Spice: The History of a Temptation

by Jack Turner

  * Here meaning potency or sexual vigour.

  * Another common sexual dysfunction amenable to endless speculation was premature ejaculation. The Portuguese physician Garcia d’Orta suggested that opium, regarded as extremely cooling, served to constrict the channels ‘along which the genital seed comes from the brain’, with the advantage that it slowed down men, by nature prone to orgasm earlier than women, and helped facilitate simultaneous orgasm.

  † John Davenport (1789–1877) relates the salutary tale of an abbot whose monks suffered from that bane of medieval monastic life known as accidia, a combination of boredom, lassitude and laziness conventionally but inadequately translated as ‘sloth’. Hoping to stir them from their idleness he fed them arugula, succeeding so well that they promptly abandoned the cloister for the brothel.

  * A lesser risk of too much sex or heat was greying and hair loss, conditions attributed to dryness reaching the head and killing off the hair. Many a case of premature baldness could be attributed to (and consoled by?) a healthy virility: I have found by experiment that fornication destroys the hair of the head, the eyebrows and the eyelashes,’ wrote the great Muslim philosopher-physician ar-Razi (Rhazes) (c.865–c.930).

  * Private or public humiliation was another likely consequence of impotence. It was legal grounds for divorce, and there are numerous records of neighbours and friends being called on to testify on the state of a couple’s sex life. Doctors might be called to examine a man’s genitalia and pronounce upon their adequacy, and men might even be expected to provide public proof of their capacity. A court record from fifteenth-century York contains the report of a group of women who were called upon to witness a husband’s unsuccessful efforts to copulate with his wife. When he was unable to do so the women berated him ‘with one voice … because he presumed to take as a wife some young woman by defrauding her’.

  * Storax is the aromatic resin obtained from the shrub Styrax officinalis, native to Eastern Europe and Asia Minor. It was widely used in ancient incense.

  * Readers of Dante will recognise the notion of contrapasso, a form of punishment befitting the crime.

  * An aromatic North African root, sometimes also known as pellitory. It has a light aroma and a persistent, pungent taste.

  IV

  Spirit

  6

  Food of the Gods

  Drive here the finest herds;

  Pile the harvests of the Indians on the altars,

  Whatever the Arabs pick from fragrant trees;

  Let the rich fumes pour forth …

  Seneca (c.4 BC – AD 65), Hercules Oetaeus

  Some natures are so sensitive to certain odours! It would indeed be an attractive question to study, as much in a pathological as in a physiological sense. Priests are well aware of their importance, having always mixed aromatics in their ceremonies with the aim of numbing the rational faculties and provoking a state of ecstasy, which is easily accomplished with women, who are more delicate than men.

  Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1856

  Holy Smoke

  If Ovid is to be believed, a promise of spice helped lubricate the most famous seduction of all time. In his Heroides the Augustan poet relates the agonies of indecision undergone by Helen of Sparta as she debates whether to abandon home, reputation and family to run off with Paris, her smooth-talking, good-looking houseguest. Ultimately, his blandishments and putdowns of her boorish, ‘rustic’ husband decided the issue. The ships were waiting offshore, ready to whisk her away:

  The Trojan fleet is ready, fitted out with arms and men;

  presently wind and oars will make swift our way.

  You will go through Dardanian [Trojan] towns, a great queen,

  and the common people will believe that a new goddess is among them.

  Wherever you are, the flames will offer up cinnamon,

  and a sacrificial victim will strike the bloodied earth.

  It worked, and Helen of Sparta became Helen of Troy.

  If the story is ageless, the terms of Paris’ offer are anything but. Pole-axed carcasses and cinnamon-scented flames might seem a curious way to spark a romance and a war, but in the ancient world something close to the reverse was the case. Whether to the urban sophisticates of Augustan Rome who read Ovid’s poem or, if she ever existed, the Bronze Age queen known to legend as Helen, the precise force of the offer was unmistakable. It was, in fact, of a piece with Paris’ offer that Helen would be treated as a goddess. Along with various other spices and aromatics harvested in tropical Asia and ferried across unknown seas and deserts by ship and caravan, cinnamon was the food of the gods.

