cut across, and by its decoction giving the chemical reactions for tannin.[1] The rhizome is darker in colour in proportion to its degree of dryness, age and richness in oil. A specimen dried by Schroff lost in eleven days 65% of water.
H. niger, orientalis, viridis, foetidus, and several other species of hellebore contain the glucosides helleborin, C36H42O6, and helleboreïn, C23H20O15, the former yielding glucose and helleboresin, C30H38O4, and the latter glucose and a violet-coloured substance helleboretin, C14H20O3. Helleborin is most abundant in H. viridis. A third and volatile principle is probably present in H. foetidus. Both helleborin and helleboreïn act poisonously on animals, but their decomposition-products helleboresin and helleboretin seem to be devoid of any injurious qualities. Helleborin produces excitement and restlessness, followed by paralysis of the lower extremities or whole body, quickened respiration, swelling and injection of the mucous membranes, dilatation of the pupil, and, as with helleboreïn, salivation, vomiting and diarrhoea. Helleboreïn exercises on the heart an action similar to that of digitalis, but more powerful, accompanied by at first quickened and then slow and laboured respiration; it irritates the conjunctiva, and acts as a sternutatory, but less violently than veratrine. Pliny states that horses, oxen and swine are killed by eating “black hellebore”; and Christison (On Poisons, p. 876, 11th ed., 1845) writes: “I have known severe griping produced by merely tasting the fresh root in January.” Poisonous doses of hellebore occasion in man singing in the ears, vertigo, stupor, thirst, with a feeling of suffocation, swelling of the tongue and fauces, emesis and catharsis, slowing of the pulse, and finally collapse and death from cardiac paralysis. Inspection after death reveals much inflammation of the stomach and intestines, more especially the rectum. The drug has been observed to exercise a cumulative action. Its extract was an ingredient in Bacher’s pills, an empirical remedy once in great repute in France. In British medicine the rhizome was formerly official. H. foetidus was in past times much extolled as an anthelmintic, and is recommended by Bisset (Med. Ess., pp. 169 and 195, 1766) as the best vermifuge for children; J. Cook, however, remarks of it (Oxford Mag., March 1769, p. 99): “Where it killed not the patient, it would certainly kill the worms; but the worst of it is, it will sometimes kill both.” This plant, of old termed by farriers ox-heel, setter-wort and setter-grass, as well as H. viridis (Fr. Herbe à séton), is employed in veterinary surgery, to which also the use of H. niger is now chiefly confined in Britain.
In the early days of medicine two kinds of hellebore were recognized, the white or Veratrum album (see Veratrum), and the black, including the various species of Helleborus. The former, according to Codronchius (Comm.... de elleb., 1610), Castellus (De helleb. epist., 1622), and others, is the drug usually signified in the writings of Hippocrates. Among the hellebores indigenous to Greece and Asia Minor, H. orientalis, the rhizome of which differs from that of H. niger and of H. viridis in the bark being readily separable from the woody axis, is the species found by Schroff to answer best to the descriptions given by the ancients of black hellebore, the ἑλλέβορος μέλας of Dioscorides. The rhizome of this plant, if identical, as would appear, with that obtained by Tournefort at Prusa in Asia Minor (Rel. d’un voy. du Levant, ii. 189, 1718), must be a remedy of no small toxic properties. According to an early tradition, black hellebore administered by the soothsayer and physician Melampus (whence its name Melampodium), was the means of curing the madness of the daughters of Proetus, king of Argos. The drug was used by the ancients in paralysis, gout and other diseases, more particularly in insanity, a fact frequently alluded to by classical writers, e.g. Horace (Sat. ii. 3. 80-83, Ep. ad Pis. 300). Various superstitions were in olden times connected with the cutting of black hellebore. The best is said by Pliny (Nat. hist. xxv. 21) to grow on Mt Helicon. Of the three Anticyras that in Phocis was the most famed for its hellebore, which, being there used combined with “sesamoides,” was, according to Pliny, taken with more safety than elsewhere.
The British Pharmaceutical Conference has recommended the preparation which it terms the tinctura veratri viridis, as the best form in which to administer this drug. It may be given in doses of 5-15 minims. The tincture is prepared from the dried rhizome and rootlets of green hellebore, containing the alkaloids jervine, veratrine and veratroidine. It is recommended as a cardiac and nervous sedative in cerebral haemorrhage and puerperal eclampsia. Black hellebore is a purgative and uterine stimulant.
