Natural History — Book XXII

Pliny the Younger & Pliny the Elder · a new plain-English translation from the Latin

1| Nature and the earth could have filled us with wonder at them, if we considered only the endowments described in the previous volume and so many kinds of plants brought forth for the uses or the pleasures of mankind. But how many more remain, and how much more wonderful to discover! For with those plants, the appeal of food, or of scent or beauty, led for the most part to numerous experiments; the potency of the rest proves that nothing is produced by nature without some more hidden reason.

2| For my part, I also observe that some foreign peoples use certain plants on their bodies for the sake of beauty and by a custom handed down for ever. Among the barbarian peoples, at any rate, the women smear their faces, some with one plant and some with another; and among the Dacians and Sarmatians even the men tattoo their bodies. With a plant like plantago, which in Gaul is called glastum, the wives and daughters-in-law of the Britons smear their whole bodies and go naked in certain rites, imitating the colour of the Ethiopians.

3| We know too that garments are dyed with a wonderful colouring; and, to say nothing of the coccum grain of Galatia, Africa and Lusitania, reserved for the cloaks of commanders, Transalpine Gaul dyes Tyrian purple and conchylium and all the other colours with plants. It does not seek murex in the depths, nor, offering itself as bait to the monsters of the sea while it snatches its prey from them, search shallows untouched even by anchors, to find the means by which a matron may please her lover more easily and a seducer lay snares for a married woman:

4| standing on dry ground, it gathers its dye as it gathers grain. But people complain that it washes out with use; otherwise luxury could have been furnished more brilliantly, and certainly more innocently. It is not our purpose now to pursue these matters, nor shall we be guilty of hemming in luxury with usefulness by suggesting cheaper substitutes, though we shall also say elsewhere that walls are coloured with plants rather than painted with stone. Nor, however, should we have left out the method of dyeing, had it ever been counted among the liberal arts.

5| Meanwhile we shall proceed with greater vigour, and the authority they deserve will be accorded even to the 'deaf', that is, undistinguished, plants. For the founders and builders of the Roman empire too drew something immeasurable from this source, since it was from nowhere else that the sagmina came for public remedies, and the verbenae for sacred rites and embassies. Certainly the same thing is meant by both names, namely grass torn up with its earth from the Citadel; and of the envoys, whenever they were sent to the enemy to make a formal demand, that is, to demand the return of things seized, one was always called the verbenarius.

6| Indeed, no crown was more glorious than the grass crown in the majesty of the people that ruled the world, and among its rewards of glory. Jewelled and golden crowns, crowns of the rampart, of the wall and of the ship's beaks, civic crowns and triumphal crowns ranked after this one, and they all stand far below it, with a great difference.

7| All the others were given by individuals, even by generals and commanders themselves, to soldiers or sometimes to colleagues; the senate, free from the cares of war, and the people at their ease decreed them at triumphs; but the grass crown has never been bestowed except in the utmost desperation, and has never been decreed except by a whole army that has been saved. The other crowns commanders gave; this one alone the soldiers gave to their commander. It is also called the siege crown, when a whole camp has been delivered from a siege and from a dreadful end.

8| And if the honour of the civic crown is held glorious and sacred for saving some single citizen, even the humblest, what then ought we to think of a whole army saved by the valour of one man? This crown was given made of green grass plucked from the spot where someone had saved the besieged. For among the ancients the supreme sign of victory was for the vanquished to hold out grass, that is, to yield up their land, the very soil that nourished them, and even burial in it; a custom which I know still survives among the Germans.

9| Lucius Siccius Dentatus was presented with it once, though he had won fourteen civic crowns and had fought a hundred and twenty times, always victorious. That is how much rarer it is for one saviour to be presented with it by those he has saved. Some commanders were even presented with it more than once, such as Publius Decius Mus, military tribune, once by the army and a second time by those who had been besieged in the outpost. He acknowledged how great the prestige of that honour was by an act of religion: on being presented with it he sacrificed a white ox to Mars, and also the hundred tawny oxen that had been given him at the same time by the besieged for his valour. This Decius later, as consul with Imperiosus as his colleague, devoted himself to death for victory.

10| It was also given by the senate and the Roman people, and I consider no distinction in human affairs loftier than this, to that Fabius who restored the whole Roman state by not fighting. It was not given when he had rescued the master of the horse together with the latter's army (it was then thought better that he should be crowned under a new title, being called 'father' by those he had saved), but he was honoured with it by the consensus I have described when Hannibal had been driven out of Italy. This is the only crown so far placed on a man's head by the hands of the empire itself, and, a thing peculiar to it, the only one given by the whole of Italy.

11| Besides these men, the honour of this crown fell to Marcus Calpurnius Flamma, a military tribune in Sicily, and to only one centurion up to the present time, Gnaeus Petreius of Atina, in the Cimbrian War. Holding the post of chief centurion under Catulus, when his legion had been cut off by the enemy he rallied it, killed his tribune, who was hesitating to break out through the enemy's camp, and led the legion out. I find in the authorities that this same man, besides receiving this honour, offered sacrifice wearing the purple-bordered toga, to the music of a piper at a small brazier set up for the purpose, in the presence of the consuls Marius and Catulus.

12| The dictator Sulla also wrote that he too was presented with it by the army, at Nola, when he was a legate in the Marsic War, and he even had this painted in his villa at Tusculum, which later belonged to Cicero. If that is true, I should call him all the more accursed for it, since by his proscription he tore it from his own head with his own hand, having saved so many fewer citizens than he afterwards killed. Let him add to this glory, too, his arrogant surname Felix; yet he himself, when the proscribed were besieged all over the world, had to yield to Sertorius in respect of this crown.

13| Scipio Aemilianus too, Varro is authority, was given the siege crown in Africa, when Manilius was consul, for having saved 3 cohorts and led out as many again to save them, a thing which the deified Augustus inscribed upon his statues in his own forum. Augustus himself, in the consulship of Marcus Cicero the son, on the Ides of September, the senate presented with the siege crown; so far was the civic crown thought not enough. And apart from these we find no one so honored.

14| There were therefore no fixed herbs for this honor, but whatever had been in the place of the danger, however obscure and unknown, made the honor famous; and that this lies hidden among us I do not so much wonder, seeing that even those things are neglected which concern preserving health, driving off the torments of the body and warding off death. But who would not rightly chastise our manners? Pleasures and luxury have added to the price of living; never was desire of life greater, nor care for it less.

15| We believe that this is the business of others, and that others do it even without our commission, and that physicians have made provision for us against diseases. We ourselves enjoy our pleasures and, than which I judge nothing more shameful, live on the trust of others. Nay more, to most people we are even a laughingstock when we make these investigations, and are charged with trifling work, though it is a great consolation for immense labor to be scorned along with the nature of things, which we shall show certainly did not fail us and has set remedies even in hated herbs, since she has given medicines even to the prickly.

16| For these are what remain nearest of those we named in the preceding book, in which there is no end to admiring and embracing the providence of nature. She had given the soft kinds we have described, pleasing in food; she had painted remedies in the flowers and invited the spirit by the very sight, mixing aid with delights:

17| behold, she devised some bristling in appearance and fierce to the touch, so that we seem almost to hear her very voice as she forms them and gives her reason, lest the greedy four-footed creature graze them away, lest bold hands snatch them, lest neglected feet trample them, lest a bird settling on them break them, protecting them with prickles and arming them with barbs, so that they may be safe and sound for remedies. So even this, which we hate in them, was devised for the sake of men.

18| Foremost among the prickly plants in fame is erynge, or eryngion, which grows against serpents and all poisons. Against stings and bites its root is drunk, in the weight of a drachma, in wine, or, if a fever commonly accompanies such injuries, in water. It is applied to wounds, and is particularly effective against chersydri and frogs. The physician Heraclides thinks that, boiled in goose broth, it is more effective than all other remedies against toxica and aconites.

19| Apollodorus boils it with a frog against toxic poisons, the rest in water. The plant itself is hard, bushy, with thorny leaves and a jointed stalk, a cubit high and sometimes more, one kind whitish, another black, with a fragrant root. It is both cultivated and grows of itself in rough, rocky places, but on the sea shores it is harder and blacker, with the leaf of celery.

20| Of these our countrymen call the white one centum capita. All have the same effect, the stalk and root being taken into the food of the Greeks in either way, whether one likes to cook or to eat it raw. What is reported of it is portentous: that its root bears the likeness of one sex or the other, rarely found, but that if a male one falls to men, they become lovable; on this account Phaon of Lesbos was loved by Sappho, with much about this from the vanity not only of the Magi but also of the Pythagoreans.

