In Book 15 of the Natural History, on fruit and nut trees, Pliny the Elder deploys unusually strong language in a remarkable statement phrased as rhetorical apophasis (bold mine):

These lines are poignant and use lexical choices – egregius, gloria, aeterna memoria, etc. – more normally found in the context of military achievements, the elite’s traditional avenue to fame. Instead, Pliny emphasizes developing new fruit varieties and naming them as a pursuit that can confer glory and ensure posthumous commemoration. Grafting occupied a prominent place in some Latin literary production, notably in Virgil: its symbolism and allegorical values had multivalent effects.Footnote ¹ Ancient myth emphasizes the absolute importance of grafting in agriculture: according to Macrobius, grafting and the cultivation of fruit trees, along with sowing and other forms of propagation, featured among the teachings that the god Saturn would have given to the early inhabitants of Italy.Footnote ²

Is Pliny being sarcastic with these words, attributing immortal celebrity to the creator of a new apple or a new type of fig?Footnote ³ I do not think so. The idea that successful agricultural hard work could bestow fame occurs more than once in the Natural History.Footnote ⁴ When such glory is sought in the right measure, it is a positive thing, whereas excesses, as in other cases in Pliny’s discourse, are utterly negative.Footnote ⁵ In Pliny’s work, the interest in grafting by prominent Romans for both ideological and practical reasons (i.e., to ameliorate production of one’s estate and gain commercial advantage) is stated most explicitly.

It has been said that Pliny’s discussion of grafted cultivars ‘is also a discussion of aristocratic agriculture and fame in an empire that left few avenues for social recognition to the Roman elite’.Footnote ⁶ However, even if certain traditional avenues of recognition for the Roman elite had been curtailed in the imperial period, most notably the possibility of obtaining a military triumph or of sponsoring building projects in the city of Rome, how to explain why grafting and naming new fruit could be charged with such high value?

First, the actual biology behind grafting is absolutely central to the domestication and cultivation of fruit trees and the maintenance of a cultivar with consistent traits and characteristics. Grafting may have been a source of fascination and a curiosity for some Latin writers, but it was a fundamental and normal practice on any farm from antiquity to the present; arboriculture cannot exist without grafting.

Second, the ideological valence given to grafting and the creation of new varieties represents the culmination of those processes discussed in the first three chapters of this book: the historical emergence of gardens and plants as embodiment of the public persona of the owner and the use of garden spaces to political ends, as seen in the case of Pompey; the social prestige among elites in plant transplanting and in the acclimatization of new plants, which could be seen as a symbolic representation of Rome’s imperialism and participation in it; and, finally, the considerable interest and advancement in horticulture in general that occurred during the end of the Republic and the Julio-Claudian period. Such interest in horticulture largely occurred in response to two phenomena: the general demographic growth of Roman Italy, with an increase in the percentage of urban population, in particular in Rome, which increased the demand for fresh produce destined for the capital;Footnote ⁷ and the extensive programmes of veteran settlements in the provinces, which stimulated the search for, and selection of, the best cultivars of grape, but also other plants, to be grown on the newly established farms.Footnote ⁸ These very practical and economically based issues, feeding Rome with vegetables and fruit and establishing successful provincial cultivations, coexisted with the development of the Augustan ideology celebrating a new Golden Age after the long period of civil wars and turmoil. As we have seen, many intellectuals took interest in all matters agricultural, including arboriculture, in response to, and in coordination with, this ideology.

Grafting and Arboriculture

With the domestication of fruit trees, cultivators changed ‘the reproductive biology of the plants involved by shifting from sexual reproduction (in the wild) to vegetative propagation (under cultivation)’.Footnote ⁹ In other words, domesticated varieties of fruit trees are reproduced as clones, by the farmer’s intervention, by using three possible vegetative techniques:

• rooting of twigs/cuttings;

• planting of suckers;

• scion grafting.

Very rarely are domesticated fruit trees raised from seeds,Footnote ¹⁰ since seedlings tend to revert to the wild form of the plant and the fruit produced does not have the same qualities of the parent plant, but tends to deteriorate in quality.Footnote ¹¹ The ancient Greeks were well aware of this problem, and Theophrastus commented on it.Footnote ¹² This is the result of the fact that fruit trees are ‘normally cross-pollinated and widely heterozygous.Footnote ¹³ Therefore even if employing seeds from a superior cultivar, the progeny will not have the desired characteristics and will be economically worthless’.Footnote ¹⁴ On the contrary, vegetative propagation, in particular grafting, gives a yield true to type.Footnote ¹⁵ Thus, the farmer is able to select individual plants that display desirable characteristics, such as hardiness, size, and flavour of fruits and time of ripening. These can be maintained by cloning the plant to obtain saplings that are genetically identical to the parent plant. Vegetative propagation rather than seed planting has thus been the manner in which farmers could assure a dependable supply of desired genotypes and select superior cultivars. Once humans discovered grafting and fully mastered it, the domestication of a whole new range of fruit trees became possible, as in the case of the citrus group, which seem to have been first domesticated in the East, probably in China, before spreading to the Mediterranean.Footnote ¹⁶

Of the three vegetative reproductive techniques listed above, grafting offers a clear advantage from the point of view of the cultivator: it allows one to ‘domesticate’ wild varieties of the same plant by grafting a domesticated variety that has desirable characteristics onto it, thus changing adult, and productively/commercially worthless plants, into productive ones. This solution is very advantageous if, for instance, one is looking to bring to fruit an already relatively developed (wild) plant which does not bear commercially viable fruits, because these are very small or too sour, for instance. The most common occurrence of this practice in antiquity is probably the grafting of the olive onto the oleaster, the wild olive spontaneously present in a number of Mediterranean regions,Footnote ¹⁷ or onto the olivaster,Footnote ¹⁸ which is attested in a number of epigraphic documents from Roman North Africa (see discussion below).Footnote ¹⁹

The other situation when recourse to grafting is very useful is when a stronger rootstock is sought in order to develop more resistant plants, better able to withstand disease, frost, or droughty soils. Even in the case of cultivated plants that have been reproduced from suckers or root cuttings, grafting can be economically advantageous because it offers the means to reduce the wait for young plants to reach maturity and start bearing fruits; by grafting the scion of an adult plant onto a young rootstock, this hiatus is circumvented, since the scion will be ready to flower and produce fruits.

Not all three vegetative propagation techniques are equally suitable for every kind of fruit tree. When looking at the history of domestication of fruit trees and nuts, available evidence indicates that the first fruit trees introduced into domestication in Southeast Asia and Europe were the olive, the vine, the date palm, the pomegranate, the fig, and the sycamore fig. These are all plants that can be reproduced by simply taking cuttings and letting them root (vine, fig, sycamore) or by digging out suckers (the pomegranate), by taking offshoots (the palm) or by planting basal knobs (the olive).Footnote ²⁰ The fact that these trees did not need a more sophisticated technique such as grafting for vegetative propagation probably explains why they were the first fruit trees to be domesticated. On the contrary, other very common fruit trees in classical antiquity – the apple, the pear, the plum, sweet cherry, and the pistachio – do not lend themselves well to simple vegetative propagation and their maintenance is almost entirely reliant on grafting.Footnote ²¹ Although the earliest evidence for the domestication of these fruit trees appears in the third millennium bp,Footnote ²² their extensive incorporation into horticulture seems to have been a phenomenon of the Greek and Roman periods.Footnote ²³ Grafting has applications in viticulture too, since the grape vine (Vitis vinifera L.) is normally propagated vegetatively, by either rooting winter dormant twigs or by grafting.

Horticulture, and particularly fruit-tree cultivation, differs fundamentally from cereal agriculture. While the latter, being annual crops that can be harvested some months after sowing, theoretically allow the cultivator to move production from one spot to another (known as ‘shifting farming’), fruit trees start to bear fruit after three to eight years, depending on the species, but reach full productive potential only several years later.Footnote ²⁴ For that reason, arboriculture is a long-term investment requiring a well-developed, settled society, secure property rights and/or long-term land leases, as well as the protection of the plants from intruders and animals for the whole year.

This overview helps set the right context for understanding the emphasis given to grafting in certain Latin literary sources. The goal was to maintain the same characteristics of the parent plant in common fruit trees by propagating the plants by grafting. In addition, grafting is an essential technique in developing fruits with new characteristics or in domesticating new plants. It is also essential to commercial agriculture, when maintenance of the same fruit genotypes and reproduction of a given cultivar on a large scale are needed. Therefore, grafting, which finds its earlier classical descriptions in the Greek author Theophrastus and in the Hippocratic author of the treatise On the Nature of the Child,Footnote ²⁵ was a basic and common technique for the ancient Mediterranean farmers of the Greek, Roman, and – we should also add – Punic worlds.

