\"Pliny ’s Natural History and the Flavian Templum Pacis: Botanical Imperialism in First Century CE Rome\" in JWH (2009)

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Journal of World History, Vol. 20, No. 3© 2009 by University of Hawai‘i Press

Pliny’s Natural History and the Flavian Templum Pacis: Botanical Imperialism in

First-Century c.e. Rome*

elizabeth ann pollardSan Diego State University

During the Pax Romana of the fi rst century c.e., not only did the Roman Empire unite the Mediterranean basin, but that empire

was also part of a much broader network of exchange reaching far to the north into the Baltic region, to the south into the sub-Sahara, and to the east into India and beyond.1 The nature of this network at its largest scale has been a topic of much recent debate, stirred up in no small part by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s Corrupting Sea

* This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the May 2006 meeting of the University of California Multi-Campus Research Unit on World History. I offer thanks to the organizers of that gathering for focusing the sessions on ancient history, to the partici-pants for the lively discussion of and feedback on this paper, and, most importantly, to my colleagues Ross Dunn and David Christian for their support and guidance. Thanks are also due to Emily Pace for her help securing image permissions for this article. Finally, I would like to dedicate this work to the memory of R. E. A. Palmer, thanks to whom I fi rst encoun-tered the wonder and possibilities inherent in the study of Roman epigraphy, topography, and religion.

1 Much scholarship explores the links between Rome and the farthest reaches of the world as the Romans knew it: for trade between Rome and the East (especially India), see for example, E. H. Warmington, The Commerce between the Roman Empire and India, 2nd ed. (1928; New York: Octagon Books, 1974); M. P. Charlesworth, “Roman Trade with India: A Resurvey,” in Studies in Roman Economic and Social History in Honor of Allan Chester Johnson, ed. P. R. Coleman-Norton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 131–143; M. P. Charlesworth, Trade-Routes and Commerce of the Roman Empire, rev. ed. (1926; New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1970); M. Wheeler, Rome beyond the Imperial Frontiers (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955); J. I. Miller, The Spice Trade of the Roman Empire, 29 B.C. to A.D. 641 (London: Oxford University Press, 1969); M. G. Raschke, “New Studies in Roman Commerce with the East,” ANRW II.9.2 (1978): 604–1361; the various studies of pottery, coins, glass, and bronzes in V. Begley and R. D. de Puma, eds., Rome and

310 journal of world history, september 2009

and its deconstructionist challenge to the Braudelian paradigm.2 Sepa-rate from this Mediterranean discussion, Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas Hall have offered one model that could be helpful for thinking about the various kinds of exchange networks of which the Romans were a part, ranging from bulk goods networks moving heavy items such as rice, corn, and other commodities; political-military networks involving intermarriage, alliances, warfare, and treaties; prestige goods networks along which goods with high value and low weight move, such as money, jewelry, and spices; and information networks along which language, religion, and other symbolic technologies move.3 Bulk goods would have been comparatively too expensive to move along the long-distance trade routes.4 Political-military networks seem not to

India: The Ancient Sea Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); and most recently G. Parker, “Ex Oriente Luxuria: Indian Commodities and Roman Experience,” JESHO 45 (2002): 40–95; and G. Parker, The Making of Roman India (New York: Cam-bridge University Press, 2008). See also G. Parker and C. M. Sinopoli, eds., Ancient India in Its Wider World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), p. 2, for a brief review of other India-related scholarship. For Red Sea trade in particular, see S. E. Sidebotham, Roman Economic Policy in the Erythra Thalassa 30 B.C.–A.D. 217 (Leiden: Brill, 1986); L. Casson, The Periplus Maris Erythraei (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989); and G. Young, Rome’s Eastern Trade: International Commerce and Imperial Policy, 31 BC–AD 305 (New York: Routledge, 2001). For Hellenistic (i.e., pre-Roman) interaction between the Mediterranean world and India, see W. W. Tarn, The Greeks in Bactria and India, 3rd ed. (1938; Chicago: Ares Publishers, 1985), republished by F. L. Holt with an updated bibliog-raphy. To expand the lens even wider, to include interactions between Rome and China, see for example, F. Hirth, China and the Roman Orient (1885; repr., New York: Paragon Book Reprint Corp., 1966); F. Teggart, Rome and China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1939); and J. Ferguson, “China and Rome,” ANRW II.9.2 (1978): 581– 603. The Stan-ford Ancient Chinese and Mediterranean Empires Comparative History Project (ACME) is a recent attempt to draw comparisons between imperial Rome and China (http://www.stanford.edu/~scheidel/acme.htm).

