Endlings: Silphium - Oct 21

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, so let us talk about the silphium plant instead. Pause.

This is a somewhat different topic from my usual discussions, so, firstly, what was the silphium plant, beyond the obvious? The honest answer may surprise you: no one knows. It died out fully, presumably, during the reign of the Roman emperor Nero, and it was supposed to be a spice that improved the taste of food and an aphrodisiac.

What could it have been? Jonathan Drori in his book “Around the world with 80 plants” calls it a plant of the Ferula genus, but others suggest the genus Thapsia instead; still others proclaim that silphium was not a plant in the Ferula genus, but rather asafoetida, latex gum, made from the roots of such plants. Pause.

The depictions of this plant exist, but they are stylized, and do not fully match the depictions of the extant Ferula & Thapsia plants; that would not be wrong, as silphium could have been its’ own species, but as Ms. Suta at BB pointed out, the depictions of silphium overall show it having stems and leaves of one plant, flowers of another, and fruits of yet a third, making it something of a chimera, then… Wait, what?

The word ‘Chimera’ has several meanings, but we’re interested in the most well-known: a Greek imaginary monster, so ridiculous that it could not have existed for real, as it had a leonine head, a caprine body, and a serpentine tail. Not even the ancient Greeks and Romans believed that the Chimera was ever real, and neither are its’ descendants, ‘lesser chimeras’, the children of human imagination.

Silphium, unfortunately for some, seems to share the Chimera’s baseline traits: a mixture of features of different species, though plant, not animal. This is important, as while people usually know plenty of animal species, the species of plants are more obscure, and one often needs a lot of botanical experience to differentiate between, say, an American basswood, a European linden, and a cultivar of either one of them. You can say: “This beast looks like a tiger, but it is not a tiger, because it has [insert traits here]”, and even complete homebodies will identify it correctly as a lion, a leopard, or even a jaguar. However, if you say “This plant looks like a fennel, but it is not a fennel, because…” then identifying it becomes much harder, because of the obvious. In addition, people said that “silphium looks like a Persian herb, but it is not the same because it tastes differently”, eh?

Gastronomy, now, is something else. People also say “The sauce for the goose is the sauce for the gander”, but people had different tastes in food since the Stone Age, and food preparation is an important variable, too. The Persian Ferula species might have tasted worse than the Libyan silphium did, or it might not have been. Pause.

…Libya is a reason why I have paused, too – you know what else Libya is associated with? The “Odyssey” – Homer put his Lotus-eaters and their Lotus tree there. Like silphium, people argued about the identity of the Lotus tree for a while now; there are several RL plant species that fit the identity of this mythical plant, but not entirely, just as it is with silphium.

Could silphium been a myth, just like how the vegetable lamb and the unicorn are? Technically yes, but there are plenty of evidence that it did exist, right? Nero received the last stalk of it, (what he did with It is another matter entirely), and The Julius Caesar supposedly had much more in his treasury, but the problem with such declarations that by now they are just historical anecdotes, where separating fact from fiction is simply hard. JC might have really had ‘1500 pounds of laser’ in his treasury, or he might not have – now it is hard to tell.

(Silphium is also called laser or laserwort, but the plants of the genera Laser & Laserpitium are not related to it at all. Fun!)

These days, of course, separating truth from fake news can be done easily enough, but in the Ancient period? Not so much, and silphium’s obscurity made it worse. Even the reasons of its’ extinction are conflicting: Johnathan Drori proclaimed that it was the overharvesting, but Ms. Suta at BB suggests that overgrazing and the desertification that follows were to blame instead.

Now, since we’re talking about ‘Bizarre Beasts’, listen – BB does not do wholesale cheating, but it can alter its performance accordingly; the ‘Endlings’ premiere, the passenger pigeon episode, was done grandly, with a guest speaker, and the BB staff sending out tiny plastic pigeons afterwards. The silphium episode, on the other hand, was much more subdued and restrained; Ms. Suta moved on quickly enough to talk about the general ‘extinction is bad and why’ topic, and the episode was about 10 minutes long, almost 30% shorter than the passenger pigeon piece. Why?

Because BB did their research and realized that underneath all the historical anecdotes and culinary discussions might be a chimera – a plant that never was as it was described; it existed – it might still exist – in another way entirely, but the way Pliny and friends described? It never been.

Finally, getting back to the silphium’s extinction – could it have been saved? (If it was a real Libyan plant?) Again, we get more ambiguity – Drori suggests that silphium was very hard to move and translocate, but…

On one hand, this sort of operation is hard to do, even now – only a few years ago people tried to introduce African cheetahs to India; the Indian government was difficult, (and when the cheetahs were introduced, they died out in India quite quickly). In addition, when it comes to translocating just some of India’s only Asiatic lions, (they live in the Gir forest; from the genetic P.O.V., they are a part of the leonine subspecies that live in West and Central Africa), India flat-out refused. Things could have gone in any way, but then the Donald’s government partially alienated Modi’s India, it turned from the U.S. to RF and CPR, so now the West are not bothering India with their rewilding projects, lest it gets worse. Bully, and yes, translocating silphium from Libya to other countries might have been just as hard, but on the other hand, the Roman republic/empire of that time was much less concerned about PR; if there was silphium in Libya, and it was profitable, they would have done something about the status quo – but they did not. Maybe because there really wasn’t anything profitable in Libya, not even silphium? Until time machines become available to the public, we will never know.

For now, however, this is it. See you all soon!