Pour Some Pepper on Me
The King of Spices in Greece and Rome
By Evan McDuff and Joel Christensen
What table is complete, what kitchen is ready without it? We’ve found it buried in the scorching sands of Berenike, Egypt and waterlogged in the cesspits and wells of Roman settlements in Germany, England, and France. Three out of four recipes in a Roman cookbook call for it! Galen says if you’re feeling a little, well, frigid, you can combine it with honey and put it on your…well, you know. Pepper, one of the most influential spices in history, found its way into the hearts, kitchens, dining rooms, and, in many instances, rectums of ancient Mediterranean peoples.
Pepper — a name shared with the Sanksrit pippali but with an unknown Indic origin — is so ubiquitous that most of us don’t even think of what it costs, where it comes from, or how it got here. The US is the world’s largest importer and consumer of pepper, and the harvesting and trade of pepper is a massive multimillion-dollar worldwide industry. But the modern pepper industry is only the most recent chapter in the long history of pepper commerce, which stretches back to a spice trade established during the Roman Empire.
Thanks to its economic value, physical application, and poetic intrigue, pepper — the “king of spices”—could be thought of as an index for global interconnections and self-representation. The Romans, like modern Americans, consumed pepper avidly. Roman merchants, voyaging from Egyptian ports on the Red Sea, arrived on the shores of the Indian subcontinent with shiploads of gold in order to purchase the spice and other Indian luxuries. The Tamil poet Erukkaddur Tayan-Kannanar wrote of the merchants he observed at the Port of Muziris: “The thriving town of Muziris where the beautiful large ships of the Yavanas [a word used to describe the Greeks and Romans] bring gold … and return laden with pepper.”
Strabo highlights the magnitude of this Roman effort to acquire Indian goods, including pepper, by comparing the massive Roman fleet sent from Myos Hormos in Egypt to the small number of ships sent to the Indian subcontinent under Ptolemaic rule. He writes, “…I found that about one hundred and twenty ships sail from Myos-hormos to India, although, in the time of the Ptolemies, scarcely any one would venture on this voyage and the commerce with the Indies.” The vessels of this merchant fleet had to be numerous, large, and incredibly durable in order to withstand the gale force winds of the monsoon.
But what did the ancient Greeks and Romans do with all that pepper? According to available written sources, they were just like us! Well, mostly. Pepper was in fact used to flavor cuisine all over the Mediterranean. While Greeks employed pepper and spices in wine (!), they were sparing in its use in food — Theophrastus stresses the Greeks’ disdain for the use of aromatics in food when he notes how they give a pleasant taste to wine but ruin the flavor of both cooked and uncooked dishes. In large part, pepper appears in ancient Greek food only when its presence is deemed medically beneficial. For instance, Diphilius of Siphnos, as cited in The Deipnosophists 3.40, suggests serving pepper paired with cumin on scallops because the combination of botanicals helps with the digestion of the bivalve.
The Romans, on the other hand, adored spicing up their food. Pepper is called for in 349 of the 468 (75%) recipes found in the one-of-a-kind Roman period cookbook Apicius, where the spice is featured in sauces, roasted pork and hare, vegetable purees, and mulled wines. Martial remarks on the habitual use of pepper on even the most basic of Roman dishes, saying, “Oh, with the insipid beet, the luncheon of laborers, how often the cook looks to pepper and wine.”
Pepper was spicing up Greek and Roman lives outside of the triclinium too, as medicine. Numerous extant sources comment on its curative power for ailments from hemlock poisoning to excessive menstrual bleeding. In many prescriptions, pepper was to be added to wine or some other concoction for oral ingestion. Such oral suspensions are less surprising than some rather (un)tasteful applications of the spice.
Take for instance, a medical experiment presented by Galen: a man suffering from colic is given several horrible treatments, including a mixture of honey boiled with pepper. Although the full sequence of treatments is a bit unclear, Galen seems to suggest that, following earlier treatments of rue and castor oil, the honey-pepper concoction was administered through the rectum. In an empirical observation, Galen notes that this application of pepper caused the patient extraordinary amounts of suffering. (Once Galen decided that stuffing him like a Thanksgiving turkey wasn’t helping any, the man made a full recovery.)
Beyond pepper’s culinary and medicinal applications for humans, at least one source prescribes the spice as part of good animal husbandry. In De Natura Animalium, Aelian recounts several methodologies that shepherds employed to encourage their sheep to mate. One method: rub honey and pepper on the hindquarters of female animals. Apparently, this would cause females to “dote upon” the males of the herd. In other words, the females would grind up against anything, including the males, to get relief from the irritating sensation caused by the volatile chemicals in the pepper. Worry not, Homo sapiens — Dioscorides and the Magical Papyri both approve of pepper as an aphrodisiac in humans too!
