CHAPTER VIII.

HOMER’S MAGIC HERBS.

THERE are certain low-lying districts in southern Spain where the branched lily, or king’s spear, blooms in such profusion that whole acres, seen from a distance towards the end of March, show as if densely strewn with new-fallen snow. Just such in aspect must have been the abode of the Odyssean dead. There, along boundless asphodel plains, Odysseus watched Orion, a spectral huntsman pursuing spectral game: there Agamemnon denounced the treachery of Clytemnestra: there Ajax still nursed his wrath at the award of the Argive kings: there Achilles gnawed a shadowy heart in longing, on any terms, for action and the upper air: thither Hermes conducted the delinquent souls of the suitors of Penelope. A tranquil dwelling-place: where the stagnant air of apathy was stirred only by sighs of inane regret.

Homer’s asphodel grows only in the under-world, yet it is no mythical plant. It can be quite clearly identified with the _Asphodelus ramosus_,[306] now extensively used in Algeria for the manufacture of alcohol, and cultivated in our gardens for the sake of its tall spikes of beautiful flowers, pure white within and purple-streaked without along each of the six petals uniting at the base to form a deeply-indented starry corolla. The continual visits of pilfering bees attest a goodly store of honey; while the perfume spread over the northern shores of the Gulf of Corinth by the abundant growth of asphodel was said to have given their name, in some far-off century, to the Ozolians of Locris.

Footnote 306:

The daffodil has no other connexion with the asphodel than having unaccountably appropriated its name, through the old French _affodille_. It is a kind of narcissus, while the asphodel belongs to the lily tribe.

Introduced into England about 1551, it was succeeded, after forty-five years, by the yellow asphodel (_Asphodelus luteus_), of which already in 1633 Gerard in his Herbal reports ‘great plenty in our London gardens.’ Hence Pope’s familiarity with this kind, and his consequent matter-of-course identification of it with the classical flower in the lines,

By those happy souls who dwell On yellow meads of asphodel:

wherein he has entirely missed what may with some reason be called the local colouring of Hades.

In order to explain the lugubrious associations of the branched asphodel, we must go back to an early stage of thought regarding the condition of the dead.

Instinctively man assumes that his existence will, in some form, be continued beyond the grave. Only a few of the most degraded savages, or a handful of the most enlightened sceptics, accept death with stolid indifference as an absolute end. The almost universally prevalent belief is that it is a change, not a close. Humanity, as a whole, never has admitted and never can apostatise from its innate convictions by admitting that its destiny is mere blank corruption. Apart from the body, however, life can indeed be conceived, but cannot be imagined; since imagination works only with familiar materials. Recourse was then inevitably had to the expedient of representing the under-world as a shadowy reflection of the upper. Disembodied spirits were supposed to feel the same needs, to cherish the same desires, as when clothed in the flesh; but they were helpless to supply the first or to gratify the second. Their opulence or misery in their new abode depended solely upon the pitying care of those who survived them. This mode of thinking explains the savage rites of sacrifice attendant upon primitive funeral ceremonies: it converted the tombs of ancient kings into the treasure-houses of modern archæologists; and it suggested a system of commissariat for the dead, traces of which still linger in many parts of the world.

Here we find the clue we are in search of. It is afforded by the simple precautions adopted by unsophisticated people against famine in the realm of death. Amongst the early Greeks, the roots of the branched lily were a familiar article of diet. The asphodel has even been called the potato of antiquity. It indeed surpassed the potato in fecundity, though falling far below it in nutritive qualities. Pliny, in his ‘Natural History,’ states that about eighty tubers, each the size of an average turnip, were often the produce of a single plant; and the French botanist Charles de l’Écluse, travelling across Portugal in 1564-5, saw the plough disclose fully two hundred attached to the same stalk, and together weighing, he estimated, some fifty pounds. Moreover, the tubers so plentifully developed are extremely rich in starch and sugar, so that the poorer sort, who possessed no flocks or herds to supply their table with fat pork, loins of young oxen, roasted goats’ tripe, or similar carnal delicacies, were glad to fall back upon the frugal fare of mallow and asphodel lauded by Hesiod. Theophrastus tells us that the roasted stalk, as well as the seed of the asphodel served for food; but chiefly its roots, which, bruised up with figs, were in extensive use. Pliny seems to prefer them cooked in hot ashes, and eaten with salt and oil; but it may be doubted whether he spoke from personal experience.

