Pliny the Younger & Pliny the Elder · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
1| Theophrastus, one of the most celebrated Greek authorities, stated around the year 440 of the city of Rome that the olive did not grow except within 40,000 paces of the sea; and Fenestella says that it did not exist at all in Italy, Spain or Africa in the reign of Tarquinius Priscus, 173 years after the founding of the Roman people. Yet now it has spread even across the Alps and into the heart of the Gauls and the Spains.
2| In the year of the city 505, when Appius Claudius, grandson of Appius the Blind, and Lucius Junius were consuls, twelve pounds of oil sold for ten asses; and soon afterwards, in the year 680, Marcus Seius, son of Lucius, as curule aedile, supplied oil to the Roman people at ten pounds for one as throughout the whole year.
3| This will surprise less anyone who knows that 22 years later, in the third consulship of Gnaeus Pompey, Italy exported oil to the provinces. Hesiod too, who thought that instruction in farming was of the first importance for life, said that no one who planted an olive ever gathered fruit from it, so slow a business was it then. But now olives even bear in the nurseries, and the berries are picked from transplanted trees in their second year. Fabianus says that the olive does not grow in the coldest places, nor in the hottest.
4| Virgil named three kinds of them, the orchites, the radius and the posia; he said that they need neither rakes nor pruning hooks nor any care at all. No doubt with olives too it is the soil and the climate that matter most. Nevertheless they are also pruned, at the same time as vines, and they also like to have the soil scraped around them.
5| The olive harvest follows, and an even greater skill, that of tempering the must of oil. For different juices come from the same olive. The first oil of all comes from the raw olive, before it has even begun to ripen; this is the best in flavour. Moreover, from this the first flow of the press is the finest, and then the quality declines step by step, whether the olives are pressed in baskets or, as has lately been invented, with the pulp enclosed between slender laths.
6| The riper the berry, the fattier the juice and the less pleasant. The best time for picking, balancing quantity against quality, is when the berry begins to turn black; they then call them druppae, and the Greeks call them drypetides. Beyond that, it makes a difference whether that ripening takes place in the pressing rooms or on the branches, and whether the tree has been watered or the berry has drunk only its own juice and nothing but the dews of heaven.
7| Age brings distaste to oil, unlike wine, and a year is the greatest age it should have. Nature is provident here, if one cares to understand it: there is no necessity to use new wines for getting drunk, and indeed the agreeable mellowness of the aged wine invites one to keep it; but nature did not want oil to be hoarded, and by this necessity she made it common and available to all.
8| In this good too Italy has won first place in the whole world, above all in the territory of Venafrum and the part of it that produces Licinian oil, which is why the Licinian olive has particular renown. Unguents have given it this prize, because its scent suits them, and the palate has given it too, by a more delicate verdict; besides, no bird goes for the berries of the Licinian olive. The rest of the contest, between the land of Histria and that of Baetica, is even. Otherwise the quality is nearly the same in the provinces, except for the grain-bearing soil of Africa: nature has given it wholly to Ceres, and has not so much begrudged it oil and wine as given it glory enough in its harvests. Everything else is full of mistakes, and we shall show that in no area of life are they more numerous.
9| The olive consists of a stone, oil, flesh and amurca. This amurca is its bitter watery fluid; it is formed from water, and so it is least in times of drought and plentiful when the tree is watered. The olive's own juice is oil, and this is understood especially from unripe olives, as we have shown in the case of omphacium. The oil increases from the rising of Arcturus, on the 16th day before the Kalends of October; after that the stone and the flesh grow. Then, if heavy rains come as well, the oil is spoiled and turns into amurca. It is the colour of the amurca that makes the olive turn black; so when the blackness is just beginning there is very little amurca, and before it there is none.
10| People make a mistake in thinking that the beginning of ripeness is what is in fact the next thing to decay, and a second one in thinking that the oil grows with the flesh of the olive, when the juice all passes into the body and the woody stone grows larger inside. So it is then that the trees are watered most; and when this happens, through tending or through heavy rains, the oil is used up, unless fine weather follows to thin the body. For, as Theophrastus holds, heat is in every way the cause of oil, which is why it is sought even in the pressing rooms and storerooms by means of large fires.
11| The third fault lies in thrift: because of the cost of picking, people wait for the olives to fall. Those who keep a middle course in this beat them down with poles, to the injury of the trees and the loss of the following year's crop. Indeed the most ancient rule for olive gatherers was: "Do not strip the olive, and do not beat it."
12| Those who go about it most carefully strike with a cane, with a light blow, and not against the branches. Even so, the tree is forced to bear in alternate years, because the buds are knocked off; and no less so if one waits for the olives to fall, for by hanging on beyond their proper time they use up the nourishment of the coming crop and keep it from taking its place. The proof is that unless they are gathered before Favonius, they recover new strength and fall with more difficulty.
13| So the first olives to be gathered, after autumn begins, are (through a fault of the work, not of nature) the posia, which has the most flesh, then the orchites, which has the most oil, and after it the radius. For these, being the most tender, are very quickly taken over by the amurca, which forces them to fall. But the hard-skinned kinds, which fight against moisture and are therefore very small, are put off even into the month of March: the Licinia, the Cominia, the Contia, and the Sergia, which the Sabines call the royal olive. These do not turn black before the first breath of Favonius, that is, the 6th day before the Ides of February.
14| Then they judge the olives to be ripening, and because the best oil is made from them, reasoning seems to be added to the error; and they say that harshness arises from cold, as abundance does from ripeness, whereas that goodness belongs not to the season but to the kind, which is slow to rot into amurca. There is a similar error in keeping the gathered fruit on shelves and not pressing it before it sweats, though with every delay the oil decreases and the amurca grows. And so they commonly say that no more than six pounds are pressed from each modius. No one measures the amurca, how much more of it is found in the same kind as days are added.
15| Altogether unconquerable, and universal, is the error of thinking that oil increases with the swelling of the olive, especially since the quantity of oil is shown not to depend on size by the olives called regiae, by others maiorinae, by others babbiae, which are in other respects very large, with the least juice. In Egypt the fleshiest olives yield a meager amount of oil, and in the Decapolis of Syria they are exceedingly small, no larger than capers, yet are recommended for their flesh.
16| For this reason overseas olives are preferred to Italian ones as food, though they are outdone by them in oil, and in Italy itself the Picene and the Sidicine are preferred to the rest. Those are preserved especially in salt, and the others in amurca or sapa, while some, the colymbades, float pure in their own oil, needing no recommendation from outside. The same are broken and preserved with the flavor of green herbs. Early ones are also made by pouring boiling water over them, however unripe; and it is a marvel that olives drink in a sweet juice and are infected by a foreign flavor.
