In one of Rome’s most powerful periods, when its borders stretched from Britain to Syria, when Julius Caesar spoke in the Forum, and when legions marched along roads leading to the Euphrates, there was a disease that no conqueror could defeat. There was no effective knowledge or miracle cure at the time, only experience and instinct, yet every Roman knew its name, although it was not pronounced as we do today.
They spoke of febris palustris, marsh fever, which returned in waves, first with cold and chills, then with heat, and finally with sweating, leaving a person exhausted, pale, with a heavy, hard spleen. They believed it was caused by mala aria, bad air hovering over the wetlands, the dark breath of the earth that killed quietly and slowly. They did not know about mosquitoes, about parasites in the blood, about cyclical relapses, but they knew one thing: those who lived near the swamps got sick more often. That is why they instinctively fled higher, further away, to the hills and vineyards, where the air seemed cleaner and the night calmer.
Various remedies were tried for this fever, and one of the most commonly used was wine laced with wormwood, called absinthium. The name itself says it all, as it comes from the Greek ἀψίνθιον (apsínthion), which literally means “that which cannot be drunk,” a drink so bitter that it scratched the throat and made everyone grimace, but it was drunk nonetheless, because its bitterness was seen as a cure, and its suffering as hope that the body would expel the disease. Ironically, hundreds of years later, it was from this absinthium that a strong drink known as absinthe, the green fairy of artists and decadents, was born in modern Europe. And it was no longer just a drink of the Parisian bohemian salons – it also had its military history. In the 19th century, French colonial soldiers used absinthe as protection against malaria and dysentery, as if repeating the gesture of the ancient legionnaires who drank wormwood wine on the Tiber. This creates a beautiful parallel: the Romans tried to save themselves from febris palustris with a bitter medicine, and their spiritual heirs, Napoleon’s soldiers and colonialists, again reached for wormwood in another form, this time distilled. At the same time, while the army drank absinthe for health reasons, the artists of the Belle Époque created a ritual out of its bitterness, giving it an almost religious dimension. The Greeks called wormwood “the undrinkable,” and 19th-century Parisians transformed it into a green fairy, an hour of inspiration, a whole ceremony with sugar, water, an openwork spoon, and a fountain. What was a medicine swallowed with pain for the Romans became a pleasure and even an inspiration for the decadents. Among its followers were Lautrec, van Gogh, Verlaine, Picasso, people whose talent cannot be questioned, but whose bodies and souls were quietly consumed by absinthe, taking them away step by step. For the Romans, wormwood was a drink that was supposed to save lives; for the modernists, it was a drink that slowly took them away, leaving behind paintings, poems, and legends.
So, we can say that this story combines several layers of irony and continuity: a disease whose cause was unknown, called “bad air,” gave us the word “malaria,” which we still use in medicine today. A plant whose bitter taste was supposed to cure fevers gave us the name of a drink that is consumed for pleasure rather than necessity. And in the background remains the question: does absinthe really “help your health”? A Roman from Caesar’s time, struggling with febris palustris, would smile bitterly: he knew that no wine or wormwood could stop swamp fever. Today, we can smile differently, with a glass in our hand, rejoicing that medicine has moved on and that the bitter taste of wormwood has remained only in culture, art, and history as a bitter lesson and, at the same time, a sweet myth.
