The creation of royal gardens, parks, and temple gardens housing imported plants and animals and using plants as a symbol of new conquests and territorial expansion is a phenomenon that dates back to at least Mesopotamian and Pharaonic times. In many different civilizations rulers have shown interest in acquiring and exhibiting novel and exotic plants for their gardens, out of scientific interests, decorative purposes, and as a demonstration of power. The plants were used as symbols of the territorial extent of the royal domain or conquest, but they could also have economic valence when intending to acclimatize and grow edible/useful/valuable plants outside the limits of a royal garden.Footnote ¹ Whether the fruit of direct territorial annexation or of exploratory geographic expeditions and diplomatic gifts, plants being moved from one region to another have a lively history. In Pharaonic Egypt, at the temple of Deir el-Bahri, a relief depicts some thirty small trees being carried with their root balls in baskets, evidently transported from somewhere else, probably in connection with the exploration of other lands that took place in the reign of Hatshepsut in the middle of the second millennium bc. In turn, Hatshepsut’s son Thutmosis III (1479–1426 bc) brought plants and animals from the conquered regions of Asia back to Egypt.Footnote ² In Mesopotamia, several Assyrian kings are known to have had an interest in transplantation of plants from the regions they had conquered and naturalizing them in royal parks. Tiglat-Pileser I (1114–1076 bc) seems to have created botanical gardens in which various specimens of plants (in his case, decorative trees and also lumber wood and fruit trees) collected during military expeditions were acclimatized and then apparently disseminated to other growers. An inscription declares:

In the ninth century bc, Assurnasipal II collected 41 species of trees and bushes during his military campaigns and planted them near Kahlu, his capital city; he proudly proclaimed: ‘I took note of and collected the trees and the seeds in the lands through which I travelled and in between the hills which I passed.’Footnote ⁴ Sennacherib brought new plants into Nineveh and claimed to have planted gardens with imported plants that his gardeners actually improved in their new locations: ‘plants from the mountains and the surrounding countries, spices from the land of the Hittites, plants of myrrh which grow better than in their country of origin, vines brought from the hills and fruit trees … all this I did for my subjects’.Footnote ⁵ The fruits of victory came to be, literally, new and better grapes and scented spices. Achaemenid and Hellenistic kings also embarked on the collection of plants and animals from foreign lands, creating royal parks. The symbolic valence of these acts is generally recognized: an epigraphic text of the second century ad from Magnesia on the Maeander, apparently reproducing an earlier inscription of the fifth century bc, reveals the ideological and practical importance given to plant transplantation by the Persian king.Footnote ⁶ It also clearly shows that dissemination of trees was a matter of Persian royal policy and served as a message between the king and his most important delegates and governors. A text, in the form of a letter from Darius I to his satrap Gadatas, who probably was in charge of the western part of Asia Minor, states:

However, the text of the letter also issues a stern warning to the satrap: by forcing the gardeners bonded to work in the holy sanctuary of Apollo to work on unsanctified land and imposing secular taxes on them, the satrap is ignoring the king’s instructions that their work in the sanctuary be respected as a matter of religious duty.Footnote ⁷ These gardeners were probably those directly involved in transplanting the trees and the king’s instruction indicates not only that horticulturally skilled personnel existed among the Greek communities of Asia, but also that it could be found in the context of large sanctuaries. The specialized gardeners and arborists of the temple precincts were to be respected as to what they could be forced to do, valued for their expertise but not abused. Regardless of the king’s displeasure at the treatment of Apollo’s personnel, it is still clear that the text praises not simply the general introduction of new plants, but more specifically of fruit trees: the satrap is ‘working the land’ of the king and is making it more productive and increasing the variety of fruits available. It is easy to see how the economic (productive land is linked to taxation, that is, it brings produce for the king) mixes with the allegorical (a land under production is a land at peace, where prosperity reigns; it is a land with a good ruler, where things are bountiful and where nature can be controlled). Gadatas’ horticultural deeds (though not his forced involvement of the Greek gardeners) gain him the king’s favour; in this context, having a governor engage in what we can presume was large-scale horticulture is no less important than military deeds and direct territorial annexation. Darius’ letter is an instance of the militarization of arboriculture, and later (Chapter 4) we will see that Pliny the Elder also used the language of military success when discussing the creation of new fruit varieties.

Alexander the Great, who had encouraged the planting of Greek plant species such as the ivy in the gardens of Babylon, is often mentioned as an example of investing plants with strong symbolism.Footnote ⁸ Hellenistic rulers were often de facto direct heirs of the previous dynasties that had ruled the territory, as one line of kingship was sustained, as for instance in the case of the Seleucids in respect to the earlier kings of Mesopotamia, so that ‘the Seleucids were the direct heirs of the gardens of Assurnasirpal, and their attitudes and behavior toward the ancient customs of their new empire would be expressed through their use of imperial gardens’.Footnote ⁹ Strabo writes that the grape vine was not grown in Mesopotamia until the arrival of the Macedonians:

Strabo’s account is incorrect and biased: the grape vine had already been cultivated in Mesopotamia.Footnote ¹⁰ His statement embodies a ‘settlers’ attitude towards an aspect of their heritage: by planting this quintessentially Greek plant in the chief city of a foreign land, the Macedonians are asserting their control of the land’s natural processes … They are asserting dominance over the land itself, much as they had over its inhabitants.’Footnote ¹¹

Transplanting was attempted even in the case of exotic spices and aromatics growing in very specific climates and natural habitats, attempts with slim prospects of success. A famous case is that of King Seleucus Nicator (c.358–281 bc), who, as reported by Pliny the Elder, tried unsuccessfully to introduce amomum and nard from India into Arabia:

Seleucus was probably attempting to obtain two outcomes with the introduction of these economically important plants; on the one hand, he might have had economic considerations in mind, trying to start cultivations of these spices much closer to home in order to reduce dependence on suppliers in India.Footnote ¹³ On the other hand, Seleucus may well have continued the behaviour of the Achemenid rulers who had preceded him: by importing exotic plants from faraway regions to be planted in royal parks, the king was ‘bringing the periphery to the center and thereby uniting the empire through a display of the king’s power over the natural environment’.Footnote ¹⁴ The attention that Pliny’s sources would have given to Seleucus’ unsuccessful transplantation attempt may well be an indication that his rule was not seen as having the same degree of control over the natural world as that of the Persian kings.Footnote ¹⁵ Seleucus certainly commanded large resources and had unparalleled access to the goods of the eastern trade, as attested from many sources, among them an inscription from the sanctuary of Apollo at Didyma recording the king’s gifts, which included large quantities of precious spices.Footnote ¹⁶ However, he could not succeed in bringing a live plant into his empire. Thus, plant transplantation by rulers and powerful individuals trumped both the real success of the effort (plants did not cooperate) and even any benign economic considerations: plants as items in a list of victorious achievements were as much symbolic as actual.

The social ideology of the Persian elites comprised plant cultivation as an essential part of its pedagogy. Strabo tells us that the training of noble youths included the morning activity of hunting as a prelude to military prowess as well as, in the afternoon, activities in the royal gardens: how to tend to plants (φυτουργεῖν) and cut roots (ῥιζοτομεῖν), as well as weapon-forging and linen- and net-making.Footnote ¹⁷

These images, inscriptions, letters, and accounts of trees, plants, fruits, spices, and horticultural and arboricultural imports and innovations come to us from the Egyptian New Kingdom, the Assyrian royal conquests, the Achaemenid empires, and the Hellenistic royal sources. They represent, in few and lapidary words, much work. In the royal gardens and ordinary orchards, they tell us of more than 1,000 years of humble work by highly trained gardeners and experienced planters: transport and transplantation, rerooting, root-paring, irrigation experiments, success of techniques, discarding of failed plants, improvement of successful ones, reports to officials, dissemination of results, and official approval. The history of plants and trees is as much royal and imperial history as one of hard work on the ground.