17| Among these also there are purple ones, as among grapes, the posiae passing into a black color. There are also superbae, besides the kinds already named. There are also very sweet ones, simply dried by themselves and sweeter than raisins, quite rare in Africa and around Emerita in Lusitania.
18| Oil itself is protected by salt from the fault of greasiness. It takes on an odor from cut olive bark. Treatment is otherwise as for wine; there is no concern for the palate, nor is the difference so numerous: it differs in three goodnesses at most. The odor is keener in the thin oil, and yet even in the best it is short-lived.
19| It is the nature of oil to warm the body and fortify it against chills, and to cool the heat of the head. The Greeks, the begetters of all vices, turned its use to luxury by making it public in the gymnasia; it is well known that the magistrates holding that office sold the scrapings of oil for eighty sesterces. The majesty of Rome paid great honor to the olive, by crowning the squadrons of the knights with it on the Ides of July, and likewise those who celebrated lesser triumphs. Athens also crowns its victors with olive, and Greece at Olympia with wild olive.
20| Now the teachings of Cato about olives will be given. In warm and rich soil he orders the greater radius, Sallentina, orchites, posia, Sergiana, Cominiana and albicera to be planted, and he adds with singular prudence: whichever of them they say is best in those places; but in cold, lean soil, the Licinia. For its oil is spoiled by rich or hot soil, and the tree is exhausted by its own fertility, and moreover is attacked by moss and blight.
21| He judges that olive groves should face the west wind, in a place exposed to the sun, and he praises no other way. Olives are best preserved as orchites and posiae, either green in brine or broken with lentisk. Oil is best made from the most bitter olive. For the rest, it should be gathered from the ground as soon as possible, washed if soiled; three days of drying are enough. If frosts freeze, it should be pressed on the fourth day; this also should be sprinkled with salt. Oil on a shelf diminishes and becomes worse, likewise in amurca and the fraces (these are the flesh, and from them the dregs);
22| therefore it should be dipped out more than once a day, and with a shell, into lead vats; it is spoiled by bronze. All this is done in a heated, closed press, as little ventilated as possible, and for that reason wood should not be cut there (for which reason the stones of the olives themselves make the most suitable fire); from the vats it should be poured into basins, so that the fraces and amurca are left behind. For this reason the vessels should be changed rather often, and the baskets wiped with a sponge, so that the greatest possible purity and clearness may remain.
23| Later it was discovered that the olives should in any case be washed in boiling water and put under the press whole at once (for in this way the amurca is pressed out), and soon, broken in the mills, pressed a second time. They do not approve of pressing more than a hundred modii at a time; the result is called a pressing; but what is first pressed out after the mill is called the flower. It is right for three pressings to be made through a double opening by four men each, night and day.
24| In that age there was no artificial oil, and therefore, I think, nothing was said of it by Cato. Now there are several kinds of it, and first we shall take those which are made from trees, and among them, before all, that from the wild olive. It is thin, and far more bitter than that of the olive, and useful only for medicines. Very like it is that from chamelaea, a rocky shrub no higher than a palm, with the leaves and berries of the wild olive.
25| The next is made from cici, a tree abundant in Egypt (some call it croton, others sibi, others wild sesamon), and there, and not long ago in Spain also, it springs up suddenly to the height of an olive, with a stalk like a ferula's, a leaf like the vine's, and the seed of slender, pale grapes. Our people call it ricinus, from the likeness of the seed. The seed is cooked in water, and the oil floating on top is skimmed off. But in Egypt, where it abounds, it is pressed out without fire and water, sprinkled with salt; it is foul for food and meager for lamps.
26| Almond oil, which some call neopus, is pressed from bitter nuts, dried and pounded into a mass, sprinkled with water and pounded again. Oil is also made from laurel, with the oil of drupes mixed in, and some press it from the berries only, others from the leaves alone, some from the leaf and the bark of the berries, and they also add styrax and other odors; the best laurel for this is the broad-leaved wild one,
27| with black berries. A similar oil is made from the black myrtle, and here too the broad-leaved is better. The berries are pounded, sprinkled with hot water, and then boiled down. Others boil down the softest of the leaves in oil and press them, others first ripen them in the sun after throwing them into oil. The method is the same for the cultivated myrtle, but the wild is preferred, with the smaller seed, which some call oxymyrsine, others chamaemyrsine, some acoron from the likeness; for it is low and shrubby.
28| Oil is also made from the citrus, the cypress, the walnut, which they call caryinum, from apples, from the cedar (pisselaeon), and also from the Cnidian grain, the seed cleaned and pounded, and from the lentisk. For how cyprinum, and oil from the Egyptian acorn, are made for scents has already been told. The Indians are said to make it from chestnuts and sesima and rice, the Ichthyophagi from fish.
29| Want sometimes compels oil to be made for lamps even from plane-tree berries, steeped in water and salt. Oenanthinum is also made; of the oenanthe itself I have spoken among the unguents. Must is boiled into gleucinum over a slow steam, by others without fire, with grape skins placed around it, mixed twice for each of 21 days, and the must is consumed in the oil. Some mix in not only sampsuchum but even more costly perfumes, as in the gymnasia oil is also scented with odors, but the cheapest.
30| It is made from aspalathus, calamus, balsam, iris, cardamomum, melilot, Gallic nard, panax, sampsuchum, helenium, and the root of cinnamomum, the juices of all being steeped in oil and pressed out. So too rhodinum from roses, iuncinum from rush, which is also very like the rose oil, likewise from henbane and lupines, and narcissus. Most of all in Egypt it is made from the seed of the radish, or from the grass-herb they call chortinon, likewise from sesima and from nettle, which they call cnidinum.
31| Oil from the lily is made elsewhere also, steeped in the open air, in sun, moon and frost. Between Cappadocia and Galatia they compound from their own herbs what they call Selgiticum, very useful for the sinews, as the Iguvini do in Italy. From pitch is made what they call pissinum, when it is boiled, fleeces being spread above its vapor and then pressed out. The best approved is from Bruttia; for it is the fattest and most resinous.
32| The color of this oil is tawny. What they call elaeomeli grows of itself on the coasts of Syria; it flows from trees, rich, thicker than honey, thinner than resin, sweet in taste, and this is for physicians. Old oil also has been used for certain kinds of disease; and it is thought useful too for protecting ivory from decay: certainly at Rome the statue of Saturn has been filled inside with oil.
33| But above all Cato lavished praises on amurca. He says that oil jars and casks are soaked in it, so that they do not drink up the oil; that threshing floors are worked over with amurca for the threshing of the harvest, so that ants and cracks may be kept away; that the clay of walls and plaster and the floors of granaries for grain, and also clothing against moths and harmful animals, are sprinkled with amurca, and seed of crops soaked in it. With it, he says, the diseases of quadrupeds and also of trees are to be treated, and it is effective for internal ulcers, also of the human mouth.
