by Jack Turner
Not all of the amorous reputation of spices was as direct, or laid such stress on love’s more physical aspects, as Villon’s boast of the explosive effects of his ginger, or doctors’ claims of bolstering sperm and enhancing the libido. Like Donne chafing at the arrival of the daylight, not everyone has taken the spice-sex connection too literally. Spices have long held the promise of more subtle enchantments, often more figurative than real. At the start of Moby-Dick, Ishmael, mooching around a wintry New Bedford, sings the praises of the women of Salem, ‘where they tell me the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands’. A fond hope, perhaps, but a common one. Oskar’s lover in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum smells of cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg, the scent of Christmas and cake spice. No object of desire ever suffered from the comparison.
For poets of all eras spices have served as powerfully evocative shorthand. It is a particularly enduring conceit that the truly desirable woman need not eat or apply them, for she smells of spice naturally. The seventeenth-century poet and voluptuary Robert Herrick was especially fond of the idea. Anthea smelt of cinnamon:
If I kisse Anthea’s brest,
There I smell the Phenix nest.
Anne on the other hand smelled of cloves:
So smell these odours that do rise
From out the wealthy spiceries:
So smels the flowre of blooming Clove;
or Roses smothere’d in the stove [dried roses].
Julia, trumping them all, smelled of all the spices:
Breathe, Julia, breathe, and Ile protest,
Nay more, Ile deeply sweare,
That all the Spices of the East
Are circumfused there.
So spicy was Julia that with one kiss she could infuse a wedding cake with a taste of spices:
This day my Julia thou must make
For Mistresse Bride, the wedding Cake:
Knead but the Dow and it will be
To paste of Almonds turn’d by thee:
Or kisse it thou but once, or twice,
And for the Bride-Cake ther’l be Spice.
Other poets saw a parallel in the astringency of the spices. Juan Ruiz (1283–1350), the rambunctious Castilian priest jailed by an archbishop of Toledo for his licentious life and writings, found in pepper an allegory for the hot and feisty short women he preferred over their tall sisters, whom he found frigid and aloof. Though cold on the outside, the short woman is blazing hot in love; in bed, she is comforting, fancy-free and cheerful, and good around the house besides:
Though the grain of good pepper is small,
It is hotter and spicier than a nutmeg;
So a little woman, if she gives herself to love –
There’s no pleasure in the world she cannot give.
Tall or short, others turned to spice to evoke hidden, mysterious charms. ‘Consider her lips and realise/The joy of besieging that scarlet prize/Wherein all nectar and spices seem to be,’ as the Florentine-Pisan poet Fazio degli Uberti (c.1310–c.1367) had it.
The archetype to which many of these poets looked was, perhaps surprisingly, the Bible. In every sense the spiciest of its books is the Song of Songs, generally believed to have been composed in its present form in the fourth or third century BC, though perhaps containing much older fragments. Cinnamon and cassia are recurrent features of its lushly amorous, spice-rich imagery:
A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.
Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard,
Spikenard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices:
A fountain of gardens, a well of loving waters, and streams from Lebanon.
Love, in the Song, enters through both eyes and nose:
His cheeks are like beds of spices, yielding fragrance;
and elsewhere:
Thou bast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck. How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! How much better is thy love than wine! And the smell of thine ointments than all spices.
While the Song is far and away the most consistently spicy biblical book, the notion of scent and its seductions is a recurrent one. The harlot of Proverbs uses cinnamon to lure the unwary young man into her bed ‘as a bird rushes into a snare’. The first spicy woman of literature was the enigmatic Queen of Sheba: ‘There came no more such abundance of spices as these which the Queen of Sheba gave to King Solomon.’
