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Whose Fault is it Anyway? Plant Infertility in Antiquity

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The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History

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Abstract

Historians who study infertility tend to focus – quite naturally – on human females. Studying the same issue in relation to plants, however, can offer new insights into the question and help challenge assumptions, especially since ancient women were often compared to fields awaiting fertilization. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which ancient scholars explained plant infertility; that is, a plant’s inability to bear fruits to maturity (rather than the complete inability to produce seed). Farmers were usually seen as responsible for this infertility; they lacked the knowledge and skill to make their crops fructify. Thus, while the female earth was the (in)fertile principle in plant generation, the ultimate blame fell on the male farmer. I argue that the same principle applied in human generation: men were by nature infertile – they could not carry children to maturity – but they had a crucial role in helping women to become fertile and make their family flourish.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    [Aristotle], Enquiry into Animals 10.1, 633b13–14. Unless stated otherwise, all translations are mine. This treatise is preserved as the tenth book of Aristotle’s Enquiry into Animals: David M. Balme and Allan Gotthelf, Aristotle. History of Animals. Books VII-X. Edited and Translated by D.M. Balme. Prepared for Publication by A. Gotthelf (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1991), pp. 476–539. Scholars are not all in agreement over the authorship of this book. Philip van der Eijk considers it to be a short medical Aristotelian treatise On Sterility; while Lesley Dean-Jones argues that only the two final chapters are Aristotelian. Philip J. van der Eijk, ‘On Sterility (‘HA X’), a Medical Work by Aristotle?’, Classical Quarterly, 49:2 (1999); Lesley Dean-Jones, ‘Clinical Gynecology and Aristotle’s Biology: The Composition of HA X’, Apeiron, 45:2 (2012).

  2. 2.

    Enquiry into Animals 10.5, 636b11–13.

  3. 3.

    Paul Potter, Hippocrates. Volume X. Edited and Translated by P. Potter (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2012), pp. 327–95. See Elizabeth Craik, The ‘Hippocratic’ Corpus: Content and Context (London, 2015), pp. 162–4.

  4. 4.

    See Page DuBois, Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women (Chicago, IL, 1988), pp. 67–81; Ann E. Hanson, ‘Conception, Gestation, and the Origin of Female Nature in the Corpus Hippocraticum’, Helios, 19 (1992), pp. 36–7; Helen King, ‘Sowing the Field: Greek and Roman Sexology’, in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (eds), Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of Attitudes to Sexuality (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 38–9.

  5. 5.

    Arthur F. Hort, Theophrastus. Enquiry into Plants and Minor Works on Odours and Weather Signs, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1916–1926). For an introduction to this work and bibliography, see Gavin Hardy and Laurence M.V. Totelin, Ancient Botany (London, 2016), pp. 8–10.

  6. 6.

    The work by Lesky remains fundamental: Erna Lesky, Die Zeugungs- und Vererbungslehre der Antike und ihr Nachwirken (Mainz Wiesbaden, 1951), pp. 127-9. One will find a convenient summary in Véronique Dasen, ‘Becoming Human: From the Embryo to the Newborn Child’, in Judith Evans Grubbs, Tim Parkin and Roslynne Bell (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Childhood and Education in the Classical World (Oxford, 2013), pp. 41–2.

  7. 7.

    Hippocratic Corpus, Regimen 1.27–31 (4.264–272 Jones); Generation 6 (10.14–16 Potter). See Iain M. Lonie, The Hippocratic Treatises On Generation, On the Nature of the Child, Diseases IV: A Commentary (Berlin, 1981), pp. 124–32; Hanson, ‘Conception, Gestation’, pp. 41–2; Helen King, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London, 1998), pp. 8–9.

  8. 8.

    See for instance Eva Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens, 2nd edn (Berkeley, CA, 1993), pp. 144–6; Lesley A. Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science (Oxford, 1994), p. 177; Susan G. Cole, Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space: The Ancient Greek Experience (Berkeley, CA, 2004), p. 165.

  9. 9.

    See in particular Robert Mayhew, The Female in Aristotle’s Biology: Reason or Rationalization (Chicago, IL, 2010), pp. 41–3. On whether Aristotle’s biology was ‘sexist’, see also Sophia M. Connell, ‘Aristotle and Galen on Sex Difference and Reproduction: A New Approach to an Ancient Rivalry’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 31:3 (2000); Devin M. Henry, ‘How Sexist is Aristotle’s Developmental Biology?’, Phronesis, 52:3 (2007).

  10. 10.

    See Rebecca Flemming, Medicine and the Making of Roman Women: Gender, Nature, and Authority from Celsus to Galen (Oxford, 2000), p. 298.

  11. 11.

