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Pepper and the Romans
Appears in
Published 2008
As founders of the world’s first empire, the Romans had sophisticated cosmopolitan tastes. Their appetite for pepper was insatiable and, with the expansion of the Roman Empire, they were responsible for its migration north through Europe.
Andrew Dalby writes, ‘It was for pepper, more than any other single product, that Roman gold and silver coins were exported to India’. The Romans treated it as currency, hoarding vast amounts in the treasury and in the horrea piperataria – a spice bazaar and storehouse in Rome’s most fashionable quarter. In the words of French historian Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat ‘pepper more than any other spice, being stronger and more abundant than the others, came to be seen as a symbol of power and virility, qualities reflected in its powerful and aggressive flavour’.