By Laurence Totelin
Yesterday I read some press releases about a fascinating Welsh
research project (based at my University: Cardiff University) that will screen Welsh honey for antibiotic properties. The aim is to find the Welsh answer to Manuka honey,
by driving bees to flowers with the highest antibiotic properties. This
project, if successful, will no doubt have significant positive
medical, ecological, and economic implications. The press release
mentions the use of medicinal honey since the Middle Ages. One should
never take press releases too literally, but the history of employing
honey medicinally goes much further than the Middle Ages. I will focus
here on the Greek and Roman periods of antiquity, but honey was used in
many cultures well before the Greeks started using writing. A coin from ancient Ephesus, representing a bee. Source: wildwinds.com
Honey is one of the most common ingredients in Greek and Roman
pharmacopoieias. It was taken orally as well as applied to the body.
What interests me here is the great care the ancients took to
differentiate between types of honey. In particular, ancient recipes
frequently and consistently ask for Attic honey. For instance, the
Hippocratic text Internal Affections (end of the fifth, beginning of the fourth century BCE) has the following recipe for a ‘hip-disease’: If this [previous treatment] does not help, purge with the
following remedy: crush half a kotyle of cumin; chop into pieces an
entire gourd, of the small and round variety, in a mortar; sprinkle with
the finest red Egyptian natron, in the amount of a quarter of a mina;
roast; pound finely; put these ingredients in a pot; pour in a kotyle of
oil, half a kotule of honey; a kotyle of sweet white wine, and two
kotylai of juice of beet. Boil these [ingredients] until they have the
right consistency; pass them through a cloth; add to them a kotyle of
Attic honey, if you do not want to boil they honey together with the
other ingredients. If you do not have Attic honey, use some of the best
honey and heat up in the mortar. If this clyster preparation is too
thick, add the same wine to the recommended thickness. Use this as a
clyster. [Hippocratic Corpus, Internal Affections 51]
Several interesting things here: first, the Attic honey is not the
only ‘ethnic’ ingredient in this recipe: it also contains Egyptian
natron. This use of geographically-qualified ingredients is a
characteristic of ancient recipes. Second, the author understands that
not everyone will have access to Attic honey and suggests using the best
possible honey available if that is the case. Third, the recipe
recommends not to boil the honey together with the other ingredients,
possibly indicating an awareness that heat destroys some of the
qualities of honey.
The Hippocratic authors do not tell us what made Attic honey special,
but other medical authors tell us that Attic honey (and in particular
the honey of Mount Hymettus) was special because the bees fed on thyme,
which was itself an important medicinal herb. Some writers produced
lists of plants that produced the sweetest honey (thyme, violets,
asphodel, iris), and those that should be avoided (spurge, thapsia,
wormwood, wild cucumber). According to Palladius, a fifth-century CE
agronomist, these plants had to be avoided because their bitter taste
would prevent the creation of sweetness (1.37).
The Greeks and Romans also mention poisonous honeys. The historian
Xenophon (fourth century BCE) describes the effect of a poisonous honey
to be found in the land of the Colchians (East Coast of the Black Sea,
modern Georgia). And swarms of bees were numerous there, and the soldiers who ate
the honeycombs all went out of their mind, vomited and suffered from
diarrhoea, and none of them was able to stand up; but those who had
consumed only a little appeared like those who are extremely drunk;
while those who had taken a lot seemed like mad or even dying men. Thus
many lied there as if there had been a defeat, and there was much
despondency. But the next day nobody had died, and around the same hour
as they [had taken the honey], they came back to their senses. And on
the third or fourth day they got up, as if after a poisoning (pharmakoposia). [Xenophon, Anabasis 4.8.20-21].
Unfortunately, Xenophon does not tell enough about the flora of the
region to make a hypothesis about the nature of the plants upon which
these bees fed. Pliny the Elder also describes a poisonous honey from
Heracleia Pontica (on the Black Sea, modern Turkey), this time produced
from a plant called ‘the goat killer’ (Natural History 21.74). I
wonder whether modern apiculturists are aware of such poisonous honeys,
and whether these dangerous honeys, taken in small doses, could be used
medicinally? In any case, there is much scope for honey bioprospecting,
and I wish my Cardiff colleague the best of luck!
