The tomb had already been looted. Whatever secrets it had once contained were long gone.
But since it was about to be destroyed by a new power line, Russian archaeologist Andrei Belinski
and his team spent nearly a month digging to the base of the ancient grass-covered mound.
Just as they were finishing, they discovered a hollow lined with stones.
And there, to their amazement, they found gold. Golden armbands, golden cups, a heavy golden
ring – and the greatest treasure of all: two spectacular golden vessels. The outer faces
of the vessels swirled with scenes of dueling warriors and mythic beasts. The insides, oddly,
were coated with a sticky black residue. The puzzled archaeologists sent samples for analysis
in a nearby lab. The results were surprising: the residue was opium, with traces of marijuana.
The tomb that the archaeologists uncovered, dated to the fourth century BC, had been constructed by
the Scythians, nomadic horsemen who roved the vast grasslands north of the Black Sea.
The Ancient Greeks knew the Scythians – the vessels, in fact, may have been produced by
Greek craftsmen – and they also knew about the Scythians’ fondness for mind-altering substances.
According to Herodotus, the Scythians bathed and ritually purified themselves in sweat lodges,
where they threw hemp onto hot stones, creating clouds of marijuana smoke that made them shout,
sing, and dance as though drunk. The Scythians, in other words, got high. And as we’ll see in this
video, so did their Greek and Roman neighbors, though often in ways you might not expect.
In the classical world, most drug use – or at least most of the drug use visible
in our sources – was medical. Several herbal remedies with psychoactive effects were in use,
including henbane and mandrake. The most powerful drug in ancient medicine, however, was opium.
The opium poppy – Papaver somniferum – was grown throughout the Mediterranean.
Its seeds were eaten as food and pressed to make oil. But it was the narcotic milk extracted from
immature seed pods that gave the opium poppy its critical – and deadly – role in ancient medicine.
Opium had a wide range of medical uses. First and foremost, it was a painkiller and relaxant.
In the Odyssey, for example, Helen slips what is almost certainly opium into the drinks of
banqueting heroes to help them forget their sorrows. Opium also served as a soporific.
For years, on the advice of his doctor Galen, Marcus Aurelius drank a cup of opiated wine
every night to help himself sleep. Mixed with honey or pressed into pills, opium was also used
to ease everything from skin infections to coughs. Although ancient doctors did
not understand opium’s addictive nature, they were well aware that overdoses could be fatal.
At least a few terminally ill Romans, knowing this, ended their lives with the drug.
The Greeks and Romans also used cannabis in medicine. Like the opium poppy, the hemp
plant – Cannabis sativa – had many applications. The most commercially important of these involved
the fibers of the male hemp plant’s stem, which could be woven into durable clothing, shoes,
and ropes. The psychoactive resin of the female plant baffled and intrigued classical physicians.
One ancient doctor observed that those who ate hempseed experienced confusion and a sensation
of warmth. Others noted that hempseed dampened the sex drive and left the body dehydrated.
On the plus side, it was good for earaches. Although there’s no textual evidence for medical
use of the much more potent leaves and buds, the recent discovery of cannabis resin in the tomb of
a Roman woman who died in childbirth suggests that labor pains were sometimes eased with hashish.
Outside medicine, the Greeks and Romans may have at least occasionally used
psychoactive substances to heighten the effects of religious rituals.
In this, they were anticipated by the Minoans, who worshipped the so-called
poppy goddess, a female deity with a trance-like expression and a diadem of poppy heads. The
largest known statue of the goddess was found near a tubular vase for inhaling opium smoke.
The evidence for ritual drug use in the classical world is more ambiguous.
The Greeks associated the opium poppy with the fertility god Demeter, who is often shown – as
in this relief – holding bundles of grain and poppy heads. As far as we can tell,
however, these poppies were emblems of abundance, not allusions to opium’s narcotic power.
It’s sometimes claimed that opium smoke played a role in the incubation rituals of the healing god
Asclepius, and that vision-inducing mushrooms were mixed into the wine at Dionysian rites.
Though certainly possible, neither of these theories is backed by firm evidence.
It has also been suggested that one of the most famous Ancient Greek rituals,
the Eleusinian Mysteries, involved a hallucinogenic beverage.
During an all-night vigil, just before the climactic ceremony,
initiates drank a blend of water, barley flour, and pennyroyal. A few scholars have pointed out
that the ergot fungus, which grows on barley, can have effects similar to those of LSD. If the
barley in the initiates’ drinks was contaminated with ergot, they would have experienced
awe-inspiring visions. The theory is appealing – but here again, definitive proof is lacking.
The scope of recreational drug use is equally unclear. One Roman author mentions a plant that
caused uncontrollable laughter when added to wine. Another notes that fried hempseed was sometimes
served as a dessert, and that those who ate large quantities experienced a warm and intoxicating
sensation. Neither suggests, however, that consumption of these substances was common.
Although the opium poppy was widely cultivated, it was grown for its seeds,
which were a popular snack. Hemp, likewise, was used primarily to make rope and clothing.
The Greeks and Romans were aware, as we have seen, of the narcotic properties of opium and cannabis.
But wine, occasionally spiked with psychoactive herbs like mandrake,
seems to have almost always been their intoxicant of choice.
An absence of evidence, of course, is not necessarily evidence of absence. The near silence
of our written sources suggests that recreational drug use was limited, or at least not socially
prominent. There is, however, no reason to doubt that it occurred. So until more information comes
to light, the scope of ancient drug use, like so many other aspects of daily life in the classical
world, will remain a mystery. If you enjoyed this video,
please consider supporting toldinstone on Patreon. Every donation helps me to continue
making carefully researched videos about ancient history. You might also be interested in my book,
Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants. Thanks for watching.