Hey everyone! There's a line in The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius that I really enjoy and I am planning on getting a tattoo to represent it. I was talking with my tattoo artist about it and we both thought it would be great if it was historically accurate. After some googling, I'm not sure that I have a good sense of what incense looked like during Marcus Aurelius' time.
Would any of you be able to shed some light on what incense looked like around the time he was writing, apparently between 171-175 AD while on campaign?
The line is: "Many lumps of incense on the same altar. One crumbles now, one later, but it makes no difference." [Book 4, chapter 15, translation by Gregory Hays]
I don't know if it's helpful but I checked on the Ancient Greek:
The Greek reads as: " Πολλὰ λιβανωτοῦ βωλάρια ἐπὶ τοῦ αὐτοῦ βωμοῦ: τὸ μὲν προκατέπεσεν, τὸ δ᾽ ὕστερον, διαφέρει δ᾽ οὐδέν."
And here's the link to it on Perseus: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0641%3Abook%3D4%3Achapter%3D15%3Asection%3Dpos%3D120
Using the Liddell & Scott Lexicon, I'm translating βωλάρια as "lumps," from βῶλος. The Gregory Hays translation matches this but the Maxwell Staniforth translation translates it as "grains."
Anyway, let me know if you have any information that would be helpful!
Thanks!
Incense almost certainly would have meant frankincense. The only other real contender is myrrh, but myrrh was not typically burned. Other forms of incense--resin from sandalwood or cedar, cassia bark/cinnamon, etc. were either not as popular in the ancient mediterranean or, like myrrh, weren't typically burned.
Frankincense is the resin of the bushy trees from the boswellia family. For harvesting, notches are made in the trunk of the tree. The resin seeps out of the notches and hardens. One the resin is dried on the tree it's harvested in small clumps. Visually, they're small amber-colored nuggets, and opacity is related to their quality (that is, a more opaque nugget is assumed to be higher quality.)
Other incenses have been made by adding fragrant oil to bases. Athonite incense, originating from the mid to late byzantine era, is made by kneading ground frankincense and oils to produce a dough, that is then cut and cured. And we have two recipes from the first century BCE inscribed in the walls at Edfu in Egypt that describe infusing fragrant oils into raisins or dried figs to them be burned. But frankincense was so vastly preferred and so ubiquitous in Roman (and Greek) customs that it was often simply called "incense" without specification. And especially because you're only using the image of it, a nugget of dried resin--even if it's actually supposed to be myrrh, or something akin to athonite incense--is certainly a historically accurate depiction of incense.