Notwithstanding the brevity of the biblical account of Sheba, later poets tended to give her visit a romantic gloss – the Eastern queen arriving trailing all the gorgeous trappings of the splendid Orient. (Historians on the other hand have tended to see in the episode a memory of trade routes and agreements with the Arabian peninsula.) One who smelled of Sheba’s Sabaean spices was Quixote’s Dulcinea, at least in the knight-errant’s imagination. When Sancho Panza returns from his visit to his master’s lady, Quixote asks whether he perceived about her a certain ‘Sabaean odour, an aromatic fragrance’. Sancho replies that it was not so, but rather mannish or ‘butch’, as though she were dripping with sweat from overexertion. He must, concludes the Don, have smelled himself.
Spices, needless to say, did not evoke an unwashed, goatish squire. They were exotic, rich in mystique, their attraction as mysterious as it was elusive of description, poetic shorthand for an exotic sensualism. When Quixote imagined Dulcinea’s Sabaean aromas or when Donne compared his lover to the spiced Indies the effect was to convey a sense of alluring and distant promise; like Oberon returning from the fairies, the beloved carried with her something of the Oriental air – no ordinary Londoner savouring of Southwark and Stepney Marsh, or sweaty Manchegan peasant reeking from her labours in the field.
Behind this long literary tradition, behind even the biblical texts, lay more literal applications for spice, of which the most enduring and ancient was perfume: poetry for the nose. When Eastern spices were first used is a matter for speculation. Akkadian texts dating from around 1200 BC refer to a ‘Perfumeress’ employing various aromatic gums and resins, but it is unclear whether she would have known any Eastern spices. It is clear, however, that each of the major Near Eastern civilisations had a wide and sophisticated repertoire of perfumes onto which spices, once they became available, could readily be grafted. In ancient Egypt, perfumes utilising various Near Eastern aromatics played an important role in worship, which in turn drove a far-ranging trade – a subject to which we shall return. The Ishmaelites who bought Joseph from his brothers were en route to Egypt with an unspecified range of spices: ‘They saw some Ishmaelites on their way coming from Galaad, with their camels, carrying spices, and balm, and myrrh to Egypt.’ By the time of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (1938–c.1600 BC), perfume was put to widespread secular uses. In the British Museum there is a wall painting of a Theban tomb depicting a feast, where the guests are attended by serving boys and girls offering wreaths, bowls of wine, perfumes and ointments. The inscription urges the guests to ‘celebrate the joyful day! Let sweet odours and oils be placed for thy nostrils, Wreaths of lotus flowers for the limbs.’ It is all too much for one guest, who casually vomits over her shoulder.
By Greek times both techniques and the range of aromatic materials had broadened considerably. By Homer’s day there was, moreover, a clear association of scent and sensualism. The oldest seduction scene in Western literature occurs in the Iliad, where Hera distracts her wandering husband with the aid of an irresistibly fragrant oil: ‘One breath of the scent in the bronze-floored house of Zeus and it filled heaven and earth.’ It works to such effect that Zeus declares that ‘never before had such lust rushed in a flood over my heart, whether for a goddess or a mortal woman’, proceeding to reel off a list of his earlier conquests.
However,
the most consistently aromatic of the gods were none other than the gods of love themselves, Aphrodite and her son Eros, the limb-loosener. In The Republic Plato argued that desire was stimulated by perfume – and I suspect that most lovers of fine perfume would agree; this at least is the message of the advertising. During his discussion on the nature of love in the Symposium, Plato credits the poet Agathon with the argument that Eros is attracted by sweet scents and flowers. But this was merely to put a philosopher’s spin on an ancient belief, whereby scent was one of Aphrodite’s hallmarks, her attractant and harbinger, if not a disembodied manifestation of love itself. In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, the goddess appears shrouded by an irresistible fragrance as she wafts down from Olympus to her island of Cyprus and her perfumed altars. All the gods of the Greeks received perfumes among their offerings, but Aphrodite did more with them. In one myth she gifts a ferryman with a perfume that renders women utterly powerless to resist him. For a time he makes hay although, as tends to be the way with Greek myths, his gift proves his eventual undoing: after cuckolding one husband too many he is caught in the act and killed.
