This is an extract from:
Byzantine Garden Culture
edited by Antony Littlewood, Henry Maguire,
and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn
published by
Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection
Washington, D.C.
2002 Dumbarton Oaks
Trustees for Harvard University
Washington, D.C.
Printed in the United States of America
www.doaks.org/etexts.html
Herbs of the Field and Herbs of the Garden
in Byzantine Medicinal Pharmacy
John Scarborough
Among scholarly studies of Byzantine gardens are a number that provide details about what
plants were grown and why they were cultivated as a common practice. Yet little attention
has been paid to the botanical and pharmacal particulars of Byzantine garden lore. More-
over, even less well known are the all-season plant gatherers of the Byzantine Empire, plant
collectors who continually augmented the herbal drugs of the monasteries. By focusing on
some aspects of the gathering of wild specimens, which were, in many ways, taken for
granted, one receives a rather different picture of Byzantine botanical lore than if research
depends solely on evidence drawn from gardens.
An interested student or scholar wishing to inquire about the essentials of herbalism in
the Byzantine Empire likely will be led into the Greek texts on gardens, well illustrated by
the Christian dream garden as published in Greek, with a French and now English trans-
lation, by Margaret Thomson.1 Within are, indeed, the expected fruits and vegetables, sweet
smelling and pleasantly verdant, along with some descriptions of how to plant a garden.
Presumably technical names, however, are not intended as a guide for the reader, but rather
suggest how an ideal garden would appear. For example, in Thomson s text is the knowl-
edge of smilax, 2 and one reads an ethereal account of the possible shapes of such a tree, but
nothing one could designate as practical. Thomson s notes on Jardin, 21, indicate biblical
allusions, but nothing concerning botanical, agricultural, or medical utility. Smilax here is a
tree (to dendron), so that one need not bother to consider other plants with the same name,
for example, the cowpea or cherry bean as described by Dioskorides,3 or the European
sarsaparilla first noted by Pliny the Elder and Dioskorides,4 probably drawing information
1
M. H. Thomson, ed. and trans., Le jardin symbolique (Paris, 1960); and The Symbolic Garden: Reflections
Drawn from a Garden of Virtues. A XIIth Century Greek Manuscript (North York, Ont., 1989).
2
Le jardin symbolique, 68 77; The Symbolic Garden, 86 95.
3
Vigna unguiculata L. = V. sinensis Endl., the cowpea or cherry bean, as in Dioskorides, Materia medica,
2.132 and 146 (Greek text ed. M. Wellmann, Pedanii Dioscuridis Anazarbei De materia medica, 3 vols. [Berlin, 1906
14; repr. Berlin, 1958], 1:132 and 146).
4
Smilax aspera L., Dioskorides, 4.137 and 142 (ed. Wellmann, 2:282 83 and 285 86). Pliny the Elder,
Natural History, 16.163 and 24.82 83. The common source is probably the lost tract on medical botany by
Sextius Niger (fl. probably early 1st century).
178 John Scarborough
from a common source; nor does one need to posit the infamous scammony (occasionally
called smilax) with its well-known cathartic resin.5
Two trees are possible: Taxus baccata L., the so-called English yew, renowned in medi-
eval Asia Minor for its heavy and hard, yet elastic, wood (thus the English yew-bow of
folklore6, and, second, the ever-popular tree of an enchanted grove, the holm oak (Quercus
ilex L.),7 with its prickly, hollylike sucker-shoot leaves. Centuries earlier, Theophrastus had
remarked that the name is Arcadian, and since Thomson s text leaves little doubt about the
fairy-tale purpose of the anonymous writer, it seems clear enough that this famed dream
garden manual is just that: an imaginary world of fragrances and wafting breezes, of pruned
shapes and colorful flowers and equally colorful fruits edible only with the nose and eyes.
Thomson attributes this garden of the imagination to the eleventh century,8 and there is
an ancestry in similar tracts of pagan antiquity, such as those published by A. Delatte in the
Herbarius.9 Delatte s texts retail the plants of medical astrology, with seven major kinds of
plants linked with planets also of extremely important ceremonial use and prominence in
mythology.
Yet this genre of the dream garden manual represents only one facet of Byzantine
garden lore and herbalism. Too often, moderns ignore other types besides this religio-mystical
symbolism of specific plants: Thomson herself had called attention to other and varying
traditions of more practical utility in her seldomly cited Textes grecs indits relatifs aux plantes,10
texts in themselves supplementary to those on botany (and other topics) as edited and
published earlier by Delatte.11 Important is Thomson s section of Greek texts (with French
translations) of botanical lexicography,12 paralleled by Delatte s fifteen botanical glossaries,13
only slightly emended by J. Stannard.14 Delatte s glossaries include one by a Pseudo-Galen,15
nine by anonymous authors, one by a Pseudo-Symeon Seth,16 and one each by Neophytos,
Nikomedes, and Nicholas Hieropais, followed by Thomson s Greek text of a Lexicon of
Arabic Plant Names, 17 leading into several more tracts of similar content and with the
obviously intended purposes of pure lexicography. These are not the vaguely perceived or
5
Convolvulus sepium L. is the most common, cosmopolitan species of scammony, still used in Greece,
Turkey, and Syria as a powerful cathartic. In some botanical guides, the plant bears the name C. scammonia. Why
Smilax, in ancient Greek botanical nomenclature, should sometimes take the place of skammonia is a lexico-
graphical mystery. The scammony s main pharmaceutical action is its properties to cause large amounts of bodily
fluids to be evacuated, which explains why many modern herbal manuals describe it as a diuretic.
