Dioscorides

Pliny’s contemporaries Crateus and Dioscorides were herbalists and botanists who created an extensive pharmacology. Dioscorides traveled with Roman armies as a physician—he collected specimens of flora and fauna, and he published a complete materia medica. In some respects Dioscorides was the first real Roman pharmacist—he wrote a pharmacology that listed hundreds of floral remedies.

Russell M. Lawson, Science in the Ancient World: An Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004), 134.