How not to make Nero’s bruise-removing cerate
Thursday night I oversaw a discussion of the Medicina Plinii’s chapter For Bruisings and Swellings.1 It was a small turnout which is unsurprising for the penultimate week of classes, but those who attended were engaged and interested. I made a few of the remedies to show attendees, so I was relieved that at least three people had attended. That said, I personally learned a lot from my experimentation. I had first intended to make a recreation of the cerate. Cerates often include oils too, but I am using this as a term for a wax-based medicament. This product and its use was described by Pliny the Elder thus:
Nero Caesar gave renown to this [the juice from the African thapsia] at the start of his rule, when his face was beaten as a result of nocturnal prowlings, anointing it with frankincense and wax, and on the following day bearing uninjured skin in opposition to the rumour.²
The Medicina Plinii, obtaining the recipe from Pliny, wrote:
At the beginning of his reign, because Nero had often been struck in the face during nocturnal prowlings, he smeared the blows with thapsia together with frankincense and wax, and on the following day he presented his face to be seen by the Roman people without any evidence of the brawl.³
Tacitus dates these events to 56 CE, but neither he nor Suetonius includes a description of disappearing bruises in their accounts of these events.⁴ That noted, I am inclined to believe Pliny for a couple of reasons:
- He lived though Nero’s reign, whereas Tacitus and Suetonius did not. For all we know, this is a fist-hand account;
- The correct use of thapsia. Thapsia was described as having the ability to remove bruising at least from the 3rd Century BCE, when Theophrastus, our earliest extant botanical writing included it in his History of Plants. It was included in numerous other texts combined with other medicaments in the Greek medical tradition; and
- Dioscorides, who based much of his work on the Greek tradition, included this precise combination with more details:
…the ground root or the juice with equal amounts of frankincense and wax removes black eye and livid spots; but they must stay on no more than two hours ten washed with warm seawater.⁵
Dioscorides wrote in his Preface to the first book that he had gathered his information while travelling with the army, so it seems unlikely that he acquired this precise recipe in Rome. He was writing around the same time as Pliny, although he was younger.
Thapsia is known by a different common name today: deadly carrot. It can be fatal to livestock, it’s a strong skin irritant, and its application to the skin can lead to burning and blistering. It is being investigated for medical applications and has been used for some skin cancer treatments. Thaspia’s nature explains why in this recipes it is being mixed with frankincense and wax; frankincense resin has been found by modern chemical analyses to have analgesic and anti-bacterial properties to offset some of the burning sensation and help prevent infection. It also explains why Dioscorides had a time limit for application.
There is a logic behind its use. Skin irritants, called rubefacients, increase the blood flow to where they are applied. Increased blood flow was thought to speed up the dispersal of the blood from the bruised skin. The technique is severely frowned upon today as it is dangerous and might lead to the creation of sores.
So I was prepared to carefully make this cerate. I thought I had thapsia. When I went too look at my historical medicaments collection I realised I made an embarrassing rookie error: I had the herb thlaspi, known in English as Shepherd’s Purse. I was working from memory, and my memory let me down: oops!
And strangely enough, it isn’t easy to acquire thapsia in Australia. I imagine that our biological custom controls play some role, but so does the fact that all the stuff I saw available online was chemically extracted stuff for use in labs at enormous prices.
I could not make Nero’s cerate. And not just because I didn’t have one ingredient.
Making a Variation of It
The more I have read about thapsia, the happier I am that I did not have this stuff. Dioscorides’ advice for harvesting it is a little terrifying, and the arthritis in my hands makes me more inclined to “oopsies.” Dioscorides stated:
…they extract its juice [from the root] by scratching the skin or by hollowing it out conically and covering it with a lid so that the milky juice remains clean. The following day they must come collect the milky juice that flowed out. … Those who extract the milky juice must not face the wind; on the contrary, they must do the extraction when there is no wind: for it causes severe facial swelling, ad the uncovered parts do blister from the sharpness of the emanation.⁶
There is some back and forth in sources about whether thaspia resin or juice was used, but the Medicina Plinii doesn’t specify whereas Pliny say “juice” sucus. “Juice” suggests a water content, and as well all learnt at school, water and oil do not mix. Beeswax and frankincense resin are oil-based products.