21| But in medical use, besides what has been said above, it helps flatulence, colic, faults of the heart, the stomach, the liver, the midriff in honeyed water, the spleen in sour wine, and likewise, in honeyed wine, the kidneys, strangury, opisthotonos, spasms, the loins, the dropsical, epileptics, the menses of women, whether they are held back or abundant, and all faults of the womb. With honey it draws out things stuck in the body. It heals scrofulous swellings, swellings of the parotid glands, boils, and flesh withdrawing from the bones, with salted lard and cerate, and fractures also. Taken beforehand it wards off the sickness of overeating; it stops the bowels. Some of our countrymen have directed that it be gathered at the solstice and applied with rain water to all faults of the neck. Some have reported that, tied on, it heals the white spots of the eyes.

23| There are those who add acanus to eryngion, a thorny, short, broad herb with broader thorns. This, applied, wonderfully stops blood.

24| Others have falsely thought eryngen and glycyrrhiza to be the same, for which reason it is relevant to add it at once. It too is undoubtedly among the prickly plants, with spiny leaves, rich and gummy to the touch, bushy, two cubits high, with a flower like the hyacinth's and fruit of the size of the little balls of the plane. The best is in Cilicia, second in Pontus, with a sweet root, and this alone in use.

25| It is taken at the setting of the Pleiades, long, juicy like lycium, of a box-wood color; the better is the black, and that which is tough rather than that which is brittle. It is used, boiled down to a third, in the things put under the tongue, and the rest to the thickness of honey; sometimes also pounded, in which manner it is applied to wounds and all faults of the throat, and is most useful for the voice, its juice so thickened being put under the tongue, and likewise for the chest and liver. By this, we have said, thirst and hunger are allayed;

26| on that account some have called it adipson and have given it to the dropsical so that they may not thirst. Therefore, chewed, it is a mouth remedy for sores of the mouth; sprinkled on, it is often good for pterygia too. It heals scab of the bladder, pains of the kidneys, condylomata, sores of the genitals. Some have given it to drink in quartan fevers in the weight of two drachmas, with pepper, in a hemina of water. Chewed, it stops blood from a wound. There are those who have reported that stones are driven out by it.

27| Of tribulus one kind grows in gardens, another only in rivers. A juice is collected from them for eye medicines; for it is of a cooling nature and therefore useful against inflammations and gatherings. Ulcers breaking out of themselves, especially in the mouth, it heals with honey, and the tonsils likewise. Drunk, it breaks stones. The Thracians who live by the Strymon fatten horses on the leaves of tribulus, and themselves live on the kernel, making a very sweet bread, which constrains the belly. The root, gathered in chastity and purity, disperses scrofulous swellings; the seed, tied on, relieves the pains of varicose veins; pounded and sprinkled in water, it kills fleas.

28| Stoebe, which some call pheon, boiled in wine, cures especially suppurating ears, as well as eyes bloodied by a blow; poured in, it also helps hemorrhage and dysentery.

29| Hippophaes in sandy places by the sea has white thorns, is clustered in the manner of ivy, with whitish berries, in part reddening. The root is moist with a juice, which is stored either by itself or in lozenges of ervum meal. It draws off bile in the weight of an obol, most wholesomely with honeyed wine. There is another hippophaes, without stalk, without flower, with only small leaves. Its juice too is wonderfully good for the dropsical.

30| They ought to be suited also to the nature of horses, and not to have taken their name for any other reason. For some are born for the remedies of animals, with a divinity rich in producing defenses, so that there is no end to admiring the genius of her who arranges aids by kinds, by causes, by times, so that one thing helps in some hours and another in others, and almost no day is found without protections.

31| What can be more hated than the nettle? Yet it, apart from the oil which we said is made from it in Egypt, teems with very many remedies. Nicander affirms its seed to be contrary to hemlock, and to mushrooms, and to quicksilver; Apollodorus, that, cooked with tortoise broth, it is contrary to salamanders, and likewise to hyoscyamus and to serpents and scorpions. Indeed that very biting bitterness, by touch, forces the prolapsed uvula in the mouth, and the womb, and the seat of infants, to spring back, and the lethargic to wake when their legs, and more their forehead, are touched with it.

32| The same, with salt added, cures the bites of dogs; pounded and put into the nostrils it stops blood, and more so the root. With salt mixed in, it heals cancers and foul ulcers, and likewise dislocations and boils, swellings of the parotid glands, and flesh withdrawing from the bones. The seed, drunk with boiled-down must, opens the womb in those suffering suffocation. Applied, it stops fluxes of the nostrils. Taken after dinner in honeyed water it makes vomiting easy, in a dose of two obols, but one drunk in wine restores weariness.

33| For faults of the womb it is given roasted, in a measure of an acetabulum; drunk in boiled-down must, it resists flatulence of the stomach. It benefits those who struggle for breath, with honey, and clears the chest with the same electuary, and cures the side, with flaxseed. They add hyssop and a little pepper. It is applied to the spleen; roasted, it softens a difficult belly when taken in food.

34| Hippocrates declares that the womb is cleaned by drinking it, that pain is relieved by the roasted seed in a measure of an acetabulum, drunk in sweet wine and applied with juice of mallow, that the animals of the intestines are driven out with hydromel and salt, and that falling of the hair is made handsome again by the seed applied. For joint diseases and for the gouty very many apply it with old oil, or the leaves pounded with bear's fat. For the same purposes the root, pounded with vinegar, is no less useful, likewise for the spleen; boiled in wine it disperses boils, with old salted lard. The same, dry, is a depilatory.

35| Its praises were set down by the natural philosopher Phanias, who declared it most useful boiled or seasoned as food for the windpipe, cough, catarrh of the belly, stomach, boils, swellings of the parotid glands, chilblains; with oil it brings sweat, boiled with shellfish it moves the bowels, with barley gruel it clears the chest and the menses of women, and with salt it checks ulcers that spread.

36| Its juice too is in use. Pressed out and applied to the forehead, it stops bleeding of the nose; drunk, it stirs the urine, breaks stones, and when gargled restrains the uvula. The seed should be gathered at harvest. The Alexandrian is most praised. For all of these the milder and tender kinds are effective, but above all that wild one, and in addition it removes leprosies from the face when drunk in wine. If a four-footed female will not conceive, they show that nettle should be rubbed on the private parts.

37| That also which we called lamium among their kinds, very mild and with leaves that do not sting, cures, with a grain of salt, bruises and blows, burns, scrofulous swellings, tumors, gout, wounds. It has a white spot in the middle of the leaf, which cures erysipelas.

38| Some of our people have distinguished the kinds by season, and have reported that the root of the autumn nettle, tied on in tertian fevers in such a way that the sick are named when the root is dug up, and it is said for whom, and for the son of which parents, it is taken out, frees them of the disease; and that this same is effective also against quartans. The same say that, with salt added, the root of nettle draws out things stuck in the body, and that the leaves with lard disperse scrofulous swellings or, if they have suppurated, eat them out and fill them.

39| The herb scorpio took its name from its appearance. For it has a seed like the tail of a scorpion, and few leaves. It is of force against the creature of its name. There is another of the same name and effects, without leaves, with a stalk like asparagus, having a sting at the tip, and from that its name.

40| Leucacantha some call phyllon, others ischas, others polygonaton, with a root like cypirus, which, chewed, calms pains of the teeth, likewise of the sides and loins, as Hicesius reports, the seed being drunk in a dose of eight drachmas, or the juice. The same cures ruptures and convulsions.

41| Helxine some call perdicium, because partridges feed on it especially; others call it sideritis, some parthenium. It has leaves of a mixed likeness to plantago and horehound, dense stalks, slightly reddening, and seeds in burr-like heads clinging to clothes, from which they would have it called helxine. But what the true helxine is we have said in the previous book.

42| This one dyes wool, and heals erysipelas, tumors and all gatherings, and burns, and boils. Its juice with psimithium treats erysipelas and throats beginning to swell, and, drunk in a cyathus, old cough and all moist ailments, such as the tonsils and the ears, with rose oil. It is applied to the gouty with goat suet and Cyprian wax.

43| Perdicium, or parthenium, or sideritis too, is another; our countrymen call it herba urceolaris, others astercum; it is like ocimum in leaf, only darker, growing on tiles and old walls. With a grain of salt, pounded, it cures all the things that lamium does, and in the same manner; likewise abscesses of the lungs, the juice being warmed and drunk; but it is unique against sprains, ruptures, falls and headlong tumbles, such as upsets of carriages.

