Artichoke

Ancient Greeks and Romans (classical language and botany) · Ancient Mediterranean (Greek world, Sicily, Rome)

The Greek authors name an edible spiny plant kinara / kynara (κινάρα, κυνάρα), Latinised as cinara/cynara among the Romans: it is the cardoon (Cynara cardunculus) and its cultivated forms, prized as a table vegetable in the ancient Mediterranean world. Athenaeus, in The Deipnosophists (book II), discusses this plant in a botanical and culinary vein, citing Sicilian authors. This ancient name survives in the botanical genus Cynara. A debated point: the ancient names do not reliably tell the artichoke from the cardoon. For Sonnante and colleagues (2007), the artichoke was being domesticated in Roman times, possibly in Sicily, then spread with the Arabs in the early Middle Ages; its first certain trade dates from the early 15th century, from Sicily to Florence.

Liddell-Scott-Jones, Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. κινάρα / κυνάρα ; Athénée, Deipnosophistes, livre II (discussion botanique et culinaire) ; Sonnante, G., Pignone, D. & Hammer, K. (2007). The domestication of artichoke and cardoon: from Roman times to the genomic age. Annals of Botany, 100(5), 1095-1100.

The 'Greek myth of Cynara' (a young girl loved by Zeus, made a goddess then changed into an artichoke for having wanted to see her mother again), very widespread on culinary blogs, is ATTESTED IN NO surviving classical text. According to the sources consulted, the passage of Athenaeus (book II) on the kinara is botanical/culinary, without any metamorphosis of a young girl; these sources themselves acknowledge that one cannot verify that this is an authentic ancient tale. The attribution sometimes made to Athenaeus comes from secondary etymological notes, not from the text. The legend appears modern, possibly born of a confusion with the 'Cinara' of Horace (Odes IV, 1 and IV, 13; Epistles), a woman loved in his youth, with no link to the plant. BOTANICAL NUANCE: the kinara of the Ancients designates the species Cynara cardunculus, of which the artichoke and the cardoon are two cultivated forms; which of the two they ate remains debated (Sonnante et al., 2007). Limit: the ABSENCE of the myth in Athenaeus (book II) and the uncertainty of the legend were confirmed by the sources consulted, but no primary text could be consulted to positively confirm a precise phrase about the kinara; the ancient name rests on lexical attestation, not on a primary passage read in full.