The silphium motif adorning ancient Libyan coinage: Marketing a medicinal plant

Abstract

Ancient texts provide an extensive list of purported medicinal benefits for Cyrenaic silphium but omit reference to this extinct, unidentified species of Ferula (Umbelliferae) as an aphrodisiac. The plant may have been so regarded since ithyphallic and testicular imagery are evoked via stylized representations of the silphium plant and seed pod on the mintage of Greek Cyrenaica in North Africa. These numismatic motifs play to an imitative principle. Whether by calculation or serendipity, commodity marketing likely drew on more subliminal communications through an association between phallus-like renderings of the plant and apotropaic function and through possible association of the geography of a love philtre with a philosophical product of Cyrene, Aristippus' uninhibited hedonism. Other circumstantial evidence draws on the writings of Avicenna, who attributed aphrodisiacal qualities to a recognized substitute for Cyrenaic silphium, and to the poetry of Catullus whose art linked silphium to carnal pleasures.