The Augustan period was an era of profound transformations. Rome’s political structure changed from within while, on the outside, the Republic was being ‘restored’ and traditions of old ‘revived’. In fact, many had been invented or completely re-elaborated by Augustus. There were changes in the way aristocratic families could manifest their achievements – precluded were military triumphs or large euergetic projects in the city of Rome – changes in the moral values to uphold, in the nature and structure of the army, in how the provinces were administered, in the composition of the senate, and, above all, changes in the citizen body. In the period between the lex Iulia of 90 bc, which extended Roman citizenship to the socii, and the end of Augustus’ reign in ad 14, ‘citizenship had not only expanded, it had changed its nature’.Footnote ¹ The important period of transition from Republic to empire, when Rome experienced these changes in her culture, society, and identity, has been referred to – ironically and provocatively – as ‘revolution’ in influential studies. It will not have escaped the reader that the title of this chapter alludes to both Ronald Syme’s Roman Revolution and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill’s Rome’s Cultural Revolution. The allusion is intentional. These crucial years in Rome’s history, normally remembered for the ‘fall of the Republic’ and the ‘birth of the rule of one man’, were also the years during which another type of ‘revolution’ took place: the emergence of large-scale horticulture, with improvements in productivity levels and an increase in the number of varietals available to consumers. The changes were practical and affected the economy – improved irrigation facilities, selection of better cultivars, for instance – but also cultural. As observed by Thibodeau, the available evidence suggests that it was in the Augustan period that the horticulture treatise as a distinct genre first came into existence.Footnote ² In this period, the evolution in Rome’s sociopolitical structure also profoundly affected traditional modes of elite self-representation. While benefactions in the capital became a de facto imperial monopoly and forced the aristocracy to turn their attention to the towns of Italy, the nature of the elite’s intellectual production also changed. Explicit political content in literary works was very problematic and new ways of talking about romanitas had to be sought. Didactic manuals on agriculture followed a well-established tradition and conformed to the most traditional of elite values. They were, on the whole, not controversial.Footnote ³ As Augustus turned to simplicity and tradition in his household, and used the old metaphor equating the care of plants to the care of the state, so did a number of members of the elite turn to agricultural matters in their intellectual production.Footnote ⁴ However, the emergence of the horticulture treatise in the Augustan era also addressed, on the one hand, the elite landowners’ real concerns and interests in the increased role of horticultural cultivations in proximity of the urban centres that had experienced great population growth, and, on the other, the introduction of certain plants in provincial territories where these did not exist before and the search for the best varieties to grow on the farms of colonial settlers and overseas estates of Roman elite owners. The return of stability after the civil wars and the demographic growth seen in Roman Italy and parts of the West, in conjunction with the programme of colonial foundation, were key factors in explaining both the changes in horticultural practices and the elite ideologically charged interest in arboriculture which I shall address in Chapter 4.

Horticulture and the Roman Suburbium

Rome, even in the early period of her development and then as a flourishing urban centre later, generated horticultural cultivation in her suburban lands and proximate accessible territories. The city’s inhabitants used spaces nearby for burials, manufacturing and, as we have seen in Chapter 1, for the horti, the villas-with-gardens of the wealthy, but these uses must have been relatively small in relation to cultivation for meeting the ever-growing needs of the urban population.

The conditions of supplying a concentrated urban population with fresh and even lightly preserved produce in preindustrial times differed little from antiquity until well into the nineteenth century, so it is not surprising that Rome’s suburbium had been the place for the small vegetable plots of the people and the rural estates of the rich. In most historical periods (and in many places still today), horticultural production is to be found in close proximity to urban centres or even in towns themselves, as is nicely illustrated in the commercial orchards excavated within the urban perimeter of ancient Pompeii. Perishable fruit and vegetables not suitable for long transport had to be grown near the consumers, unless it was possible to extend their life by drying or liquid storage. In antiquity, fruit was often preserved: it could be dried, a method most often used for figs, but also for apples and pears, which in this form could make up a good share of the peasants’ diet in winter.Footnote ⁵ Alternatively, fruit could be preserved in brine, must, or oxymel, a mixture of honey and vinegar.Footnote ⁶ Mau reported that in the shops of/near the Macellum of Pompeii charred figs, grape, plums, chestnuts and lentils were discovered, as well as fruit in glass vessels.Footnote ⁷ As has been observed, the large diffusion of glass containers in the years preceding the eruption of ad 79 probably had an impact on food preservation techniques.Footnote ⁸ Columella does indeed refer to the use of glass containers when giving prescriptions on how to preserve vegetables and fruit.Footnote ⁹ But fruit, and especially vegetables, were also consumed fresh, and in the ancient world, with its constraints on the speed of transport and lack of refrigeration, the distance between the place of cultivation and the market was very important to both producers and customers.

The distance from the fields to the market in conditions similar to those of Rome in the early days of urban growth has been calibrated in practical economic terms. The general principle of optimum land use in relation to distance to market was expressed by Johann Heinrich von Thünen in his The Isolated State (Der isolierte Staat) model of agricultural location in Reference von Thünen and Wartenberg1826.Footnote ¹⁰ Von Thünen’s model predicts that, other considerations being equal, perishable crops, whose profitability declines with the increasing of the distance from the market, will be cultivated closer to towns. As one moves further away, this model predicts that land will be devoted to silviculture, intensive arable rotation, arable with long ley, and so forth.Footnote ¹¹ The further away from the market the land is, the more it will be used for products that can withstand a longer journey (e.g., cereals, olive oil) and whose prices are thus more resilient to the effects of transport on them over progressively greater distances.

Ancient historians and archaeologists have adopted von Thünen’s model, and other theoretical models ultimately deriving from it – among them the central place theory – as a useful way to understand the relationship of the ancient city with its hinterland and with other settlements within a region. The city of Rome, which was a high-consumption metropolis by both ancient reckoning and modern standards, fits von Thünen’s model.Footnote ¹² It was in Rome’s suburbium that perishable crops for the capital were grown and where the so-called pastio villatica – the production of high-quality fresh foods such as game, birds, and fish in the context of the villa estate – boomed. It is not surprising then that, as we shall see in Chapter 5, the earliest archaeological attestation for large-scale fruit cultivation comes from a section of the suburbium very close to Rome.

In terms of the surviving ancient writings on agriculture, horticultural production was advised as suitable for properties in proximity of cities and recognized as commercially important as early as Cato. He refers to suburban properties as being well suited for orchards, particularly for the cultivation of apples, pears, pomegranates, and quinces, and advises to grow flowers and vegetables on properties near a city, to be sold on the urban market.Footnote ¹³ Cato’s often quoted passage on the hierarchy, in terms of best use, of land in commercial agriculture places the irrigated vegetable garden (hortus irriguus) in second position, right after the vineyard.Footnote ¹⁴ Later on, at the start of the de Re Rustica dialogue, Varro’s character Cn. Tremellius Scrofa stresses the importance of cultivations that not only aesthetically enhance agricultural land, such as planting fruit and olive trees in rows, but, more importantly, increase the value of the land and give secure profit to the farmer.Footnote ¹⁵ The passage plays on the semantic ambivalence of fructus and its derived adjective fructuosus: the words refer to the actual fruit/crop, but also to gain and what is fruitful, both in terms of productivity and financial return.

However, among the three Republican and early imperial agronomists (Cato, Varro, and Columella), Columella is the writer who devotes considerable attention to horticulture. He explicitly states that horticultural produce was more widely consumed at his time and that therefore horticulture had gained greater importance, prompting him to treat the subject in greater detail than the earlier writers. Columella’s text has led scholars to claim that market-oriented, large-scale horticultural enterprises only began in the imperial period due to specific socioeconomic changes.Footnote ¹⁶ This is difficult to believe, because Rome already had a sizeable urban population at the start of the first century bc: 375,000 inhabitants are estimated for 100 bc and, by 50 bc, the city’s population had probably reached 600,000, an almost 70 per cent increase in two generations.Footnote ¹⁷ From those estimates alone, substantial market-oriented horticulture can be posited for this period to satisfy the dietary needs of the capital. It should be noted too that the mid first century bc is also when agri cultura as a set linguistic unit is first securely attested;Footnote ¹⁸ possibly the discourse about farming as an abstract notion was in part a result of the growing demand on agricultural production in connection to demographic changes. The Forum Holitorium, the vegetable market of Rome, which in its maximum extension is thought to have measured c.20,000 m² (2 ha), existed from the early Republican period, namely before 213 bc when Livy reports its destruction by fire.Footnote ¹⁹ In addition, growing needs for irrigation and for irrigation infrastructure in some sections of the suburbium can be seen already in the second century bc, leading Roman jurists to develop detailed legal solutions to regulate competition for water resources.Footnote ²⁰ In Rome, where prices in general were higher for the simple fact that demand greatly exceeded the offer, fruit may have fetched high prices. At the start of the de Re Rustica, Varro refers to the shops at the top of the Via Sacra as shops ‘where fruit brings its weight in gold’.Footnote ²¹

