Opium in Ancient Greece:

At the end of the Bronze Age, about 1100 B . C ., the Egyptians introduced opium to the ancient Greeks, and opium played a prominent role in their society until they were conquered by the Romans one thousand years later. The image of the poppy seedpod can be found in much of the art of the ancient Greeks, as well as on many of the coins and other artifacts from their society. As with most ancient opium-using societies, opium held supernatural connotations for the Greeks because of its seemingly miraculous pain-relieving properties, and much of their mythology contains references to the drug, including those of their oldest surviving poem, Homer's Iliad .

Opium also appears in the medical chronicles of ancient Greece, where it was praised by their earliest physicians, many of whom mistakenly assumed that it cured diseases because it removed the painful symptoms associated with them. The physician Hippocrates, for example, who is widely known as the father of medicine, praised opium's usefulness as a pain reliever and remedy for internal diseases, though he dismissed the widespread notion that it possessed magical attributes. Opium eventually received similarly high praise from some of the great physicians of the Roman Empire, including Galen, who prepared opium remedies for several Roman emperors.

Despite opium's powerful pain-relieving and euphoric properties, however, some ancient Roman physicians and scholars—most notably the well-known scholar Pliny the Elder—recognized its dangers and classified it as a poison, and considered it useful only for performing euthanasia on the terminally ill. They had seen The Illiad opium cause crippling dependency and even lethal overdose in many of its users, and felt that its risks outweighed its medical benefits.

In spite of such warnings, however, widespread opium use continued for the duration of the Roman Empire and made addicts of such historic figures as Marcus Aurelius, the emperor of Rome from A . D . 161 to 180.

Opium use spread throughout much of the world during the early centuries of the second millennium. Opium from the Egyptian fields at Thebes, for example, was introduced to Persia, India, and China by Arab traders, and its use was common in the Middle and Far East by A . D . 1000. High-profile opium casualties occurred in these places as well, including the accidental overdose death in 1037 of the great Arabic physician Avicenna. Avicenna had been an advocate of the healing power of opium during much of his lifetime, having praised it as "the most powerful of stupefacients."

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