When the garlic flowering season is upon us in late spring, and some varieties begin to send up their curious, coiling flower stalks and their long, pointed, spathe-enveloped flower heads, what's one obvious visual association your mind makes? Snakes, right? Well, you're not the first to have made this connection. In fact, you are simply making a mental leap thousands of years old. Such a connection, made by people whose observations of nature often led to popular traditions and beliefs lasting centuries, went like this: "If something looks like something else, then it shares its properties or can affect it in some way." So it was with garlic in the popular traditions of the Ancient Mediterranean.
Some of these observations and the beliefs they generated have survived in writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Looking at these we can see how garlic (Greek: skorodon; Latin: allium) was often closely associated with serpents. In the First Century AD, for example, the famous herbalist Dioscorides, in his influential Greek work About Medicinal Substances (2.152) identifies one variety of the plant as "serpent garlic" (ophioskordon : ophis = "snake") because of its familiar coiling flower stalk; he also reports that the Romans reacted to the plant in a similar way, calling it "viper's garlic" (allium viperinum). Today we know it as as rocambole or serpent hardneck garlic (Allium sativum var. ophioscordon).
Furthermore, in addition to this visual similarity, garlic was thought to defend against serpent bites or to offset the effects of venom. Thus Dioscorides, describing the innate properties of the plant, credits it with being the best remedy for snake bite:
A century later these same notions are also found in Philumenos's Greek work on animal poisons (About Venemous Beasts 9).
Pliny the Elder, the famous Roman encyclopedist and a contemporary of Dioscorides, relates all sorts of interesting beliefs about garlic, mentioning its powers against poisons, particularly against snake venom (Natural History 20.23.51):
While still acknowledging the plant's supposed effectiveness against serpents, other ancient works emphasize the magical properties of garlic, reflecting popular folk concepts about the hidden "powers" of plants rather than incorporating a strictly medical or scientific approach. Thus the Kyranides, a Greek collection of magical remedies from the early Roman Empire but preserving both earlier and contemporary material, recommends garlic as a safeguard (3.3.8-9):
Several centuries later the Geoponica, another Greek work incorporating elements of magic and superstition into a collection of materials about agricultural practices, recommends a salve of garlic and its ingestion for relief from both viper bites and the bites of rabid animals (12.30.1). Like the Kyranides it advises the eating of garlic for preemptive protection (12.30.4).
Such ideas are not restricted to only scientific or magical works,
however. In literature, too, such popular concepts can be found. For example,
Horace, the famous Roman poet of the First Century BC, wrote a poem devoted
entirely to the effects of garlic on his innards. In his Epode 3, a
half-serious denunciation of both the plant and the wealthy patron who served
it to him, the poet at one point complains about the burning sensations caused
by the garlic in his salad, referring to its popular association with serpents
(ll. 5-7):