An ancient Greek plant, now extinct, called Silphium, was used by the ancient Greeks and Romans for perfume, seasoning, medicine, and even contraception. It was one of the most sought-after goods in the ancient world.

The plant was so useful that Julius Caesar himself was said to have a large stash of silphium on hand at all times.

Silphium only grew in a narrow strip of land near the North African city of Cyrene in modern-day Libya and was essential to the city’s economy. The cultivation and trade of the plant transformed Cyrene into the richest region of Africa at the time.

Its widespread use in the ancient world allowed Cyrene’s economy to flourish, which in turn transformed the city into a center of art, culture, and medicine in the ancient Greek world.

In fact, it was home to a famous medical school and even a philosophical movement based around happiness whose members were called the Cyrenaics. Eratosthenes, the famous Greek mathematician, was a native of the city.

Although now extinct, researchers have determined, through studying ancient drawings and descriptions of the plant’s taste and appearance, that silphium likely belonged to the genus Ferula, which includes existing plants like giant fennel and asafoetida.

This theory is bolstered by the fact that asafoetida, which is still widely used today in Indian and central Asian cooking, was used as a cheaper substitute for silphium in antiquity, meaning that it was either related to the plant or had a very similar flavor.

The extinct plant silphium had many uses for ancient Greeks

Plants of the genus tend to resemble ancient depictions of the plant, which was widely found on coins from Cyrene due to its economic importance to the city.

It seems to have been a tall, flowering plant with a heart-shaped seedpod on the top. In fact, some theories about the origins of the modern symbol for love point to the shape of silphium’s seedpod, as the plant was widely used as an aphrodisiac.

Silphium was long used throughout the ancient Mediterranean. Both the Minoans and ancient Egyptians had specific glyphs to represent the plant, and it was widely lauded in songs and poems across ancient cultures.

According to myth, silphium came from the god Apollo himself. It had a wide variety of medicinal properties and was used to treat cough, pain, warts, fever, and indigestion. Although considered an aphrodisiac, it was also used as a contraception and even as an abortifacient.

The father of medicine Hippocrates himself even prescribed the plant for a protruding gut.

Silphium was likewise found in Greek and Roman cuisine and featured prominently in recipes by Apicius, who compiled one of the most well-preserved collections of ancient recipes in existence today.

Its earthy scent and medicinal properties also made it an important ingredient in perfume, as well as in ancient lotions and creams.

Why did silphium go extinct?

Due to its varied uses, silphium was in very high demand. Yet, by the time of the Roman emperor Nero, who lived from 37 to 68 AD, the plant was virtually extinct. According to Pliny, when the last remaining silphium plant was found, it was given to Nero.

Scholars theorize the plant was over-harvested and over-farmed due to its popularity, causing the soil in the limited area where the plant grew to become devoid of nutrients.

Additionally, shepherds used to feed silphium to their flocks, as the plant would transform the meat, making it tender and delicious. Scholars theorize that overgrazing of the plant likely contributed to its demise.

Others claim that regional climatic changes, which caused once green fields to turn into an arid desert, resulted in the plant’s extinction.

Ancient writers, such as Theophrastus, noted that silphium was very sensitive to changes in soil and therefore could not be cultivated in large  numbers nor in areas outside of Cyrene.

In 189 BC, Ancient Greeks defending the city of Ambracia used an early form of chemical warfare against Roman forces during a siege, deploying a clay jar filled with burning chicken feathers.

At first, the story sounds almost absurd, but it becomes far more striking once the details are unpacked and we understand what was happening beneath the city walls—and, more importantly, why this moment even matters in the history of ancient warfare.

Ancient Greeks turn to chemical warfare and burning feathers as siege intensifies

The Romans arrived in Ambracia with overwhelming force. Consul Marcus Fulvius Nobilior deployed battering rams under a two-hundred-foot covered gallery, a massive mobile shed designed to protect his engineers from arrows and boiling pitch as they hammered away at the walls. The Ambraciot defenders held firm. The walls didn’t collapse.

Frustrated and running out of options above ground, the attackers eventually turned underground. Their plan was straightforward enough: tunnel beneath the city, collapse the foundations, and force the stubborn Greeks to surrender. For a while, the effort proceeded in silence. Then the Greeks noticed the piles of excavated earth building up outside the camp and understood exactly what was going on. Locating the tunnel was another matter. The Greeks solved it with one of the most clever pieces of field engineering in ancient history.

They placed thin bronze vessels against the ground at various points inside the city and then pressed their ears to them to listen. The vibrations traveling through the earth from the pickaxes told them exactly where the tunnel was heading. It functioned as an early acoustic detection system, and it worked brilliantly. They then dug a counter-tunnel and broke through into the mine. What followed was the kind of close-quarters underground fighting where normal weapons become useless. Spears are too long, shields too wide, and you can’t even see the man you’re fighting, so they built something new.

The Greeks took a large clay jar, a pithos, sized to precisely fit the tunnel, capped it with an iron lid drilled with holes, inserted an iron tube connected to a blacksmith’s bellows, and filled the jar with glowing charcoal covered in a dense layer of fine feathers, creating what can be described as an early chemical warfare device. When it was pushed into the tunnel and activated with the bellows, it produced a thick cloud of acrid, choking smoke that billowed forward into the darkness.

The Roman miners couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, and had nowhere to go. They abandoned their tools and fled to the surface to escape the choking fumes. The Greeks had driven off a superior Roman force solely with clay, iron, fire, and feathers. Military historian Adrienne Mayor has pointed to this episode as evidence of just how sophisticated ancient weapons technology really was.

This deliberate act of chemical engineering would be remembered in later accounts of ancient warfare. The pithos was matched to the tunnel width specifically to prevent blowback. The feathers were chosen for the particular quality of smoke they produced when burned at high temperatures. Someone thought this through. The parallels to later warfare are hard to ignore. The same basic horror—an invisible, suffocating enemy in a dark enclosed space—would define trench warfare on the Western Front more than two thousand years later.

The psychology hasn’t changed even if the chemistry has. Ambracia ultimately surrendered. Cut off and outnumbered, the city eventually negotiated terms rather than fight on indefinitely, but the defenders had already shown what was possible. Historians now regard what happened in those tunnels as one of the earliest documented uses of asphyxiating chemical weaponry in a tactical military context—a genuine milestone in the history of warfare.

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During the Roman siege of Ambracia in 189 BC, the defenders deployed what is one of the earliest recorded uses of a chemical weapon in history — and they used it underground. Rome was besieging the Greek city, held by the Aetolian League. When the walls held and the siege artillery failed, the Romans turned to mining — digging a tunnel beneath the walls, concealed behind a two-hundred-foot covered walkway, worked in relays day and night. For days the defenders didn’t notice. Then the pile of excavated earth grew too large to hide. Unable to see the tunnel, the defenders pressed bronze vessels against the ground to detect the vibration of digging, located the Roman mine, and dug a counter-tunnel straight toward it. The two tunnels met. Soldiers fought face to face in darkness too cramped to swing a sword. When direct combat failed, the defenders built a device described in detail by the historian Polybius: a clay jar fitted to the tunnel’s width, packed with feathers over burning coals, sealed with a perforated iron lid, and connected to a blacksmith’s bellows. They pumped the choking smoke directly into the Roman tunnel. The Romans were driven out of their own mine. According to Polybius, it was among the first uses of toxic smoke in the history of war. Further reading — Polybius, The Histories: https://amzn.to/4uWM9wN #AncientHistory #RomanEmpire #Ambracia #Shorts #HistoryShorts #ChemicalWarfare #TimelineHistory #history #shorts #ancientrome #education

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