This miracle plant was eaten into extinction 2,000 years ago—or was it?

This miracle plant was eaten into extinction 2,000 years ago—or was it?

https://i.natgeofe.com/n/b3d7d4e7-9b...?w=1440&h=1800

Silphion cured diseases and made food tasty, but Emperor Nero allegedly consumed the last stalk. Now, a Turkish researcher thinks he’s found a botanical survivor.

September 23, 2022

From before the rise of Athens to the height of the Roman Empire, one of the most sought-after products in the Mediterranean world was a golden-flowered plant called silphion. For ancient Greek physicians, silphion was a cure-all, prized for everything from stomach pain to wart removal. For Roman chefs, it was a culinary staple, crucial for spicing up an everyday pot of lentils or finishing an extravagant dish of scalded flamingo. During the reign of Julius Caesar, more than a thousand pounds of the plant was stockpiled alongside gold in Rome’s imperial treasuries, and silphion saplings were valued at the same price as silver.

This miracle plant was eaten into extinction 2,000 years ago—or was it?

Cool. It looks different on coins, but maybe that was a stylistic choice. I first read about silphium in Pausanias:

Every year the women weave a tunic for the Apollo at
Amyklai, and they call the room where they weave it the
TUNIC-HOUSE. There is a house near it which they say was
first built by Tyndareos’s sons, and later came into the
possession of a Spartan called Phormion. The Dioskouroi came
to visit him disguised as foreigners; they told him they had
come from Kyrene and asked him to take them in and let
them have the room they had loved most when they were
among mankind. He told them they could live wherever
they liked in the rest of his house, but not in that room,
because his daughter was a young virgin girl and she was
living in it. The next morning the young girl and all her
attendants vanished; and statues of the Dioskouroi were found
in the room, and also a table with sylphium on it.

In On Farming, Cato explains how to preserve lentils using silphium (laserpicium):

How you should preserve lentils. Dissolve silphium in
vinegar, soak the lentils in the silphium-vinegar, and stand
them in the sun. Then rub the lentils with oil, let them dry,
and they will keep quite sound.