44| A house-born slave dear to Pericles, first citizen of the Athenians, when he was building the temple on the citadel and had crept up over the height of the pediment and fallen from there, is said to have been healed with this herb, shown to Pericles in a dream by Minerva; wherefore it began to be called parthenium and is assigned to that goddess. This is the house-slave whose likeness was cast in bronze, and that famous splanchnoptes.

45| Some call chamaeleon ixia. Of it there are two kinds: the whiter has rougher leaves, creeps on the ground raising its thorns like a hedgehog, with a sweet root and a heavy scent. In certain places it produces a white viscum under the armpits of the leaves, chiefly around the time the Dog Star rises, in the way frankincense is said to be born, whence also it is called ixia. Women use this as mastic. That it is called chamaeleon comes from the variety of its leaves; for it changes colors with the ground, here black, there green, elsewhere blue, elsewhere saffron and other colors.

46| Of these the white heals the dropsical by the juice of the boiled root; a drachma is drunk in raisin wine. It expels also the animals of the intestines, a measure of an acetabulum of the same juice in sharp wine with brooms of origanum. It is good for difficulty of urination. This juice kills dogs and pigs, put in pearl barley with water and oil added; it draws mice to it and kills them, unless they at once drink water. Some direct that its root be cut up and kept hanging on cords, and boiled in food against the fluxes the Greeks call rheumatisms.

47| Of the black, some have called the one with a purple flower male, and the one with a violet flower female; but they grow with one stalk a cubit long, the thickness of a finger. By their roots lichens are cured, boiled together with sulphur and bitumen, and loose teeth when chewed or boiled in vinegar. By the juice they heal scab, also of four-footed beasts. It kills also the ticks of dogs, and young oxen as in quinsy, whence some call it ulophyton, and also cynozolon for the heaviness of its smell. They report this too to bear a viscum most useful for ulcers. The roots of all its kinds are hostile to scorpions.

48| Coronopus is an oblong herb with clefts. It is sometimes sown, since its root, roasted in ashes, does excellent service for coeliac troubles. The root of anchusa also is in use, the thickness of a finger. It splits like papyrus and stains the hands with a blood-red color; it prepares wool for costly colors. It heals ulcers in cerate, especially those of the old, and burns likewise. It cannot be dissolved in water, but dissolves in oil, and this is the test of the pure.

49| A drachma of it in drink is also given for pains of the kidneys, in wine, or, should fever be present, in a decoction of balanus; likewise for faults of the liver and spleen and those suffused with bile. It is applied with vinegar to leprosies and freckles. The leaves, pounded with honey and meal, are applied to sprains, and drunk in honeyed wine in a dose of two drachmas they stop the bowels. The root boiled in water is reported to kill fleas.

50| There is another like it, called for that reason pseudoanchusa, but by some echis or doris and many other names, woollier and less fat, with thinner leaves, more drooping. Its root in oil does not pour out a reddening juice, and by this it is distinguished from anchusa. It is most effective against serpents, in a drink of the leaves or seed. The leaves are applied to stings. The smell drives away serpents. It is drunk also for a thorn. The Magi direct that its leaf be plucked with the left hand, and that it be said for whom it is taken, and tied on in tertian fevers.

51| There is another herb also with the proper name onochilon, which some call anchusa, others archebion, others onochelis, some rhexia, many enchrysa, a small shrub with a purple flower, rough leaves and branches, a root bloodred at harvest and otherwise black, growing in sandy places, effective against serpents and most of all vipers, with root and leaves, alike in food and drink. It has its strength at harvest. The leaves, pounded, give the smell of cucumber. It is given in three cyathi for a prolapsed womb.

52| It drives out tapeworms also, with hyssop, and for pain of the kidneys or liver it is drunk in honeyed water, if there is fever, but if not, in wine. The root is applied to freckles and leprosies. Those who have it are said not to be struck by serpents. There is also another like it, with a red flower, smaller, and itself for the same uses, and they say that if it is chewed and spat upon a serpent, the serpent dies.

53| Anthemis is celebrated with great praises by Asclepiades. Some call it leucanthemis, others leucanthemum, others eranthemis, because it flowers in spring; others chamaemelon, because it has the smell of an apple. Some call it melanthion. Its three kinds differ only in the leaf; not going beyond a palm's height, and with small leaves [….] of rue, white or apple-coloured or purple. It is gathered in spring on lean soil or beside footpaths and stored away for garlands. At the same season physicians also pound the leaves into lozenges, and likewise the flower and the root. All of them mixed together are given in a dose of one drachma against the stings of all serpents. They expel dead foetuses, and in a drink bring on the menses, urine and stones; applied, they relieve swellings, disorders of the liver, and bile spread beneath the skin and aegilopia; chewed, they heal weeping ulcerous eruptions. Of all these kinds the most effective for stones is the one that has a purple flower, in which the leaves and the shrub are rather large. Some call this one in particular eranthemis.

55| Those who think that the lotos is only a tree can be refuted even on the authority of Homer. For among the herbs growing up for the delight of the gods he named the lotos first. Its leaves with honey disperse scars of the eyes, argema and small clouds.

56| There is also the lotometra, which comes from the sown lotos, from whose seed, like crumbling millet, shepherds in Egypt make loaves, kneaded especially with water or milk. It is said that nothing is more wholesome or lighter than that bread, so long as it is warm. When cooled it is digested with more difficulty and becomes heavy. It is agreed that those who live on it are troubled neither by dysentery nor by tenesmus nor by other diseases of the belly. For that reason it is counted among their remedies.

57| The marvel of the heliotropium, which turns itself around with the sun even on a cloudy day, we have often mentioned; so great is its love of the star. At night, as if from longing, it draws in its blue flower. It has two kinds, the tricoccum and the helioscopium.

58| The latter is taller, although neither exceeds half a foot in height, and is branched from the lowest root. The seed is gathered in a little pod at harvest time. It grows only in rich soil, and above all cultivated soil; the tricoccum grows everywhere. I find that if it is boiled it is pleasing in food, and that in milk it loosens the bowels more agreeably, and that if the juice of the boiled plant is drunk it purges most effectively. The juice of the larger kind is taken in summer at the sixth hour and mixed with wine, which makes it stronger.

59| Mixed with rosaceum, it calms headaches. The juice of the leaf with salt removes warts, whence our people called it the wart herb, though it deserves to be named from other effects. For it also resists serpents and scorpions, taken in wine or honeyed water, as Apollophanes and Apollodorus report. The leaves applied relieve catarrhs of infants, which they call siriasis, and likewise contractions, even when this happens in the manner of the falling sickness. It is also very wholesome to bathe the mouth with the decoction. Drunk, it expels tapeworms and the gravel of the kidneys. If cumin is added, it breaks stones. It should be boiled with the root, which with the leaves and goat's tallow is smeared on gouty limbs.

60| The other kind, which we have called tricoccum and which is called by another name scorpiuron, has leaves that are smaller, and that also bend down toward the ground. Its seed has the shape of a scorpion's tail, whence the name. Its power is against all venomous creatures and phalangia, but especially against scorpions when applied. Those who carry it are not struck, and if someone draws a circle on the ground with a sprig of heliotropium, they say the scorpion does not go out of it; and if the herb is laid on it, or if it is so much as sprinkled with the wet herb, it dies at once. Four grains of the seed drunk are said to help in quartan fevers, and three in tertian, or if the herb itself, carried around three times, is placed under the head.

61| The seed also stimulates sexual desire, and with honey disperses panos. This heliotropium in particular pulls out warts by the root, and growths in the seat. The seed, applied and drunk, boiled in cock's broth or with beet and lentil, also draws out the corrupted blood of the spine and loins. The husk of the seed restores colour to bruised places. The Magi order that in quartan fevers heliotropium be tied on four times, in tertian three times, by the sick man himself, and that he pray to it that he will untie the knots once freed, and that he lie down without removing the herb.

62| Another marvel belongs to the adiantum: it is green in summer, does not wither in winter, repels water, and when sprinkled or dipped is like something dry (so great a separation is detected), whence its name, given by the Greeks to what is otherwise an ornamental shrub. Some call it callitrichon, others polytrichon, both from its effect. For it dyes the hair, and for this it is boiled in wine with celery seed added and a good deal of oil, to make the hair curly and thick; it also prevents it from falling out.

63| It has two kinds: the paler, and the black and shorter. The one that is larger, the polytrichon, some call trichomanes. The twigs of both shine with a black colour, and have leaves like fern, of which the lower are rough and dark, and all of them on opposite stalks, crowded facing one another; there is no root. It seeks shady rocks, the spray on walls, above all the caves of springs, and dripping stones, which is a wonder, since it does not feel water.

