Crateuas is known to have written a scholarly three-volume
herbal in Greek known as the
Rhizotomica (,
Rhizotomoúmena). In it, he described the medicinal properties of various plants known to the Greeks. He also produced a simplified work on the same subject for general readers, with the plants
alphabetized and illustrated in colour.
Pliny the Elder credits Crateuas with Dionysius and Metrodorus as the first to provide such illustrations with their descriptions of various plants, although he complains that the images he knew of were frequently misleading. Only two direct fragments of these works are known to have survived into the present day.
Luigi Anguillara claimed to have consulted a complete illustrated manuscript of Crateuas's guide in
Istanbul for his 1561
Semplici, although Max Wellmann subsequently established that Anguillara's source must have been a Latin version of Dioscurides's
De Materia Medica. The
Rhizotomica was well regarded in its time, however, and was one of the main sources for Dioscurides's work, which was the primary herbology for Europe during the
Middle Ages. The early 6th century "
Vienna Dioscurides" produced for
Anicia Juliana in
Constantinople includes numerous images captioned with short texts beginning with the name Crateuas. Wellmann and
Singer believed these were based on now-lost manuscripts of Crateuas dating to the 2nd or 3rd century, although others have argued that it may only be the text which derives from Crateuas's work. == Legacy ==