  Long before there is any evidence that spices were eaten, they were put to applications variously described as religious or – the distinction is largely a matter of perspective – the magical. Ovid’s dialogue was, needless to say, a wholly imagined version of an event that may or may not have happened over a thousand years earlier, yet it is all the same a reminder of one of the most important and enduring themes in the history of spices. And as to the practicalities of spiced worship, the words he puts in Paris’ mouth are accurate enough.

  In Ovid’s day, in the last decades before the birth of Christ, scenes not unlike those evoked by Paris occurred on a daily basis in hundreds of temples and shrines around the empire. As Paris promised Helen, spices were typically burned in incense or simply added to the flames in the temple brazier during the performance of religious rituals. Alternatively, they could be infused in perfumes and unguents applied to the cultic statues or to the worshippers themselves. Exotic, rare and inexplicable, they were among the most esteemed props of ancient worship. Not the least of spices’ attractions was their practicality. Mixed with incense, they released a sweet, penetrating aroma, adding depth and potency to various Near Eastern and Arabian gums and resins – which is precisely what they still do in commercially produced incenses, many of which use cinnamon, pepper, mace, ginger, cloves and nutmeg. In the back streets of Indian towns it is still possible to find workers preparing blends of incense, grinding the spices into a paste that is then rolled into cones or rubbed on thin wooden sticks. It is a custom that has survived intact since antiquity.

  Paganism, in not so many words, smelled. A typical scene of worship is described in The Acts of Sharbil, an early Christian work composed during the reign of the emperor Trajan from AD 98 to 117. The setting is a festival in the Syrian town of Edessa:

  The whole city was gathered together by the great altar which was in the middle of the town, opposite the Record Office, all the gods [i.e. their statues] having been brought together, and decorated, and sitting in honour … And all the priests were offering incenses of spices and libations, and an odour of sweetness was diffusing itself around, and sheep and oxen were being slaughtered, and the sound of the harp and the drum was heard in the whole town.

  Outside the great festivals, the aromas of spices, incense and perfumes permeated ancient religion as thoroughly as religion permeated life itself. Every town of any size had dozens of temples and cultic centres whose tutelary deities were honoured with fragrant offerings and their festivals marked with processions of devotees bearing censers and smoking jars of perfume. Sailors and travellers carried portable incense burners known as thymiateria, often shaped in the form of figurines with a concave top; examples have been recovered from the wreck of the Lion Ship, excavated from the silt of Pisa harbour, where it sank early in the second century BC. Outside the routine of daily worship, special occasions called for special aromas. When the Syrian-born Emperor Elagabalus ascended the throne in AD 218, he thanked his tutelary deity with the finest wines, animals and the richest aromatics, while a chorus of Syrian beauties ‘performed their lascivious dances to the sound of barbarian music’.

  The Romans hated the luxurious Eastern ways of Elagabalus and his foreign cult, but they could have had no quibble with his spices, for by now Roman religion was thoroughly odiferous. Within the Roman home garlands and fragrances were offered eac
h morning to the Lares and Penates, the ancestral household gods guarding the domestic gates and hearth. (In Bali the locals make similar offerings to this day.) Cicero writes of incense offered to statues of heroes in the streets, and beyond the city walls the countryside was dotted with shrines adorned with the fragrant offerings of passers-by. Virgil describes the hundred altars of Venus fuming with Sabaean incense and redolent with fresh garlands. When Seneca’s Hercules thanks the gods for another victory he calls for the best sacrificial victims and Indian spices.

  The gods of love, we have seen, smelled especially divine, but all gods liked a sweet smell. It was to win their favour that athletes hopeful of success in the games used perfumes either on their bodies or in offerings before competition – the original performance-enhancing drug, with the significant advantage that blame for any failure could easily be deflected. To wit, Philostratus (c.170–c.245) writes of athletes who put their losses down to poor perfume selection: ‘… if only I had burnt this and not that perfume, I would have won’. During games held by King Antiochus Epiphanes (c.215–164 BC) of Syria at Daphne, spectators were anointed with one of fifteen perfumes including cinnamon, spikenard and saffron, then sent away at the conclusion with crowns of myrrh and frankincense. Lovesick Romans burned spices to win over the gods of love, reasoning that any failures were their own doing: ‘… if the experiment does not come off, he [the lover] is as ready as ever to blame some oversight, reasoning that he forgot to burn this spice, or to sacrifice or melt up that’.