34| Straps too and all hides and shoes and axles are anointed with it boiled down, and bronzes against verdigris and for the sake of a finer color, and all wooden furniture and earthen vessels in which one wishes to keep dried figs, or leaves and berries on twigs of myrtle or some other similar kind. Finally, wood steeped in amurca burns without the annoyance of smoke. If a goat's tongue touches an olive tree by licking and has grazed it at its first budding, Marcus Varro states that it becomes barren. And so far about the olive and oil.
35| The remaining fruits of trees can scarcely be enumerated by appearance or shape, still less by flavors and juices, so often mixed together and grafted. The largest is the pine nut, hung from the highest place. Inside, it encloses slender kernels in coffered ridges, clothed in another coat of rust color, a marvelous care of nature in softly placing the seeds. Of these, one kind is the Tarentine, with a shell that breaks in the fingers, and stolen by birds on the tree.
36| And a third is the sappinus, from the cultivated spruce, the covering of the kernels being rather a skin than a shell, so soft that it is chewed along with them. A fourth they call pitydia, from the wild pines, of singular remedy against cough, the kernels being boiled down in honey. The Taurini call them ravicelos. With a crown of pine, victors at the Isthmus are crowned.
37| Next to these in size are the apples that we call cotonea and in Greek cydonea, brought from the island of Crete. They bend down the branches they bear and hinder the parent tree from growing. There are several kinds of them: the chrysomela, marked with incisions, its color inclined to gold; the whiter, which they call 'native,' is of the most excellent odor.
38| The Neapolitans too have their own honor. Smaller ones of the same kind are the struthea, which give off a stronger scent, with a late crop; the early ones, however, are the mustea. Cotonea grafted on struthea made their own kind, the Mulvian, which alone of them are even eaten raw, and now are shut up in the bedchambers where men receive their morning visitors, and placed on statues that are privy to the nights. There are also small wild ones, of the struthea kind, very fragrant, growing in hedges.
39| We call by the name of apples, although they are of a different kind, the Persian and the pomegranate, which among the Punic trees have been spoken of as being of nine kinds. In the latter the seed lies under the rind inside, in the former there is wood in the body. Also certain pears, called libralia, claim for themselves a size by the name of weight. But the palm among Persian fruits goes to the duracina. The Gallic and Asiatic bear the names of nations.
40| After autumn the Asiatic ripen; the early summer ones were discovered within 30 years and at first were sold at a denarius apiece. The supernatia come from the Sabines, the common ones from everywhere. The fruit is harmless and is sought by the sick, and the price was by now thirty coins apiece, higher for none, which we may marvel at, because nothing is more fleeting. For after being plucked it lasts at most two days and forces itself to be sold.
41| Afterward there is a huge crowd of plums: the versicoloriae, whitening out of black; the hordearia, so called from the company of that grain; others of the same color, later and larger, called asinina from their cheapness. There are smaller ones, but more praised, the cerina and purpurea, and also the Armenian, named for a foreign people, which alone are commended for their smell. A peculiar impudence is found in those grafted upon nut trees, which show the face of the parent and the juice of the adoption, and are called nucipruna from both.
42| Both these and the Persian and the cerina and the wild ones, preserved in casks like grapes, prolong their life until others are born, while the speed of the rest, which soften quickly, flies past. Lately in Baetica there began to be called malina those grafted on apple trees, and others, amygdalina, on almond trees. In these the stone inside the wood is that of an almond; no other fruit has been doubled more ingeniously.
43| Among foreign trees the Damascena have been mentioned, named after Damascus of Syria, long since growing in Italy, though with a larger stone and thinner flesh, and never dried into wrinkles, since their own suns are lacking. At the same time may be mentioned their countrymen the myxae, which also themselves have now begun to grow at Rome, grafted on service trees.
44| That the Persian trees, on the whole, are foreign, even to Asia and Greece, is plain from the very name, and that they were brought from Persia. But it is certain that wild plums grow everywhere, so that I wonder the more that no mention of this fruit was made by Cato, especially when he showed how certain things, even wild ones, should be preserved.
45| For the Persian trees crossed late and with difficulty, such as bear nothing in Rhodes, which was their first lodging from Egypt. It is false that in Persia they grow poisonous, causing agony, and were carried over by the kings to Egypt as a punishment, the soil having softened them. For the more careful writers tell this of the persea, which is wholly different, like red myxae, and would not grow outside the east.
46| The more learned have also denied that this was carried over from Persia on account of punishments, but say it was planted at Memphis by Perseus, and that on this account Alexander established that victors there be crowned with it, in honor of his forefather. It always has leaves and fruit, others growing up beneath. But it will be plain that all the plums too began after Cato.
47| Of apples there are several kinds. Of the citrea I have spoken with their own tree, but the Greeks call the Medica by the name of its native country. Equally foreign are the zizipha and the tubures, which also themselves came to Italy not long ago, the tubures from Africa, the zizipha from Syria. It was Sextus Papinius, a consul in our own day, who first brought both, in the last times of the deified Augustus, planted in the camp, more like berries than apples, but especially ornamental for terraces, since woods now climb even onto roofs. There are two kinds of tubures: the white, and that called syricum after its color.
48| Almost foreign are the ones that grow in a single district of Italy, the Veronese, called lanata; a down covers them, most of all on the struthea and Persian ones, but it gave the name particularly to these, which are distinguished by no other recommendation.
49| Why should it irk me to name the rest individually, when they have propagated an eternal memory for their founders, as though for some outstanding deed in life? Unless I am mistaken, it will appear from this how great is the talent of grafting, and that nothing is so small that it cannot beget glory. So they have their origin from Matius and Cestius and Mallius, and likewise Scaudius; from whom, a cotoneum being grafted by Appius of the Claudian house, the Appian were named.
50| They have the smell of cotonea, the size of the Scaudian, a reddish color. And lest anyone think that the glory of a family so prevailed by ambition, there are also the Sceptiana from a freedman discoverer, notable for roundness. Cato adds the Quiriniana and the Scantiana, which he says are preserved in jars. But most recently of all were adopted the small ones of most pleasing flavor, which are called Petisia. The Amerina and the Graecula ennobled their native lands. The rest drew their
51| name from causes: gemella, from brotherhood in clinging together, never single in bearing; syrica from color; melapia from kinship; mustea from the speed of ripening, which are now called melimela from their honeyed flavor; orbiculata from the shape of a circle drawn round into roundness (the Greeks are the evidence that these first grew in Epirus, for they call them Epirotica); orthomastia from the likeness of breasts; and from the condition of a castrated seed, those the Belgae call spadonia.
