Wormwood and Honey In Ancient Rome

In Chapter XXXI of The Estate of Wormwood and Honey, Sergey recalls his mother using wormwood as a medicinal remedy.  To overcome the child’s resistance to drinking the very bitter medicine, his mother smears some honey around the rim of the cup.  This particular way of dealing with the bitterness has roots that are quite ancient.

Lucretius (the Roman poet and philosopher who lived in the 1^st Century BC) expressed the same idea in his great philosophical poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things):

            “And as physicians when they seek to give

            A draught of bitter wormwood to a child,

            First smearing along the edge that rims the cup

            The liquid sweets of honey, golden hued.”

Lucretius was a great proponent of epicureanism, of which I hope to blog at some point in the future.  For now, let us pause for a moment to reflect on the good old days when great works of philosophy were written in the form of epic poetry.

Opening of De rerum natura, 1483 copy by Girolamo di Matteo de Tauris for Pope Sixtus IV

Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is the epic philosophical poem De rerum natura about the beliefs of Epicureanism, and which is translated into English as On the Nature of Things. He is believed to have been born circa 99 BC and died circa 55 BC.

Wormwood, Absinthe, Degas

The technical name of the wormwood plant is Artemisia absinthium.  Is there thus a connection between wormwood and the popular French drink absinthe?

The ever helpful “The Wormwood Society—America’s Premier Absinthe Association and Information Network” explains on its FAQ page: Absinthe is an anise and wormwood flavored distilled spirit, made from aniseed, fennel and wormwood.  

Traditionally, absinthe in France has been a working class drink, especially popular in the South, and associated with melancholy rather than exuberance. Edgar Degas said it best:

Economists and the Arts

Economists don’t have reputations as being particularly artistic or even being sensitive to the arts.  According to the old tired saw, they aspire to be accountants but lack the personality. And yet, in reality, the intersection between them and the arts is surprising rich.  Here is an overview (and I will follow up with more detailed stories):

First, we have economists who changed their countries’ policies to make them supportive of the arts.  One case stands out: John Maynard Keynes, the most famous economist of the 20^th century, and his support for the theater, the opera and the ballet.  (He also married a famous ballerina!)

Second, we have economists who defended or helped particular artists.  Examples include Alexander Gershenkron of Harvard standing up for Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” against a particularly bad translation by a celebrity writer and Gregory Grossman of Berkeley providing a home and enabling the Polish poet Alexander Wat to produce a masterpiece of Polish literature “My Century”

Third, we have economists who provided patronage for the arts by collecting  works of struggling artists.  There are many examples, but perhaps the most fascinating one is the case of Norton T. Dodge of the University of Maryland who, at great personal risk and over many years, bought and smuggled out of the Soviet Union thousand of pieces of avant garde arts.  Another case is that of Tyler Cowen of the George Mason University who championed the cause of Mexican amate painters, and art form that without interest from abroad would have probably have died out, and with it the ancient art of making amate paper.

Fourth, there are the economists who have enriched the arts by leaving economics and becoming artists.  Professor Richard Gill of Harvard left the teaching of economics and became an accomplished opera singer.  The famous Vikram Seth left the graduate program at Stanford to write his masterpiece “The Golden Gate” (also a tribute to “Eugene Onegin”).  And even today, in St. Petersburg, the young jazz singer Olesya Yalunina is exuberantly celebrating her transition from economics to performing arts and we have painters as far apart as Nigeria and India who are doing the same.

(Thanks are owed to Tyler Cowen,  commentators on his blog “The Marginal Revolution”, and Christopher Kofler their help in collecting these and other cases.)