A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (27 page)

Of course, politics played a huge part in the
annona
system. Look at today’s welfare system. In the third century
AD
, Septimius Severus made himself popular
with the Roman plebs and with the people of his native Leptis Magna in North Africa, who were suffering from some terrible trade setback, by buying up all the North Africans’ oil for free
distribution in Rome. A few years later, Septimius Severus decreed that cooked bread should be distributed instead of grain. Less trouble, less danger of fire, less wastage, less indigestion?
Aurelian increased the daily ration to a pound and a half and added pork fat to the list of free goodies, and, in order to use up the wine ponds on his hands paid as taxes in kind from the wine
growers, he shoved wine in too . . . When he mooted that all this should be expected permanently by
annona
takers, a horrified official exclaimed: ‘Before we know where we are,
we’ll be giving them chickens and geese as well!’ But as the Empire got into hotter financial waters towards its close, money became tight all round and free distribution stopped, many
basic foodstuffs remaining available, but at an exorbitant price.

As to the quantities – at the time of Augustus, it has been estimated it was necessary to import 14 million bushels of grain a year, the produce of several hundred square miles of
wheatfields, to feed the poorer of the city of Rome alone. A third came from Egypt and most of the rest from North Africa and Sicily. Transport was efficient and rapid. A Roman cargo ship could
cover 160 kilometres a day and camels
about thirty-four kilometres a day. Although most import/export merchants dealt with and through the city of Rome, or Ostia, its port at
the mouth of the Tiber twenty-five kilometres from Rome, maritime, cart and camel trade routes criss-crossed the Empire. So a rich family in Britain or Germany could order silk from China, a few
spices from India, or a peacock.

But the transport of grain for public distribution was subject to the strictest security. The grain was handed over in its country of origin and merchants would take it to Ostia, or, when Ostia
silted up, to the neighbouring artificial harbour of Portus. If they put in anywhere on the way it was under the pain of death or deportation. Everyone in Rome knew when the grain ships were due
in. If late, there was panic. When they reached port hundreds of barges ferried the grain, checked and weighed, up river to Rome, a journey which took three days.

The Greeks were great bakers. The list of breads and cakes they confected at the bakery, at home, for everyday use and for special occasions is exhaustive but it would seem that the Romans took
a leaf from the Greeks’ cookbook and gave bakers a special union status, mid-Republic. When the Romans took an interest in baking in the eighth or seventh century
BC
,
a sort of flat bread was baked at home and in the embers; this new-fangled scone was disapproved of by Cato (who was still used to his pottage) and was called
maza.
And for centuries the
purists like Cato forbade the offering of bread as a sacrifice in Roman religious ceremonies, thus echoing the Jewish concept of the impurity of fermented dough (and was it fermented in the early
days? probably not).

Cato’s ideal farinaceous sacrifice was the
libum
, a cake made of cheese and eggs – a pound of flour to two pounds of cheese and an egg, a sort of cheesecake – and note
that butter
hardly ever appears in Roman cooking. The cheese they would have used would have been a full fat curd cheese, either goat or sheep (probably not cow as there was
so little grazing space near Rome). The curds would be pressed in a screw-top mould, according to Columella, who wrote in the first century
AD
a treatise on matters
agricultural. Previously, they’d just put a stone on top. The compressed curds were then moulded in a basket or wooden box (
phormos
– Greek,
forma
– Latin), whence
the modern French
fromage
; the English for cheese comes from the Latin
caseus,
meaning the foodstuff itself. While on cheese, the Romans used to salt, dry, smoke, mature, brine and
add chopped herbs, garlic and onions to cheeses. So they must have enjoyed the equivalent of a hard Chavignol goat cheese, a
crottin
or our ubiqitous Boursin and a
feta
. Smoked
mozzarella is still a great Italian speciality. Pliny, who loved cheeses, gives a long list of local specialities of the Iberian peninsula, Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul, among them a huge
sheep’s milk wheel from the borders of Tuscany and Liguria; he also talks fondly of the cheeses of the Cevennes and the Auvergne, the ancestors of today’s Roquefort and Cantal.