6
Dioskorides, 4.76 and 79 (ed. Wellmann, 2:88 89 and 92 93). Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 16.51.
7
Theophrastus, Historia plantarum, 3.16.2; Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 16.19.
8
Thomson, Le jardin symbolique, 10 11; The Symbolic Garden, 10 11.
9
A. Delatte, Herbarius: Recherches sur le crmonial usit chez les anciens pour la cueillette des simples et des plantes
magiques (Paris, 1938).
10
Paris, 1955.
11
A. Delatte, ed., Anecdota Atheniensia et alia, vol. 2, Textes grecs ą l histoire des sciences (Paris, 1939).
12
Thomson, Textes grecs, 125 77.
13
Delatte, Anecdota, 273 454.
14
J. Stannard, Byzantine Botanical Lexicography, Episteme 5 (1971): 168 87.
15
Delatte, Anecdota, 385 92.
16
Ibid., 339 60.
17
Thomson, Textes grecs, 139 67; Delatte, Anecdota, 279 318, 331 39, and 393 417.
Herbs of the Field and Herbs of the Garden in Byzantine Medicinal Pharmacy 179
fancifully aromatic plants of the symbolic garden: rather these spare listings show repeated
attempts at precision in nomenclature, attempts forecast quite early by the multilingual
synonyms provided by Dioskorides and later scholiasts,18 augmented first by an obscure
Pamphilus about a century after the original Materia medica appeared,19 and by the Syn-
onym Lists of drugs circulating by the second century, illustrated by the Galenic tract
under this title.20
The Greek tracts published by Delatte and Thomson are ample evidence of an herbalism
among the Byzantines, an herbalism rather far removed from the redolently imaginary gar-
dens of pagan and Christian myth. Such treatises also tell us immediately that doctors,
pharmacologists, herbalists, and farmers not only were very interested (and literate), but also
required information about wild as well as cultivated plants: some were used as medicinals,
others for the manufacture of ointments and perfumes (especially the numerous oil plants ),
others as food sources on a seasonal basis, still others as condiments, and, of course, as sources
of the species transplanted and carefully tended in the well-known gardens of both the
Byzantine East and medieval Latin West, with similar and carefully cultivated gardens also
characteristic of the Islamic world.21
Yet even a short survey of this kind of modern study, representing excellent scholarship
and detailed command of the texts and multilingual sources, shows the predominance of an
ideal garden, when a scholar considers medicinal plants or potherbs (e.g., J. Stannard, G.
Keil, and C. Opsomer-Halleux in the 1986 Medieval Gardens).22 This tendency is widespread
18
Most of the presumed synonyms are set below the text of Dioskorides in the Wellmann edition, with
the clear designation RV, in turn given parallel readings in other sources by the editor as part of the apparatus
criticus.
19
M. Wellmann, Pamphilos, Hermes 51 (1916): 1 64.
20
Often cited as Galen, Glossary, the first set of synonym lists in the Galenic corpus appear in C. G.
Khn, ed., Claudii Galeni Opera omnia, 20 vols. (Leipzig, 1821 33; repr. Hildesheim, 1964 65), 19:62 157. The
second set of exegetical references and synonyms are in the same volume, 721 47; the first of the pair is devoted
to explicating puzzling words and definitions of Galen s ideal, Hippocrates; the second tract (if either is
genuine: some scholars believe both are Renaissance forgeries) provides a set of quickie remedies in a kind of
Substitution List, not synonyms. Apparently whoever compiled this Substitution List was well aware that
many drugs as listed in the Greco-Roman Galenic texts were not available locally from time to time, so such
substitution of drug B for the usual recommendation of drug A became a model for later Byzantine Greek,
classical Arabic, and medieval Latin glossaries of this sort. Unhappily, many scholars have confused Galen s
Glossary (best read as a series of explications of earlier medical terminologies, including those from the Hippo-
cratic corpus) with the Substitutions, so that the novitiate may gain a reference from the Glossary, when in
actuality it emerges from Substitutions. Much of this confusion is nicely laid to rest by R. J. Durling, A Dictionary
of Medical Terms in Galen (Leiden, 1993), to which an interested scholar should first resort, especially for the
sometimes more-than-obscure terms of pharmacology.
