Recreating Democritus’ Party Tricks II: Egg Yolks

Revisiting Democritus’ Party Tricks

Here’s an update on my attempt to replicate one of the party tricks or paignia (παίγνια) attributed to Democritus in the London Papyrus 121, col. 5, ll. 1–19.

Since last year, I’ve noticed that several translators have interpreted the word κρόκος to mean egg yolk instead of saffron.

“To make an egg like an apple: after boiling an egg, coat it with a mixture of egg yolk and wine.”

Ὠὸν ὅμοιον μῆλον* γενέσθαι· ζέσας τὸ ὠὸν χρεῖε κρόκῳ μείξας μετ’ οἴνου.

*μήλῳ Wessely

Papyri Graecae Magicae VII 171–172 = VII (Atomists) R127A.2 Laks-Most

I figured it was worth testing the egg-yolk hypothesis experimentally.

In Greek natural philosophical and medical literature, κρόκος normally refers to the saffron crocus, Crocus sativus L., in particular to the dried stigmata from the flowers used as a spice. Since the spice dyes and stains with a strong orange-yellow colour, the name also came to refer to the colour itself, just as κόκκος, the ‘berry’ of the kermes oak, came to be used for the dark red color of plums. At some point, it also came to refer to the yellow part of the egg, much like the English word ‘yolk,’ which comes from old English word geolca, ultimately from OE geolu, ‘yellow.’ (Both yolk and yellow are cognate with the ancient Greek word χλωρός, ‘fresh,’ ‘green,’ ‘yellow,’ which also came to mean egg yolk).

All this means that interpreters have two options when translating κρόκος in our passage: saffron or egg yolk. Maybe because of the egg connection, some interpreters wagered here it means yolk.

It seemed unlikely to me that mixing egg-yolk with wine could produce a dye of any effect, but I decided to try it out using roughly the same procedure I used last year, boiling the eggs and then dying both the shells and the boiled egg whites. I should have used controls, but this is mostly for fun.

The Experiment

I tried to stay as close to the original experiment as possible. I would use red and white wine, brown and white boiled eggs, and paint both the shells and the egg whites with the mixture. I also tested saffron again for comparison.

Testing the egg yolk interpretation: egg yolks, red and white wine, brown and white eggs.

Egg yolks mixed with red and white wine.

Here are the shells painted with egg yolk and saffron. As you can see, none of these looks like apples.

Brown and white egg shells painted and smeared with wine and yolk mixtures.

Then I peeled the eggs and painted the whites — and the yolks too for good measure. The egg painted with saffron and white wine is the most yellow, almost the colour of the yolk. The egg painted with egg yolk and wine also is a bit yellow, but the mixture flowed off pretty quickly without staining the egg at all (see large photo below). Red wine in all cases made the whites blue. If I’d run a control of plain red wine, I imagine the same would have happened. The egg yolks look pretty gross.

Testing yolk vs saffron on cooked egg whites.

Painted and smeared on.

Here the saffron and wine mixture worked much like last time. It produced egg slices that look like peach or apricot. The egg yolk and wine mixture didn’t produce much of anything.

Red wine (top row) makes egg whites go blue, regardless of what is added. White wine with yolk (bottom right) does almost nothing. White wine with saffron (bottom left) turns egg white saffron or peach coloured.

Conclusions

I talked about the results with Glenn Most and André Laks, who went with egg yolks in their translation for the Loeb series. They offered a response that I admit had not occurred to me and is worth keeping in mind: what if the recipe was not meant to work? What if it was designed to fail?

After all, one might suppose that the title, ‘παίγνια’, even if the term is used in an nonstandard way, still has something to do with childish things: games, jokes, ticks, trifles. What if, in this case, the tick is the one played on the person gullible enough to perform it? It’s a least plausible, given some of the tricks:

“To get hard whenever you want. Grind up pepper with honey and rub it on your thing.”

Στ[ύ]ειν ὅτε θέλεις· πέπερι μετὰ μέλιτος τρίψας χρῖέ σου τὸ πρᾶ̣γ̣μ̣α.

Papyri Graecae Magicae VII 186

Could be. Then again, here’s a 2015 patent for a topical preparation to enhance genital sensation using piperine, a primary component of Piper nigrum L., black pepper.

Replication of PGM VII 171-172

A dinner party plate. Can you tell which of these is an egg?

Recreating Democritus’ Party Tricks

I. The Recipe

A while ago, I wrote about a collection of recipes for dinner party games in the Greek magical papyri. The collection is light and frivolous, much more so than its arcane and erotic neighbours. It calls itself paignia—tricks—and it also names its author—Democritus, no less!—something most of the other medical and magical recipes avoid. I doubt anyone thinks Democritus actually wrote these recipes, but I still find the ascription curious. Democritus tends to be associated with magic and alchemy (on this, see Matteo Martelli’s work on the Pseudo-Democritus, and his faculty page + academia.edu), and he’s even sometimes presented as a physician. But these recipes aren’t magic or medicine. They’re party tricks.