A Transition to Greece and Rome: Ebony and Balsam

In classical Greece, the aftermath of war was intimately linked to gardens: the most famous of its gardens, the Academia (later to become the seat of Plato’s school), was planted with plane trees after depredations suffered during the Persian occupation of Athens in 480 bc. Plutarch credits Cimon with planting plane trees in the Agora and Academia to provide citizens with shady walks, and he did so in the ‘rebuilding effort’ after the end of the hostilities with the Persians. The beautification works he undertook were in part financed by the spoils of the subsequent Athenian victories over the Persians, and also in part out of Cimon’s own funds.Footnote ¹⁸ Politics and planting were closely associated in the process of political persuasion and social status.

Roman politicians too, with the growth of Rome’s territorial empire, showed interest in acquiring new plants from newly conquered territories and in explicitly using these plants as a symbol of the conquest. Rather than creating the equivalent of ‘royal parks’, live plants were proudly displayed in the solemn processions together with the other booty – slaves, kings, humbled military leaders, vanquished warriors, members of royal families, strange animals, precious metals, weapons, works of art, and so forth. This direct connection between plants and military conquest is a late Republican phenomenon; it is unambiguous in the case of Pompey’s triumph celebrated in 61 bc at the end of his campaigns against Mithridates, king of Pontus, and the Mediterranean pirates. Pompey staged magnificent triumphal celebrations, and the procession included the display of living trees, apparently for the first time in Rome’s history. More than a century later, Pliny reports that Pompey displayed the ebony tree in his triumph,Footnote ¹⁹ and he tells us that Pompey was merely the first to exhibit trees in such processions: another passage, about the triumph of Vespasian and Titus over Judaea in ad 71 (for Pliny, a recent event), reports that the balsam plant was displayed in Rome. Pliny closes his comments about the balsam and the Flavian triumph remarking: clarumque dictu, a Pompeio Magno in triumpho arbores quoque duximus (‘it is remarkable to say that since the time of Pompey the Great, we have led also trees in a triumphal procession’), thus attributing to Pompey’s triumph the incipit or first instance of the practice of displaying live trees.Footnote ²⁰

Pliny mentioning that Pompey had exhibited ebony in his triumph at Rome, and then conflating the ebony with the balsam brought to Rome by the Flavian emperors, may indicate that both the ebony and the balsam plant had been paraded in Pompey’s triumphal procession.Footnote ²¹ Pompey’s triumph was an unprecedented affair that made his deeds comparable to those of Alexander the Great and Hercules. He celebrated victories over Asia, Pontus, Armenia, Paphlagonia, Cilicia, Syria, the Scythians, the Judaeans, the Albani, Hiberia, Crete, the Basterni, and the kings Mithradates and Tigranes. Pliny reports the dedicatory inscription commemorating Pompey’s staggering military achievements that would have stood in the temple of Minerva in Rome:

Since Pompey’s triumph celebrated victories over a vast geographical area, the balsam plant, so strongly associated with Syria-Judaea, may indeed have been included in the display. As for the ebony, the primary geographic association of the ebony tree proper (Diospyros ebenum) is India,Footnote ²² but as remarked by Pliny himself in his Book 6, Ethiopia ‘is verdant with forests, mostly of ebony trees’Footnote ²³ and a few lines prior to the mention of Pompey’s parading live trees, Pliny reports that, according to Herodotus, the Ethiopians used to pay as tribute one hundred logs of ebony to the Persian king every three years. Strabo too mentions the ebony (ἔβενος) as a plant commonly found in Ethiopia, while for the first-century ad Greek physician Dioscorides, the Ethiopian ebony, black, with no veins and smooth as a horn, was the best.Footnote ²⁴ The three sources therefore attest a geographic association between the ebony and Ethiopia.Footnote ²⁵

As there are c.500 different species of trees and shrubs in the Ebanaceae family, not all of them appreciated for the quality of their wood, it is not clear which type of ‘ebony’ Pompey included in his triumphal procession. If it was the Indian ebony, displaying these plants in the triumph was an additional evocation of the Alexander-like deeds Pompey had achieved; if the trees were Ethiopian ebony, a territory over which Pompey did not triumph, they would suggest the vast geographical spread of the territories involved, directly and indirectly, in Pompey’s military operations and the various exotic novelties encountered in his travels.Footnote ²⁶ The symbolic allusion to the territories conquered and their rich fauna and flora was also an element of precious objects displayed in the triumph, like the ‘square mountain of gold with deer, lions and every variety of fruit [or of fruit tree] on it and a golden vine entwined around it’.Footnote ²⁷

Military victory and exotic novelties were an integral part of Roman triumphal displays, high dramatic points in stressing Rome’s imperial geography.Footnote ²⁸ In the procession, painted tableaux were exhibited, depicting the cities or new lands subjugated, and the landscapes of foreign battles. Rome’s encounter with the ‘other’ was physically embodied by the parading of the prisoners of war, with their foreign appearance, and of the enemies’ strange weapons. Even the precious objects in the booty, such as the various types of tableware listed by Plutarch in the triumph of Aemilius Paulus, had names that clearly evoked victories over foreign cities and dynasties.Footnote ²⁹ In the context of the triumph, then, parading the trees is a symbol of the land from which they came, Judaea and/or Syria for the balsam,Footnote ³⁰ and India or Ethiopia for the ebony. The plants become a synecdoche of the territories won, and it is possible that Pompey’s live tree triumphal display also included Asiatic plane trees,Footnote ³¹ because plane trees were planted in the Porticus Pompeiana. Because these trees originated from Asia, as later reported in Latin sources, they could be taken to symbolise Pompey’s campaigns there.Footnote ³² As von Stackelberg put it, in the Porticus Pompeiana ‘artistic plunder was matched by horticultural plunder’.Footnote ³³ In the two specific cases being examined here, ebony and balsam, the valuable and sought-after plants shown in the triumph were also a symbol of the economic resources now under Rome’s control. Ebony wood, with its fine grain, black lustre, hardness, and durability, was highly appreciated.Footnote ³⁴ In addition, the sawdust of this wood and the ebony root were used for medical preparations.Footnote ³⁵

The connection between the plants paraded and the revenue they generated is, however, much clearer in the case of the balsam (which Pompey may have displayed, and which was certainly paraded by the Flavians during the triumph over Judaea). The balsam trees of Judaea had long been a considerable source of revenue for the region. As Pliny explains, it was not only the resin from the balsam plant that had commercial value, but so did cuttings and shoots (called xylobalsamum), which were commonly used in the manufacture of perfumes. In the first century bc Mark Antony had given as a gift to Cleopatra the balsam plantations, from whom Herod leased them.Footnote ³⁶ After the Battle of Actium and the annexation of Egypt, these plantations probably passed to Herod, and when Judaea became a Roman province in ad 6, they may have been transferred to Roman ownership, although the Jews probably still leased the right to cultivate them.Footnote ³⁷ In some cases at least, imperial ownership seems quite certain: En Gedi, where balsam seem to have been grown and perfume produced, is referred as belonging to an imperial estate in the Babatha Archive.Footnote ³⁸ During the first Jewish revolt of ad 66–73, the Jews had tried to destroy the balsam plantations, but the Romans had saved the precious trees, indeed ‘pitched battles’ were fought for the sake of the shrub, so that – according to Pliny – the trees, too, were turned into tribute-paying subjects, with the fiscus cultivating the balsam and, it seems, selling the product directly.Footnote ³⁹ Within five years of the victory over Judaea, cuttings of xylobalsamum generated a revenue of 800,000 sesterces.Footnote ⁴⁰ The importance of balsam plantations in the economy of Judaea is corroborated by a papyrus from Masada dating to after ad 73, which mentions xylobalsamum, probably from En Gedi.Footnote ⁴¹ In addition, the seed, seed husk, and the bark were in demand as aromatics or for medicinal use; thus, because of the great monetary value of balsam, a range of adulterated products infiltrated the market.Footnote ⁴² The commercial value of the balsam, particularly of its resin, had always been high, because of the small yield of the single plants in their earlier cultivated state. At the time of Alexander the Great a large garden (hortus) was said to produce six congii of resin (c.20.46 litres), and a smaller garden one congius (c.3.41 litres).Footnote ⁴³ The information about the levels of production in the fourth century bc that Pliny reports must have come from Theophrastus.Footnote ⁴⁴ In his text we are given the extent of the large balsam cultivation, c.2 hectares, whereas the other is said to have been ‘much smaller’.Footnote ⁴⁵ However, with time, Pliny tells us, the yield had increased, probably due to human selection of the plant characteristics and improvement in the propagation techniques.Footnote ⁴⁶ In his own time Pliny claims that ‘even a single tree produces a larger flow’.Footnote ⁴⁷

The desirability of balsam finds poetic echoes, as for instance when in Eclogue 3 Virgil fantasizes that thanks to the art of grafting the bramble will grow balsam or, as expressed in Eclogue 4, that the ‘Assyrian spice’ (i.e., the balsam) will grow everywhere with the arrival of the new Golden Age.Footnote ⁴⁸ Grafting, the new Augustan peace, and a fresh, exotic fertility were woven together in Virgil’s verse.

