Zopyre (Egyptian doctor)

Zopyre , doctor, on whom he reached us only of the incomplete information, lived at the court of Ptolémée Aulètes , king of Egypt.

He imagined for this prince the known Antidote universal under the name of Ambrosia. Celse gave the composition (liv of it. 5, chap. 23); one finds it in Scribonius Largus , Compositiones medicœ , and in Galien, Antidotarium , delivers 2, C. 8. It is about the famous antidote of Mithridate; and one conjectures with much probability that Zopyre had communicated its receipt with king de Pont, the friend of Aulètes and its ally. Indeed, Galien ( Of antidot , liv. 2) speaks about a letter of Zopyre with Mithridate, in which the doctor proposes to the king to try the test of his antidote: it which advised to make swallow with a criminal a mortal poison and to give him at once its Ambrosia, ensuring that this composition would destroy certainly the effect of the poisonous substance.

Zopyre appears to have had the knowledge extended enough in botany. It is believed that it is of its name that the Clinopedion was initially called Zopyron (Pline, Hist. nat. , liv. 24, ch. 15; Dioscoride, liv. 3, chap. 108), that is to say that he had discovered this plant or that he had recognized the first of it the medical properties. One sees by various passages of the Collectanea of Oribase (liv. 14) that Zopyre had classified the drugs according to their mode of action; but it allots to certain substances properties which one is far from their granting today (see: Sprengel, History of medicine , transl. of Jourdan, T. 1, p. 489).

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