Their consumption, however, was recommended by the example of Pythagoras, and was said to have helped to lengthen out the fabulous years of Epimenides. Yet, such illustrious examples notwithstanding, the degenerate stomachs of more recent times have succeeded ill in accommodating themselves to such spare sustenance. When about the middle of last century the Abate Alberto Fortis was travelling in Dalmatia, he found inhabitants of the village of Bossiglina, near Traù, so poor as to be reduced to make their bread of bruised asphodel roots, which proving but an indifferent staff of life, digestive troubles and general debility ensued. This is the last recorded experiment of the kind. The needs of the human economy are far better, more widely, and almost as cheaply subserved by the tuber brought by Raleigh from Virginia. The plant of Persephone is left for Apulian sheep to graze upon.

Asphodel roots, accordingly, rank with acorns as a prehistoric, but now discarded article of human food. They were, it is likely, freely consumed by the earliest inhabitants of Greece, before the cultivation of cereals had been introduced from the East. There is little fear of error in assuming that the later Achæan immigrants found them already consecrated by traditional usage to the sustenance of the dead—perhaps because the immemorial antiquity of their dietary employment imparted to them an idea of sacredness; or, possibly, because the slightness of the nourishment they afforded was judged suitable to the maintenance of the unsubstantial life of ghosts. At any rate, the custom became firmly established of planting graves with asphodel, with a view to making provision for their silent and helpless, yet still needy inmates. With changed associations the custom still exists in Greece, and, very remarkably, has been found to prevail in Japan, where a species of asphodel is stated to be cultivated in cemeteries, and placed, blooming in pots, on grave-stones. We can scarcely doubt that the same train of thought, here as in Greece, originally prompted its selection for sepulchral uses. Unquestionably some of the natives of the Congo district plant manioc on the graves of their dead, with no other than a provisioning design.[307] The same may be said of the cultivation of certain fruit-trees in the burying-grounds of the South Sea Islanders. One of these is the _Cratæva religiosa_, bearing an insipid but eatable fruit, and held sacred in Otaheite under the name of ‘Purataruru.’ The _Terminalia glabrosa_ fills (or filled a century ago) an analogous position in the Society Islands. It yields a nut resembling an almond, doubtless regarded as acceptable to phantasmal palates.

Footnote 307:

Unger, _Die Pflanze als Todtenschmuck_, p. 23.

We now see quite clearly why the Homeric shades dwell in meadows of asphodel. These were, in the fundamental conception, their harvest-fields. From them, in some unexplained subsensual way, the attenuated nutriment they might require must have been derived. But this primitive idea does not seem to have been explicitly present to the poet’s mind. It had already, before his time, we can infer, been to a great extent lost sight of. It was enough for him that the plant was popularly associated with the dusky regions out of sight of the sun. He did not stop to ask why, his business being to see, and to sing of what he saw, not to reason. He accordingly made his Hades to bloom for all time with the tall white flowers of the king’s spear, and so perpetuated a connexion he was not concerned to explain.

