Chapter 5 - Of Peaches and Peach Trees

Summary

This chapter discusses the appearance of the peach in Roman Italy as a locally cultivated plant. The peach, a plant originating from the East, had reached the eastern Mediterranean sometime in the Hellenistic period via Persia, but it was introduced to Italy only in the late first century BC/start of the first century AD. The chapter discusses the archaeobotanical and other archaeological evidence related to the cultivation of the peach and examines a large early imperial fruit farm discovered in Rome in recent years as an example of financial investment in large-scale fruit cultivation. The archaeological evidence provided by this site suggests how Rome’s aggregate demand for fresh products created the right conditions in the early Julio-Claudian period for financial investment in irrigation technology and in recent horticultural introductions such as the peach.