It was the Greeks, too, who made aroma a feature of erotic verse. Archilochus (c.675–c.635 BC) wrote of courtesans who ‘with their hair and breasts covered in perfume would arouse the desire even in an ancient’. In the Lysistrata of Aristophanes (c.447–c.385 BC), the comedy of a sex strike by the women of Athens, Myrrhine (her name means ‘Little Myrtle’) drives her frustrated husband wild with desire with the help of a fragrant ointment. The poet Antipater of Sidon expressed this close association of aroma and eroticism in his epitaph for his fellow poet Anacreon (c.582–c.485 BC), known for his frivolous, drunken eroticism. Even dead this famous seducer smelt good, as in Robin Skelton’s translation:
This is Anacreon’s grave. Here lie
the shreds of his exuberant lust,
but hints of perfume linger by
his gravestone still, as if he must have chosen for his last retreat
a place perpetually on heat.
That this was something more than a theological or literary conceit is suggested by the fact that perfumes and spices were widely employed at fertility rites and weddings. At the midsummer festival of the Adonia, fennel seeds were grown in small flowerbeds known as the ‘gardens of Adonis’, so named in honour of the dead mortal loved by Aphrodite, accompanied by drinking and unbridled sexual excess. In Aristophanes’ Clouds, Strepsiades recalls his wife’s perfume as she came to her wedding bed, when she ‘positively oozed perfume and saffron, not to mention sex, money, sex, over-eating, and, well, sex’.
When the Eastern spices arrived they slotted right in. They were certainly there by the fourth century, when Theophrastus, who wrote an entire book on the subject of perfumes, says that the necessary aromatics came either from India or Arabia, mentioning cassia, cinnamon and cardamom by name. Other ingredients were nearer to hand, such as balsam of Mecca, storax,* saffron, marjoram and myrrh. There was still a good deal of confusion as to their origins, but this only added to their appeal: Theophrastus thought his cardamom came from Persia, though he says that some were of the opinion that it came from India, along with the other spices. Cinnamon in particular stood out as superlative. The Middle Comedy poet Antiphanes mentions a perfumer by the name of Peron in his Anteia, composed c.380–370 BC; Peron was known for his cinnamon:
I left him trying Peron’s unguents,
Bent on mixing nards and cinnamons for your scent.
A few years later Aristotle warned that the ‘dryness’ of perfumes risked causing premature greyness: ‘Why do those who use perfumes have grey hair sooner? Is it because perfume, through the spices in it, has a drying quality, wherefore the users of perfume become parched? For parching makes people more grey. For whether greyness is a drying up of the hair or a deficiency in heat, certain it is that dryness withers.’
No one seems to have listened, although a few shared Aristotle’s misgivings. Middle Comedy poets were fond of mocking the young man with an excessive fondness for fragrances, eager for the latest products. Aristophanes’ lost play Daetales featured two brothers, one a sophisticate from the city with a big selection of the latest imported perfumes, the other a yokel who has heard of none of them. Egypt in particular was renowned for its scents, many of which found their way to the Athenian myropoleion, a part of the market dedicated to the purpose. Besides Peron’s cinnamon formula, several of their brand names survive, among them Psagda and Megallus, each named after a celebrated parfumier.
Imitators and inheritors of the Greeks in so many other respects, the Romans likewise lost their heads over perfume, with the difference that the erotic associations were, if anything, more heavily accentuated. Plutarch, who disapproved of this sort of thing, regarded perfumes as ‘an effeminate, emasculating luxury which has absolutely no real use. Yet, although it is of such nature, it has depraved not only all women, but also the greater part of men, so that they will not even sleep with their own wives unless they come to bed reeking of myrrh and scented powders.’ Too much perfume was seen as tawdry. In a comedy of Plautus (c.254–184 BC) one courtesan says to another: ‘Do you really want to go around with those common prostitutes, the friends of jail-birds, dripping with ginger grass oil?’