Now, along with recipes for drinking without getting drunk and techniques for picking up fellow guests, the text also includes a few practical jokes. The first is a recipe for making bronze tableware look like golden, perhaps an omen of alchemy. I’ll try this one as soon as I get my hands on the materials. Materials for the second one were easier to source: it’s a recipe for making eggs look like apples.

“To make an egg that resembles an apple: having boiled the egg, coat it with a mixture of saffron and wine.”

Ὠὸν ὅμοιον μήλον γενέσθαι· ζέσας τὸ ὠὸν χρεῖε κρόκῳ μείξας μετ’ οἴνου.

PGM VII 170–171

I was recently talking about this recipe with Lucia Raggetti (faculty page, academia.edu) from the AlchemEast project at l’Università di Bologna, who inspired me to try it out. It seemed like a good way to try to understand some puzzles about the text: what kind of eggs would they have used? Did they leave the shell on, like an Easter egg? What kind of wine was it? Does the strength of the wine matter? Could we just use water? And saffron—isn’t it yellow? What kind of yellow apple is this supposed to look like? I would need to experiment.

In the end, with a suggestion from Lucia, I think we’re pretty close to understanding the recipe and getting the joke.

Here’s what I came up with:

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Democritean still life: boiled eggs coated with saffron-infused white wine, cut to resemble peaches (with abnormally large stones).

The goal of the recipe seems to be to make the whites of boiled eggs look like the flesh of peaches or apricots. Maybe this conclusion is a bit speculative, but when I showed the results of the experiments to people, these were the ones they found convincing. The other candidates just looked like badly-dyed eggs.

II. Designing the Experiments

The replication of the recipe taught me that imagination and creativity are about as important for designing such experiments as the text itself. I went into the project with a bunch of assumptions about what the recipe was for, assumptions which turned out to be unjustified. I had assumed, for instance, something about the process, namely that I was going to be making Easter eggs; and I had assumed something about the result, namely that I would end up with things that look like little apples.

Because I was starting from these assumptions, my initial design for the experiment was constrained. I came up with what I thought was a thorough test: I would coat the shells of two kinds of eggs (brown and white) using saffron soaked in two kinds of wine (white and red), and I would run two controls, coating each kind of egg with plain red or white wine.

I didn’t realize how constraining these assumptions were until I ran the experiment. What I got looked… well … the results didn’t make convincing Easter eggs, never mind apples (pictured below).

And as it turns out, I had made two mistakes.

The first was to restrict myself to apples. The word written on the papyrus obviously isn’t the English word “apple”—it’s a Greek word, mēlon (μῆλον). This word is by an interesting historical fluke cognate with the English word “melon,” but in Greek it does not refer to cantaloupes or honeydew. Instead, like its Latin cognate, malum, it refers to some kinds of tree fruit. It is usually translated “apple,” like in the Eve and Adam story; and, indeed, “apple” is what I found in most modern translations of the ps.-Democritean paignia. But of course, mēlon doesn’t really mean apple. Its range of meanings is much wider: peaches, citrons, plums, and apricots are all “apples”, or more accurately mēla. The word covers most of the larger tree fruits, which in Greek are usually distinguished by region. Peaches for example are “Persian mēla”; citrons are “Median mēla”, etc.

I knew this. I’ve even written on it before; but, once I had rashly accepted “apple” as a translation, I forgot about the other possibilities. Instead, I’d anticipated a result that wasn’t implied by the text of the papyrus at all.

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First attempt at the replication. White-shelled eggs with (1) saffron and red wine (left) and (2) saffron and white wine (right). The brown eggs (not pictured) showed no appreciable colour change.

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Peaches, detail, showing characteristic long, slender leaves (left panel of those pictured at the top of the post).

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Dyed eggs sliced with shells on to look like apple slices.

My second mistake was to restrict the experiment to dying shells. I didn’t have a principled reason for doing this and the text itself didn’t suggest it. It was more or less force of habit. I’m just used to dyeing egg shells. That’s not to say it was a bad guess (even though I think it was wrong). What I should have done, however, was set up experiments dyeing all the parts of a boiled egg, because the recipe was vague on precisely this point. It doesn’t say what part of the egg is to be coated after you boil it.

Luckily, Lucia caught the mistake. After seeing my yellow Easter eggs, she suggested that I try slicing them to make them look more like what you might find on a plate at a dinner party. These sliced eggs didn’t come out too badly; and it also opened up the possibilities for experimenting. Once the yolks fell out, the imagination took over. It became clear how close the shape and visible texture of the sliced egg was to a slice of peach or apricot.

Once I coated the slices without the yoke and shell, it was immediately obvious.

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Peach slices, canned. Image from here.

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Boiled egg-white, soaked in white wine infused with saffron.

III. How to Make Eggs that Look Like Peaches

Materials:

• Red wine

• White wine

• Brown eggs

• White eggs

• Saffron (you’ll need lots—I got mine at a market pretty cheap)

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Procedure:

The set up for this experiment is pretty straightforward. It also got a bit messy, so best avoid nice clothes and linens.

