The Chemical Muse: Drug Use and the Roots of Western Civilization

by D. C.A. Hillman Ph.D.

Overview

"The last wild frontier of classical studies." ---The Times (UK)
The Chemical Muse uncovers decades of misdirection and obfuscation to reveal the history of widespread drug use in Ancient Rome and Greece. In the city-states that gave birth to Western civilization, drugs were an everyday element of a free society. Often they were not just available, but vitally necessary for use in medicine, religious ceremonies, and war campaigns. Their proponents and users existed in all classes, from the common soldier to the emperor himself.
Citing examples in myths, medicine, and literature, D. C. A. Hillman shows how drugs have influenced and inspired the artists, philosophers, and even politicians whose ideas have formed the basis for civilization as we know it. Many of these ancient texts may seem well-known, but Hillman shows how timid, prudish translations have left scholars and readers in the dark about the reality of drug use in the Classical world.
Hillman's argument is not simply "pro-drug." Instead, he appeals for an intellectual honesty that acknowledges the use of drugs in ancient societies despite today's conflicting social mores. In the modern world, where academia and university life are often politically charged, The Chemical Muse offers a unique and long overdue perspective on the contentious topic of drug use and the freedom of thought.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466882294
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/30/2014
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	552,275
File size:	327 KB

About the Author

D. C. A. Hillman earned an M.S. in bacteriology and an M.A. and Ph.D in classics from the University of Wisconsin. His research has been published in the academic journal Pharmacy in History. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife and children.

Read an Excerpt

The Chemical Muse

Drug Use and the Roots of Western Civilization

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By D. C. A. Hillman

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2008 D. C. A. Hillman, Ph.D.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8229-4

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CHAPTER 1

The Ancient Crucible

The Greek knew and felt the terror and horror of existence. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Two thousand years ago, life was nothing less than an endless struggle for survival. The cultural milieu of the ancient Greeks and Romans, something we now call Classical civilization, gave birth to venerated institutions and ideas like Western philosophy, the scientific method, and democratic governance, yet it was neither idyllic nor romantic. Antiquity saw the birth of humanism and political freedom, concepts that brought hope and prosperity to the West and ultimately sparked the Renaissance and Enlightenment, but the ancient world was very much a place of overwhelming anguish. Greece and Italy were home to renowned authors and statesmen like Pliny, the natural historian, Pericles, the democratic reformer, and Julian, the Roman emperor who tried in vain to break Christianity's stranglehold on state affairs, but in the midst of such psychologically liberating tendencies, distress and misery were accepted facts of life, cruel torments sent by a host of merciless gods. Men and women died a thousand preventable deaths in antiquity, where existence was oftentimes a sorrowful tragedy, a pitiful farce that opened with a chorus of grieving mothers and closed with the entire cast's premature exit.

Natural disasters, fatal diseases, and unending warfare dogged man's every step from womb to pyre like maddening Furies. Volcanoes, epidemics, and vicious combat brought death and destruction, claiming the lives of the famous and the infamous alike, along with history's forgotten multitudes. The devastatingly harsh conditions that prevailed forged literary traditions characterized by equal proportions of pessimism and passion. Modern audiences often fail to appreciate the ancient world's understanding of the transience of life, and thereby misread Greek and Latin literature. Scholars, Hollywood, and a now vanishing breed of high school Latin teachers see much more of themselves in ancient peoples than actually exists. Give them a toga and a laurel wreath and they'd suddenly think they're Julius Caesar. However, history just doesn't work that way. Time and social evolution have changed the ways we live and die, and thus our experiences as a species.

Today the West views death as an endogenous process, the breakdown of the body, while ancient Greeks and Romans saw it as the result of uncontrollable external forces. Catastrophes killed them; we kill ourselves. Fatty foods, indolence, and a history of smoking give most of us moderns that ignominious heart attack, stroke, or cancer that escorts us to our resting places. However, in antiquity plague, famine, and hand-to-hand combat cut life short. Those who managed to live long were champions of a small but resilient minority. They were a select few, constantly aware that most of their contemporaries were not so lucky. Accordingly, sorrow, pessimism, and anxiety form a strong undercurrent in Classical literature, produced as it was by those who survived the diseases and wars that dominated ancient life. Classical myth, the lifeblood of Western society, is endowed with a spirit of tragic evanescence, a heartfelt communion with the metaphysical reality that life is painful and fleeting.