64| It expels stones from the body, and breaks them, wonderfully, especially the black one; for that reason, rather than because it grew on rocks, I should believe it was called saxifragum by our people. It is drunk in wine, as much as three fingers can pluck. They provoke urine, resist the poisons of serpents and spiders, and boiled in wine stop the bowels. A garland of them calms headaches. Against the bites of the scolopendra they are applied, to be removed often so that they do not burn; the same is done for alopecias. They disperse scrofulous swellings, scurf on the face, and weeping ulcers of the head.

65| A decoction of these is good for asthmatics, and for the liver and spleen, and for those with bile spread beneath the skin, and for dropsy. They are applied for strangury, and for the kidneys with wormwood. They bring on the afterbirth and the menses. Drunk in vinegar or in bramble juice they stop blood. Infants who have sores are also anointed with them together with rosaceum and wine. (The rank juice of the leaf, ground up in the urine of a boy not yet grown and applied with aphronitrum to the belly of women, is said to ensure that it does not become wrinkled.) They think that partridges and cocks become more pugnacious if these are added to their food, and that they are most useful to cattle.

66| Picris is named from its remarkable bitterness, as we have said; it has a round leaf. It removes warts excellently. Thesium also has a not dissimilar bitterness, but it purges the bowels, and for that use it is ground up in water.

67| Asphodelum is among the most famous of herbs, so that some have called it heroion; Hesiod said that it also grows in woods, and Dionysius that there is a male and a female. For wasted bodies and consumptives it is agreed that its bulbs boiled with tisana are most suitably given, and that bread made from them kneaded with flour is very wholesome. Nicander also prescribed, against serpents and scorpions, the stalk (which we have called anthericum), or else the seed or the bulbs, in wine, at three drachmas, and spread it beneath sleepers as a safeguard against these fears.

68| It is given also against marine venomous creatures and against land scolopendras. Snails in Campania pursue that stalk wonderfully and dry it up by sucking. The leaves too are applied in wine to the wounds made by venomous creatures. The bulbs, pounded with polenta, are applied to sinews and joints. It is also good to rub lichens with them cut up in vinegar, and likewise to lay them in water on putrefying ulcers, and on inflammations of the breasts and testicles.

69| Boiled in wine lees, they treat the epiphorae of the eyes, a small linen cloth being placed beneath. In almost any disease they use them boiled rather than raw; likewise for foul ulcers of the shins and for cracks of the body in any part, as a meal of the dried bulbs. They are gathered in autumn, when they are at their strongest. The juice too, pressed out of the pounded or boiled bulbs, with honey is useful for bodily pain, and the same with dry iris and a little salt for those who aim at a pleasant body odour.

70| The leaves, boiled in wine, treat both the conditions mentioned above and scrofulous swellings, panos, and ulcers on the face. The ash of the root corrects alopecias and cracks of the feet and the seat; the juice of the root boiled in oil treats chilblains and burns and heaviness of the ears, and is poured in from the opposite ear for toothache. The root drunk in moderation is good also for urine and the menses and pains of the side, and likewise for ruptures, convulsions and coughs, drunk in wine at the weight of a drachma. The same, chewed, also helps vomiting.

71| If the seed is taken, the belly is disturbed. Chrysermus cured parotid swellings with the root boiled in wine, and scrofulous swellings with it mixed with cachrys in wine. Some say that if the root is applied and part of it hung in smoke, and is taken down on the fourth day, the scrofulous swelling dries up together with the root. Diocles used it for gout in both ways, cooked and raw, and for chilblains boiled in oil; he gave it also to those with bile spread beneath the skin, in wine, and to dropsy sufferers. They have reported also that sexual desire is stirred in those who are anointed with it, or drink it, with wine and honey.

72| Xenocrates says that lichens, psorae and leprae are removed by the root boiled in vinegar, and likewise by the juice with hyoscyamus and liquid pitch, and also the ailments of the armpits and thighs; and that the hair becomes curlier, the head having first been shaved, if it is rubbed with that root; Simos says that the stones of the kidneys are expelled by the root boiled and drunk in wine. Hippocrates thinks that the seed should be given for attacks of the spleen. The root applied, or the juice of the boiled root, also restores hair to the sores and mange of beasts of burden. By the same, mice are driven away, and if their burrow is stopped up they die.

73| Some have supposed that asphodelum was called halimon by Hesiod, which I think false; for halimon has its own name, and it is itself the subject of no small confusion among authors. For some say that it is a dense shrub, white, without thorns, with leaves of the olive but softer; that these are cooked for the sake of food, and that by the root, drunk in honeyed water at the weight of a drachma, gripings are dispersed, and likewise ruptures and convulsions.

74| Others have said that it is a salty sea vegetable, whence the name, with leaves long in roundness, praised as food. Moreover, there are two kinds, wild and gentler, and either is good for dysenterics, even ulcerated ones, with bread, and for the stomach with vinegar. They say that it is applied raw to old ulcers, and soothes the violent pain of fresh wounds and the pains of sprained feet and of the bladder. The wild kind has thinner leaves, but in the same remedies its effects are greater, as also in curing the mange of men and cattle.

75| Besides, a gloss comes to the body and whiteness to the teeth if they are rubbed with that root, and thirst is not felt if the seed is put under the tongue. It is also eaten, and both kinds are even pickled. Crateuas has reported a third kind too, with longer and hairier leaves, with the smell of cypress, growing chiefly under ivy, good for opisthotonos and contractions of the sinews, at three obols to a sextarius of water.

76| Of acanthus, an ornamental and city herb with a broad long leaf that clothes the edges of borders and the swellings of rising cushions of ground, there are two kinds: the prickly and the curly, which is shorter; the other is smooth, which some call paederos, others melamphyllum. Its roots are wonderfully good for burns and sprains, likewise for ruptures and convulsions, and for those who fear consumption, taken as food boiled, especially with tisana. They are also applied to gouty limbs, pounded and warmed, hot with salt.

77| Bupleuron the Greeks count among the vegetables that grow wild; it has a stalk a cubit high, many long leaves, and a head like dill. It is praised as food by Hippocrates, and in medicine by Glaucon and Nicander. The seed is effective against serpents. The leaves, or the juice in wine, they apply to bring on the afterbirth in women, and for scrofulous swellings the leaves with salt and wine. The root is given against serpents in wine, and to provoke urine.

78| Buprestis, with great inconsistency, the Greeks have counted among the praises of foods, and the same people have handed down remedies for it as if against poison. The very name is evidence that it is certainly poison for oxen, which they admit burst open when they have tasted it. For that reason I shall say no more about this either. As if there were any reason to point out poisons among the garlands of grass! Unless to someone it seems worth seeking for the sake of lust, which they think is not otherwise kindled more than by drinking it.

79| Elaphoboscon is like a giant fennel, jointed, the thickness of a finger, with seed in hanging clusters like that of sili, but not bitter, and the leaves of olusatrum. This too is praised as food (it is even kept longer when pickled), for provoking urine, for calming pains of the side, for healing ruptures and convulsions, for dispersing swellings and colic gripings, and against the stings of serpents and of all creatures that sting, since the report is that stags with this fodder resist serpents. The root, with nitrum added, applied also heals fistulas, but for this use it must first be dried so that it is not moist with its own juice, which does not make it worse against the stings of serpents.

80| Scandix also the Greeks place among wild vegetables, as Ophion and Erasistratus report. Likewise, boiled, it stops the bowels, and the seed immediately calms hiccups, with vinegar. It is applied to burns, and provokes urine. The juice of the boiled plant is good for the stomach, liver, kidneys and bladder. This is what Aristophanes jokingly throws at the poet Euripides: that his mother sold not even a lawful vegetable, but scandix.

81| The same was enthryscum, if it had more tender and sweeter-smelling leaves. Its particular praise is that it comes to the aid of a body wearied by sexual intercourse, and rouses to intercourse men already languishing with age. It stops the white discharges of women.

82| Iasine too is counted a wild vegetable, creeping on the ground, with much milk, bearing a white flower; they call it conchylium. And its recommendation is the same, for stimulating intercourse. Raw, in vinegar, in food, it provides women with abundance of milk. It is beneficial to those who feel the onset of consumption. Applied to the heads of infants, it nourishes the hair and makes the skin of the head firmer.

83| Caucalis is also eaten, like fennel, with a short stalk and white flower, good for the heart. Its juice too is drunk, highly recommended for the stomach and for expelling urine, stones and gravel, and for itching of the bladder. It reduces the phlegm of the spleen, the liver and the kidneys. The seed helps the menses of women and dries up the bile after childbirth. It is given also to men against discharges of the seed. Chrysippus thinks it contributes much to conception. It is drunk in wine by those fasting. It is also applied against the poisons of marine creatures, as Petrichus indicates in his poem.