1. I placed around 30 saffron stigmata in separate glass bowls and soaked them in approx. 10 ml of red or white wine. I used a lot of saffron—so much you could smell it even at an arm’s distance from the bowl. I might have gotten away with less.

2. I let the saffron soak in the wine for around 15 minutes at room temperature. If you don’t use a lot of saffron, let them soak longer.

3. At first, I tried brushing the wine and saffron onto the egg shells, masking half the egg with tape, brushing on the wine, letting them dry, and then painting on the other half. The difference, though, was so minor that I gave up and simply smeared the mixture onto the shells with my fingers without masking. This got me yellow eggs.

4. Lucia suggested slicing the eggs to hide the egg shape and give the impression of a fruit with a rind. It seemed even better to simply remove the shells altogether and try again.

5. After removing the shells, I rolled the eggs around in the wine and saffron.

6. I then sliced them and coated the slices with the saffron and wine mixture again. Sometimes, I removed a slice and left the yolk intact, dimpled with a pencil to look like a peach stone, so that the whole thing looked like something from the Pompeii frescoes.

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1. Adding wine to the saffron

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2. Letting the saffron soak in the wine

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3. Failed experiment: brushing on the saffron mixture

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4. Sliced egg with shell, resembling white-fleshed quince slices.

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5. Rolling eggs, shelled, in the wine and saffron mixture.

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6. Finished product: sliced, with yolk dimpled to look like a peach pit.

IV. Some Conclusions

I shouldn’t read too much into this experiment, but I can’t help but get excited about it. There is something about the process of replicating an ancient recipe that tempts a feeling of familiarity. It’s like being at their table.

I’d love to believe this experiment counts as a piece of evidence for culinary history, that it tells us people used to serve succulent peach slices at their symposia, maybe even with presentations like those we see in the Pompeian frescoes.

And maybe it’s a stretch, but I’d also like to think it adds something to a passage from Sextus Empiricus about yellow apples that always puzzled me:

“The phenomena that strike our senses seem to be complexes of sensations, just as the apple seems to be smooth, fragrant, sweet, and yellow.”

ἕκαστον τῶν φαινομένων ἡμῖν αἰσθητῶν ποικίλον ὑποπίπτειν δοκεῖ, οἷον τὸ μῆλον λεῖον εὐῶδες γλυκὺ ξανθόν.

Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 1.94

Maybe Sextus and Democritus went to the same kinds of parties.

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Alexander and the Peach Tree

While I was researching the Persea tree, I often came across the claim that the peach was introduced to Europe by Alexander the Great after he had conquered Persia.

Here is one variation I found when searching Google—the top search result (on 14. July 2016) for “peach tree Alexander the Great”. It’s from the blog Kingsburg Orchards, a peach-grower in California:

“As with many stone fruits, peaches originated in China. It is in the Rosaceae, or Rose, family; genus species Prunus Persica. From China this delectable fruit spread to Persia, where it was widely cultivated. Alexander the Great furthered its spread into Europe - paintings of peaches were even found on the walls of Herculaneum, preserved despite the destruction of Vesuvius.”

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Marion Eugene Ensminger & Audrey H. Ensminger, Foods & Nutrition Encyclopedia, 2nd Edition, CRC Press, 1993, p. 1040.

Another variation also shows up in Wikipedia’s article about the peach. Wikipedia always needs a source, and the source listed is Marion Eugene Ensminger & Audrey H. Ensminger, Foods & Nutrition Encyclopedia, 2nd Edition, CRC Press, 1993, p.1040. It, too, claims Alexander the Great introduced the peach to Europe after conquering the Persians. No ancient source for the claim is given, and none is given anywhere else in the Ensmingers’ Encyclopedia.

I’ve found that this is pretty normal. Nearly every one who mentions this story fails to mention a source. The details of the story can even be gloriously elaborate, but still without a source.

It left me wondering. Let’s say there is a delicious fruit growing in Persia, a place well-known to Greeks before Alexander’s time; and let’s assume the Persians and Greeks almost certainly traded with one another before the time of Alexander. Why wouldn’t the Greeks have known about the peach tree? Were the Persians keeping it from the Greeks out of spite? Did they have border checks to make sure no contraband was smuggled out of the Achaemenid empire? It just made no sense (unless the peach was itself a quite recent import to Persia as well, in which case it might just be a coincidence that Alexander conquered Persia around the same time the peach first shows up in the west).

There is also a pretty plausible explanation for how people might have come up with this story: a confusion of names. In his Inquiry into Plants, Theophrastus discusses a fruit he calls the “Persian apple”, which could easily be confused for a peach if we go only by the name. It seems, however, from his description that it is not a peach, but something more like a citron or lemon (the passage is at Inquiry into Plants 4.4.5). It would not be hard for later writers, however, to confuse the “Persian apple” (again) with the peach, especially if those writers had not seen one or the other of them.

Theophrastus discusses the Persian apple in part of a longer discussion (HP 4.4) about plants native to what he calls “the east and the south”: Persia, India, Arabia, and Africa. In this same discussion, he also talks about Alexander’s “expedition” east, along with many of the plants that were first recorded by Greeks during that expedition.

