Harpocrationis epistula is a long medical-astrological letter to Caesar Augustus, edited by Graux in Revue philologique 2 (1878), pp. 70–77. Harpocration greets Augustus: many have tried to hand on paradoxa and failed; he alone has finished a work beyond mortal measure. Trained in grammatike in Asia, he went to Alexandria with silver, sat with philologoi and dialectical physicians, found a book of Nechepso with fourteen whole-body treatments by zodiac through stones and plants, bungled the “solar pastille,” and in grief left the city. At Diospolis he befriended a high priest, obtained a lecanomantic rite, and spoke with Asclepius, who explained that Nechepso knew sympathies of stones and plants but not the times and places of the stellar aporrhoiai — hemlock deadly in Scorpio-Italy, a salad in Crete.
The dating is uncertain; the writer is perhaps Harpocration of Alexandria, dated uncertainly to the fourth century CE.
The page is that letter: Alexandria, Nechepso, and Asclepius on plants and stars.
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