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Wild and Cultivated Plants: a Note on the Peasant Economy of Roman Italy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2012

Joan M. Frayn
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Extract

It has long been surmised that the Italian peasant in the Roman period could not have subsisted entirely upon his heredium, even when it was considerably more than two iugera. Juvenal was speaking for many of those before him, as well as for his own contemporaries, when he said of the traditional allocation:

‘Nunc modus hic agri nostro non sufficit horto’.

(Satires XIV, 172)

Yet amid much speculation upon this point one aspect of the countryman's livelihood seems to have attracted little attention. In addition to any other resources he had the use of the wild plants of the extensive forests, the mountains, pastures and fallow fields. In general, food obtained from wild plants did not in Roman times, any more than it does in Italy today, take the place of grain, the staple article of diet. This may account for Pliny's statement in the Natural History XXI, 50 (86) where, after mentioning the large number of ‘herbae sponte nascentes’ used for food by other peoples, he writes: ‘In Italia paucissimas novimus, fraga, tamnum (wild vine), ruscum (butcher's broom), batim marinam (samphire), batim hortensiam, quam aliqui asparagum Gallicum vocant. …’ Such a remark seems astonishing in view of the numerous other examples Pliny himself has previously given, but its interpretation depends on the meaning to be assigned to the word cibus, as well as on the limiting effect of the phrase ‘herbae sponte nascentes’, which may not include all the plants we call ‘wild’. It is clear from the conclusion of the paragraph cited above, where ‘oblectamenta’ are compared with ‘cibos’, that cibi is being used here to mean ‘staple foods’.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 65 , November 1975 , pp. 32 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © Joan M. Frayn 1975. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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References

1 Pliny, Nat. Hist, xix passim.

2 cf. Pliny, Nat. Hist, xvi, 1(1): ‘Pomiferae arbores quaeque mitioribus sucis voluptatem primae cibis attulerunt et necessario alimento delicias miscere docuerunt.’ (References to Pliny are to the Teubner edition.)

3 Plants and Archaeology (1967), 31. The point is also made by , D. and Brothwell, P., Food in Antiquity (1969), 115 ffGoogle Scholar., where some Roman examples are given. This survey relies heavily upon Apicius, who, being an exponent of the haute cuisine of the Empire, is difficult to handle as evidence for earlier periods or different social classes.

4 This attitude to the forest is also observable in the history of the Italian selva, as for example in Dante, Inferno 1, 2 and throughout the poem, where it is a place of wandering and confusion. Owing to deforestation the modern Italian countryman is more likely to regard la montagna as the wilderness.

5 Varro, , Res Rusticae i, 45Google Scholar.

6 Pliny, Nat. Hist, xx, 19 (77).

7 Agrestis is also used to mean ‘wild’, though not by Cato and only in one paragraph by Varro. This is iii, 7, in reference to pigeons, and even here the connection with agri is strong. It may also have this sense in ii, 1, 4, where it is combined with ferus, perhaps to confirm the meaning. Theophrastus distinguishes another type of plant which he describes as ποώδη. This is usually translated as ‘herbaceous’, in the sense of the Italian erbaceo as defined by Baroni, E., Guida Botanica d'Italia, ed. Zanetti, S. B., (1955), 695Google Scholar: ‘Verde o della consistenza molle dell'erba, in opposizione a colorato o legnoso’.

8 Plautus, , Pseudolus, 1, 825Google Scholar. The point is made even more clearly in 1, 811, when he speaks of other cooks ‘qui mihi condita prata in patinis proferunt’.

9 De Re Rustica xi 3, 54 (ed. Lundström, , 1906)Google Scholar.

10 De Agri Cultura 6, 3 (ed. Mazzarino, A., 1962)Google Scholar.

11 Pliny, Nat. Hist, xix, 4 (19): ‘Silvestres fecerat natura corrudas ut passim quisque demeteret: ecce altiles spectantur asparagi …’

12 Nat. Hist. xix, 8 (42).

13 For a similar practice in later times, see Culpeper's Complete Herbal (repr. 1970), 33: (Asparagus Sativus) ‘It groweth usually in gardens, and some of it grows wild in Appleton meadows, in Gloucestershire, where the poor people do gather the buds of young shoots, and sell them cheaper than our garden asparagus is sold in London’.