21
Illustrative are the following: A. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of
Crops and Farming Techniques, 700 1100 (Cambridge, 1983); E. B. MacDougall and R. Ettinghausen, eds., The
Islamic Garden (Washington, D.C., 1976); D. N. Wilber, Persian Gardens and Garden Pavilions, 2d ed. (Washington,
D.C., 1979); E. B. MacDougall, ed., Medieval Gardens (Washington, D.C., 1986). For Muslim Spain, one of the
better studies is L. Bolens, La cuisine andalouse: Un art de vivre, XIe XIIIe siŁcles (Paris, 1990).
22
J. Stannard, Alimentary and Medicinal Use of Plants, in MacDougall, Medieval Gardens, 69 92; G. Keil,
Hortus Sanitatis: Gart der Gesundheit. Gaerde der Sunthede, ibid., 55 68; and C. Opsomer-Halleux, The
Medieval Garden and Its Role in Medicine, ibid., 93 114.
180 John Scarborough
in the specialist literature, and particularly characteristic (perhaps appropriately) of the nu-
merous books on medieval English botanical lore, exemplified by the work of Teresa McLean.23
One can, to be sure, argue that humankind s occupation and cultivation of Europe and the
Near East had consumed millennia, and thereby truly feral areas were unusual (unlike the
New World in 1492, which was almost all wild, with the exceptions of certain Amerindian
cultures that flourished and passed away long before the arrival of Europeans), so that wild
herbs were presumably unimportant in the pharmacal lore of classical antiquity and the
Middle Ages.
Our texts, however, demonstrate vividly that physicians in ancient Greece, the Helle-
nistic world, the Roman Republic, and the successor empires of the Roman and Byzantine
centuries, knew and valued both wild and cultivated plants, employed as drugs; such are fully
attested in the works of many Byzantine physicians and pharmacologists, ranging from
Alexander of Tralles to John Aktouarios. In fact, Byzantine concepts of what was herbal
medicine were fundamental in the teaching of herbal pharmacology in the medical schools
of Renaissance Europe; many of these teaching institutions boasted of their own teaching
gardens that incorporated traditionally cultivated potherbs along with wild herbs gath-
ered from local countrysides (with information on the curative powers of these plants also
derived from local folklore); soon added to these often beautiful and scrupulously planned
teaching gardens were the ever-increasing numbers of new and wild botanicals from the
New World, Africa, and Asia.24 And as one would expect, culinary arts overlapped pharmacy
in the discussions of plant properties (or virtues as they were often termed), so that foods
and foodstuffs became part of herbalism in almost all eras.25 The Byzantines valued such
expertise, and some recent scholarship has begun to explore how Portuguese, Spanish, and
English, alongside long-term Venetian, trading ventures came to improve the Byzantine
diet.26
Medical botany is quite prominent in Byzantine medicine, and, as I have indicated
elsewhere,27 early Byzantine pharmacy occupies a central role in how the doctor treats
disease, in company with how the physician perceives the properties (here usually dynameis
in the Greek as one explicates how drugs work ). Our written texts, from Oribasios to
Paul of Aegina, repeatedly show how the Byzantine philosopher-physicians (and those some-
times known as iatrosophists) reworked, streamlined, augmented, and clarified the medical
and pharmacological texts of the Greco-Roman era. Dioskorides great Materia medica (ca.
23
Medieval English Gardens (London, 1981).
24
There is an enormous bibliography on the introduction of new species into the pharmacal lore of
Europe in the Renaissance. For a summary and collection of references, see J. Scarborough, Botany, Pharmacy,
and the Culinary Arts, in A. C. Crombie and N. Siraisi, eds., The Rational Arts of Living (Northampton, 1987),
161 204.
25
This interplay is well demonstrated in two monographs (among many): R. Howard, La bibliothŁque et le
laboratoire de Guy de la Brosse au jardin des plantes ą Paris (Geneva, 1983), and W. T. Stern, Botanical Gardens and
Botanical Literature in the Eighteenth Century (Pittsburgh, 1961).
26
Most recently (among the welcome interest in food history by classicists and medievalists), one may
consult with profit A. Dalby, Biscuits from Byzantium, Siren Feasts (London, 1996), 187 211.
27
J. Scarborough, Early Byzantine Pharmacology, DOP 38 (1984): 213 32.
Herbs of the Field and Herbs of the Garden in Byzantine Medicinal Pharmacy 181
a.d. 70) had become the basic treatise on all aspects of pharmacology and pharmacognosy,
and pure botany continued to be represented by Theophrastus rightly honored Inquiry into
Plants and Causes of Plants (both ca. 300 b.c.). It is, however, Galen of Pergamon (a.d. 129
after 210) who became the absolute authority on all facets of medicine in the Eastern
Roman Empire, especially after Oribasios of Pergamon (ca. a.d. 325 400) had performed
probably the first known of many attempted truncations, summaries, and rearrangements
of Galen s often massive, self-contradictory, and presumably all-inclusive works on medicine
(the often-cited edition by C. G. Khn [Leipzig, 1821 33; repr. Hildesheim, 1963 64] oc-
cupies four linear feet on one of my bookshelves).
