Amber: the tears of the Heliades and the Baltic route

Amber is a fossil resin, produced millions of years ago by ancient conifer forests and later hardened underground. The Baltic coasts still yield large quantities of it after storms, and it was from there that one of Europe's oldest trade routes began, already in prehistory. Warm to the touch, light, often translucent and able to attract small fragments when rubbed, amber seemed to the ancients a living material, and for this reason it was charged with protective meanings.

The myth of Phaethon and Pliny's judgement

According to the myth told by Ovid and other poets, when Phaethon fell with the chariot of the Sun into the river Eridanus, his sisters, the Heliades, mourned him so long that they were turned into poplars. Their tears, trickling from the bark, hardened in the sun and became amber, which the river carried down to the sea. The tale explained both the golden colour of the resin and its link with sunlight.

Pliny the Elder, in the thirty-seventh book of the Natural History, reports these versions with open scepticism and reproaches the Greeks for their credulity. He knows that amber comes from the islands of the northern Ocean and correctly describes it as the sap of pine-like trees, hardened by cold and time. He also records that peasant women north of the Po wore it in necklaces as an ornament and, according to belief, as a remedy too, and that it was hung on children as an amulet.

The amber route and Aquileia

The amber trade linked the Baltic to the Mediterranean through central Europe. In Roman times the city of Aquileia, on the northern Adriatic, became the main centre of amber working: its workshops produced small containers, rings, statuettes and pendants shaped like animals or fruit. Pliny tells how under Nero a Roman knight was sent as far as the northern coasts and brought back so much amber that it decorated the nets and weapons of a gladiatorial show.

Many of these objects were jewellery and amulets at once. Amber figurines found in women's and children's graves suggest that the resin was thought suitable for protecting the most fragile stages of life. Its colour, like honey or fire, contributed to its association with warmth and vitality, while its transparency invited people to see in it a light enclosed within matter.

From elektron to electricity

The Greeks called amber elektron, a word some connect with the adjective used for the shining sun. According to a tradition reported by later authors, Thales of Miletus had already noticed that rubbed amber attracts bits of straw. In 1600 the English physician William Gilbert, in his treatise De magnete, called bodies able to attract like amber electrica, and from this Latin term comes our word electricity.

The history of amber shows clearly how a curious natural phenomenon could feed myth, trade and protective belief all at once. The necklaces and childhood amulets recorded by Pliny belong to the history of beliefs, not to medical knowledge. Today amber remains above all a precious natural archive, able to preserve insects and plants from remote ages, and a record of the routes that joined northern and southern Europe.