SPICE FOR TRIMALCHIO

The Feast of Trimalchio

If Atticus feasts in style, he is considered very grand.
—JUVENAL,Satires

One course of a Roman meal would lay us very low, probably, and strip our palates for many days of even the crudest perceptions of flavor.
—M. F. K. FISHER,Serve It Forth

Familiar is not, however, how most modern readers have seen Apicius. In the last few centuries, his book has provoked more bafflement than admiration, particularly in the matter of spice. “Perhaps the craving for excessive flavouring is an olfactory delirium, a pathological case, as yet unfathomed like the excessive craving for liquor, and, being a problem for the medical fraternity, it is only of secondary importance to gastronomy”—such was the verdict of one of his nineteenth-century editors. And this opinion is fairly representative of the received wisdom on Roman food. Until very recently, the ancient Roman meal was generally considered on a par with other notoriously lurid displays served up for public consumption, along the lines of gladiatorial bloodbaths and public crucifixions: harsh and brutal, a subject more for revulsion than for emulation or serious study. Apicius’s cookbook in particular is regularly cited as proof of rampant excess in the kitchen, nowhere more than in the taste for overpowering, palate-stripping seasonings.

Well, maybe. But it is a confident judge who reaches a verdict on the cuisine of an entire civilization on the basis of one cookbook, and in fact there are good reasons to read Apicius with due caution. The physiology of the human palate has not evolved appreciably in the last two millennia, and it is likely that the Romans no more regularly seared their mouths with spices than we do. Nowhere does Apicius give quantities for his recipes, so we know that the end result was spicy, but we don’t know how spicy. Doubtless if a recipe for an Indian curry were transcribed in the same manner, it would provoke similar confusion among those for whom Indian food is as alien as Roman food is to us.

In any case, it is more than a little naive to read the text simply as a practical cookbook, since the nominal author of the book was himself a figure of some notoriety. According to a version of events circulating in the first century A.D., Apicius supposedly ate his way through a vast fortune before finding himself down to his last 10 million sesterces: still a healthy bank balance but not enough for this gourmand, who took poison rather than face life on a limited budget. To the satirist Juvenal (ca. A.D. 55– ca. 127) his name was mud. Christians were still more prejudiced: to the Church Father Tertullian (ca. A.D. 155– ca. 220) Apicius’s greed was legendary, contributing an adjective of his own for his trademark seasonings; to Apollinaris Sidonius (ca. 430– ca. 490), “Apician” was another word for “glutton.” The notoriously debauched and luxurious emperor Elagabalus (ruled A.D. 218–222) is recorded as having had a high regard for his works, a detail the author of The Augustan History slipped in as mutually revealing and damning. There was, in short, nothing neutral about Apicius; his name carried none of the comforting, homely associations of a Fannie Farmer or Delia Smith. In any case, the contents of the cookbook that bears his name were of practical interest to only a relatively narrow segment of Roman society. Most of the population of the empire lived at or not far above the subsistence level, and on the grounds of cost alone Apicius’s more celebrated recipes—boiled, spiced flamingo, for instance—were out of reach of the vast majority.

Which was, in all likelihood, precisely the point. For like flamingos, spices were an expensive taste. Only pepper was reasonably available to a sizable share of the population, and even pepper, as we have seen, carried an air of exclusivity. In his Natural History Pliny gives a list of spice prices that were probably fixed by the state. Black pepper was the cheapest at 4 denarii the pound, white pepper nearly double that at 7. A pound of ginger cost 6 denarii, the same quantity of cassia anything from 5 to 50. By far the most expensive were various grades of cinnamon oil, in mixed form ranging from 35 to 300 denarii the pound, in pure form a whopping 1,000 to 1,500. At this time a citizen soldier earned a wage of 225 denarii per annum, and a little later a free day laborer could earn about 2 denarii per diem. In the days of the early empire, a pound of black pepper, the cheapest and most available spice, would buy forty pounds of wheat, representing in the order of a few days’ wages for a member of the “working class.” A pound of the finest cinnamon oil would cost a centurion up to six years’ work.