Thus, the spaces for horticulture were, by necessity, an important feature of Rome’s suburbium (or of the suburban area of any other substantial urban agglomeration); this use of the land predates the imperial era. For example, evidence dating as early as the Archaic period suggests that the area trans Tiberim on the western bank of the Tiber was used for horticulture. A sixth-century bc hortus, in use until the early third century bc, was discovered in the area of the modern Via Gaetano Sacchi in Rome at the foot of the Janiculum Hill.Footnote ²² The vegetable patch had ditches and furrows defining various planting beds, and the presence in them of small ceramic sherds suggests that an effort was made to improve drainage of the soil, using sherds as gravel is used in modern tiling-beds. Sherds may also be an indication of manuring practices (from spoil heaps made of compostable waste, night-soil, and household refuse including broken pottery which were used to enrich the soil), and this would suggest a certain sophistication in agricultural practices. In addition to vegetables, the excavators noted that vines and fruit trees might also have been cultivated here.Footnote ²³

The Via Gaetano Sacchi vegetable patch was rather small, but substantial infrastructure destined for horticulture may have already been in place by the late Republic. In fact, it is possible that public aqueducts were built as much for the irrigation of private landholdings in the suburbium as for the urban population. A lexical note in Festus reveals that already at the time of Cato, in the first half of the second century bc, a specific watercourse was destined for the irrigation of the horti located below the Via Ardeatina and Via Asinaria, as far as the Via Latina.Footnote ²⁴ The aqueduct Anio Vetus, built in the third century bc, was, at least at the time of Frontinus, used largely for irrigation and industry because of the poor quality of the water.Footnote ²⁵ Later, the Aqua Alsietina or Augusta, the aqueduct built by Augustus in 2 bc to supply the transtiberine regions, carried water that was not suitable for drinking due to its poor quality but that was used for the irrigation of the area’s gardens as well as filling the Naumachia Augusti on occasion of public spectacles with naval displays.Footnote ²⁶

The evidence (archaeological and literary) for large-scale horticulture in the mid and late Republic is admittedly scant, but we cannot conclude from such few facts that so large and growing a city did not generate a considerable demand for fresh food from its suburbs. In the case of more durable archaeological evidence related to the processing of grapes and olives such as presses and collection tanks, we do see that Rome’s suburbium made a notable contribution to the city’s needs, even when large-scale imports brought to Rome and environs wine and oil from overseas.Footnote ²⁷ It might be impossible to precisely reconstruct the extent to which Rome’s suburbium was devoted to horticultural and arboricultural cultivations, and trace changes over time, but it is certain that horticulture was important in these territories proximate to Rome. The difference drastic changes in communication infrastructure could make for agricultural strategies can be illustrated by the case of the coastal territory of Centumcellae, north of Rome. This area, known for the production of olive oil and mediocre wine,Footnote ²⁸ seems to have witnessed a notable shift towards fruit cultivation once Trajan’s new harbour was built at Centumcellae.Footnote ²⁹ Years ago Maffei hypothesized that the wild pear trees (perastri) present in notable concentration in this region are likely descendants of ancient Roman cultivations, since documentary evidence from the Middle Ages onwards does not mention the cultivation of pears in the area. In the case of the wild olive trees, a preliminary study of the DNA of these trees extracted from leaves and fruit of wild olive plants present at various archaeological sites with remains of Roman farms/presses in the Centumcellae area has concluded that these are ‘descendants’ of plants being cultivated in Roman or possibly even earlier times.Footnote ³⁰ In Maffei’s view, the wild pear trees possibly attest a shift from olive to fruit orchards.Footnote ³¹ If this is correct, it would be a nice illustration of how improvements in travel time – the idea being that the new harbour infrastructure allowed Rome to be reached by sea with ease – could change the distance-to-market size expressed in von Thünen’s model.Footnote ³²

One issue that we can try to address, however, is at what point we should place the development of fully functional, large-scale horticultural activity. The early imperial era was a period of ‘acceleration’ in many fields, from the volume of trade to building activity, to mention just a few.Footnote ³³ Was this period the moment of big differentiation also for large-scale horticulture or do we see just a continuation of what went on before? Was the change real or is this the impression we get because of the nature of the surviving evidence?

Horticultural Treatises: Late Republic and Early Empire

While various elements suggest the rising horticultural role of Rome’s immediate surroundings already during the late Republic, it is in Columella’s work that the growth of the market for foodstuffs and the shift in the supply–demand balance for vegetables and fruit can be most clearly detected. Although Columella depended greatly on Varro’s agricultural manual, often repeating information found in the earlier treatise, there are also fundamental differences in the viewpoint taken by these two authors.Footnote ³⁴ These differences reflect the historical changes that had occurred between the first century bc and the first century ad, foremost demographic growth and social and political turmoil followed by the emergence of a new political system and societal fabric.Footnote ³⁵ Columella explicitly declares that horticulture had gained greater importance at his time because its produce was more widely consumed and that therefore he feels compelled to treat the subject in greater detail than the earlier writers:

As we have seen in Chapter 1, the Latin term hortus can indicate a range of green spaces, from the humble vegetable patch to the elegant suburban residences of the aristocracy. Hortus can generically refer to the space where vegetables, flowers, and fruit were cultivated, including vineyards; sometimes it can be accompanied by a modifier, such as hortus holitorius, the proper vegetable garden, or hortus vinearius, which featured vines.Footnote ³⁶ However, the late Republican and early imperial authors tend to make a distinction in their lexical use between hortus employed to refer to the vegetable and herb garden, pomarium to indicate the fruit orchard, and vinea meaning the vineyard as a contained and distinct unit. Such linguistic differentiation in Latin authors represents a clearer formulation than what is attested in the Greek authors, on whom the Latin writers relied as models and sources. In Greek, kepos, which simply means garden, can cover all the cultivation possibilities enumerated above. The linguistic differentiation we find in late Republican Latin very likely reflects actual changes in agricultural practices, with commercial agriculture becoming more specialized, and with the use of agricultural land defined according to class of cultivars: fruit trees, vegetables, and vines.Footnote ³⁷

A good degree of specialization in horticulture, with given geographic areas being renowned for a specific type of vegetable or fruit, was well established by the mid first century ad. Literary texts offer some clues. They might not give us the complete panorama as to what customers in the markets were able to choose, but they indicate how specific sites located within Rome’s hinterland engaged in commercial horticulture and arboriculture, and were known for specific horticultural products. So we find that Crustumerium to the north of Rome was known for its pears;Footnote ³⁸ Nomentum for fruit;Footnote ³⁹ Tibur for various types of fruit, specifically mulberries, figs, and apples;Footnote ⁴⁰ Praeneste for nuts;Footnote ⁴¹ Aricia for leeks and cabbage;Footnote ⁴² Alba for almonds;Footnote ⁴³ Tusculum for onions;Footnote ⁴⁴ Ostia for leeks and mulberries;Footnote ⁴⁵ and Rome herself for turnips, mulberries, and figs.Footnote ⁴⁶ As we will see in Chapter 4, many new varieties of fruit were developed during the first sixty years or so of the first century ad, in contrast to the previous two centuries: whereas Cato names only five types of pear and six of fig, Columella names eighteen types of pear and seventeen of fig, and Pliny the Elder thirty-nine and twenty-nine, respectively. The increase in the number of varietals is impressive. Furthermore, the early first century ad was also the time when two novel fruit trees were cultivated in Italy: the peach and the apricot.Footnote ⁴⁷

However, while it is impossible to escape the idea that commercial horticulture had existed on a considerable and well-organized scale at least for the whole of the first century bc, it is certainly true that agricultural writers – and we must assume actual growers as well – in the early principate changed gears.Footnote ⁴⁸ For a start, several treatises focusing specifically on horticulture and viticulture were composed in this period, the two top categories in the profit-making use of land that Cato had identified so many years earlier. There was a real spurt of writing about different types of specialized agricultural cultivation. Intellectuals of different backgrounds, many from the circles of Augustan aristocracy,Footnote ⁴⁹ wrote on these agricultural topics, including the medical author Celsus, who wrote a treatise on agriculture.Footnote ⁵⁰

Columella and Pliny the Elder both cite many writers and itemize numerous treatises on agriculture from the generations fairly proximate to themselves, especially those of the principate of Augustus and his Julio-Claudian successors. These agricultural treatises are lost to us, and in most cases we know only the names of their authors and their titles. The phenomenon raises at least two questions. The first is a cultural question: was the interest in the subject of horticulture and specialized market agriculture (arboriculture, viticulture) exemplified by these literary works due to a specific development in elite self-representation caused by the sociopolitical changes and by the ideology of the time, which celebrated peace and the return of the Golden Age? The second question might be: were the agricultural treatises in their new abundance the outcome of political stability and favourable economic conditions which allowed technical improvements and development in market-oriented agricultural production and these new profitable enterprises? Or do the two questions represent a historical continuum, with both having one answer?