Two millennia ago people were capable of living just as long as modern postindustrialists, but most didn't. Harsh environmental factors lowered the average survival rate in antiquity, but it's important to understand that the biology of human life was no different. People are not capable of living longer today than they did then, they just manage to dodge the statistical bullets of the ancient world. Although it's impossible to put a number on the average life expectancy of the Classical world with any accuracy, the written records left behind by the Greeks and Romans make it clear that it was much lower than it is today.

Much of the great psychological burden imposed by the harsh living conditions of ancient life has been alleviated, making it difficult for us to fully appreciate the customs, values, and mores found in ancient literature. More important, a great demographic gulf prevents us from understanding several facets of the Classical world that have been intentionally ignored by modern scholars, namely, the widespread use of mind-altering substances, antiquity's enduring obsession with drug-wielding sorcerers, and the profound influence of narcotics on the development of Western literature and society.

In order for us to wrap our modern minds around the ancient love affair with drugs, we must first understand why these chemicals were so desperately needed; we must ask ourselves what compelled the Greeks and Romans to seek the solace offered by pharmaceuticals, and how their lifestyles and living conditions induced them to become experts in the use of narcotics. Examining the ancient world's struggle with the forces of nature, disease, and violence will show us why drugs were such valued commodities and how the Greeks and Romans started their cultural journey on the path toward discovering the psychotropic and analgesic effects of certain natural substances.

The search for information about antiquity begins in the dust and ashes of ancient ruins. Beneath the ominous shadow of Mount Vesuvius today, tourists walk the streets of Pompeii peering in at the remains of once-lavish temples, public buildings, marketplaces, brothels, and eateries. Archaeologists who excavated the site made grim plaster molds of impressions left by the volcano's ash-covered victims, which give viewers today the eerie feeling that the dead still inhabit the dark corners of the city. Pompeii, along with one of her close neighbors, Herculaneum, is amazingly well preserved for one simple reason: It was completely wiped off the map of human affairs by a volcanic eruption in 79 A.D. The forces that snuffed out its inhabitants with such sudden violence preserved it for later generations.

Across the Mediterranean, tourists drink and dance the night away on the picturesque island of Santorini. The island, just a few hours' journey from mainland Greece, is a wonderful place to relax, unwind, and maybe sow a few wild oats. Long before it became a popular vacation spot, it was known as Thera, the home of an ancient people we call the Minoans. A terrible explosion on this volcanic island sometime around 1600 B.C. buried its settlements in ash and forever transformed its circular shape into something resembling a crescent moon enfolding a monstrously ominous crater. Like Pompeii, it sports some fantastic ruins.

Both Pompeii and Thera tell us one important thing about the ancient world: Natural disasters occasionally wiped out everything from small communities to neighboring villages, large cities, and even entire cultures. There were no emergency warning systems, no protective architecture or sophisticated fire codes, no storm cellars, no disaster plans, and no International Red Cross. When tragedy struck in the form of an earthquake, volcano, flood, or fire, the people of antiquity bore the full weight of nature's wrath. Victims of natural disasters simply vanished.

Archaeological ruins like those of Pompeii make for sensational viewing, but it's important to remember that the disaster that preserved the city's streets and buildings also snuffed out the lives of countless victims. Pliny the Elder (a title meant to distinguish him from his nephew of the same name) was one such man. He died while valiantly trying to rescue survivors from the terrible devastation of the fiery eruption. As the head of the Roman naval fleet stationed in the area, he was in an excellent position to render assistance to those who fled to the beaches to get away from the ash and noxious fumes. Of course, his rescue attempt was not entirely altruistic. As an author of a lengthy and rather obsessively detailed work on natural history, he was quite anxious to view firsthand the behavior of Vesuvius.

