When Did Ancient Romans Start Taking Opium?

Opium in ancient Rome was not a secret vice but a shelf medicine: poppy juice in pills for a cough, a toothache, a sleepless fever, and in the great compound called theriac. And the question the title asks has a more honest answer than you might expect. In this video, in order: why the poppy is older than Rome, and what chemists did and did not find in a Bronze Age jar from Cyprus; the poppy in Roman stories, from a king's garden to the coins of Vespasian; how opium was actually made, from the cut on a clear morning to the four tests Pliny gave for telling real from fake; the doctor's shelf in the writings of Celsus, with doses measured by the size of a vetch seed and a bean; Pliny's warning that a larger dose ends in the sleep of death, and what historians found when they searched the sources for Roman addiction; what Romans did before the knife, from mandrake wine to a stone from Memphis, and why the famous sleeping sponge and the willow-bark aspirin do not belong to Rome; the compound theriac and its 64 ingredients; and the emperor Marcus Aurelius, who took it every day, and the single doctor's account behind the claim that he could not sleep without poppy. Sources: Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book 20, chapter 76, and Book 25, section 150 (translations by H. Rackham and in the Loeb series) Celsus, De Medicina, Book 3, chapter 18; Book 5, chapter 25; Book 6, chapter 8; Book 7, Proem and chapter 26 Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, Book 4, chapters 64 and 75 Cassius Dio, Roman History, Book 72, chapters 6, 24 and 36 Galen, On Antidotes, Book 1, as discussed in D. Karaberopoulos, M. Karamanou and G. Androutsos, The theriac in antiquity, The Lancet 379 (2012), 1942-1943 M. Julyan and M. Dircksen (2011), The ancient drug opium, Akroterion 56, 75-90 P. Nencini (1997), The rules of drug taking: wine and poppy derivatives in the ancient world. VIII. Lack of evidence of opium addiction, Substance Use & Misuse 32(11), 1581-1586 T. W. Africa (1961), The Opium Addiction of Marcus Aurelius, Journal of the History of Ideas 22(1) A. Salavert et al. (2020), Direct dating reveals the early history of opium poppy in western Europe, Scientific Reports 10, 20263 G. Giachi et al. (2013), Ingredients of a 2,000-y-old medicine revealed by chemical, mineralogical, and botanical investigations, PNAS 110(4), 1193-1196 #AncientRome #RomanHistory #RomanMedicine