Library › Greek: Science & Medicine › To Petasius on the Sacred and Divine Art
This short alchemical text is addressed to Petasius, a figure named among the alchemical authorities. It is ascribed to Ostanes, the legendary Persian magus whom Greek tradition made a master of magic and alchemy. The ascription is pseudepigraphic, and the piece belongs to the Byzantine alchemical corpus edited by Berthelot and Ruelle. It praises a 'divine water' that heals every illness and gives a recipe for preparing it through grinding and repeated distillation.
The text is a small example of the Greek alchemical literature, where recipes for transformation are expressed in the language of mystery and healing. It shows how legendary Eastern sages were drawn on to lend authority to the 'sacred and divine art'.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: CAAG II 261–262). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ). This Byzantine alchemical piece is pseudepigraphically ascribed to the legendary Persian magus Ostanes.