This overriding authority is further attested by the Seven Physicians folio of the a.d.
512 Vienna manuscript of Dioskorides (fol. 3v),28 which, accompanied by the previous
seven physicians of folio 2v, provides a pictorial history of medical authorities in the
early sixth century (notably absent is Hippocrates of Cos). Galen sits top and center on folio
3v, flanked by Dioskorides and Krateuas, the former the major author of this beautiful,
alphabetical version of Dioskorides Materia medica. And although one admires the occa-
sionally magnificent (and one growls at some of the paintings, which are dreadful) illumina-
tions of Dioskorides plants, Nicander of Colophon s poisonous creatures, and some other
topics including a manual of ornithology by an otherwise unknown Dionysius, all are but
28
Regarding the famous Vienna codex (properly cited as Codex Vindobonensis med. gr. 1 der
sterreichischen Nationalbibliothek), two reproductions of what constitutes 485 folios (weighing 14 lbs.) have
appeared in the 20th century: the first was published in Leiden in two volumes by A. W. Sijthoff (1906), with the
first volume of descriptive commentary and the second of black and white reproductions of the folios; useful in
its day, this De codicis Dioscuridei Aniciae Iulianae, nunc Vindobonensis Med. Gr. I (with commentary by A. de
Premerstein, C. Wessely, and J. Mantuani), has been completely superseded by the full-color, full-sized
reproduction (five volumes, with a sixth containing commentary and listings by H. Gerstinger) published
by the Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt (Graz, 1970). Unlike the 1906 Leiden edition, the 1970
reproduction has full commentary on the other works represented (other than a shortened, alphabetical version
of Dioskorides): an anonymus Poem on the Properties of Herbs (fols. 388 392); two paraphrases of Nicander s
Theriaka and Alexipharmaka by an otherwise unknown Euteknios (fols. 393 459 [many illuminations
scattered here and there in the margins, with many accurate renderings especially of the blister beetles
and many purely imaginary images of the poisonous creatures retailed by Nicander of Colophon]); a
paraphrase of Oppian s Book on Fishing, again by Euteknios (fols. 460 473 [the illuminations, however, seem
more intended to accompany pseudo-Oppian s lengthy poem, On Hunting]); and, finally, a paraphrase of an
Ornithology (Grk. Ixeutika) by an (again) otherwise unknown Dionysios (fols. 474 485 [fol. 483v shows twenty-
four birds, quite vividly painted from life]). Most large libraries have copies of the Graz reproduction volumes; I
apologize to my readers for my inability to gain permission to reproduce relevant folios from Vienna in time for
publication. One can, however, peruse the selection of illuminations, reproduced in full color and size, in O.
Mazal, Pflanzen, Wurzeln, Sfte, Samen: Antike Heilkunst Miniaturen des Wiener Dioskurides (Graz, 1981), a volume
held much more commonly in university libraries. It is interesting to speculate about the first illuminated folio,
showing a peacock (male, with feathers spread in the courting position), presumably the family s animal (a kind
of 6th-century coat of arms), and reflect how this peacock precedes the famous two folios of famous physicians,
not to mention the portrait folio 6v, showing the princess Anicia Juliana and her attendants. The tale of how this
magnificent manuscript survived to be deposited in the Hapsburg collection in the 16th century is a tale worth
telling in itself, perhaps best summarized by G. Sarton, Brave Busbecq, Isis 33 (1942): 557 75. Anicia Juliana
was known as a generous benefactor in her day, as suggested by M. Harrison, A Temple for Byzantium: The
Discovery and Excavation of Anicia Juliana s Palace Church in Istanbul (London, 1989). On this manuscript, see also
Leslie Brubaker, The Vienna Dioskorides and Anicia Juliana, in this volume, 189 214.
182 John Scarborough
selections from the complete works; but those that do appear give us a reasonable guide to
which plants were deemed useful in early sixth-century Byzantine pharmacology. It is im-
portant likewise that one have in hand the complete, nonalphabetical Greek text of
Dioskorides (last and best edited by Max Wellmann in 3 vols. [Berlin, 1906 14; repr. 1958]),
so that one can gain a clear impression of which plants were deemed useful in sixth-century
Byzantine pharmacology including plants gathered in the wild and those emerging from
one of the countless gardens, so appropriately recapitulated and condensed in several books
in the tenth-century Geoponika. Sometimes what is omitted in theVienna text of Dioskorides
(admittedly our earliest medical manuscript in Greek) is surprising, but inclusion of a plant
per se suggests a reader may be presumed to have known a more complete account: that
the 14-pound codex was not intended as a field manual should be apparent, but even as a
royal gift fit for a princess, the codex is a valuable guide to what plants were thought
valuable for a household in the highest levels of the ruling class of the Byzantine Empire in
the sixth century.