Someone reading this discussion might think when Theophrastus talks about “the expedition”, he is talking about the whole trip east. But the plants he discusses in relation to the expedition are (as far as I can tell) exclusively plants from India (at 4.4.1, 4.4.5, 4.4.8, 4.4.12, 4.7.8). This makes sense. India was much more remote to fourth-century Greeks than Persia was. Persia, on the other hand, must have been familiar. Persians and Greeks had already fought a few wars by this point, and all the Greek colonies in Anatolia were essentially part of the Persian empire.

It is not surprising that Theophrastus talks about plants from just one part of the expedition, the part to India. They were novel. Persian plants were not.

But if one confuses Theophrastus’ discussion of the Persian apple with what we call the peach, and if the “expedition” is thought to mean any part of Alexander’s expedition east, then the story of Alexander and the peach becomes somewhat understandable.

And in fact I’ve found one place where this confusion shows up explicitly: a paper written by Andrew Dalby called “Alexander’s Culinary Legacy”, published in Cooks and Other People (ed. Walker, Devon: Prospect Books, 1996, pp. 81-93), the proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery held in 1995.

The story is so ubiquitous, however, I keep thinking it must have an earlier source. I looked through more ancient writers: Columella (5.10.19), Pliny (15.13, 44-46), Athenaeus of Naucratis (82F-83A), and Gargilius Martialis (394-403 Mai 1828). But there is no mention of Alexander and the peach. I started to think that maybe it was a modern invention, or even a medieval confusion (I haven't looked at any medieval texts yet). 

Then, I came across a history written by a peach grower, Samperi in Italy:

“Peaches arrived in Rome in the first century B.C. as they were brought by the Greeks to the Mediterranean basin. Rutilius Taurus Emiliano Palladio, in the fourth century. A.D. said that Alexander the Great was very impressed by this tree when he saw it in the gardens of King Darius III during his campaign against Persia.”

The first part of this story is right as far as archaeologists can tell. And in the second part, about Alexander, we finally have a source. This Palladius wrote a work on farming, the Opus agriculturae. He probably lived during the late fourth or early fifth century CE, but his precise dates are uncertain. The best evidence for a terminus post quem of c. 370 CE is the honorific title given in the mss. He is called vir inlustris, which first appears in use during the second half of the fourth century (see the Introduction to John Fitch’s Palladius: The Work on Farming and Poem on Grafting, Devon: Prospect Books, 2013, p. 11). He was a knowledgeable farmer, probably a land-owner, and liked fruit-trees. Sounds like a plausible author of such a story.

Except I have not been able to find any mention of Alexander or Darius in the opus agriculturae. 

I wrote to the Samperi orchard to ask if they knew the reference. Within an hour they had written back to say they found him named in the Italian peach entry on Wikipedia, and figured it was accurate; but they took a quick look through Palladius, and could not find the reference, either. We are working on tracking it down.

In the mean time, I found this elegy by Palladius on the peach:

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Owen’s 1807 translation of the elegy. Source: Google Books.

Ipsa suos onerat meliori germine ramos
persicus et pruno scit sociare genus
imponitque leues in stipite phyllidis umbras
et tali discit fortior esse gradu.

Palladius, Rutilius Taurus Aemilianus, Opus agriculturae, Book 14, ll. 94-98 Schmitt (Teubner, 1898).

And a reference to the curious practice of writing inscriptions on peach pits before planting them: 

“The Greeks assert that the peach will grow with writing on it, if you bury the stones and after seven-days, when they begin to open, you take out the kernels and inscribe whatever you want on them with cinnabar.”

Adfirmantibus Graecis persicus scripta nascetur, si ossa eius obruas et post septem dies, ubi patefieri coeperint, apertis his nucleos tollas et his cinnabari, quod libebit, inscribas.

Palladius, Rutilius Taurus Aemilianus, Opus agriculturae, Book 12.7. Translation largely follows Owen’s 1807 (source).

Invasive species

I

We like to tell stories about how things get their names, perhaps because we imagine names will give us insight into something’s essence. We also don’t always agree on what names mean, and so sometimes we tell different stories.

Take the avocado. The avocado’s botanical name, Persea americana Mill., comes from another tree, the Persea, that grew in ancient Egypt. The name was chosen by the English botanist Philip Miller (1691–1771), whose great achievement was to name many of the New World’s plants without ever having left Europe. Miller must have noticed some resemblance between descriptions of the old-world Persea and the new-world avocado, although what it was is unclear. I doubt he ever saw an ancient Egyptian Persea, and although he writes as if he tried to grow avocados, I can’t tell if he was ever successful. Whatever had inspired him, Miller left no record. The story is lost. 

The story I am interested in, however, is not about the avocado, but about the plant it was named after: the Persea. How did a tree from Egypt end up with a name that sounds like it came from another country, from Persia?

This is a story people were already interested in telling two-thousand years ago. Galen alludes to it in the middle of a long argument against Aristotle and Athenaeus of Attalia and he says just enough to make one curious.

