How Did Roman Women Avoid Pregnancy?

How Did Roman Women Avoid Pregnancy? In 49 BCE, Julius Caesar marched on Rome, the Senate fled, and he walked into the public treasury and took what was in it. The inventory survived because Pliny the Elder wrote it down. Gold. Silver. And fifteen hundred pounds of a plant resin called laser. Rome kept a plant in its treasury, next to the bullion, measured by the hundredweight. The plant was silphium, and it grew in exactly one place on earth — a narrow strip of the North African coast around the Greek city of Cyrene, in what is now Libya. Nobody ever managed to cultivate it anywhere else. Pliny wrote that the resin sold for its own weight in silver. And according to the physicians of the Roman world, women used it so they would not become pregnant. This is the part of daily life in ancient Rome that the emperors and the battles leave out. Cyrene put the plant on its silver coins instead of a god or a founder, because the plant was the economy — and by the 420s BCE an Athenian comedy audience already knew it well enough to follow a joke about its market price. Then the medicine, and here the history of Roman women gets harder. Soranus of Ephesus, the most respected specialist in women's medicine in the empire, prescribed a dose of silphium the size of a chickpea dissolved in water once a month, and gave a second method any household could manage: a tuft of wool soaked in the plant's juice. He also did something unusual for an ancient medical writer — he said openly that much of what he knew came from midwives and from women themselves. His alternatives were a strange mix. Olive-oil and honey barriers that actually made physical sense. A pharmacopoeia that included white lead, with no way to measure a safe amount. And advice about fertile days that pointed women at exactly the wrong part of the month, because Greek medicine had the cycle backwards. All of it given in good faith by the best doctor available. And then silphium disappeared, inside Pliny's own lifetime. He blamed the grazing rights — flocks turned loose on silphium land were simply more profitable than protecting the plant. Modern explanations add overharvesting of a wild plant with a tiny natural range, possible drought in Cyrenaica, and the strong likelihood it could never be domesticated, which left no fallback once the wild population collapsed. Pliny reports that the last stalk found was sent to the emperor Nero as a curiosity. What silphium actually was remains open. The leading candidates are species of giant fennel, Ferula — relatives of the plant that gives us asafoetida. Modern researchers have tested extracts of related Ferula species on animals and got wildly different results between species: high effect in some rat trials, essentially nothing in hamsters. Which means a related plant does carry real biological activity, and also that we cannot reason from a rodent to a woman. The one plant that could settle the argument is extinct. What's left is the thing that bothers me most about this whole story. We know the physician's name. We know which emperor got the last stalk, and which general took the resin out of the treasury to pay for a civil war. We know the price per weight, the shipping routes, the design on the coins. We do not know the name of one single woman who used it. CHAPTERS: 0:00 Caesar opens the treasury 0:33 The plant that grew in one place on earth 1:11 Almost gone inside one lifetime 1:22 The question this video is really asking 1:48 Start with the money — Cyrene's fortune 2:08 A vegetable on a silver coin 2:37 Athens was already joking about the price 3:07 Soranus of Ephesus — and whose voice we're hearing 3:59 The dose, and the argument about it 4:37 The wool method any household could afford 5:07 The barriers that actually made sense 5:39 White lead — where the medicine turned dangerous 6:18 The advice that pointed the wrong way 7:06 Dioscorides, Pliny and the amulets 7:53 How the plant disappeared 8:57 What silphium actually was 9:55 The knowledge nobody wrote down 11:25 The law that rewarded childbearing 12:16 The honest answer 12:30 The plant on the coin — and the women no one named If there's a piece of ordinary ancient life you've always wanted explained properly, put it in the comments — the best episodes here have come from there. And if you want the next one, subscribing is the thing that makes these possible. #AncientRome #RomanHistory #RomanWomen #Silphium #HistoryDocumentary