One example will serve to illustrate the question of herbs in the field and herbs of
the garden as would be depicted in the Vienna manuscript: the opium poppy (Papaver
somniferum L.).29 Folio 221v gives a reasonably accurate painting of the opium capsules in
the various stages of growth (the leaves are not well depicted, but at least the pinnate edges
receive emphasis; the P. somniferum does not have multilobed, pinnated leaves as here repre-
sented by the unknown artist), and the root stock is somewhat of the generic type.
Here is what Dioskorides, 4.64 (ed. Wellmann, 2:218 21; my trans.) has to say about
this famous and presumptive analgesic:
1. [The opium] poppy. Some is cultivated and grown in gardens, from which the
seed is made into bread, and becomes part of a healthy diet; and with honey, they
use the poppy seed in place of the sesame seed, and thereby it is called the com-
mon poppy, which has a longish head and a seed that is white. Another kind that is
wild has a capsule head that droops, a seed that is black, and is called the corn
poppy, and some term this rhoias on account of the juice flowing from it. But
there is a third kind of these poppies, much less cultivated, and it is smaller and
more useful as a drug; this type has a longish capsule.
Then follow medical and pharmaceutical uses, and Dioskorides makes explicit the
variations between the cultivated and wild poppies (4.64.5 [ed. Wellmann, 2:221; my
trans.]):
Best is the latex (or juice, = opos) which is thick and heavy of the wild kind; it is
soporific to the person who smells it, bitter to the taste, easily diluted in water,
smooth, white, neither rough nor full of lumps, nor does it congeal as it is passed
29
For a discussion of both ancient and modern views of opium, see J. Scarborough, The Opium Poppy
in Hellenistic and Roman Medicine, in R. Porter and M. Teich, eds., Drugs and Narcotics in History (Cambridge,
1995), 4 23.
Herbs of the Field and Herbs of the Garden in Byzantine Medicinal Pharmacy 183
through a sieve as would be characteristic of wax; and set down in the sun and
allowed to spread out while melting [identifies it as genuine]; and set alight from an
oil lamp, it does not have a darkly colored flame, retaining indeed the odor of its
own particular property. Some, however, counterfeit it by mixing the juice of the
horned poppy or acacia gum or the juice of the wild lettuce.
This is the text readers and viewers of the famous Vienna codex of the Materia medica
would have known and consulted; Dioskorides has warned previously (4.3 [ed. Wellmann,
2:119]) that too much of the wild latex can kill, so that the physician-pharmacologist had to
use great care in its employment. Several points are important, even in this short account of
the opium poppy: some poppies are, indeed, part of garden plots, and would remain so from
Roman times through the twentieth century (many botanical gardens today proudly display
their specimens of this famous plant, sometimes with a guard closely observing the visitors);
those poppies that are cultivated are raised for their oilseeds, and they remain a staple in the
production of breads (the ancients were well aware that there are no narcotic properties in
the seeds); and, as Dioskorides and the Vienna version make clear enough, it is the wild
variety that is gathered for the ill-famed soporific and occasionally for its death-dealing
properties. These uses were well known to Nicander of Colophon (fl. ca. 130 b.c.) and his
sources,30 so that wild and cultivated poppies are part of the long history of classical and
Byzantine gardening culture, as well as the lore of gathering the latex from the maturing
plant in the field.
It is unlikely that the artist who rendered the opium poppy on folio 221v of the Vienna
codex has painted from life, but he has captured the four basic stages of the life cycle of the
capsules development (harvesting the best latex is detailed in Dioskorides, 4.64.7 [ed.
Wellmann, 2:221]), and except for some slightly more sophisticated knives and collection
pans, the methods of modern harvesting of the P. somniferum s latex from the capsules just
before they ripen (almost exactly what Dioskorides records) remain almost identical. More-
over, ancient pharmacologists and their Byzantine successors were well aware that there
were several varieties of poppies, ranging from a truly wild kind (Vienna codex, fol. 222)
through less potent varieties (fols. 223v, 224v, and 225v). The scholia on poppies in the text
of Dioskorides are not particularly revealing of Byzantine gardeners or physicians experi-
ences that might have varied from the textual tradition, so that it would seem that later
doctors and pharmacologists found that Dioskorides was essentially correct. That same tex-
tual tradition, beginning in the second century, suggested that repeated employment of the
opium poppy latex thus generally verified the account of Dioskorides, confirmed as one
examines parallel passages, condensed by Oribasios, or elaborated by Alexander of Tralles,
and a few others, conveniently listed in Wellmann s apparatus criticus.
