until his attempt to obtain gold had ended in failure. Thus it is possible that the story may have some truth in it.
Pliny461 relates a somewhat analogous story about an attempt to obtain gold from orpiment, the golden-yellow, native sulfide of arsenic. This is said to have been ordered by the Emperor Caligula. According to Pliny, a small quantity of gold was actually obtained in this experiment, but the amount was so small that die attempt was considered a failure. Probably many experiments of this sort were tried by the ancients.
59. This did not happen long ago, but about ninety years before Praxiboulos was archon at Athens. This interpretation agrees with that of Pliny, who paraphrases the passage as follows: Theophrastus LXXXX annis ante Praxibulitm Atheniensium magistratum—quod tempus exit in urbis nostrae CCCXLVIIII annum—tradtt inventum minium a Callia Atheniense . . . .462 (Theophrastus states that ninety years before Praxibulus was archon of the Athenians—a date that corresponds to the 349di year of our City—cinnabar was discovered by Callias the Athenian . . . .) Thorndike463 explained the passage in quite a different way, for he believed that the preposition ei? in Theophrastus meant "back to" rather than "prior to," and therefore he placed the time of the discovery in the archonship of Praxiboulos. In his opinion this was also the interpretation of Hill, though Hill's translation of the passage is actually so ambiguous that it may be taken either way. It reads as follows, "And this is no old thing, the invention being only of about ninety years date; Praxibulus being at this time in the Government of Athens."46* Since Praxiboulos is known to have been archon in 315-314 b.c, the interpretation of Thorndike implies that this treatise was composed in 225-224 b.c, sixty years after die death of Theophrastus. Thorndike therefore suggested that the treatise was written by someone else and ascribed to Theophrastus. However, the text does not
461 XXXIII, 79.
462 XXXIII, 113. See also Bailey, The Elder Pliny's Chapters on Chemical Subjects, Part I, pp. 118-21, 218.
463 C. Singer and Η. Ε. Sigerist, Essays on the History of Medicine Presented to Karl Sudhoff on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (Oxford, 1923), pp. 73-74.
464 Theophrastus's History of Stones, p. 139.
