According to the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1771), aphrodisiacs are “medicines which increase the quantity of seed, and create an inclination for venery.” Since the twentieth-century advent of sexual endocrinology, the definition of an aphrodisiac has become restricted to “a substance which excites sexual desire” (Steadman’s Medical Dictionary, 25th edition, 1990).The search for aphrodisiacs is rooted in universal anxieties about sexual performance and fertility. In many instances since ancient times, a distinction has been made between substances that were alleged to improve fertility (quantity of seed) and those that only stimulate the sex drive (inclination to venery). Some authorities held that the latter could only be achieved by achieving the former.

The scope of this essay is limited geographically to Europe and the Near East and, so far as possible, to foods and their preparation. Adequate nourishment has always been recognized as a requirement for health and a normal level of sexual activity, although the norm for the latter undoubtedly varies somewhat among cultures.

In ancient medical practices, when and by what indications nutritive and medicinal qualities of foods were differentiated is uncertain. A rather clear distinction, however, was made by Heracleides of Tarentum, a Greek physician in the first century B.C. In writing about aphrodisiacs, he said that “bulbs, snails, eggs and the like are supposed to produce semen, not because they are filling, but because their very nature in the first instance has powers related in kind to semen” (Athenaeus 1951: 275).