Pliny on Erica

Gaius Plinius Secundus greets you!

I have been asked to share with you my knowledge of the plant known as erica, and some of its medicinal applications, which may not be as well known today as they once were.

I shall begin by revisiting my Natural Histories in which I wrote of the erica being also known as myrice, and being used by the people of Ameria to make their brooms. But that is just the beginning of its usefulness.

Erica has many medicinal uses. The leaves, when crushed and taken in drink, are an antidote to the sting of a serpent. Boiled in wine and applied with honey they will heal cancerous sores.

Erica is especially useful in afflictions of the spleen, the juice being extracted and taken with wine. So marvellous is its antipathy to this organ of the body, that if swine drink from a trough made from this wood they will be found to lose the spleen. This is why food and drink are given to sufferers from maladies of the spleen in vessels made of this wood.

Some commentators have dismissed these latter claims, saying that they cannot possibly apply to any of the heaths of Europe, none of which produce wood large enough to make a trough or drinking vessel. They should read my words more closely. I refer to the wood of the tamarice, a much larger tree found in Eurasia and Africa. In fact, we ancients generally grouped together the brooms, heaths and tamarisks, under the name of erica.

And broom, by the way, bruised with axle-grease, is a cure for diseases of the knees.......

Many more such facts could I bring to your notice, but in these hurried days people do not have the time to read at length on various subjects no matter how interesting they may be. I myself have been asked specifically not to exceed twenty lines in this blog. Twenty lines! I believe I have failed to comply.

Bee Memory 2

And that's not my only bee memory. I have a bee memory for each of my children. Here is the second.

It was about 10 years ago. We were living in a house with a beautiful garden. Every day I would hang the bathroom towels out to dry in the sun.

One morning Sean came down the stairs with a stricken look. I've been stung by a bee! he said. In the bathroom! It was on my towel!

I felt guilty because I had brought the bee in on the towel.

Or possibly, we were living in the house with the swimming pool. Or this house, with the apricot tree. He didn't come down the stairs then, because there were/are no stairs. But he had a stricken look, and was holding a towel. I just got stung by a bee! he said. In the bathroom!

I felt guilty because I had brought the bee in on the towel.

Or it's even possible, now I think about it, that the bee wasn't on the towel at all. The bee was inside the tee shirt that he had put on after his shower. And he said, I just got stung by a bee! It was inside my tee shirt!

And I felt guilty, because it still would have been me that brought the bee in, on the tee shirt.

Easy Mo Bee

Pliny the Elder saw me reading Aesop's Fables. These tales are meant to be heard, not read out of a book, said he. They are oral tales. That is all very well, said I, but I have borrowed this book from the library.

Perhaps you could google up a site where someone speaks the stories, he suggested helpfully.

So I found a site and listened to several of the fables read by a child who did not read very well. Not all the fables could be listened to. I decided to give up on the child and read Jupiter and the Bee.

It was exactly the same story as the one in my library book. The Bee brings Jupiter some honey. Jupiter is pleased and offers a reward. The Bee asks for a sting to kill men who want to steal its honey. Jupiter is angry, and grants the sting, with the proviso that if the Bee uses the sting it will die. A good story. I suppose the moral is: Always ask for nice things.

But the moral of my story is yet to come. You can double click on any word in the fable you are reading and you will get an instant link to a site called ANSWER, which will tell you the meaning of the word. You can double click on Jupiter for instance, and learn that he is a God. I clicked on Bee. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Bee was a famous New York rapper, whose full name was Easy Mo Bee. I passed this on to Pliny who shook his head in disbelief.

The moral of this story is : The path to enlightenment is littered with red herrings.