Cure-alls are, generally speaking, never what they claim. Most medical wonder drugs are nothing of the sort, and snake oil salesmen have existed throughout history, prospering as long as there are people out there who are prepared to believe them.

But this is not to say that all such medical supplements are fraud. Some have turned out to be genuine, for reasons more or less clear, with modern science providing the mechanism behind old remedies.

Further back still are the stories of wonder drugs which we can no longer find, mysterious miracles from ancient times which, were all the stories to be believed, would certainly have a place on the shelf of a modern pharmacy.

Perhaps chief among these would be silphium, the wonder drug of the Romans. It could treat almost any malady from muscle aches to coughs to fever. You could apply it to warts for example, or use it to reduce swelling.

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Silphium was also used commonly in cooking as an aromatic herb. This suggests that, aside from its medical benefits, it had a pleasing smell and flavor, truly a wondrous drug.

On top of this, it was thought to be both a contraceptive, an abortifacient and a aphrodisiac, a heady combination in anybody’s book. All this from a plant which, according to the surviving texts which described it, needed minimal processing to retrieve its valuable resin, and which grew wild on the hillsides of north Africa, well within reach of Rome.

This sounds like something we should bring back, right? Well, there’s one key problem: we aren’t entirely sure what silphium is, or rather was.

The disappearance of this mysterious plant is considered the first extinction in history caused by man, apparently occurring simply because the high demand led to overharvesting. But this seems careless, and the Romans were no fools.

How could such an important drug be allowed to become extinct? Why didn’t the Romans, who thought it worth its weight in gold, do anything to stop it?

The Perfect Plant

In answering such questions we are immediately hampered by the fact that we do not exactly know what silphium was ourselves, not having any surviving plant to analyze. Based on descriptions and surviving depictions in Roman art we believe it to be a type of fennel, but this is largely a guess.

The Romans tell us it had ceased to exist around the middle of the first century AD. Only a century earlier Julius Caesar had deposited “1,500 pounds” of the resin in the Roman treasury, but flash forward a hundred years and we hear of a stalk of the plant, supposedly the last, being given to the Emperor Nero.

Much survives from antiquity which allow us to picture the plant, and it was not just the Romans who knew of it. The Greek philosopher Theophrastus describes its roots as thick and black, about half a meter long and supporting a hollow stalk with golden leaves.

The coinage of Cyrene, the Roman city situated nearby the area that silphium grew wild, also commonly depicts the plant, as the city had grown rich from its export. Here it spears as a thick, ridged stalk resembling celery, with leaves spreading out along its length and a bulb of flowers atop.

Based on these depictions some still believe that silphium may in fact survive, and that the extinction was just localized to the growing fields of which the Romans were aware. Various members of the fennel family have been suggested, but perhaps the closest to surviving accounts is Ferula drudeana.

This species of fennel is found in only three isolated sites in Turkey and physically has a close resemblance to ancient depictions. It also produces resin, one of the key things we know about silphium, and which the Romans called laserpicium.

There are problems with identifying this plant as ancient silphium, however, not least that its range does not appear to extend to north Africa and Cyrene. It may not be silphium exactly, then, but it might be something similar, and these similarities may also offer a clue as to why ancient silphium went extinct. 

The most prominent theory as to why silphium was lost comes again from Theoprastus, who notes an oddity about the plant in that it cannot be cultivated. We also know where wild silphium grew in the vicinity of Cyrene, and it is a remarkably small range. It is easy to see Roman demand outstripping supply of this finicky and rare wild plant.

If that is what happened, then it truly is a crying shame. Silphium had been famed for many centuries before the Romans came to prominence. Before the Greeks, the Egyptians knew of its medicinal qualities, and even the mysterious Bronze Age Minoans, one of the oldest civilizations in the Mediterranean, knew of it.

The Minoan hieroglyph “psi” meaning plant is thought to be a stylized representation of the silphium stalk, a hint as to how ubiquitous and commonly known this plant was. But there is another symbol, much more familiar to modern readers, which is associated with the plant and which may offer a final clue as to its identity.

Cyrenean coinage sometimes contains a drawing of a heart, which as depicted alongside the silphium plant appears to represent its seed. This would make sense given silphium’s aphrodisiac properties, but it may be a direct description of the plant itself.

There are members of the family of plants known as the Apiaceae, which includes such modern ingredients as parsley, celery and carrots, which have heart shaped features. Heracleum sphondylium, commonly known as “hogweed” is one such.

The problem with hogweed is that it is not good for eating, and is in fact poisonous, albeit only at a low level. Once again it would seem we are at a dead end.

And that, unfortunately, is where we have to stay. Nothing in our modern understanding meets all the descriptions of ancient silphium. Only two possibilities remain, and the first is that the Romans were right: silphium is gone forever,

The other possibility is that silphium was not one plant but a range, all of which did one or another of the things it was claimed silphium could do. Some believe the aromatic herb asafetida, known to the Romans as well as us, may be the culinary silphium, for example.

But all this is guesswork. It seems that silphium, for the moment at least, will remain a lost treasure of the ancients.

Top Image: A coin from Cyrene depicting silphium: the plant, which only grew locally to the city, became its chief export. Source: ArchaiOptix / CC BY-SA 4.0.