    See for example Hippocratic Corpus, Aphorisms 5.62 (4.176 Jones); Airs, Waters and Places 21 (1.124 Jones); Lucretius, On the Nature of Things 4.1240 (see below for more detail). See Rebecca Flemming, ‘The Invention of Infertility in the Classical Greek World: Medicine, Divinity, and Gender’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 87 (2013), pp. 571, 589.

  12. 12.

    The word ‘atokos’ (without child) is sometimes used too, although more rarely. See Flemming, ‘Invention of Infertility’, p. 576.

  13. 13.

    Hippocratic Corpus, Infertile Women 213 (10.330 and 338 Potter).

  14. 14.

    See Flemming, ‘Invention of Infertility’, p. 573.

  15. 15.

    Hippocratic Corpus, Infertile Women 224 (10.360 Potter).

  16. 16.

    On the symbolism of the ingredients in this recipe, see Danielle Gourevitch, ‘Fumigation et fomentation gynécologiques’, in Ivan Garofalo et al (eds), Aspetti della terapia nel Corpus Hippocraticum: Atti del IXe Colloque International Hippocratique: Pisa, 25–29 Settembre 1996 (Florence, 1999), p. 210; Vincent Barras, ‘La Naissance et ses recettes en médecine antique’, in Véronique Dasen (ed.), Naissance et petite enfance dans l’antiquité. Actes du colloque de Fribourg, 28 Novembre–1er Décembre 2001 (Fribourg and Göttingen, 2004), p. 101; Laurence M.V. Totelin, Hippocratic Recipes: Oral and Written Transmission of Pharmacological Knowledge in Fifth- and Fourth-Century Greece (Leiden, 2009), pp. 200–1.

  17. 17.

    See Laurence M.V. Totelin, ‘Sex and Vegetables in the Hippocratic Gynaecological Treatises’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 38:3 (2007); Totelin, Hippocratic Recipes, pp. 199–214. On the use of dung in ancient gynaecology, see also Heinrich von Staden, ‘Women and Dirt’, Helios, 19 (1992), pp. 15–16; Ann Ellis Hanson, ‘Talking Recipes in the Gynaecological Texts of the Hippocratic Corpus’, in Maria Wyke (ed.), Parchments of Gender: Deciphering the Body in Antiquity (Oxford, 1998), p. 89.

  18. 18.

    See Iain M. Lonie, ‘On the Botanical Excursus in De Natura Pueri 22–27’, Hermes, 97:4 (1969).

  19. 19.

    The formula appears several times in the plays of the comedian Menander: Dyskolos 842–844; Perikeiromene 1013–1014; Samia 897–898.

  20. 20.

    Cole, Landscapes, pp. 153–4.

  21. 21.

    For objectification, see King, ‘Sowing the Field’, p. 38.

  22. 22.

    Hesiod, Theogony 126–127; See Nicole Loraux, Born of the Earth. Translated from the French by Selina Stewart (Ithaca, NY, and London, 2000), p. 110.

  23. 23.

    For a use of aphoros, see for example Theophrastus, Causes of Plant Phaenonema 1.17.10 (in relation to figs). See Flemming, ‘Invention of Infertility’, p. 577.

  24. 24.

    Theophrastus, HP 1.3.1.

  25. 25.

    Theophrastus, HP 1.3.5.

  26. 26.

    See Andrew Dalby, Food in the Ancient World from A to Z (London, 2003), pp. 150–3.

  27. 27.

    Theophrastus, HP 2.5.7.

  28. 28.

    Theophrastus, HP 3.3.6.

  29. 29.

    Theophrastus, HP 2.2.10.

  30. 30.

    For an introduction to botanical observations carried out during the rule of Alexander, see Suzanne Amigues, ‘L’expédition d’Anaxicrate en Arabie occidentale’, Topoi Orient-Occident, 6 (1996).

  31. 31.

    Theophrastus, HP 2.2.8 (date palm); 3.3.5 (persea and date palm); 4.1.5 (date palm and sycamore).

  32. 32.

    Theophrastus, HP 2.2.8.

  33. 33.

    Pliny, Natural History 16.135–136. See Hardy and Totelin, Ancient Botany, p. 172 with same translation.

  34. 34.

    See Ida Östenberg, Staging the World: Spoils, Captives and Representations in the Roman Triumphal Procession (Oxford, 2009), pp. 184–8

  35. 35.

    See Hardy and Totelin, Ancient Botany, p. 127.

  36. 36.

    Theophrastus, HP 3.1.2.

  37. 37.

    See also Theophrastus, HP 2.2.10 (black poplar; elm); 3.3.4 (willow, black poplar and elm); CP 1.1.4 (willow, elder, white and black poplar); 1.3.5 (black and white poplar); 1.5.1 (willow, elm and thyme).

  38. 38.