The scant information on the existence of many of these treatises comes from Pliny’s encyclopaedic work, when he lists the sources he had used for the various sections of the Natural History. For his discussion of vegetables and horticulture in Book 19, he cites as his sources a number of writers who authored cepurika, literally works on ‘garden stuff’, inspired by the Alexandrian κηπουρικά.Footnote ⁵¹ A number of these lost authors were writers active in the Augustan period specifically or in the first half of the first century ad more generally. Sabinus Tiro, for instance, is one of Pliny’s sources about whom we know next to nothing. Tiro is mentioned only by Pliny as a source, and is said to have written a work on gardening, which he dedicated to Maecenas, the creator, together with Lucullus and Sallust, of one of the most famous horti of Rome, whose essential characteristics may have been captured by the verses of the Elegiae in Maecenatem.Footnote ⁵² Maecenas’ gardens were a symbol of withdrawal from politics but also, to paraphrase Labate, of political ambition of a different nature than occupying public offices.Footnote ⁵³

There are four authors to whom Pliny attributes works expressly entitled cepurika or whose subject matter can be classified under the cepurika label: Caesennius, Castritius, Firmus, and Potitus. This last author is Valerius Messalla Potitus, the suffect consul of 29 bc and cousin of Messalla Corvinus, and probably the earliest of the four named by Pliny.Footnote ⁵⁴ Potitus also had a wine named after him; evidently his agricultural interests included also the more traditional and ‘aristocratic’ viticulture.Footnote ⁵⁵ Castritius or, with alternative spelling, Castricius, may possibly be the C. Castricius Calvus Agricola mentioned in an inscription discovered in Forlì (ancient Forum Livii) in the nineteenth century and dated on the basis of letter forms and formulae to the years ad 1–14.Footnote ⁵⁶ The connection between the Castricius, author of a work on horticulture, and the individual of the inscription, suggested by Carandini many years ago,Footnote ⁵⁷ is tempting and almost too good to be true, because the epigraphic text defines the freedmen of C. Castricius Calvus Agricola as those who ạgros bene [et strenue colant] (‘those who cultivate the fields well and strenuously’; the integration, as far as the verb is concerned, seems uncontroversial).Footnote ⁵⁸ The additional cognomen ‘Agricola’ that this Castricius has (or should it be understood as ‘agricola’, a qualifier, rather than as part of his name?) may also be relevant, as it may allude to his knowledge and expertise in matters agricultural. Indeed, later the epigraphic text indicates that Castricius had experiential knowledge and had taught his freedmen. To these four authors mentioned by Pliny, the Augustan lexicographer Cloatius Verus can be added: he wrote a catalogue of different types of fruit, quoted much later by Macrobius.Footnote ⁵⁹

In addition to works on horticulture, the first half of the first century ad also saw the composition of a number of treatises focusing on viticulture specifically. Columella devotes considerable attention to commercial viticulture in his work, stressing its profitability, and Pliny went as far as claiming that profits from viticulture could even exceed those made in the Far East trade.Footnote ⁶⁰ But Columella was not the only one in that period to feel the need to write about viticulture in some detail. One of the lost authors known to us only by name was a certain Iulius Atticus, who wrote a work on viticulture; in his de Re Rustica Columella mentions him as a contemporary in the 40s–50s ad.Footnote ⁶¹ Iulius Graecinus, the father of Cn. Iulius Agricola, Tacitus’ father-in-law, is also mentioned in that same passage as a ‘disciple’ of Iulius Atticus and someone who wrote two books on viticulture, a more elegant and learned work than that of his predecessor.Footnote ⁶² Both Iulius Graecinus and Iulius Atticus were of Gallic origin and their interest in viticulture was a response to considerable expansion of viticulture in Gaul following the programme of provincial colonial settlements initiated by Caesar and continued by Augustus, a topic further discussed in Chapter 7. There is abundant and widespread evidence from archaeological sites in Gaul about trenches for vineyards, and wine processing facilities attest to a boom in Gallic viticulture in the Roman period.Footnote ⁶³ These highly organized initiatives must have stimulated interest in identifying the best cultivars to be successfully grown in the new areas where the new settlers had received a piece of land to farm and where pro-Roman local elites had been building up sizeable landholdings. Within the span of a few years Gaul, which in the Republic had imported large quantities of wine from Italy, became a sizeable wine exporter. Selecting the best type of grape vine to grow in these new farms must have been a primary concern and important decision for the new colonists and aspiring viticulturists. Indeed, an occasion when Columella references Iulius Graecinus is precisely about the need to search for the best vine cuttings and for the best-suited plants for a given location, or when discussing wine yields for different cultivars.Footnote ⁶⁴

Although he is not among the authors of literary works on horticulture and/or viticulture, in the first century ad the equestrian Caius Matius (Calvena), the son of his homonymous father who had been very close to Caesar, a friend of Cicero,Footnote ⁶⁵ and a supporter and friend of Octavian/Augustus,Footnote ⁶⁶ is remembered for having developed a new variety of apple, the mala matiana, which, as we have seen in Chapter 2, may have found particular popularity in the Iberian Peninsula.Footnote ⁶⁷ Matius is remembered also for having ‘invented’ the art of clipping trees, what we call topiary or, alternatively, the art of hard pruning in order to dwarf trees and control their height and spread.Footnote ⁶⁸ It seems that Matius had landed estates in the north of Italy, where he developed the new varietal. Athenaeus reports appreciation for these types of apples that ‘are sold in Rome and said to be imported from a village situated in the Alps near Aquileia’.Footnote ⁶⁹ According to Columella, Matius also wrote giving instructions for urban dinner parties and entertainments, and produced three books entitled, respectively, ‘The Cook’, ‘The Fish-salter’, and ‘The Pickle-maker’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Columella mentions two otherwise unknown authors who, together with Matius, had written about food processing and food preservation: Maenas Licinius, perhaps to be corrected into Maecenas Licinius and understood as a freedman of Maecenas,Footnote ⁷¹ and Marcus Ambivius. Food preservation, as shown by the agricultural treatises, was an integral part of the agricultural science; it had been a general topic in Cato’s treatise, but almost two centuries later, salting and pickling came into their own as topics of treatises of distinguished authorities.

The content of some of these lost literary works can be partially reconstructed from citations by later writers. In the surviving portion of the third-century ad work de Hortis by Gargilius Martialis,Footnote ⁷² in which the quince, peach, almond, and chestnut are discussed, there are a few occasions when Celsus is named as a source for a specific opinion on fruit trees.Footnote ⁷³ Celsus, who is identified as italicae disciplinae peritissimus (‘the most skilled in the Italian arts [of agriculture]’) at 4.1.264, is, for example, cited as having a distinct opinion, but one different from other sources that Gargilius mentions, about the planting of peach trees. Celsus returns as a source, together with the Carthaginian Mago, about the practicalities of planting almond trees and, later, as a source on when the almonds start to ripen and how to know when they are ready to be picked for long-term storage.Footnote ⁷⁴ Celsus is then mentioned again in the section of Gargilius Martialis’ treatise on the chestnut. Gargilius remarks that despite Celsus’ great expertise on cultivations in Italy and the need to fill the omissions in Mago’s treatise, who, not being familiar with the chestnut, had not much discussed it, he did not provide a detailed discussion of the chestnut tree. By noting Celsus’ near silence on the chestnut, Gargilius gives us an historical fact: in Celsus’ time, the cultivation of the chestnut for its fruit was not of much interest (as opposed to coppicing to obtain props for vines that is discussed contemporaneously by Columella in the context of viticulture).Footnote ⁷⁵ The chestnut was ‘vilissima’ according to Celsus’ near contemporary Pliny the Elder,Footnote ⁷⁶ more suited to feed pigs than end up on the tables of the elite to whose circles the writers on agricultural matters belonged and for whom they were writing. It was also a tree that grew on hills and mountainsides at a certain altitude and therefore not suited for the locations occupied by many villa estates. From these later references to Celsus’ lost work, it can be inferred that Celsus had treated a number of fruit trees widely cultivated in Italy in the first century ad, of which several varieties existed and new ones were being developed, and also trees such as the peach, which had only recently entered the cultivated landscape of Varro’s ‘Italian orchard’ and were still a novelty (for more on the peach, see Chapter 5).

Moving away from agriculture and horticulture proper, the interest in plants and cultivation that characterizes the Augustan era in both literature and art (e.g., the vegetal motifs on the Ara Pacis; the painted garden from Livia’s villa at Prima Porta, Figure 3.1)Footnote ⁷⁷ can also be appreciated in authors such as C. Valgius Rufus (suffect consul in 12 bc), who composed a work on the medicinal properties of plants dedicated to Augustus, the orator Asinius Pollio, who probably commissioned his freedman Asinius Pollio of Tralles to epitomize Diophanes’ Geōrgika, and more obscure authors such as the Oppius who wrote On Wild Trees, a work which also discussed the chestnut and the citron.Footnote ⁷⁸ In sum, works on agriculture became both increasingly numerous and very specialized as to their content. In addition, they were quite obviously not mere elaborations on Cato’s old tome or variations on Varro’s charming literary presentation, but treatises on new practical techniques and ideas about arboriculture as well as homely advice on pickling. That they are lost to us is a pity, but that they were written and in circulation is enough for our purposes.