“[Aristotle and Athenaeus] say that children who are similar to their mothers are made similar by the nutriment [i.e., the nutriment the mother provides to the fetus]. From there they extend a long string of arguments showing just how many alterations in animals and plants are produced by nutriment. Then, they fail to notice they are unable to prove any of the alterations they mention [involves] a change in its species [brought about by the nutriment]. For to begin with, when the Persea plant was transplanted to Egypt, its species did not change; instead, when it got useful nutriment, its fruit became edible, when it hadn't been edible before. ”

τὰ δ’ ὁμοιούμενα παιδία τῇ μητρὶ διxὰ τὴν τροφὴν ὁμοιοῦσθαί φασιν· κᾄπειτα ἐντεῦθεν ἀποτείνουσι δολιχὸν τοῦ λόγου δεικνύντες, ὅσαι διὰ τροφῆς ἀλλοιώσεις ἐγίγνοντο καὶ ζώοις καὶ φυτοῖς. εἶτ’ οὐκ αἰσθάνονται μηδεμίαν ὧν λέγουσιν ἀλλοιώσεων ἐπιδεῖξαι δυνάμενοι τὸ εἶδος ἐξαλλάττουσαν. αὐτίκα γὰρ <οὔτε> τὸ Περσαῖον φυτὸν εἰς Αἴγυπτον μετακομισθὲν ἐξηλλάγη τὴν ἰδέαν, ἀλλὰ χρηστῆς ἐπιλαβόμενον τροφῆς τὸν καρπὸν ἐδώδιμον ἔσχεν, οὐκ ὂν πρότερον τοιοῦτο.

Galen, De semine 2.1.40–42 (IV.603 K. = CMG V 3,1 154,9–15 De Lacy)

Galen must have some story in mind about how the Persea got to Egypt, but what is the story? Who was his source? I could not find anything like it in Aristotle’s works, so I kept searching to see if the source might have been Athenaeus, the other target of Galen’s attack.

I found a lead in an anonymous ancient paradoxographer. The paradoxographer reports a story attributed to someone named Athenaeus*—a tall-tale of botanical etymology and biological warfare gone wrong. It goes like this:

“Athenaeus says that among the Persians there was a certain tree which bore fatally poisonous fruit. The Persians, when Kambyses waged war against Egypt, imported it to Egypt and planted it in many places so that the Egyptians would be killed when they ate the fruit. Since, however, the soil the tree was in had changed, the fruit it produced became harmless, and it came to be called Persaea because it had been planted by Persians.”

Ἀθήναιός φησιν ἐν Πέρσαις εἶναι δένδρον τι θανάσιμον τὸν καρπὸν φέρον, ὃ τοὺς πέρσας, ὅτε Καμβύσης ἐπ’ Αἴγυπτον ἐστράτευσε, κομίσαι εἰς Αἴγυπτον καὶ ἐν πολλοῖς φυτεῦσαι τόποις, ὅπως οἱ Αἰγύπτιοι τὸν καρπὸν προσφερόμενοι διαφθαρῶσι· τὸ δὲ δένδρον μεταβαλὸν τὴν γῆν ἀπαθῆ τὸν καρπὸν ἐξενεγκεῖν, καὶ περσαίαν τ’ ὀνομάζεσθαι διὰ τὸ ὑπὸ Περσῶν φυτευθῆναι.

Paradoxographus Palatinus, Admiranda 18 (Giannini ed. in Paradoxographorum Graecorum Reliquiae, Milan: Istituto Editoriale Italiano, 1965: 354–360.)

A little background. After the Cyrus the Great had conquered most of the Middle East, his son Kambyses II set out to conquer Egypt. Athenaeus says that on his campaign, he brought along a certain kind of tree from his homeland which he knew to be poisonous. If he planted them while marching through Egypt, the ideas seems to be that the Egyptians would naively eat the fruit, become poisoned, and die, making the land that much easier to conquer. Unfortunately for Kambyses, since the soil in Egypt was so much more fertile than it was in Persia, the fruit from the trees turned from evil to good and his plans were thwarted.

Even by ancient standards, this is a pretty fantastic way of trying to explain why a plant in Egypt is called Persian. Kambyses would have been playing the long game (how many years would it take for the plants to start fruiting?). Besides, why would the Egyptians keep eating it once they found out it was poisonous? For whatever reason, though, Athenaeus seems to have thought the story was plausible enough, since he uses it to support a claim he knew his audience would find implausible—that while mothers contribute only nutrition, and no seminal traits, to their offspring, nutrition can still determine enough of an offspring’s formal characteristics, even its species, to account for why a child will look like its mother.

II

Athenaeus, however, was not the only one to tell this story. As I looked into it, the details started to become more complicated and more interesting. It turns out, it was generally agreed that there was some story about how the Persea got its name, but there was disagreement about the details. In fact, there seem to have been at least two different versions.

Here’s a version, reported by Diodorus of Sicily:

“There are many kinds of tree [in Egypt], and of them, what are called Persaea have fruit that stand out as being extremely sweet. The plant was introduced from Ethiopia by Persians during the time when Kambyses conquered the place.”