Yet the Byzantine scribes did not simply parrot their classical texts in medicine and
related matters, and one can choose no better example than that selected by John Riddle, in
30
Scarborough, Opium Poppy, 11.
184 John Scarborough
his fine essay of 1984,31 to illustrate two matters: (1) additional information by later and
obviously experienced gardeners and physicians; and (2) parallel traditions accompanying
the texts of the Materia medica, in this instance an almost exact match with a series of
passages in the Geoponika. When Riddle submitted his essay for inclusion in the published
collection of papers resulting from the 1983 Dumbarton Oaks Symposium on Byzantine
Medicine, I was happy to augment his arguments on asparagus with the Geoponika, and I
think it quite appropriate here to call attention to these again.
Dioskorides, 2.125 (ed. Wellmann, 1:198; my trans.), had written that some (in his
usual manner of giving a report that he has heard but did not necessarily believe) have set
down that if someone were to bury rams horns broken into small pieces, asparagus grows.
A scribe, sometime before the fourteenth century, flatly denied this, saying in his scholiastic
comment, this appears incredible to me, and, as Riddle notes, this emoi de apithanon appears
in at least ten variant manuscripts of Dioskorides discussion of this common garden veg-
etable. And although Riddle did not make particular note of Dioskorides account of the
utility of the asparagus, it is clear (again) that both wild and garden-grown varieties are
included: the feral sort grows in rocky soils, the cultivar as one would expect in the soils
prepared for other vegetables (medicinal uses are those well known in many folk traditions:
bowel softener, diuretic, treatment for sciatica and jaundice, as a remedy for toothache, and
as an antidote for the bites of poisonous spiders). Perhaps the gardener is attempting to
duplicate the rocky soil for his asparagus plot (a tricky and long-term vegetable to grow as
any modern gardener all too well knows), but of importance is the parallel passage in the
tenth-century Geoponika (last edited by H. Beckh as Geoponica sive Cassiani Bassi scholastici
De re rustica eclogae [Leipzig, 1895; repr. Stuttgart, 1994]),32 which reads: If one wishes to
produce an abundance of asparagus, chop up horns of the wild ram into small pieces, throw
them into the asparagus beds, and water them. Some [others] say that it is better if the whole
rams horns are bored with holes and then put down into the soil, they will produce aspara-
gus (Geoponika, 12.18.2 3 [ed. Beckh, p. 365; my trans.]).
Quite puzzling in this passage is its description of technical details: is the would-be
gardener being advised to put rootstocks (or crowns) of old asparagus into the holed rams
horns? Growing edible asparagus from seeds gives poor yield, but crown-growth from per-
manent beds can yield annually (after the third year); the tender shoots of springtime (in
temperate climes) can be harvested repeatedly for up to twenty years. One is, however,
struck by the Geoponika extract that both a wild and a cultivated sort are known and
used. The extract (if we can rely on the copyists of the tenth century) is quoted from a
Didymus, probably the Didymus of Alexandria known to have written a fifteen-book Georgika
in the fifth century, and if Wellmann is right,33 Didymus was a physician of some repute.
The mix of agricultural and pharmacological data remains explicit, and the passage in
Dioskorides neatly interlocks with that of Didymus as quoted in the tenth-century Geoponika.
31
J. M. Riddle, Byzantine Commentaries on Dioscorides, DOP 38 (1984): 95 102.
32
On this text, see also Robert Rodgers, Khpopoii?a Garden Making and Garden Culture in the
Geoponika, in this volume.
33
M. Wellmann, Didymus, RE, vol. 9 (Stuttgart, 1903), 445.
Herbs of the Field and Herbs of the Garden in Byzantine Medicinal Pharmacy 185
The Byzantine text is incorporated into the book on gardens (e.g., 12.2 [ed. Beckh,
pp. 349 50]), quoted from an otherwise unknown Florentinus, and headed How to make
a garden, with a preceding gardening calendar (12.1.1 2 [ed. Beckh, pp. 347 49]): Janu-
ary through December, with each month specified with plantings as is suitable for the
climate of Constantinople. As one reads through the accounts of the particular vegetables
and foodstuffs (asparagus, lettuce, beets, cabbages, and so on), one notes again and again that
there are wild kinds also to be harvested, and one again can use the exemplar of the
asparagus: Geoponika 12.18.4 and 5 (ed. Beckh, p. 365) tells us that in order to have asparagus
year-round, one is to take the seeds [?: such are really more akin to berries ] and weed
around the surface roots, a description that can match only what one finds in the growth
patterns of the still common wild asparagus of Turkey; its underground stem grows hori-
zontally, which then produces the spring shoots that are very tender and tasty, the so-called
turions. Gathering asparagus, for both medical and culinary purposes, thus includes garden
lore as well as a common knowledge of how this vegetable favors sandy soils. Modern
California s January asparagus spears, so horribly expensive in a Wisconsin winter, are, in
some respects, quite like those gained by herbalists in fifth-century Alexandria and tenth-
century Constantinople. And these were gathered and marketed by professional herbalists,
not gardeners of the town. These herbalists were indeed farmers addressed and assumed
to be literate, an assumption by the compilers of the text we have as the Geoponika. This
manner of mixing the cultivars with the gathering of wild species, for the sake of (one
presumes) freshness, could be illustrated by several accounts in Geoponika 12 and in other
books of the same compilation that address plants and their employment as drugs, foods, or
condiments.
