The Romans may have used up a plant worth its weight in gold.
Silphium was the ancient world's wonder herb: a seasoning, perfume and medicine so valuable that the city of Cyrene put it on its coins. It grew only in a narrow strip of what is now Libya and resisted cultivation. By Roman times it had apparently vanished. Nobody is sure what it was.
Silphium grew wild in a small area of Cyrenaica, in modern eastern Libya, roughly 125 miles by 35. The Greek city of Cyrene grew rich exporting its resin, and most of the city's coins showed the plant. Greek and Roman writers prized it in cooking, with recipes in the Roman cookbook attributed to Apicius, and as a remedy for coughs, fevers, indigestion, warts and much else. It may also have been used as a contraceptive. Roman poets treated it as worth its weight in gold, and Julius Caesar recorded 1,500 pounds of it in the Roman treasury.
Then it disappeared. Pliny the Elder reported that the last stalk found in Cyrenaica was sent to the emperor Nero as a curiosity. Its loss has been suggested as the first recorded extinction of a plant or animal species. The traditional explanation is overharvesting combined with overgrazing, though some recent research blames desertification. It did not help that the plant apparently could not be cultivated; one theory is that it was a sterile hybrid that spread only through its roots.
What silphium actually was remains a mystery, since no sample survives for analysis. Candidates include various species of giant fennel in the genus Ferula and plants in the genus Thapsia. Some Romans, including the geographer Strabo, treated it as the same thing as asafoetida, a pungent spice still used today, so it may simply have been a superior variety. A rare Turkish plant, Ferula drudeana, shares several unusual traits with ancient descriptions, though it grows nowhere near Libya.
Silphium may also have left a mark on symbols. Some Cyrenean coins show a heart-like shape thought to depict its seed, which has led to speculation, and it is only speculation, that it helped inspire the traditional heart symbol. Scholars also suspect a Minoan sign for 'plant' was modelled on it. Its story is an early warning about what happens when a unique, valuable species is harvested faster than it can recover.
Source: Wikipedia — Silphium · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