ἔστι δὲ καὶ δένδρων γένη πλείονα, καὶ τούτων αἱ μὲν ὀνομαζόμεναι περσαῖαι καρπὸν διάφορον ἔχουσι τῇ γλυκύτητι, μετενεχθέντος ἐξ Αἰθιοπίας ὑπὸ Περσῶν τοῦ φυτοῦ καθ’ ὃν καιρὸν Καμβύσης ἐκράτησεν ἐκείνων τῶν τόπων.

Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica 1.34.7 = Agatharchides of Cnidus (~200 BCE?)  Jacoby FGrH 2a 86 F, Fr. 19 ll. 89–92. (DNP claims he influenced Posidonius and cite fr. 86)

In the version Diodorus reports, the plant wasn’t brought with Kambyses from Persia. Instead, Kambyses and the Persians bring it to Egypt from Ethiopia. We don’t get an explanation why.

One story, therefore, explains the name by saying it was introduced from Persia, the other saying it was introduced from Ethiopia by Persians.

Looking into more sources, I found that both versions had made the rounds in antiquity, people knew it, but no one knew which story was true.

Some authors were confused enough that they simply told both tales. This was the strategy of an anonymous commentary on Nicander’s Theriac, who attributes one to a certain Sostratos, the other to Bolos the Democritean:

“The kranokolaptes are seen on Perseia, as Sostratos [says] in his book On Things that Sting and Bite. They say the Perseia, which they call Rhodakinea, was transplanted from Ethiopia to Egypt. But Bolos the Democritean says in his book On Sympathies and Antipathies that the Persians had a poisonous plant in their own country and planted it in Egypt, since they had wanted to conquer it for some time. Since [the land in Egypt] was good, [the plant] changed into its opposite and the plant made the sweetest fruit.”

ὁ κρανοκολάπτης ἐν ταῖς περσείας ὁρᾶται, ὡς Σώστρατος ἐν τῷ περὶ βλητῶν καὶ δακέτων.  τὴν δὲ περσείαν φασίν, ἣν ῥοδακινέαν καλοῦσιν, ἀπὸ Αἰθιοπίας εἰς Αἴγυπτον μεταφυτευθῆναι. Βῶλος δὲ ὁ Δημοκρίτειος ἐν τῷ περὶ συμπαθειῶν καὶ ἀντιπαθειῶν Πέρσας φησὶν ἔχοντας παρ’ ἑαυτοῖς θανάσιμον φυτὸν φυτεῦσαι ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ, ὡς πολλῶν μελλόντων ἀναιρηθήσεσθαι, τὴν δὲ ἀγαθὴν οὖσαν, εἰς τοὐναντίον μεταβαλεῖν ποιῆσαί τε τὸ φυτὸν καρπὸν γλυκύτατον

Scholia in Nicandrum Theriaca 764A (text above is from Crugnola’s 1971 text; link is to Bussemaker’s 1849 text, which is slightly different)

These details make things even weirder. The second story is familiar. But the first version: why would an Ethiopian plant transplanted to Egypt known as Persea also come to be called Rhodakinea? Did it make a stop in Rhodes? And how did it end up in Egypt? 

Then there are the deadly spiders, the kranokolaptes. Dioscorides also mentions them in his Materia medica:

“The Persaea is a tree which grows in Egypt. It bears edible fruit, it is good for the stomach, and on it are found the venomous spiders called kranokolaptes, especially in Thebes. The dried leaves when sprinkled as a fine powder are able to stop hemorrhage. Some report that this tree was poisonous in Persia, but that it changed when it was introduced to Egypt and became edible.”

περσαία δένδρον ἐστὶν ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ, καρπὸν φέρον ἐδώδιμον, εὐστόμαχον, ἐφ’ οὗ καὶ τὰ λεγόμενα κρανοκόλαπτα φαλάγγια εὑρίσκεται, μάλιστα δὲ ἐν τῇ Θηβαίδι. δύναμιν δὲ ἔχει τὰ φύλλα λεῖα ἐπιπαττόμενα ξηρὰ αἱμορραγίας ἱστᾶν. τοῦτο δὲ ἱστόρησάν τινες ἐν Περσίδι ἀναιρετικὸν εἶναι, μετατεθὲν δὲ εἰς Αἴγυπτον ἀλλοιωθῆναι καὶ ἐδώδιμον γενέσθαι.

Dioscorides, De Materia Medica 1.129 (120,12–18 Wellmann)

Dioscorides seems remarkably confident about the spiders (maybe they are nature’s way of restoring some kind of poison-health balance after the tree’s fruit became edible). Notice, however, his ambivalence about the origin story: on the one hand, he assigns it to people he is not even willing to name; on the other, he still mentions it, even though it adds very little that might be useful for identifying the plant or sorting out how to use it.

Galen, too, seems to share this ambivalence:

“Instead of the seed from the Chaste Tree, plaster the forehead with the fresh leaves of Persaea and an equal amount of myrrh with Egyptian perfume. I know the Persaea tree to exist only in Alexandria, at least not in any other of the Roman provinces. Some call it Persion and say in Persia the fruit of this tree is deadly, while in Egyptian countries it is harmless.”