The Cherry Tree: Italy and Beyond

Republican generals often took inspiration for their behaviour from Hellenistic kings, including elements in triumphal celebrations, and it is possible that displaying live trees in a celebratory context had already occurred in Hellenistic celebrations.Footnote ⁴⁹ Pompey might have been the first Roman general to display live trees in a triumphal procession, but he was not the first to come back from military campaigns with new and exotic plants. His rival L. Licinius Lucullus, who we have seen embarked on garden-building in a prominent position overlooking the Campus Martius, is credited for having brought back to Rome from his campaigns against Mithridates not just riches and booty, but also the cherry tree.Footnote ⁵⁰ The source for this piece of information is again Pliny the Elder, who states that before the victory over Mithridates in 74 bc there had been no cherry trees in Italy.Footnote ⁵¹

In fact the sweet cherry (Prunus avium L.), at least as a wild plant, seems to have been already present in Italy well before Lucullus’ triumph in 63 bc;Footnote ⁵² possibly Lucullus introduced the sour cherry from Pontus (Prunus cerasus L. or Cerasus vulgaris Miller)Footnote ⁵³ or, alternatively, it was a superior variety of sweet cherry that he brought back. But Pliny’s emphasis is on the fact that the plant had not existed in Italy before, whereas in other passages Pliny is well aware of different cultivars of the same fruit and discusses them accordingly; on these grounds, the importation of the sour cherry by Lucullus seems the more likely solution. The presence of wild sweet cherry might have helped the diffusion of the sour cherry and the creation of different varieties, since it was possible to graft the sour cherry onto wild cherries, as Palladius attests many centuries later.Footnote ⁵⁴ Varro does mention, briefly, that cherry trees are to be grafted in winter,Footnote ⁵⁵ a reference that some scholars take as an indication that the cherry was, at the time of his writing around 34 bc, commonplace and not a relatively recent introduction by Lucullus.Footnote ⁵⁶ In my view, thirty years – this is the time that would have elapsed between Lucullus’ return to Rome in 66 bc and the time when Varro was writing – was sufficient time for a new cultivated tree to become established and common, especially when a wild variety that could be used as rootstock already existed in the region. But not only did Lucullus introduce the tree to Italy; according to Athenaeus, he also gave to the new plant its Latin name, cerasus, from the Pontic town Cerasus, where presumably he first came across this fruit tree.Footnote ⁵⁷

This apparent parenthetical information on the origin of the name cerasus that Athenaeus preserves ought to be contextualized within the general upper-class interest in scientific knowledge of plants and horticulture on the one hand, and geographic explorations connected to territorial expansion on the other. By giving a name to something previously unknown, the agent also expresses possession and some sort of claim over the object named. To be able to ‘precisely’ name a foreign novelty, in our case from its area of origin, is akin – albeit on a simpler level – to the ability of the conqueror to know the new lands, to produce accurate geographical maps, and to indicate not only the topographical characteristics, but also the fauna and flora of the conquered regions.Footnote ⁵⁸ Late Republican interest on the part of some generals in geographic knowledge during extended military campaigns, such as those conducted by Lucullus, Sulla, and Pompey across Asia, found renewed impetus with the Julio-Claudians, starting with Augustus himself, who sent expeditions to Arabia Felix, Ethiopia, and across the Rhine to the River Elbe.Footnote ⁵⁹ These achievements were visually presented to the people in Rome: famous is the large map of Rome’s conquests put up by Agrippa and displayed in the Porticus Vipsania.Footnote ⁶⁰ Expeditions such as the one that Nero sent to Ethiopia in search of the springs of the Nile had the aim of not only gathering information on topography, but also on flora and fauna.Footnote ⁶¹ The map produced (Pliny writes forma in discussing this expedition) showed also the trees or lack thereof, in addition to the topographic features.Footnote ⁶²

While Lucullus’ ‘deed’ of importing the cherry into Italy does not appear to have gained major renown at the time or in the near term afterwards, the cherry tree did become, for Pliny at least, a charged plant, which naturally evolved in his narration from being a ‘spoil’ of Lucullus’ military campaigning in Asia to becoming an allegory of the Roman conquest of Britain. When Pliny writes, in a matter-of-fact manner, that: is primum invexit e Ponto, annisque CXX trans oceanum in Britanniam usque pervenere (‘Lucullus first imported them from Pontus, and in 120 years they have crossed the ocean and got as far as Britain’),Footnote ⁶³ he hints that this new land was now under Roman control and its nature could be altered. As has been noted, Rome’s role as ‘shaper’ of British flora and fauna has been conceptualized in both ancient and modern times; ‘Rome not only drew exotic species into the imperial core, it also redistributed them around the provinces. Several ancient authors commented on this phenomenon in general, and with specific reference to Britain’.Footnote ⁶⁴

The specific reference to Britain in Pliny suggests two things. On the one hand, being an island and the furthest northern provincial possession, reference to this location pointedly emphasized the great territorial diffusion achieved by the once-exotic, distinctly southern and eastern, cultivar. On the other hand, and possibly this frame of reference explains also the other mentions of Britain as a place where the Romans introduced new flora and fauna, this land was perceived as in great need of being ‘civilized’, and horticultural knowledge was often seen as an important element of civilization. In drawing the distinction between the barbarian other (often nomadic, and hence pastoral populations) and the civilized Greek and Roman world (consisting of settled, agricultural populations), an intermediate level of marginalizing the barbarian ‘other’ was offered: new flora and fauna were emollient civilizing devices for Britannia and Germania, its neighbour across the Channel, arguably another ‘barbarian’ region. Tacitus in his Germania stresses that while the Germani know agriculture and the basic measuring of time (the calendar in its origins is related to seasonal agricultural chores), they do not know arboriculture and horticulture, nor do they have any good and advanced definition of the seasons, which are fundamental concepts in any agricultural society.Footnote ⁶⁵

Plants, the Triumph, and Arboricultural Knowledge: Scholarly and Practical

Literary sources do not tell us whether Lucullus actually displayed a cherry tree in his triumph in 63 bc. Maybe, unlike Pompey’s balsam shrubs and ebony trees, the geographic association between the new fruit tree and the Pontic region where Lucullus had conducted his campaigns was not that strong. The cherry might have been a novelty, but the plant certainly did not have the same commercial value as balsam, so the idea of displaying the plant in the triumphal procession may never have been thought of. It is equally possible that, because Lucullus had to wait three years before being granted his triumph, parading the ‘original’ live trees came to be impractical: we will never know. However, as discussed in Chapter 1, while waiting for the triumph outside Rome’s pomerium, Lucullus did embark in creating the lavish Horti Lucullani on the Pincian Hill; the cherry trees from Pontus could have been planted there or in one of the other villas Lucullus owned, entrusted to the care of a gardener who grafted and reproduced the plant by slippage. Considering the close rivalry and competition between Lucullus and Pompey, it is also possible that the very fact that Lucullus had introduced a new plant from a region where he campaigned inspired, some years later, Pompey to parade live trees as symbol of two of the regions on which he triumphed.