14 De Re Rustica xi, 3, 37.

15 cf. Columella, , De Arboribus 25, 1Google Scholar: ‘Amygdala si parum feracia erunt, perforate arbore lapidem adigito: ita librum arboris inolescere sinito’. Also Theophrastus, Hist. Plant, ii, 4, 3.

16 cf. Pliny, Nat. Hist. xix, 30 (94).

17 For another example of transferre, where it may have the meaning ‘move from the wild to cultivation’, see Pliny xix, 54 (170) where in reference to mustard (sinapi) he says it grows ‘nulla cultura, melius tamen planta tralata.’ Cf. xix 29 (92): ‘siser transferre melius’, where he has not mentioned sowing it, and has just been writing about elecampane (inula) being propagated ‘oculis ex radice excisis’.

18 Nat. Hist. xix, 55 (172).

19 De Re Rustica xi, 3, 39 (ed. Josephson, A., 1955)Google Scholar.

20 De Re Rustica ix, 4, 4.

21 cf. a much later example, this time from pastureland, in Travels in the Two Sicilies, 1777–80, by Henry Swinburne, London, 1783–1785, Vol. i, 227: ‘Our next stage was to Manfredonia, twenty miles through a flat pasture covered with asphodels, thistles, wild artichokes, and fennel-giant; of the last are made bee-hives and chair-bottoms; the leaves are given to asses by way of a strengthened and the tender buds are boiled and eaten as a delicacy by the peasants. … The artichokes are given to buffaloes.’

22 Isaac, E., The Geography of Domestication (1970), 114.Google Scholar

23 Marcelli de Medicamentis, ed. Helmreich, G., 1889Google Scholar.

24 Prehistoric Europe: The Economic Basis (1952), 115Google Scholar.

25 Histoire de l'alimentation végétale depuis la préhistoire jusqu' à nos jours, trans. Guidon, F. (1932), 608–28Google Scholar.

26 The Early Growth of the European Economy, (1974), 16–17. cf. idem, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West (1968), 9 and 21–22.

27 Theophrastus, Hist. Plant. vii, 6, 1; G. W. Dimbleby, op. cit. (n. 3), 31, et al.

28 Περί λεπτυνούσης διαίτης (ed. Marinone, Nino, La Dieta dimagrante, Torino, 1973Google Scholar), 9, 72 (p. 86). Galen does make an exception in favour of γογυλιδες and βολβοί. On the latter Marinone has an interesting comment: ‘I suoi bulbi (non le radici, come ritiene Galeno) sono mangerecci e costituiscono un cibo noto ancor oggi nell'Italia meridionale con il nome di lampascioni’.

29 De Alimentorum Facultatibus xlii (p. 628, Teubner editions, 1965): διαφέρει δὲ τῶν ὁμοειδῶν φυτῶν ξηρότητι μὲν τὸ άγριον, ὑγρότητι δὲ τὸ κηπευόμενον.

30 De Alimentorum Facultatibus ii, 64.

31 The moretum has often been described as a cake, most recently by Bertha Tilly in a note to Varro, R.R. i, 13, 2, in Varro the Farmer (1973), 166. The ingredients mentioned in the Moretum of the Appendix Vergiliana (cf. Columella xii, 59) produce a mixture of softer consistency than a cake, unless a disproportionate amount of cheese is used. This might sometimes have been done, and the product would have been a herb-flavoured cheese. But cheese was not an essential ingredient of the moretum, as may be seen from Columella, xii, 59, where two of the recipes given omit the cheese. Although the use of the word globus in I. 117 suggests a cake, the moretum of the Appendix Vergiliana is to be eaten as a relish with bread. It forms a globus when it is being mixed and the fragments are gathered in from the edges (cf. the use of conglobari in reference to similar processes). The mention of aioli by D. and P. Brothwell, op. cit. (n. 3), 109, also has some bearing on this question.

32 Nat. Hist. xx, 24–6 (58–68).

33 Nat. Hist. xx, 26 (64).

34 These, as we are reminded by R. MacMullen in Enemies of the Roman Order (1966), 253, must have occurred frequently in the ancient world. In the anecdote from Galen to which he refers, the peasants suffered not because they were eating wild foods, but because they were forced by famine to do so indiscriminately. For remarks upon the incidence of famine, see C. Clark and M. Haswell, The Economics of Subsistence Agriculture (1967), 60.