Homer cannot be said to have attained to any real conception of the immortality of the soul. The shade which flitted to subterranean spaces when the breath left the body, resembled an animal principle of life rather than a true spiritual essence. Disinherited, exiled from its proper abode, without function, sense, or memory, it survived, a vaporous image, a mere castaway residuum of what once had been a man. Tiresias, the Theban soothsayer, alone, by special privilege of Persephone, retained the use of reason: the rest were vain appearances, escaping annihilation by a scarcely perceptible distinction. No wonder that life should have been darkened by the prospect of such a destiny—or worse. For there were, in the Homeric world to come, awful possibilities of torment, though none—for the common herd—of blessedness. Deep down in Tartarus, those who had sinned against the gods—Sisyphus, Ixion, Tantalus—were condemned to tremendous, because unending, punishment; while the haunting sense of loss, which seems to have survived every other form of consciousness, giving no rest, nor so much as exemption from fear, pursued good and bad alike. Nowhere does the utter need of mankind for the hope brought by Christianity appear with such startling clearness as in the verses of Homer, from the contrast of the vivid pictures of life they present with the appalling background of despair upon which they are painted.

Its relation to the unseen world naturally brought to the asphodel a host of occult or imaginary qualities. Of true medicinal properties it may be said to be devoid, and it accordingly finds no place in the modern pharmacopœia. Anciently, however, it was known, from its manifold powers, as the ‘heroic’ herb. It was sovereign against witchcraft, and was planted outside the gates of villas and farmhouses to ward off malefic influences. It restored the wasted strength of the consumptive: it was an antidote to the venom of serpents and scorpions: it entered as an ingredient into love-potions, and was invincible by evil spirits: children round whose necks it was hung cut their teeth without pain, and the terrors of the night flew from its presence. Briefly, its faculties were those of (in Zoroastrian phraseology) a ‘smiter of fiends’; yet from it we moderns distil alcohol! Of a truth it has gone over to the enemy.

Sweet is moly, but his root is ill,

wrote Spenser in one of his sonnets. But it may be doubted whether he would have committed himself to this sentiment had he realised that the gift of Hermes was neither more nor less than a clove of garlic.

Odysseus approaching the house of Circe in search of his companions (already, as he found out later, transformed into swine), was met on the road by the crafty son of Maia, and by him forewarned and forearmed against the wiles of the enchantress. Skilled in drugs as she was, a more potent herb than any known to her had been procured by the messenger of the gods. ‘Therewith,’ the hero continued in his narrative to the Phæacian king, ‘the slayer of Argos gave me the plant that he had plucked from the ground, and he showed me the nature thereof. It was black at the root, but the flower was like to milk. The gods call it moly, but it is hard for mortal men to dig; howbeit, with the gods all things are possible.’ It is thus evident that the Homeric moly is compounded of two elements—a botanical, so to speak, and a mythological. A substratum of fact has received an embellishment of fable. Before the mind’s eye of the poet, when he described the white flowers and black root of the vegetable snatched from the reluctant earth by Hermes, was a specific plant, which he chose to associate, or which had already become associated, with floating legendary lore, widely and anciently diffused among our race. The identification of that plant has often been attempted, and not unsuccessfully.

The earliest record of such an effort is contained in Theophrastus’s ‘History of Plants.’ He there asserts the moly of the Odyssey to have been a kind of garlic (_Allium nigrum_, according to Sprengel), growing on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia (the birthplace, be it observed, of Hermes), and of supreme efficacy as an antidote to poisons; but he, unlike Homer, adds that there is no difficulty in plucking it. We shall see presently that this difficulty was purely mythical. The language of Theophrastus suggests that the association of moly with the Arcadian garlic was traditional in his time; and the tradition has been perpetuated in the modern Greek name, _molyza_, of a member of the same family.

John Gerard in his Herbal, calls moly (of which he enumerates several species) the ‘Sorcerer’s garlic,’ and describes as follows the Theophrastian, assumed as identical with the epic, kind.

Homer’s moly hath very thick leaves, broad toward the bottom, sharp at the point, and hollowed like a trough or gutter, in the bosom of which leaves near unto the bottom cometh forth a certain round bulb or ball of a green colour; which being ripe and set in the ground, groweth and becometh a fair plant, such as is the mother. Among those leaves riseth up a naked, smooth, thick stalk of two cubits high, as strong as is a small walking-staff. At the top of the stalk standeth a bundle of fair whitish flowers, dashed over with a wash of purple colour, smelling like the flowers of onions. When they be ripe there appeareth a black seed wrapt in a white skin or husk.

