Aroma

The Cultural History of Smell

Constance Classen, David Howes, Anthony Synnott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415114721
• eBook ISBN: 9781134822393
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Smell is a social phenomenon, given particular meanings and values by different cultures. Odours form the building blocks of cosmologies, class hierarchies, and political odours. They can enforce social structures or transgress them, unite people or divide them, empower or disempower. The authors argue that the sociology of smell is repressed in the modern West, and its social history ignored. This book breaks the "olfactory silence" of modernity. It offers the first comprehensive exploration of the cultural role of odours in Western history - from antiquity to the present. It also covers a wide variey of non-Western societies. Its topics range from the medieval concept of the "odour of sanctity", to the aromatherapies of South America, and from olfactory stereotypes of gender and ethnicity in the modern West to the role of smell in postmodernity. Its subject matter will fascinate anyone who likes to nose around in the inner workings of culture.

Part I

In search of lost scents

Chapter 1 The aromas of antiquity

‘The pleasure of perfume’, wrote Pliny in the first century, ‘[is] among the most elegant and also most honourable enjoyments in life.’¹ The inhabitants of the ancient world, indeed, enjoyed sweet scents with an intensity which we moderns, for all the money we spend on perfumes, can scarcely imagine. People of antiquity used scent not only for purposes of personal attraction, but also as an important ingredient for everything from dinner parties through sporting events and parades to funerals. In our own age, by contrast, the notion of a perfumed dinner party or parade is so alien as to seem absurd.

Concomitantly, many of the foul smells which infused the lives of the inhabitants of earlier periods in Western history have been eliminated from our modern First World consciousness. In effect, therefore, an olfactory gulf lies between our own deodorized modern life and the richly scented lives of our forbears.² In what follows we will explore this lost world of scents in order to try and recapture, if only on paper, the essence of those earlier, more redolent, times.

The period focused on in this chapter is the first century AD.References are also made to selected works from earlier and later periods of antiquity, however, in order to indicate the continuity of certain beliefs and practices.

ATTAR OF ROSES, CINNAMON AND MYRRH

The Graces are described in classical poetry as wearing garments scented with

crocus, hyacinth, and blooming violet and the sweet petals of the peerless rose so fragrant, so divine.³

Such floral scents were, in fact, associated with a state of grace in antiquity, evoking a sense of distilled youth and beauty: sweet, fresh and evocative. Garlands and floral crowns were thought to make fitting offerings for the gods, and to bestow on their wearers an essence of divinity when worn by mortals.⁴

Interested as they were in floral scents, the ancients were particularly attentive to the olfactory nuances of the garden. Pliny writes in his Natural History, for example,

The smell of some plants is sweeter at a distance, becoming fainter as the distance is lessened; for instance, that of the violet. A freshly gathered rose smells at a distance, but a faded rose when nearer. All perfume however is stronger in spring, and in the morning; as the day draws near to noon it grows weaker. Young plants also have less perfume than old ones; the strongest perfume however of all plants is given out in middle age.⁵

Pliny also informs us that ‘weather too makes a difference for in certain years the rose grows with less perfume, and furthermore all roses have more perfume on dry soils than on moist’.⁶

Not only the aromas of flowers, but also the odour of the earth was appreciated by the ancients:

It is certainly the case that a soil which has a taste of perfumes will be the best soil… The earth [after a shower] sends out that divine breath of hers, of quite incomparable sweetness, which she has conceived from the sun. This is the odour which ought to be emitted when the earth is turned up, and the scent of the soil will be the best criterion of its quality.⁷

While many of the perfumes appreciated in Greece and Rome could be found in the garden, others had to be imported from Arabia. These included spices such as cinnamon and cassia, and aromatic resins, such as myrrh and frankincense. The sale of these aromatic products made the fortune of many an Arabian merchant, as endless caravans carted loads of olfactory wealth through the dusty deserts of Arabia en route to the markets of Greece and Rome. Arabia felix, happy Arabia, was the name the Romans wistfully gave to the country that produced such a fragrant bounty.⁸

Most of our information about the role of scent in the ancient world comes from the writers of Greece and Rome. The cultures of the ancient Middle East, however, had olfactory traditions that were in many respects more developed than those of their Western neighbours. The Greeks and Romans sometimes deprecated the extensive use of perfumes by the Egyptians, Persians and others as sensualist foppery. More than they deprecated, however, they admired and imitated. Just as aromatics travelled to Greece and Rome from the East, there is no doubt that many aromatic customs also came via the same route.

With their home-grown and their imported aromatics the ancients created gloriously heady blends of perfumes.⁹ Susinum, made of lilies, oil of behen nut, sweet flag, honey, cinnamon, saffron and myrrh. Megalium, the great creation of the Roman perfumer Megallus, was made of balsam, rush, reed, behen nut oil, cassia and resin. The elaborate ‘royal perfume’ was composed of over twenty ingredients, including wild grape, spikenard, lotus, cinnamon, myrrh, gladiolus and marjoram. The most famous of Egyptian perfumes, Kyphi, was a blend of sixteen ingredients.According to the Greek historian Plutarch, this perfume had the power to relieve anxiety, brighten dreams, and heal the soul.¹⁰ Kyphi was also a sacred incense, offered up by the inhabitants of the city of Heliopolis to the sun-god Re as he set in the sky every evening.¹¹

As in our own fashion-conscious age, however, trends in perfumery came and went in the ancient world. ‘The first thing proper to know about [perfumes]’, writes Pliny, ‘is that their importance changes.’ Thus: ‘The iris perfume of Corinth was extremely popular for a long time, but afterwards that of Cyzicus …vine-flower scent made in Cyprus was preferred, but afterwards that from Adramytteum, and scent of marjoram made in Cos, but afterwards quince-blossom unguent.’¹² Our olfactory appetite is whetted by the thought of what the iris perfume of Corinth that was so ‘extremely popular’ was like, or the quince-blossom unguent from Cos or the vine-flower scent of Cyprus.

