Elder in Antiquity: what Dioscorides and Pliny actually write

Whoever searches the ancient materia medica for elder is searching not for one plant but for a pair of terms. The Greek tradition knows the akte, the tree elder, and beside it the chamaiakte, literally the low or ground elder. Modern classical scholarship assigns this pair unambiguously: the akte is our true elder, Sambucus nigra, while the herbaceous, black-fruited chamaiakte is by contrast the dwarf elder, Sambucus ebulus.[1]

This distinction is not a later misunderstanding; it already appears in Dioscorides. His entry on the akte and the one immediately following on the chamaiakte deal with two distinct plants that he expressly keeps apart: the one tree-like, the other creeping and herbaceous.[3][2]

The akte entry in Dioscorides is predominantly description, not use. He sketches a tree with reed-like hollow, whitish branches of considerable length, round clustered umbels of white flowers at the top, and a fruit of a faintly purple-black colour, in bunches, juicy and tasting of wine.[2]

Important for the question of species: Dioscorides names the Roman equation himself. The akte also bears, so the text says, the names arbor ursi and sativa, and among the Romans it is called sambucus. With that the bridge between the Greek and Latin name is laid already in antiquity, long before Linnaeus names the genus.[2]

Remarkable is what this entry does not contain. In the Goodyer version the akte passage is description-heavy and refers, for the actual uses, further down, namely to the following chapter. The species central to our brand is thus described botanically here, while the detailed uses appear in the next entry. That is exactly where the next section leads.[2]

The following chapter describes the chamaiakte as a creeping plant with a rootstock, smaller and more herbaceous than the tree elder, with a four-cornered, many-jointed stalk. This passage carries, in the edition, the express marking that its berries are toxic. It is in this entry for the species with toxic berries that most of the recorded uses appear.[3]

What matters, though, is how the text introduces this list. It says the chamaiakte has the same properties and the same use as the akte above it, namely drying and water-driving, yet hard on the stomach. The uses are thus not confined to the smaller species but are described in the text as shared. Galen later confirms this equation with the remark that dwarf elder and elder have nearly the same properties.[3]

In particular: the leaves, cooked as a vegetable, are said to carry off phlegm and bile. The root, cooked in wine and given to eat, counts as good for dropsy, and the entry names a softening action on the womb. A decoction of the fruit, drunk in wine, is said to do the same, and rubbed in it dyes the hair dark.[3]

The entry carries the list on: root in wine against the viper's bite, a polenta poultice for inflammation, burns and dog bite, with fat against hollow ulcers and gout. That too stands in the chamaiakte chapter, sorted throughout by plant part, leaf, stalk, root and fruit each with its own use.[3]

Pliny the Elder devotes to elder, in the Naturalis Historia, a chapter of its own, headed with fifteen remedies. He too separates two species from the start. There are, he writes, two kinds of elder, one of them growing wild and much smaller, called by the Greeks chamaeacte or helion.[4]

Which species the smaller wild elder is, the Bostock-Riley edition clarifies in its own footnote: the chamaeacte is Sambucus ebulus after Linnaeus, the dwarf elder, the other species the true elder, Sambucus nigra. Here Pliny agrees with the distinction in Dioscorides, down to the assignment of the species.[4]

Contrary to some abbreviated accounts, Pliny refers the remedies expressly to both species. A decoction of the leaves, the seed or the root of either of the two species, drunk in old wine, is said to carry off all watery humours. Only after that follows the addition that the smaller species is, for all these purposes, the more potent of the two. With Pliny the dwarf elder is thus not the sole site of the catalogue but the stronger variant of a use common to both.[4]

In detail: the berries, whose action Pliny describes as weaker than that of the other plant parts, dye the hair and, drunk in a certain dose, act as a diuretic. A decoction of the root in wine is said to drive out the water in dropsy and to soften the uterus. The leaves, taken in wine, are said to neutralise the venom of snakes.[4]

Alongside the medicine stands in Pliny the apotropaic, and indeed in exactly this chapter. Against the boa, a complaint that shows itself as red pustules on the body, the sick person is to be whipped with an elder twig. Remedy and folk belief blur here in one breath, a trait that marks the ancient image of elder and that the anchor piece takes up in its broad arc.[4]

Before the medicine stands the pure botany. Theophrastus, a good three centuries before Dioscorides, brings up elder as a teaching example. In his Historia Plantarum the akte is the model case of a wood without knots, expressly contrasted with the knotty wood of fir and silver fir.[5]

Elsewhere Theophrastus groups elder with the fleshy-cored plants, that is, with vine, fig, apple, pomegranate and ferula, yet holds at the same time that some grant elder no core at all, no pith. Here lies the ancient ancestor of the motif of the elder without heartwood, of the hollow pith.[6]

A third, fuller Theophrastus report in the same work depicts the akte as shrubby, growing by water and in shade, with branches hollow throughout, from which light walking sticks are made, and with a white, honeycomb-built flower form. We paraphrase this fuller account here. The exact wording of the passage is not independently confirmed online, which is why we mark it as a standard reading and do not quote it verbatim, unlike the two preceding, verified loci.[7]

This botanical account does not discuss medicinal use. It describes build and form, not action, and so supplies the structural foundation on which the later hollow-trunk and pithless motifs rest.[6][5]

Our access to the full text of Dioscorides owes much to a long chain of translation. One important node lies in the 9th century: the Kitab al-Hashaish, the Arabic version of the De Materia Medica, translated by Istifan ibn Basil and revised by Hunayn ibn Ishaq, carries the Greco-Roman medical knowledge onward into the Islamic world. In this corpus the elder entries travel along too.[8]

The Renaissance bridge decisive for Europe is Pietro Andrea Mattioli's Discorsi, a commentary on Dioscorides that appears from 1544 in Venice and follows the ancient materia medica book by book. Because Mattioli comments on Dioscorides chapter by chapter, he carries the pair sambuco and ebulo, that is, the true elder and the dwarf elder, together with their division, onward into early modern pharmacology.[9]

In substance Mattioli stays close to Dioscorides: two species, both drying and carrying off the watery humours, both hard on the stomach. The commentary adds his own observations, among them a third type growing in mountains and marshes with red berries, as well as uses such as flower water for headache and a salve from the green bark for burns.[10]

Here caution is in order. We render Mattioli's substance but hold back the exact Italian wording and the folio numbers of the 1568 Valgrisi edition, because they still need to be checked against the scan. The finding that Mattioli passes on the ancient two-species division faithfully stands; the individual quotations remain provisional.[10]

The limits of the sources belong in this account. We leave three points open. First: the fuller Theophrastus report on the shrubby growth, the hollow branches and the walking sticks is, in its exact formulation, not independently confirmed online. We present it as a standard reading; verbatim we have quoted only the verified accompanying passages on the knotless wood and the question of pith.[7]

Second: with the Kitab al-Hashaish the route of transmission is verified, but not the specific Arabic elder lemma. For that reason it stands here as a transmission node, not as evidence of a particular turn of phrase.[8]

Third: Mattioli's Italian wording and the folio numbers are first to be secured against the original scan. The substantive statement, that the Discorsi carries the Dioscorides division onward, is untouched by this; exact quotation remains provisional.[10]