Lasine

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Lasine Plinius olus silvestre in terra repens cum lacte multo, florem fere candidum habens cauliculum vocant et cetera,
et alibi, lasinia unum folium habet sed ita implicatum ut plura videantur et cetera.


Apparatus:

Lasine ABC ejp | Lassine f | iasine/ iasione Pliny
olus | holus p
terra om. j
fere candidum habens cauliculum | fert candidum conchylium Pliny
candidum | cãdũ p
{candidum} habens cauliculum habens cauliculum p
cauliculum ABC e {written twice in e} fjp {for p see previous line} | conchylium Pliny
vocant | vocat j
alibi | alii ms. e
lasinia AC | lasinea f | lasina j | lasinia or lasima p | lasime B | lascuna or lascinia ms. e | iasine/ iasione Pliny
plura | unũ p
videantur | videat~ jp
et cetera om. ef


Translation:

"Lasine {'bindweed'?} according to Pliny is a wild vegetable that creeps along the ground, it has a considerable amount of milky sap and a flower that is almost white {Pliny: it bears a white flower}, which they call cauliculum" {Pliny: conchylium; see Commentary}
"and somewhere else Pliny says:
Lasine has one leaf {= petal} but it is folded in such a way that it appears to be consisting of many".


Commentary:

Simon’s entry consists of two near-verbatim excerpts from Pliny, Natural History, 22, 39, 82, ed. W.S.H. Jones (1938-63: VI, 350) and
after “alibi” op.cit. 21, 65, 105; (VI, 236).

Lasine/ Lassine:
A plant name ἰασιώνη /iasiṓnē/ is first attested in Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants, 1, 13, 2, ed. A. Hort (1916, I, 90) [[1]].
According to Strömberg (1940: 81) it contains the word ἴασις /íasis/ {“healing”} + the suffix –ωνη /-ōnē/. If this is so, its meaning must be “healing herb”.

For Latin a transliteration iasione is expected but in Pliny it is usually found as iasine. This latter form was corrupted by all of Simon’s witnesses by misreading initial “I” as “L”, leading to corrupted forms like lasine {i.e. Lasine} etc., a misreading which must have occurred early on since the lemma is listed under the letter “L”. André (1985: 130) s.v. iāsinē sees Convolvulus arvensis L or “field bindweed” [[2]] as the plant in Pliny’s first excerpt and Convolvulus sepium L. – nowadays Calystegia sepium (L.) R.Br – “hedge bindweed” [[3]] for the second. Convolvulus arvensis was originally distributed over Euope and temperate Asia, but is now found much further afield. Calystegia sepium is found throughout the temperate Northern and Southern hemispheres, including Europe and Asia.

cauliculus:
In the original Plinian text it says that the white flower of iasine is called conchylium, with variants concilium or concylium. The word is of Greek origine, κογχύλιον /konkhýlion/ “little shell”, the diminutive of κογχύλη /konkhýlē/ a variant form of κόγχη /kónkhē/ “mussel; shell-fish; anything resembling that”. André (1985: 73) thinks the naming motive was the shell-like appearance of the flower of iasione . The expected classical Latin transliteration conchylium would in late Antiquity often be written conc(h)ilium and possibly be misinterpreted to be Latin concilium {“meeting, assembly”}, but in all of Simon’s witnesses, perhaps even in Simon’s copy itself, the word was further corrupted to cauliculus “little stem”.


Botanical identification:

André (1985: 130) s.v. iāsinē sees Convolvulus arvensis L. or “field bindweed” [[4]] as the plant in Pliny’s first excerpt
and Convolvulus sepium L. – nowadays Calystegia sepium (L.) R.Br – “hedge bindweed” [[5]] for the second.
Convolvulus arvensis was originally distributed over Europe and temperate Asia but is now found much further afield. Calystegia sepium is found throughout the temperate Northern and Southern hemispheres, including Europe and Asia.

There are a number of objections one can raise to these identifications. Pliny calls this plant olus, which acc. to Lewis & Short means “kitchen or garden herbs of any kind; vegetables, esp. cabbage, colewort”, an unlikely category for bindweeds – here understood to comprise Convolvulus and Calystegia species - although some parts of some species when cooked can be eaten. Also: bindweeds, although they do at times creep along the ground, are first and foremost climbers reaching at times a height of 5 m.

Considering other possibilities for identification, there is e.g. one species, Calystegia soldanella (L.) R.Br. ex Roem. & Schult {formerly Convolvulus soldanella L.} the “seashore false bindweed” [[6]] which grows on beaches, with a world-wide distribution in temperate and subtropical coastal regions, and its stems do produce a white milky sap when bruised or cut. Since it grows on sandy beaches there is little occasion for it to climb, and often its stems are buried in the sand; so it could be described as ‘creeping along the ground’. Less fittingly however its flowers are pink or purple in colour, with whitish stripes

Another candidate is Convolvulus scammonia L. “scammony”, “Syrian bindweed” or “Sea Bindweed” - a name sometimes confusingly also applied to Calystegia soldanella [[7]] with a somewhat restricted distribution to the Eastern Mediterranian. Its flowers are light yellow. According to M. Grieve, A Modern Herbal, London (1973: 102 ) “The leaves of the Sea Bindweed (i.e. C. scammonia} abound with a milky juice which has been employed as a purge”, which fits in well with Pliny’s cum lacte multo – “with a great amount of milky sap”. However the roots of many bindweeds have this milky sap and since Pliny does not specify where this milky sap is found it is not as helpful a description as would at first appear.


The second of Pliny’s excerpts contains an interesting descriptive feature of the plant: unum folium habet sed ita implicatum ut plura videantur – “it has a single leaf but folded or arranged in an entangled manner in such a way that it seems to be many”. His description is probably ultimately taken from the forementioned monograph by Theophrastus who says op.cit.: ἔνια δὲ καὶ μονόφυλλα φύεται διαγραφὴν ἔχοντα μóνον τῶν πλειόνων ὥσπερ τὸ τῆς ἰασιώνης /énia dè kaì monóphylla phýetai diagraphḕn ékhonta mónon tôn pleiónōn , hṓsper tò tês iasiônēs/, which A Hort translates: "Some flowers again consist of a single ‘leaf’ {annotation: i.e. gamopetalous (or gamosepalous)) having merely an indication of more, as that of bindweed. …”

In other words by μονόφυλλος /monóphyllos/ {“single-leaved”} Theophrastus most likely meant that the corolla is gamopetalous, i.e. composed of united petals, cf. Pliny’s unum folium habet- “it has one/ a single leaf {= “petal”}. Thus rather than seeing it as a number of petals growing somehow together to unite Theophrastus sees this as a single leaf {i.e. “petal”} that has signs/indications as if it was made up of several petals, a description Pliny echoes by saying: sed ita implicatum ut plura videantur. And indeed the bindweed corollas are perfect examples of gamopetalous flowers [[8]].

As so often one can only say that most likely some species of Convolvulus or Calystegia were described by the ancient authors but the paucity of information does not allow any exact identification.


The word iasione has survived into modern botanical terminology in the form: Jasione for a genus of flowering plants in the Campanulaceae or ‘bellflower familiy’. As usual it is most unlikely that the plants of modern days thus named have anything in common but the name with the plants the ancients had in mind.


WilfGunther (talk) 14:37, 10 September 2016 (BST)


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