My last example of the continual intermeshing of farm and field with the geometri-
cally pleasing ideal gardens, so common in medieval times from England to Bombay, had
more to do with veterinary practices than with vegetables, but will illustrate the same point:
knowledge flowing both ways, from city to countryside and back again, perhaps corrected
or refined for the city slickers. We have to keep in mind that most people lived in the
country in those days, with a few making a living knowing the plants to be gathered, while
the great majority tilled the fields of one or another overlord, living out their years as had
their forefathers before them. Life in the country, however, was not without its special
realms of pure knowledge. Country dwellers (pagani in Latin) knew the plants: they did
not name them, a habit that reaches back as far as Mycenaean times and Homeric Greece,
if not to the beginnings of our species somewhere in northeastern Africa some many
millennia ago.
Alongside the domestication of wheat, rice, barley, oats, and several other food plants
came the domestication of animals. We do not know when these processes were firmly in
place, but with the creation of urban centers in Mesopotamia, China, India, Egypt, and
elsewhere after about 7000 b.c., we find animals side by side with the plants on the farms
(by whatever name) most of the human population tilled. From the very beginnings, people
and animals transferred illnesses to one another, but, except for the worst of the plagues, it
would seem that most of what today we would call illnesses went unnoticed, as a part of
186 John Scarborough
normal life. Even so, as we learn in the late texts we know as the Geoponika and the collec-
tion of excerpts from the same era which we call the Corpus hippiatricorum Graecorum,34
farmers and horsemen had many problems with parasites on and in their animals, and I have
chosen one very intriguing passage in the Geoponika that indicates Byzantine sheep herders
did deal with ticks and other irritating pests. Indeed, the modern world is coming back to
something like these natural insecticides or vermicides, since there would be, by definition,
very few (if any) side effects or long-term damage to either the environment or to the
productive capability of the sheep and their prized wool. Geoponika 17.16 is headed Con-
cerning lice. From Didymus, and one reads (ed. Beckh, p. 495; my trans.):
1. If sheep have ticks or lice, pound thoroughly some maple tree roots and boil this
mash in water; part the wool on the sheep from head to the end of the spinal
column, and then pour this liquid on while still warm, so that it finds its way over
the whole animal s body. Some use cedar oil in the same way.
2. Some others likewise in a similar fashion prepare mandrake root for this use, but
one must ensure that the animals do not ingest this mandrake root wash, since it is
poisonous to them.
3. Others prepare likewise in a similar fashion a decoction of cyperus root and
wash the sheep with it.35
From the modern vantage, the phytochemistry and the logic of using a maple root wash
and its tannin as an excellent flea- and tick-repellent, makes good sense, but the cyperus
root s chemical properties remain obscure. At this juncture, however, I wish to emphasize
the curious appearance of mandrake as a delouser for sheep.
Mandrake (Mandragora officinarum L. or M. autumnalis Spr.), among the six species known
in ancient and modern times, contains goodly amounts of hyoscyamine, a powerful nar-
cotic, especially in the famous manlike roots. The narcotic properties of the mandrake
were famous among laypersons and professional medical practitioners, and its fame reached
even into a well-known scene in Apuleius Golden Ass,36 where the physician and those
listening to his testimony both knew of the generally safe anesthetic properties of mandrake.
Mandrake leads us immediately back to the Vienna codex of Dioskorides: widely known is
folio 5v, depicting three figures doing three things with the mandrake root (and this painting
of the root [twice] is not replicated elsewhere in the codex); on the right is Dioskorides
reading the account of the plant and its properties (4.75 [ed. Wellmann, 2:233 37]); in the
center Epinoia holds the root in her hands extended in front of her to ensure that the
34
E. Oder and C. Hoppe, eds., Corpus hippiatricorum Graecorum, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1924 27; repr. Stuttgart,
1971). Most recently, a third compilation of this sort from the mid-10th century on toxicology has been docu-
mented by Sibylle Ihm, ed., Der Traktat Peri tMn iobolMn thriMn kai dltriMn pharmakMn des sog. Aelius Promotus
(Wiesbaden, 1995).
35
I suspect that kypeiros is not galingale, but either the edible cyperus (Cyperus esculentus L.), or perhaps a
turmeric (Curcuma longa L.), known as early as Dioskorides, whose Materia medica, 1.5, seems to be the first
mention of this Indian rhizome, today used as a condiment in curries.