As we have seen, the scale reached in Pompey’s triumph, geographically and quantitatively, was unimaginable; the number of populations won, and hence the number of prisoners, of precious metal objects, weapons and rostra (beaks of captured ships), and illustrations of battles fought and places conquered were spectacular. With all this to show to the eager eyes of the inhabitants of the capital and impress them with Pompey’s greatness and divine favour, adding also the balsam plant, the ebony tree, and perhaps the plane tree to the procession may seem insignificant. However, as I have already suggested elsewhere,Footnote ⁶⁶ the ebony and balsam could not be acclimatized to grow in Italy and therefore retained their association with their distant and exotic places of origin. These plants could act as symbols of the regions they came from, and being highly valuable commercially, they also symbolized the revenues that the triumphing general had brought under Rome’s control. Pompey’s choice, later replicated by the Flavians and perhaps also in other instances in intervening triumphal processions, was simply a further layer of that aristocratic ideology which vested plants with real meaning (e. g., their economic value) and allegorical symbolism according to which the plant evoked a range of values and allusions. Of course, in the case of plants that could be acclimatized, they fitted well within the general discourse about control of nature, civilizing power, and appropriation of ‘things’, living or not, from the conquered regions. The booty comprised money, precious objects, and slaves, but also plants. These could be a simple ‘souvenir’ and memento of the geographic areas visited, but they could also be prized for their economic importance and for their potential to shape new horticultural landscapes in Italy. Plants could be centripetal towards Rome and radiate outwards to the new provinces.

With these points in mind, it appears natural that Pompey’s triumphal ‘vegetal display’ should have as its counterpart the celebrated portico-garden that he developed after his triumph, as we have seen in Chapter 1. The portico enclosed a garden that symbolized Pompey’s great military deeds and acted as a memento of them for the population of Rome. The central garden area featured double rows of plane trees and,Footnote ⁶⁷ if Asiatic plane trees had been a feature of his triumph,Footnote ⁶⁸ some of them may have found their permanent planting in his Porticus Pompeiana. For those who had seen the triumphal procession, these trees would be a reminder of the triumph itself and, of course, of the great man and his achievements.

Both Lucullus and Pompey had been victorious over Mithridates;Footnote ⁶⁹ both appropriated much that had belonged to their enemy, not simply booty, but also some ideas and ideologies. The ‘garden competition’ between Lucullus and Pompey may ultimately have been a reaction to Mithridates’ use of Hellenistic and Persian themes in his propaganda, and the Roman generals both saw how to appropriate these themes of garden spaces and plants with the public persona of their commissioners. Pompey, as the one who definitively defeated the king of Pontus in 63 bc, achieved something else Lucullus had not: to appropriate the specific and detailed botanical knowledge that Mithridates had developed as both personal and royal occupation.

Mithridates was famous for his research on the medicinal properties of plants as well as on poisons and antidotes. He was also said to have tried to acclimatize, for ritual purposes, both the laurel and the myrtle at Panticapeaon.Footnote ⁷⁰ His botanical interest continued a tradition followed by other Hellenistic rulers; Attalus I, the Pergamene king, had authored at least one work on botany, and his grandson, Attalus III, was an expert in herbal toxicology. The latter personally cultivated noxious plants in the royal gardens and tested the effectiveness of the antidotes against them on criminals condemned to death.Footnote ⁷¹ He also wrote a work on agriculture, a source used by both Varro and Pliny.

Pompey, in Pliny’s account, came into possession of a chest that contained Mithridates’ personal notes on his pharmacological research, including details of the herbal prescriptions and their effects. The general ordered the grammarian Pompeius Lenaeus, a freedman of his who seems to have accompanied Pompey in all his expeditions as his secretary, to translate these papers into Latin.Footnote ⁷² Such a prize was, at least in Pliny’s view, as important as Pompey’s military victory itself; where one had benefited the state, the other had benefited human life in general: Vitaeque ita profuit non minus quam rei publicae victoria illa (‘This great victory therefore was as beneficent to life as it was to the State’).Footnote ⁷³ This work on pharmacology was the first work of this kind to appear in Latin and may have further stimulated interest in the properties of plants among a small group of scientific physicians, intellectuals, and scientists.

Plants and the Language of Citizenship

As a scientist himself, Pliny’s interest in plants and their characteristics was genuine. Still, in his discussion of plants that came from the East, Pliny is ‘mostly concerned with the relationships Romans of his time have with the plants, rather than the interactions that take place in their native country’.Footnote ⁷⁴ In many passages of the Natural History Pliny clearly shows great – even what we might call scientific and descriptive – disinterestedness about plants, but he also distinguishes between the ‘foreign and exotic’ ones and those native to Italy. His discourse on plants is a mirror for the relationships the Roman empire had established and was still creating among humans and their legal categories, but it was also a way to convey his moralistic remarks on current excesses of innovation. The cherry, together with the peach and the other acclimatized exotic plants, are still ‘peregrinae’ or ‘foreign’ despite their naturalization in Italy:

The language Pliny chose to describe the exotic plants and those which were fully acclimatized and currently naturalized draws on legal categories in respect to citizenship: foreigners (peregrine) and foreign residents (incolae); the unspoken third category here is, of course, the cives romani, the Roman citizens, as if citizenship were an horticultural and arboricultural category as well as a civic status.Footnote ⁷⁵

In Roman culture, the language of citizenship and status was intimately related to exaggerated, often sentimental but politically charged notions of a glorious but morally strong past. This is subsumed in the general notion of the mos maiorum, in which the personal morality of men and women in the past was always superior to the weak or even depraved persons of the present. Part of the mos maiorum was a devotion to place-bound, Italian origins of all kinds, whether in traditional eating habits and culinary ingredients, or rejection of foreign ideas and customs, innovation in social attitudes, and any other newfangled phenomena. Pliny’s discussion of horticulture and arboriculture shares some of these attitudes.

Pliny is an encyclopaedist: he wishes to present, fairly and factually, the great variety of goods, edible and not, that were available in the Roman empire and that came from different corners of its vast conquered territory and from beyond its frontiers. In that, of course, he is bound to discuss expensive exotic plants, spices, and medicines as well as new and foreign trees, bushes, plants, berries, root-vegetables, improved varieties and so on: he does not always take an explicitly moralistic view that these foreign innovations are bad, although sometimes he does say so. There is, however, an additional level of concern in Pliny that transcends purely moralistic and conservative views. While avoiding uselessly old-fashioned views and considerations about expensive foreign innovations, he is at pains to point to Italian indigenous plants that can serve as well as the exotic newly cultivated plants, trees, condiments and so on. He also emphasizes the medicinal properties of plants that grow or used to be commonly planted in Roman gardens. His locus of agricultural appreciation is always Italy, to which he attributes primacy in a number of areas.

For Pliny, ‘discovering’ a new plant and importing, acclimatizing, and thus appropriating it successfully in Italy, was to make it ‘Roman’. His moderate conservatism and his Italocentrism are exemplified in his views about Rome’s dependence on the long-distance trade that brings to Rome exotic plants that cannot properly grow and produce the same aromatic fruit in Italy. Pepper is a case in point.Footnote ⁷⁶ ‘Bought by weight like gold or silver’ – proclaims Pliny – people go all the way to India to get it just because of its pungent taste. And yet, he claims, in his time pepper trees were grown in Italy, although the taste of their berries was not as pungent as black pepper, due to the different climate.Footnote ⁷⁷ This pepper tree is an ‘immigrant’, but it has been assimilated and nourished by Italic soil and hence, in Pliny’s mind, it is morally acceptable to seek it as condiment.Footnote ⁷⁸ The continued sourcing of the foreign spice abroad rather than making do with the local and bland one is a matter of regret.