Grafting for Dummies

Grafting consists in joining the tissues of two different plants,Footnote ²⁶ allowing them to bind and continue their growth together as a single plant with a compound genetic system in which the distinct genetic identity of the stock and scion are maintained.Footnote ²⁷ A plant, chosen for its roots only and called the rootstock, is connected to a cutting (the scion), chosen for its proper vegetative parts, i.e., the leaves, flowers, and fruits.Footnote ²⁸ It is also common, both in ancient and modern times, to graft two varieties of the same fruit onto a plant, so that, for instance, one half of a tree will bear white mulberries and the other black ones. For a graft to take hold and the point where the two plants have been joined to ‘heal’, several weeks are needed; the exact time depends on the type of plants being grafted and what grafting methods are used. Plant compatibility is crucial for a successful graft because only ‘interclonal/intraspecific grafts are nearly always compatible’.Footnote ²⁹ Very rarely are intragenetic and intrafamilial grafts compatible, whereas grafts between plants of different families are always incompatible.Footnote ³⁰

Grafting is mentioned in the work of all four Latin agronomists (Cato, Varro, Columella, and Palladius); however, the degree of detail given in their works notably varies. Whereas Cato refers to grafted fruit at various points of his manual, largely by the use of the verb inserere,Footnote ³¹ and Varro discusses the compatibility of stock/scion,Footnote ³² for a detailed (and largely accurate) description of various grafting techniques we need to turn to Columella. As he himself clearly states in the preface to his agricultural treatise, the knowledge required to truly master all agricultural things is considerable, and not many people had achieved this. In this opening, Columella uses the example of the knowledge of the various grafting techniques and of horticulture to emphasize that few would have applied themselves to systematically acquire this knowledge:

Columella, on the contrary, presents himself as someone who has knowledge of all these topics, and therefore his work devotes ample space to discussion of grafting and horticultural matters. He is very clear about the benefits of grafting: an engrafted tree is more fruitful than one that is not, as for instance, a young plant reproduced by slippage.Footnote ³³As summarized by White,Footnote ³⁴ Columella describes four kinds of grafting techniques:

1. (1) cleft-grafting and (2) bark-grafting, indicated by the Latin term insitio, from the verb inserere;

2. (3) patch-budding, referred to by either the term inoculatio or by the Greek-derived emplastratio, which means patch;

3. (4) bore-grafting, called terebratio.

The scion, i.e., the cutting that is being grafted onto the rootstock, was called surculus.

Cleft-grafting envisages the cutting and clefting (wedge shape) of the stock, so that it can receive the scion, which has been shaped accordingly. In the bark grafting case, the scion is instead placed between the bark and the hard wood. These first two methods are referred to in Cato’s manual on agriculture.Footnote ³⁵ The third method, patch-budding, requires a small portion of the bark to be removed from the stock to form an ‘eye’, while the graft consists of a bud with the same size of bark attached as the one removed from the ‘eye’. Columella seems to claim that this technique was a Roman invention, and goes on to give a detailed description of how to proceed with successful patch-budding.Footnote ³⁶ The good fit of stock and scion was very important in this technique, and Pliny notes that to achieve same-sized cuts, the same hollow punch was used.Footnote ³⁷ The fourth method, bore-grafting, was used only for vines and required the stock to be carefully bored with a special instrument, the Gallic auger.Footnote ³⁸

Columella also claims to have developed a grafting technique which allows circumventing the problem that only trees that are similar to each other can be grafted together, as he states at the opening of section 11 of Book 5.Footnote ³⁹ In concluding his description of grafting methods, Columella gives the reader a flavour of his hands-on approach and direct experience of agriculture by stating:

Columella’s account continues with the description of this new, time-consuming method, which is now referred to as ‘inarching’,Footnote ⁴⁰ using as example the binding of an olive with a fig.Footnote ⁴¹ Whether indeed Columella himself experimented with grafting and discovered the method described or whether it was developed by some farmer/specialized gardener on Columella’s estate made no difference: the discovery was made under Columella’s patronage and was his to claim.Footnote ⁴² Just as in Varro there is a clear difference in the way in which slave personnel engaged in animal farming and in the cultivation of plants were recognised or not as individuals with distinct agency, so does Columella here ignore the contribution of the specialized slave horticulturists that he must have had on his estates.Footnote ⁴³ I shall return to this point later, for its implications about elite attitudes towards the betterment of cultivars and the creation of new ones.

Finally, among the agricultural writers, we find Palladius (Rutilius Taurus Aemilianus Palladius), an author writing much later than the others, in the late fourth/early fifth century ad, and who was much reliant on the earlier treatises as his sources. Palladius included an elegiac poem on grafting, the de Insitione, in his fourteen-book Opus agriculturae. While the rest of Palladius’ treatise is in prose, the choice of poetry for the book on grafting shows, on the one hand, the continuation of a literary tradition that can be traced back to at least Virgil’s Georgics. On the other hand, Palladius’ choice suggests that he wanted to distinguish the treatment of grafting from the rest of the treatise. The shaping and control of nature, which grafting embodies, was perceived as a topic suitable for the grand rhythms of poetic metre.Footnote ⁴⁴

The continuous selection of fruit plants with desired traits and their propagation by grafting allowed, with the passing of time, the development of a range of varieties of the same fruit featuring different characteristics (Figure 4.1). In ancient Rome, these developments are reflected in the mention of various fruit varieties found, above all, but not exclusively, in the texts of the agronomists and in Pliny the Elder’s books dealing with arboriculture.Footnote ⁴⁵ If we take as example the cases of the pear, apple, and fig, among the most common fruit trees of the Roman world, we can see a steady increase over time in the number of varieties. Cato, the earliest of the agricultural writers, refers in his manual written around 160 bc to five varieties of pear, four of apple, and six of fig. Varro, one century later, ignores the pear altogether, but mentions five varieties of apple and four of fig.Footnote ⁴⁶ However, in the early first century ad Columella, who, as mentioned above, is also the author who gives a very detailed account of the grafting techniques and refers to his personal experience in experimental grafting, lists eighteen kinds of pear, which, he specifies, represent only a selection, eight of apple, and seventeen of fig. When we arrive at Pliny the Elder just a few years later than Columella, we find thirty-nine varieties of pear, twenty-three of apple, and twenty-nine of fig, and the impression is that he has not given an exhaustive list. The great increase in varieties available and cultivated is not limited to fruit trees, but includes the grape vine and, to a lesser extent, the olive too, two of the major crops of the Roman world: whereas in Cato one finds seven kinds of grape vine and ten of olive mentioned, by the time of Pliny’s account these have risen to seventy-one and fifteen, respectively (Table 4.1).

Figure 4.1 Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France: the grafting of a tree, detail of one of the vignettes making a large mosaic floor depicting an agricultural calendar, first half of the third century ad.

Photo © RMN-Grand Palais-Musée d’Archéologie Nationale / Michel Urtado.

As far as the surviving literary sources are concerned, then, the late first century bc to the mid first century ad appears to be the time when a boom in the development of new fruit varieties occurred. However, regardless of Varro’s limited interest in fruit varieties and grafting in his de Re Rustica (rather he gives great prominence in his dialogue to pastio villatica, which had become very fashionable on estates in his time),Footnote ⁴⁷ the start of systematic grafting as a practice of horticulture is firmly rooted in the late Republican period. It even came to the notice of those whom we would not expect to be interested: Cicero mentions grafting as a very ingenious practice when he adds horticulture, flower cultivation, and pastio villatica (honey production in this case) to the activity of the farmer:Footnote ⁴⁸

The ‘boom of grafting’ ought to be contextualized on two very different levels: on the one hand, there is the practical side of grafting in the context of commercial agriculture, increased urbanization rates, and population size of Rome and other major towns, which in turn meant increased demand for different varieties of plant food and novelties on the part of a greater range of demanding consumers engaged in different degrees of competitive display. In this discourse, the elite landowners occupy centre stage, not simply because of the nature of the surviving written evidence – works of upper-class authors for elite readers – but also because substantial innovation in agriculture, such as the cultivation of new species, was ‘designed to produce great profits for the proprietors rather than to add to the poor man’s repertoire of stratagems for avoiding risks’.Footnote ⁴⁹ On the other hand, though, there was also a clear ideological dimension that is exploited and elaborated on, particularly on the part of the upper classes. Grafting meant domestication of, and control over, wild nature, a conceptual point of reference which finds parallel echoes in other civilizations too, for instance ancient China.Footnote ⁵⁰ It is these aspects that find their way in literary texts such as Virgil’s Georgics and to which we now turn.

