“Take it with a grain of salt.”
You know what it means. Don’t believe everything that you’re told. Be skeptical. Check it out for yourself. If you don’t you could be deceived, swindled, or – worst case scenario – you could be killed.
That worst case scenario was a frequent happening in the ancient Roman Empire. And it was way back then when taking something with a grain of salt emerged as a prudent measure. This is the rest of the story, as told to us by Pliny the Elder in his “Natural History,” written around 77 CE.
Kings, emperors, nobles, and other potentates of that era often had a very short time at the top of the heap before someone knocked them off. And the preferred method of assassination wasn’t the knives-in-the-forum killing that did in Julius Caesar. The weapon of choice was poison.
One man, King Mithridates VI of Pontus, decided to do something about it. Mithridates (135–63 BCE, r. 120-63 BCE) was a bad guy. Of course, the Romans wanted to kill him. If the writings of Plutarch are correct, he orchestrated the mass killing of up to 150,000 Roman and Italian noncombatants in a single day. He was perennially at war with the Roman Republic. But he managed to live until age 82.
How did he do that? By concocting and regularly ingesting an antidote for all toxins known at the time. Legend has it that he built up a tolerance to deadly poisons, thanks to the magic elixir that became known as mithridatum.
Pliny the Elder wrote the story of how Pompey, a foe of Caesar, found the recipe for Mithridates’s secret protective. It included dried nuts, figs, rue leaves, and close to 50 different ingredients – arsenic and venom also among them – that were mixed together with honey and made into chewable tablets. It was to be taken after “additio salis grano” – an added grain of salt.
So now you do know the rest of the story. And if you find it less than believable, well, reach for the salt shaker.
Veteranscribe's Blog 