Theriac was a compound drug made of a variable, usually high, number of ingredients. Dating back to the early Roman empire, for centuries it was considered the best antidote and a miraculous panacea against all diseases. This book deals with the written sources that allow us to reconstruct the recipes of theriac, its myth, and the debates that it raised over the past two millennia. Each chapter is about specific sources, which the authors discuss in depth; but the book also provides its readers with an overall and consistent account of the historical development of theriac. All chapters are written in French and grouped into three main sections. The first section is about theriac in the ancient world and contains five contributions. In the first chapter, Veronique Boudon-Millot discusses the most relevant Greek sources on theriac: Andromachus the Elder, who wrote a recipe of theriac in verse (its text, with a French translation and essential notes, appears in chapter 3, authored by Alessia Guardasole); Andromachus the Younger, who wrote his father's recipe in prose; Galen, who included the recipes of the two Andromachoi in his work On antidotes and thus canonized their formula; and the pseudo-Galenic Theriac to Piso, which is now generally regarded as inauthentic, thanks also to the research of Boudon-Millot herself. This chapter represents the summary of more than twenty years of research and is the most up-to-date status quaestionis currently available on theriac in Galenic and pseudo-Galenic texts. One point must be mentioned, however. At p. 22 n. 6 Boudon-Millot states that ms. L (early twelfth century) is the model of ms. M (second half of the fifteenth century) for the text of On antidotes. Yet, this is not possible in the case of book I of the work. L does not contain the portion of text which is preserved by both M and a papyrus (PLondLit 169 + PBodl MS gr. class. G 69) much older than L. M was therefore copied from an
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