Subduing Nature

It has been stated that ‘the Romans were fascinated (obsessed even) by the process [i.e., grafting]’,Footnote ⁵² and grafting is a theme that finds its way also in other literary genres besides the agricultural manuals proper, as the quotation from Virgil’s Georgics exemplifies.Footnote ⁵³ Indeed the verses from Virgil’s second Georgics extolling grafting and other forms of vegetative propagation (see lines 22–31) as central in the taming of spontaneous vegetation are possibly the best-known passages of Latin literature dealing with this subject. In this poem, Virgil presents grafting as the essential technique which allows the farmer not simply to tame nature’s silvestrem animum, particularly in the case of unfruitful trees (infecunda, line 48), but also to propagate fruit trees with selected characteristics, something generation from seed could not ensure:

As the verses progress, grafting becomes wondrous, a complete transformation of nature which skirts the realm of outright hubris. From line 69 onwards the reader encounters the mention of several impossible grafts because they are crossings between plants of completely different genera, such as arbutus and walnut or ash and pear. In this poem, even the sterile tree par excellence, according to the view of several moralistic writers, the plane tree,Footnote ⁵⁴ is made to produce apples thanks to the art of grafting. The poem’s recurrent theme is clearly the taming of nature at various levels, not simply in the actions of the rustic farmer. In praising the fertility of Italy, where ‘cows calve two times a year and the trees fruit twice in a year’ (2.150), the poet also adds his praise for major engineering feats, such as the creation of Portus Iulius in the Bay of Naples, by which human intervention and ingenuity profoundly modified the natural landscape. As has been pointed out, the act of grafting similar species/compatible plants (e.g., the apple and the pear) ‘was never more interesting for the Romans than planting or sowing; only farfetched combinations connoted anything more’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Lowe stresses that writers of the late Republic and early first century ad period such as Virgil had an overall positive view of grafting and artificial ‘polycarpophoria’. For the first generation of readers of the Georgics, the immediate association to come to mind was of a Saturnian golden age and not the idea of violence perpetrated against the natural world.Footnote ⁵⁶

Virgil is not the only poet to insert grafting among his verses; Propertius, for instance, refers to the grafting of unwilling pears.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the Eclogues, a poem attributed to Calpurnius Siculus, the grafting ars of a certain Astacus was described in this way: ‘the tree puts on a dress of alien leaves and fruits of a diverse species’, pears are combined in due proportion with the apple, and he ‘constrains engrafted peaches to supplant the early plums’.Footnote ⁵⁸

In several writers one can detect a fascination with extraordinary grafting combinations, perhaps culminating in Pliny the Elder’s claim that in Tibur there was a tree which had been grafted with an amazing variety of fruits: ‘nuts on one branch, berries on another, while in other places hung grapes, pears, figs, pomegranates and various sorts of apples’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Plutarch was not immune to such fancies and inserts a discussion on grafting in his Table Talk, to answer the question of why evergreen plants such as cypress, fir, and pine are not grafted.Footnote ⁶⁰ The literary setting Plutarch gives to this little disquisition is a stroll by the interlocutor in Soclarus’ garden, where he showed ‘trees which had been fancified in all sorts of ways by what is called grafting’.Footnote ⁶¹ Unusual or plainly impossible grafts are mentioned here too:

In this passage we find the combination of the unproductive plane tree with the apple which we have seen in Virgil’s Georgics, but also the pairing of oak, whose acorns were good primarily for pig rearing and not for human consumption, transformed into a pear-producing plant suitable to humans. As remarked by Squatriti,Footnote ⁶² ‘surprising hybridity’ continued to be a concern and source of fascination all the way down to Palladius: in his treatise he also claimed that it was possible to graft incompatible plants, such as chestnut on pear, and apple on mulberry or willow, suggesting that late antique writers and landowners shared the same fascination with strange grafts expressed by authors of the early empire centuries earlier.Footnote ⁶³

Multiple grafts among compatible plants were a challenge, and cultivators liked to undertake them. The emperor Marcus Aurelius, in a letter to his former tutor M. Cornelius Fronto, mentions a single-trunk tree displaying shoots of many kinds of different plants (so a tree that had been grafted by inoculation, or the emplastron grafting technique):

The epistle is lacunose and what the tree was and what kinds of shoot had been grafted onto it is not specified, but Marcus’ astonishment and admiration for the plant he had seen, together with his father M. Annius Verus, on the estate of the distinguished senator Q. Pompeius Falco is clear.Footnote ⁶⁵ As this is a letter to his former tutor, its contents may well be accurate; although the etymological origins and precise meaning of the word catachanna are obscure,Footnote ⁶⁶ the fact that Marcus Aurelius reports it as the ‘proper name’ for this kind of engrafted plant, suggests that it was a term used with a technical meaning in the context of horticulture.Footnote ⁶⁷ It has been suggested that the term is a Punic word:Footnote ⁶⁸ if so, its currency in Latin might indicate the influence Punic arboriculture had (Mago and his treatise come to mind) on developing advanced grafting techniques.

It was not only grafting that fascinated Latin writers and poets and that had an important role in the routine operations carried out in the cultivation of orchards; pruning can be added too. At least in the case of gardens as depicted in wall paintings such as the famous painted ‘garden of Livia’ from the Primaporta villa, the fruit trees depicted do not display a large crown and only a few branches have fruits on them. Small crown and few branches as depicted are the result of repeated expert pruning. Kathryn Gleason’s careful examination of the wall paintings has drawn attention to the fact that the painter has indeed depicted the marks left by the pruning cuts and that gardens so densely planted as those depicted in art and archaeologically attested at Villa Arianna in Stabiae must have required considerable care and expense to keep.Footnote ⁶⁹ The thick planting, which at first gives the impression of ‘natural’ growing, needed very expert regular pruning to achieve and maintain certain effects. This expert pruning is indeed recorded in the wall paintings. References to individuals who were expert in pruning trees, the arboratores, appear in Columella and Pliny. In the former, while enumerating experts in various required agricultural tasks who could pass their knowledge to the bailiff, the arborator is paired with the vinitor, the vinedresser; in the latter, it is just a quick mention, while giving the recommendation that one should not cut foliage at midday.Footnote ⁷⁰

Names – Agricultural and Aristocratic

As we have seen, Pliny saw grafting as a way to secure future remembrance. The list of various grafted fruit varieties he offers, with names largely derived from the name of their ‘creator’, is a positive acknowledgment of human ingenuity, of the relationship between man and nature, whereby nature’s variety and productivity are increased and ameliorated by controlled human activity.Footnote ⁷¹ Prominent Romans and distinguished gentes who have given their names to cultivars of apple, pear, fig, and cherry include a Dolabella, Pompey the Great, the gens Claudia, the Lutatia, the Pomponia, and even Livia. Pliny does not explicitly say that these people grafted the new cultivars – he does not use the verb inserere – but the connection between prominent individuals and the creation of new fruit, which could have only happened by traits selection and vegetative propagation, is unmistakably stated by the noun auctor, which here means both the creator of the new cultivar and the producer, as can be appreciated in the passage about pears:

The relationship between man and nature adds to Pliny’s vision of the world as, to use Bispham’s words, ‘inextricably linked with the progress of Roman conquest’.Footnote ⁷³ The positive idea of, and the pursuit of, novel fruit became a topos which travelled from the scrolls of literary works written in Rome for elite readers to the stone of metric funerary inscriptions far away from the capital a good century later: a long Severan inscription from Nikopolis in Moesia Inferior (modern Bulgaria) ends with an appeal to decorate the tomb with flowers and ‘with many novel fruits of various kinds’ (emphasis mine).Footnote ⁷⁴

However, there is a contrast between the way in which Pliny writes about grafting and developing new varieties of fruit and how, for instance, he laments that simple vegetables such as cabbages have become so huge and so expensive that they are beyond the means of the poor people on whose tables they used to feature prominently.Footnote ⁷⁵ The very large cabbages or the asparagus, plants that Pliny states were made by nature to grow wild and were now cultivated producing large specimens, are also the result of human ingenuity. We have here that sharp juxtaposition of ars vs. natura, a theme explored in Chapter 1 when discussing Pliny the Younger and his description of the garden of his villa in Tuscis.

The agricultural means that led to these horticultural results are not explicitly stated but can be easily inferred: irrigation, well-manured soil,Footnote ⁷⁶ and seed selection. Because of the historically humble role cabbages had, Pliny uses the example to overemphasize the immoderate luxury of the table of his own times.Footnote ⁷⁷ On the contrary, fruit and fruit consumption are rarely presented as a symbol of excess and gluttony in our literary sources; when they are, it is normally in the case of out-of-season fruit, such as in the anecdote about Gallienus serving melons in winter and out-of-season green figs and apples always fresh from the trees.Footnote ⁷⁸ In late antiquity, abstaining from eating fruit may have been seen by some as a sign of imperial self-control and restraint, as in the case of Constantius II who, according to Ammianus Marcellinus,Footnote ⁷⁹ never wiped his mouth or nose in public, or spat, or tasted fruit, but the emperor’s abstention from fruit may rest on religious grounds rooted in his Manichaeism rather than in fruit having assumed the connotation of luxury.Footnote ⁸⁰

Overall, grafting is not as prominent in Pliny’s discourse on luxury and excess as other aspect of horticulture. It is true that at the start of Book 17 he frames grafting morally, characterizing the ingenious technique as introducing adultery even to trees, so that ‘not even fruit should grow for the poor’.Footnote ⁸¹ In this passage, Pliny also openly states the financial returns that effective fruit cultivation could bring to estates in proximity of Rome, a point to which I shall return later. Pliny seems to be more cautious than Virgil about the claim at Georgics 2.69 that nuts could be grafted ‘on an arbutus, apples on a plane and cherries on an elm tree’;Footnote ⁸² there are religious implications that make the pursuits of certain types of surprising grafts unadvisable, but this does not deny a fascination with the wondrous and exceptional, as in the story Pliny reports of the tree from Tibur mentioned earlier in the chapter, the one bearing nuts, berries, grapes, pears, figs, pomegranates, and apples. However, the developing of new fruit varieties and transplantation of (useful) plants are largely seen in a positive light in the Natural History, even though the topic is not devoid of the contradictions and complexities that so often characterize Roman discourse in general. Through a narrative shaped by politics and morality, the essential nature of grafting for Pliny emerges as something allowing fruit to be improved and differentiated. This stance can be appreciated in the opposite situation, when grafting could not create varieties of a fruit or enhance any of its traits, as in the case of the mulberry, which significantly does not acquire an association with any personal names, only to the geographic area where it was grown:

It is only when dealing with unproductive plants that Pliny seems to perceive vegetative propagation as a subversion of natural order, as in the case of the plane tree that did not shed its leaves in winter that we will encounter later in this chapter.Footnote ⁸³ If we are to take Pliny’s words literally, not only did a long list of very prominent Romans have an interest in creating new varieties of common fruits, but they actually also personally engaged in grafting experiments. Perhaps some did so, taking a keen interest in the productivity of their estates and enjoying gardening for relaxation, as many centuries later some of the aristocrats of Europe did. But it remains hard to believe that Pompey or Livia, wife of Augustus, developed the new types of early-ripening figs attributed to them with their own hands. Rather, it is much more likely that achievements made in one’s household, by one’s slaves, were claimed by the master as his or her own. As remarked earlier about Columella’s claim to have invented a new grafting technique, it did not matter in terms of the credit whether the author was indeed Columella or someone in his household. What is revealing, however, is that a Pompey or a Dolabella should bother at all in taking the credit for the successful grafting and for the naming of the new fruit; the strong symbolic value this action had in Roman mentality cannot be denied, and the best example of the complex cultural layers surrounding grafting techniques and the creation of new cultivars is the case of Livia Augusta.

Livia Augusta

Livia Drusilla, Augustus’ wife, was a remarkable lady in many respects. Married to Augustus for about fifty years, she must have been as politically shrewd as her husband. She helped him transform the Roman state, promote, in the celebration of established peace and return of a golden age, ideals about the importance of the family, simplicity and marital harmony, linked her name to euergetic building projects that were transforming the city of Rome (e.g., the Macellum Liviae, the Porticus Liviae, but also restorations of temples such as the one consecrated to Fortuna Muliebris),Footnote ⁸⁴ and participated in political life probably more than any other woman in Rome had ever done before. As she had responsibility for the welfare of her family and husband, which due to their prominence was under continual public scrutiny, Livia had an important role in encouraging marital harmony and peace in general, as exemplified by the promotion of the cult of Concordia. Her public role and unique standing were well captured in the expression Romana princeps of the Consolatio ad Liviam, written by a Roman eques after the death of Drusus, Livia’s son, in 9 bc.Footnote ⁸⁵ Even more explicitly, during the reign of her son Tiberius she had, in Cassius Dio’s words:

As a powerful woman, she attracted plenty of criticism too, being presented in some sources as scheming, ruthless, and, inter alia, the mastermind behind the murder of her grandson Germanicus. She was even suspected of causing the death of her husband when he was ill: rumours that she had killed him by poison circulated.Footnote ⁸⁶

In the context of this study, I am primarily concerned with another instance of Livia’s exceptionality: the attribution to her of the development of a particular kind of fig by grafting. As we have seen, Pliny explicitly names her as the auctor of the fruit to which she gave her name.Footnote ⁸⁷ Whether she actually grafted the plants herself (unlikely in my view) or practised any form of gardening is not the point. As discussed earlier, it was perfectly normal to attribute to the owner of a given estate, or of a given slave, the horticultural achievements developed on his property. So whether the ficus liviana or the ficus pompeiana mentioned by Pliny were directly cultivated by these illustrious individuals or were more likely developed on their estates by someone else and given fame by the association of their names, the end result was the same: it is Livia or Pompey who are remembered as their ‘inventors’.

What is also remarkable is that Livia appears to be the only woman to whom the creation of a new fruit variety by grafting is attributed. In the list of names of prominent (male) Romans and illustrious families grafting apples, pears, and other fruits provided by Pliny, Livia’s name stands out. In Latin literature the only other example of female active involvement in grafting concerns Pomona in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but she is not a woman, she is a nymph.Footnote ⁸⁸ I propose that Livia’s unique status as auctor of the ficus liviana had as much to do with her transit into the male – and public – sphere in other areas of action as it did with her social prominence at a time when great interest in arboriculture, grafting, and horticulture arose, as exemplified, for instance, by the number of literary works on these topics (unfortunately many lost) composed in the Augustan age and the various innovations in the field of horticulture that occurred in the period, as examined in Chapter 3.

Grafting, as an action, was perceived as being male by definition; insero, to in-graft, can also mean to insert, to thrust, and the term could take sexual overtones, as remarked by Hardy and Totelin in the case of the verses Priapea where there is a word play with inserta.Footnote ⁸⁹ Theophrastus, in his categorization of male and female trees, normally places fruit-bearing trees in the female category.Footnote ⁹⁰ As these ‘female’ trees, to remain true to type, were largely propagated by grafting, it is natural that the act of grafting was perceived as male. It seems a fair generalization to say that, for Romans of the early and mid Republican periods, the hortus, here intended as the domestic vegetable garden, was typically a female space entrusted to the charge of the women of the house.Footnote ⁹¹ As stressed by Pliny, who refers to Cato’s authority, in old times the status of the kitchen garden gave the measure of the mater familias’ ability since haec cura feminae dicebatur, that is, the care of the hortus was considered the woman’s responsibility.Footnote ⁹² By contrast, the cultivation of crops, and in particular of vines and fruit trees, was in the male domain.

With time, however, and with the emergence of commercial vegetable gardens, the hortus was no longer seen as an exclusively female sphere, although, as observed by von Stackelberg, the perception of a possible loss of masculinity if the male presence in the garden was not balanced by an appropriate activity, such as digging, planting, and exercising (either the body or the mind) continued.Footnote ⁹³ Arboriculture and viticulture, however, were not subject to this gender ambiguity: they remained a male preserve throughout.

Starting from 35 bc, Livia received several exceptional honours – some were traditional male prerogatives, like the right to be preceded in public by a lictor granted to her after Augustus’ death – that distinguished her among all the other matronae of Rome and clearly marked her public role.Footnote ⁹⁴ It seems to me that attributing to her the creation of a new kind of fig, an attribution that must have circulated during her lifetime since a Livian fig was listed by the lexicographer Cloatius Verus,Footnote ⁹⁵ was possible because she had acquired such a special and unique status in Roman public life, appropriating several much more important prerogatives from the exclusively male political and public sphere. We have seen the strong ideological value that grafting, naming, and transplanting new plants from faraway regions had for the Roman elite; Livia cum tribunicia potestate, Livia suis iuris, ‘Livia the builder’,Footnote ⁹⁶ could then also become ‘Livia the auctor’ of a new fruit variety. The naming of the fig after Livia is not inconsequential; rather, it is yet another indicator of how ideologically charged even mundane activities were. It could also be a remnant of an intentional ‘promotion’ of Livia as engaging in an activity – agriculture – that was traditionally Roman and morally sound,Footnote ⁹⁷ for Livia’s connection with vegetation ‘branched’ in different directions.Footnote ⁹⁸

Grafting, Boasting, and Marketing

As in the case of landscape art and the appreciation of natural landscapes, the Romans did not admire or represent pure wilderness but rather a tame, ordered landscape with visible human interventions. Grafting was also a means of bending nature to one’s will. As time progressed and Rome witnessed the importation of new exotic plants, the emergence of topiary art and the creation of luxurious horti, green spaces open to the public, brought knowledge and experience of the expanding empire home to an urban public. At the same time, it appears that the higher the social standing of a person, the more extraordinary the achievements in the case of grafting were expected to be. Whereas the famous Pompey is credited with a new fig variety, by the time of Pliny (at least on the basis of the information given in his narrative), this was not quite impressive enough. So we read of a man of consular rank, who boasted – Pliny says he heard this himself – of having a new type of walnut tree that could bear fruit twice a year.Footnote ⁹⁹ Even though Pliny had declared that ‘there is no further room for ingenuity; no new fruit has been discovered for a long time now’,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ placing the acme at about the time of Virgil, clearly landlords did not cease to be interested in curiosities and in the amelioration of their trees’ produce.

