Blame the Boletus? Demystifying Mushrooms in Latin Literature

Abstract

Keeping in mind Emily Gowers's dictum that ‘food, for the Roman writer who chose to discuss it, was simultaneously important and trivial’, let us go on a mushroom hunt through the fragmented habitat of Latin literature, with some preliminary nosing about in the Greek. We are looking for μύκαι and μύκητες in Greek, and fungi in Latin, and we are keeping an eye open for one kind in particular, the boletus, although we also will stumble upon the occasional interesting fungus suillus (‘pig fungus’). We are not truffle hunting: tubera (Greek ὕδνα) are a topic for another day. Although no survey, however comprehensive, of the appearances of one foodstuff in Latin literature can do full justice to the individual sources, we can still gain something from an overview of the tradition; and although what we learn may be trivial, even the trivial can make its own small contribution to our understanding of a larger matter, in this case the representation of time and change in the Roman world.Ahead of us with knife and collecting basket roams the ghost of the Reverend William Houghton M.A., F.L.S., Victorian parson, Rector of Wellington parish in Preston township, Shropshire, a man with time on his hands—and at least two cats—who in 1885 compiled a list titled, ‘Notices of Fungi in Greek and Latin Authors’. Dr Denis Benjamin, author of Mushrooms: Poisons and Panaceas, says that ‘it would take the persistence of another classical scholar to discover if he [Houghton] missed or misrepresented anything’. Persistence, in the form of the TLL—in its infancy when Houghton was doing his research—the RE entry ‘Pilze’, Maggiulli's Nomenclatura Micologica Latina, and the PHI database, has indeed added to the good Rector's basket a few more specimens on the Latin side, some of which are useful for our inquiry.