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BY SUSAN McCARTHY

July 1, 1999 | This is the true story of giant fennel birth control. Don't worry, fundamentalist religious leaders, it's extinct! Almost certainly. And maybe it wasn't birth control, maybe it was just a garnish. Or cough syrup. Or snake poison. Yeah.

Once upon a time (around 630 B.C.) there were way too many people on the Greek island of Thera. Then, according to Herodotus, a terrible drought killed all but one tree on the island. At the suggestion of the Oracle of Delphi, the Pythoness, they decided to send a bunch of citizens away to found a colony in North Africa. The Pythoness had to suggest this repeatedly, because nobody seemed to want to go.

Colonists were selected by lot, and when some tried to come back, the Therans threw rocks at them, so off they went, and eventually, with the guidance of friendly North Africans, settled at Cyrene (pronounced sigh-REEN-ee) in what is now Libya. Cyrene had a better climate than most of North Africa, and so the Therans farmed, and married Libyans, and made up a story about how their king was descended from Apollo and the nymph Cyrene. (Cyrene was guarding her father's sheep when along came a lion. She wrestled the lion to a standstill and Apollo, who was hanging around watching helpfully, the way gods do, was impressed and carried her off to Libya, where she had two children by him and one by Ares. Ares? Maybe it's better not to ask.)

Shortly after the colonists arrived, they discovered the amazing silphion plant, a form of giant fennel, which grew in a limited band along the Libyan coast. Linguistic evidence indicates that the Libyans already knew about silphion, but it was news to the colonists. Silphion was later called silphium or laserwort, and its juice was called laser, and everybody wanted some. Selling it around the Mediterranean made the Cyreneans rich. Or at least it made the rich Cyreneans richer, so they could spend their spare time racing four-horse chariots, something they picked up from the Libyans, and that means more jobs in the chariot industry for the less-rich.

They put pictures of silphium on their coins, sometimes with a female gesturing at it in a Vanna-like way. They were able to charge quite a bit for silphium, which was eventually worth its weight in silver. The Romans deposited it in their treasury.

There was one problem with silphium. They couldn't farm it. The Cyreneans grew everything from saffron crocuses to olive trees, but silphium wouldn't cooperate. Like the caper bush, Theophrastus noted, it would grow wild or not at all.

Silphium was a royal monopoly, with strict rules about how much could be harvested each year. The rules were broken, of course -- fennel-smugglers went through Carthage -- but not disastrously so. At least for the first five or six centuries.

But then silphium became extinct. Pliny the Elder (23-79 A.D.) wrote that in his lifetime only one stalk of genuine silphium had been found -- which was picked and sent to Nero. It's hard to pin down exactly when extinction happened, since when people couldn't get Cyrenean silphium they substituted "Syrian silphium," or asafoetida, a fennel of greater distribution. Asafoetida is known today chiefly for smelling just ghastly, unlike silphium, yet it was considered a reasonable substitute.

All this importing and rationing and depositing and smuggling and substituting sounds more like opium than fennel. What on earth was the stuff?

Next page | Its greatest use might have been as birth control