Grafted plants as indicators of skills that allowed the control of nature and as something to be proud of, show off to one’s peers, and even boast about are the connecting link between elite gardens and horticulture, the element that allows us to close the circle connecting the symbolic and political valence of gardens I have discussed in Chapter 1 and the ideologically charged elite involvement in arboriculture. Garden spaces were the setting for the daily strolls of the upper classes, for the ambulationes or gestationes in which to exercise by walking, mounting a horse, or driving a light chariot. In the case of walking, arboricultural prowess, novel plants, or new cultivars became part of the display to be admired during these strolls. I have referred in Chapter 3 to the Latin inscription attesting a gestatio set in a pomarium, a fruit orchard. The choice was not purely practical, because that pomarium offered the required space for a gestatio, it was above all ideologically charged: the productivity and horticultural skills embodied by the fruit trees were a spectacle that the owner wanted to enjoy and share with his friends and peers. It ultimately had to do with the idea that morally acceptable otium had to be productive: exercising the body by walking the recommended one mile, while perhaps talking to a friend about philosophy and taking in the view of a productive orchard which displayed horticultural skills and the master of nature, ticked all the boxes.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Archaeological data indicate that such use of garden spaces and aspirations were to be found at every level of the upper strata of society. Herod’s gardens at Jericho, initially thought to have showcased balsam and palm, the main sources of revenue for his reign, in fact housed a miniaturized collection of trees and shrubs from the Mediterranean: growing these plants here required defying the environmental conditions of the desert and they were therefore something to show off.Footnote ¹⁰² Wide walkways in gardens (c.2 m), even in those that are not in a peristyle setting and may be taken as being only commercial gardens, suggest their use as ambulationes while admiring the plants. On the contrary, orchards and market gardens with purely utilitarian functions, like those excavated in Pompeii by Wilhelmina Jashemski, have c.1 m wide paths in between plantings. We have seen earlier in this chapter Plutarch’s passage from the Moralia, in which the interlocutor strolls with friends in the garden and shows them trees displaying skilful grafting.Footnote ¹⁰³ Beauty, and above all the unusual, in terms of rarity of a plant or of difficulty of the horticultural feat achieved, were elements that reflected well on the owner of a specific garden or orchard, regardless of whether the actual work had been carried out by his or her slave gardeners. Pliny recounts a personal memory of his: Caecina Largus used to point out and show off to his guests the lotus trees that were in the garden of the house that had once belonged to Licinius Crassus.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ These trees were famous for the exchange that occurred between Domitius Ahenobarbus and Crassus, mentioned in Chapter 1, but also because skilful care made them last, strong and verdant (cultu virides et iuvenesque), until they were destroyed in the fire of Rome in ad 64. The longevity of the trees thanks to horticultural skills is as important an element as their famous past history as motive for Caecina Largus regularly pointing them out to his guests while walking in the garden.

These literary gardens have ‘real’ counterparts in several examples of Roman gardens excavated in recent years. Horticultural display of grafted fruit trees and other plants reproduced by layering might have characterized the large garden of the so-called Casa della Regina Carolina near Pompeii’s forum (viii.3.14). Initial results from the ongoing excavation project suggest that walkways separated regular planting, and that some of these plants were reproduced by layering.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Another suggestive archaeological example of provisions for elite walking and display of agricultural productivity, this time having as the setting a vineyard rather than fruit trees and shrubs, comes from the recent investigations at the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. A 4 m wide beaten earth path led from the villa’s large peristyle to a round pavilion/belvedere some distance away, running through a vineyard.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Walking in one’s garden and showing off to visitors the plants has many recorded historical examples beyond the world of ancient Rome.

At Villa Arianna in Stabiae the excavation of the great peristyle garden has revealed the garden design: a series of rectangular planting beds, some narrow, some wider, separated by broad, beaten earth walkways (Figure 4.2). As has been argued, the narrow planting beds, which, as shown by the root cavities, once hosted all different types of plants placed in a single file, may have hosted a vegetal display that alluded to the extent of Rome’s geographic reach by having plants from different geographic areas (at the end of the planting beds there were palm trees).Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Valued guests and close associates may have even left after their visits with cuttings of novel cultivars to graft onto trees in their own villa estates, as attested in twelfth-century China, where ‘grafting offered a good possibility for the owner of a rare or particularly beautiful variety to partake this pleasure with a visiting friend who would leave with a cutting’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The planting beds of elite gardens like the Villa Arianna’s may also have displayed a new fruit cultivar, a novel fruit plant, trees dwarfed by pruning skills, or some impressive and successful graft, such as the tree that Marcus Aurelius saw in the property of the senator Pompeius Falco.

Figure 4.2 Castellammare di Stabia (Italy): Villa Arianna, plan of excavated garden in the Great Peristyle showing planting beds, walkways, and root cavities.

Courtesy of Thomas N. Howe and Kathryn Gleason.

Garden views in Roman wall paintings capture the aesthetic importance given to fruit trees and other plants, whose growth was carefully controlled by pruning; these painted gardens, the finest examples of which date to the Augustan era, show trees laden with fruit, as can be appreciated in the ‘Casa del Frutteto’ in Pompeii (i.9.5) or in the Prima Porta villa.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ It is worth noting that the plants depicted in the wall paintings were pruned in such a way as to bring the plants to the eye level of the viewer.Footnote ¹¹⁰ This type of painted scene alluded to, and amplified, the horticultural ‘spectacle’ experience offered by the actual gardens. It might be significant that the quince was one of the preferred rootstock plants for the Romans. Besides its compatibility with the other popular fruit trees in the same family, the fact that when quince is used as rootstock it produces a dwarfing effect and smaller trees, may have been intentionally sought not only because of the practical advantages in cultivation (e.g., when harvesting fruit) but also because it produced plants that were closer to eye level, helping in creating fruit trees that were also meant for viewing.

The Villa Arianna garden, with its beaten earth walkways in between elongated rectangular planting beds featuring a variety of plants, was not exceptional but needs to be taken as indicative of an upper-class garden and the type of human–plant interaction that took place in these spaces. It is the type of garden we need to imagine as the setting for the anecdote told by Phaedrus in one of his fables involving the Emperor Tiberius.Footnote ¹¹¹ Tiberius had stopped at the imperial villa at Misenum and went for a stroll in the garden, when the over-zealous and sycophantic atriensis tried to win some praise or reward from the emperor for hurrying to sprinkle with water the dusty and scorched beaten earth paths on which Tiberius was stepping. Even in Phaedrus’ short text the fact that the luxuriant display of a well-tended garden was the essence of the pleasure one would take in while walking in the garden is clear: the emperor is strolling in laeta viridia, in a luxuriant garden, among luxuriant plants.Footnote ¹¹²

The link between activities only the elite could afford (i.e., leisurely strolling in the private luxurious setting of a villa estate) and the importance accorded to the view, or, better, the spectacle of agricultural productivity is one of the cornerstones underpinning the elite interest in grafting I have discussed above. However, naming new fruit varieties after illustrious people may have also had another goal beside the aggrandizement of the ‘inventor’, according to Roman traditional values – the practice of agriculture and the idealized projection of Rome’s early Republican rustic simplicity when generals got their hands dirty tilling their field remains a positive value in elite mentality – and according to imperialistic ideas. Pliny seems also to suggest that fruit varieties bearing the names of notable Roman families, such as the Appiana mala (from the Appii Claudii) or the Dolabelliana pear, could be seen as some kind of ‘advertising expedient’ to give celebrity to a specific variety of fruit, either by connecting its creation to some famous person or by presenting it as the favoured fruit of a famous individual, as for instance in the case of the Tiberiana pear, so named because it was said to be the emperor’s favoured variety. In the middle of his enumeration of various kinds of apples connected to famous gentes he states:

One wonders whether it was just Pliny’s opinion that linking an object, in this case a fruit, to a famous family or individual may increase its market appeal or whether there was a more widespread realization of the marketing value attached to names. That there was clear awareness of product differentiation in antiquity and that the market required the identification of the various products, whether by their names or the shape of their containers, is beyond doubt.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Certainly this is not the only instance in the Natural History of various ‘marketing’ expedients, in many cases also including abuse of customers’ trust via food adulteration or fraudulent labelling of products. Evidence from other contexts suggests that the basic rules and mechanisms one finds in retailing today were clearly understood. To give just some examples, we know that particular amphora shapes were copied when trying to enter a new market where a similar product was already in circulation, in an attempt to gain consumers’ confidence by proposing a familiar amphora shape, reinforced with tituli picti on containers proclaiming the quality of a product or giving the name of a specific ‘brand’, such as in the case of the famous urcei containing the garum of Umbricius Scaurus from Pompeii.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Freedmen and Arboriculture

Latin literary sources emphasize the direct involvement of elite members of Roman society in the agricultural endeavours of their estates and in practising arboriculture, but in them and in a number of other references about skilful and highly productive cultivators we find the omnipresent, but sometimes invisible, figures of Roman society: freedmen (liberti). In the cases of trade, commerce, transport, and industry, freedmen have been recognized as the major actors, the real entrepreneurs. However, their role in commercial agriculture and in innovation in this field has not received the attention it deserves. Some freedmen had the specialized technical knowledge that was the basis of their contribution to agricultural advances; they must have been specialized horticulturist slaves on wealthy estates, who continued to apply, this time on their own properties, their expertise in agricultural matters after gaining freedom. The link between highly skilled gardeners and elite villa estates is well known in the case of the topiarii, a term usually understood as meaning landscape/ornamental gardener. The inscriptions attesting this slave specialization are geographically limited to areas where there was a high concentration of elite villas (Bay of Naples, surroundings of Rome, Lake Como) and to members of the familia of wealthy families and the imperial household.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Therefore, the connection between wealthy landowners – who could either acquire trained slave horticulturists or who were able and willing to invest in training them, in advancement of horticulture, and in the development of commercially viable new cultivars – and the successful agricultural endeavours of these freed slaves is a significant aspect of Roman arboriculture.