84| To these they add sium also, broader than celery, growing in water, richer and darker, abundant in seed, with the taste of nasturtium. It is good for urine, kidneys, spleen and the menses of women, whether taken itself as food, or the broth of it boiled, or the seed in wine at two drachmas. It breaks stones and resists the waters that produce them. Poured in, it is good for dysenterics; applied, for freckles, and for the ailments of women's faces, applied at night; and with lomentum it improves the skin and soothes ramices, and the mange of horses too.

85| Sillybum, like the white chamaeleon, equally thorny, is not thought worth cooking even in Cilicia or Syria or Phoenicia, where it grows. So laborious, it is reported, is its cookery. In medicine it has no use.

86| Scolymus also the East takes into its foods, and by another name calls it limonia. It is a shrub never higher than a cubit, forbidding with the spines of its leaves, with a black but sweet root, praised even by Eratosthenes in a poor man's dinner. It is reported especially to provoke urine, to heal lichens and leprae in vinegar, and to stimulate sexual desire in wine, with Hesiod and Alcaeus as witnesses, who wrote that when it is in flower the cicadas have their shrillest song, and women are most greedy of lust and men most sluggish for intercourse, as if by the foresight of nature this help were then most potent.

87| Likewise, the foul smell of the armpits is corrected by an ounce of the root with its pith removed, boiled down to one third in three heminae of Falernian wine and drunk one cyathus at a time by the fasting person after the bath, and likewise after food. It is a marvel, what Xenocrates promises from experience, that this fault flows away from the armpits through the urine.

88| Sonchos is also eaten (as that which Hecale in Callimachus sets before Theseus), both the white and the black. Both are like lettuces, except that they are thorny, with a stalk a cubit high, angular, hollow inside, but which when broken stays full of abundant milk. The white, whose gloss comes from the milk, is useful for those with orthopnoea, in the manner of lettuces, from the embamma. Erasistratus shows that stones are expelled through the urine by it, and that foul breath is corrected when it is chewed.

89| The juice, in a measure of three cyathi, warmed in white wine and oil, helps childbirth so that pregnant women walk after drinking it. It is given also in a gruel. The stalk itself, boiled, produces abundance of milk in nurses and a better colour in infants, and is most useful to those who feel their milk curdling. The juice is dropped into the ears, and warm it is drunk in strangury in the measure of a cyathus, and, where the stomach is gnawed by pain, with cucumber seed and pine kernels.

90| It is applied also to collections in the seat. It is drunk against serpents and scorpions, and the root is applied. The same, boiled in oil with the calyx of the pomegranate, is a safeguard in diseases of the ears. All this is said of the white. Cleemporus forbids eating the black, as causing diseases, agreeing about the white. Agathocles also shows its juice against the blood of the bull, though it is agreed that the black has a cooling power, and for this reason is to be applied with polenta. Zenon recommends the root of the white in strangury.

91| Condrion, or condrille, has the leaves of endive, like gnawed ones, a stalk less than a foot, wet with a bitter juice, and a root like a bean, sometimes numerous. Next to the ground it has a mastiche with a little knob like a bean, which, applied, is said to draw down the menses of women. The whole, pounded with the roots, is divided into lozenges against serpents, on a probable argument, since field mice that have been hurt by these are said to eat this plant. The juice of it boiled in wine stops the bowels. The same, in place of gum, most effectively sets in order the most disordered hairs of the eyelids. Dorotheus in his poems pronounced it useful to the stomach and to digestion. Otherwise they have thought it hostile to women, to the eyes, and to the generation of men.

92| Among the things that are eaten heedlessly I should rightly place boleti too, a rich food indeed, but brought into disrepute by an immense example, poison having been given by this means to the emperor Tiberius Claudius by his wife Agrippina, by which deed she gave to the world another poison, and to herself above all her Nero. The poisons of some of them are easily recognized by a diluted redness, a rancid look, a livid colour within, a cracked streak, and a pale rim around the edge.

93| These signs are not present in some, and these, dry and looking like the genuine kind, carry, as it were, white drops on the top from their own covering. For the earth first produces a volva for this purpose, and the boletus itself afterwards within the volva, as the yolk is in an egg. Nor is the covering less welcome in the food of the infant boletus. This is broken when it first comes up, and soon, as it grows, is consumed into the body of the stalk; and it is rare for a twin to grow from one foot.

94| The first origin and cause is from the mud and sourish juice of moist earth, or from a root, usually of an acorn-bearing tree; at the beginning there is a rather sticky foam, then a body like a membrane, soon the offspring, as we have said. How many different signs there are for proving those deadly ones! If the nail of a shoemaker's boot, or some rust of iron, or the mouldiness of cloth was present at its birth, who but countrymen, and the gatherers themselves, can have found that every alien juice and flavour is immediately concocted into poison?

95| Other faults not even these can detect, if the lair of a serpent has been nearby, if it has breathed on the boletus as it first opens, since its kinship with poisons makes it apt to take up the venom. It would therefore be advisable to be on guard before the serpents hide themselves. The signs will be so many herbs, so many trees and shrubs, from their emerging up to the hiding place, remaining green, and even the leaves of the ash alone neither growing afterwards nor falling before. And boleti indeed have their whole rising and setting within seven days.

96| The nature of fungi is slower and the kinds numerous, but their origin is only from the phlegm of trees. The safest are those that are red with a thick skin, with a less diluted redness than boleti; next the white, with a stalk marked like the cap of a flamen; the third kind is the suilli, most suited to poisons. Recently they have killed households and whole banquets, Annaeus Serenus, prefect of Nero's watch, and tribunes and centurions.

97| What pleasure is there in so doubtful a food? Some have distinguished them by the kinds of trees, approving those from the fig, the giant fennel and gum-bearing trees, but not likewise those from the yew, the oak or the cypress, as we have said. But who vouches for these things in the market? The colour of all is livid; this will have its evidence of poison, the more it resembles the bark of trees. Against these we have spoken of remedies and shall speak;

98| meanwhile there are some remedies in them too. Glaucias thinks boleti useful to the stomach. Suilli are dried hung up, pierced through with a rush, such as come from Bithynia. These treat flowings of the belly, which they call rheumatismoi, and fleshy growths in the seat; for they diminish them and in time consume them, likewise freckles and the ailments of women's faces. They are even washed, like lead, for use in medicines for the eyes. For foul ulcers and eruptions of the head and the bites of dogs they are applied in water.

99| It is a pleasure also to give some observations common to all this kind in cooking, since the gourmets themselves prepare this food alone with their own hands and feast beforehand on the thought of it, with amber knives or silver equipment accompanying. Harmful will be the fungi that become harder in cooking; more harmless those cooked with nitrum added, at any rate if they are cooked thoroughly. They become safer cooked with meat or with the stalk of a pear tree; pears also help if eaten at once. And the nature of vinegar, contrary to them, overcomes them.

100| All these come with rains; with rain too silphium first came, as has been said. From Syria it is now chiefly imported, inferior to the Parthian, but better than the Median, all the Cyrenaic having been destroyed, as we said. The use of silphium in medicine is of the leaves, for purging the womb and expelling dead foetuses; they are boiled in white, fragrant wine, to be drunk in the measure of an acetabulum after the baths. The root is good for roughened windpipes, and is applied to collections of blood. But in foods it is digested with difficulty, causes swellings and belching. It is harmful also to urine; it is a great friend, with wine and oil, to bruises, and with wax to scrofulous swellings. Warts of the seat fall off from frequent fumigation with it.

101| Laser, flowing from silphium in the way we described, counted among the choice gifts of nature, is put into very many compounds; by itself, however, it warms chills, and drunk it thins disorders of the sinews. It is given to women in wine, and applied to the womb on soft wool to bring on the menses. Mixed with wax, it draws out corns of the feet that have been cut around with iron. Dissolved in a quantity the size of a chickpea, it provokes urine.

102| Andreas promises that when taken in fairly large amount it does not cause swellings and contributes very greatly to digestion in old men and women, and likewise that it is more useful in winter than in summer, and then for those who drink water. One must take care that there is no ulceration within. For recovery from sickness it is effective in food; for given in good time it has the force of cautery, more useful even to those accustomed to it than to those without experience of it.

103| Its effects on the exterior of the body have undoubted testimony: drunk, it extinguishes the poisons of missiles and serpents; with water it is smeared around these wounds, but only on the blows of scorpions with oil; on ulcers that do not ripen, with barley meal or dried fig; on carbuncles, spread over them with rue or with honey or by itself with birdlime so that it sticks; so too for the bites of a dog; for growths around the seat, boiled with the rind of a pomegranate in vinegar; for the corns commonly called morticina, mixed with nitrum.