ἢ ἄγνου σπέρμα, Περσαίας χλωρὰ φύλλα καὶ σμύρνης ἴσα σὺν μύρῳ Αἰγυπτίῳ κατάπλασσε τὸ μέτωπον. ἐν Ἀλεξανδρείᾳ μόνῃ τὸ τῆς Περσαίας δένδρον εἶδον, οὐ μὴν ἐν ἄλλῳ γέ τινι τῶν ὑπὸ Ῥωμαίοις ἐθνῶν. ἔνιοι δὲ Πέρσιον ὀνομάζουσιν αὐτὸ καί φασιν ἐν Πέρσαις ὀλέθριον εἶναι τὸν  καρπὸν τοῦ δένδρου τούτου. κατὰ δὲ τὴν τῶν Αἰγυπτίων χώραν ἀβλαβὲς ὑπάρχον.

Galen, De compositione medicamentorum secundum loco 2.2 (12.569–570 K)

I’m not sure why, unlike Dioscorides, Galen doesn’t mention that it grows in Thebes, since it seems to have been well-known:

“In fact, a tree in the Theban city of Hermopolis, which is called Persaea, is said to drive off many diseases…”

Καὶ ἐν Ἑρμουπόλει δὲ τῆς Θηβαΐδος δένδρον, ἣ Περσαία καλεῖται, πολλὰς ἀπελᾷν νόσους λέγεται...

Nicephorus Callistus Xanthopolus, Historia ecclesiastica 10.31.20–22

Galen also does not mention the spiders. Maybe he had a different source for the story.

At any rate, it seems we now have a plant in Egypt, called Persea, which is covered in deadly spiders (especially in Thebes), which comes either from Persia or Ethiopia, is good for stomach aches, and stops bleeding. 

And what about that other name mentioned by Sostratos, Rhodakinea? One might think this is explained by something Theophrastus says:

“The nature of places makes a great difference relative to bearing or not bearing fruit, as in the case of Persea and the date-palm. The first bears fruit in Egypt and in similar places, but in Rhodes it only comes to the point of blooming…”

εγάλη δὲ διαφορὰ πρὸς καρπὸν καὶ ἀκαρπίαν καὶ ἡ τῶν τόπων φύσις, ὥσπερ ἐπί τε τῆς περσέας ἔχει καὶ τῶν φοινίκων· ἡ μὲν ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ καρποφορεῖ καὶ εἴ που τῶν πλησίον τόπων, ἐν Ῥόδῳ δὲ μέχρι τοῦ ἀνθεῖν μόνον ἀφικνεῖται...

Theophrastus, Historia plantarum 3.3.5

It’s clear Theophrastus or his source thought the plant grew in Rhodes, and it might have taken the name Rhodakinea from there. But Theophrastus, at least, thinks that the Persea is a native tree (ἴδια δένδρα) of Egypt, and he only says that some tried to move it—unsuccessfully—to Rhodes. 

So it’s anybody’s guess how it got to Rhodes in the first place. It doesn’t bear any fruit up north so it must have been cultivated; and in Theophrastus’ version of the story, the plant was not introduced to Egypt at all, but was native to Egypt.

And contrary to what some people think, Theophrastus never says the Persea is grown in Persia. He speaks of something called a Median or Persian apple (τὸ μῆλον τὸ Μηδικὸν ἢ τὸ Περσικὸν καλούμενον) at Historia plantarum 4.4.2, but he never says it grows in Egypt and he says that people do not eat it, but use it for perfume, for keeping moths away, as an antidote for poison and as a breath-freshener. This was probably something like a citron.

Regarding the Persea, on the other hand, Theophrastus, like Diodorus, mentions it has nice, sweet fruit: 

“Some plants are not able to sprout at all in certain places, others sprout but do not bear fruit, like the Egyptian Persaea at Rhodes, but as you proceed south it produces, but only a little, and only there does it produce nice, sweet fruit.”

Τὰ μὲν οὖν ὅλως οὐδὲ βλαστάνειν ἐνιαχοῦ δύναται τὰ δὲ βλαστάνει μὲν ἄκαρπα δὲ γίνεται καθάπερ ἡ περσέα ἡ αἰγυπτία περὶ Ῥόδον, προϊόντι δὲ οὕτω φέρει μὲν ὀλίγον δὲ καὶ καλλικαρπεῖ καὶ γλυκυκαρπεῖ ἐκεῖ μόνον.

Theophrastus, De causis plantarum  2.3.7 (cf. Historia plantarum 4.2.5)

Whatever plant Theophrastus and Diodorus were talking about, assuming they were the same, it does not seem to be the one Athenaeus was talking about. There’s no mention of Persia, no mention of biological warfare, and no explanation why there is a plant growing in Egypt called Persian.

But it also means there are at least two stories, each about a plant called Persea, both growing in Egypt.

III

Prunus persica - The Persian Plum. From Prof. Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé, Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz 1885, Gera, Germany. Distributed under CC 4.0 license, via Wikimedia Commons.

