Ancient Botany

Gavin Hardy, Laurence Totelin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781134386789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: History

Gavin Hardy and Laurence Totelin have brought together their botanical and historical knowledge to produce this unique overview of ancient botany. It examines all the founding texts of botanical science, such as Theophrastus' Enquiry into Plants, Dioscorides' Materia Medica, Pliny the Elder's Natural History, Nicolaus of Damascus' On Plants, and Galen' On Simple Remedies, but also includes lesser known texts ranging from the sixth century BCE to the seventh century CE, as well as some material evidence. The authors adopt a thematic approach rather than a chronological one, considering important issues such as the definition of a plant, nomenclature, classifications, physiology, the link between plants and their environment, and the numerous usages of plants in the ancient world. The book also takes care to place ancient botany in its historical, social and economic context. The authors have explained all technical botanical terms and ancient history notions, and as a result, this work will appeal to historians of ancient science, medicine and technology; classicists; and botanists interested in the history of their discipline.

1
Introduction

Even though many authors, both ancient and modern, have composed works about the preparation, powers, and testing of drugs, dear Arius, I shall attempt to show you that it is not a vain and irrational impulse that took hold of me in dealing with this topic. I am doing so because some did not give complete accounts, while others based their writings mostly on [written] enquiries (historias). For instance Iollas of Bithynia and Heracleides of Tarentum touched upon only a small part of the subject, leaving aside completely the botanical tradition (tēn botanikēn paradosin), and they did not mention minerals and spices at all.

(Dioscorides, Materia Medica, preface 1, our emphasis)

1.1 General introduction

We open this book with a passage from Dioscorides, the first-century CE pharmacologist, for several reasons. First, it is one of the rare ancient texts that mentions a botanical tradition (botanikē paradosis), sometimes also referred to as botanikē technē, the botanical art.¹ Dioscorides is here criticising the pharmacologists Iollas (second century BCE, see Jacques 2008b for references) and Heracleides (first century BCE, see Stok 2008b for references) for writing drug recipes without studying that art, without examining plants in any detail. While we conceive of ‘botany’ as a science that deals with all plants, the ancient botanikē technē was the study and application of medicinally active plants. In practice, that covered most plants, since the Greeks and Romans made use of most vegetables for pharmacological purposes. This close association between plant science and medicine perpetuated through the centuries. The Renaissance witnessed the flourishing of ‘physic gardens’, the predecessors of our botanical gardens; and the first chairs of botany in universities were called chairs of materia medica. The science of botany thus had a very pragmatic beginning: it grew out of the knowledge of herbs for medical purposes. In fact, all ancient writings that deal with plants insist on their utility. In this context, drawing a distinction between ‘pure’ botany (i.e. the study of plants for their own sake) and ‘applied’ botany (i.e. the study of plants for practical purposes) is almost meaningless for the ancient world. In the present book, ‘botany’ refers to all technical knowledge of plants, whether it has practical applications or not.

Distinguishing between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ ancient botany, however, has a long history. In 1694, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656–1708) opened his seminal work Elemens de Botanique with the following statement: ‘Botany, the science that deals with plants, has two parts that one must distinguish carefully: knowledge of plants, and knowledge of their powers (virtues)’ (1694: 1, our translation from the French). For the French botanist, the inventor of that first part was the philosopher Theophrastus, while that of the second was the physician Hippocrates. Tournefort did not deny the utility of applied botany, but asserted that the more theoretical part must ‘of necessity precede the study of plant virtues’. The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), for his part, distinguished between botanists and plant collectors (1755: 4). In the early twentieth century, the American botanist and historian of the discipline Edward Lee Greene (1843–1915) gave the following definition of botany:

In the most extended use of the term, all information about the plant world or any part of it is botany. According to this view, all treatises upon agriculture, horticulture, floriculture, forestry, and pharmacy, in so far as they deal with plants and their products, are botanical. What many will consider a better use of the term is more restricted. In this use of it there will be excluded from the category of the properly botanical whatever has no bearing on the philosophy of plant life and form.

(Greene 1909: 7, our emphasis)

Greene then called these two categories ‘botany’ and ‘plant industry’ respectively, recognising that some traces of ‘genuine botany’ can occur in more practical texts. Agnes Arber (1879–1960), the Cambridge botanist, in her history of herbals talked about ‘philosophical and utilitarian’ botany, pointing out, however, the somewhat arbitrary nature of this division (1912: 1). The historian of science Charles Singer (1876–1960), in an important article on ancient herbals, wrote rather scathingly on the two branches of plant lore:

A Herbal is a collection of descriptions of plants put together for medicinal purposes. Most herbal remedies are quite devoid of any rational basis. It may be taken for granted that the writer of a herbal is unable to treat evidence on a scientific basis. He makes a ‘direct attack’ on disease, without any ‘nonsense about theories.’ The herbal is thus to be distinguished from the scientific botanical treatise by the fact that its aims are exclusively ‘practical’ – a vague and foolish word with which, from the days of Plato to our own, men have sought to conceal from themselves and from others their destitution of anything in the nature of general ideas.