Pliny emphasized the Roman traditions of old and prioritized the agricultural fertility of Italy as the centre wherefrom new plants were broadcast to the provinces. Ultimately, his outlook is a development, in the age of an expanded empire and in a Rome that had become more cosmopolitan and resources-draining than before, of Varro’s presentation at the start of his treatise of the Italian peninsula as an extremely and uniquely developed fertile landscape, so that ‘the whole land seems to be an orchard’.Footnote ⁷⁹

Plants on the Move: Incoming and Outgoing

The movement of plants in antiquity was, obviously, not limited to military conquests and victorious generals. It occurred, perhaps primarily, in the context of commercial exchange and in connection with the relatively new habit of wealthy Romans buying new land and already developed estates in different geographic locations. Wealthy Romans of the late Republic and early empire soon saw the advantage of owning multiple properties in different regions of the empire. This habit of agricultural (and residential) investment in often far-flung estates may have also incubated the transferal of specific fruit varieties from one estate to the other. The movement of plants among landed possessions of the same individuals could be posited in the case of the so-called African fig. Pliny records that that type of fig, which many people preferred to all the other varieties of figs, had been introduced to Africa only very recently (nuperrime).Footnote ⁸⁰ It had evidently been cultivated on several estates, whence it was probably exported in dried form; it then came to be known as the ‘African’ fig, disregarding what the actual country of origin of this variety had been before being established in North Africa. If Pliny’s nuperrime is here to be taken quite literally to refer to an event dating just a few years back – the late 50s or 60s – we would be in the Neronian period, known for the formation of large estates in North Africa, some belonging to the emperor and some to an exclusive and small number of senatorial owners.

On big estates, arboriculture on a large scale was possible because the extension of the land holdings facilitated the cultivation of different crops on different parts of the estate. This afforded the crucial space and irrigation to assign a portion of the estate to the development of a new fruit orchard, which, unlike cereals, might require some years to bear fruit. Arboriculture could also be relatively labour-intensive; Columella’s comments on the various stages of care needed in the propagation of fruit trees from cuttings and the fact that only after twenty-four months were the young plants ready to either be transplanted or engrafted, reminds us that arboriculture required time and planning ahead.Footnote ⁸¹ Only wealthy landlords with substantial up-front financial resources could engage in large-scale fruit cultivation: time costs money. Figs, of course, have a main advantage compared to some other fruits: they do not need to be consumed fresh, but can successfully be sundried and widely exported in this form. The scale of North African fig cultivation hinted at by Pliny’s passage is confirmed in the later epigraphic evidence from the Majerda valley concerning the management of imperial estates and the incentives given to coloni to cultivate neglected land: the crops regularly mentioned in these inscriptions are the grape vine, the olive, and the fig, plants whose produce in the form of wine, oil, and dried figs has a good shelf life and is thus suitable for export and transport to markets quite distant from the place of production. The lapse of time between the planting of a new fig tree and the first substantial harvest is about five years. This fact of practical cultivation was clearly known and fully understood: five years is the amount of time the tenants on imperial estates in North Africa were exempt from paying rent (which was paid in kind) on land planted with new fig trees.Footnote ⁸²

For wealthy landlords whose possessions included estates in a number of regions, the possibility of acquiring plant cuttings from one of the estates to plant on another, or of developing plant nurseries to supply the various properties, was feasible and implementable. The geographic diffusion of specific cultivars must have owed much to this mode of diffusion, even though we do not have the hard evidence to confirm this hypothesis. At times there are tantalizing little clues that suggest very interesting scenarios that, unfortunately, remain completely speculative given the nature of the evidence. For instance, could it be that C. Matius, Augustus’ friend who had ‘invented’ topiary and developed a type of apple that was grown on his estates near Aquileia, also had properties in Hispania, where the apple cultivar had been transplanted? The name of the cultivar of apple he developed – Matiana – is a name which seems to be at the origin of the Spanish noun for apple, manzana.Footnote ⁸³ If this etymology is correct, it strongly suggests that the cultivar matiana had a particular and long-lasting diffusion in the Iberian Peninsula. Matius’ possible economic interests in southern Spain are suggested by an inscription attesting liberti of a G. Matius at Emerita Augusta and by a shipwreck of the late first century bc found in the upper Adriatic near Comacchio, a ship which was in all likelihood bound to Aquileia and which carried lead ingots.Footnote ⁸⁴ These ingots, which scientific analysis has shown were made of lead originating from near Carthago Nova, were stamped with various names, including the name of Agrippa, who was the patron of this Spanish town. A small group of ingots was stamped ‘C. Mat.’ and another group only ‘Mat.’, possibly a reference to our Gaius Matius, since this personal name is not widely attested.Footnote ⁸⁵

Besides elite proprietors owning multiple estates across the empire, other likely vectors of diffusion of plants and cultivars were the colonial settlers. In all likelihood, the distribution of provincial land to veterans participating in the various colonial programmes, especially those promoted by Caesar and Augustus, were accompanied by the export of plants and agricultural techniques native to the Italian peninsula itself. Indeed, the greater spread of viticulture and oleiculture in provinces such as Gaul and the Iberian Peninsula owes much to the colonists who, it can be reasonably assumed, acquired cuttings either from nearby areas where cultivations already existed or from their area of origin on Italic soil, perhaps even from the farms of family or friends back home.Footnote ⁸⁶ Since late Republican and early imperial veteran colonization was almost entirely restricted to Italians (in this period army recruitment was still geared heavily towards Italy), the farming habits, knowledge, and traditions of the peninsula, such as the type of wine press used or the must fermentation technique employing sunken dolia, soon found new homes outside the heartland, along with the demobilized men settling overseas.

However, it is in the context of military expansion and certain Roman customs such as the taking of foreign notables, enslaved people, animals, money, objects and other exotica that the symbolic dimension of plants is most explicit: the solemn value of spolia opima or ‘rich booty’ was conferred on trees and other living plants.Footnote ⁸⁷ When the triumph became a reserve of the emperor and members of the imperial family marked for succession, and upper-class generals no longer celebrated triumphs, the symbolic value of ‘naming’ a foreign species after a specific general or person may have ended, but in practical terms importing new plants or new varieties of fruit from the provinces into Italy or into other provincial territories continued and most probably increased. The military seems to have played an important role in this ‘dispersal of biodiversity’. The literature indicates some instances of the military movement of plants at the hands of officers: besides Lucullus and Pompey, Pliny cites commanders who were responsible for the transfer of plants from one part of the empire to the other. Just before ad 14, Sextus Papinius Allenius, the consul of ad 36, brought the zizipha to Italy from Africa and tubures from Syria.Footnote ⁸⁸ Identification of these plants is not completely secure, but they are generally understood to refer to the Zizyphus vulgaris L. of the Rhamnaceae family, commonly known as the jujube tree, and Crataegus azarolus L., known in English as azerole.Footnote ⁸⁹

Pliny’s description, in the context of discussing the many kinds of apples (mala), qualifies the fruits of the zizipha and tubures as more akin to berries than proper apples,Footnote ⁹⁰ and this suits the type of fruit the jujube and azerole produce. The fruits of the jujube tree are edible oval drupes measuring 1.5–3 cm; green when immature, once the fruit ripens it becomes brown to purple-black in colour, and wrinkled, resembling a date (a common name for the jujube is ‘red date’). The azerole or Mediterranean medlar, a plant belonging to the family of the Rosaceae, bears small fruits similar in appearance to very small apples; modern cultivars feature a red variety (the rossa d’Italia type) and white varieties (bianca d’Italia). The fruits are picked either unripe, to make preserves, or eaten fresh once they ripen around September.Footnote ⁹¹

Jujube and azerole are, according to Pliny, a relatively recent arrival into Italy. The plants are labelled as peregrinae, and Sextus Papinius, while on military duty in Syria and in North Africa, had them first planted in castris, in the military camp:

Besides the Libyan jujube, Pliny notes a variety called Cappadocian, which was appreciated for garland-making: its flower had ‘a scent like that of olive flowers’.Footnote ⁹²

