Familiar Studies in Homer

by Agnes M. Clerke

And bade the wine outpour, and answering spake again.[[309]]

[309]. Odyssey, iv. 219-32 (Worsley’s translation).

Such is the story which has formed the basis of innumerable conjectures. The name of the drug administered by Helen signifies the negation of sorrow; and we learn that it grew in Egypt, and that its administration was followed by markedly soothing effects. Let us see whither these scanty indications as to its nature will lead us.

Many of the ancients believed nepenthes to have been a kind of bugloss, the leaves of which, infused in wine, were affirmed by Dioscorides, Galen, and other authorities, to produce exhilarating effects. It is certain that in Plutarch’s time the hilarity of banquets was constantly sought to be increased by this means. But this was done in avowed imitation of Helen’s hospitable expedient. It was, in other words, a revival, not a survival, and possesses for us, consequently, none of the instructiveness of an unbroken tradition.

A new idea was struck out by the Roman traveller Pietro della Valle, who visited Persia and Turkey early in the seventeenth century. He suspected the true nepenthean draught to have been coffee! From Egypt, according to the antique narrative, it was brought by Helen; and by way of Egypt the best Mocha reached Constantinople, where it served to recreate the spirits, and pass the heavy hours, of the subjects of Achmet. Of this hypothesis we may say, in the phrase of Sir Thomas Browne, that it is ‘false below confute.’ The next, that of honest Petrus la Seine, has even less to recommend it. His erudite conclusion was that in nepenthes the long-sought aurum potabile, the illusory ornament of the Paracelsian pharmacopœia, made its first historical appearance! Egypt, he argued, was the birthplace of chemistry, and the great chemical desideratum from the earliest times had been the production of a drinkable solution of the most perfect among metals. Nay, its supreme worth had lent its true motive to the famous Argonautic expedition, which had been fitted out for the purpose of securing, not a golden fleece in the literal sense, but a parchment upon which the invaluable recipe was inscribed. The virtues of the elixir were regarded by the learned dissertator as superior to proof or discussion, in which exalted position we willingly leave them.

More enthusiastic than critical, Madame Dacier looked at the subject from a point of view taken up, many centuries earlier, by Plutarch. Nepenthes, according to both these authorities, had no real existence. The effects ascribed to it were merely a figurative way of expressing the charms of Helen’s conversation.

But this was to endow the poet with a subtlety which he was very far from possessing. Simple and direct in thought, he invariably took the shortest way open to him in expression; and circuitous routes of interpretation will invariably lead astray from his meaning. It is clear accordingly that a real drug, of Egyptian origin, was supposed to have soothed and restored appetite to the guests of Menelaus—a drug quite possibly known to Homer only by the rumour of its qualities, which he ingeniously turned to account for the purposes of his story. Now, since those qualities were undoubtedly narcotic, the field of our choice is a narrow one. We have only to inquire whether any, and, if so, what, preparations of the kind were anciently in use by the inhabitants of the Nile valley.

Unfortunately our information does not go very far back. A certain professor of botany from Padua, however, named Prosper Alpinus, has left a remarkable account of his personal observations on the point towards the close of the sixteenth century. The vulgar pleasures of intoxication appear to have been (as was fitting in a Mohammedan country) little in request: among all classes their place was taken by the raptures of solacing dreams and delightful visions artificially produced. The means employed for the purpose were threefold. There was first an electuary of unknown composition imported from India called bernavi. But this may at once be put aside, since the ‘medicine for a mind diseased’ given by Polydamna to Helen was, as we have seen, derived from a home-grown Egyptian herb. There remain of the three soothing drugs mentioned by Alpinus, hemp and opium. Each was extensively consumed; and the practice of employing each as a road to pleasurable sensations was already, in 1580, of immemorial antiquity. One of them was almost certainly the true Homeric nepenthes. We have only to decide which.

The first, as being the cheaper form of indulgence, was mainly resorted to, our Paduan informant tells us, amongst the lower classes. From the leaves of the herb Cannabis sativa was prepared a powder known as assis, made up into boluses and swallowed, with the result of inducing a lethargic state of dreamy beatitude. Assis was fundamentally the same with the Indian bhang, the Arabic hashish—one of the mainstays of Oriental sensual pleasure.

The earliest mention of hemp is by Herodotus. He states that it grew in the country of the Scythians, that from its fibres garments scarcely distinguishable in texture from linen were woven in Thrace, and that the fumes from its burning seeds furnished the nomad inhabitants of what is now Southern Russia, with vapour-baths, serving them as a substitute for washing. Marked intoxicating effects attended this peculiar mode of ablution.