Like the Greeks and Egyptians before them, the Romans were inventive in the uses they found for their perfumes. In Nero’s Golden House there was a scented dining room, the roof of which rained down roses and scented water. They followed the Greeks in branding and marketing the finest blends with appropriately exotic names. Pliny mentions one choice perfume grandiloquently known as ‘The Royal Unguent of the Kings of Parthia’, a suitably regal mix of many exotic and expensive ingredients, some of which defy identification, but including cinnamon, cardamom, cassia, calamus, ginger-grass, saffron, marjoram and honey. While variety, rarity and the obscurity of the aromatics meant cachet, there was agreement that cinnamon was the pick of the bunch. In poetry the spice commonly appears as a paragon of the sublime, as in the lament of a grieving widow for the ‘cinnamon smell’ of her dead husband’s ‘ambrosial body’. Plautus’ comedy Casina – ‘Cinnamon’ – takes its title from the object of an old man’s extramarital longings, which are betrayed by the smell of her perfumes. The aged procuress of his Curculio waxes lyrical in and over her cups: ‘My beauty of Bacchus! You’re old, but then so am I, and how badly I need you! Compared with you, every other essence is bilge-water! You are my myrrh, my cinnamon, my ointment of roses, my saffron, my cassia, my rarest of perfumes! Where you are poured is where I want to be buried.’
As a rule, the associations of spice and perfume tended towards the erotic. Nowhere is this clearer than in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses or Golden Ass. At one point in his adventures trapped in the body of an ass, the perpetually sex-starved hero Lucius sleeps with a beautiful noblewoman. Though initially reluctant to commit a bestial act, after a few drinks he is unable to withstand the desire brought on by plenty of good wine and the ‘inflammatory scent’ of the woman’s oil of balsam. Earlier, while still in human form, he is drawn into a passionate affair with a witch’s serving maid, powerless to resist her jiggling buttocks and cinnamon-scented breath. But even cinnamon had its limit. To Lucius, who admired nothing about women as much as their hair, not even a liberal dose of cinnamon could rescue a bald woman:
If you were to take even the most outstandingly beautiful woman, cut off the hair from the head and so deprive the face of its natural setting: well, even if she were cast down from heaven, even if she were Venus herself, accompanied by all the Graces and with every Cupid in attendance and girded with her famous belt of love, blazing with cinnamon and dripping in balsam – if she were bald, she couldn’t please even her own devoted slave.
In part, the esteem in which spices were held boiled down to a question of technique. Ancient perfumes and unguents were a good deal weaker than their modern equivalents, there being no way of isolating the powerful essential oils that enable modern perfumes to
pack such a punch, based on alcohol, synthetic chemicals and essential oils isolated by the process of distillation. In their place, the ancient perfumer obtained his perfumes by soaking aromatics in fat or oil which was then gently heated (maceration), or left to sit unheated (enfleurage). The end product was commonly worn on clothes and hair or, alternatively, poured on a brazier and burned (the modern word itself derives from the Latin per fumum, ‘through the smoke’). Spices had the added attraction of unrivalled potency and durability, for which reason they were critical ingredients for the perfumer, and they remained so until the process was transformed with the invention of distillation, and then the advent of the chemical age.
This is, of course, just the sort of tidy, functional explanation that historians like: spices were necessary, ergo fashionable. But in Roman eyes – or noses – the matter was more complicated. Not the least of their attractions were their godly associations. Cinnamon in particular came with a heavy freight of fable and religion, reputed to grow in quasi-mythical lands of gods and monsters. A Roman audience, steeped in the literature of Homer and Virgil, could not fail to escape the parallel with the ambrosial aroma of their gods and heroes, for whom fragrance was a hallmark of more-than-mortal status. In the Iliad, the dead heroes Patroclus and Hector are anointed with fragrant ointments, and the Venus of Ovid’s Metamorphoses likewise makes Aeneas immortal by applying a perfume: ‘She anointed his body with the heavenly perfume.’ An ambrosial substance was by definition deathless, for that was what the word meant, from the Greek am-brotos, or immortal.