104| It fills alopecias that have first been worked over with nitrum, using wine and saffron or pepper and mouse dung and vinegar. It treats chilblains in wine, and boiled in oil; so applied it is put also on a callus, the corns of the feet having been pared down. It is of especial use against bad waters and pestilential regions or days; in cough, and for the uvula; for old suffusion of bile, for the dropsical, for hoarseness; for it purges the throat at once and restores the voice.

105| Gout it relieves, dissolved in vinegar-water on a sponge. To pleurisy patients who are about to drink wine, it is given in a gruel; to those with contractions and opisthotonos, smeared around with wax, to the size of a chickpea. In angina it is used as a gargle. To those who pant, and in an old cough, it is given with leek in vinegar; with vinegar also to those who have swallowed curdled milk, for wasting disorders of the midriff, with wine for epileptics, in honeyed water for paralysis of the tongue. For sciatica and pains of the loins it is applied with boiled honey.

106| I should not recommend what the authorities advise, that it be put in the hollows of teeth in pain and sealed in with wax, given the great experience of a man who for this reason threw himself down from a height. For it inflames bulls when smeared on their nostrils, and mixed with wine it bursts serpents, which are most greedy for wine; therefore I should not advise anointing with it either, though they prescribe it with Attic honey. What uses it has mixed with others is immense to relate, and we treat simples, since in these nature is evident, while in the others there is conjecture, more often deceptive, no one having kept sufficiently the harmony and the conflict of nature in mixtures. More on this matter shortly.

107| The authority of honey would be no lower in price than that of laser, were it not produced everywhere. Nature herself made the latter, but for producing honey, as we have said, an animal; its uses are countless, if we count how often it is mixed. First, the propolis of the hives, of which we have spoken, draws out stings and everything lodged in the body, disperses tumours, ripens hard swellings, soothes pains of the sinews, and closes into a scar ulcers already despaired of.

108| The nature of honey itself is such that it does not allow bodies to putrefy. With a pleasant taste, not harsh, unlike the nature of salt, it is most useful for the throat, the tonsils, angina and all desires of the mouth, and for the tongue drying in fevers; further, boiled, for sufferers from peripneumonia and pleurisy, and likewise for wounds, for those struck by a serpent and against poisons and fungi, and for paralytics in mulsum, although the endowments of mulsum are established in their own right. Honey is dropped into the ears with rosaceum, and kills nits and the foul vermin of the head.

109| The use of honey that has been skimmed is always more suitable, yet it inflates the stomach, increases bile, and creates disgust. Some think it of no use for the eyes by itself; again some advise that ulcerated corners of the eyes be touched with honey. The causes, differences and kinds of honey, and its indication, we have given in dealing with bees and then with the nature of flowers, when the plan of the work compelled us to divide the subject; those who wish to know the nature of things thoroughly must in turn mix them.

110| Among the works of honey honeyed water too must be treated. It has two kinds, one made suddenly and fresh, the other aged. The sudden kind, with skimmed honey, has an excellent use in the light food of the sick, that is, washed alica, for restoring strength, soothing the mouth and stomach, and cooling burning heat. For it is more useful given cold for softening the belly. I find in the authorities that the decoction is to be drunk by those sensitive to cold, and likewise by those of low and over-thrifty spirit, whom they called micropsychoi.

111| There is a reasoning of immense subtlety, descending from Plato, in the small bodies of things, smooth and rough, angular and round, which approach the nature of others more or less, and that therefore the same things are not bitter or sweet to all; so too, in weariness and in thirst people are more inclined to anger. Therefore this roughness of mind, or rather of the soul, is softened by a sweeter juice, the passage of the breath being eased and the channel made softer, so that it does not tear the breath as it goes and returns. Each has the experiments in himself: the anger and grief of everyone, sadness, and every impulse of the mind are softened by food, and therefore those things must be observed which have a medicine not only for bodies but for characters.

112| Honeyed water is reported useful also to those who cough; warmed, it invites vomiting; it is a safeguard against the poison of psimithium with oil added, likewise against that of hyoscyamus, especially with asses' milk, and against halicacabum, as we have said. It is poured also into the ears and into fistulas of the genitals. It is applied to the womb with soft bread, and for sudden swellings, for dislocations, and for soothing everything. The use of the aged kind later authors condemned, as less harmless than water and less strong than wine; yet with long age it passes into wine, as is agreed among all, most useless to the stomach and contrary to the sinews.

113| Mulsum made with old wine is always the most useful, and it blends most easily with honey, which never happens with sweet wine. Made from austere wine it does not inflate the stomach, nor does that made from boiled honey, and it fills less, which usually happens; it also recalls the eagerness for appetite for food. It softens the belly when drunk cold, and for many stops it when drunk hot; it increases the body.

114| Many have borne a long old age on mulsum alone, in a gruel, and no other food, by the famous example of Pollio Romilius. When he was past his hundredth year, the deified Augustus, his guest, asked him by what regimen above all he had preserved that vigour of mind and body. And he answered: mulsum within, oil without. Varro reports that the jaundiced disease is called regius, because it is cured by mulsum.

115| How melitites is made from must and honey we explained in our account of wine. I do not think that in these times this kind is made, being prone to cause swellings. Yet when aged it used to be given for the sake of the belly in fever, and likewise to those suffering from joint disease and weakness of the sinews, and to women who abstain from wine.

116| Joined to the nature of honey is wax, of whose origin, goodness and kinds we have spoken in their places. All wax softens, warms and fills bodies. The fresh is better. It is given in a gruel to dysenterics, and the honeycombs themselves in a porridge of alica first toasted. It opposes the nature of milk, and ten grains of wax, the size of millet, swallowed do not allow milk to curdle in the stomach. If the groin swells, it is a remedy to fix white wax on the pubes.

117| Nor could medicine enumerate the uses of this, which it provides mixed with others, any more than of the other things that are good with others. These, as we have said, depend on human ingenuity. Wax salve, malagmata, plasters, eye salves and antidotes were not made by that parent, the divine artificer of things; they are the inventions of the workshops, or rather, more truly, of avarice. The works of nature, indeed, are born complete and perfect, a few things being taken from reason, not from conjecture, as when dry things are tempered with some juice for the passages, or moist things with another body for the joints.

118| To collect and mix powers scruple by scruple is not the work of human conjecture, but of shamelessness. We do not touch the medicines of Indian and Arabian merchandise or of the outer world. Remedies born so far away do not please us; they are not produced for us, nay, not even for those who sell them; otherwise they would not sell them. Let them be bought for the sake of perfumes and ointments and luxuries, if you like, even for the sake of superstition, since we make supplication with incense and costus. That health can stand without those things we shall prove, if only for this, that men may be the more ashamed of their luxuries.

119| But having followed medicines from flowers and garlands and garden plants and the herbs that are eaten, in what way do we omit the grains? Surely it is fitting to point these out also. First, it is agreed that the wisest of animals are those that feed on grain. Grains of siligo, burnt and ground in Aminnean wine and smeared on the eyes, calm epiphorae, and those of wheat burnt with iron are an immediate remedy for places that cold has burnt.

120| Wheat flour cooked in vinegar helps with contractions of the sinews; and with rosaceum and dried fig and boiled myxa plums, the bran is good as a gargle for the tonsils and throat. Sextus Pomponius, father of a man of praetorian rank, a leading man of Hispania Citerior, when he was overseeing the winnowing of his granaries, was seized by pain of gout and plunged himself above the knees into the wheat, and, his feet dried out, he was relieved in a wonderful manner and afterwards used this remedy.

121| Its power is so great that it dries up full jars. Straw too, of wheat or barley, hot, those who have tried it order to be applied for the troubles of ramices, and to foment them with the water it was boiled in. In spelt there is a little worm like a woodworm, which, when shut with wax into hollows of the teeth, is said to make the diseased teeth fall out, even if they are only rubbed. Olyra we have said is called arinca. From this, boiled, is made a medicine which the Egyptians call athera, very useful to infants, but they smear adults with it too.

122| Barley meal, both raw and boiled, disperses collections and violent inflammations, soothes and ripens. It is boiled sometimes in honeyed water or dried fig; but for pains of the liver, when the pus needs to be ripened, in wine; when the aim lies between ripening and dispersing, then it is better in vinegar or in the dregs of vinegar or with boiled quinces or pears; for the bites of the multipeda with honey, for those of serpents in vinegar, and against suppurating things; for drawing out suppurations, in vinegar-water with Gallic resin added;

123| for ripening, and for old ulcers, with resin; for hardnesses, with pigeon dung or dried fig or ash; for inflammations of the sinews or pains of the intestines or sides, with poppy or melilot, and whenever the flesh recedes from the bones; for scrofulous swellings, with pitch and the urine of a boy not yet grown, with oil; with fenugreek against swellings of the midriff, or in fevers with honey or old fat. For suppurations, wheat meal is much gentler.

