In the first century CE, the Greek surgeon Dioscorides, who traveled with the Roman army, described in his medical encyclopedia 'De Materia Medica' how to prepare liquid opium by crushing the pods of the poppy plant. This work became a standard pharmacological reference for over 1,500 years, spreading knowledge of opium preparation throughout the Roman Empire and beyond.

Dioscorides's detailed botanical descriptions influenced not only medicine but also the literary imagination, providing poets with vivid imagery of the poppy as both a source of healing and sleep. This imagery would be employed by writers from the Roman poet Virgil to the English Romantics, who saw in the poppy a symbol of beauty, death, and oblivion.