Imagine what life would be like if lived, in May Sarton’s lovely phrase, with “joy instead of will.” That is what Beethoven imagined, and invited humanity to imagine, two centuries ago in the choral finale of his ninth and final symphony, known as “Ode to Joy” — an epochal hymn of the possible, half a lifetime in the making.
In the spring of 2012, the Spanish city of Sabadell set out to celebrate the 130th anniversary of its founding with a most unusual, electrifying, and touchingly human rendition of Beethoven’s masterpiece, performed by a flashmob of 100 musicians from the Vallès Symphony Orchestra, the Lieder, Amics de l’Òpera and Coral Belles Arts choirs. Watching the townspeople — children with kites, elders with walkers, couples holding hands — gather to savor the unbidden music in a succession of confusion, delight, and ecstasy is the stuff of goosebumps: living proof that “music so readily transports us from the present to the past, or from what is actual to what is possible.”
There we were: Three women — a neuroscientist, a mycologist, and me — talking about the perplexities of love when a cloud in the perfect shape of a broken heart appeared in the gloaming sky backlit by the sun setting over the Andes. Suddenly, we found ourselves wondering about the origin of the heart icon as the universal symbol of love. It doesn’t figure into the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians or the Aztecs’ elaborate pictogram language of embodied emoji, and yet by the time of the Romantics, it had become a fixture of love letters and lockets, Queen Victoria’s favorite jewelry shape, recognized today by every culture in every language, dominating tattoo parlors and text threads, drawn into the wet sand by our children, traced on our backs by our lovers, emblazoned on the tombstones of our dead.
The answer, drawn out by the tenuous thread of selective collective memory we mistake for history, is a story of empire and ecology, of love and ruin and more love.
Coins from Cyrene circa 510–470 B.C.E.
In 1990, Expedition magazine published an image of a coin excavated almost a decade earlier at the Sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone in Cyrene, present-day Libya. Emblazoned on the silver drachm circa 500 B.C.E. is a small heart so familiar it feels strangely modern — a depiction not of the human organ but of the seed of a mysterious plant, whose stem and bloom appear on the back of another Cyrenean coin.
The ancients called it silphium. Its fate may be the first case of extinction in the common record. Its legacy is the most enduring graphic symbol of the modern world.
With its golden pom-pom blossoms and neatly fractal branches, silphium didn’t just look magical — it was heralded as a panacea. But none among its panoply of medicinal properties was more revered than its dual potency as aphrodisiac and contraceptive, which earned it the moniker “the lovers’ plant.” In a society where women had no political power and no civil rights, here was a path to empowered embodiment, here was a plant that put their pleasure and their reproductive rights into their own hands.
But despite how meticulously the ancients tended to their silphium, it resisted cultivation. Hippocrates himself reported two failed attempts to transplant it from Cyrene to Athens. Long before Erasmus Darwin sensationalized the sexual reproduction of plants, before Gregor Mendel seeded the modern science of genetics, the Greeks had no way of understanding how silphium’s peculiar evolutionary adaptation crippled it, made them all the more responsible for its survival.
Silphium seed from La vérité sur le prétendu Silphion de la Cyrénaïque, 1876.
A monoecious shrub, silphium grows both male and female flowers on the same plant, the male ones fruitless and the female ones giving the heart-shaped seeds. But unlike the androgynous plants known as “perfect flowers” — which contain both the male pollen-producing stamen and the female ovule-producing pistils, and can therefore self-pollinate — silphium’s female flowers grow under the leaves and the male ones above, so that they need the help of an insect or a human gardener to pollinate.
For seven centuries, the Greeks meticulously tended to it, passing down the lore of its vulnerable secret from generation to generation. By the time of the Roman Empire, silphium had become so precious that it was traded at the price of silver and accepted as tax payment to be held at the public treasury.
But as the Romans began their brutal conquest and cultural assimilation, they did what all colonizers do, discounting the indigenous knowledge that had ensured silphium’s survival. By the first century of the modern era, Pliny the Elder lamented in his Natural History that only “a single stem was found.” In a cruel twist of irony, the last of this ancient symbol of female empowerment was given to the troubled tyrant Nero, who famously murdered his mother and all of his wives, then played his lyre while Rome was burning before committing suicide.
Nero by Auguste Rodin, 1900-1910.
Considered extinct for two thousand years, silphium grew so remote in our collective memory that some began to doubt it ever existed.
But then came a bright testament to how the love of life and of truth is always more powerful than the lust for power: In the early 2020s, Turkish botanist Mahmut Miski, leading a group of researchers and farmers in Anatolia, discovered a rare endemic shrub — Ferula drudeana — whose morphology and chemical properties closely match the ancients’ descriptions of silphium.
Ferula drudeana (Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh)
Two civilizations after the Greeks failed to cultivate the precious plant, Miski and his team found that it could be grown in a greenhouse using cold stratification — a process of breaking seed dormancy by mimicking winter conditions: cold, moist, and dark. This means that, with proper tending, silphium can go the way of the black robin, the way of the ginkgo, and come back from extinction, its tiny hearts once again growing roots and shoots into Earth’s soil — a lovely reminder that even after all the depredations of time and terror, the heart can come back to life.