HELLENISM (from Gr. ἑλληνίζειν, to imitate the Greeks, who were known as Ἕλληνες, after Ἕλλην, the son of Deucalion). The term “Hellenism” is ambiguous. It may be used to denote ancient Greek culture in all its phases, and even those elements in modern civilization which are Greek in origin or in spirit; but, while Matthew Arnold made the term popular in the latter connexion as the antithesis of “Hebraism,” the German historian J. G. Droysen introduced the fashion (1836) of using it to describe particularly the latter phases of Greek culture from the conquests of Alexander to the end of the ancient world, when those over whom this culture extended were largely not Greek in blood, i.e. Hellenes, but peoples who had adopted the Greek speech and way of life, Hellenistai. Greek culture had, however, both in “Hellenic” and “Hellenistic” times, a common essence, just as light is light whether in the original luminous body or in a reflection, and to describe this by the term Hellenism seems most natural. But whilst using the term in the larger sense, this article, in deference to the associations which have come to be specially connected with it, will devote its principal attention to Hellenism as it appeared in the world after the Macedonian conquests. But it will be first necessary to indicate briefly what Hellenism in itself implied.
No verbal formula can really enclose the life of a people or an age, but we can best understand the significance of the old Greek cities and the life they developed, when, looking at the history of mankind as a whole, we see the part played by reason, active and critical, in breaking down the barriers by which custom hinders movement, in guiding movement to definite ends, in dissipating groundless beliefs and leading onwards to fresh scientific conquests—when we see this and then take note that among the ancient Greeks such an activity of reason began in an entirely novel degree and that its activity in Europe ever since is due to their impulsion. When Hellenism came to stand in the world for something concrete and organic, it was, of course, no mere abstract principle, but embodied in a language, a literature, an artistic tradition. In the earliest existing monument of the Hellenic genius, the Homeric poems, one may already observe that regulative sense of form and proportion, which shaped the later achievements of the race in the intellectual and artistic spheres. It was not till the great colonizing epoch of the 8th and 7th centuries B.C., when the name “Hellene” came into use as the antithesis of “barbarian,” that the Greek race came to be conscious of itself as a peculiar people; it was yet some three centuries more before Hellenism stood fully declared in art and literature, in politics and in thought. There was now a new thing in the world, and to see how the world was affected by it is our immediate concern.
I. The Expansion of Hellenism before Alexander.—In the 5th century B.C. Greek cities dotted the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea from Spain to Egypt and the Caucasus, and already Greek culture was beginning to pass beyond the limits of the Greek race. Already in the 7th century B.C., when Hellenism was still in a rudimentary stage, the citizens of the Greek city-states had been known to the courts of Babylon and Egypt as admirable soldiers, combining hardihood with discipline, and Greek mercenaries came to be in request throughout the Nearer East. But as Hellenism developed, its social and intellectual life began to exercise a power of attraction. The proud old civilizations of the Euphrates and the Nile might ignore it, but the ruder barbarian peoples in East and West, on whose coasts the Greek colonies had been planted, came in various degrees under its spell. In some cases an outlying colony would coalesce with a native population, and a fusion of Hellenism with barbarian customs take place, as at Emporium in Spain (Strabo iii. p. 160) and at Locri in S. Italy (Polyb. xii. 5. 10). Perinthus included a Thracian phyle. The stories of Anacharsis and Scylas (Herod, iv. 76-80) show how the leading men of the tribes in contact with the Greek colonies in the Black Sea might be fascinated by the appeal which the exotic culture made to mind and to eye.
The great developments of the century and a half before Alexander set the Greek people in a very different light before the world. In the sphere of material power the repulse of Xerxes and the extension of Athenian or Spartan supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean were large facts patent to the most obtuse. The kings of the East leant more than ever upon Greek mercenaries, whose superiority to barbarian levies was sensibly brought home to them by the expedition of Cyrus. But the developments within the Hellenic sphere itself were also of great consequence
- ↑ For the microscopical characters and for figures of transverse sections of the rhizome, see Lanessan, Hist. des drogues, i. 6 (1878).