The root is great and bulbous, covered with a blackish skin on the outside, and white within, and of the bigness of a great onion.

So much for the question in its matter-of-fact aspect. We may now look at it from its fabulous side.

And first, it is to be remembered that moly was not a charm, but a counter-charm. Its powers were defensive, and presupposed an attack. It was as a shield against the thrust of a spear. Now if any clear notion could be attained regarding the kind of weapon of which it had efficacy thus to blunt the point, we should be perceptibly nearer to its individualisation. But we are only told that the magic draught of Circe, the effects of which it had power to neutralise, contained pernicious drugs. The poet either did not know, or did not care to tell more.

There is, however, a plant round which a crowd of strange beliefs gathered from the earliest times. This is the _Atropa mandragora_, or mandrake, probably identical with the _Dudaim_ of Scripture, and called by classical writers _Circæa_, from its supposed potency in philtres. The rude resemblance of its bifurcated root to the lower half of the human frame started its career as an object of credulity and an instrument of imposture. It was held to be animated with a life transcending the obscure vitality of ordinary vegetable existence, and occult powers of the most remarkable kind were attributed to it. The little images, formed of the mandrake root, consulted as oracles in Germany under the name of _Alrunen_, and imported with great commercial success into this country during the reign of Henry VIII., were credited with the power of multiplying money left in their charge, and generally of bringing luck to their possessors, especially when their original seat had been at the foot of a gallows, and their first vesture a fragment of a winding-sheet. But privilege, as usual, was here also fraught with peril. The operation of uprooting a mandrake was a critical one, formidable consequences ensuing upon its clumsy or negligent execution. These could only be averted by a strict observance of forms prescribed by the wisdom of a very high antiquity. According to Pliny, three circles were to be drawn round the plant with a sword, within which the digger stood, facing west. This position had to be combined, as best it might, with an approach from the windward side, upon his formidable prey. Through the pages of Josephus the device gained its earliest publicity, of employing a dog to receive the death penalty, attendant, in his belief, on eradication. It was widely adopted, and by mediæval sagacity fortified with the additional prescriptions that the canine victim should be black without a white hair, that the deed should be done before dawn on a Friday, and that the ears of the doer should be carefully stuffed with cotton-wool. For, at the instant of leaving its parent-earth, a fearful sound, which no mortal might hear and sanely survive, issued from the uptorn root. This superstition was familiar in English literature down to the seventeenth century.

Thus Suffolk alleging the futility of bad language in apology for the backwardness in its use with which he has just been reproached by the ungentle queen of Henry VI., exclaims,

Would curses kill, as doth the mandrake’s groan, I would invent as bitter-searching terms, As curst, as harsh, and horrible to hear, Deliver’d strongly through my fixed teeth, With full as many signs of deadly hate, As lean-fac’d Envy in her loathsome cave.

And poor Juliet enumerates among the horrors of the charnel-house,

Shrieks like mandrakes’ torn out of the earth, That living mortals hearing them, run mad.

The persuasion was, moreover, included amongst the Vulgar Errors gravely combated by Sir Thomas Browne.

Mandragora, then, is the most ancient and the most widely famous of all magic herbs; and the old conjecture is at least a plausible one that from its exclusive possession were derived the evil powers employed to the detriment of her wind-borne guests by the inhospitable daughter of Perse.

Moly, on the other hand, must be sought for amongst the herbaceous antidotes of fable. Perhaps the best known of these is the plant repugnant to the fine senses of Horace, and equally abominable to the nostrils of Elizabethan gallants. The name of garlic in Sanskrit signifies ‘slayer of monsters.’ Juvenal ridiculed the Egyptians for paying it reverence as a divinity.