They at least would not have been pouring on the spice with a heavy hand. And even for those with the money, there is plenty of evidence that Romans knew when their food was overspiced. The irony of the now traditional images of Roman food as an exercise in baroque excess is that they were in large part the product not of Rome’s enthusiasm for bingeing but of its reticence, the credit for which is due to Christian polemicists, who were virtually obliged to portray Rome as a vast, gluttonous sink; culinary history, like any other form of history, is written by the winners. But in fact a great deal of Roman writing on food is couched in the sort of language we might associate more with Zen minimalism than with a Lucullan banquet. In his eleventh satire Juvenal lays out the criteria of the morally blameless meal: modest, rustic, and homegrown, it will not break the bank. The service is simple and unaffected, without any indecent floor shows. A bracing reading of epic poetry is entertainment enough. One of the letters of Pliny the Younger reproaches his friend Septicius Clarus, who repeatedly scorned invitations to simple meals of lettuce, snails, and wheat cakes chez Pliny for the flashy delights of oysters, sow’s innards, sea urchins, and Spanish dancing girls (can we blame him?). In Pliny’s opinion the ideal meal should be “as elegant as it is frugal.”

In this respect Pliny was far from alone—particularly, it would seem, in respect of seasonings and spices. The comedies of Plautus (ca. 254–184 B.C.) and Terence (ca. 195– ca. 159 B.C.) are sprinkled through with references to seasonings (condimenta), one of their stock characters the boastful cook who can reel off all the exotic flavors at his disposal: Cilician saffron, Egyptian coriander, Ethiopian cumin, and, most tempting of all, silphium of Cyrene. This North African aromatic, ultimately harvested to extinction, turned Roman gourmets weak at the knees.* There was even a musical comedy on the topic. And when the seasonings were overdone, Romans were capable of expressing themselves with a forcefulness that makes even the most hostile restaurant review seem a model of restraint. In Plautus’s Pseudolus, first produced in 191 B.C., a pimp by the name of Ballio goes to hire a cook from the “Cooks’ Forum” (or “crooks’ forum,” as the tightfisted Ballio calls it). Through his preening chef, Plautus has fun at the expense of all the trendy cooks who employ all the latest spices and “celestial seasonings,” the names of which are pure fantasy: cepolendrum, maccidem, secaptidem, cicamalindrum, hapalocopide, cataractria. Some of these mock Greco-Latin pastiches sound vaguely menacing: secaptidem, for instance, sounds like something that cuts or slashes through you (from secare, to cut or sever), and the unappetizing cataractria evokes a waterfall, a portcullis, a sluice, or a type of seabird. For such mockery of novelty for novelty’s sake to get a laugh, the culinary scene must already have been reasonably diverse and sophisticated. (The inflated language of Plautus’s cook often comes to mind when I’m looking over the menu of a fashionable new restaurant.) Trying to justify his high fee, the cook declares of his rivals that “they don’t season with condiments, but with screech-owls, that devour the guests’ innards alive.”

Which is not, in so many words, the sort of language one would expect of a culture accustomed to drowning out its flavors with overpowering, palate-stripping seasonings. And in fact there is a perfectly reasonable explanation of Rome’s apparent addiction to spices, one that has more to do with the social than the strictly practical purpose of cookery. In Rome no more than in any other developed culture can one explain habits of cooking merely in terms of function, any more than other fashions such as dress or language can be accounted for in such narrowly utilitarian terms. Historically, people have eaten spices not simply because they taste good but also, and sometimes more importantly, because they look good. “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are,” wrote Brillat-Savarin. For most of their history spices spoke unequivocally of taste, distinction, and wealth.

For a wealthy Roman the dinner table (technically, the couch, the dining table being a medieval innovation) was one of the most effective stages on which he could display his sophistication and liberality. Public or semipublic events such as banquets offered the perfect opportunity for flaunting it (the cost and flamboyance of a dish were a proclamation of opulence and generosity). At his banquets the emperor Elagabalus mixed together jewels, apples, and flowers, tossing out as much food from the window as was served to his guests. He “loved to hear the prices of the food served at his table exaggerated, claiming it was an appetizer for the banquet.” He fed foie gras to his dogs, served truffles in place of pepper and ground pearls on the fish, and dished up gold-encrusted peas.