Curiosity got the best of Pliny. He succumbed to the poisonous gases belched up by the volcano. It was a sudden and sad end to the life of a man who spurned the spirit of superstition that so characterized his world and searched for rational explanations to natural marvels.

Born in northern Italy around 23 A.D. to an aristocratic family, Pliny steered clear of the political intrigue of the mid–first century that claimed the lives of many prominent citizens. He took an assignment with the Roman military in Germany and became acquainted with Titus, the son of the future emperor Vespasian, an association that would eventually serve him quite well. However, things quickly began heating up for the ruling elite in Rome when the emperor Nero assumed power, and Pliny wisely took a backseat in political affairs. During this period of his life he devoted his energies to writing and scholarly research.

Pliny was nothing less than a workaholic, a man who spent all hours of the day reading and writing. His greatest work, the Natural History, is a marvelous encyclopedia of facts and fictions of the natural world, excerpted from countless ancient authorities. It includes topics as diverse as geography, anthropology, zoology, botany, and medicine. Pliny talked about any and all aspects of the world of nature, fearing to leave out any pertinent details on a given subject, even if they seemed a bit hard to believe. He was a master of the curious and the controversial, and his work contains a wealth of information on the early development of science and scientific investigation. Most important, Pliny was fascinated by the world of drugs; his Natural History contains lengthy sections on the use of botanicals, animal products, and minerals in medicines and poisons.

Despite his intimate knowledge of the natural world, Pliny failed to predict the lethality of Vesuvius and became one of its many victims at a not-so-ripe old age; he was only in his midfifties. His death serves to remind us that the great accomplishments of the citizens of antiquity were brought to fruition against a background of tremendous suffering and future uncertainty.

Pliny, like his contemporaries, was a victim of his surroundings; and it wasn't just spectacular natural disasters like floods, earthquakes, and volcanoes that threatened survival. Technological inadequacies were also a persistent problem, and the ancient world constantly suffered as a result. Although Greeks and Romans were known for their genius for abstract mathematics and engineering, the materials and methods available two thousand years ago significantly limited their technological development. Juvenal, a Latin satirist known for his biting criticisms of Roman society, writes that it was not uncommon for buildings to collapse under their own weight, without the aid of an earthquake or volcano:

We live in a city shored up, for the most part, with gimcrack
Stays and props: that's how our landlords arrest
The collapse of their property, papering over great cracks
In the ramshackle fabric, reassuring the tenants
They can sleep secure, when all the time the building
Is poised like a house of cards ...

Stone monuments aside, much of the construction in antiquity was simply inadequate and even downright dangerous. Even when buildings managed to stand firm against gravity, there remained the frightening danger of fire, due to the highly flammable components commonly used in construction. Conflagrations were a common spectacle, especially in large, overcrowded cities like Rome. Juvenal gives us the gruesome details, with just a touch of Roman sarcasm:

... I prefer to live where
Fires and midnight panics are not quite such common events.
By the time the smoke's got up to your third-floor apartment
(And you still asleep) your heroic downstairs neighbor
Is roaring for water, and shifting his bits and pieces to safety.
If the alarm goes at ground-level, the last to fry
Will be the attic tenant, way up among the nesting
Pigeons with nothing but tiles between himself and the weather.

Fires could wipe out entire neighborhoods in an incredibly short time; and the fire department wasn't always reliable, particularly if you didn't have enough money to pay it off.

Natural disasters and poor construction materials threatened survival in the premodern West, but misfortune also wore other guises to life's miserable masquerade. Famine was a menace, a fiend the first world has only recently learned to live without. Obesity was more of an oddity than a regular occurrence in ancient society, where concerns about fatty foods were unknown; few had the resources to be gluttons. Fat wasn't unseemly because it was unfashionable, it was just unnatural.

