fraas lived in Athens and was appointed professor of botany at the newly founded university. He used this time for botanical excursions, which also had the pur- pose of identifying ancient plant names. The results of his research were published as Synopsis plantarum florae classicae (München 1845) – a work that Sir Arthur Hort dismissed as “ambitious but uncritical”. Nevertheless, some of Fraas’ suggestions have prevailed over the identifications of John Sibthorp (1758–1796) and Kurt Sprengel (1766–1833) and have found their way, among others, into Hort’s Theophrastus Loeb edition (1926) and the Liddell-Scott-Jones Lexicon. In my paper I will analyze some of his merits and de- merits and place him in the ongoing debate on Dioscuridean plant names.