2 P. Horden and N. Purcell, The Corrupting Sea (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000). N. Purcell, “The Boundless Sea of Unlikeness? On Defi ning the Mediterranean,” Mediter-ranean Historical Review 18 (2003): 25 n. 2, lists no fewer than twelve critical reviews of their book to which he responds. W. V. Harris, ed., Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) includes essays inspired by, and in response to, Horden and Purcell, not to mention “Four Years of Corruption,” pp. 348–375, a defense by Horden and Purcell of their own work. Other recent edited collections on the Mediterranean include D. Abulafi a, ed., The Mediterranean in History (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003); and I. Malkin, ed., Mediterranean Paradigms and Classical Antiquity (New York: Routledge, 2005), which reprises in book form Mediterranean Historical Review 18 (2003). At the time this article was under-going fi nal revisions, the much anticipated second volume of Horden and Purcell’s project, Liquid Continent, was not yet released.

3 C. Chase-Dunn and T. D. Hall, Rise and Demise (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 52–55.

4 H. J. Loane, Industry and Commerce of the City of Rome (50 BC–200 AD) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1938; New York: Arno Press, 1979), pp. 14–28, for a dis-cussion of the movement within the Mediterranean region of the products derived from grain, grapes, and olives. G. Woolf, “Imperialism, Empire and the Integration of the Roman

Pollard: Pliny’s Natural History and the Flavian Templum Pacis 311

have developed to any signifi cant degree, despite occasional claims on either end of the network that ambassadors were received—for exam-ple, Augustus’s claims to have received ambassadors from India, and China’s claims to have received embassies from Rome.5 There is still much work to be done on information networks between Rome and the East and their rate of “fall-off ” (the diminishing of their impact across space),6 exploring for example the movement, or lack thereof, of religious ideas east and west.7 Roman exchange with India and China, however, was primarily a prestige goods network,8 moving spices, gem-stones, and silks. Discovering what happens with those prestige goods in Rome offers an excellent snapshot of this network of exchange and how Romans living at the heart of the empire may have tried to make sense of that exchange and the wider world it represented.

Pliny’s wide-ranging Natural History, written in the 70s c.e., is a particularly useful source for tracking the various goods exchanged and

Economy,” World Archaeology 23 (1992): 283–293, studies amphora types to demonstrate Mediterranean-wide distribution of nonluxury products such as wine and olive oil. This Mediterranean-based exchange, as wide-reaching as it may have been (G. Woolf, “World-Systems Analysis and the Roman Empire,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 3 [1990]: 52), was on a smaller geographic scale than that between Rome and India.

5 Res Gestae 31 for Augustus’s receiving of ambassadors from India; see Sidebotham, Roman Economic Policy, pp. 129–130; and Wheeler, Rome beyond the Imperial Frontiers, pp. 134–135, for further discussion of these embassies. Charlesworth, Trade-Routes and Com-merce, pp. 108–109, 262, for Chinese imperial sources describing Parthian obstruction of Roman embassies to, and overland trade with, China and for the successful embassy from Marcus Aurelius to China. See also Richard Foltz, Religions of the Silk Road (New York: St. Martins Press, 1999), pp. 23–87, for discussion of Buddhism, Nestorianism, and Man-ichaeism on the Silk Roads.

6 For the concept of “fall-off,” see Chase-Dunn and Hall, Rise and Demise, pp. 17–18, 53–55.

7 Particularly intriguing questions to be pursued further include the spread of Chris-tianity to the East, especially given the traditions of Thomas in India, and why Buddhism appears not to have spread to the West. On Thomas in India and the settlement of Jews in India after 70 c.e., see Charlesworth, “Roman Trade with India,” pp. 132–133. On holiness and wisdom in Greco-Roman ideas about India, see Parker, Making of Roman India, pp. 251–307.