52| In the melofolia a single leaf, sometimes a double one, bursts out from the middle of the side. The pannucea quickly wither into wrinkles. The pulmonea swell stupidly. Some have a blood-red color, drawn from their origin in a grafting on the mulberry. In all of them, however, the parts that faced the sun are red. There are also small wild ones of slight pleasantness of taste and even sharper in odor. Peculiar to these is the reproach of an outrageous sourness, and a force so great that it dulls the edge of a sword. Meal gives others a very cheap name, though they are the first to arrive and are in a hurry to be plucked.
53| For the same reason a name of arrogance is charged against certain pears, the superbae; these are small, but very early. Of all, however, the Crustumian is the most pleasing, and next to it the Falernian for drinking, since so great a quantity of juice abounds in it (it is called lactere), and among them is another of black color, a gift of Syria. The names of the rest are given differently in different places.
54| But, with their names acknowledged in the City, the Decimiana have ennobled their authors, and what is derived from it which they call Pseudodecimianum, the Dolabelliana with the longest stalk, the Pomponiana, called mammosa, the Liceriana, the Seviana and those born from them, the Turraniana, differing in the length of the stalk, the Favoniana, red, a little larger than the superbae, the Lateriana, the Aniciana, ripening after autumn, pleasing in a slightly sour taste. Those are called Tiberiana which pleased the emperor Tiberius most. They are colored more by the sun and grow larger; otherwise they would be the same as the Liceriana.
55| The latest of all, with names from their native places, are the Amerina, Picentina, Numantina, Alexandrina, Numidiana, Graeca, and among them the Tarentina and Signina, which others call testacea from the color, as onychina, purpurea; myrapia from the smell; laurea, nardina; hordearia from the season; ampullacea from the neck; and the Coriolana; the Bruttia, from a family name; the cucurbitina,
56| sour in juice. The cause of the names is uncertain in the barbarica, the Veneria, which they say are colored, the regia, which sit on the smallest stalk, the patricia, the vocima, the viridia and oblonga. Besides, Virgil mentioned the volema, taken from Cato, who also names the sementiva and the mustea.
57| This part of life reached its summit long ago, men having tried everything, since Virgil says the arbutus is grafted on the nut tree, the plane on the apple, the elm on the cherry. Nothing further can be devised; certainly no new fruit has been found for a long time. Nor is it lawful to mix everything in grafting, any more than to graft thorns, since lightnings cannot easily be expiated, and it is declared that as many kinds as have been grafted, so many lightning-bolts result from a single stroke.
58| Pears have a more top-shaped figure. Among them the late kinds hang on the mother tree until winter, ripening in the frost: the Greek, the ampullacea, the laurea, just as among apples the Amerina and Scaudiana. Pears are preserved like grapes and in as many ways, and nothing is put into casks except plums. Of fruits, pears have a property like that of wine, and physicians likewise beware of them in the sick. They are cooked in wine and water and serve as a relish, which no other fruit does except the cotonea and the struthea.
59| In general, regarding the keeping of fruits, it is prescribed that orchard storerooms be floored in a cold and dry place, open on a clear day with windows to the north, shut against the south winds with panes, since the blast of the north wind also disfigures fruit with wrinkles. Apples are to be gathered after the autumn equinox, neither before the 16th day of the moon nor beyond the twenty-eighth, neither on a rainy day nor before the first hour; the windfalls are to be set apart; they are laid on solid straw or chaff, and arranged sparsely, so that the passages between may be open and receive an even breath of air. The Amerina last longest, the melimela least.
60| Cotonea, in a closed place, must be deprived of all breathing space, or boiled in honey or sunk in it. Pomegranates are hardened in boiling sea water, then dried for three days in the sun, hung so that the night dew does not touch them, and when one wishes to use them, washed in fresh water. Marcus Varro also orders them to be kept in jars of sand; and unripe ones to be buried in earth in pots with the bottom broken out, but the air shut out and the twig smeared with pitch: so they even grow larger than they could on the tree. The other apples, except the windfalls, are wrapped singly in fig leaves and stored in wicker baskets, or smeared over with potters' clay.
61| Pears are buried in a trench in pitched earthen vessels turned upside down. The Tarentina are gathered as late as possible; the Aniciana are also kept in passum; service-berries too, and in trenches with a plastered lid, two feet of earth thrown over, in a sunny place, in upturned vessels; and they are hung in jars like grapes and among grapes with their branches.
62| Some of the more recent authorities go back to the care at a deeper level and prescribe that fruits and vines be set aside at once for this use when the moon is waning, after the third hour of the day, in clear weather or with dry winds. Likewise grapes are to be chosen from dry places and before perfect ripeness, with the addition that the moon is below the earth, with a hard cutting of the shoot, the spoiling berries removed with shears, and hung in a fresh pitched jar, all air shut out by a lid and plaster. So too service-berries and pears, with the twigs of all smeared with pitch.
63| The jars are to be far from water. Some store them thus with the vine shoot itself, squills fixed in both ends of it; others even in jars that contain wine, provided the grapes do not touch it; some, apples floating in earthen dishes, by which method they think the wine too acquires a scent. Some prefer to keep all these in millet, but most in a trench two feet deep, with sand laid beneath and an earthen lid, then covered with earth.
64| Some smear even grapes with potters' clay and hang them up after they have dried in the sun, washing off the clay when they are to be used. The same they work in with wine for fruits. The most noble apples they coat in the same way with plaster or wax, which, unless they have ripened, burst the lime by their growth. They always set them on their stalks. Others pluck them with twigs and bury them, fitted into the pith of elder, as written above.
65| Others assign a separate earthen vessel to each apple and pear and shut it again in a jar with a pitched lid; some also in flocks of wool and boxes which they smear with clay mixed with chaff; others do the same in earthen dishes, some in a trench with sand laid beneath: they cover them dry and then with earth. There are those who sink cotonea smeared with Pontic wax in honey.
66| Columella states that grapes are sunk in wells or cisterns in earthen vessels smeared with pitch with careful attention. The maritime part of Liguria nearest the Alps wraps grapes dried in the sun in bundles of rush and shuts them up in casks with plaster. The Greeks do the same with leaves of plane or of the vine itself or of fig, dried in one day in the shade and placed in a cask with grape skins between. By this method the Coan grape and the Berytian are kept, to be put after none in sweetness.
67| Some, to make these, dip them in lye ash as soon as they have drawn them from the vines, then dry them in the sun, plunge the raisins into hot water and dry them again in the sun, then wrapped in leaves, as said above, pack them with grape skins. There are those who prefer to keep grapes in sawdust or shavings of fir, poplar, ash. There are those who order that they be hung up far from apples and at once in granaries, since the dust of grain dries them best. For hanging ones, the remedy against wasps is to sprinkle them with oil from the mouth. Of palms we have spoken.