Porrum et cepe nefas violare ac frangere morsu. O sanctas gentes, quibus hæc nascuntur in hortis Numina!

The Eddic valkyr, Sigurdrifa, sang of its unassailable virtue. As a sure preservative from witchcraft it was, by mediæval Teutons, infused in the drink of cattle and horses, hung up in lonely shepherds’ huts, and buried under thresholds. It was laid on beds against nightmare: planted on cottage roofs to keep off lightning: it cured the poisoned bites of reptiles: it was eaten to avert the evil effects of digging hellebore; while, in Cuba, immunity from jaundice was secured by wearing, during thirteen days, a collar consisting of thirteen cloves of garlic, and throwing it away at a cross-road, without looking behind, at midnight on the expiration of that term. The occult properties of this savoury root originated, no doubt, as M. Hehn conceives,[308] in its pungent taste and smell. Substances strongly impressive to the senses are apt to acquire the reputation of being distasteful to ‘spirits of vile sort.’ Witness sulphur, employed from of old, in ceremonial purification. But this may have been owing to its association, through the ‘sulphurous’ smell of ozone, with the sacred thunder-bolt.

Footnote 308:

_Wanderings of Plants_, p. 158.

All the magic faculties of garlic, it may be remarked, are directed to beneficent purposes; whereas those of the mandrake (regarded as an herb, not as an idol) are purely maleficent. Later folk-lore, however, has not brought them into direct competition. Each is thought of as supreme in its own line. Only in the Odyssey (on the supposition here adopted) they were permitted to meet, with the result of signal defeat for the powers of evil.

Thus we see that the identification of moly with garlic is countenanced by whatever scraps of botanical evidence are at hand, fortified by a constant local tradition, no less than by the fantastic prescriptions of superstitious popular observance. The difficulty or peril of uprooting, which made the prophylactic plant obtained by Hermes all but unattainable to mortals, is a common feature in vegetable mythology. It figures as the price to be paid for something rarely precious, enhancing its value and at the same time affixing a scarcely tolerable penalty to its possession. It belonged, for instance, in varying degrees, to hellebore and mistletoe, as well as to mandragora. With the last it most likely originated, and from it was transferred by Homer, in the exercise of his poetical licence, to moly.

From the adventure in the Ææan isle, as from so many others, Odysseus came out unscathed. But it was not without high moral necessity that he passed through them. The leading motive of his character is, in fact, found in his multiform experience. He is appointed to see and to suffer all that comes within the scope of Greek humanity. No vicissitudes, no perils are spared him. Protection from the extremity of evil must and does content him. For his keen curiosity falls in with the design of his celestial patroness, in urging him to drink to the dregs the costly draught of the knowledge of good and evil. Yet it is to be noted that from the house of the enchantress there is no exit save through the gates of hell.

Within the spacious confines of the universe there is perhaps but one race of beings whose implanted instincts and whose visible destiny are irreconcilably at war. Man is born to suffer; but suffering has always for him the poignancy of surprise. The long record of multiform tribulation which he calls his history, has been moulded, throughout its many vicissitudes, by a keen and ceaseless struggle for enjoyment. Each man and woman born into the world looks afresh round the horizon of life for pleasure, and meets instead the ever fresh outrage of pain. Our planet is peopled with souls disinherited of what they still feel to be an inalienable heritage of happiness. No wonder, then, that quack-medicines for the cure of the ills of life should always have been popular. Of such nostrums, the famous Homeric drug nepenthes is an early example, and may serve for a type.

We read in the Odyssey that Telemachus had no sooner reached man’s estate than he set out from Ithaca for Pylos and Lacedæmon, in order to seek news of his father from Nestor and Menelaus, the two most eminent survivors of the expedition against Troy. But he learned only that Odysseus had vanished from the known world. The disappointment was severe, even to tears, notwithstanding that the banquet was already spread in the radiant palace of the Spartan king. The remaining guests, including the illustrious host and hostess, caught the infection of grief, and the pleasures of the table were over-clouded.