Elagabalus was an extreme and indeed a pathological case, yet his appetites exemplified an ingrained tendency of Roman society. Romans of a certain class generally took an uncomplicated attitude to the relationship between wealth and happiness, an ethos well summarized by Apuleius: “Truly blessed—doubly blessed!—are those that trample gems and jewelry underfoot.” A single adjective, beatus, sufficed for both wealth and happiness. To those inclined to agree, display at the table was nothing less than a social imperative. Only the poor or miserly patron stinted in his hospitality, at the expense of influence and regard, whether in his own eyes or those of the client’s. Juvenal’s fifth satire is addressed to the contemptible client who accepts second-rate hospitality and a miserly meal of fish bloated on Tiber sewage, “like some public buffoon.” Even the host’s satirically sentient lobster disdains such contemptible guests.

For those keen to avoid such a fate, whether a host out to impress or a client on the receiving end, spices were a godsend. They were expensive and exotic, not far behind the gems Elagabalus tossed from his window. Elagabalus himself perfumed his swimming pool with spices. They were the ideal accoutrements of the flashy gourmands who, in Juvenal’s words,

"scour air, sea and land for tasty morsels,
and cost is never an object; pry more closely, and you find
the more they spend, the greater their pleasure."

It was doubly impressive that spices were, in nutritional terms, superfluous: prime examples of what Lucan (A.D. 39–65) saw as “what luxury, frenzied by an inane love of display has sought out throughout the entire globe, unbidden by hunger.” The Romans certainly did not invent gastronomic snobbery, but they raised it to a high art. Athenaeus (ca. A.D. 200–?) dedicated a book to the subject, The Deipnosophists or Banquet of the Learned, a fifteen-book marathon of recherché commentary on matters gastronomic through the course of a nightlong banquet.

In social terms, then, the cost of spices was less a liability than an asset. They were, moreover, ideally suited for the equally ancient inclination to pretentiousness. One of the Satires of Horace (65–8 B.C.) mocks an absurdly affected banquet hosted by a certain Nasidienus Rufus, who waxes lyrical over the dinner he serves. For the appetizer there is wild boar “captured while a gentle south wind was blowing.” Pepper—the white variety is de rigueur— features in one of the main courses, a dish of lamprey served in a sauce of live shrimp, described by the host in language worthy of a modern gourmet magazine. His lamprey,

"he said, was caught while still pregnant; had it been taken later, the flesh would have been inferior. These are the ingredients of the sauce: extra-virgin olive oil from Venafrum; fish sauce from Spain; a five-year-old wine, but Italian-grown, and added during the cooking—if you add it after the cooking a Chian vintage suits best—white pepper, not without a little vinegar, made from fermented wines from Lesbos. I was the one who first pointed out that you should boil arugula and bitter elecampane in the sauce; whereas Curtillus prefers sea urchins, unwashed."

For Nasidienus it was apparently the sheer difficulty of obtaining ingredients that counted. Elagabalus refused to eat fish while at the coast, yet insisted on it when he found himself far inland. The emperor’s insistence on novelty could take a sadistic turn:

"By way of entertainment he used to propose to his guests that they should invent new sauces for seasoning the food, and he would offer a great prize to him whose sauce he liked, even giving him a silk robe, which was at that time regarded as a rarity and an honor. If, however, he disliked the sauce, he would order that its creator would have to keep eating it until he came up with a better one."

But it is a character from fiction that is most closely identified with the Roman penchant for culinary exuberance. The Cena Trimalchionis, or Trimalchio’s banquet, is a mid-first-century work by Petronius (?–ca. A.D. 66), bon vivant, courtier, and style consultant to the emperor Nero—a position that presumably left him well informed on the subject of lavish dinners. The action of the Cena revolves around a dinner laid on by Trimalchio, a fabulously wealthy parvenu who has made a pile from speculative voyages—exactly, as it happens, the milieu of the India trader. (Similarly engorged characters reappear many centuries later, in the time of the Dutch and English East India companies.) Trimalchio’s guests are treated, if this is the mot juste, to a banquet of toe-curling vulgarity. The meal is part theatrical stunt show, part gastronomic marathon. There is a daunting variety of courses, the only common element a stress on the exotic, the unexpected, and the bizarre. One guest tries the bear meat and “practically spews her guts out.”

