Is Widespread Drug Use to Thank for the Inventions of the Classical World?

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Why don’t more of us know about this version of history? Why are dense textbooks otherwise full of references to misbehavior in the ancient world (think: sodomy and, well, killing the head of the Roman Republic for the greater good of the state) lacking in their coverage of drugs and drug use?

Look a little closer and many of the people of ancient Greece and Rome sound like alcoholics. Athenian statesman and orator Alcibiades famously bursts into Plato’sSymposium drunk and supported by a flute-girl and other partiers. He joins the discussion despite his inebriation. But what if he weren’t just drunk? People of the classical world didn’t just drink a lot. They used drugs a lot, too.

The reason this isn’t common knowledge, especially among the high school and college students who aren’t so far removed from the history books as to have forgotten most everything in them, appears to have a lot to do with editing.

Classical literature is full of sorcerers, magicians, and witches. But these people weren’t mythical wizards; they were real people, with real expertise. Hillman argues that our misunderstanding of the ancient world stems from the fact that translators don’t typically explain that these people were powerful, “magical” largely because they knew how to use drugs. As he writes: “The Greeks and Romans used opium, anticholinergics, and numerous botanical toxins to induce states of mental euphoria, create hallucinations, and alter their own consciousness; this is an indisputable fact.”

He discovered this though careful translation of the original texts. Hillman, for example, was reading an ancient document by Thucydides that references slaves taking wounded Spartan soldiers “poppy mixed with honey and pounded linseed.” The word is mekon, which in English versions is usually translated as “poppy seed.” But slaves aren’t taking soldiers the ingredients for  lemon poppy seed muffins. “You don’t send poppy seeds to wounded soldiers,” Hillman points out. “You send them opium.” Wounded soldiers don’t need poppy seeds.

Traditional scholars, either by natural inclination or academic training, are a conservative lot, and whenever they encounter drug references in ancient texts they seem to default to simply removing them. Hillman argues. In his book,  The Chemical Muse: Drug Use and the Roots of Western Civilization, which grew out of his dissertation, he writes that: “The moral bent that so characterizes contemporary Classicists forces them to write histories that best promote the cultural agendas of our times, rather than the actual facts of the past…. Blacklisting is not a cruelty of the distant, uninformed past; it’s a very real phenomenon that flourishes within academic circles today, whether in the humanities or the sciences.”

But Hillman’s research hasn’t exactly been warmly received or gained widespread acceptance among classical scholars. His doctoral thesis review committee at Wisconsin objected to the drug references. According to Hillman,  the committee said he should take the drugs out or he wouldn’t get the degree. And he complied.

And it’s important to remember that this is also just one scholar. Hillman’s book was published by a commercial publisher, and not subject to peer review, and his evidence is based on literature, not scientific data or contemporary primary sources. More research may reveal additional information.

Interestingly enough, while Hillman could find evidence of widespread drug use in his research, he didn’t find much about societal efforts to curtail that practice. (Emperor Augustus’ wife,  Livia, while otherwise involved in all sorts of public morality efforts, had no apparent  Dicite iusto nulla project.)

Today’s drug problems aren’t, of course, exclusive to the United States. The widespread use of opium in early modern China may well have undermined the government and even Chinese society itself, but somehow no one seemed much to mind in the ancient world. Opium was just, like  garum and wine, something people regularly consumed. As Hillman put it in  a 2008 interview: “The people of Athens didn’t care if you got high. They focused on keeping aristocrats from hijacking the democracy they invented. The prohibitionists lived in Sparta, where tyranny was the rule.” No big deal.