Figure 3.1 The villa of Livia, Prima Porta, Rome: Wall painting with garden scene from one of the walls of the underground triclinium of the villa ad Gallinas Albas, now in the Museo Nazionale Romano-Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Rome.

Photo by Leemage / Corbis Historical / Getty Images.

It is not hard to know why writers at various social and intellectual levels produced treatises on horticulture and viticulture in the Augustan period: after the unsettled and long years of the civil wars, the idea of prosperity, peace, and the arrival of a new golden age permeated much of the literary and artistic production, both in public and in private architecture.Footnote ⁷⁹ However, the centre stage assumed in the Augustan era by horti (as gardens) and horti (as vegetable patches), and the art of cultivating fruit trees, was not limited to ideological agendas. Peace, the normalization of the landscape of ownership after proscriptions and confiscations of land to satisfy veteran assignments,Footnote ⁸⁰ and various policy reforms and practical initiatives brought in by Augustus such as the standardization of weights and measures across Italian towns, had a positive effect on the new imperial economy. There was no longer the risk of war damaging cultivations and disrupting infrastructure such as irrigation facilities. Decisions which needed medium- to long-term periods in order to be implemented, as might have been the case when committing to planting a new orchard or selecting certain characteristics in a fruit in order to develop a new variety, could be taken, because planning and certainty were possible again.

In addition, Rome’s population growth meant that the demand for fresh produce had also increased, as had, in a society where display and competition were strong motivations, the demand for quality products that somehow differentiated themselves from the others, such as larger cabbages and early- or late-ripening fruits. Big size, new and unusual, out-of-season, and out-of-norm characteristics in vegetables and fruits are always desirable to urban consumers, as are name-branding and assured freshness. The loop between producers and consumers stimulated development, and the aggregate demand these forces generated should not be underestimated. Rome’s impact on its hinterland was considerable and multidirectional; Neville Morley aptly remarks: ‘the demands of Rome for perishable goods like fruit and vegetables and for luxury foodstuffs supported the development of particular forms of production in the suburbium, resulting in increased exploitation of the land and increased prosperity’.Footnote ⁸¹

From Vegetable Patches to Garden Tombs

At about the same time as these early first-century agricultural treatises were composed, Romans began to enhance funerary spaces with ornamental and even productive gardens. In the early first century bc the garden tomb, named hortus along with both grand gardens and vegetable patches, appears first in inscriptions; later, during the second half of the first century ad, a new compound noun, modelled on Greek nomenclature, indicates specifically the garden tombs: cepotaphium, from the Greek kepos = garden and taphos = tomb.Footnote ⁸² It is also from the first century ad onwards that tomb owners ‘tried to protect the cultivated lands and other productive properties attached to their monuments by declaring them inalienable from the tomb itself’.Footnote ⁸³ Pressure on the land in the immediate vicinity of Rome was high; funerary plots competed, among others, with industrial and manufacturing activities, warehouses, the villas and horti of the wealthy, and in such densely occupied space, to use Bodel’s words, ‘even the smaller enclosed open spaces around tombs may have been pressed into productive service in order to supply the high-volume fruit and vegetable markets of Rome … but to what extent productivity and profit were systematically pursued at these garden locations is unclear’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Intercultivation of agricultural produce among tombs, creating new mixed-use spaces, was necessitated by the growth of the city itself and the demands of its population.

Close proximity and mixture of different uses of the land could be found outside any town; in Pompeii, for instance, just outside the Herculaneum Gate, a suburban residence, the Villa of the Mosaic Columns, had tabernae or shops attached to it as well as an ornamental garden, a tomb garden, a cultivated vegetable plot, and other tombs lining the street.Footnote ⁸⁵ Horti and pomaria attached to tombs needed to be protected from the encroachment of other tombs, houses, workshops and the like in the suburban environment of any urban agglomeration; the concerns of the tomb owners registered in the formulaic inscriptions are the same when we look at other towns and later periods. A funerary inscription from the necropolis along the Via Campana outside the port town of Puteoli, generically dated to the years ad 150–230 on the basis of letter forms and language, mentions the tomb of a Iulia Benedicta and her husband Aelius Eutychianus, a veteran of the praetorian fleet based at Misenum. The funerary monument with its small orchard (pomariolius)Footnote ⁸⁶ is ‘protected’ from future unauthorized inhumations or from the alienation of burial spots by placing the monument under the supervision of the town of Puteoli itself, which will be entitled to collect the fine due for such violations.Footnote ⁸⁷

The phenomenon of garden tombs does not seem to have been fuelled by financial considerations. Productive vegetable patches would most probably not have financed and/or supported the expense of erecting a tomb, though they could have been used for expenses related to the maintenance of the tomb and the recurring celebrations commemorating the dead, to which the produce of the garden tombs was certainly destined.Footnote ⁸⁸ Rather, garden tombs expressed the ideological aspiration to ‘cultivate’ the tomb in the same manner as the house was cultivated in life, and, above all, to have a locus amoenus or pleasant place with all that one desires. These gardens, intended as much for the dead as for the living, were meant to be seen, visited, and used, offering a pleasant venue for the banquets the family held during various celebrations.Footnote ⁸⁹

This idea of the funerary locus amoenus and tomb was evidently important in Roman conceptions, so much so that it could be satirized by a master of social criticism, Petronius (Gaius Petronius ‘Arbiter’, c. ad 27–66). In the Satyricon, the rich social-climbing freedman Trimalchio wants to have his ashes encircled by every kind of fruit tree and vine (omne genus enim poma volo sint circa cineres meos, et vinearum largiter)Footnote ⁹⁰ on a 100 × 200 feet plot. He proclaims that: ‘it is surely wrong to cultivate our homes while we are alive and not to care for those where we will have to dwell longer’.Footnote ⁹¹ The tomb gardens of the Roman world, attested in many inscriptions and, sometimes and exceptionally, in the archaeological record,Footnote ⁹² are at once a resting place and a symbol of one’s achievements in life, additional elements in the commemoration of the deceased. Garden tombs were the seat of commemorative banquets and other rituals, and often inscriptions detail the deceased’s wish to have the produce of the garden/orchard used for such commemorations and festivals.Footnote ⁹³ Just as naming the suburban residences-cum-gardens of the wealthy as horti reveals the elite aspiration to the ideal of self-sufficiency (despite what happened in reality), the importance of agriculture as an ideal, and the idea of gardens as loci for the cultivation of the mind and soul, so did the garden tombs represent the final place for cultivation of the soul.

Gardens acquired a specific ideological dimension in the early empire; they could be used, with their plantings, statues, garden architecture and the activities that took place in them, to convey complex meanings, not the least of them being an ideal of simplicity and attachment to a tamed nature that at the same time recalled ancient attachments to the land.Footnote ⁹⁴ In parallel, horticultural and arboricultural spaces became part of the cultural landscape. It is not simply the association mentioned above between tomb and garden – the garden as a place for commemoration – but also perhaps as a specific productive space that could ensure what was needed for the funerary rituals. It is the hortus or the pomarium conceived as places for mythical associations or for elite practices that had become fashionable: the daily outdoor strolling and exercise in a garden space.Footnote ⁹⁵ An inscription from Rome, documented by the humanist Justus Lipsius in the sixteenth century, recorded a gestatio located in an orchard; one needed to walk along the path back and forth for five times to have walked one mile, or one thousand paces, the typical length of gestationes often attested in inscriptions.Footnote ⁹⁶ Another epigraphic text inscribed on a headless herm, in all likelihood from a suburban villa located at Le Colonne near Rome, proclaims that hortulus hic Vari est opus Alcinoi, ‘this little garden of Varus is the work of Alcinoos’, a clear literary and mythical allusion to the garden of Alcinoos, ruler of the Phaiacians, and its ideal palace-garden in the Odyssey, and perhaps a word play on the (slave) gardener’s name.Footnote ⁹⁷

With the early empire, lifestyle, religion, mythical echoes, aspiration to self-sufficiency, and celebration of fructus all came together in the discussion and perception of planted spaces, whether ornamental gardens, orchards and vegetable gardens, or garden tombs. The hortus, from the name adopted for the luxurious late Republican and early imperial suburban estates, radiated as a persuasive social idea: it became the subject of literary works, and, at another and less elevated level, how ordinary people with some money but little upward access, decided to be commemorated in death. These examples suggest that by the early empire, the idea of productive gardens and orchards, the cultivated space in which different edible plants but also some ornamental plants would be grown for enjoyment, was desired by, and well embedded in, all strata of society. They also suggest that the symbolic role of gardens/horti and their plants as a reflection of one’s personality and as a metaphor of one’s life achievements had trickled down from the higher to lower social strata.Footnote ⁹⁸ At the highest social level, Cicero’s public image had been attacked by removing the mature trees from his villa garden in Tusculum. In the grand and symbolic planting-cum-statuary of his Porticus (Chapter 1), Pompey had proudly proclaimed, with trees and ‘conquered’ plants, his prestige and largesse to the people. But these grand historical examples soon became mere exemplars. By the Augustan age, a freedman and medicus, C. Hostius Pamphilus, proudly declared on his epitaph that his tomb was his eternal house, estate (fundus), garden (horti) and monument (monumentum).Footnote ⁹⁹ The language of the elite had been appropriated by individuals much lower socially who were confident that the elevated word they used had become common and understood by a wider audience.