8 Woolf, “World-Systems Analysis,” pp. 51–52, reviews the debate on whether or not the luxury items exchanged in a prestige goods network are essential. Sidebotham, Roman Economic Policy, p. 45, argues that the plants and plant products from the East were so cen-tral to “basic religious, funerary, culinary, and medicinal requirements of ancient life” that such items were necessities and not luxuries. He posits further that “luxuries do not require price regulation [as we will see with spices in Vespasian’s reign], necessities of life often do.” Woolf, “World-Systems Analysis,” p. 55, also argues that while luxury items primarily for ostentatious display are not essential, “goods invested with religious mana, perhaps by use in ceremonies, may be less easy to replace.” Pepper and other spices acquired primarily through long-distance trade with the East were used as incense in religious ceremonies and would fall into this category. Regardless, spices were low mass and high price items, making them prestige goods for the purpose of this study.


the networks along which that exchange took place.9 Natural History demonstrates Pliny’s attempts to make sense of the world as the Romans knew it, mapping Rome’s relationship with this wider world both liter-ally and fi guratively. His cataloging of animals, plants, and minerals as well as foreign lands and peoples offers insight into the places and ideas that fi rst-century Romans were encountering and how they tried to claim, integrate, and make sense of them. While Pliny was writing, the fi rst Flavian emperor, Vespasian, was attempting to reestablish peace and reassert control over an empire recently fraught with civil war, provincial revolt, and economic crisis.

A broader conceptualizing of what Pliny was doing with his Natural History sheds light on a curiosity in the city of Rome: an odd, previously poorly explained feature near the Roman Forum, namely the gardens in Vespasian’s Templum Pacis (or Temple of Peace). Until now, these gardens have been identifi ed only by their representation (as chains of rectangles in the layout of the Templum Pacis) on a map of the city made around 200 c.e. Scholars have offered only vague assertions about what these gardens might have contained or why they were included in Vespasian’s Templum Pacis. This article argues that the gardens in the Flavian Templum Pacis are best understood as colonial botanical gardens, populated with exotic fl ora of the type cataloged by Pliny, and that those gardens, along with the spice market (Horrea Piperataria) located next to the Templum Pacis on the Sacred Way at the center of Rome, were monumental statements of imperial power over the world as the Romans knew it.

In order to construct this argument, each building block must be examined in turn. First, Pliny and the scope of his work will be intro-duced. Next, a discussion of Vespasian’s Templum Pacis will lay the foundation for answering the questions at hand: what was planted in its gardens, why, and with what signifi cance. Then, Roman gardening in general and comparative parallels for colonial botany will be used to interpret the evidence from Pliny for the contents of the Templum Pacis gardens. Finally, discussion of fi rst-century c.e. trade with the East and the spice market that Vespasian built next door to the Templum Pacis will show that botanical gardens were not the only attempt by the Fla-vians to control Rome’s role in this exchange network and the products fl owing into Rome as a result of that contact.

9 Other sources for Rome’s trade with the East include Isidore of Charax’s Parthian Stations (early imperial period), Strabo’s Geography (early fi rst century c.e.), Ptolemy’s Geog-raphy (second century c.e.) and the Periplus Maris Erythraei, a fi rst-century c.e. merchant’s guide for sailing and trading on the route from the Red Sea to the southern tip of India.


Pliny and His NATURAL HISTORY

The preface to Pliny’s Natural History puts a date of 77 c.e. on the text.10 At the height of his career, Pliny was a friend of Vespasian and of Titus, with whom he had served in mid fi rst-century Julio-Claudian military campaigns against the Germans. Ever the curious recorder of natural phenomena, it was Pliny’s curiosity that resulted in his death when on 24 August 79 c.e., he sailed too close to the eruption of Vesuvius and died from poisonous fumes.11 Arguments about Pliny abound in the scholarship, ranging from the course of his career, the rhetoric and larger themes of the text, his use of sources, and his skill as a botanist to the use of his work by sixteenth-century humanists.12 Regardless of how much Pliny drew from other authors in the compilation of his Natural History or how obsessed humanists became with the manuscript tradi-tions of Pliny, the work is clearly the product of extended contact with

10 Pliny HN Preface 3 refers to Titus as six-times a consul, a detail which fi rmly dates the text’s dedication to 77 c.e.