68| Of the remaining class of fruits the fig is the largest, and certain figs rival even pears in size. Of the marvels of the Egyptian and the Cyprian I have told among foreign things. The Idaean is red, of the size of an olive, only rounder, with the flavor of the medlar. They call it Alexandrian there, a cubit in thickness, branching, strong in wood, tough, without milk, with green bark and a leaf like the linden's, but soft. Onesicritus reports that in Hyrcania figs are much sweeter and more fertile than ours, so that single trees bear 270 modii.
69| To us they have passed over from other peoples, from Chalcis and Chios, of which there are several kinds. For indeed the Lydian, which are purple, and the mamillana have a likeness to them, and the callistruthia are superior in the flavor of stuffing, the coldest of all figs. As for the African, since many prefer them to all, there is a great question, since that kind crossed into Africa only very recently.
70| The Alexandrinae, too, keep their native name, among the black ones, with a whitening cleft, with the surname delicatae. The Rhodian is also black, and the Tiburtine among the early ones. They also have the names of authors, Liviae and Pompei. These are most suitable for drying in the sun for a year's use, with the mariscae, and those that a mark of a reed leaf variegates. There is also the Herculanea, and the albicerata, and the white aratia, with the smallest stalk,
71| the broadest. First, however, appears the porphyritis, with the longest stalk. It is accompanied by one of the smallest and cheapest, called popularis. On the other hand the latest, the chelidonia, ripens in winter. There are besides the same kinds that are both late and early, the biferae, white and black, ripening with harvest and vintage. The late ones are also called after their hard skin, some of the Chalcidic bearing three crops.
72| Only at Tarentum grow the very sweet ones, which they call onae. Cato speaks thus of figs: "Plant the mariscan figs in chalky or open ground, but in richer or manured ground the African and the Herculanean, the Sacontine, the winter, the Tellan, black with a long stalk." Afterward so many names and kinds came in that from this alone, to those who weigh it, it appears that life has been changed. There are winter figs also in certain provinces, as in Moesia, but of art, not of nature. They cover a kind of small trees with dung after autumn,
73| and the unripe figs caught in them in winter, which, dug up in a milder climate with the tree and sent back into the light, eagerly receive new suns and others than those under which they lived, as though born a second time, and ripen with the bloom of those that are coming, early in another year's season, in even the coldest region.
74| But the African fig, already so named by Cato, reminds us of Africa, for a great proof was drawn from the use of this fruit. For, burning with a deadly hatred of Carthage and anxious for the security of his descendants, while he cried out before the whole senate that Carthage must be destroyed, one day he brought into the senate house an early fig from that province, and showing it to the Fathers said: "I ask you, when do you think this fruit was taken from the tree?" When it was agreed among all that it was fresh,
75| "And yet," he said, "know that it was plucked at Carthage three days before. So near to the walls we have the enemy!" And immediately the third Punic war was undertaken, in which Carthage was destroyed, although Cato was carried off in the following year. What should we first admire in it, the care of his intellect or the chance occasion, the speed of the voyage or the vehemence of the man?
76| Above all there is this, than which I certainly think nothing more marvelous: that so great a city, and the rival of the world for 120 years, was overthrown by the evidence of a single fruit, which the Trebia and Trasimene and Cannae, the funeral pyre of the Roman name, could not accomplish, nor the Punic camp fortified at the third milestone, nor Hannibal himself riding up to the Colline Gate. By so much did Cato bring Carthage nearer by a fruit!
77| The fig tree is worshipped which grew in the Forum itself and in the Comitium at Rome, sacred because lightning-strikes were buried there, and still more in memory of the one which, the nurse of Romulus and Remus, first sheltered the founders of the empire in the Lupercal, and was called the ruminalis, since under it was found the she-wolf offering the infants her rumis (so they called the breast), a marvel dedicated beside it in bronze, as though it had crossed of its own accord into the Comitium, Attus Navius being the augur. Nor does it wither without some presage, and it is planted again by the care of the priests. There was also one before the temple of Saturn, removed in the year of the City [….] after a sacrifice by the Vestals, since it was overturning the statue of Silvanus.
78| The same lives in the middle of the Forum by chance planting, where Curtius, by the greatest of goods, that is, by virtue and piety and a glorious death, had filled up the foundations of the empire as they sank, by a fated portent. Equally by chance in the same place are a vine and an olive, planted by the diligence of the plebs for the sake of shade, the altar being removed from there at the gladiatorial show of the deified Julius, which was the last fought in the Forum.
79| Admirable is the haste of this fruit, which alone among all hastens to ripeness by the art of nature. The wild fig, a kind of fig from the wild stock that never ripens, is called caprificus, but it gives to others what it does not itself have, since there is a natural passage of causes, and it happens that something is born from things decaying.
80| So it breeds gnats; these, cheated of nourishment in their mother, by her putrid decay, fly out to their kindred, and with their frequent biting of the figs, that is, a greedier feeding, opening their mouths, penetrate inside and bring the sun in with them at first and let in the airs of Ceres through the opened doors. Soon they consume the milky moisture, that is, the infancy of the fruit (which also happens of itself); and therefore the caprificus is allowed in fig plantations according to the wind, so that the breeze may carry the flying gnats to the figs.
81| Hence it was discovered that branches brought in from elsewhere and tied together should also be thrown upon the fig, which in a lean and north-facing soil they do not need, since the figs dry of themselves from the situation of the place and from cracks, the same cause achieving what the gnats achieve by their work; nor where there is much dust, which happens most on a frequented road alongside. For dust too has the power of drying and absorbing the juice of milk. This method, by dust and caprification, also ensures that the figs do not fall, the tender moisture having been used up and the fruit being heavy with a certain fragility.
82| All figs are soft to the touch; when ripe, they have grain inside, the ripening ones a juice of milk, the fully cooked ones of honey. They grow old on the tree and in old age drip tears of gum. Esteem dries the prized ones and keeps them in boxes, the best and largest in the island of Ebusus, then among the Marrucini; but where there is abundance, in Asia jars are filled, and in Ruspina, a city of Africa, casks, and dried figs serve at once as bread and as relish, inasmuch as Cato, fixing the allowances of food for farm laborers by a kind of lawful rule, orders them reduced at the time of the fig's ripening. To eat cheese with fresh fig, in place of salt, was devised recently.
83| Of this kind, as we have said, are the cottana and the caricae, and those which gave an omen to Marcus Crassus as he boarded ship against the Parthians, when the seller cried Cavneae. All these Lucius Vitellius, who was afterward censor, brought from Syria to his Alban estate while legate in that province, in the last times of Tiberius Caesar.
84| To the class of apples and pears the medlar and the service-berry may rightly be reckoned. Of the medlar there are three kinds: the anthedon, the setania; the third degenerates, yet is more like the anthedon, and is called Gallic. The fruit of the setania is larger and whiter, the stone of softer wood; the others have a smaller fruit, but more excellent in odor and such as is kept longer. The tree itself is of the largest. The leaves redden before they fall; the roots are many and deep and therefore cannot be pulled out. This tree was not in Italy in Cato's age.