Another, impressed, whispers to his neighbor that everything— even the pepper!—is homegrown (without a greenhouse, a botanical impossibility). If you want hen’s milk, Trimalchio can get it. He orders mushroom spawn from India and serves boar stuffed with live birds that fly out when the boar is cut open. There are dormice seasoned with honey and smoking sausages resting on a silver grill above “coals” of plums and pomegranates. A slave brings in a basket containing a wooden hen atop a pile of eggs, at which point Trimalchio wonders out loud if the eggs are half cooked. The narrator tries to crack an egg and finds it made of pastry. He is about to toss it aside, imagining that there is nothing but a half-formed embryo inside, when he fishes about within and pulls out a figpecker swimming in peppered egg yolk.

The spices, evidently, were in keeping with the flashy and expensive display. Another dish, borne in by four slaves, consists of heaped plump fowls topped with sows’ bellies. Perched at the apex is a hare to which wings are attached in imitation of Pegasus, the winged steed of myth—the effect not unlike a broiler hen trussed up as Superman. Live fishes flop about this pile of flesh in a slew of peppered wine sauce. The spicy sauce is little better than the bear meat, but then a display of taste was never the host’s intention.

Thanks in no small measure to the brilliance of Petronius’s creation, the lurid hues of Trimalchio’s debauch continue to shape modern images of the Roman meal. But as Trimalchio’s unfortunate guest is at pains to point out, to many Romans this was all a bit much. A powerful purist aesthetic ran through Roman culture, indeed was basic to a cherished if increasingly tarnished self-image until the final days of the empire. Viewed in this light, not merely spices but for that matter all seasonings were superfluous, luxurious, and even harmful fripperies. The correct purpose of food was nutrition; all else was vanity. Cicero (106–43 B.C.) was of the opinion that the best spice for his dinner was—or should be—hunger. He even claimed that he preferred the smell of earth to that of saffron. In his Tusculan Disputations he relates the salutary tale of the visit to Sparta of Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, a town famous in antiquity for the quality and sophistication of its cooks. Spartan food was equally stereotypical, but to the other extreme. This was, in short, an encounter made to order for edification: the archetypal rich sybarite meets the dour ascetics, famed for their renunciation of all pleasure. On being served a stodgy black broth, Dionysius complained that the meal was not to his taste, whereupon the Spartan cook put the visitor in his place. “Small wonder,” replied the cook, “for the condimenta are lacking.” “And what condimenta are they?” asked the visitor, obligingly walking into the trap. “Honest toil in hunting, sweat, a run to the Eurotas [the local stream], hunger, and thirst” was the tart response, “for with these things the Spartans season their feasts.”

Self-evidently, the message of such exemplary incidents ran deeper than a straightforward declaration of personal preferences. To Romans such as Cicero, how and what you ate were issues of the utmost ethical importance. Diet was a yardstick of, and in some sense shaped, moral worth. It was Brillat-Savarin’s point inverted: you were what you ate. And what a shocking contrast present indulgence formed with the rugged heroes of the past! Historians and satirists never tired of contrasting contemporary debauch with ancient virtue. Manius Curius Dentatus, conqueror of Pyrrhus, is reported to have cooked his own vegetables. The emperor Augustus, according to Suetonius, liked his dinner plain and unaffected; the Stoic Cato declared that he ate meat only so as to be strong enough to fight for the state. The past was tough, frugal, and pristine; the present, luxurious and bloated.

In this sorry tale of decline, the cook naturally deserved special mention. The historian Livy (59 B.C.–A.D. 17) went so far as to date the onset of Roman decadence to the time when the cook rose above his station: “And it was then that the cook, who had formerly the status of the lowest kind of slave, first acquired prestige, and what had once been servitude came to be thought of as an art.” There were even sumptuary laws passed in an effort to regulate the culture of excess. Julius Caesar (ca. 100–44 B.C.) once ordered brigades of food police to the market to look for forbidden delicacies and sent his soldiers into private homes to check whether the state’s edicts were being violated at the banqueting couch.

