According to the History Channel’s The History of Sex, the ancient Romans ate a specific plant for birth control purposes. It was described as being enormously effective, to the extent that it was extinct by the fall of the empire. I’m sure a quick Web search would tell me the story of a worthless little herb, but I’d like to hear you weigh in on this long-lost miracle drug. –Brett, Memphis
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About that herb. Long before hippies thought hemp could solve all the world’s problems, Romans used an alleged wonder plant of the carrot and parsley family called silphium. It was a sort of giant fennel that grew wild near Cyrene, an ancient coastal city in North Africa. Silphium had many uses–perfume from its flowers, food from its stalk, and medicine from its juice (or resin) and roots. The Romans didn’t discover the plant’s properties–there’s evidence the Greeks and Egyptians used it as a contraceptive as early as the seventh century BC on the advice of physicians, who recommended a monthly dose of a lump of resin the size of a chickpea mixed with water. The Roman scholar Pliny the Elder described use of the resin (called laser or laserpicium) “with soft wool as a pessary to promote the menstrual discharge.” Menstrual discharge, of course, means no pregnancy. One physician in the second century AD named Soranus claimed a special recipe using silphium had been used to terminate pregnancies. In Contraception and Abortion From the Ancient World to the Renaissance (1992), medical historian John Riddle claims that modern studies show the recipe and others like it would work.
Did they? The possibility can’t be ruled out. A long list of herbs must be avoided during pregnancy because they’re abortifacients, causing contractions or damage to the lining of the uterus. If taken as ancient writers claimed, silphium might have worked as a monthly morning-after pill. Other items touted as contraceptives in antiquity include wild carrot (a silphium relative also known as Queen Anne’s lace), pennyroyal, and pomegranate. In small doses many of these are known to stimulate menstrual flow, just as silphium is supposed to have done. But some, pennyroyal for one, are poisonous–and if the abortion fails to occur, the infant can suffer birth defects.