Agricultural Techniques, Morality, and Market Forces

I have suggested that the proliferation and specialization of literary works on agricultural matters in the first century ad, and specifically by Augustan authors, could not merely have been an ideological exercise.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ It must have also been stimulated by socioeconomic changes as well as technical developments. For viticulture, about which a substantially greater amount of information exists in both archaeological and written sources than for other cultivations, certain methods to plant and cultivate the grape vine seem to have been perfected starting precisely in the Augustan period. This is the case of one of the techniques perfected in extensive (as opposed to intensive) vine cultivation, the arbustum technique, in which vines and other crops were grown on the same land. The technique, common in parts of Roman central Italy and northern Italy, involved training the vines on rows of trees and growing them in combination with cereal cultivation.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Growing vines by training them on trees is still practised in very specific areas of Italy, such as the Po Valley and the area of Aversa in Campania, a technique currently called alberata. Although yields were lower than in the case of low grape vines or vines planted more intensively and supported by posts, the arbustum technique required less labour and gave the farmers the possibility to grow a mixed range of other crops on the same land (fruit, fodder, even olives if this tree was used as support for the vines). When the vineyards were grown intensively, supported by artificial props, the vines were on average planted every 3–10 feet.Footnote ¹⁰² A vineyard so planted required one man for 7–10 iugera; in the arbustum, however, which had a much lower planting density, one man could take care of 18 iugera.Footnote ¹⁰³

The widespread adoption of the arbustum in parts of Roman Italy, where in later historical periods the alberata technique became prevalent, has been dated to the early first century ad. While the practice is mentioned by Varro and Cicero,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ about a century later Columella and Pliny give a much more perfected version of it with specific instructions on the distance between trees that one should allow when planting vines in this manner and wanting to grow cereals in between.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The technique evidently caught the attention of farmers and estate owners who perfected it in the Augustan period.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ While wine (and olive oil) for transmarine markets had flourished in the Republican period, the cereals, fruit, and fresh or pickled olives of arbustum plantings may have been developed in response to population growth and increased local demand; recent research in central Adriatic Italy suggests so.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Market forces did not only affect improvements in viticulture and arboriculture. They also affected the cultivation of vegetables. The farmer had a range of cultivation techniques, and expedients to reach wanted results are mentioned in both Columella and Pliny. For instance, for cultivating cucurbita, gourds, a distinction in how to plant the seed was made depending on whether the product was destined for consumption within the household of the grower, to use as container for liquid (in this case a greater growth was desirable), or to be sold as food: ‘so that the fruit which grows from it may be longer and narrower; this certainly commands a better price than any other’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Much later iconographic evidence, the fifth-century ad mosaic depicting a calendar from the basilica of Thrysos in Tegea, depicts the two shapes the gourd could take: for the month of August we find the depiction of a male figure holding two gourds, one almost perfectly round, the other elongated.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In the passage I have quoted earlier (p. 95), Columella’s remarks, drawing a contraposition between pretiosioribus cibis and vulgares, seem to suggest that the increased demand for the produce of the vegetable patches was due to the increased role vegetables had in the daily diet of the ordinary people, who could no longer afford other types of food. A comment like this is ambiguous: did it (and others like it) reflect the reality of the increased pressure on fresh food supply caused by the exponential growth of Rome’s population, or is it merely a continuation of a tired topos in the moral discourse about the decline of Rome? Were in fact ordinary people pushed out of the consumer pool for commercial horticulture, with the focus now being on wealthy and demanding consumers? It is undeniable that Columella’s interest in including horticulture in his treatise is based on the social changes that have ‘transformed opportunities for profitable production’ with the implication, to put it as Purcell does, that ‘the interest in catering for the new market as well as the demand itself is a matter for plebeian interest’.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Condemnation of the luxury of the table is a feature of moralist writings of the first century ad. The higher demand for improved fruit and vegetables, which commanded much higher prices on the market than their old versions, is a recurrent reason for complaints and criticism of contemporary society on the part of Pliny the Elder. Pliny’s remarks are on a new level compared to Columella’s just a few years before: for him, even some vegetables have become too expensive and common folk can no longer afford them. Authors such as Pliny the Elder found reasons to moralize against the ‘excesses’ of the time even in the case of the size reached by cultivated cabbage and asparagus.Footnote ¹¹¹

Vegetables can be rather ambiguous, as we have seen. They are either ‘simple and commonplace’ or ‘rare and luxuriantly delicious’.Footnote ¹¹² The humble cabbage, which received considerable attention due to its dietary and medicinal properties in Cato’s manual (and in earlier Greek writers), with the additional benefit that ‘it is not expensive’, was, by the time of Pliny, no longer cheap;Footnote ¹¹³ cabbage had become a new luxury and was now considered among food delicacies.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Cabbage larger than ‘a poor man’s table’ or Ravenna’s cultivated asparagus weighing just over 100 grams each are probably rhetorical exaggerations.Footnote ¹¹⁵ However, Pliny’s tirade does suggest that significant improvements – some immoral according to him but real nonetheless – had occurred in recent times also in horticulture, not only in viticulture, cereal culture, and animal breeding, areas in which there had been substantial changes and improvements in the early imperial period.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Some of the techniques mentioned by Pliny show a high degree of specialization and sophistication in agricultural practices, undoubtedly the outcome of much experiential learning, intermixed with magic beliefs and superstitious practices. For instance, in reference to cherry trees, he mentions that applying lime to the roots stimulates precocious fruit production and forces the fruit to mature early, a useful technique with commercial benefits, since early fruits can fetch higher prices.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Digging a trench around the roots of a plant to pour hot water in it was also a technique used to force plants, particularly flowers, to bloom early. It is mentioned by Pliny in reference to roses, and probably by Seneca about the lilium.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Among the horticultural improvements of the period we can also count the use of lapis specularis (selenite gypsum or, according to others, muscovite)Footnote ¹¹⁹ to create greenhouses or protective screens for plants.Footnote ¹²⁰ In epigram 14 of Book 8 Martial mentions protecting an ‘orchard from Cilicia’ (possibly a reference to saffron plants, although the use of terms such as nemus seems better suited to trees) from the cold in winter by means of specularia, while in another epigram he writes of grapes protected from the ‘chill frost’ by means of transparent panes.Footnote ¹²¹ As recognized already in 1785, this was also a way to force the grape (or other fruit) to mature earlier.Footnote ¹²² Columella, when talking on methods for having early-ripening cucumeris, discusses planters on wheels, protected by sheets of lapis specularis, that could be moved between outdoors and indoors according to need, as in the case of Tiberius’ famous mobile ‘small greenhouses’ which supplied him with snake melons for almost the whole year.Footnote ¹²³ Other references in Latin literature to forcing concern flowers, such as the mention of glass in both Ovid and Martial to protect/force lilies.Footnote ¹²⁴ Many sheets of lapis specularis, once fastened to frames, were recovered in the nineteenth century from a corridor leading to the garden of a luxurious villa near Rome; perhaps some of these frames were used to protect plants.Footnote ¹²⁵ Besides forcing plants to fruit, and fruit to mature early (or to mature later than usual), techniques were also developed to create surprising and unusual vegetables, probably for show. Well-known cases refer to the gourd and the cucumis (the snake melon or, according to an older interpretation, the cucumber), which were made to grow into a variety of shapes by using sheathes of wickerwork or into very long specimens by inserting the flower into a fistula.Footnote ¹²⁶ Even in the vegetable patch, the desire to control and tame nature prevailed.

For an author like Pliny, the care of the hortus – which should denote the good, simple, and morally sound qualities of the ancestors, tending to the vegetable patch that will provide simple, wholesome fare on the table and the much-desired self-sufficiency – is profoundly ambiguous, an ambiguity born out of the commercial horticulture that was fully developed and normalized by his own time and even before. It was a branch of agriculture where care and ingenuity could bring profit, something Pliny does not seem to disdain completely, although he refers to this profit as non sine pudore dicenda, as something that must be mentioned but with some embarrassment.Footnote ¹²⁷ But horticulture also represents subversion of nature and the ‘gluttony’ of men, as when wild types of plants are selected and turned into desirable plant food. The example of the cardoon well encapsulates this ambivalence, which Pliny spells out unmistakably:

One could compare Pliny’s attitude towards the cardoon, which probably was slowly being selected into what would become the artichoke,Footnote ¹²⁸ with the regard in which in the Middle Ages the ‘novel’ aubergine was held: food not liked even by donkeys, as even now some people in the Istanbul area say, although some of the best dishes of Turkish cuisine feature aubergine as the main ingredient.Footnote ¹²⁹ Vegetables, trees, and fruits considered as moral issues, as objects of social disdain, or unwelcome innovation, are hard issues or topics to reconcile or even contrast and compare. The Roman drive to moralize on even the most mundane topics, which Pliny often takes, are conspicuously unconvincing. In the market itself, imported or new varieties will often capture the interest and tastes of householders looking for something special.

