The Herb of Courage and the Altar

Thyme, Thymus vulgaris, is a small woody aromatic shrublet of the mint family, native to the Mediterranean and grown for the kitchen and the beehive; its flowers yield one of the most prized of honeys. Its Greek name is bound up with two ideas. It is linked to thymos, the seat of spirited courage, so that to smell of thyme was to be brave; and to thymiama, incense, for thyme was burned on altars as a fragrant offering, its very name perhaps meaning to fumigate or to sacrifice. Medieval ladies embroidered a sprig of thyme with a bee on the scarves they gave to knights, a token of courage.

Thyme's antiseptic reputation rests on a real chemical compound, thymol, first isolated from the plant in the nineteenth century and still used today as an active ingredient in some commercial mouthwashes and hand sanitisers, including formulations of Listerine, first marketed in 1879; thymol's genuine antimicrobial action is one of the few herbal correspondences in this family of articles with a straightforward modern chemical explanation rather than a purely symbolic one. Thyme honey has been prized since antiquity for a specific place: Mount Hymettus near Athens was already famous in the classical world for the quality of its thyme-fed honey, praised by ancient writers and still produced and marketed under that name in Greece today.