cover image The Chemical Muse: Drug Use and the Roots of Western Civilization

The Chemical Muse: Drug Use and the Roots of Western Civilization

D. C. A. Hillman, . . St. Martin's/ Dunne, $24.95 (243pp) ISBN 978-0-312-35249-3

At once defensive and pugnacious, classicist Hillman uses this book to get back at the “overly conservative” academics who forced him to delete from his doctoral dissertation a chapter on the widespread recreational drug use in antiquity. The world was rife with disease, war and natural catastrophes, Hillman reminds readers, and “extreme suffering demands extreme relief.” Ancient Greeks and Romans used substances from plants and animals to heal the body, but also, Hillman says, to heal the mind and as a source of creative inspiration. Taking up an old thesis of such scholars as Morton Smith and John Allegro, Hillman contends that ancient poets and playwrights from Homer to Aristophanes, and philosophers from Pythagoras to Empedocles, featured the use of mind-altering drugs in their writings. Despite being tiresomely polemical throughout, Hillman ends with a peroration on the roots of the Western notion of freedom in ancient Greece and on the right to use recreational drugs as a core freedom. (July)