Jujube and azerole plants were successfully acclimatized in Italy. The azerole in particular seems to have spread very effectively: it was in common use in Pliny’s time, since he states that these plants were very decorative when used on the terraces of urban houses.Footnote ⁹³ As in the case of the modern Italian varieties mentioned above, Pliny too distinguishes two types of azerole, a white one, and a red type, called ‘red Syrian’, a reference to the province where Sextus Papinius Allenius encountered the azerole he introduced into Italy. Both the North African origin and the established presence around Rome of the jujube plant were sufficiently common to be worthy of mention by Martial in one of his epigrams: the poet suggests that the ‘jujubes and the soft-seeded pomegranates’ do not come from Libyan branches but from the trees of Nomentum.Footnote ⁹⁴ Martial’s reference to both the North African origins and the naturalized sources of these fruits is similar to Pliny’s concern for foreign origins and Italian naturalization of plants (see p. 67). Pliny is not the only author to ‘humanize’ trees when he writes that since the time of Pompey the Great also trees were displayed as captives in the triumph. Martial uses similar references in another epigram of Book 13, calling the jujube shrubs ‘home-born slaves’ or tubures vernae, picked up, together with soft-seeded pomegranates, from ‘suburban branches’. The image of a slave, still of foreign origin despite being home-born in a Roman domus or villa, precisely and poetically defines the contours of Pliny’s problems with the same issue of origin and naturalization of trees and plants into Italy. The closing of the epigram, with its rhetorical question ‘What do you want with Libyan (i.e. tubures)?’ sharply juxtaposes the appreciated home-grown slaves (human and vegetal) with the plants (and slaves) coming directly from Libya.Footnote ⁹⁵

Some years after Papinius’ transplanting of the jujube and azerole, L. Vitellius, the father of the emperor Vitellius and governor of Syria in ad 34–7, brought back several new kinds of fig tree from his eastern province, which he planted on his estate near Alba. These fig varieties were the cottana, the Carica, and the Caunea. Vitellius did not limit himself to figs. Pliny credits him with importing to Italy, for the first time, the pistachio tree (Pistacia vera). A colleague of his, the eques Pompeius Flaccus, introduced the pistachio to another western Mediterranean region, Hispania.Footnote ⁹⁶

Can we believe Pliny about Vitellius and Pompeius Flaccus bringing the pistachio to Italy and Hispania? A modern analysis indicated that the pistachio, a plant native to Central Asia which became known to the Greeks during Alexander’s expedition, had already spread around the Mediterranean in Hellenistic times, by grafting on terebinth rootstock.Footnote ⁹⁷ However, modern cultivation of pistachio trees depends entirely on grafting and this suggests that the plant, which grows wild in northeast Iran, north Afghanistan, and in the middle Asian republics, was domesticated late. Therefore, Pliny’s account about their introduction into Italy and Hispania at the time of Tiberius is possible.Footnote ⁹⁸

Roman trade networks or the transplantation of seeds and plants by the military may have also brought eastern spices to the northern regions. In some cases, the transplants were successful; in others, plants grown in different environmental conditions – especially spices – did not have the same colour and taste as the original. One example to be found in Pliny concerns the cassia: Pliny claims to have seen it being cultivated amidst apiaries along the Rhine, but unfortunately the spice grown here did not have the same scent as the one from plants cultivated in hotter and drier climates.Footnote ⁹⁹

Soldiers and officers move in accordance with necessities unrelated to agricultural and food needs of the empire. Still, the scattered references to military and administrative personnel engaging in plant-transplanting and acclimatization of plants in new territories suggest that the considerable geographic mobility these individuals enjoyed over the course of their careers was an important contribution to the diffusion of new cultivations, both in Italy and in the provinces. The indications given by Pliny in the case of well-known individuals are a small number of the ordinary soldiers, officers, and provincial administrative staff who may well have played an important role as agents of diffusion. Geographic mobility in antiquity was certainly not limited to the military;Footnote ¹⁰⁰ from the forced movements of slaves to the travels of traders, there likely were other agents of ‘botanical’ diffusion whose contribution was not a matter of note for ancient authors like Pliny and is now lost for us.

Plant Globalization in the Roman World: Nature or Nurture?

Pliny’s encyclopaedia of plants includes only a small number of geographical plant-transfers that took place in antiquity. Whether appreciated as food and for satisfying particular tastes, serving as cultural markers, or for ornamental purposes, plants, seeds, and cuttings have always moved from one region to another, at times very slowly, at other times more quickly, especially when some important person, like L. Vitellius or Sext. Papinus Allenius, was involved.

In fact, other fruit trees that were not native to Italy had already been well established on Italian soil by the time Rome started her military expansion beyond the Italian peninsula into the Mediterranean.Footnote ¹⁰¹ These could have been introduced to Italian farms and agricolae by seaborne or landborne commercial exchanges, colonization, or military expeditions, or a combination of all three. If there were some ordinary individuals responsible for such importation and cultivation, we do not know their names: merchants and farmers do not generally appear in accounts of what are, after all, casual opportunities for selling produce. Instead, geographical names are known. The pomegranate (malum Punicum in Latin), of which Pliny mentions nine species, might have been introduced to Italy, Spain, and Gaul by the Carthaginians, as a result of their commercial trade: the Latin name indicates association with Carthage.Footnote ¹⁰² The apricot, commonly called μῆλον Ἀρμενιακόν in GreekFootnote ¹⁰³ and Armeniacum in Latin, was associated with Armenia, even though it was already known in ancient Mesopotamia and had spread to the west after Alexander’s expedition.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The peach, as indicated by its Latin name, malum persicum (‘Persian apple’) was recognized as having come from Persia.

Not only fruit trees moved; other plants did so as well. Pliny’s sources, for instance, believed that the laurel had not grown in Corsica, but that it had been successfully introduced there and acclimatized.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The case of a ‘humble’ vegetable, which was not only used as plant food but could also have other practical uses, is the bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria), which in European sites appears with some frequency starting in the Roman period.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ As its name implies, the dried gourd could be used as a container for liquids, such as wine or water, or as floats, for instance as swimming aids and, in all likelihood, for fishing nets. A study of ancient DNA (aDNA) – extracted from seeds and pericarp of a nearly complete bottle gourd discovered at the Roman site of Oedenburg/Biesheim–Kunheim in France in first-century ad layers, and individual seeds excavated in third-century ad contexts at the Roman vicus of Petinesca (mod. Vorderberg), in Switzerland – indicated that there were different landraces (i.e., locally adapted varieties of a domesticated plant) in the northern provinces;Footnote ¹⁰⁷ this is an indication that selection and possibly even importation of seeds and plants for cultivation and propagation had occurred in those regions.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Although fruit and seed shape of bottle gourds can be very variable, making classifications based on morphology difficult,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ two subspecies have been recognized in modern times, the African L. siceraria ssp. siceraria and the Asian L. siceraria ssp. Asiatica.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In the case of the Oedenburg bottle gourd, the application of aDNA technology and geometric morphometrics has shown that it was the Asian type of bottle gourd that was introduced into the northern Alpine regions in Roman times, not the African subspecies.Footnote ¹¹¹ This result does not mean that the bottle gourds to be found in northern Europe in Roman times came directly from Asia, since genetic origin does not necessarily reflect the origin of the specific specimen analysed. Rather, it means that cultivars grown in the Roman world ultimately derived from the Asian bottle gourd. It is possible that the Romans themselves imported the bottle gourd from the East into Europe, because to date, with the exception of one Iron Age seed find from northern Italy,Footnote ¹¹² all archaeobotanical finds of bottle gourd in Europe date to the Roman era. As in the case of other plant foods and fruits, the bottle gourd’s western advance was probably a very slow process. It is possible that the vegetable found its way into Europe not directly from Asia but from Egypt, where bottle gourd seems to have been cultivated since Pharaonic times. Egypt, with its major port of Alexandria, was a gateway to a number of exports bound to other regions of the Mediterranean. As Egyptian roses were exported to Rome, so seeds of vegetables may have found their way to overseas land plots. Pliny does say that the finest leeks came from Egypt, Ostia, and Ariccia.Footnote ¹¹³

The study on the bottle gourd remains from Oedenburg and those from Petinesca have also revealed a variation in the morphometry (external dimensions) of the seeds between the first-century taxa and the third-century ones. This suggests that, during those 200 years, different varieties of landraces (plants adapting to local conditions) were present in northern Europe. In other words, plants with different characteristics had been selected and developed as suitable for cultivation in particular local conditions.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Although one cannot be sure of whether the bottle gourds excavated at Oedenburg were cultivated locally or had been imported, the fact that Oedenburg produced the largest archaeological assemblage of bottle-gourd remains known for the Roman period, that an almost complete example of gourd found there included the stalk, and the fact that bottle gourds can be grown in the area today, all suggest that the gourds recovered in the excavation had been grown locally.

