While keeping to a single topic, Nicander's organization of his material in the Theriaca obviates a harmonious relationship between instruction and delight.
The Theriaca makes its venomous creatures into Homeric heroes; Oppian's Halieutica, and pseudo-Oppian's Cynegetica, make nonhuman animals the subjects of epic and tragic action.
Jacques 2002, lxviii, Ixxxvi, cxv on the poeticity of Nicander's "radical didactic poetry" with respect to its sources, and the poet's ambition to confound contemporary readers whose taste was limited to the classics with the "reality poetry" of the Theriaca.
Overduin provides students, academics, and researchers with the first full literary commentary on the
Theriaca, focusing on the artistic merits of Nicander and placing the work in the context of Alexandrian aesthetics and the didactic epic tradition.
45, reads: "Andarurkahas." On Andromachus maior, personal physician of Nero, and his son Andromachus, see Ullmann, Medezin, 323-34; Lutz Richter-Bernburg, Eine arabische Version der pseudogalenischen Schrift De
Theriaca ad Pisonem (Ph.D.
The longest,
Theriaca, is a hexameter poem of 958 lines on the nature of venomous animals and the wounds they inflict.
Nicander of Colophon and Galen both record that Attalus' research also encompassed poisonous animals, and the unique data on the sea hare (Aplysia depilans) suggests the links between Nicander's
Theriaca and Alexipharmaca to Attalus' research, and in company with Galen's later comments, the fame attained by the king with drugs named fittingly 'Attalids'.