11 Pliny the Younger (Ep. 3.5 and 6.20), Pliny’s nephew, gives useful information about his uncle, including a list of his lost works such as De Iaculatione Equestri, Bella Germaniae, and a history A Fine Aufi di Bassi, as well as a recounting of his death. For debate over Pliny’s death in the eruption of Vesuvius, see M. Beagon, Roman Nature: The Thought of Pliny the Elder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 1 and n. 1.

12 The 1980s was a good decade for Pliny scholarship, including several conferences on Pliny, notably those at Nantes and at London, both of which resulted in published volumes, Helmantica 37–38 and Science in the Early Roman Empire, respectively (A. Wallace-Hadrill, “Pliny the Elder and Man’s Unnatural History,” Greece and Rome 37, no. 1 [1990]: 82). On Pliny’s career, R. Syme, “Pliny the Procurator,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 73 (1969): 201–236; for the rhetoric and larger themes, see Wallace-Hadrill, “Pliny the Elder” (on Pliny’s Roman valuing and divinizing of Nature as opposed to the unnaturalness of the Greek ideals of luxury), Beagon, Roman Nature (which takes a holistic, rather than the usual cherry-picking, approach to the text), and P. Sinclair, “Rhetoric of Writing and Reading in the Preface to Pliny’s Naturalis Historia,” in Flavian Rome: Culture, Image, Text, ed. A. J. Boyle and W. J. Dominik (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 277–300 (which explores how Pliny employs the rhetoric of gender, class, and national difference); on Pliny’s method, use of sources and skill, or lack thereof, as a botanist (an argument usually based on Pliny’s use of Theophrastus and the other herbalists on whose work he draws), see J. André, “Pline l’Ancien Botaniste,” REL 33 (1955): 297–318; J. Stannard, “Pliny and Roman Botany,” Isis 56, no. 4 (1965): 420 – 425; A. Locher, “The Structure of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History,” in Science in the Early Roman Empire: Pliny the Elder, His Sources and Infl uence, ed. R. French and F. Greenaway (London: Croon Helm, 1986), pp. 20 –29; T. Murphy, “Pliny’s Naturalis Historia: The Prodigal Text,” in Boyle and Dominik, Flavian Rome, pp. 301–322; and for his popularity among humanists, see C. G. Nauert, “Humanists, Scientists, and Pliny: Changing Approaches to a Classical Author,” AHR 84, no. 1 (1979): 72–85. See also G. Serbat, “Pline l’Ancien. Etat présent des études sur sa vie, son oevre et son infl uence,” ANRW II.32.4 (1986): 2069–2200, for an exhaustive bibliography of Pliny scholarship, arranged by topic and by chapter in the Natural History.


an Afro-Eurasian network of exchange and fi rmly places Rome within a broad Indo-Mediterranean world system.

A quick review of the contents of the Natural History gives a sense of its scope. At the beginning of his Natural History, Pliny summarizes in almost index form the later contents of the corpus, promising to describe, among other topics, the sites, peoples, towns, harbors, moun-tains, rivers, dimensions, and present and past populations of Sarma-tia, Scythia, the islands of the Black Sea, North Sea islands, peoples toward the Scythian Ocean, Caspian Gates, Caspian and Hyrcanian Seas, regions toward the Eastern Sea, China, India (both along the Ganges and the Indus), Aryans and adjoining races, and voyages to India. That Pliny provides such an index, complete with a list of his sources for each topic, suggests that he intended this work not to be read straight through, but to be used as a reference.13 Elsewhere in his Natural History, Pliny describes various types of animals from elephants and lions to camels and unnamed land animals of India and Ethiopia. He discusses trees, herbs, fl owers, and the drugs derived from them.14 Given the length and thoroughness of the text, there can be no doubt that Pliny spent most of Vespasian’s reign and before (69–79 c.e.) com-piling the work.15 As Pliny was constructing this masterpiece, another major undertaking was underway at Rome.

The Flavian TEMPLUM PACIS

Construction of the Templum Pacis began in 71 c.e., close on the heels of the destruction of Jerusalem at the conclusion of the Jewish War and just a few years after Vespasian secured imperial power following the

13 Pliny HN Preface 33 explains that the fi rst book is intended as an index, to keep the reader from having to read the whole work. Sinclair, “Rhetoric of Writing and Reading,” p. 290 describes this indexing as “an important advancement in book technology.” Interest-ingly, Pliny’s Natural History was published at about the same time that the codex began to come into use, popularized especially among Christians and compilers of letters. For the shift in book technology from papyrus roll to codex in the late fi rst through the fourth centuries c.e., see the classic treatment by Roberts, revised in C. H. Roberts and T. C. Skeat, Birth of the Codex (London: British Academy, 1983).