85| Service-berries are fourfold in difference. For some of them have the roundness of an apple, others the top shape of a pear, others an egg-like form, like one of the apples; these are liable to sourness. The round ones excel in smell and sweetness, the rest have the taste of wine. The most noble are those which have tender leaves about the stalks. A fourth kind they call torminale, approved only for remedy, constant in yield, with the smallest fruit, and a different tree, with leaves almost of a plane. They do not bear before the third year in any kind. Cato says that service-berries are also preserved in sapa.
86| Next after these the walnuts may claim a place by their size, though they yield in prestige, although these too are companions of nuptial Fescennine verses; much smaller than pine nuts in the whole, yet larger in proportion in the kernel. They also have a peculiar honor of nature, being protected by a double covering, first of a cushioned calyx, then of a woody shell. This is what made them sacred in marriages, the offspring being fortified in so many ways, which is more likely than that they make a favorable omen in falling.
87| And that these were carried over from Persia by the kings, the Greek names are the evidence: for the finest kind of them they name Persicum and basilicon, and these were the first names; caryon, from heaviness of the head, was fittingly said on account of the heaviness of the smell. Wools are dyed with their husk, and hair is reddened by the first nuts as they come forth; this is found by hands stained with handling. They grow rich with age.
88| The only difference among the kinds lies in the shell, hard or brittle, thin or thick, divided into chambers or simple. Of all fruit, this alone has nature shut up inside a jointed covering. For the keels of the shells are split in two, and the kernels have another fourfold division, a woody membrane running between. In the rest, whatever there is, is solid, as in hazelnuts, and in that very kind of nut which they formerly called Abellinae from their native place. They came to Asia and Greece from Pontus, and for that reason are also called Pontic nuts.
89| These too a soft beard protects, but the shell and kernels have a solid roundness. These are also roasted. They have a navel inside at the middle of the belly. The almond has a third nature among them, with an outermost covering thinner than the walnut's but like it, and likewise a second covering, the shell; the kernel is unlike in breadth and has a sharper callus.
90| Whether this tree existed in Italy in Cato's time is doubted, since he names Greek ones, which some also keep within the kind of walnuts. He adds besides the hazelnuts and the galbae, the Praenestine, which he praises most, and he reports that they are kept green, stored in pots in the ground. Now the Thasian and the Alban are celebrated, and two kinds of Tarentine, with a brittle shell and a hard one, which are also the largest and least round; besides the molluscae, which break their shell.
91| There are those who interpret the name as an honor and say that it is the acorn of Jupiter. I heard lately of a man of consular rank who declared that he had walnut trees too that bore twice. Of pistachios, which are themselves a kind of nut, we have spoken in their place. These too the same Vitellius was the first to bring into Italy, at the same time, and at once into Spain Flaccus Pompeius, a Roman knight who served with him.
92| We call chestnuts also nuts, although they are closer to the kind of acorns. A fence is set round them with a prickly calyx, which was begun with acorns, and it is marvelous that the cheapest things are those which nature has hidden with so great care. Some have three offspring from a single calyx; the rind is tough, and the membrane nearest the body, both in these and in nuts, spoils the flavor unless it is removed. It is more pleasant to roast them for food, or else they are ground, and in fasting they give women a certain image of bread.
93| These first came from Sardis, and therefore among the Greeks they call them Sardian acorns, for the name Dios balanou was afterward put upon those made more excellent by planting. Now there are several kinds of them. The Tarentine are easy and not troublesome for food, flat in shape. The rounder is called balanitis, most easily cleaned, and leaping out of itself clean.
94| The Salariana is also flat, the Tarentine less tractable, the Corelliana more praised, and, made from it in the way we shall tell among grafts, the Tereiana, which a reddish rind sets above the triangular and common black ones, which are called coctivae. The most praised have their native land at Tarentum, and in Campania Naples. The others are grown as fodder for pigs, with a scrupulous chewing of the rind even within the kernels.
95| Not far from these may be seen the very sweet pods, except that in them the rind itself is chewed. All of them are a finger in length, sometimes sickle-shaped, a thumb's width in breadth. Acorns cannot be counted among fruits, for which reason they will be spoken of in their own nature.
96| The rest are of the fleshy kind, and they differ in berries and flesh. In some the flesh is on grape-stones, in others on mulberries, in others on arbutus berries, and in others on seeds between skin and juice, in others on myxae, in others on berries like olives.
97| The juice in the flesh of mulberries is wine-like, and they have three colors, white at first, then reddening, black when ripe. They flower among the last, and ripen among the first. When ripe they stain the hands with their juice; when unripe they wash it out. In this tree talents have advanced least, in names or in grafts; nor do they differ in any other way than in size of fruit, the Ostian and Tusculan mulberries at Rome. They also grow on brambles, with a much different callus.
98| The substance of the strawberries of the earth is one thing, that of their relative the arbutus another, which alone is a fruit that grows at once from a shrub and from the earth. The tree itself is shrubby. The fruit ripens in a year, and the one growing up beneath flowers at the same time as the earlier one is ripening. Whether the male or the female is sterile is not agreed among the authorities. The fruit is without honor,
99| since its name is derived from the argument that only one may be eaten. Yet the Greeks call it by these two names, comaron and memaecylon, from which it appears that there are as many kinds; and among us it is called by another name, arbutus. Juba states that in Arabia they are fifty cubits in height.
100| There is also a great difference among grape-stones, first among the grapes themselves, in callus, tenderness, thickness, in the interior wood, small in some and even double in others, which are the least productive of must. But the berries of ivy and elder differ most, and the shape also of the pomegranate, which indeed has an angular seed. Nor is there any skin on single ones besides the common one, which is white. And all have juice and flesh, especially those in which there is a very small amount of wood. There is also great difference in berries:
101| for some are those of olives, laurels, and in another way lotus, cornel; in another, myrtles, lentisk. The holly and the thorn have no juice, and there is still a middle kind between berries and grape-stones, the cherries. The fruit of these is at first white, as in almost all berries; soon in some it turns green, as in olives and laurels, but reddens in mulberries, cherries, cornels. Then it blackens in mulberries, cherries, olives.
102| There were no cherries in Italy before the victory of Lucius Lucullus over Mithridates, up to the year 680 of the City. He first brought them from Pontus, and in 120 years they reached beyond the ocean as far as Britain; the same [as we have said] could not be made to grow in Egypt by any care. Of cherries, the Aproniana are reddest, the Lutatia the blackest, and the Caeciliana are round.