That spices and luxuries fell foul of this vision of Rome’s character and its past was all but inevitable. Like the pearls that came back in the holds of the same India ships (another favorite target of the moralists), when it came to foreign contamination spices stuck out like a sore thumb. The satirist Persius (A.D. 34–62) was honoring an old tradition when he blamed “learned Greeks” for corrupting even that most homely, Catonian symbol of Roman authenticity, a farmhand’s porridge, with their highfalutin ideas, greasy sauces, dates, and pepper. In Dryden’s splendid translation:

"We never knew this vain Expence, before
Th’ effeminated Grecians brought it o’re:
Now Toys and Trifles from their Athens come;
And Dates and Pepper have unsinnew’d Rome."

Thus it was that spices entered a discourse of decadence and decline: piquant symbols of corruption and degeneracy, the flavors of a lascivious Eastern Other. And if any confirmation of the truth of the assertion were required, one needed only to look to the rough vigor of the barbarians, who were, at least for edifying, literary purposes, not the type to flavor their meals with expensive and luxurious seasonings. Before leading her troops on the slaughter of the effete Roman colonists of Britain, the Briton queen Boadicea reminded her troops of their superiority, drawing particular attention to the culinary divide. Dainty eaters made weak fighters. In the account of the historian Dio Cassius (ca. 150–235), “We ought not to term these Romans ‘men,’ who bathe in warm water, eat artificial dainties, drink unmixed wine, anoint themselves with myrrh, sleep on soft couches with young boys for bedfellows—boys past their prime—and are enslaved to a lyre player—a bad one!”

Charges such as these easily dovetailed with more material concerns. To a Roman moralist, the waste entailed by fine and expensive foodstuffs was not just that they were needless, but that the money flowed out to foreigners. The Romans had little they could trade in return for the Indians’ spice, with the exception of the empire’s coinage of near-pure gold and silver—the reason why today a number of Indian museums boast some excellent collections of Roman coins. To date some seven thousand gold and silver coins have been found in India, representing, presumably, a fraction of a much larger total. The high-quality denarii and aurei were so esteemed that some Indian rulers even went so far as to mint imitations of their own.

Yet Rome’s coins were as sorely missed in Rome as they were sought after in India. The consequence of the largely cash basis of the India trade was, to some, a disastrous outpouring of the empire’s finite currency reserves, provoking a debate about a national balance-of-payments crisis and marking the debut of an economic bogeyman that would survive and flourish into the age of mercantilism and beyond. In the days of the early empire, fretting over what the historian Tacitus called “spendthrift table luxuries” attained the significance of a question of national importance. In A.D. 22 the emperor Tiberius lectured the Senate that the habit of luxury and the appetite for Eastern exotica had provoked a hemorrhage of Rome’s money “to alien or hostile countries.” Buying imported goods was nothing less than “subversion of the state,” and few of his distinguished audience were blameless. (One and a half millennia later, the English would encounter the identical problem, finding no market for their heavy woolen goods in the sweltering tropics. Only in the age of industrialization was the flow of gold and silver from Europe into Asia reversed.) Pliny the Elder complained that India swallowed up the colossal sum of 50 million sesterces per annum—all for the sake of pepper and other “effeminate” Eastern fripperies. India and its luxuries were turning Rome into a city of wimps. Presumably the traders who made their fortune from India felt differently, but the moralists had a ready riposte for them as well. What better illustration of the lunacy of living for money and the stomach than the long and perilous journey to India? In Horace’s first Epistle the merchant trading out of India appears as an iconic figure, a symbol of the pursuit of profit taken to perverse extremes, regardless of the risks and the cost to one’s personal life: a character he elsewhere calls “a beggar amid wealth.” Like the corporate workaholics of the twenty-first century, the India merchant of the first epitomized the cost of soul-destroying materialism and overwork:

"You rush, a tireless merchant, to furthest India,
Fleeing poverty across the sea, through rocks and flames..."