Agricultural Productivity

As we have seen, Pliny the Elder’s discourse on Rome’s excesses and moral decline includes even the ‘humble’ vegetables, which he describes as having become grossly huge and beyond the reach of the poorer people because of the price their artificially large size fetched. Pliny exaggerates to make his point, but his comments on the new size of cabbages and asparagus imply that he was observing a small ‘horticultural revolution’: intensive care of crops, constant selection of the desirable characteristics in a plant leading to the creation of different varieties and, we can safely assume, better and more careful irrigation and manuring. The productivity of ancient agriculture – long thought to be quite low – has been calculated as potentially much higher due to the adoption of practices such as crop rotation, manuring, integration of animal husbandry with cultivation of crops, and better understanding of ad hoc irrigation for specific plants.Footnote ¹³⁰ The topic is a very complex one, and no single instance of improvement justifies a general conclusion.

Manuring in the context of cultivating vegetables and fruit trees is important in order to increase production, and this was well understood in the ancient world and incorporated into official documents: a lease contract from 178 bc relating to an estate of the temple of Zeus Temenites on the island of Amorgos includes the contractual obligation for the lessee to provide manure for the orchards.Footnote ¹³¹ In Roman agriculture, improvements to soil fertility via regular manuring cannot be doubted: in the Digest, Ulpian lists amongst the essential equipment of a farm/agricultural estate (the instrumentum which must pass to the heir at the death of the owner) plaustra quibus stercus evehatur, i.e., ‘carts by which manure is carried out’.Footnote ¹³² In Book 19 on vegetables, Pliny the Elder mentions manuring and irrigation more than once, for instance in reference to lettuce that can be sown any time of the year in ‘irrigated and well manured soil’ (19.130) or, a few lines later, when he observes that umore omnia hortensia gaudent et stercore (‘all garden plants are fond of moisture and manure’).Footnote ¹³³ Not only animal manure, but also human excrement collected in cities was used as fertilizer. Varro reports the opinion of Cassius Dionysius of Utica that human excrement was the second-best fertilizer after pigeon dung and Pliny refers to diluted human urine used to water pomegranate trees in order to increase the fruit’s sweetness.Footnote ¹³⁴ Since Cassius Dionysius was the translator of Mago’s agricultural treatise, this information may go back to Mago himself, and therefore to Punic practices.Footnote ¹³⁵

Remarks in Pliny when discussing lettuce, endive, vines, and fruit trees point to the integration of horticulture with pig rearing, since he says that some people, in order to increase the size of lettuces and endives, cut the plants back and give ‘them a dressing of fresh swine’s dung’ and that swine dung should be diluted with water to avoid burning the vines.Footnote ¹³⁶ It has been suggested that pigs, since they can be fed on scraps and kept in a relatively confined environment, were regularly raised within large Roman towns, thus in part explaining, in the light of the high urbanization rates seen in the Roman imperial period, the Roman preference for pork meat shown by the archaeofaunal record. An integration of horticulture and pig rearing along the lines suggested by Pliny’s passage would make particular sense in the outskirts of large urban centres such as Rome. Manure was also used to induce production of fruit out of season. Pliny reports on the technique, stating that in some provinces like Moesia, fig trees were covered up in manure at the end of autumn, and then when milder weather arrived they were dug up and exposed to light again, thus stimulating early ripening (precoces), out of season (alieno anno).Footnote ¹³⁷ Pliny labels these figs as the product of art, not nature.

Increasing agricultural productivity by seed or cultivar selection via vegetative propagation and adopting a range of strategies that maximized yield had been part of ‘basic’ Roman agriculture (by this I mean the cultivation of cereals, olives, and vines, the three major Mediterranean crops) for centuries. The Latin agronomists often remark on these practices and are quite aware of the need to control soil erosion. However, enhancing productivity is different in theory and the written record and in the practices of everyday farming, especially in the case of farmers of small- and medium-sized agricultural units who did not have the same access to capital, manpower, technical skills, and social networks as the big landlords. For authors such as Tchernia and Kron, Columella’s estimate of 31.5 to 42 hectolitres per hectare as the normal yield for a typical Roman vineyard was based on the reality of Roman agriculture. The fact that these figures were matched in the modern era by the production of French vineyards only in the 1950s, when large-scale and regular use of fertilizers began, has, however, left some scholars unconvinced about Roman agricultural productivity.Footnote ¹³⁸

Was the agriculture practised by the majority of farmers in the Roman world really so effective? The archaeological project ‘Excavating the Roman Peasant’ has investigated a number of very small rural sites in southern Tuscany with the aim of determining the practices of lower-class rural dwellers. The sites were lower by much – smaller size, cruder dwellings – and in no way comparable, on the settlement hierarchy scale, to the villas and large farms associated with market-oriented agriculture and with the application of the agricultural precepts reported by the agronomists. However, and in the face of their very humble nature, these farms gave compelling evidence for the practice of ley farming, or convertible agriculture, for the period from the first century bc to the first century ad.Footnote ¹³⁹ Ley farming is a sophisticated practice, adapted to more than mere subsistence farming. These sites are small and in a secondary geographic location; if peasants living there applied advanced farming techniques such as convertible agriculture, the owners and managers of larger estates must have known them as well. They, of course, would have benefited the most from systematic use of manure and irrigation for those crops produced for profit. Is it just by chance that Tibur, one of the preferred leisure destinations for the Roman moneyed and political elite and where everyone of some distinction owned villas and farms, is also remembered in literary texts for its irrigated orchards and fruit cultivation?Footnote ¹⁴⁰ There may have been ‘trickle-up’ of practical knowledge from small farmers, and ‘trickle-down’ from knowledgeable up-to-date owners of estates.Footnote ¹⁴¹

Irrigation

Andrew Watson, in an influential and controversial book of 1983 on agricultural innovation in the medieval Islamic world, put great emphasis on the fact that the ‘agricultural revolution’ of the medieval Muslim world, especially in Sicily and the Iberian Peninsula, was possible thanks to the agricultural intensification which complex irrigation systems allowed and to the introduction of key summer crops, such as sorghum, cotton, and sugar cane, which benefited from carefully controlled watering.Footnote ¹⁴² Watson’s argument rested in part on the idea, found in various studies on ancient agriculture, that the Romans essentially practised dry farming and that during the hot and dry Mediterranean summers the land largely lay fallow, with the few plants the Romans knew as summer crops playing a very minor role and even so only in more northern regions.Footnote ¹⁴³ In his reconstruction, ‘investment in irrigation works and the spread of irrigation technology endowed the early Islamic world with a gradation of artificially watered lands’,Footnote ¹⁴⁴ which, combined with the new summer crops, profoundly changed the timings of the agricultural year and the level of labour needed both in the creation and maintenance of the irrigation channels and to cultivate the summer crops in a period that, earlier on, had been relatively ‘quiet’ as to agricultural chores. In turn, among the outcomes of the new agricultural system were greater stability and higher earnings, justifying its greater labour- and capital-intensive investments.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Watson does recognize that, previously, in the various regions that became part of the Islamic world in the early Middle Ages – Egypt, Spain, and North Africa – elaborate irrigation works had existed by the first century ad, but he seems to largely reduce pre-Islamic irrigation to ‘temporary trapping of rain water or river floods and the spreading of them by gravity flow over the land … little or no irrigation water was provided in summer’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ He further states that the ‘most efficient of these devices (i.e., water lifting devices), the noria was not used widely in pre-Islamic times’Footnote ¹⁴⁷ and that while cisterns and reservoirs offered perennial storage of water, these were used mainly for domestic water supplies and not much in agriculture.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Watson’s poor opinion of Roman irrigation techniques has been, and still is being, re-evaluated.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ There have been important discoveries, among them a bronze tablet with a Latin inscription from the territory of Agón, c.50 km west of Zaragoza in Spain, known as the Lex Rivi Hiberiensis.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ This text preserves the regulation, sanctioned by the Roman authority, governing irrigation communities along the right bank of the middle Ebro River and belonging to two towns founded by Augustus.Footnote ¹⁵¹ The Roman legal corpus contains ample references to the importance of water rights in general and to irrigation in particular, including imperial deliberations about specific points of contention.Footnote ¹⁵² For example, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus were asked to give a pronouncement, certainly in the context of addressing a petition on some dispute, on how to regulate the use of a public river for irrigating fields.Footnote ¹⁵³ The answer, that water ‘should be divided in proportion to the property holdings, unless someone shows that more has been given to him by an individual right’, alludes to the need to fairly regulate access to water for irrigation and to the unavoidable disputes that would arise on a regular basis. While it is true that Roman jurisprudence tries to address most eventualities, the extent of the corpus on water rights speaks of the importance and diffusion of irrigation in everyday agricultural practices in the Roman world.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