103| The Junian cherries have a pleasing flavor, but almost only beneath their own tree, so tender that they do not endure being carried. The first place goes to the duracina, which Campania calls Plinian, but in Belgica the Lusitanian, even on the banks of the Rhine. These have a third color, mixed of black and red and green, always like those ripening. Not yet five years have passed since those appeared which they call laurea,
104| of a not unpleasant bitterness, grafted on the laurel. There are also the Macedonian, of a small tree and rarely exceeding three cubits, and, of an even smaller shrub, the chamaecerasi. Among the first of fruits this one returns a yearly favor to the farmer. It rejoices in the north and in the cold, is even dried in the sun, and is stored in casks like the olive.
105| The same care is applied to cornels and even to lentisk. Lest anything seem not to have been born for the belly of man, flavors are mixed and one is forced to please by another; and the regions of earth and sky are mixed also: in one kind of food India is summoned, in another Egypt, Crete, Cyrene, and each land. Nor does life cease in poisonings, so long as it devours everything. This will be made plainer in the nature of herbs.
106| Meanwhile, the kinds of flavors common to fruits and all juices are found to be 13: sweet, pleasant, rich, bitter, harsh, sharp, pungent, unripe-sour, acid, salt. Besides these there are three kinds of a most marvelous nature: one in which several flavors are perceived together, as in wines; for in them is both harsh and pungent and sweet and pleasant, all foreign.
107| The second is a kind in which there is a foreign flavor indeed, but also a certain one of its own and peculiar, as in milk; for it contains what nevertheless cannot rightly be called sweet and rich and pleasant, a mildness prevailing, which itself takes the place of flavor.
108| In waters there is none of this, nor any juice, so that yet by that very thing it becomes something and makes a kind of its own. To perceive any flavor or juice in water is a fault. In all these, odor has great weight and a great kinship; and this itself is none in waters or, if it is perceived at all, is a fault. It is a marvel that the three chief elements of nature are without flavor, without odor, without juice: waters, air, fire.
109| Therefore, of juices, the wine-like belong to the pear, mulberry, myrtle, and least, which we may wonder at, to grapes; rich ones to the olive, laurel, walnut, almonds; sweet ones to grapes, figs, palms; watery to plums. There is also great difference in the color of the juice: blood-colored in mulberries, cherries, cornels, black grapes; the same white in white ones; milky in the head of figs, but not so in the body; foamy in apples, none in Persian fruits, though especially the duracina abound in juice. But who could name any color of it?
110| Odor has its own marvels: sharp in apples, diluted in Persian fruits, none in the sweet ones. For wine of that kind is without odor, the thin has more; and such things come into use much more quickly than rich ones. Those that have odor are not tender in taste likewise, because odor and flavor are not alike. For this reason citrea have a most pungent odor and a most rough flavor, to some extent also cotonea, and figs have no odor.
111| And so far let there be the species and kinds of fruits: it is fitting that their natures be gathered more closely. Some are distinguished by pods, sweet in themselves, but enclosing a bitter seed, though in many seeds please and in a pod are condemned; others by berries, inside which is wood and outside flesh, as in olives, cherries; of some the berries are inside and the wood outside, as in those which we said grow in Egypt.
112| What is the nature of berries is the same in fruits. Of some the body is inside and the wood outside, as in nuts; in others the body is outside and wood inside, as in Persian fruits and plums, and the fault is surrounded by fruit, while elsewhere the fruit is fortified by the fault. Nuts are shut in by a shell, chestnuts by a rind; this is removed from them, but in medlars it is chewed. Acorns are covered by a crust, grapes by skin, the pomegranate by rind and membrane. Mulberries consist of flesh and juice, cherries of skin and juice.
113| Some at once draw away from the wood, as nuts and palms; some cling, as olives and laurel. Some kinds have both natures, as in Persian fruits; for in the duracina the body clings and cannot be torn from the wood, while in the others it is easily separated. Some have wood neither inside nor outside, as in the kind of palms.
114| In some the wood itself is in use and in place of fruit, as we said of certain kinds with kernels in Egypt. In some the faults are doubled outside, as in chestnuts and almonds and walnuts. In some the nature is threefold: the body, then the wood, and again the seed in the wood, as in Persian fruits. Some are dense among themselves, like grapes, and service-berries, which surround the branches from every side and weigh them down in the manner of grapes; others sparse, as in Persian fruits; some are held in a belly, like the pomegranate.
115| Some hang by stalks, like pears, others by clusters, like grapes and palms, others by both stalks and clusters, like ivy and elder; others cling to the branch, as in the laurel; some in both ways, as olives. For the stalks are both short and long. Some consist of little vessels, like the pomegranate and the medlar and the lotus in Egypt and on the Euphrates.
116| Now indeed the attraction and recommendation are different: palms please by their flesh, the Theban by its crust, grapes and caryotae by juice, pears and apples by callus, mulberries by body, kernels by cartilage, certain things in Egypt by grain, figs by skin. This is stripped from green figs like a shell, and in dried ones it pleases most. In papyri and ferulae and the white thorn the stalk itself is the fruit,
117| like the stalks of the fig tree, and in the shrubby kind with the stalk of the caper; but in pods, what is chewed except wood? The peculiarity of their seed must not be passed over: for it can be called neither body nor wood nor cartilage, nor can another name be found.
118| The nature of juices has its chief marvel in the myrtle, since from the one tree two kinds each of oil and of wine are made, and likewise myrtidanum, as we have said. The berry also had another use among the ancients, before pepper was discovered, taking its place, and in a certain kind of relish a name drawn from it, which even now is called myrtatum. And from the same source the flavor of boars is commended, myrtle berries being generally added to the dips.
119| The tree itself, in the climate of nearer Europe, which begins at the Ceraunian mountains, is reported first to have been seen at Circeii on the tomb of Elpenor, and its Greek name remains, by which it appears to be foreign. It was where Rome now is, already when it was founded; for it is so reported that the Romans and Sabines, when they had wished to fight on account of the stolen maidens, laid down their arms and were purified with a myrtle branch in that place which now has the images of Venus Cluacina; for the ancients said cluere for to purify.
120| And in this tree also there is a kind of incense, chosen then for this reason because Venus presides over union and over this tree. I do not know whether it was not also the first of all planted in public places at Rome, with a prophetic and memorable augury. For among the most ancient shrines is that of Quirinus, that is, of Romulus himself. In it there were two sacred myrtles before the temple for a long time, one called patrician, the other plebeian. The patrician for many years prevailed, luxuriant and fresh;
121| as long as the senate also flourished, that one was huge, the plebeian withered and squalid. After the plebeian grew strong, as the patrician turned yellow, from the Marsic war the authority of the Fathers became languid, and by degrees the majesty withered into sterility. There was also an old altar to Venus Myrtea, whom they now call Murcia.
122| Cato recorded three kinds of myrtle, the black, the white, the coniugula, perhaps from marriages, from that kind of the Cluacina. Now there is another distinction, of the cultivated or the wild, and in each the broad-leaved, in the wild the oxymyrsine proper. Of the cultivated kinds the ornamental gardeners distinguish the Tarentine with a small leaf, our native with a spreading one, the hexasticha with the densest, with six rows of leaves. This is not in use, being branching and not tall. I think the coniugalis is now called ours. The myrtle is most fragrant in Egypt.