Then Helena the child of Zeus strange things Devised, and mixed a philter in their wine, Which so cures heartache and the inward stings, That men forget all sorrow wherein they pine. He who hath tasted of the draught divine Weeps not that day, although his mother die And father, or cut off before his eyne Brother or child beloved fall miserably, Hewn by the pitiless sword, he sitting silent by.

Drugs of such virtue did she keep in store, Given her by Polydamna, wife of Thôn, In Egypt, where the rich glebe evermore Yields herbs in foison, some for virtue known, Some baneful. In that climate each doth own Leech-craft beyond what mortal minds attain; Since of Pæonian stock their race hath grown. She the good philter mixed to charm their pain, And bade the wine outpour, and answering spake again.[309]

Footnote 309:

_Odyssey_, iv. 219-32 (Worsley’s translation).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In China, from the beginning of the third century of our era, if not earlier, a preparation of hemp was used (it was said, with perfect success) as an anæsthetic; and it is mentioned as a remedy under the name of _b’hanga_, in Hindu medical works of probably still earlier date. Its identity with nepenthes was first suggested in 1839, and has since been generally acquiesced in. But there are two objections.

The practice of eating or smoking hemp, for the sake of its exalting effects upon consciousness, appears to have originated on the slopes of the Himalayas, to have spread thence to Persia, and to have been transmitted farther west by Arab agency. It was not, then, primitively an Egyptian custom, and was assuredly unknown to the wife of Thôn. Moreover, hemp is not indigenous on the banks of the Nile. It came thither as an immigrant, most probably long after the building of the latest pyramid. Herodotus includes no mention of it in his curious and particular account of the country; and, which is still more significant, no relic of its textile use survives. Not a hempen fibre has ever been found in any of the innumerable mummy-cases examined by learned Europeans. The ancient Egyptians, it may then be concluded, were unacquainted with this plant, and we must look elsewhere for the chief ingredient of the comfort-bringing draught distributed by the daughter of Zeus.

There is only opium left. It is legitimately reached by the ‘method of exclusions.’ Should it fail, no substitute can be provided. But it does not fail. No serious discrepancy starts up to shake our belief that in recognising opium under the disguise of nepenthes we have indeed struck the truth. All the circumstances correspond to admiration: the identification runs ‘on all fours.’ The physical effects indicated agree perfectly with those resulting from a sparing use of opium. They tend to just so much elevation of spirits as would impart a roseate tinge to the landscape of life. The intellect remains unclouded and serene. The Nemesis of indulgence, however moderate, is still behind the scenes. The exhibition of a soporific effect has even been seriously thought to have been designed by the poet in the proposal of Telemachus to retire to rest shortly after the nepenthean cup has gone round; but so bald a piece of realism can scarcely have entered into the contemplation of an artist of such consummate skill.

For ages past, Thebes in Egypt has witnessed the production of opium from the expressed juice of poppyheads. Six centuries ago, the substance was known in Western Europe as _Opium Thebaïcum_, or the ‘Theban tincture.’ Prosper Alpinus states that the whole of Egypt was supplied, at the epoch of his visit, from Sajeth, on the site of the ancient hundred-gated city. And since a large proportion of the upper classes were undisguised opium-eaters, the demand must have been considerable. Now it was precisely in Thebes that Helen, according to Diodorus, received the sorrow-soothing drug from her Egyptian hostess; while the women of Thebes, and they only, still in his time preserved the secret of its qualities and preparation. Can we doubt that the ancient nepenthes was in truth no other than the mediæval Theban tincture? Even stripping from the statement of Diodorus all historical value, its legendary significance remains. It proves, beyond question, the existence of a tradition localising the gift of Polydamna in a spot noted, from the date of the earliest authentic information on the subject, for the production of a modern equivalent. The inference seems irresistible that the two were one, and that, as De Quincey said, Homer is rightly reputed to have known the virtues of opium.