  So potent was perfume’s reputation that in republican times its use in a secular context smacked of sacrilege. When Julius Caesar entered Rome in triumphal procession in 46 BC, he was flanked by attendants bearing censers of sweet-smelling perfumes. However well the gesture went over with the masses, among the senatorial elite Caesar’s trespass on a custom previously reserved for the gods was viewed with outrage, as though he were some Oriental monarch posturing as the son of heaven. Within two years Caesar would get his comeuppance, but the assassins’ daggers only resulted, in the long run, in Caesar’s deification as the martyred head of a new imperial dynasty. The time was not far off when all of Rome’s emperors were numbered among the gods, propitiated with perfumes, spice and incense.

  There is no knowing what perfumes Caesar burned, but there is a good chance they contained cinnamon. By this time, this was far and away the most esteemed and important of the Eastern spices, followed closely by its poor relation and lookalike, cassia. In powdered form, the spice was easily dissolved in a base of fat or oil; or the sticks could be added to the flames – holy tinder. In a sense it was sacred, magical. Philostratus tells of a wondrous second-century brew of spices, gems and chopped snake, supposedly imparting the power to converse with animals. The emperor Vespasian (AD 9–79) dedicated crowns of cinnamon covered with beaten gold in the temple of Peace. Pliny the Elder had seen a huge piece of cinnamon kept on permanent display in a gold dish in a temple on the Palatine, much as Christian churches would in due course exhibit their own prodigious, miracle-working relics.

  The Romans shared this reverence for cinnamon with older cultures to the east. The Greek ruler of Syria Seleucus II, in power from 247 to 226 BC, dedicated two pounds each of cinnamon and cassia to the temple of Apollo at Miletus. Even at this time the spice had been known in the Mediterranean for centuries: early in the sixth century BC the book of the prophet Ezekiel mentions cassia among the exotic luxuries of Tyre. In Greece around the same time Sappho wrote of the cassia burned at the wedding of Hector and Andromache as they processed through the doomed city of Troy. It was long the assumption among philologists that Sappho’s cassia and the modern spice could not possibly be the same thing, but that the poetess was familiar with the spice no longer seems impossible. A little to the south, on the island of Samos, German archaeologists found cinnamon in a deposit dated to the seventh century BC. The find was made on the site once occupied by the temple of Hera, where it was doubtless offered to the goddess, in or before Sappho’s lifetime.

  And herein is cause for wonder. There is no evidence that the Greeks of Sappho’s day knew India, and for centuries thereafter it remained more a notion than a place, little more than generic shorthand for the East. But if India was a mystery, its spices were doubly so. They were, in a sense, magical if not divine, arriving by unknown means from the vast blank spaces on the map, spaces populated by dragons, gods and monsters. From mystery grew mystique. In the fifth century BC the Greek historian Herodotus started a long tradition with his account of the cinnamon harvest:

  The way they [the Arabians] get cinnamon is even more extraordinary. They cannot say where it comes from and where in the world it grows (except that some of them use an argument from probability to claim that it grows in the parts where Dionysus was brought up). But they say that the sticks which the Phoenicians have taught us to call ‘cinnamon’ are carried by large birds to their nests, which are built of mud plastered onto crags on sheer mountainsides, where no man can climb. Under-these circumstances, the Arabians have come up with the following clever procedure. They cut up the bodies of dead yoke animals such as oxen and donkeys into very large pieces and take them there; then they dump the joints near the nests and withdraw a safe distance. The birds fly down and carry the pieces of meat back up to their nests – but the joints are too heavy for the nests. The nests break and fall to the ground, where the Arabians come and get what they came for That is how cinnamon is collected in that part of Arabia, and from there it is sent all over the world.

  Even the sober Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor at the head of the Lyceum, was scarcely less colourful: ‘They say that cinnamon grows in deep glens, that in these there are deadly snakes that have a deadly bite. Against these they protect their hands and feet before they go down into the glens and then, when they have brought up the cinnamon, they divide it into three portions, one of which they leave behind as the lot of the Sun. And they say that as soon as they leave the spot they see this take fire.’

