Note 9 — ETYMOLOGIES.
Reading edition
Dioscorides, who lived in the time of Nero, says that pigs dig up “truffles” in spring. Matthiolus, in his commentaries, speaks of an inferior, smooth-barked, red truffle known to the ancients, to which the above remark of Dioscorides perhaps applies; certainly it does not apply to the black truffle, which begins to come into the Roman market in November, and is over long before the spring.