124| It is applied to the sinews with the juice of hyoscyamus, and with vinegar and honey to freckles. Meal of zea, from which we said alica is made, seems even more effective than barley meal; that of three-month wheat is softer; it is used lukewarm in red wine for the blows of scorpions and for those who spit blood, and likewise for the windpipe, in cough, with goat's tallow or butter.

125| The kind from fenugreek, the softest of all, heals weeping ulcers and scurf of the body, pains of the stomach, and the feet and breasts, boiled with wine and nitrum. The aerina cleans old ulcers and gangrenes more than the others, with radish and salt; with vinegar it treats lichens, with live sulphur leprae, and with goose fat applied to the forehead it treats headaches. It ripens scrofulous swellings and panos, boiled with pigeon dung and linseed in wine.

126| Of the kinds of polenta we have said enough in the place of the grains. In the reckoning of physicians it differs from barley meal in that it is toasted, and for this reason is useful to the stomach. It stops the bowels and the attacks of red swelling; it is applied to the eyes and to headache with mint or another cooling herb, likewise to chilblains and the blows of serpents, likewise to burns in wine, and it holds back pustules.

127| Meal worked down to fine flour has the power of drawing out moisture, so that for those suffused with blood it brings the blood out as far as the bandages, more effectively in sapa. It is applied also to a callus of the feet and to corns. For with old oil and pitch, the fine flour boiled, condylomata and all other ailments of the seat are cured in a wonderful way, applied as hot as possible. By porridge the body is increased. The meal with which papers are glued is given lukewarm to those who spit blood, to be sipped, with good effect.

128| Alica is a Roman thing and not long ago devised; otherwise the Greeks would not have written the praises of tisana rather than of it. I think it was not yet in use in the age of Pompey the Great, and for that reason scarcely anything about it was written by the school of Asclepiades. That it is exceptionally useful no one doubts, whether it is given washed in honeyed water, or boiled in a gruel, or in a porridge.

129| The same, for stopping the bowels, is toasted and then cooked with the wax of honeycombs, as we said above. It comes to the aid in particular of those reduced to wasting by a long illness, three cyathi of it being boiled slowly in a sextarius of water until all the water is used up, afterwards a sextarius of sheep's or goat's milk being added, for continuous days [….], then honey added. By this kind of gruel wasting is corrected.

130| With millet the belly is stopped and gripings dispersed, and for this use it is toasted first. For pains of the sinews and others it is applied boiling in a bag, and nothing is more useful, since it is the lightest and softest and holds heat best. Thus its use is of this kind for everything for which heat will be of benefit. Its meal with liquid pitch is applied to the blows of serpents and of the multipeda.

131| Panicum the physician Diocles called the honey of the grains. It has the effects of millet. Drunk in wine it is good for dysenterics. Similarly it is applied warmed to things that need steaming. Boiled in goat's milk and drunk twice daily, it stops the belly. So it is good also for gripings.

132| Sesame, ground and taken in wine, holds back vomiting. It is applied to inflammation of the ears and to burns. It has the same effect while still green in the blade. Further, boiled in wine it is applied to the eyes. In foods it is useless to the stomach and makes the breath heavy. It resists the bites of stellions, and ulcers which they call cacoethe, and we have said that the oil made from it is good for the ears.

133| Sesamoides has received its name from the resemblance, with a bitter grain and smaller leaf. It grows in gravelly places. The seed drunk in water draws off bile; it is applied to erysipelas and disperses panos. There is still another sesamoides, growing at Anticyra, which some therefore call Anticyricon, in other respects like the herb erigeron, of which we shall speak in its place, with a sesame grain. It is given in sweet wine for purgings, as much as is taken in three fingers. They mix in it there one and a half obols of white hellebore, using that purgation especially for melancholic madness, for epileptics, and for gout. And by itself at the weight of a drachma it empties the body.

134| The best barley is the whitest. The juice of it boiled in rain water is made into lozenges, to be poured into ulcerated intestines and wombs. Its ash is applied to burns, and to flesh that withdraws from the bones, and to eruptions of phlegm, and to the bites of the shrew-mouse. The same, with salt and honey sprinkled on, produces whiteness in the teeth and sweetness of the mouth.

135| They say that those who use barley bread are not attacked by disease of the feet. If someone passes round a boil with nine grains, three times with each grain, with the left hand, and throws them all into the fire, they say it is cured at once. There is also an herb called phoenice by the Greeks, by our people mouse barley; this ground and drunk in wine is excellent for bringing on the menses.

136| The praises of tisana, which is made from barley, Hippocrates set down in one volume, which now all pass to alica. How much more harmless alica is! Hippocrates nevertheless praised it for the sake of the gruel, since being slippery it was easily swallowed, since it kept off thirst, since it did not swell in the belly, since it was easily passed. For those accustomed to it, this food alone could be given twice a day in fever, being so far removed from those who practise medicine by hunger. Yet he forbade giving the whole of the gruel, or anything else than the juice of the tisana; likewise he forbade, as long as the feet were cold, that even a drink should then be given. A stickier kind is also made from wheat, more useful for an ulcerated windpipe.

137| Amylum dulls the eyes, and is bad for the gullet, contrary to what is believed. Likewise it stops the belly, holds back epiphorae of the eyes and heals ulcers, likewise pustules and flows of blood. It softens hardened eyelids. It is given with egg to those who have spat blood, but for pain of the bladder half an ounce of amylum with an egg and three eggs of passum, lightly warmed after the bath. Further, oat meal boiled in vinegar removes moles.

138| This bread itself, by which we live, contains almost countless medicines. With water and oil or rosaceum it softens collections; with honeyed water it greatly relieves hardnesses; with wine it disperses, or checks what needs to be checked, and if still more is needed, with vinegar, against sharp flows of phlegm, which the Greeks call rheumatismoi, likewise for blows and dislocations; for all these, however, the fermented bread, which is called autopyrus, is more useful. It is applied also to paronychiae and to a callus of the feet, in vinegar. Old or ship's bread, pounded and baked again, stops the belly.

139| For those zealous for the voice, and against catarrhs, it is most useful to have it dry as the first food. Sitanius, that is, bread made of three-month wheat, applied to the face when it is beaten or scaly, with honey, cures it most suitably. White bread soaked in hot or cold water gives the sick the lightest food. It is applied to a swelling of the eyes in wine; so too to pustules of the head, or with dry myrtle added. For those who tremble they show that bread should be eaten in water, fasting, immediately after the baths. Moreover, burnt it corrects the heaviness of smells in bedrooms, and added to the wine strainers it corrects wine.

140| The bean too gives help. For whole, parched and boiling hot, thrown into sharp vinegar, it cures gripings. In food, crushed and cooked with something else, it is taken as daily food against hopeless coughs and suppurations of the chest, and chewed with the mouth fasting, it is applied also to ripen or disperse boils, and boiled in wine for swellings of the testicles and the genitals.

141| With lomentum boiled in vinegar it also ripens and opens swellings, and cures bruises and burns. That it is good for the voice, Marcus Varro is the authority. The ash too of bean stalks and pods is good for the hips, and for old pains of the sinews, with old pig's fat. By themselves the husks boiled down to a third stop the belly.

142| The best lentil is the one that cooks most easily and that which absorbs most water. It dulls the sharpness of the eyes and inflates the stomach, but stops the belly in food, and more when thoroughly boiled in rain water; the same, less thoroughly cooked, loosens it. It bursts pustules of ulcers; it cleanses and draws together the things within the mouth. Applied, it calms all collections, and especially ulcerated and cracked places; for epiphorae of the eyes, with melilot or quince. With polenta it is applied against suppurating sores.

143| The juice of the boiled lentil is applied to ulcerations of the mouth and the genitals, for the seat with rosaceum or quince, and in cases that demand a sharper remedy, with the rind of the pomegranate and a little honey added. To prevent it quickly drying out, they add beet leaves as well. It is applied also to scrofulous swellings, panos, whether ripe or ripening, boiled in vinegar, to cracks in honeyed water and to gangrenes with the rind of the pomegranate; likewise to gout with polenta, and to the womb and kidneys, chilblains, and ulcers slow to form a scar.

