A herb of exceptionally remarkable nature is black herb, the Greek name for which is horse-parsley, and which others call zmyrnium. It is reproduced from the gum that trickles from its own stalk, but it can also be grown from a root. The people who collect its juice say that it tastes like myrrh, and Theophrastus states that it sprang first from sown myrrh seed. Old writers had recommended sowing horse-parsley in uncultivated stony ground near a garden wall; but at the present day it is sown in land that has been dug over and also after a west wind has followed the autumn equinox. The reason for the old plan was that the caper also is sown principally in dry places, after a plot has been hollowed out for deep digging and stone banks have been built all round it: otherwise it strays all over the fields and takes the fertility out of the soil. It blossoms in summer and continues green till the setting of the Pleiades; it is most at home in sandy soil. The bad qualities of the caper that grows over seas we have spoken of among the exotic shrubs, 13.127.¥

Pliny, Natural History 19.48.162

In all these plants the gum occurs in the stems, the trunks, and the branches, but in some plants it is found in the roots, as in alexanders, scammony, and many other medicinal plants.¥

Theophrastus, Hist Plant 9.1.3

Now the juice of alexanders is like myrrh, and some, having heard that myrrh comes from it, have supposed that, if myrrh is sown, alexanders comes up from it, for, as we have said, this plant can be grown fron an exudation, like the krinonia (lily) and other plants.¥

Pliny, Natural History 9.1.4

Of under-shrubs and herbaceous plants the greater part grow from seed or a root, and some in both ways; some of them also grow from cuttings, as has been said.... Most peculiar is the method of growth from an exudation; for it appears that the lily grows in this way too, when the exudation that has been produced dried up. They the say the same of alexanders, for this too produces an exudation.¥

Pliny, Natural History 2.2.1

Smyrnion has a stem like that of celery [perhaps parsley?], and rather broad leaves, which grow mostly about its many shoots, from the curve of which they spring; they are jiucy, bending towards the ground, and with a drug-like smell not unpleasing with a sort of sharpness. The colour shades off to yellow; the heads of the stems are umbellate, as are those of celery, the seed is round and black. It withers at the beginning of summer. The root too has a smell, and a shrarp, biting taste, being soft and full of juice. Its skin is dark on the outside, but the inside is pale. The smell has the character of myrrh, whence too the plant gets its name.¥

Pliny Natural History 27.109.133

Alexanders. Cf Fr alesandre (Lyte's dodoens), alisandre, Palsy alisaundre, allisandere Godef., med L name Petroselinum Alexandrinum, a synonym of P Macedonicum. The note in Hollands Pliny (1643) ii.30 that alisanders is a "corrupt word from olus atrum, as if one would say olusatros", seems disproved by 10th century "alexandre." An umbelliferous plant also called Horse-parsley, formerly cultivated and eaten like celery. ¥

Oxford English Dictionary

Aphrodite. One day the wife of King Cinyras the Cyprian--but some call him King Phoenix of Byblus, and some King Theis the Assyrian, foolishly boasted that her daughter Smyrna was more beautiful even than Aphrodite... (1, p69)¥

Robert Graves, The Greek Myths18.