Part of the reason people were skinnier in Athens and Rome than they are today was the difficulty of maintaining a constant, safe food supply. Without agricultural controls and advanced food distribution systems, famines could be caused by a variety of environmental factors. Simple fluctuations in rainfall, temperature, and relative humidity could significantly reduce crop yields and diminish the nutritional value of agricultural produce. In addition, plant diseases, like wheat rust, devastated wide swaths of agricultural lands and quickly threatened critical food supplies. Even if a particular season's yield happened to be bountiful, there was no guarantee that the foodstuffs would be properly distributed. The Mediterranean Sea was antiquity's best means of transporting its grain across great distances, but critical shipping routes were regularly disrupted by storms, warfare, and piracy; supplies often failed to reach their destinations, and people died as a result.

Furthermore, food shortages were usually accompanied by mass migrations, civic unrest, or deadly plagues. Difficulties like these only added to the number of the dead, which meant that starvation and malnutrition were among the most significant causes of death in the Classical world. For example, in 125 B.C. a disastrous locust infestation caused a famine that killed roughly 200,000 people. Although this scourge has largely disappeared from the West's social radar screen thanks to insecticides, pestilence was a recurrent disaster and an implacable source of anxiety for our ancestors.

Slowly digesting one's own body for sustenance is a painfully horrific way to die, and many poor souls watched the awful spectacle of friends and family wasting away to nothingness, but nature possessed far quicker means that were equally shocking. A variety of venomous creatures lurked in bustling cities and the verdant countryside, waiting for unsuspecting victims to present themselves as targets. Among the host of reptiles and insects that the Classical world met on a daily basis, snakes were a particularly persistent source of anxiety. North Africa was practically overrun with these creatures, while southern Europe had its own share of lethal species.

The Greeks and Romans bestowed names on venomous snakes that reflect a macabre appreciation for aspects of their behavior and physical characteristics: The muagros was the "mouse hunter," and the kerastes was the "horned one." They also gave names that reflected the symptoms brought about by an unfortunate encounter: Accordingly, the seps caused "putrefaction" and the dipsas made its victim suffer from "extreme thirst." From this vocabulary, English derived a number of scientifically valuable words like keratin, sepsis, and polydipsia.

In a society lacking antivenin, snakes presented a significant threat to survival. Classical authors tell us snakes invaded homes, frequented temples, frolicked in agricultural fields, and often scurried across well-traveled highways. No place was safe, and nobody was immune from random attacks; rural families, field slaves, travelers, merchants, and soldiers were frightfully accustomed to the sight of dangerous snakes: As a contemporary poet described it:

Consider now the murderous asp, bristling with dry scales, the most sluggish of all snakes. Its form is terrifying, but when in movement, it uncoils its weight slowly and ever seems to wear a fixed look in its drowsy eyes ... It has four fangs, their underside hollow, hooked, and long, rooted in its jaws, containing poison, and at their base a covering of membranes hides them. Thence it belches forth poison unassuageable on a body. Be they no friends of mine whose heads these monsters assail. For no bite appears on the flesh, no deadly swelling with inflammation, but the man dies without pain, and a slumberous lethargy brings life's end.

Much of the ancient medicine and magic found in texts from Egypt to Spain is preoccupied with the treatment of snake and insect bites.

Ancient doctors relied on drugs to counter the specific symptoms of snake venom, but botanical curatives failed to block the toxins themselves, so they were seldom effective and therefore only palliative. Despite their frequently impressive understanding of human anatomy and pharmaceuticals, the biochemistry of toxic substances was well beyond the level of medical advancement achieved in the Greco-Roman world. As a result, weaker members of society, including infants, young children, and the elderly frequently succumbed to an untimely death. Fortunately, what was once a source of peril has now become just a nuisance. The modern world's separation from nature's most dangerous creatures has significantly quelled our age-old concern for such venomous animals and insects.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Chemical Muse by D. C. A. Hillman. Copyright © 2008 D. C. A. Hillman, Ph.D.. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction
1 The Ancient Crucible
2 Ancient Medicines
3 Greeks, Romans, and Recreational Drugs
4 Promethean Euphoria
5 Drawing Down the Moon
6 The Divine Gift of Mind-Bending Intoxication
7 The Pharmacology of Western Philosophy
8 Democracy, Free Speech, and Drugs
Conclusion: The Western Pursuit of Happiness
Notes
Bibliography
Index