144| For looseness of the stomach 30 grains of lentil are swallowed. In cholera also and dysentery it is more effective boiled in three waters, and in this use it is always better to toast it first and pound it so that it is given as fine as possible, either by itself or with quince or pears or myrtle or wild endive or black beet or plantain. It is bad for the lung and for headache and for all the sinewy parts and for the gall, nor is it easy for sleep, but boiled in sea water it is useful for pustules and erysipelas and the breasts, and in vinegar it disperses hardnesses and scrofulous swellings.

145| For the sake of the stomach it is sprinkled into drinks in the way of polenta. For burnt places they use it half-cooked in water, afterwards ground and the bran poured out through a sieve, then, as the treatment advances, with honey added. It is boiled in vinegar-water for the throat. There is also a marsh lentil, growing by itself in standing water, of a cooling nature, and for that reason it is applied to collections and above all to gout, both by itself and with polenta. It glues together also intestines that have prolapsed.

146| There is a wild elelisphacos, so called by the Greeks, called by others sphacos, lighter than the sown lentil, with a smaller leaf, drier and more fragrant. There is also another kind of it, wilder, with a heavy smell; this gentler one has leaves in the form of the quince, but smaller and white, which are boiled with the twigs. It provokes the menses and urine, and heals the stings of the sea pastinaca, but spreads numbness over the place struck. It is drunk with wormwood also for dysentery.

147| With wine the same draws down delayed menses, and checks excessive ones by a drink of its decoction. The herb applied by itself restrains the blood of wounds. It cleanses also the bites of serpents and, if it is boiled in wine, calms itching of the testicles. The herbalists of our time call it elelisphacum in Greek, salvia in Latin; it is like mint, hoary, fragrant. By applying it they draw out dead foetuses, and likewise worms from ulcers and ears.

148| Cicer exists also wild, similar in the leaves, with a heavy smell. If taken more freely, the belly is loosened and flatulence and gripings are brought on. Toasted it is held to be more wholesome. Cicercula is still more effective for the belly. The meal of either heals weeping ulcers of the head, the wild more effectively, likewise epileptics and swellings of the liver and the stings of serpents.

149| It provokes the menses and urine, especially the grain. It corrects also lichens and inflammations of the testicles, the regius morbus, and dropsy. All these kinds harm an ulcerated bladder and kidneys. They are more useful for gangrenes, with honey, and for the ulcers called cacoethe. For warts of every kind, at the first moon they touch each wart with a single grain, and tie those grains in a small cloth and throw them behind them, thinking that the fault is thus put to flight.

150| Our people prescribe that the arietinum be boiled down in water with salt, and from it two cyathi be drunk at a time in difficulties of urine; so too stones are expelled, and the regius morbus. The leaves and twigs of the same, boiled in water as hot as possible, relieve diseases of the feet, and so does the chickpea itself, hot and ground, applied. The water of the boiled columbinum is believed to lessen the shivering of tertian and quartan fever. The black kind, ground with half a gall-nut, treats ulcers of the eyes, in passum.

151| Of ervum we have said certain things in mentioning it, and the ancients attributed to it no less power than to cabbage against the stings of serpents, in vinegar, and for the bite of crocodiles and of men. If someone eats ervum daily, fasting, the most reliable authorities affirm that his spleen is consumed. Its meal corrects pimples, and also blemishes of the skin over the whole body. It does not allow ulcers to creep, and is most effective on the breasts.

152| It bursts carbuncles, in wine. Difficulties of urine, swelling, ailments of the liver, tenesmus, and those conditions in which people take no nourishment from food, called atrophia, it corrects, toasted and gathered with honey to the size of a hazelnut and swallowed; likewise impetigines, boiled in vinegar and loosed on the fourth day. Laid on panos in honey, it prevents them from suppurating.

153| The water of its decoction cures chilblains and itching by bathing. Further, they think that the colour of the whole body becomes better if someone drinks it daily, fasting. As food it is likewise unsuited to man. It moves vomiting, disturbs the belly, is burdensome to the head and stomach, and weighs down the knees too. But steeped for several days it grows mild, and it is most useful to cattle and beasts of burden. Its pods, green before they harden, ground with their own stalk and leaves, dye the hair a black colour.

154| Lupines also are wild, smaller in every way except in bitterness. Of all that are eaten dry, none has less weight nor more usefulness. They grow mild with hot ash or water. Eaten frequently they brighten a man's colour; the bitter ones are effective against asps. Dry, hulled and ground, with a cloth placed beneath, they bring black ulcers back to living flesh. Boiled in vinegar they disperse scrofulous swellings and parotid swellings.

155| The juice of those boiled, with rue and pepper, even in fever, is given to drive out the creatures of the belly in persons under 30 years; to boys, even applied to the belly while fasting, they are good, and toasted in another manner or drunk in defrutum or taken in honey. The same produce an appetite for food and remove disgust. Their meal worked up with vinegar and applied in the baths holds back papules and itching and by itself dries ulcers. It corrects bruises, and with polenta calms inflammations.

156| The wild kind has the greater power against weakness of the hips and loins. Boiled, they correct freckles and the skin of those who bathe in the decoction, and if boiled down to the thickness of honey, or [sown] ones, they correct black vitiligines and leprae. The sown kind too, applied, burst carbuncles; boiled in vinegar they lessen or ripen panos and scrofulous swellings, and restore a white colour to scars; and if they are boiled thoroughly in rain water, that juice becomes a smegma, with which it is useful to bathe gangrenes, eruptions of phlegm, and the weepings of ulcers; to drink for the spleen, and with honey for delayed menses.

157| Raw ones ground with dried fig in vinegar are applied to the spleen. The root also, boiled in water, expels urine. They treat cattle when boiled with the herb chamaeleon, the water strained for drinking. They cure also the mange of all quadrupeds, boiled in amurca, or with both liquids afterwards mixed. The smoke of them burnt kills gnats.

158| Irio, among the grains, we have said, is like sesame and is called by the Greeks erysimon; the Gauls call it vela. It is a shrubby plant, with the leaves of rocket, a little narrower, and the seed of nasturtium, most useful to those who cough, with honey, and in purulent spitting from the chest. It is given also for the regius morbus and ailments of the loins, to pleurisy patients, for gripings, and to coeliacs. It is applied for the evils of parotid swellings and carcinomas, and for burnings of the testicles in water, otherwise with honey; most useful also to infants; likewise for ailments of the seat and joint diseases with honey and fig; it is also effective against poisons when drunk. It treats asthmatics, and also fistulas with old axle-grease, in such a way that it is not added inside.

159| Horminum in seed, as we have said, is like cumin, otherwise like leek, three-quarters of a foot high, of two kinds: one has a darker and oblong seed (this for stimulating desire and for argema and albugines of the eyes), the other a whiter and rounder seed. Either pounded draws thorns out of the body, applied by itself or in water; the leaves applied in vinegar disperse panos, by themselves or with honey, likewise boils before they come to a head, and all sharp humours.

160| Indeed, even the very pests of the crops are of some use. Darnel was called "unlucky" by Virgil; yet, ground, boiled in vinegar and applied, it heals impetigo, and the faster the more often it is changed. With oxymel it also treats gout and other pains. The method is this: two ounces of honey are diluted in one sextarius of vinegar. The right proportion is, to three sextarii so mixed, [….] sextarii of darnel flour, boiled down until thick and applied hot to the aching limbs. The same flour draws out splinters of broken bone.

161| The herb that kills millet is called miliaria. Pounded and poured in through a horn with wine, it is said to cure gout in draught animals. Bromos is the seed of a plant that bears an ear. It grows among the weeds of the cornfield, of the oat kind; in leaf and stalk it imitates wheat; at its tips it has tiny hanging things like locusts. The seed is useful for poultices, for the same uses as barley and the like. Its juice is good for those with a cough.

162| We have named orobanche as the plant that kills ervum and the legumes; others call it cynomorion, from its likeness to a dog's genitals. It is a small stalk without leaves, fleshy and red. It is eaten both by itself and in stews, boiled, while it is tender.

163| In legumes too there breed small venomous creatures, of the solipuga kind, which sting the hands and put life in danger. Against these all the same remedies serve that are set out against spiders and phalangia. And these are the medicinal uses of the crops.

164| From the same crops drinks are also made: zythum in Egypt, caelia and cerea in Spain, cervesia and several other kinds in Gaul and other provinces. The froth of all of these nourishes the skin of women's faces. As for the drink itself, it is better to pass on to the mention of wine and to begin the medicines of the trees with the vine.

Cite a passage by its number: every paragraph here has its own anchor (for example https://openscriptorium.com/read/pliny/033-natural-history-book-xxii#p1), and the bracketed reference numbers link the same way.

← All of Pliny the Younger & Pliny the Elder: Letters, Panegyricus & Natural History