The whole project could have come to an end, but I decided that it might be interesting to replace the juice with that of another plant and see what that might tell me. So I decided to use the juice from an aloe in my yard, aloe aborescens known as candelabra aloe, to get a sense of the act of creating it.
 |
| Candelabra aloe growing in my back yard. |
I was following the Medicina Plinii’s recipe which gives no amounts, so like anyone dragging this codex with them, I had to make a guess. My first act was to finely ground some frankincense so it could more easily dissolve into the wax. I ended up using half a drachma of frankincense (1.7 grams).
I next juiced my aloe stems by slicing away the hard, and sometimes sharp, spikes on the side. It takes considerable pressure (or I’m weak - an equally plausible explanation). I obtained one drachma’s weight (3.4 grams).
Then I weighed out some beeswax. This was difficult as mine is a little old. Fresher wax might have been easier. I ended up using to drachmas (6.8 grams) of wax.
 |
| Clockwise from top: 2 drachmas of beeswax, 1 drachma of aloe juice (my great uncle swiped the butter dish before the fall of Singapore in WWII for those curious), and half a drachma of finely ground frankincense. |
I then MacGyvered myself a bain-marie to work with using a milk pot and a ceramic noodle pot and applying the heat slowly.
 |
Home-made bain-marie. |
 |
| Ground frankincense added to molten wax. |
 |
| The wax after the incense was stirred in. |
After melting the wax I added the frankincense and dissolved it in. It darkened the wax somewhat. I then added the aloe juice. It seemed to curdle on the sides.
 |
| Aloe added to wax and frankincense mixture. |
I stirred it as hard as I possibly could safely, but regardless of my hope for an emulsion, this did not take place.
 |
| Notice how it has not mixed through. |
I let it seethe for a period to possibly remove some of the moisture from the mix, but it continued to not mix through. I decided to let it cool a little and spoon it into small containers.
 |
| Cooling mix. |
It made an opaque waxy mix.
I still had some left over, and I found a nub of frankincense attached to my spoon, so I reheated the bowl, stirred that frankincense in and then did a warm liquid pour into another container. This has a semi-transparent finish which looks more aesthetically pleasing to me.
That noted, I do not know if this contains any of the aloe. To know for sure, I would need to repeat the experiment and warm liquid pour all of it.
 |
| The three containers of “cerate”. |
Thoughts
So thapsia is a poisonous plant. It required skilled experts to harvest it and potentially use it safely. I severely doubt Nero was preparing this cerate. Yet Nero had a contact with someone who knew poisons.
It was only when I was talking with students about who might have prepared it that I remembered Locusta. Locusta (also spelled Lucusta) was described as a professional poisoner, but I do wonder how much of her reputation was a result of what she is said to have done for Nero and his mother, and the fact that she was described as being from Gaul. There is a tendency to accuse both foreigners and women of poisoning in antiquity, and much of her reputation might have been tinged by this, as the sources are all later.
Suetonius goes so far as to say that Nero pardoned her because she was caught poisoning someone (we have no idea whom), and sent her students. This is a typical attack against someone like Nero, but if we remove the invective, perhaps we are seeing something else. I wrote back in 2017 about ancient toxicological research being promoted by eastern monarchs (in fact it forms a small part of my honours thesis), and suggested that Lucusta was teaching students toxicology.
If my theory about Lucusta is accurate, she could have had the necessary poisonous ingredient (thapsia), knew how to handle it, and would have known how to prepare the cerate. Because I failed terribly!
The dry spoon out smells more strongly of frankincense than the wet pour example. And both examples were difficult to dig out of the containers and impossible to rub into my skin on my wrists. I now understand why cerates typically include an oil to soften them.
I do not know just how helpful this recipe would be for a reader without amounts, and if Nero was using this recipes (something I consider possible if not probable), someone with expertise was preparing it for him.
Future reflections
To know if it was just the relative amounts which created this problem and not the replacement of thapsia juice with aloe juice, I would need to recreate it again using Dioscorides’ direction to use equal portions. I am not sure that this is something I wish to do immediate but might be a future project.
Comments
Post a Comment