36
Apuleius, Golden Ass (or Metamorphoses), 10.11.
Herbs of the Field and Herbs of the Garden in Byzantine Medicinal Pharmacy 187
viewer sees exactly its color and shape; and on the left of the full-page folio is the artist
depicting the plant while he looks at Epinoia, not Dioskorides. Mandrake is, in effect, the
first medicinal plant in the codex, and Dioskorides full description of the properties and
uses of mandrake root parallels its employment today in many folk medical systems from
Spain to India: it is an excellent purgative and emetic, with narcotic properties particularly
valuable in treatment for asthma, hay fever, and coughs, since the alkaloidal phytochemistry
in the natural drug acts as vasodilators. There are numerous references in the medical
sources of classical antiquity, as well as those of the Byzantine era: mandrake was the nar-
cotic of choice, or, as Dioskorides puts it, The physicians use this whenever they are about
to begin cutting [i.e., surgery], or when they are cauterizing [a wound] shut (4.75.7 [ed.
Wellmann, 2:237; my trans.]).
Garden plant or wild? Evidence shows (again) both. In the text On the Mandrake,
printed by Thomson in her Textes grecs indits (pp. 84 87; numbered texts 5, 3, and 4), it is
clear that this is indeed an herb raised and used against leprosy and eye diseases and as a
remedy for raging diarrhea, among other afflictions. Older traditions (e.g., Theophrastus,
Historia plantarum, 9.9.1 and Dioskorides as above) indicate that mandrake was brought into
market by ever-present and expert rhizotomoi ( root cutters ).
Throughout the centuries, there is little doubt that anyone could obtain mandrake in
just about any season, as would be true of the opium poppy and its hardened latex, easily
remelted as needed. Among the Byzantines, one gains the sure impression from Alexander
of Tralles directions for the preparation of pastilles for specific treatment of quartan fevers
characterized by yellow bile,37 that all ingredients are commonly obtained and that many are
garden cultivated : one reads about the saffron crocus, licorice, anise, castor (a plant in this
instance), henbane (if this, indeed, is what hyoskyamos leukos means), and likely enough the
three grams of mandrake bark (the outer layers of the root) that end the preparation
formula. Alexander of Tralles is recording what he considered tried and true pharmaceu-
tical recipes sometime at the very end of the sixth century or, at the very latest, the begin-
ning years of the seventh. A principle of his practice and its written summary is almost
always a direct simplicity, a characteristic especially true of his botanical or medicinal phar-
macy. The opium poppy is an ordinary drug, much as is mandrake (whether its apples or
juice or rind or stem or roots). Alexander s long career and extensive travels (he died in
Rome in a.d. 605) enabled him to compose several medical masterpieces, including the
Book on Fevers, the Twelve Books on Medicine, and the Letter on Intestinal Worms (this last tract is
the first western treatise on parasitology and deserves careful translation and commentary).
He has carefully selected drugs readily obtained from feral areas and then brought to the
marketplace, or, as one would expect, from the common herb gardens; such cultivated plots
included well-known poisons like aconite, the two hellebores, henbane, and the ever-infamous
hemlock, not to mention the commonly employed female contraceptives, pennyroyal and
rue. In both pharmacy and cooking, in the manufacture of perfumes or the flavorings of
37
Alexander of Tralles, Book on Fevers, 7 (ed. T. Puschmann, Alexander von Tralles, 2 vols. [Vienna, 1878 79;
repr. Amsterdam, 1963], 1:426 29, especially formulas and measures, 429).
188 John Scarborough
wine, fresh was a mark of quality, so that out of season would engender the ordinary
assumption of the continual activity of farmers and the rhizotomoi (who were in all likeli-
hood farmers too) who gathered herbs for the market stalls, so nicely recorded by Pollux in
the second century.38
In summary, even a short study reveals food and medicinal sources in the Byzantine
Empire rather well balanced by city and countryside. Wheat, barley, and other long-cultivated
staples continued to be planted and harvested by the traditional farmer, and his stock (whether
pigs, chickens, and so on) contributed the major part of each Byzantine city s food supply.
Herb gardens existed almost in all cities in great numbers, but much of what we know of
Byzantine drugs, condiments, perfume production, and several other luxury products (e.g.,
wine flavorings), and the frequently ignored production of the best grapes for the finest
wines, remained (obviously) products of the country dwellers. In medicinal pharmacy, Byz-
antine root gatherers and farmers at large provided specific herbs, especially out of season,
suggested by the examples of asparagus, the opium poppy, and mandrake.
University of Wisconsin, Madison
38
Pollux, Onomasticon, 5.132 (ed. E. Bethe, Pollucis Onomasticon, 3 vols. [Leipzig, 1900 1937; repr. Stuttgart,
1967], 1:297).
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