Juan Ponce de Leon never mentioned a magic fountain. His 1513 charter was about land, gold and power, so how did he become the poster child for the ultimate anti-aging quest? This episode traces the biography of an idea, beginning with the Epic of Gilgamesh and its plant of youth stolen by a snake, Herodotus and the violet-scented, zero-density waters of the long-lived Macrobians, and the Alexander Romance, where a cook washing a salted fish discovers the water of life and keeps it for himself.

We follow the myth as the Babylonian Talmud traces the water to the Garden of Eden, as Spanish explorers pasted it onto Arawak tales of a rich land called Bimini, and as Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo launched a 1535 smear campaign painting Ponce de Leon as a vain old man chasing a cure for impotence. Later writers like Fontaneda and Herrera cemented th ...