  While the greater part of such explanations was fantasy, it was true that fires of cinnamon were lit to the sun and various other gods. These burnt offerings may have been in some sense a re-enactment of a mythic event, understood by the participants as a ritual act of returning the spice to its divine ‘owner’ or recalling in some sense its solar origins. According to Pliny, who thought cinnamon grew in Ethiopia, the plant could not be cut without the sun god’s permission, obtainable only by the sacrifice of forty-four oxen, goats and rams. No plant could be cut in the hours of darkness. First some twigs were removed with a spear and offered to the god, before the rest was cut, peeled and given to the merchants who took it to Ocelis on the Red Sea, the port of the Gabbanites. From here it was conveyed into the Roman world by the proverbially wealthy Arabians. Shuttling northward through the shoals and reefs of the Red Sea, or following the ancient Arabian incense route through Mecca and Medina, by camel and dhow they brought the spice to markets in Egypt or Arabia and on, eventually, to Rome.

  Or so Pliny presumed, for this was his best reconstruction of what remained, in the end, a mystery. There was, however, a sense of Eastern origins. According to Ovid, cinnamon was introduced from the East with the cult of Bacchus, god of wine and ecstasy, bringing the sacred aromas back after his conquest of India: ‘You [Bacchus] were the first to offer cinnamon and incense from the conquered lands.’ There may be some truth in this, inasmuch as the spice almost certainly arrived with the introduction of older, Eastern cults long accustomed to spiced offerings. Before then, ‘the altars were without offerings, grass grew on the cold hearth’.

  Where history and reliable information were lacking, such myths helped fill a gap. And still today some speculation on the ancient spice trade appears scarcely less fabulous than that of the Greeks and Romans. But if the ‘how’ of the trade defies an answer, the ‘why’ seems clearer. On some level or another a belief in the auspicious qualities of a pleasant scent is a universal phenomenon. It was, we hav
e seen, an article of Greco-Roman religious belief that the gods smelled divine. And as the gods, their food and their clothing were exquisitely sweet-smelling, so there was a fundamental symmetry in mortals offering fragrance to the fragrant immortals. Offering spices to the gods was, essentially, a matter of offering like to like.

  For this reason not only spices but many other Mediterranean aromatics served as sacraments before they were seasonings. Saffron, fennel and coriander all appear in a sacred setting long before there are records of their secular use. Thyme takes its name from the Greek verb ‘to sacrifice’ or ‘to make a burnt offering’. Writing in the fourth century BC, Theophrastus believed that spices followed incense and locally available herbs to the altar and censer, and no one has been able to come up with a better explanation since. The Egyptians and other cultures of the ancient Near East had made use of Arabian and Levantine aromatics such as frankincense, myrrh, balsam and terebinth *since at least the early third millennium BC. The name of the principal Phoenician deity, Baal Hammon, means ‘lord of the perfume altar’; a Sumerian incense stand dating to about 2500 BC is shaped in the form of a priest with incense on his head. Throughout the temples and shrines of the ancient Mediterranean the effect of smell was understood more in spiritual than aesthetic terms. A sweet smell was a form of ‘inarticulate prayer’.*

  Like religion in the rest of the ancient world the Greek and Roman faith came aromatised. In a sense, the gods were fragrance. In literary encounters between mortals and immortals the latter are regularly betrayed by their gorgeous aroma. The Zeus of Homer’s Iliad sits perfumed in a fragrant cloud on Olympus, where his fellow gods feast on ineffably fragrant substances called ambrosia and nectar. The latter is some form of supernal beverage, apparently scented with sacramental aromatics such as myrrh or other incenses from the altar, of whose precise nature Homer seems to have had only the vaguest idea. Scholars have speculated whether the nectar and ambrosia of the Homeric epics represent a memory of various Near Eastern aromatics. The word itself is probably derived from a Semitic root meaning ‘to fume, waft upwards as smoke or vapour’. If so, nectar was perfume, and perfume was nectar, which is to say that the gods ate perfume. Certainly this is how later Greeks understood it. When the physician to Philip of Macedon compared his healing skills to Zeus’ own, his employer reprimanded his act of hubris by serving him incense for dinner: if he was indeed fit to compare himself with the gods, then let him feed on aromatic smoke.