Poverty is a lesser risk to the well-being of the soul than the rocks and flames Horace imagines in the Indian Ocean. The risks and costs of wealth outweigh the rewards. Horace, having none of it, will buck the world’s trend of getting and spending for the simple pleasures of Stoic became almost paradigmatic. In the early imperial period, pepper served as a convenient symbol for the satirists, much in the way that junk bonds came to epitomize the greed of the 1980s. Persius claims that only sheer greed (avaritia) could account for the appetite for pepper, driving a trader to take the newly arrived spice from the camel’s back without even giving the thirsty beast a drink. In Dryden’s translation:

"Nature is ever various in her Frame:
Each has a different Will; and few the same:
The greedy Merchants, led by lucre, run
To the parch’d Indies, and the rising Sun;
From thence hot Pepper, and rich Drugs they bear,
Bart’ring for Spices their Italian ware."

Persius’s fellow satirist Juvenal likewise saw in the spice trade all the risks and delusions of wealth. He claimed that a merchant with a cargo of pepper would cast off beneath an inky sky in the teeth of a tem-pest—“It’s only a summer storm!” he declares—and for his folly be pitched overboard and swallowed by the waves, still clutching his purse between his teeth as he gasps his last breath. Where we might see heroic endeavor, many Romans were more inclined to seephilosophy.

For those inclined to agree, India and its pepper greed and lunacy. To Pliny the Elder—who, being a former naval commander, might have been inclined to admire this sort of enterprise more than most—the voyage to India was no more than a grubby quest for loot, “and so India is brought near by a lust for gain.”

So it was that spices failed the moralists’ checklist of acceptability on all counts. They were expensive, enfeebling, Eastern, effeminizing. And as if this were not enough, they lacked any evident nutritional value, their sole apparent function being to stimulate the appetite into new excesses of gluttony. Pliny drew these themes together while affecting an air of lofty contempt for the taste for pepper then sweeping the empire. The spice never stuck to Romans’ ribs but merely tickled their palates:

"It is remarkable that its [pepper’s] use has come into such favor: for with some foods it is their sweetness that is appealing, others have an inviting appearance, but neither the berry nor the fruit of pepper has anything to recommend it. The sole pleasing quality is its pungency—and for the sake of this we go to India! Who was the first person who wanted to try it on his food, or who in his craving for an appetite was not content simply to go hungry?"

It must have been galling for Pliny that his fellow Romans apparently paid him little attention, yet his complaint would ring down the ages—enduring, in fact, until our own day. Modern historians are less prone to make the same connection between luxury and decline, yet much ink has been spilled on the question of Rome’s balance of payments with India, although it would seem that the surviving economic data are too fragmentary or too biased to reveal whether or to what extent the spice trade was in fact harmful to the Roman economy. In any case, the murky reality is arguably less important than the perception, which was crystalline. Even the equation of spicy Eastern luxury and Roman enfeeblement has rung some bells. E. H. Warmington, one of the authorities on Rome’s trade with India, worked himself into a flap in suggesting that “India with its manifold supplies of precious stones, perfumes and spices … contributed a very large proportion towards satisfying the luxurious inclinations of a Rome which had lost most of its ancient morality, and helped to increase certain tendencies which led to the downfall of the western Roman Empire.”

The merits of the case need not detain us. More interesting is the moralizing thrust, which forms one of the central themes of the history of spice from the days of imperial Rome practically to our own day. All of these themes would in due course resurface—often, ironically enough, in the form of Christian polemics directed at the decadent empire. As spices were sought after, so too were they seen as an insidious cancer eating away at Rome’s personal and public vigor. (How the eastern half of the empire, which survived until 1453, was any less dissolute or less addicted to Eastern luxury than the western half is unclear. With its access to the trans-Eurasian caravan routes, there were more, not fewer, spices in Byzantium.) In this view it was not the barbarians or even the lead pipes but all that spice that caused the fall of Rome.

By Jack Turner in "Spice - The History of a Temptation", Vintage Kooks (a division of Random House inc.), New York, 2004, excerpts chapter 2. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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