DNA studies are steadily contributing to our knowledge of the diffusion of horticulture and introduction of new plants, as this is the only way to identify the genetic make-up of a given plant and determine whether it was developed from local wild varieties or foreign types. We have already seen that Pliny claimed that the cherry, after Lucullus introduced the plant into Italy from Pontus, was later introduced into Britain, turning this once ‘exotic’ tree into an ideological symbol of civilization for the newly conquered province. Pliny may have been right as far as ideology went, and cherries are attested in waterlogged deposits of the Roman period in Britain from different types of site (urban, military, and rural, both elite and ‘lesser’, following van der Veen’s classification).Footnote ¹¹⁵ Their incidence does increase over time, peaking in the later Roman period. However, cherries as indicators of Roman ‘civilizing’ activity must come with a caveat, because to my knowledge, complete DNA studies of the cherry looking at whether the cultivars present in Britain and northern Europe can be traced back to cherry trees introduced by the Romans are not yet available. The genome sequencing of sweet cherry was recently mapped,Footnote ¹¹⁶ and some studies have looked at the genetic make-up of cherry cultivars in specific regions, in Turkey and the Ukraine, but not at the history of this plant in northwestern Europe.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Roman interest in transplanting and introducing new plants into Italy and the provinces of the empire included ornamental plants besides edible species. The rosa gallica, one of the main types of rose grown by the Romans (and the Greeks) together with the rosa damascena and rosa centifolia,Footnote ¹¹⁸ may have originated in the Far East, as suggested by recent research. The roses of the Romans, as attested by textual and visual evidence, were red/dark pink or white, but the double red rose, which flowers several times during the year, prevails in the depictions in wall paintings.Footnote ¹¹⁹ It has been observed that, in the spontaneous European rose, the red colour does not exist, and that the colour red and the repeated flowering are instead characteristic of the rosa chinensis or Chinese rose.Footnote ¹²⁰ For that reason, it may be that the ‘Roman’ red rose so often depicted in Pompeian wall paintings had in fact originated in the Far East,Footnote ¹²¹ probably reaching the Mediterranean via Persia and then Greece and/or Egypt, just as the peach tree had been introduced into Europe from the East via Asia Minor.Footnote ¹²²

Agents of Diffusion: Soldiers, Farmers, Tradesmen

In a study of the introduction of new crops/plants in the Islamic world, Andrew Watson has formulated tree and plant diffusion in this way: ‘before it came to be a common crop in a region, a plant may have been brought there on a number of different occasions by agents who belonged to different social classes, were actuated by different motives and operated independently of one another’.Footnote ¹²³ By analogy for Roman times, common people travelling or migrating to a different region outside their own could have brought with them seeds, live plants, and cuttings of plants they used to grow at home. Of course, the transferral of the plant(s) went along with the technical knowledge needed to grow them successfully; ‘difficult skills are most readily diffused by the migration of those who possess them’.Footnote ¹²⁴ Watson illustrates the need for plants and technical and practical skills with the cases of Sicily and Spain after the Christian reconquest: Frederic II sought from the Levant two individuals who knew how to grow pumpkins/squashes well (duos homines qui bene sciant facere zuccarum), whereas Jaime II looked to Sicily for two Saracen slaves, of whom one was to be expert in (growing) cotton, the other in sugar cane (duos sclavos sarracenos quorum alter sit magistro cotonis et alter de cannamellis).Footnote ¹²⁵

Although the details of exactly how many and which plants were introduced by the Romans in territories conquered by them are debated,Footnote ¹²⁶ there is a general consensus that the Romans did introduce a number of plants into the provinces and that it was in the Roman period that horticulture and arboriculture became much more widespread and pursued at commercial rather than subsistence level. Many fruit trees that are thought to have been introduced by the Romans have no native progenitor in northern Europe, meaning that the plants had to be introduced from elsewhere, and currently there is no evidence of their cultivation in northern Europe prior to the Roman era. In the case of Roman Britain, for instance, it has been noted that a ‘significant innovation in Romano-British farming concerns the introduction and development of horticulture’ and that the cultivation of vegetables, fruits, and herbs for nearby markets was, on the basis of current evidence, ‘established during the Roman period, as part of a wider introduction of some fifty new food plants’.Footnote ¹²⁷ The apple has, at times, been said to be a fruit tree introduced into Britain by the Romans. This attribution was not universally accepted because Europe, including Britain, did have as native species the wild crab apple (malus sylvestris), which may have been the progenitor of the cultivated apple. However, genetic studies of the apple have clarified that the progenitor of the cultivated apple is, in fact, the malus sieversii, native of northwestern China and the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, discarding a connection with the native crab apple. Therefore, an introduction of the domesticated apple by the Romans is possible.Footnote ¹²⁸ The introduction of the walnut, plum, and pear to Britain in the Roman period is considered uncontroversial, since none of the wild ancestors of these cultivated trees had been native to the island.Footnote ¹²⁹ Likewise, certain fruits such as the peach, and vegetables such as bottle gourd and beets are considered a Roman introduction in central and north European regions.

We have seen that the literary sources mention a few cases of military officers or provincial governors moving plants from one region to the other. Military sites may have played an important role in the spread of new plants in the provinces and development of local varieties. It is well known that military settlements generated aggregate demand for a range of foodstuffs, from staples to exotic plant foods, and that many of these products were imported to the military stations from other provinces and the Mediterranean regions.Footnote ¹³⁰ Often, military units stationed in a region had been enlisted from elsewhere in the empire, such as the soldiers based at Neuss in Germania, believed to have come from eastern and southern provinces, or the auxiliary units at Velsen, which seem to have been made of Spanish, Illyrian, Gaulish, and eastern recruits.Footnote ¹³¹ Soldiers moving from one region of the empire to another which had very different foods and cuisine would seek the ‘taste of home’.Footnote ¹³² Livarda observes that Mediterranean and exotic spices and flavourings followed the army and ‘that an extra effort was possibly made, especially in the more politically unstable first phase of the Roman occupation in the north, to access produce from “back home”’.Footnote ¹³³ Research has shown that military sites, especially intramural ones, and major towns in Roman Britain were where the highest number of imported plant food and new foods were found.Footnote ¹³⁴ In addition to imports, however, products were also acquired locally and some military sites may have become centres of acclimatization and cultivation of some of the plants initially imported in the area when the military camps or transport routes were set up.

‘Two modii of ground beans, twenty chickens, one hundred apples, if you can find nice ones, one hundred or two hundred eggs, if they are for sale there at a fair price…’.Footnote ¹³⁵ So goes a fragmentary letter from Vindolanda, a shopping list dating to around ad 100, which alludes to the local market for horticultural produce. It was perhaps a letter sent to a slave of the praetorum, giving him instructions on what provisions to purchase at a nearby market. Despite its fragmentary state, it indirectly attests commercial horticulture: wherever the unnamed recipient of the letter was, the writer expects that he will find large quantities of apples available for purchase, and that he will probably have a choice about their quality, maybe even the type since he is instructed to get them only if they are ‘good-looking’, ‘nice’ (formonsa). This was not happening in a highly urbanized province, but on the far northern limit of the Roman world. This shopping list also hints at the role fruit had in the diet, alongside more common staples such as beans and olives, and at how the army was a generator of aggregate demands for certain goods which the army itself may have helped to spread in the provinces. Indeed, if the hypothesis that the cultivated apple tree was introduced into Roman Britain by the Romans is correct, this text would show us how much the cultivation of the apple had spread in the country in the six decades after the conquest, and the possible link between the geographic mobility of military personnel and dispersal of plants not native to a region.Footnote ¹³⁶

There is archaeological evidence for cultivation of probable vegetable plots (small plots at times defined by shallow gullies) near military sites and vici.Footnote ¹³⁷ That horticulture took place near the military camps – whether with the input of locals or soldiers is impossible to determine – is indicated by evidence from Vindolanda-Chesterholm, Wallsend, and Housesteads on Hadrian’s Wall; archaeobotanical remains of vegetables or traces in small irregular plots identified outside the walls of the forts have been connected to local horticultural activity.Footnote ¹³⁸