Pliny’s concession to include a freedman’s name alongside famous individuals who had named fruit is a pointer towards those that probably were, more often than not, the real entrepreneurs in the field of arboriculture. The Sceptius of the mala Sceptiana, who must have laboured (or supervised his own slaves/cultivators) in selecting and grafting apples until he reached the desired results of a fruit with a remarkable rotundness, can be probably placed in the same category as the very successful grape cultivator Acilius Sthenelus, son of a libertus, and the freedman Gaius Furius Chresimus.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Sthenelus, who had intensively cultivated a 60 iugera (c.15.10 ha or 37.33 acres) vineyard he owned and which he sold for 400,000 sesterces, had developed new methods of trenching and planting vines on a neglected estate on the Via Nomentana near Rome purchased by Q. Remnius Palaemon, achieving, after eight years, record grape harvests.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The freedman Gaius Furius Chresimus, we are told, ‘was extremely unpopular because he got much larger returns from a rather small farm than the neighbourhood obtained from very large estates’, to the point of being accused of casting spells on his neighbours’ crops.Footnote ¹¹⁹ This anecdote and the resolution of the matter when Chresimus was indicted by the curule aedile and called to appear in front of the tribes is often cited when discussing Roman agricultural productivity. In court, and before judge and jury, Chresimus produced all his good-quality and well-maintained agricultural tools, his well-fed slaves and oxen, in short all that was central to his farm’s production and proclaimed ‘These are my magic spells, citizens, and I am not able to exhibit to you or to produce in court my midnight labours and early risings and my sweat and toil.’Footnote ¹²⁰ When recounting the story about Sthenelus, Pliny presents his agricultural successes, based on his accomplished agricultural skills (exemplum consummatae huius artis), in a very positive manner.Footnote ¹²¹ In the context of viticulture, oleiculture, and arboriculture, Pliny approves of deploying know-how and technical innovation to achieve agricultural success and improve productivity, so that ‘taking an innovative approach to farming … might not be at odds with the old-fashioned ideals’.Footnote ¹²² The criticism is levied against Palaemon, who had only ‘played the part of a farmer’ (dum agricolam imitator, that is to say, he did not have any agricultural knowledge and could not really claim the success that he enjoyed because of Sthenelus’ ars), because he haec adgressus excolere non virtute animi sed vanitate primo (‘undertook the cultivation of this property not from any high motive but at first-and-foremost out of vanity’). However, the story about the alleged use of magic on the part of Chresimus reminds us that innovation can be received with suspicion and that the advancement of agricultural techniques such as grafting was not always universally admired, particularly, one can assume, when ‘unnatural’ combinations were purposed for the sake of their novelty. Pliny’s religious concerns about certain types of grafts that I have mentioned earlier, or the belief that certain techniques were in fact magic rather than the result of a cultivator’s skills, are not irrational notions exclusive to a premodern society. As late as 1912, L.H. Bailey, who was an advocate for scientific horticulture, reported that agricultural writers commonly thought that ‘graftage is somehow vitally pernicious and that its effect on the plant must be injurious … akin to magic and entirely opposed to the laws of nature’.Footnote ¹²³ Seeing grafting in a symbolic manner, and being fascinated by it, whether positively or negatively, is clearly a phenomenon that has been prevalent and long-lasting.

Another example of former slaves acquiring fame for their remarkable skills in the cultivation of trees concerns the freedman Aegilius, owner of the estate that had belonged to Scipio Africanus and was visited by Seneca to learn more about olive tree cultivation.Footnote ¹²⁴ Aegilius is certainly presented by Seneca as having advanced technical knowledge in the matter of trees. He knew how to successfully transplant a tree, regardless of its age, and he knew how to ‘revitalize’ olive trees in particular. The technique to ‘revitalize’ an old plant by digging it out and cutting the excess roots, or to plant cuttings to create new olive trees, which Aegilius would probably have explained to Seneca at length, were valued by Seneca for both their practical and allegorical value.Footnote ¹²⁵ Seneca, perhaps as witticism, tells Lucilius (the addressee of his letter) that he is not sharing any specifics of Aegilius’ tips so Lucilius will not use the freedman’s experience to compete with his (Seneca’s) own application of the freedman’s knowledge, thereby putting Lucilius in a position to compete with Seneca in olive production. Elite Romans liked to keep their sources of practical information to themselves.

As we have seen, when we are told that prominent Romans like Pompey or Columella developed new fruit varieties or new grafting techniques, they were probably claiming for themselves achievements obtained on their estates by their specialist horticulturist slaves. Some of these successful slaves may then have gained freedom and continued deploying their arboriculture skills on their own estates. A similar scenario is described by Pliny’s brief mention of two new types of chestnut developed in Campania: a knight named Corellius had developed a variety, called after him the Corelliana, and then later his freedman Tereus grafted this variety again, obtaining chestnuts of better quality still, called the Tereiana. It is hard to avoid the inference that it was Tereus that had worked on developing these two varieties, first as slave of Corellius, and later, having gained freedom, on his own estate.

On agricultural estates, freedmen were often in the position of vilici or managers of the estate. Their position meant that they took decisions on the daily running of the estate, on what to grow and how much to experiment in ameliorating a fruit variety or in creating a new one. Freedmen achieved many different levels of wealth and social stations in Roman society, and as wealthy freedmen shared in the same luxuries and indicators of success as the rich freeborn, so do freedmen, in the depiction given by elite authors, share the same aspiration and achievements of the elite concerning the discovery of new plants and their transplantation. That slave-agriculturists and freedmen are somewhat invisible in the elite accounts of advances in experimentation on estates does not mean that they were not quite important in the history of Roman horticulture, either as vilici, as grafters, or as owners of estates themselves after their manumission.

A Freedman and an Arboricultural Monstrosity

Pliny – both recounting facts and making a moral point – tells us a story about the arrival and diffusion into Italy of a peculiar plane tree which exemplifies some complex attitudes about arboriculture. By identifying the plane tree as a monster and its importer as a libertus he elides the unnatural with the socially inferior and morally vicious, and also suggests that normally, in the context of tree novelties, one would have expected a freedman to have participated in the amelioration of productive trees. The story concerns a very wealthy Thessalian freedman and eunuch, a libertus of Marcellus Aeserninus, who during the reign of Claudius had imported a novelty plane tree from Crete to his estate near Rome, a tree which did not shed its leaves in winter. The passage in full is very revealing of both facts and attitudes:

Pliny is all reproach about this deed and this plant; for him the plant is the embodiment of a vitium, a defect, something that deviates from the natural properties of the plane tree (that is, having thick foliage in summer that protects from the sun and shedding the leaves in winter so as not to impede sunlight), which made it an appreciated ornamental plant for private and public gardens. The new plane tree from Crete is not only a bad tree; in previous sections, Pliny has already expressed his disapproval of all plane trees as a non-fruit-bearing species imported into Italy: it had been brought to the peninsula only for the sake of its shade. The new Cretan variety had an additional negative trait: the tree retained its leaves in winter, preventing the little light and warmth that the sun can provide. Pliny openly frowns at the human desire for novelties (ut est natura hominum novitatis avida) and clearly does not approve of the freedman’s innovative import. I am not concerned here with the veracity of the story or with what varietal the Cretan plant might have been, but with how Pliny constructs it. The fact that the protagonist is a freedman and also a eunuch is a significant detail: someone with a social stigma as an ex-slave, but also someone whose body signifies a vitium, a change in the natural state of things, albeit one induced by the intervention of other human beings. This detail already signals to the reader that, unlike the positive story of the freedman Chresimus, what follows is not a positive example. Disapproval is further reinforced by the fact that Pliny does not tell us the name of this person, only of his patron; the freedman’s personhood is thus negated, and his name is not recorded for posterity. Additional negative characteristics are attributed to him, stereotypical of the characterization of rich liberti: our libertus had reneged the link of dependence between ex-slave and patronus, and instead had himself adopted among the freedmen of the emperor ‘potentiae causa’, only for the sake of obtaining power. So here we have a power-seeking freedman who imported a plant that Pliny disapproves of as counter to nature but that probably others would have admired as a novelty. This freedman behaves just like many members of the upper class did, and shows the same geographic mobility: he is from Thessaly, but, maybe because he was in Crete on business, maybe on some imperial administrative duties, finds out about the peculiar plane tree, obtains one or more plants, and plants them in his estate near Rome. As expected, he had invested his wealth in landed property. However, when referring to freedmen developing new fruit varieties (and, implicitly, keeping the dependency bond with their former master) like the above-mentioned Tereus, freedman of Corellius from Campania, and the new Tereiana chestnut variety, Pliny is not openly disapproving, but rather keeps his account factual and neutral. Useful acclimatizing was always welcome, an unproductive one was not.

The Economic Value of Grafting

If, ideologically, the art of grafting embodied the moulding of nature according to the human will, the civilizing power of mankind, and writers and poets could fantasize about the possibility of impossible grafts which went against any rule of nature, in the daily running of agricultural estates grafting had a much more practical value and was one of the routine operations any farmer would have been well familiar with.