123| Cato taught that wine is made from the black, dried to dryness in the shade and so put into must. If the berries are not dried, oil is produced. Later it was found that from the white also a white wine is made, two sextarii of crushed myrtle being steeped in three heminae of wine and pressed out. The leaves too are dried by themselves to a meal, for remedies of ulcers on the human body, a gently biting powder, and for cooling sweats.
124| Indeed, in the oil too, marvelous to tell, there is a certain flavor of wine and at the same time a rich liquid, of special power for correcting wines when the straining bags are first soaked with it. For it holds back the lees and does not allow anything but pure liquid to pass, and gives itself as a companion to the strained, of special recommendation. Its twigs also, merely carried, benefit the traveler on foot in a long journey; and rings of its twigs, free of iron, cure swelling of the groin.
125| It has inserted itself in warlike affairs also: Publius Postumius Tubertus, triumphing over the Sabines in his consulship, who first of all entered the city in an ovation, since he had carried out the business gently without blood, advanced wreathed in the myrtle of Venus Victrix, and made the tree desirable even to enemies. This afterward was the crown of those celebrating an ovation, except Marcus Crassus, who, over fugitives and Spartacus, advanced crowned with laurel.
126| Masurius states that triumphing generals also used a myrtle crown on the chariot. Lucius Piso reports that Papirius Maso, who first triumphed on the Alban mount over the Corsicans, used to watch the games of the Circus crowned with myrtle; he was the next Africanus's grandfather on his mother's side. Marcus Valerius used two crowns, laurel and myrtle, who had vowed this too.
127| The laurel may be said to be dedicated especially to triumphs, or most welcome to houses, the doorkeeper of the Caesars and pontiffs. Alone it adorns houses and keeps watch before the thresholds. Cato handed down two kinds of it, the Delphic and the Cyprian. Pompeius Lenaeus added one which he called mustax, because it was put under mustacei: this, he said, has the largest leaf, flaccid and whitish; the Delphic is of equal color but greener, with the largest berries, reddening from green, and crowns victors at Delphi as it does those triumphing at Rome; the Cyprian has a short leaf, black, curled with an overlapping along the margins.
128| Afterward further kinds were added: the tinus (some understand this to be a wild laurel, some a tree of its own kind) differs in color; for its berry is dark blue.
129| There is also the royal laurel, which has begun to be called the Augusta, very large in both tree and leaf, and with berries that are not harsh to the taste either. Some deny that it is the same, and make the royal laurel a kind of its own, with longer and broader leaves. The same people, in another kind, give the name bacalia to the one that is the commonest and the most productive of berries, while the barren one among them,
130| which surprises me most, they call the triumphal laurel, and say that it is the one used by those celebrating triumphs; unless that practice began with the deified Augustus, as we shall show, from the laurel that was sent to him from heaven, very low in height, with a crinkled, short leaf, and rarely found. In ornamental gardening there is also the Thasian laurel, which has a tiny outgrowth, like a little fringe of leaf, coming out in the middle of the leaf; and the spadonina, without this fringe, which tolerates shade remarkably, and so fills the ground under any amount of shade.
131| There is also the chamaedaphne, a wild shrub, and the Alexandrina, which some call the Idaea, others hypoglottion, others danae, others carpophyllon, others hypelates. It sends out branches three-quarters of a foot long from the root and is used in garland-making; its leaf is more pointed than the myrtle's, softer, whiter and larger, and its seed, between the leaves, is red. It is most plentiful on Ida and around Heraclea in Pontus, and grows only in mountainous places.
132| The kind called daphnoides is also surrounded by a crowd of names; some call it Pelasgum, others eupetalon, others stephanos Alexandri. This too is a branching shrub, with a leaf thicker and softer than the laurel's, which sets the mouth on fire when tasted, and with berries of a reddish black. The ancients noted that there was no kind of laurel in Corsica; it has now been planted there and grows well.
133| The laurel itself is a bearer of peace, so that holding it out even between armed enemies is a sign of a truce. Among the Romans especially it is the messenger of rejoicing and victories: it is attached to dispatches and to the soldiers' lances and javelins, and it adorns the fasces of generals.
134| A branch from these is laid in the lap of Jupiter Best and Greatest whenever a new victory has brought rejoicing. The reason is not that it is always green, nor that it is a bearer of peace, for in both respects the olive should be preferred to it, but because it is most conspicuous on Mount Parnassus and was therefore thought to be dear to Apollo as well. Even the kings of Rome had become accustomed to sending gifts there and seeking oracles from there, as Lucius Brutus bears witness; and perhaps also as a token, since it was there that he earned the public liberty, when, following the oracle's response, he kissed that laurel-bearing earth; and because, of all the trees planted by hand and taken into our houses, it alone is not struck by lightning.
135| For these reasons I for my part would believe that this honour was given to it in triumphs, rather than because it is a means of fumigation and purification after the slaughter of enemies, as Masurius records. And it is so wrong to defile the laurel and the olive in common uses that not even for propitiating the divine powers should fires be kindled on altars or hearths from them. The laurel indeed plainly rejects fire with its crackling and a kind of protest, its wood even writhing as though with disorders of the bowels and sinews. They say that the emperor Tiberius used to wear a laurel wreath when it thundered, against the fear of lightning.
136| There are also events connected with the laurel in the life of the deified Augustus that are worth recording. When Livia Drusilla, who afterwards received the name Augusta upon her marriage, had been betrothed to Caesar, an eagle dropped from a height into her lap, as she sat, a hen of remarkable whiteness, unhurt; and as she looked at it in wonder without fear, a further marvel was added: it held in its beak a laurel branch laden with its berries. The haruspices ordered that the bird and its offspring be preserved, and that the branch be planted and duly guarded.
137| This was done at the villa of the Caesars that stands above the river Tiber near the ninth milestone of the Flaminian Way, which for this reason is called Ad Gallinas, and a grove grew up there wonderfully. Later Caesar, when he celebrated his triumph, held laurel from it in his hand, and on his head wore a wreath of it, and afterwards so did all the Caesars who were emperors. And the custom was handed down of planting the branches they had held, and groves survive distinguished by their names, perhaps for that reason changing the laurels used in triumphs.
138| This alone of all trees gives in the Latin language a name to men; this alone has a distinct name for its leaves, for we call them laurea. The name also lasts in the city, given to a place, since the spot on the Aventine where there was a grove of laurel is called Loretum. The laurel is also used in purifications. And let it be attested in passing that it is grown from a cutting as well, since Democritus and Theophrastus doubted this. We shall now speak of the natures of the forest trees.
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