Far from Britain and at the other extreme of the empire, soldiers in Egypt have given us good archaeobotanical and documentary evidence from the Eastern Desert that offers the most complete picture of the kind of vegetables the military might grow. There, despite the hostile environment, soldiers tended vegetable patches created by bringing humus from the Nile Valley and irrigating by well water.Footnote ¹³⁹ Ostraka discovered at the site of Mons Claudianus show that personnel and soldiers stationed at the quarry and its surroundings were engaged in the cultivation of kitchen gardens. Several letters dated to the mid second century ad sent by a Dioscurus, a soldier who was growing vegetables at a praesidium not far from the main camp at Mons Claudianus, mention a range of vegetables.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ For instance, in one letter Dioscurus states to have sent to various individuals he names, and who must have been at the main camp, several bunches of lettuce and three bunches of cabbage; another letter lists three bunches of beets and one of chicory.Footnote ¹⁴¹ In a letter sent from a certain Ammonios to an Athenodoros, we find mention that ‘the garden has been damaged by salt’, probably due to excessive evaporation leaving sodium deposits in the soil.Footnote ¹⁴² With irrigation and careful soil preparation, including use of fertilizers, it was possible to grow these vegetables in the Eastern Desert.Footnote ¹⁴³ Indeed, one other letter makes reference to having received a basket full of excrement, requesting another one if possible, clearly to be used as fertilizer for the vegetable patch: this letter also sombrely informs the addressees that ‘the vegetables have not grown yet’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

The soldier Dioscurus’ letters do not tell us whether he – or others like him – had been officially assigned by his superiors to ‘vegetable patch’ duty, or whether he was able to do so on the side while stationed at a quiet praesidium. It is however certain that a small number of people, including his superiors, regularly benefited from these horticultural efforts to add variety to their diets. Such efforts were of particular importance at a site like this, in an isolated location and in a hostile natural environment which did not offer local provisions. It is also clear that the soldiers and personnel had either brought seeds with them to the station in the desert or had made it their business to acquire or request them from caravans coming from the Nile Valley. In this very dry environment, the creation and cultivation of fruit orchards was out of the question, but at other sites which did not have such a dry and hot climate and where the army presence was going to be over the medium to long term, one could also expect the cultivation of some fruit trees in addition to vegetables.

As discussed earlier, ancient texts report some information on new plants or varieties of known fruit trees being introduced from one region to another by officers or even the legate of a province, as in the case of Vitellius senior and the various kinds of fig he brought back from Syria and the pistachio that the eques Pompeius Flaccus had transplanted to Hispania.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ But these two cases are just examples involving individuals of high rank, whose importations of trees and plants would have been worth noticing by name, at least by Pliny. However, trees and plants have a much humbler, and probably more widely diverse and diffused story. A potent analogy with agricultural transformation in the medieval Islamic world may provide the historical template for the Roman context: besides royal or elite botanical gardens and enclosures with exotic plants, farmers, traders, and other ordinary individuals were the real movers of species and their promoters.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Roman soldiers, relying on the movements of traders, on the military communication networks, and on their own personal knowledge and contacts, may have been able to ask more readily for seeds, live plants, and cuttings on their own. A document recently discovered at Vindolanda suggests so.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ A letter from the decurion Masclus to the commander Iulius Verecundus mentions a cleaving knife and plant cuttings (to be used for propagation). The relevant section of the text reads:

As observed by the editors of the text and by Adams, planta here is used with the same technical meaning found in the agronomists: to refer to a shoot, slip, or cutting for propagation.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The cleaving knife was the tool used to take these plant cuttings; it may refer to a tool used to separate a sucker from the parent plant.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Although Masclus is later attested as stationed at Vindolanda, at the time of this letter he was clearly somewhere else, and belonging to a different unit than the commander Verecundus. We have here an example of officers of different units corresponding and exchanging favours and requests.Footnote ¹⁵¹ It might be worth noting that another letter found during the same excavation campaign and published together with the one just discussed contains a request for ‘greens … that is the shoots both of cabbage and of turnip’ to be sent by carriage.Footnote ¹⁵² This one is a letter of the commander Iulius Verecundus to his slave Audax, but it is unclear whether it refers to vegetables cultivated in the vicinity of the fort by personnel attached to it or to vegetables purchased at a nearby market. It can, however, be said that the plant cuttings sent by Masclus were certainty not from cabbage or turnip; these are plants grown from seed, not propagated from cuttings. The reference to the cleaving knife and the cuttings, therefore, suggests the practice of some kind of arboriculture, rather than vegetable cultivation. Pruning hooks, together with iron spades, were indeed discovered in excavations at Roman military sites.Footnote ¹⁵³ It is also remarkable that a cleaving knife needed for these horticultural operations should be in short supply. Surely the Roman military had access to a range of cutting implements and different types of blade, but the letter asks for the return of this specific tool, after it had been lent out. This detail tells us two things: first, that the writer of the letter (and the person who had borrowed the cleaving knife) considered it absolutely necessary to use a specialist tool for the horticultural tasks they wanted to carry out; second, that this type of cultrum scissorium was not that common where these two individuals were located and could not be easily acquired locally or made by the military smith.

A possible military connection can be tentatively suggested in the case of the cultivation of the peach attested archaeologically in Switzerland, at the second-century ad Roman site of Cham-Hagendorn, which we will revisit in Chapter 5. Although this site, on the basis of the structures identified, functioned as a commercial and religious centre, it had a likely connection with the Roman army. The large and very well-preserved Roman water mill that was discovered there in the 1940s probably processed cereals that were, at least in part, destined for the Roman army, since excavations recovered the badge of a beneficiarius or senior soldier assigned to special administrative duties.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ In addition, the discovery in the 1940s excavations of writing implements (styli) and weighing scales with a capacity of up to 40 kg suggests that the cereals/flour were weighed and recorded on site. This kind of accurate recording and the use of writing implements outside urbanized contexts can often be connected to Roman military presence and its administrative procedures.

Thus, the peach tree of eastern and Asia Minor origins might have arrived in Switzerland on the shores of Lake Zugersee with movement of the Roman military in the second century, and then the cultivation of the peach slowly spread to the rest of the region.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Over ten years ago, Van der Veen suggested that if vici took on the role of supplying local military garrisons with vegetables and possibly fruits, this could have ‘thwarted the development of horticulture in the north and west [of Britain]’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Fruit cultivation in Britain may have started on a small scale, and only subsequently, via grafting and vegetative propagation, commercial orchards may have developed.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ The technique of grafting itself appears to have been introduced into northwestern Europe only in the Roman period.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

Aristotle’s notion that locomotion was proof of taxonomic superiority in the natural world did not account for the diffusion, by humans (and animals in other, less purposeful ways), of trees and plants. Plants move very well, and sometimes very quickly. This diffusion must have been happening even in Aristotle’s day, but the phenomenon became noticeable, and noticed, mainly in the late Republic and early empire. The inevitable first notices were of a social, civic, and military nature: naming new species for great men became the norm, and the benefits of military victory were exhibited, then diffused (how, we do not know precisely) within Italy. At the same time, both products of Roman Italy – thought of as a conspicuously fertile landmass by Varro – and those of its new ‘imperial’ imports were considered, at least in (Pliny’s and others’) elite version of agricultural history, as somehow instances of Roman civilizing processes of so-called barbarian landscapes and agricultural practices.

The elite version of trees and plants may well be, essentially, quite partial and biased, in fact irrelevant and merely picturesque to what actually happened historically. In reality, clever farmers moving around the Mediterranean and throughout the Roman empire, traders pushing seeds, grafting, actual plants, and new techniques, multi-property owners getting ideas from their estate agents abroad, officers learning new things to personal advantage but also looking to keep their soldiers happy and well fed, and soldiers using their spare time in a little yard may have, in the course of agriculture’s Roman history, done more for horticultural diffusion than elite naming prestige. The diffusion of plants is not a social game: it is a matter of people moving around to see what they can do in another place.