At the height of the Empire, rich Romans would have eaten cheese or curds for breakfast with milk or wine to drink; a bit like the Dutch and Germans today. Little mention is made of a cheese
course at their banquets. And, when the so-called barbarians overran Rome at the end of the Empire in the fifth century
AD
, they proved to be great cheese lovers and eaters;
but it was the Benedictine and Cistercian monks who learned and evolved the secrets of cheese-making and steathily became the new pioneers. They carried on the wine and liqueur production, fish
farming, apiculture and all the careful, gentle arts the Romans had enjoyed; altogether too intellectual and finnicky for the barbarians.

Back to bread. At around 168
BC
, there was an influx of craftsmen bakers from Greece. Hitherto the rich had used slaves to knead bread in their
houses and had even made them wear gloves and masks to knead the dough to avoid sweat and breath getting into the bread. The Greeks had penetrated into Gaul long before the Romans arrived and had
established a fine rapport with the Gauls in the bread-making (and wine-making) art. The Gauls realized that yeast from beer was a good raising agent and therefore the Greeks and the Gauls formed a
good baking team. By 31
BC
during the reign of Augustus there were 329 bakeries in Rome run by Greeks with Gaulish assistants. These immigrant bakers were allowed to form a
collegium
– a guild – but were subject to enormous regulations when this union became exclusive. If you were the son of a baker you had to become a baker, and you were not
allowed to follow any other profession, even if you married outside. A famous baker, Vergilius Eurysaces, had a huge monument erected in his honour after his death, but his son was not allowed to
enter the priesthood, the law, or even the army. A baker had to save the Republic or Empire before he could sit in the Senate; if he were to do this, he would resign from the college and make over
all his possessions to the college of
pistores.
And like masons today, they had secret signs, initiatory rites and religious meetings. Interestingly, these bakers were technically well
equipped and used horses to run their mills, and not slaves, and cooked the bread in a brick bakehouse. Only men shopped for bread, whether slaves or free.

Eurysaces and his confrères were the equivalent of Poilâne in Paris today; expensive, exclusive with long queues. No women were permitted to enter the bakers’ college but they
were admitted to the colleges of greengrocers, clothiers and tavern-keepers. The breads were usually round with tops
shaped in all sorts of different ways, often a mushroom
shape, like our batch loaf. The incinerated loaves found in Pompeii were shaped like eight-petalled flowers, a shape still to be found in France and Sicily. Such loaves were probably made of fine
wheat flour, the
siligineus,
liked by the patricians; loaves called
plebeius
were rougher, made of unbolted flour and destined for filling plebeian stomachs (the wholemeal of today?
but probably full of stones and weevils too). The Romans also had the equivalent of
pain de seigle
to eat with oysters,
ostrearius
.

The Romans had flaky pastry – no doubt copied from the Arab filo pastry – layers of pastry stretched out thin and interlaced with honey, cheese and nuts. Designed to please, these
flat, layered cakes were called
placenda est;
this became
placenta,
a name we don’t associate with cakes; it is the shape. They liked fritters enormously. Reay
Tannahill
⁵⁸
draws a fun analogy of the Romans and their fondness for munching their way round the town at lunchtime – not an important meal: ‘In
his discussion of breads ancient and modern, native and foreign, Athenaeus throws out an endless list of names for what must have been the Scotch baps, croissants, Parker House rolls, and churros
of the Classical world.’

The wedding cake was a Greek institution. In Rome the cake was given to the bridal couple at the
confarreatio
(a binding and old-fashioned form of marriage), they then presented it to
Jupiter Capitoline in the presence of the grand pontiff and the incumbent priest, the
flamen dialis,
⁵⁹
who looked after the flame on which the cake
then burned. This sacrifice meant that the woman was placed under the jurisdiction of the man and bore witness to the fact that they were legally
wed. Tiberius got rid of the
cake-burning custom, but in the eighteenth-century the wedding cake returned with a venegance, a colossal confection to be shared with friends and not burned.