Pliny seems to be aware of the confusion and tries to sort it out, apparently using Theophrastus as an authority, but confusing things terribly. He distinguishes the peach (persicae), which he says grows in Egypt and was transplanted to Rhodes (with the results Theophrastus describes), from the Persea, an entirely different tree, which he says resembles the myxa, a tree that grows cherry-like fruit:

“Indeed, it is clear from the name itself that persica (peaches), though foreign, belong to Asia and Greece and were brought from Persia. For peach (persicae, i.e. Persian) trees were slow and difficult to acclimate, such that they bear no fruit in Rhodes, which was their first place of settlement from Egypt. It is false that they are poisonous and cause torment when grown in Persia and were transplanted by kings into Egypt, where the land tamed them. The more diligent writers report this about the Persea, which is entirely different, similar to red myxos fruit, and did not want to grow outside the East. More educated individuals have also denied that it was transplanted from Persia because of punishment, but rather that it was planted by Perseus in Memphis, and for this reason, Alexander established the custom of crowning victors there in honor of his ancestor. However, it always has leaves and fruits while others are still growing. But it will be evident that all plums as well came here after Cato.”

in totum quidem persica peregrina etiam asiae graeciaeque esse ex nomine ipso apparet atque e perside advecta […]. nam Persicae arbores sero et cum difficultate transiere, ut quae in Rhodo nihil ferant, quod primum ab Aegypto earum fuerat hospitium. falsum est venenata cum cruciatu in Persis gigni et poenarum causa ab regibus tralata in Aegyptum terra mitigata. id enim de Persea diligentiores tradunt, quae in totum alia est, myxis rubentibus similis, nec extra orientem nasci voluit. eam quoque eruditiores negaverunt ex Perside propter supplicia tralatam, sed a Perseo Memphi satam, et ob id Alexandrum illa coronari victores ibi instituisse in honorem atavi sui. semper autem folia habet et poma subnascentibus aliis. sed pruna quoque omnia post Catonem coepisse manifestum erit.

Pliny, Naturalis Historia 15.13.45–46

Pliny believes the Persica only recently arrived in Rome, a fact borne out by archaeological evidence. He also says it was first in Persia, then Egypt, then Rhodes. He, too, is trying to make sense of stories about it growing in Egypt, and it seems he has conflated Theophrastus’ discussion of the sweet fruit of the Egyptian Persea with Theophrastus’ other description of the inedible Persian apple (τὸ μῆλοντὸ Περσικὸν). Theophrastus said it was the Persea  which travelled to Rhodes, not the Persikon. The latter had no connection to Egypt at all.

Pliny’s story was influential. The peach tree is still called prunus persica, the Persian plum. Here’s a note from the entry in Wikipedia:

‘The scientific name persica, along with the word “peach” itself and its cognates in many European languages, derives from an early European belief that peaches were native to Persia. The Ancient Romans referred to the peach as malum persicum “Persian apple”, later becoming French pêche, hence the English “peach.” The scientific name, Prunus persica, literally means “Persian plum,” as it is closely related to the plum.’

It is now generally agreed the peach originated in China, but the story of how it got to Europe remains as obscure for us as it was for Pliny.

As for the Persea, following certain unnamed authorities, Pliny abandoned the story that the Persea was brought to Egypt from Persia. He replaces it with the story, in his mind more reasonable, that the tree was brought to Egypt by Perseus, presumably after his visit to the Kingdom of Ethiopia. Hence, the name.

Today the Persea is generally thought to be the same as Mimusops laurifolia (Forssk.) Friis, a tree sacred to the ancient Egyptians, found in the tombs of Ramses II and Tutankhamen, and likely native to Ethiopia. But of course we can’t know any of this for sure. 

Finally, to add to the confusion, Miller used Persica as the genus name for peaches (see illustration above), and Persea as the genus name for Avocados...

The Persea tree of Ancient Egypt. Source: Cow of Gold, distributed under CC 3.0.

IV

Plutarch, by the way, had no truck with any of this etymologizing. He simply states how the plant was used:

“Of the plants in Egypt they say that the Persaea is consecrated especially to the goddess, because its fruit resembles a heart and its leaf a tongue.”

τῶν δ’ ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ φυτῶν μάλιστα τῇ θεῷ καθιερῶσθαι λέγουσι τὴν περσέαν, ὅτι καρδίᾳ μὲν ὁ καρπὸς αὐτῆς, γλώττῃ δὲ τὸ φύλλον ἔοικεν.

Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 68 (Moralia 378C)

There’s a lesson here. 

*The anonymous might have meant Athenaeus of Naucritis, the author of the Sophists at Dinner (Deipnosophistae). I haven’t found the story in any of his writings, but this Athenaeus does talk about Kambyses’ expedition (Deipnosophistae 13.10) He also mentions that the source for his information about Kambyses is Ctesias of Cnidos, as plausible a source as any for a story as silly as the one we are about to hear. Still, I’d like to think the story comes from Athenaeus of Attalia, the Athenaeus attacked by Galen, if only because I am writing a book on him.

(revised with links, 18 September 2019)