    See Georg Wöhrle, Threophrasts Methode in seinen botanischen Schriften (Amsterdam, 1985), pp. 53–62; C.G. Tortzen, ‘Male and Female in Peripatetic Botany’, Classica et mediaevalia, 42 (1991); Moshe Negbi, ‘Male and Female in Theophrastus’ Botanical Works’, Journal of the History of Biology, 28 (1995); Lin Foxhall, ‘Natural Sex: The Attribution of Sex and Gender to Plants in Ancient Greece’, in Lin Foxhall and J. Salmon (eds), Thinking Men: Masculinity and its Self-Representation in the Classical Tradition (London, 1998); M. Bretin-Chabrol and C. Leduc, ‘La botanique antique et la problématique du genre’, Clio. Histoire, femmes et sociétés, 68:1 (2009).

  39. 39.

    Theophrastus, HP 3.8.1. See Hardy and Totelin, Ancient Botany, p. 131 (with same translation).

  40. 40.

    Theophrastus, HP 5.4.1.

  41. 41.

    See Diodorus, Historical Library 1.80.4; Pliny, Natural History 16.111.

  42. 42.

    See Foxhall, ‘Natural Sex’, p. 68.

  43. 43.

    See Theophrastus, HP 1.8.2; 3.9.3; 5.4.1; CP 1.16.6.

  44. 44.

    The literature on this topic is large. See in particular King, Hippocrates’ Woman, p. 29; Mayhew, Female in Aristotle’s Biology, pp. 98–9.

  45. 45.

    Theophrastus, HP 2.8.4; Pliny, Natural History 13.34–35; Achille Tatius, Clitophon and Leucippe 1.17; Basil of Caesarea, Homelies on the Hexaemeron 5.47 Ammianus Marcellinus, History 24.3.12–14; Geoponika 10.4. See also Herodotus, The Histories 1.193. See Laura Georgi, ‘Pollination Ecology of the Date Palm and Fig Tree: Herodotus 1.193.4–5’, Classical Philology, 77:3 (1982); Tortzen, ‘Male and Female’, p. 92; Negbi, ‘Male and Female’, pp. 320–3.

  46. 46.

    In some cases, the ancients described the process of grafting (where a scion is introduced into a rootstalk) in sexual terms. These cases, however, are rather complex and are beyond the scope of this chapter. See Hardy and Totelin, Ancient Botany, pp. 137–8.

  47. 47.

    Aristotle, Generation of Animals 1.23, 730b32–731a4. See Hardy and Totelin, Ancient Botany, p. 129 (same translation).

  48. 48.

    See especially CP 4.4.10.

  49. 49.

    Theophrastus, CP 3.2.6.

  50. 50.

    Pliny, Natural History 17.134.

  51. 51.

    Columella, On Agriculture 10.194–199.

  52. 52.

    Theophrastus, CP 1.15.3; 2.10.1.

  53. 53.

    Theophrastus, CP 1.15.4.

  54. 54.

    ‘Mad vines’: see for instance Theophrastus, CP 1.18.4; ‘goaty vines’: see for example Aristotle, Generation of Animals 1.18, 725b34; Theophrastus, CP 1.5.5.

  55. 55.

    According to Varro, goats were never sacrificed to Minerva, because that animal caused too much damage to the goddess’s sacred tree, the olive: On Agriculture 1.2.19–20.

  56. 56.

    Theophrastus, CP 2.9.3–6.

  57. 57.

    To a modern botanist, the process of caprification is one of dioecious reproduction, where insects carry pollen from male individuals (caprifigs) to female ones (domesticated figs).

  58. 58.

    Theophrastus, CP 2.16.8.

  59. 59.

    Theophrastus, CP 3.15.4.

  60. 60.

    Ann Michelini, ‘Hybris and Plants’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 82 (1978), 37–8. Being too fat was also considered a cause of infertility in women: see for example Hippocratic Corpus, Aphorisms 5.46 (4.168 Jones); Aristotle, Generation of Animals 1.18, 726a3–6; 2.7, 746b26–9.

  61. 61.

    Michelini, ‘Hybris’, p. 43.

  62. 62.

    See for instance Cato, On Agriculture 93.

  63. 63.

    See for example Pseudo-Aristotle, Problems 20.12, 924a1–23; Theophrastus, CP 3.7.4.

  64. 64.

    Lucretius, On the Nature of Things 2.1150–1160. Note that Lucretius calls the fruit of the earth ‘fetus’, a word that could equally refer to animals and plants.

  65. 65.

    Columella, On Agriculture 1, preface 1.

  66. 66.

    Columella, On Agriculture 2.1.2.

  67. 67.

    Columella, On Agriculture 2.1.7.

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      1. Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, UK

        Laurence M.V. Totelin

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      1. School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

        Gayle Davis

      2. Department of History, University of Essex, Colchester, Essex, UK

        Tracey Loughran

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      Totelin, L.M. (2017). Whose Fault is it Anyway? Plant Infertility in Antiquity. In: Davis, G., Loughran, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52080-7_4

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