Perhaps the oddest prescribed use for pepper in ancient text appears in a fragmentary section of Petronius’s Satyricon. After Encolpius kills one of the sacred geese kept at the Temple of Priapus, he is confronted by the temple’s attendants, who mourn the loss of the bird and threaten to have Encolpius crucified. Encolpius offers money to their leader, a sorceress named Oenothea, and she accepts. When, in a sudden change of mood, the sacred goose is prepared for a feast, Oenothea reads its liver to see Encolpius’s future, and wine is poured all around.
Oenothea then produces a leathery dildo, which she oils and sprinkles with pepper and nettle seed and proceeds to gradually insert into Encolpius’s rectum while she beats his groin with the fresh branches of stinging nettle. The romantic rendezvous, an obvious trap laid to make him pay for his crimes, has Encolpius running from the temple so fast his toes bleed. The rectal insertion of spicy botanicals as punishment is not isolated to this one instance. Both Aristophanes and Catullus refer to the use of radishes in punishing adulterers. Perhaps this particular use for pepper and radish were to be taken as absurd threats — a recipe for pain found at the nexus of the culinary, judicial, and medical arts — rather than as actual criminal punishments. But then, again who knows?
Part of the mystery — and pleasure — of dealing with our evidence for ancient food and spices is trying to separate the oddities from the everyday. While extant written sources give us a good idea of how pepper was used in the ancient Mediterranean, such sources represent only elite culture and leave us in the dark when it comes to how widespread its use was, how frequently and in what quantities people obtained it, and which types people were using. That’s right — according to the writings of Pliny, the Elder, not one, not two, but three types of pepper were imported from the Indian subcontinent to the ancient Greek and Roman world. The first two forms of pepper, likely familiar to most readers, are black and white pepper, which originate from the plant species Piper nigrum. The third — and earliest known pepper in the ancient Mediterranean — is long pepper, which is derived from the plant species Piper longum, a cousin to Piper nigrum.
The greatest pitfall of pepper research is the lack of physical evidence for the spice’s use in the ancient world. There are little to no archaeological remains of pepper in domestic contexts, where we might expect, based on written sources, pepper to have been used for cooking. Furthermore, physical remains of pepper only represent the species Piper nigrum.This leaves Piper longum as the only non-liquid food product to be mentioned in written sources for which archaeology has provided no physical evidence. This discrepancy between written and archaeological sources requires that we approach the topic of ancient pepper from a new, and rather acute, angle.
Because certain types and preparations of pepper seem to be missing from the archeological record, we have to start looking at the microscopic level to understand the big picture of pepper in the ancient world. Phytoliths, which are microscopic silica bodies produced by many plants, may help archaeologist detect and identify the decayed remains of pepper. Because of their formation process, phytoliths take on the shape of the cells they form in and around. So they can sometimes be indicative of their producing plant, as demonstrated in an investigation that identified garlic mustard seed phytoliths in food crust attached to prehistoric cooking vessels. Phytoliths observed in Piper longum and Piper nigrum can, based on author Evan McDuff’s laboratory research, be used to differentiate the decayed remains of black and long pepper.
The archaeological detection and identification of all three pepper varieties in the ancient Mediterranean would help us better understand the history of an essential good in one of the world’s earliest globalized economies and transcontinental trading networks. Such understandings may lead us to a more nuanced perception of ancient globalization and cross-cultural exchange. Furthermore, knowledge of the importation history of pepper and a broader-scale understanding of its use and consumption, particularly in the kitchen, would make it possible to investigate questions of Roman choice, preference, and individuality. The detection and identification of different varieties of peppers from cooking wares and spice-related vessels like piperatoria in the Roman world could help determine whether long pepper was favored by those who could afford it or whether long pepper was, at all economic levels, supplanted by the more affordable black pepper. It would be possible as well to investigate the opposition of literary evidence and physical evidence to find if pepper was as widespread as literary sources would have us believe.
At its core, our culinary research into pepper is aimed at understanding the flavors of ancient cuisine and, through this, Roman cultural preference for certain flavors—at least, you know, in those cases where they actually ate the pepper. But just as pepper can function as an index of cultural ideas about food, medicine, and interconnections, so too can the study of pepper serve as a framework for thinking about other goods, from food to textiles and even poetry too.
A study like Evan’s combines traditional philology and archaeology with twenty-first-century science, and it helps us understand how much we take for granted when it comes to evidence for the ancient world and how much we still have to learn. And, if all else fails, studying more about ancient spices can inspire us to try some new recipes or even make some different plans for a Saturday night….
Evan McDuff is a recent graduate from Brandeis University’s Ancient Greek and Roman Studies Master’s program. His research interests include Roman cuisine, zooarchaeology, and archaeobotany. His master’s thesis, “The Potentiality of Phytoliths in the Study of Roman Spices: An Investigation into the Nature of Phytoliths in Piper nigrum and Piper longum,” is his most recent work.
Joel Christensen is an associate professor and chair of Classical Studies at Brandeis University. He works on Homer and archaic Greek poetry and is part of the two-headed monster behind Sententiae Antiquae.
Other Articles In This Special:
A Grad Student’s Guide to Free Food
The Sustainable Stoic
Hippocrates Would Have Wanted You To Eat Cake