That irrigation technologies in the Iberian Peninsula were the work, by default, of engineers of the Islamic era has been challenged, prompting in some cases more in-depth examination of the archaeological evidence and new dating of irrigation infrastructure to the Roman rather than the Islamic period.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The middle Ebro Valley offers several examples of Roman reservoirs and dams, including dams of considerable dimensions which regulated the river and its tributaries and mitigated floods and drought.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The reservoirs stored water that could be distributed during the summer months.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Among these, the two most important hydraulic complexes, Muel and Almonacid, date to the reign of Augustus.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The Muel dam, built near the Colonia Caesaraugusta (mod. Zaragoza), was the object of recent archaeological investigations which have confirmed its impressive size and the involvement of the Roman army in its construction.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Today, the area up the river from the Roman dam is a fertile lowland hugged by the eastern bank of La Huerva and occupied by cultivation of fruit and vegetables. The dam wall may have reached 100 m in length and 13 m in height, possibly creating a dam stretching for as much as 80 ha.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Besides dams and canal attested by inscriptions, we must mention the Alcanadre-Lodosa canal, possibly dating to the second century ad, although not everyone agrees it is Roman. It diverted two tributaries of the Ebro, the Linares and the Odron, and crossed the Ebro on a series of arches. The size of its specus (1.5 m) and the considerable resulting flow capacity of 2.88 m³/s (250,000 m³/day) suggest it was used for agricultural irrigation.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Recent research has also surveyed the aqueducts of Roman Spain to identify possible cases of secondary water derivations used for agricultural irrigation, since these are attested elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁶² In the case of some aqueducts, such as the Gier aqueduct near Lyon, it seems that water was diverted to irrigation when the aqueduct was running at full capacity, because its inverted siphon system could not accommodate that volume of water.Footnote ¹⁶³ At other times, the main use of an aqueduct for irrigation came subsequently to its initial purpose, as for the famous aqueduct of Nîmes which, in the fourth/fifth century ad, was diverted to irrigate fields.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

The existence, and practical applications, of water-lifting technology in antiquity – Spain offers an impressive example in the battery of water wheels and Archimedes’ screws discovered in Roman mines – also suggest the possibility that, when necessary, such machines were used for irrigation.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Water lifting could be undertaken on a massive scale. Strabo reports the existence of a battery of water wheels and Archimedes’ screws operated by 150 prisoners in Egypt, lifting water from the Nile onto a ridge.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Even if a water course was not nearby, water-lifting devices were used to aid irrigation from wells. Pliny mentions different water-lifting devices to be used for irrigation of hortos villae iungendos (gardens/vegetables gardens adjoining the villa) from a well if no nearby stream was present: the rota (pulley, evidently meaning a simple pulley and bucket), the organis pneumaticis (force pumps, which have indeed been excavated at the bottom of Roman wells in Italy and the provinces) and the tollenonum (a shaduf).Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Columella refers to crops that benefit specifically from irrigation, such as millet and turnips.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ The Archimedes’ screw, although it has a lower lift than other devices, could also be used for irrigation, as suggested by diverse evidence. An inscription from Syria mentions the construction of a kochlias (a water screw) on the Euphrates in the early 70s ad, to be used for irrigation.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Two wall paintings from Pompeii depict genre scenes with Archimedes’ screws being operated: one from the house at I.11.5 and one from the House of the Ephebus in Pompeii (I.7.11), showing a man treading on a screw to irrigate crops. There is also a series of terracottas depicting a man treading on an Archimedes’ screw that seems to refer to irrigation.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ While summer crops came to dominate Islamic agriculture and had been less grown in Roman agricultural habits,Footnote ¹⁷¹ the role irrigation played in Roman agriculture and the sophistication of its crop rotation strategies were clearly greater than Watson had thought from his study of textual sources.

In fact, there is excellent evidence for Roman achievements in irrigation in difficult circumstances from North Africa. The extraordinary second-century ad funerary monument of the Flavii at Cillium, in the Kasserine region (Tunisia), with its 110-line-long metric inscription with some glamorous literary topoi, celebrates a concrete and wholly local achievement: T. Flavius Secundus, a military veteran, had been the first person to plant vines in the area and had established an irrigated orchard.Footnote ¹⁷² The poem is a celebration of this agricultural achievement in an area known heretofore only for its production and exportation of olive oil. Although mentioned only twice in the text, irrigation is the essential basis of the productive landscape created by Flavius Secundus; in this arid region the grape vine needs irrigation at key moments of the year and fruit trees certainly could not have been grown without irrigation.Footnote ¹⁷³ Surveys carried out in Libya and Tunisia, including in the area around Cillium, have shown how irrigation techniques deriving from indigenous African water-management systems were widely adopted in the Roman period with the increase in the number of rural settlements.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Flavius Secundus seems to have been particularly skilled ‘at adapting local farming technologies to new possibilities’.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ The problems of irrigation in the southern areas of northern Africa are not modern: they evidently began in Roman times, and such a person as Flavius Secundus could make his name and memory for having solved them, if only temporarily.

Irrigation Technologies: Examples

Complex irrigation technologies and the role of water wheels in bringing water to agricultural activities are alluded to in texts such as Vitruvius’,Footnote ¹⁷⁶ and they have now been proven as historical phenomena by the finds from the S. Giovanni in Laterano excavations I discuss in Chapter 5.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ What remains to be clarified is to what extent the capital and labour investment, exemplified by the irrigation system discovered there, can be taken to be representative of the Roman world at large or to reflect the unique circumstances and market forces generated by a metropolis that, in the early first century ad, counted about 1 million inhabitants, poor for the most part but among the very wealthiest of the empire.

Some ‘inventions’, such as Tiberius’ planters on wheels mentioned earlier, suggest that some innovations were first developed on imperial estates before finding wider diffusion. The enhancement of the irrigation infrastructure available around Rome is certainly an area where the emperor, particularly Augustus, had an impact. The Aqua Alsietina (or Augusta) I mentioned earlier, built by Augustus in 2 bc to provide water for the Naumachia Augusti when in use and for irrigation of properties in the Trastevere area, is one example. Frontinus, as curator aquarum, explicitly says that the water of this aqueduct was of poor quality and not suitable for drinking.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Secondary branches from the Aqua Alsietina aqueduct were also used for irrigation. The inscription from Casale di Galeria on the Via Clodia mentions that Augustus added a derivation called Forma Mentis and refers to rivalibus, i.e., neighbouring properties along the channel of the aqueduct (literally, ‘people sharing a channel’), which used to draw water at a set signal.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ The type of arrangement recorded in the Casale di Galeria inscription is confirmed by a now-lost inscription (Figure 3.2) which had a schematic plan of some properties that were allowed to draw water from the aqueduct channel: both represent a complex public–private agreement for water distribution and management system for the city.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ The lost inscription is detailed: for each property we have, in good legal wording, the name of the estate and of the owner, the number of water connections, and, in most cases, the hours during which the property is allowed to draw water!Footnote ¹⁸¹ For instance, one of the properties has this annotation:

We do not know whether these water connections were used for the water supply of villas and horti, or for irrigation of gardens and/or horticultural properties, or for both. However, it is highly relevant that the landowners listed are a C. Iulius, freedman of Caesar (he co-owns two properties together with C. Bicoleius Rufus), a certain Thyrsus, freedman of Augustus, and the above-mentioned C. Iulius Hymetius, who, from the name, can also be assumed to be a freedman of Caesar. The names of these proprietors give a precise date for the inscription: from about 27 bc to the Tiberian age at the very latest, at the precise time that horticulture near the city was undergoing its particular expansion. While wealthy freedmen certainly owned villas and horti (i.e., suburban residences with parks),Footnote ¹⁸² the lost inscription gives the impression that it refers to horticultural properties, and that therefore the water connections were primarily aimed at irrigating orchards and vegetable patches rather than amenities in luxurious ornamental gardens of the elite. The fact that two properties are co-owned by two individuals seems particularly revealing in this sense: co-ownership involving individuals not from the same family was not unknown among the wealthy for substantial agricultural estates well out in the countryside, but such an arrangement was not common for the regularly used urban or suburban residences.Footnote ¹⁸³ Having more water available for the irrigation of the vegetable patches of suburban Rome may be behind Horace’s comments about the tasteless cabbage produced in the irrigated horti of the suburbium.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Similarly, Pliny observed that cabbage ‘has a more agreeable taste if it has not had much moisture or manure, but makes a more abundant growth if they have been plentiful’.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Greediness for a good water supply for a suburban garden may lead its inept owner to producing inferior comestibles: big but not toothsome.

Figure 3.2 Drawing of CIL 6.1261, a lost inscription which used to be in the church of S. Maria on the Aventine, Rome. The inscription attests to a public–private agreement for water distribution.

Drawing by Mehmet Deniz Öz.