Although it is not possible to distinguish different grafted types of the same fruit from micro- or macro-archaeobotanical remains, the archaeobotanical evidence for cultivated fruit from sites such as Pompeii or the so-called peach farm of S. Giovanni in Laterano in Rome clearly implies the regular practice of vegetative propagation either by planting cuttings or by grafting. As I discuss in Chapter 6, the relatively good archaeobotanical record from Roman sites in northern Italy shows an increase in the number of cultivated fruits in the imperial period, when compared to both the Republican and late imperial ages; this suggests the increased importance of commercial arboriculture and supports the idea that the emphasis placed on horticulture and arboriculture in early imperial literature was rooted in real developments in the field of agriculture.

As we have seen, impossible and strange grafts both fascinated and repelled authors such as Pliny. When he refers to the plum grafted onto nut trees (nuces) it is as impudentia (impudence, insolence) that he categorizes the action and the resulting fruit: it had the appearance of the nut but the juice of the ‘adopted stock’.Footnote ¹²⁶ But a few lines later, Pliny does suggest that some grafts were successful and enjoyed commercial distribution. In Baetica, he writes, two grafts involving the plum had started to be called with new names reflecting the nature of the ‘adopting plant’: malina, in the case of plums grafted onto apple trees (this is a straightforward graft, since both trees are part of the same family), and amygdalina for plum grafted onto almond trees. The latter, he writes, ‘have the kernel of an almond inside their stone; and indeed no other fruit has been more ingeniously crossed’.Footnote ¹²⁷ Pliny claims that in his own time some suburban estates engaged in commercial fruit cultivation derived an annual revenue of 2,000 sesterces per tree, more than farms used to return in the times of old. He clearly links such returns to grafting, by saying that ‘It was on this account that grafting … was devised’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Two thousand sesterces per tree, in a period when a legionary soldier’s pay was 900 sesterces a year, is a lot and it may well be an exaggeration. But Pliny’s point in that passage is to emphasize that fruit cultivation had become a proper large-scale commercial activity, and that traditional and perfected farming techniques such as grafting were applied to it in order to develop fruit varieties that could command good prices on urban markets.

The important role grafting had in commercial agriculture and its economic value, in terms of shortening the time needed to have mature fruit-bearing trees, ensuring relative consistency in the fruit qualities, and propagating trees on a large scale, can be best appreciated in the case of oleiculture because of the abundant ancient evidence.

Olive trees can be propagated by suckers, layering, and graft; planting seeds will only give an olivaster, i.e., a plant derived from cultivated varieties but whose fruit will tend to revert to the wild characteristics and will not viably preserve the qualities of the mother plant. In modern oleiculture, olive pits are planted in order to obtain olivasters which will serve as rootstock for grafting with branches taken from the cultivated olive trees to be propagated.Footnote ¹²⁹ The oleaster, the proper wild olive plant, is a bushy, thorny plant which produces few and small fruits. Cultivated kinds of olives can be readily grafted onto wild oleasters, and doing so has numerous advantages: since the oleaster grows spontaneously in all Mediterranean regions, it is possible to transform wild trees into desirable cultivated varieties either for oil production or for the table; unexploited tracts of land where oleasters are present can be brought under olive cultivation without uprooting the trees and replacing them with young olive trees which will reach full maturity and fruiting capacity about ten years after planting. Grafting onto mature oleasters means that the farmer will have the first harvest in a shorter time than if he were planting young trees.

Grafting of wild olive trees or of the offspring of domesticated olives, which had reverted to a wild state, was common practice in antiquity and its benefits were well understood. The application of these techniques was perhaps the reason for the relatively quick emergence of regions such as North Africa as great producers of olive oil, as attested by abundant archaeological evidence (e.g., the many olive presses known) and numerous references in the literary sources.Footnote ¹³⁰ It certainly had an important role recognized by the imperial authorities: in the second century ad, legislation was passed to encourage the cultivation of new tracts of land or of land that had fallen into neglect.Footnote ¹³¹ The Trajanic inscription from Henchir Mettich, which mentions the tenants’ rights and obligation according to the first-century Lex Manciana, reports fiscal relief given to cultivators who would engage in arboriculture on unused land. Tenants who would either plant new olive trees or graft oleasters were exempt from rent payments for ten years in the former case, five in the latter, while planting vines and fig trees also prompted a grace period of five years.Footnote ¹³² The length of these tax-waivers is commensurate with the time it would take the different types of plants to reach maturity and produce substantial crops. The number of years covered by the exemptions is not always the same in the other North African inscriptions, perhaps reflecting different local conditions of soil, weather, and irrigation. The Severan inscription from Aïn Ouassel (or Aïn Wassel), which reports an earlier enactment issued by imperial procurators under Hadrian nearly a century before (part of the so-called Lex Hadriana), gives a ten-year exemption for both planted and grafted olives, and a seven-year exemption for other fruit trees (generically referred to in the text as poma).Footnote ¹³³

A late third-century ad funerary inscription from Africa Proconsularis found at Bou-Assid, 13 km northeast of the ancient town of Ureu (mod. Henchir Aouraou), is most remarkable in fully acknowledging the importance of grafting to bring a neglected estate back to full production. In this epitaph, set up by the wife of the deceased, the achievements of this agricola (the full name is lost as the first lines are missing) have to do with his great skills as a cultivator and the practical things he achieved on the Fundus Aufidianus. It is worth reporting the extant text in full:

Bringing oleasters to bear commercially viable fruits via grafting is singled out here as one of the important things for which the deceased ought to be remembered.Footnote ¹³⁴ It is not surprising that among the other cetera bona he did on this estate, we find planting an orchard with arbours and establishing a new vineyard:Footnote ¹³⁵ fruit trees and wine production make for a well-rounded estate, estimated at having measured c.1,600 ha,Footnote ¹³⁶ producing for the commercial market. In addition to the digging of a well, certainly needed for the irrigation of the orchard, possibly a treading vat/cella vinaria was also built, if that is the meaning of collectarium.Footnote ¹³⁷ While there were legal and practical reasons for the widow to clearly list all the improvements carried out on the estate by her husband,Footnote ¹³⁸ the list resonates into the ideological sphere: grafting, being able to transform sterile plants into oil-bearing olives, occupies central place. The deceased commemorated on the Fundus Aufidianus was, in other words, a bonus agricola, a Roman ideal with a particular valence in North Africa due to the legislation about imperial estates which conferred property rights to those who had brought abandoned lands back into good cultivation.Footnote ¹³⁹

Celebration of agricultural achievements can be found in several North African epitaphs, well into late antiquity. Not all commemorate the deceased’s skill at grafting but rather record the number of trees he had planted. The fifth-century mosaic epitaph of a certain Pudion,Footnote ¹⁴⁰ who died at 80 years old, declares that he planted 4,000 trees; his longevity and the number of trees, very likely olive trees considering that the text was found in Africa Proconsularis, are the only aspects of his life chosen for commemoration.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The number of trees reported in his inscription has seemed exaggerated to some scholars. Stone thought that the number was hyperbolic and that Pudion, a landlord, refers to trees that his colonii had planted on his estate; Brun instead considered the sum to refer to the trees he had planted during his whole life, which would make the number less impressive considering Pudion’s longevity.Footnote ¹⁴² While numbers (especially the age at death) in Latin inscriptions tend to be rounded up, there is no reason to see the 4,000 trees as hyperbolic: from the Zenon archive (see below) we learn that no less than 3,000 olive shoots and 470 olive suckers were planted on one estate at one time.Footnote ¹⁴³

Besides propagating fruit trees from one’s own existing trees on the estate, in all likelihood there were also plant nurseries providing the desired types of fruit tree. In addition to supplying commercial agricultural estates, plant nurseries must have also catered to clients wanting specific trees for the ornamental gardens of their urban houses and villas. Commercial nurseries must have been relatively common in the Roman world, especially in areas densely planted with orchards or having a concentration of elite houses/villas and public buildings with large gardens. The evidence is sparse, but suggestive. The kiln specializing in ollae perforatae, or planting pots, discovered along the Flaminia, churned out the kinds of product that plant nurseries needed;Footnote ¹⁴⁴ and the city of Rome, with all its suburban villas, aristocratic houses, and gardens in public buildings certainly created a high demand for plants. Excavation of the fill of planting pits of an orchard established sometime in the late second century ad at Champ Redon, to the east of Béziers, showed that the trees planted had a clod of earth around the root ball, an indication that they came from a nursery.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ A sizeable commercial nursery is archaeologically known in Egypt, near Abu Hummus, dating from the second century bc to the second or third century ad.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Details on the type of plants a commercial nursery could provide and the degree to which large agricultural estates depended on plant nurseries for their operations emerge clearly in the correspondence preserved in the papyrological archive known as the Zenon archive. Although dating to the third century bc and thus describing conditions in Ptolemaic Egypt, the letters of the archive encapsulate transactions about plants and trees that, in all likelihood, continued into Roman times. The letters between Zenon, a manager of an estate in Philadelphia, and Apollonius, the absentee owner of the estate and high-ranking official, reveal many details of the practicalities of acquiring plants and propagating them on an estate. One document dated to January 255 bc reports on the order of suckers of vines, olives, and fruit trees destined for the Philadelphia estate from the area of Memphis and Alexandria, or from Crocodilopolis. Plants and trees that figure in the correspondence include (but are not limited to) walnuts, figs of which six varieties are mentioned in one letter, apples, pears, plums, pomegranates, special kinds of apricots, peaches, olives, and grape vines (eleven varieties); these plants were acquired as either cuttings (phyta) or suckers (motheumata) to be planted on the estate.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Young trees were also transported when needed: one document mentions 200 pear trees sent from Apollonius’ estate to the king (?); the young plants were replaced by planting 200 shoots.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ If there were any doubts, the scale of the orders makes very clear the commercial nature of the agriculture practised on this estate. For instance, 500 pomegranate shoots, 12,400 vine shoots, and 3,470 olive shoots/suckers appear in the archive.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Possible plant nurseries have also been excavated in Pompeii. The House of the Garden of Hercules (ii.8.6) featured a large garden space which Jashemski suggested may have been used to grow commercial flowers for garlands.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ In this garden she also discovered, against one of the walls of the garden, several planting pots in the root cavities identified in the lapilli, meaning that these pots housed young trees, not flowers. The root cavity in one of these pots seemed to have been from a citron/lemon tree, a plant propagated by layering, and it has been tentatively suggested that this garden was a tree nursery.Footnote ¹⁵¹ When plant pots are found undisturbed in situ it can be seen that they contain different soils from that of the garden in which they were recovered, as in the case of the planting pots from the House of the Greek Epigrams (v.1.18) in Pompeii.Footnote ¹⁵² This means that the plants, with their pots, came from somewhere else, i.e., a nursery. A more likely plant nursery was excavated at the back of the House of the Floral Lararium (ii.9.3–4) along the Via Nocera: hazelnut, olive, grape vine, cherry, and other trees of the Prunus species seem to have been grown.Footnote ¹⁵³ The trees appear to have been young and in a relatively confined area, suggesting the vegetative propagation of plants in the context of a nursery rather than cultivation for domestic consumption or decorative value.