It is not only the ingredients of ancient perfumes that sound exotic to us now, but also the ways in which they were prepared. Scents were available in a variety of forms: as toilet waters or oils, as dry powders, in thick unguents, or as incense. Whereas when we think of perfumes today, we inevitably imagine them as liquids, an inhabitant of the ancient world would be just as likely to enjoy perfume in the form of a thick ointment, to be smeared liberally on the body, or a fragrant smoke, infusing the air with its odour. Our own English word ‘perfume’, in fact, literally means ‘to smoke through’, indicating the importance this method of imparting fragrance had for our ancestors.

As in our day, the well-to-do of antiquity bought their scents from perfumers. In one Greek play, for example, a perfumer named Peron is mentioned: ‘I left the man in Peron’s shop just now dealing for ointments. When he has agreed he’ll bring your cinnamon and spikenard essence.’¹³ Perfumers stored their wares in lead or alabaster vases to prevent their odours from evaporating. These vessels were kept in shady upper rooms of the shop where they would be shielded from the damaging heat of the sun. Clients shopping for a scent would have their wrists anointed with different oils by the perfumer, for, then as now, it was held that perfumes were sweetest when the scent came from the wrist. Perfumers employed other tricks of the trade to sell their wares as well. The early Greek botanist Theophrastus tells us, for instance, that the scent of roses is so powerful that it will overwhelm most other perfumes. Perfumers wishing their clients to buy attar of roses, therefore, would scent them with it first, after which all other perfumes they tried would seem relatively odourless.¹⁴

The royalty of antiquity had perfumers attached to their courts, not only to prepare perfumes for their own persons, but also for state feasts and entertainments. The amounts of perfumes and fragrant flowers used on such occasions could be enormous. Thus Darius III, King of Persia, for example, had in his retinue fourteen perfumers and forty-six garland makers.¹⁵

Perfumes were worn by both men and women on their hair, their breast and sometimes on legs and feet. The account in the New Testament of Jesus having his feet perfumed with expensive ointment provides a well-known example of this last custom. The true perfume lovers of antiquity were not content to anoint themselves with simply one scent, however, but would use different perfumes for different parts of the body. Antiphanes, in reference to this fashion, writes of a wealthy Greek who

• …steeps his feet
• And legs in rich Egyptian unguents;
• His jaws and breasts he rubs with thick palm oil,
• And both his arms with extract sweet of mint;
• His eyebrows and his hair with marjoram,
• His knees and neck with essence of ground thyme.¹⁶

Nothing less than a complete olfactory wardrobe! Such a discriminating use of perfumes indicates that the ancients were not simply content to douse themselves with one strong scent or another, but had a highly developed sense of olfactory aesthetics.

SCENTS OF THE CITY

Writing in the fifth century BC, Sophocles describes the city of Thebes as being ‘heavy with a mingled burden of sounds and smells, of groans and hymns and incense.’¹⁷ The cities and towns of the ancient world did indeed offer a rich melange of olfactory and other sensations. Walking through the streets of Nero’s Rome in the first century AD, one would encounter the stench of refuse rotting by the wayside, the piercing fragrance of burning myrrh emanating from temples, the heavy aroma of food being cooked by street vendors, the sweet, seductive scents of flowering gardens, the malodour of rotting fish at a fishstand, the sharp smell of urine from a public latrine and perhaps the incense trail of a passing procession honouring a god or hero.¹⁸

Certain parts of the city had the characteristic scent of the activities that were carried out there. A character in one of Plautus’s plays speaks of looking for someone in ‘the squares, gymnasiums, the barbers’ shops, the mart, the shambles, and the wrestling school, the forum, and the street where doctors dwell, the perfume-sellers, all the sacred shrines.’¹⁹ All these places would have had their own distinctive odours throughout the classical era: the gymnasium would smell of oil and sweat; the markets of the produce sold there; the barber and perfume shops of fragrant ointments; the shrines of incense and burnt offerings. >Some places were particularly well known for their foul >

>Some places were particularly well known for their foul > odours, for example the tanneries, where nauseating-smelling hides were made into leather, and the laundries, where fullers—washers and dyers of clothes—used large quantities of urine as a cleansing agent. Some places, in turn, were characterized by their fragrance, for example temples. Indeed, fragrance was such an important element of temples that not only were they heavily scented within, but perfume was occasionally mixed right into the mortar. Pliny, for example, writes that

At Elis there is a temple of Minerva in which, it is said, Panaenus, the brother of Pheidias, applied plaster that had been worked with milk and saffron. The result is that even today, if one wets one’s thumb with saliva and rubs it on the plaster, the latter still gives off the smell and taste of saffron.²⁰

These different local odours created the effect of an olfactory map, enabling the inhabitants of the city to conceptualize their environment by way of smell.

When the citizens of Rome wished to cleanse themselves of the odours and grime of the city, which they customarily did once a day, they retired to the public baths. There, they could work up a sweat in the sudatorium, have a warm bath in the tepidarium, and then cool off with a swim in the cold water of the frigidarium. When finished, the bathers entered the unctuarium, anointing room, where those who could afford it were massaged and anointed with perfumes by slaves. After passing through the various chambers of the baths, the refreshed Roman citizen coul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The meaning and power of smell
• Part I In search of lost scents
• Part II Explorations in olfactory difference
• Part III Odour, power and society
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index