Cicero’s writings offer insight into the importance irrigation had for commercial production for members of the estate-owning elite. Cicero’s favourite villa at Tusculum near Rome had a commercial flower garden (or a vegetable garden) on the property which needed attention.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ In one letter sent to Tiro, his freedman and secretary, Cicero mentions the letting of this hortus to the holitor Helico for 1,000 sesterces and refers to improvements made at the property, including an ‘emissarius’, which must be understood as an irrigation channel, possibly fed by the Aqua Crabra.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ He clearly expects that such improvements will warrant a higher rent price for the hortus than the 1,000 sesterces currently being paid by Helico and urges his secretary to persuade a Parhedrus to lease the garden. While Cicero was away from Rome as proconsul in Cilicia in 51 bc, he wrote more than once to Atticus about the issue of his property’s water supply, asking his friend to ‘take care of the water and if Philippus does anything [possibly this Philippus was a contractor in charge of some work on the estate], keep an eye on him’.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Clearly a functioning irrigation system at this property was so important that Cicero worried about it even when overseas, far from Rome. Water for the irrigation of commercial agricultural properties was also an issue in imperial legislation and legal precedent, particularly in the cases concerning water servitudes and the possible damages awarded by judges to complainants who had been prevented from drawing water. The jurist Julian, in discussing a specific case, wrote an opinion that any loss incurred by the plaintiff from drought because he had been prevented from channelling water by another person, with the result of the parching of his meadows or trees, had to be made good and whole again by that person.Footnote ¹⁸⁹

Large, well-appointed villas in the extended suburbium of Rome had sophisticated systems of water infrastructure such as cisterns which, in their size, capacity, and location, were clearly used for irrigation and not to supply the baths or other parts of the residential quarters.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ The cisterns are often located on a lower terrace of the villa complex, with no traces of any structures.Footnote ¹⁹¹ These raised artificial terraces must have been garden areas, with further planting areas below them. The South Etruria Survey has highlighted the density of rural settlements in the area north of Rome and its conclusions are that high settlement density indicates relatively small estates. It has been suggested that, considering the value of the land in proximity to Rome and the relatively small extension of the estates that were attached to these villas, these must have been used for the cultivation of high-value crops such as fresh fruit and flowers. Perhaps the lower terraces of these villa complexes had ornamental gardens and also market-oriented cultivations. However, these villas were near Rome and within striking distance of roads to the capital and its markets. From what we know of elite mentality, with its preoccupation with display and search for revenues to maintain social standing, and what we know of the Roman villa and its cultural value among the elites looking for good profit from the land as well as prestige, it is not hard to conclude that irrigation infrastructure and its techniques for suburban and rural estates were developed by elite owners for arboriculture and horticulture that were both prestigious and profitable. For Varro and his elite reader, the fruit-galleries called by the stylish Greek name of oporothecae and made fashionable by Gn. Tremellius Scrofa were an attraction people went to see, appreciating them more than Lucullus’ picture galleries filled with works of art.Footnote ¹⁹² Fruit orchards were indeed an ornament and pleasure (more than the vegetable patch was), but they could also be a source of good revenue with shrewd financial investment. Pretension and profit may not have been mutually exclusive in Roman times, or any other. The scenario that the archaeological evidence from villas suggests fits well with the interest in arboriculture on the part of prominent Romans; more of this relationship between prestige and fruit trees will be addressed in the next chapter.

Other members of the Julio-Claudian family took an active interest in the provision of irrigation. The example of the Aqua Alsietina to supply both the Naumachia spectacles and the gardens of the transtiberine region has already been discussed. In a more homely venue, an inscription from the area of Sutrium between Rome and Viterbo commemorated the construction of a rural aqueduct by Augusta Iulia (i.e. Livia, wife of Augustus) for the benefit of the vicani, the residents of a vicus, probably the Vicus Matrini on the Via Cassia.Footnote ¹⁹³ It does not seem that this aqueduct was providing water to buildings in the vicus, such as a bath complex, but that it was rather connected to irrigation. It is extremely likely that this vicus was on, or near, estates belonging to Livia, hence her benefaction in building the aqueduct. Such improvements in infrastructure were euergetic, and Livia as the benefactor may or may have not consciously reasoned that providing an aqueduct for the villagers would both increase their agricultural productivity and benefit her own properties. Regardless of her motivations, the rural aqueduct in the well-watered area around Sutrium can be understood only as directed at irrigation for trees and gardens and not, for instance, for growing grape vines, which would have done well naturally. The situation in Italy is quite different from the arid North African landscape and the area of Cillium, where, as we have seen, T. Flavius Secundus introduced viticulture where none had existed before and planted an irrigated orchard. Water is needed to establish a vineyard, but once established, vines do well on their own – over-irrigation of grapes grown for wine making is counterproductive because it dilutes their sugar and thus their alcohol content, lowering the quality of the wine.

Large-scale commercial fruit cultivation appears to have been undertaken primarily on the estates of the wealthy. They had large landholdings that permitted the cultivation of varied crops, marketable at different times of the year, intended for different types of market (e.g., the local, urban market vs. the export market). Landowners of means were able to sustain the long-term investment and planning needed in arboriculture before full production capacity is reached and also had easier access to specialized labour: they could afford to embark on the selection and creation of new fruit cultivars, and they systematically pursued this for both commercial and ideological reasons, as we shall see in the next chapter. On the contrary, growing fresh vegetables for urban markets such as Rome seems to have occurred mostly on smaller plots cultivated by ‘ordinary Romans’. This land may have been the property of wealthy individuals, who parcelled it and leased it out, or may have been the garden tombs mentioned above. The above-mentioned letter by Cicero to his secretary about the hortus in his villa estate to be rented out points to this. The names of the current lease holder, of the prospective one, and of another gardener that Cicero says had rented his flower garden in Tusculum are all names of servile origin: Helico, Parhedrus, Motho. The impression we get – I say impression because the evidence in this regard is truly scarce – is that these were middling individuals, former slaves, now engaging in the commercial cultivation of vegetables and flowers (sought after for garlands, perfume making, etc.). Professional associations too could own suburban land around Rome that they leased out for the cultivation of vegetables. In the imperial period, a collegium that had received the ius coeundi, the right to assemble, could hold collective property.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Among the various horti and hortuli mentioned in the surviving corpus of Latin inscriptions, one text clearly refers to vegetable commercial plots rather than to a productive garden part of a sepulchral complex or an elegant suburban estate.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ The inscription dates to ad 227 and mentions a tenant farmer (colonus) of horti olitorii located on the Via Ostiense and owned by the collegium of the Foundation of the Divine Faustinas. We do not know the terms of such leases or whether the rent was paid in kind or in cash, as was conventional for farm leases.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ It is likely that the leases would include an initial evaluation of the value of the market garden being leased, probably detailing the types and numbers of trees and other plants and vegetable already present. It is also possible that, as in the case of the hortulani leasing out market gardens in sixth-century Constantinople, at the end of the lease another evaluation was carried out to determine whether the lessee had improved or diminished the value of the land.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ In the case of late antique Constantinople, Justinian’s Novella 64 (ad 538) suggests that the tenant-cultivators and the appraisers of values belonging to the association of hortulani were a powerful group, frequently guilty of irregularities when evaluating market gardens at the start and end of leases in order to financially disadvantage the landowners. However, in the case of Rome in the late Republic to the mid imperial period, we do not have any indication for a similar lobby.

The interest of Augustan intellectuals in writing works on horticulture, the introduction in the late first century bc / early first century ad of new fruits into Italy, notably the peach and the apricot, the appearance of garden tombs, the wider application of water-lifting technology to irrigation in the context of fruit cultivation, and the investments in irrigation facilities at late Republican or early imperial villas north of Rome, all point to a considerable development of horticulture and intensification of cultivations in the late first century bc and the early first century ad. This phenomenon, triggered by Rome’s population growth, which had gone from c.375,000 inhabitants in 100 bc to around 1 million in just 100 years, and by targeting the markets of the capital, could come to fruition because of the return to stable conditions after the cessation of the civil wars. While horticultural exploitation in Rome’s suburbium changed gear during the early principate, I have posited that further stimulus to write about horticultural matters and invest time and labour in the selection of new varieties of fruit came also from land assignments to veterans in provincial territories and from wealthy landowners who were acquiring an increasing number of properties in overseas territories. Identifying the best varieties to be cultivated commercially in the specific environmental conditions present in the provincial territories must have been of great interest to the farmer-colonists as it was for the Romanized local elites investing in land and in cash-crop cultivations. Columella addresses in his work the issue of choosing plant varieties that are suitable to the local environment and soil conditions; this kind of observation was not a theoretical exercise of the agricultural manuals, but practical consideration aimed at addressing the knowledge needs of the ‘gentleman farmer’.

Within horticulture, two separate stories and trajectories can be discerned. On the one hand we have arboriculture, which had profound significance for elite identity and cultural importance and whose developments were primarily driven by elite activity. On the other, we have the cultivation of vegetables, which despite its economic importance did not have, at least in late Republican and early imperial Rome, the same significance as arboriculture in constructing elite identity. On the whole, though, horticultural developments over the first century bc and the first century ad appear to have been instigated by two major drives: elite activities and the consequences of imperialism. As I shall discuss in the following chapters, the available textual and archaeological evidence suggests so.

These societal transformations and the intensification of horticultural endeavours impacted on ideology too. The ideological values attached to domestic garden spaces that I have explored in Chapter 1 were now ready to be fully deployed in the orchard; it is now time to turn to the ‘glory’ of grafting fruit trees.