Having established that it took centuries for the staples to be discovered, sorted out and their virtues worked out and for tastes and customs to develop, let’s see who ate what and
why.

Augustus was frugal, he hated huge blowouts, so did Martial:

Epigram 78

In this one epigram Martial mentions several Roman favourites: lettuce was invariably served during the first course; leeks, tunny fish and eggs would be similar to a
‘salade niçoise’; the pale beans with pink bacon would be like the French country dish of
haricots blancs aux lardons,
and the sausage sitting in polenta could appear in
any trattoria. The Romans were fond of charcuterie, hams and sausages. Lupins and hot chick-peas were popular and common ‘cocktail’ nibbles, arriving before, after (as here) or during
the meal.

Lucullus was apparently an abstemious young man, and a remarkably successful general who defeated two of the more powerful potentates of his time, Mithridates, King of Pontus, and Tigranes, King
of Armenia. His campaigns made him fabulously rich and with his new-found wealth he set about procuring delicacies from all over the known world, paying no attention to his pocket, health or,
presumably, figure. It was from Pontus, Cappadocia, that he brought back the cherry tree. He sent couriers all over the then known world combing for rare and fine fare – oysters from
Colchester, flamingos from the Nile, peacocks from Persia. He paid his carvers thousands of pounds, as it were. He had three villas in the Bay of Naples where he built
vivaria
– fish
tanks – some fed by fresh water, others by salt water. For raising exotic fowl he constructed aviaries, the size of houses to ensure plenty . . . Lucullus had a private dining-room set up in
an aviary so that he could enjoy a roast thrush while its friends flew around. As well as the thrushes, nightingales and larks there were cranes, whose eyes were put out before they were fattened,
parrots and bustards. Ostriches were eaten but proved very tough even after a severe boiling. (The Emperor Heliogabalus, a real nutter, whose short reign was not mourned, served 600 ostrich heads
at a banquet, considering the brains the only digestible part. (He was probably right.) He also fed his dogs foie gras. Why? Why not . . .

Such was the scale on which Lucullus operated that he drove pipes and aqueducts through a chain of mountains in order to source his freshwater ponds. Following the example
of Fulvius Lepinus, who started rearing game at Tarquinii, Lucullus, Varro and Petronius added game parks to their estates where fallow deer, antelopes, gazelles and moufflons, imported from
abroad, were plumped for their chefs and banquets. Wild boar didn’t become popular till the beginning of the Empire as it was considered a common menace, uprooting the countryside around
Rome. Once in fashion, a whole roast wild boar was a must at every smart banquet. Hare was believed to preserve beauty, and the Emperor Septimius Severus ate it every day. Lucullus’
substantial garden in the centre of Rome was coveted by Messalina, and she did characteristically manage to get her hands on it before she met her end, indeed dying there from stab wounds on the
orders of the Emperor Claudius, her husband.

Lucullus would spend vast sums on a single meal, and soon others began to follow his ruinous and gluttonous example. Dinner started about four in the afternoon, the ninth hour, and was a lengthy
performance in three acts – the
gustatio,
hors d’oeuvre, the
fercula,
meaning the ‘dishes which are carried’ (from the kitchen), and the
mensae secundae,
the dessert courses. The usual layout of the dining area was three sofas arranged in a U shape on which the guest lolled; the open side was used by the servants to fetch and carry the food, often
changing the middle table after each course. They used fingers, knives and spoons but did not have forks. They drank from silver or bronze goblets, studded with precious stones if the host was
exceedingly rich, and sometimes from glass or crystal; it depended on the taste and means of the host. Ausonius, the prefect-poet, writing in the fourth century
AD
, waxes
extensively and minutely on food and manners
of genteel Gallo-Romans; and he describes a wedding feast where doggy-bags were quite the order of the day. Each guest brought a
mappa
, a big napkin, and bundled up all the goodies he couldn’t manage at the reception. This was expected and catered for.