(Singer 1927: 1, our emphasis)

No wonder the research into the history of pharmacology lagged behind that of other medical disciplines for so long! To give a final example – the list could go on – the classicist Reinhold Strömberg opens his detailed study of Theophrastus’ botanical writings thus: ‘The beginnings of the Greek research in nature can be divided into two branches: one pertains to natural philosophy and seeks through speculation to explain natural phaenomena; the other pertains to observation, and practically and empirically interprets natural objects’ (1937: 17, our translation from the German).²

The problem with such a division is two-fold. First, it is not an ‘actor’s category’. The ancients would not have divided plant science in such a way; the utility of plants and the submission of the vegetable kingdom to mankind are at the basis of most ancient ‘botanical’ texts. Second, beside Theophrastus’ writings (Enquiry into Plants and Causes of Plant Phaenomena) and Nicolaus of Damascus’ On Plants, no ancient text focuses on what we call ‘pure’ or ‘theoretical’ botany. Theophrastus himself wrote on the topic of what we could term ‘applied botany’: his treatises On Odours (preserved) and On Wine and Oil (lost). Book nine of the Enquiry into Plants, devoted to pharmacological plants, is also quite practical and, as a result of the prejudice against ‘practical botany’ has often been considered spurious (see p. 9). If we focus too much on this theoretical side of ancient plant science, we run the risk of reaching the same conclusions as the historian of botany Robert Harvey-Gibson: ‘After Galen follows an absolute blank; for more than fourteen centuries botany had no history. Theophrastus had to be rediscovered, or rather all that he taught had to be relearnt’ (1919: 10). One of the aims of this book is to redress this claim. There is good botanical expertise in herbals and/or in late-antique texts. In sum, by ‘botany’ in this book we mean ‘the technical knowledge of plants, their names and morphology (form), their classification, their physiology, and their habitats’. We argue that this technical knowledge was quite widespread in the ancient world.

The second reason for choosing this passage of Dioscorides is that he is dismissive of historia, that is, enquiry as contrasted to autopsia, personal observation. In other words, Dioscorides is criticising his predecessors for reading instead of doing fieldwork. Unlike these authors, Dioscorides claimed, he had acquired his botanical knowledge through experience and observation. Now, botanical experience and observation were not the sole preserve of specialist scholars; vital information on plants could be contributed by people at all levels of ancient society, be they woodworkers, country women or mighty kings. Many of these people were illiterate, but their observations and theories were written down by literate authors. At times, these authors may have misinterpreted, unwittingly or consciously, their oral sources. It is always difficult for today’s historians to analyse ancient oral sources through the filter of written texts, but we will nevertheless attempt to point out traces of the ancient oral botanical tradition whenever possible. Nor will we limit our discussion to texts that deal solely with plants; we shall consider works by historians, poets and Jewish authors.

Our main aim, therefore, is to place ancient botany in the social, economic and cultural context of the Greek and Roman world. We choose to present our material thematically rather than chronologically, because there are already many chronological overviews available, although some of them are rather outdated. Among such overviews, we can mention those by the German botanist and physician Kurt Polycarp Joachim Sprengel, Geschichte der Botanik (1807–1808, in two volumes); that by the German botanist Ernst Heinrich Friedrich Meyer, also entitled Geschichte der Botanik (1854–1857, in four volumes, the two first volumes are devoted to the ancient and medieval world); that by the American botanist Edward Lee Greene, Landmarks of Botanical History (1909); and that by Liverpool-based botanist Robert Harvey-Gibson, Outlines of the History of Botany (1919). As is quite clear, the genre of the monumental history of botany has been dominated by botanists rather than historians.³ Here we combine our classical/historical and botanical expertise to provide a thematic approach to ancient botany, although we do offer a – roughly – chronological overview of our main, preserved, sources in this Introduction. We will introduce other written sources that are not fully preserved, as well as sources that mention plants but do not focus on them, in Chapter 2 and throughout the remainder of this book. From a chronological point of view, we will go from the eighth century BCE (date of the writing down of the Homeric poems) to the seventh century CE (which saw the advent of Islam and new influx of botanical knowledge). We have taken into account as much of the secondary literature dealing with ancient plants as possible. It is very extensive and comes from numerous disciplines: history of science, medicine and technology (the branch of scholarship with which Laurence Totelin associates the most); botany (the branch of scholarship with which Gavin Hardy associates the most); classical studies, which deal with editing ancient texts on plants; history of philosophy, which deals with authors such as Aristotle and Theophrastus; ancient history, which studies the economic and social impact of plant exploitation, and the use of plants as foods; literary studies, which examine texts (in particular poems) that describe plants; archaeology, and in particular garden archaeology, which deals with remains of plants found in archaeological context; history of art, which deals with ancient depictions of plants; numismatics, which deals with coins, many of which bear plant depictions; codicology, which deals with manuscripts, some of which are botanical in nature; quaternary science, which deals with the environment of the quaternary period; ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology, which sometimes use history to understand current practices, or to develop new drugs. The study of ancient botany has recently made great advances, in particular with the edition, French translation, and extensive commentary of Theophrastus’ Enquiry into Plants by French scholar Suzanne Amigues (1988a–2006); as well as the translation into English of Dioscorides’ Materia Medica by Lily Beck (2005). Both these works are based on extensive analysis attempting to identify plants listed in ancient texts; they offer the most reliable identifications, although there is still much scope for discussion. Plant identification is often seen as an obstacle in the study of ancient botany. To a cert...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note to the reader
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Acquiring knowledge of plants in the ancient world
• 3 Organising the vegetable kingdom
• 4 Naming, describing and depicting plants in antiquity
• 5 The life of a plant
• 6 Airs, waters and places: plants and their environments in antiquity
• Conclusions: useful and wonderful plants
• Bibliography
• Passages cited
• Index of plants
• General index