Yes, I have to concur, a typo, perhaps a printer's error, though, Joel, I don't know what the "cursive" source would be (I'm inferring from "cursive" that you're envisioning a handwritten source?). And yes, kudos to bedwere. Whatever, bedwere, led you to this in the first place?!
To supplement Joel and others' research:
+ There's no evidence of there ever having been a genus
Hozanthus. Though the "minor" typo, because of the authority of LSJ, has had major consequences. Michael's search points to an illustration of the mistletoe in the illuminated Dioscorides (
De materia medica) manuscript at the Morgan library. The editors there clearly simply take the scientific name from LSJ. Lily Beck's excellent third edition of
De materia medica (2017) also identifies the mistletoe (III.89, ὁ ἰξός) as
Hozanthus europaeus, explicitly citing LSJ.
+ The genus name
Loranthus, on the other hand, goes back to Linnaeus. (Linnaeus credits the French botanist Sebastian Vaillant with this name. I don't have that source, but I'm guessing Loranthus comes from lōrum + anthus, because one German name for this plant is Riemenblume, 'belt flower'.) In the original edition of the
Species Plantarum (1753), it was a monotypic genus, the only species being Linnaeus's
Loranthus americanus, in the class
Hexandria Monogynia (six stamens, one pistil) of Linnaeus's
Systema Sexuale. In 1762, a certain Nicholaus von Jacquin, cited by Joel, used Linnaeus's system to describe and classify wild plants from the Venetian countryside, including a species of mistletoe he named
Loranthus europaeus. (Linnaeus's
Viscum genus contains other mistletoe species, such as its type species, the
Viscum album (
Tetandria within his
Dioecia, or hermaphroditic, class). In the ever-evolving post-Linnaean taxonomies, various species of mistletoe have been classified both in the Santalaceae (now inclusive of the Viscaceae) and Lorinthaceae families.
+ Accordingly, in the plant index of Sir Arthur Hort's 1916 Loeb edition of Theophrastus's
Enquiry into Plants, one of the identities of ἰξία (= ἰξός) is the
Loranthus europaeus. In the plant index (Vol. VII) to the Loeb's
Natural History, Pliny's
viscum is identifed as the
Loranthus europaeus as well as the
Viscum album.
Matching up Greek plant names with Linnaean classifications is of course a very dodgy business.
I'll cast aside modesty and claim some expertise in Michael's oh-so-true assertion, as I've spent over a year mucking around in Theophrastus, Pliny, and Dioscorides. Just as fyi, and for anyone interested, this playlist
introduction to Theophrastus is a sample.