In 1988, Bill Moyers produced a series of intelligent, inspiring, provocative conversations with a diverse set of cultural icons, ranging from Isaac Asimov to Noam Chomsky to Chinua Achebe. It was unlike any public discourse to have ever graced the national television airwaves before. The following year, the interviews were transcribed and collected in the magnificent tome Bill Moyers: A World of Ideas (public library). But for all its evenness of brilliance, one conversation in the series stands out for its depth, dimension, intensity, and timelessness — that with philosopher Martha Nussbaum, one of the most remarkable and luminous minds of our time, who sat down to talk with Moyers shortly after the publication of her daring book turned modern classic The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy.
Martha Nussbaum
Moyers begins by framing Nussbaum’s singular approach to philosophy and, by extension, to the art of living:
MOYERS: The common perception of a philosopher is of a thinker of abstract thoughts. But stories and myths seem to be important to you as a philosopher.
NUSSBAUM: Very important, because I think that the language of philosophy has to come back from the abstract heights on which it so often lives to the richness of everyday discourse and humanity. It has to listen to the ways that people talk about themselves and what matters to them. One very good way to do this is to listen to stories.
The condition of being good is that it should always be possible for you to be morally destroyed by something you couldn’t prevent. To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the human condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from its fragility.
The paradox of the human condition, Nussbaum reminds us, is that while our capacity for vulnerability — and, by extension, our ability to trust others — may be what allows for tragedy to befall us, the greatest tragedy of all is the attempt to guard against hurt by petrifying that essential softness of the soul, for that denies our basic humanity:
Being a human means accepting promises from other people and trusting that other people will be good to you. When that is too much to bear, it is always possible to retreat into the thought, “I’ll live for my own comfort, for my own revenge, for my own anger, and I just won’t be a member of society anymore.” That really means, “I won’t be a human being anymore.”
You see people doing that today where they feel that society has let them down, and they can’t ask anything of it, and they can’t put their hopes on anything outside themselves. You see them actually retreating to a life in which they think only of their own satisfaction, and maybe the satisfaction of their revenge against society. But the life that no longer trusts another human being and no longer forms ties to the political community is not a human life any longer.
Things get significantly more complicated, however, when we find ourselves in binds that seem to call for tragedy by asking us to make impossible choices between multiple things we hold dear. Nussbaum illustrates this by pointing to Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, in which the king-protagonist has to choose between saving his army and saving his daughter. The same tragedy plays out on a smaller scale in everyday dilemmas, such as juggling your career with being a good parent. Most of the time, as Nussbaum puts it, the two “enrich each other and make the life of each of them better.” But sometimes, practical circumstances pose such insurmountable challenges like an important meeting and your child’s school play happening at the same time — one of these two priorities inevitably suffers, not because you are a bad parent or a bad leader, but because life just happens that way. Therein lies the human predicament — the more we aspire to live well, according to our commitments and priorities, the more we welcome such tragic choices. And yet the solution isn’t not to aspire. Nussbaum tells Moyers:
Tragedy happens only when you are trying to live well, because for a heedless person who doesn’t have deep commitments to others, Agamemnon’s conflict isn’t a tragedy…
Now the lesson certainly is not to try to maximize conflict or to romanticize struggle and suffering, but it’s rather that you should care about things in a way that makes it a possibility that tragedy will happen to you. If you hold your commitments lightly, in such a way that you can always divest yourself from one or the other of them if they conflict, then it doesn’t hurt you when things go badly. But you want people to live their lives with a deep seriousness of commitment: not to adjust their desires to the way the world actually goes, but rather to try to wrest from the world the good life that they desire. And sometimes that does lead them into tragedy.
Bill Moyers: A World of Ideas is a treasure trove in its entirety, featuring many more conversations with luminaries spanning art, science, psychology, literature, the creative spirit, and just about every aspect of life. Complement this particular one with Nussbaum’s advice on living a full life.
The Greek polymath Pythagoras (c. 570–c. 495 BC) ignited the golden age of mathematics with the development of numerical logic and the discovery of his namesake theorem of geometry, which furnished the world’s first foothold toward the notion of scientific proof and has been etched into the mind of every schoolchild in the millennia since. His ideas went on to influence Plato, Copernicus, Descartes, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein, and the school he founded made the then-radical decision to welcome women as members, one of whom was Hypatia of Alexandria — the world’s first known woman astronomer.
Alongside his revolutionary science, Pythagoras coined the word philosopher to describe himself as a “lover of wisdom” — a love the subject of which he encapsulated in a short, insightful meditation on the uses of philosophy in human life. According to the anecdote, recounted by Cicero four centuries later, Pythagoras attended the Olympic Games of 518 BC with Prince Leon, the esteemed ruler of Phlius. The Prince, impressed with his guest’s wide and cross-disciplinary range of knowledge, asked Pythagoras why he lived as a “philosopher” rather than an expert in any one of the classical arts.
Life… may well be compared with these public Games for in the vast crowd assembled here some are attracted by the acquisition of gain, others are led on by the hopes and ambitions of fame and glory. But among them there are a few who have come to observe and to understand all that passes here.
It is the same with life. Some are influenced by the love of wealth while others are blindly led on by the mad fever for power and domination, but the finest type of man gives himself up to discovering the meaning and purpose of life itself. He seeks to uncover the secrets of nature. This is the man I call a philosopher for although no man is completely wise in all respects, he can love wisdom as the key to nature’s secrets.
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