A Special Case: Chestnut Trees and Their Fruit

The exploitation of grafting to enhance production and financial return can also, paradoxically, be detected in the case of a plant whose fruit did not actually have much economic importance in antiquity: the sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa Miller). Its relatively small presence in the Roman agricultural economy is in contrast to its greater valence in the European Middle Ages: its presence in woodlands increased, and its fruit – dried and processed into flour – became a staple in the diet of ordinary people.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

There were chestnut groves in Roman Italy, with variations among regions. While chestnut appears in the pollen record for Italy from the Bronze Age onwards, the archaeobotanical record for the Roman period does not seem to suggest a widespread use.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ A larger presence in Roman Campania has been posited, and data indicate that the chestnut was used in the Vesuvian area for its fruit and wood from at least the first century bc.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Chestnut wood has been identified used as timber in construction or as fuel at various sites of the Vesuvian area.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ It is likely that chestnut grew on the northern slopes of Vesuvius,Footnote ¹⁵⁸ but commercial interest in chestnut was principally for its wood, especially posts to be used as props for vines: the posts used to trail the vines in the vitis iugata technique were of chestnut.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Columella mentions the chestnut in the context of viticulture and gives information on the production capacity of one iugerum of land planted with 2,880 chestnut trees: 12,000 posts every five years.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ It was, in other words, in the context of coppicing (quick-growth coppiced chestnuts produced young tree stems that, cut every five to seven years, served as props for the vines) that we mostly find the chestnut in the Roman world.Footnote ¹⁶¹

Different varieties did exist; Pliny, who wonders why nature should have bothered to defend the vilest of fruit (vilissima) so well with a spiny cupule,Footnote ¹⁶² mentions seven varieties. Of these, the one he reports to be the best for eating was a type grown in Tarentum, followed by the chestnuts of Neapolis. Although Pliny does mention that chestnut flour was used to make a kind of bread consumed by women who were fasting, it is clear that, in his view at least, the chestnut was not for human consumption: ‘All the other kinds are grown to feed the pigs.’Footnote ¹⁶³ Such an opinion does not seem to be confined to Pliny; mentions of chestnut as food are not common in Latin sources. But of course, this does not mean that ordinary people in certain rural areas or also in urban settlements did not regularly consume them. It seems that Ovid alludes to chestnuts being sold in Rome in Book 2 of the Ars Amatoria: in exhorting the reader to give rustic gifts to the lover rather than costly items, the poet mentions grapes and chestnuts. Literary evocations are strong here – the chestnut is defined as the one ‘that Amaryllis loved but loves no more’, a clear echo of Virgil’s Eclogue 2.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Due to the literary discourse Ovid establishes with Virgil, it is unclear to what extent these verses could be taken as an objective indication that: (a) chestnuts were, to a degree, commercialized in a metropolis like Rome and (b) they could be considered as gifts, albeit rustic and humble, appropriate for a lover.

Chestnuts seem to have been discovered in the Bourbon excavations of the Temple of Isis in Pompeii and in the taberna of Verecundus, at Herculaneum, and also in the so-called villa of Poppaea (villa A) at Oplontis.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ A chestnut tree must have grown in the peristyle garden of the villa, since carbonized chestnuts were found during excavation in the upper lapilli layers, suggesting that these were fruits on tree branches.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ In addition, a chestnut seems to figure in one of the many still lives painted on the walls of the villa.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ In late antiquity, boiled or roasted chestnuts are described as one of the tragemata (nuts, fruits, but also cakes and some savoury dishes that were eaten as snacks or as dessert) of Greek dinners by the sixth-century author Anthimus.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

In an area such as Campania, where viticulture was fully developed, growing chestnut groves for coppicing must have been relatively common.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Results of the archaeobotanical analysis carried out in conjunction with the excavations of the ancient harbour of Neapolis have indeed revealed that, for the period from the second century bc to the fifth century ad, the chestnut was present among the local flora and the nut was consumed by humans.Footnote ¹⁷⁰

Due to its pollination type, chestnut also falls into the category of plants for which grafting is needed to replicate the characteristics of the mother plant in the fruit.Footnote ¹⁷¹ However, if the aim is to grow chestnuts for wood, especially for coppicing, and not to improve the nuts, then grafting is irrelevant, even counterproductive. Indeed, Squatriti points out that grafting may reduce the amount of wood on the tree and slow down the production of biomass.Footnote ¹⁷²

The realization that different propagating methods were to be followed if one wanted to grow chestnut trees for coppicing or for their nuts is reflected in a surviving passage of a book on horticulture by Gargilius Martialis, an author who lived in the third century ad. He refers by name to various earlier writers, such as Pliny, Columella, and the Quintilii brothers, about planting nuts to propagate the plant for the purpose of obtaining wood. A few sections later he writes, without giving any specific name for his source(s), that there are some who separate the nuts from the suckers which grow spontaneously around the tree: whereas the former are considered better to propagate plants destined to coppicing/wood production, the latter are better to reproduce a tree to produce nuts.Footnote ¹⁷³

As mentioned earlier, in Pliny’s account of the chestnut, two apparently new and newly named grafted varieties from Campania, the Corelliana and the Tereiana, are discussed. The former, called by the writer ‘celebrated’, was developed on his Campanian estate by a knight named Corellius, hailing from Ateste, and was characterized by a prolific production of nuts. Then his freedman Tereus grafted this new variety again, obtaining the kind named after him, which was less prolific but of better quality. In light of what we know was the utility of grafting in chestnut cultivation and of Pliny’s comments on the minor commercial value of the fruit, it can be inferred that the landlord Corellianus and his libertus Tereus had been experimenting with the chestnut to improve its qualities and appeal for human consumption.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Considering that a chestnut tree reaches maturity by its fourth decade and that it usually does not flower in the first ten years of its life (but it can nevertheless grow fruit in youth), experiments such as those of Corellianus and Tereus required medium- to long-term planning, even when shortening its trajectory to maturity by grafting branches on an already grown-up tree. If we assume that Pliny’s story about these two cultivators is correct, why would they invest time, effort, and money in working on a nut that did not seem to have any great market value?

The answer may be twofold. On the one hand, the fascination of taking on an unusual botanical challenge rather than the ordinary routine of grafting apples, pears, and figs, may well have been attractive, not for practical reasons but more for glory and naming-rights over the new varieties. This seems to be what Pliny himself is interested in when telling us this story. As pointed out by Squatriti, ‘to Pliny it was not the new grafted chestnut variety that mattered but the cultivator’s success, a “rare” victory of the Roman landowner over oblivion by means of a tree that perpetuated his name’.Footnote ¹⁷⁵

On the other hand, a basic preoccupation with an estate’s productivity, with what to cultivate, and what products to send to the market, must have been part of the picture for any farmer. Corellius and Tereus may not have grafted new kinds of chestnut merely to produce a botanical novelty and perhaps achieve future remembrance: they were interested in improving the chestnut so that a greater number of people would find it attractive and want to consume it. Such experimentation was ultimately concerned with increasing the market value of their produce and giving themselves, as cultivators of the variety, an advantage over competitors. After all, even if the main motivation behind such botanical experimentation was to overcome oblivion and be remembered by posterity, this is only possible if the new fruit achieves some level of popularity, if it becomes sought after, if, in other words, it is saleable. Otherwise the ‘invention’, as well as the name of the inventor, will be short-lived and soon forgotten. As is often the case in the Roman world, profit-seeking and financial decisions cannot be disentangled from ideological constructs.