The Kyranides: a Greek encyclopaedia of natural virtues

Among the technical Hermetic texts, one of the most unusual is a Greek compilation known as the Kyranides. It presents itself as a repertory of the hidden virtues of plants, stones, birds and fish, arranged according to the letters of the alphabet. For each letter the text brings together a plant, a bird, a stone and a fish whose Greek name begins with that letter, and describes the properties tradition attributed to them.

A book attributed to a king and a sage

The first book, called the Kyranis, opens with a prologue declaring it the fruit of the union of two works: one attributed to Kyranos, presented as king of Persia, and the other to Harpocration of Alexandria, who is said to have written it for his daughter. In some versions the text is also linked to the name of Hermes Trismegistus. These attributions belong to the legendary framework typical of ancient technical texts.

The prologue also relates that the text was found engraved on an iron stele. The theme of the book rediscovered on an ancient and durable support is the same one met in the Emerald Tablet and in other writings attributed to remote sages. It served to guarantee the authority and antiquity of the knowledge transmitted.

Dating and structure

The dating is uncertain. Scholars believe the core of the work goes back to the Roman imperial age, perhaps between the first and fourth centuries AD, but the compilation as we read it is the result of later additions. To the first books others were added on land animals, birds and fish, until a corpus of four books was formed, sometimes expanded to six.

The alphabetical arrangement is not just a practical device. In the prologue and the text the idea emerges that the letters themselves express a bond between beings sharing the same initial. It is a form of universal sympathy, a central concept in ancient thought on nature, according to which different things are connected by hidden correspondences that the sage can come to know.

From Greece to the Latin Middle Ages

The text had a long transmission in the Byzantine world, where it was copied and reworked in various recensions. In 1169, in Constantinople, a translator known as Pascalis Romanus produced a Latin version. Thanks to it the Kyranides entered the heritage of medieval lapidaries, herbals and bestiaries, alongside other texts on the virtues of natural things.

For historians of science and medicine, the Kyranides are a valuable source on ancient beliefs about nature. What the text says about the properties of plants, animals and minerals should be read as a document of the mentality of the time, not as knowledge to be applied. The critical edition of the Greek text was published in 1976 by Dimitris Kaimakis.

The Kyranides show how antiquity sought to order the natural world into a unified system in which language, magic and medicine were intertwined. Their fortune, from the Greek world to the Byzantine and Latin ones, bears witness to the strength of an idea destined to last until the Renaissance: that behind the appearance of things lies a web of correspondences waiting to be deciphered.