14 The later books discuss botany (12–19), botany in medicine (10 –27), zoology in medicine (28–32), and metals and stones including artistic, architectural, and medicinal uses (33–37).

15 Pliny must have completed quite a bit of work on his Natural History before the 70s, when during Pliny’s service as Spanish procurator, the imperial governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, Larcius Licinius, attempted to purchase from Pliny, for the substantial sum of 400,000 sestercii, Pliny’s research notebooks for the Natural History (Murphy, “Pliny’s Naturalis Historia,” pp. 303–308).


year of civil war that came with the demise of Nero, the last Julio-Clau-dian emperor.16 The temple was truly at the heart of Roman power, being located fewer than one hundred meters from the Roman Sen-ate house, just northeast of the Roman Forum and just across a major thoroughfare from the imperial Forum Iulium, with its temple to Venus Genetrix, and the Forum Augusti, with its temple to Mars Ultor (Fig. 1). Temples in imperial fora had symbolic and propagandistic value for the emperors who built them. For Julius Caesar, a temple to Venus Genetrix underscored his devotion and connection to a goddess whom

Figure 1. Plan of Imperial Fora, including the Forum Iulium (with a temple to Venus Genetrix), the Forum Augusti (with a temple to Mars Ultor), and the Templum Pacis built by Vespasian (from M. Cary and H. H. Scullard, A History of Rome, 1975, Macmillan Publishers; reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan). The Forum Traiani is a later construction. The main Roman Forum is located just to the southwest of the Templum Pacis, past the Curia (Senate House) via the Argiletum.

16 S. B. Platner and T. Ashby, A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome, rev. ed. (1929; London, 1965), pp. 386 –387, offers a full list of the classical references to the Templum Pacis, noting various elements of its construction and treasures displayed there, including Suet. Vesp. 9 and Dom. 5; Josephus BJ 7.5.7; Cassius Dio 65.15.1 and 72.24; Aurelius Victor Caes. 9.7; Martial 1.2.8; Statius Silv. 4.3.17; Gellius 5.21.9 for the library; Pliny 12.94, 34.84, 35.102, 109, 36.27, 58, Pausanius 6.9.3, and Juvenal 9.23. Several later Roman historians remark on the magnifi cence of the building (Herodian 1.14.2 and Ammianus Marcellinus 16.10.14). There is some debate about what it means that the structure is called aedes (Vic-tor), neos (Procopius), temenos, opera Pacis (Pliny), and only later writers refer to the whole area as a “forum” (e.g., Ammianus Marcellinus).


he claimed as the founder of his family. For Augustus, a temple to Mars Ultor commemorated the vengeance he settled against the assassins of Julius Caesar. Vespasian’s Templum Pacis, therefore, would have con-veyed a message central to the claims he wanted to make about his reign.17 An investigation into what was inside this temple helps to decode that message.

Vespasian’s Templum Pacis included a library and was a showplace for the treasures of Vespasian’s conquest of Judea as well as other famous pieces of artwork.18 The destruction of Vespasian’s temple only one century later was a portentious event, according to later historians. In the list of portents foretelling the death of Commodus, the early third-century c.e. historian Cassius Dio includes, along with hooting owls and screaming eagles, the dramatic burning of this Templum Pacis.19 The Templum was rebuilt shortly thereafter, and the Severan marble map of Rome (also known as the Forma Urbis Romae) was included in the reconstruction.20 It is from that very same Severan marble plan of Rome that we know something of the layout and contents of this structure.

The Severan marble map, on which a diagram of the Templum Pacis layout is preserved, itself was eighteen by thirteen meters in size and was created during the reign of Septimius Severus in the fi rst years of

17 See R. H. Darwall-Smith, Emperors and Architecture: A Study of Flavian Rome (Col-lection Latomus 231, 1996), and J. E. Packer, “Plurima et Amplissima Opera: Parsing Flavian Rome,” in Boyle and Dominik, Flavian Rome, pp. 167–198, for discussions of the Flavian building program as a whole. Even if, as Darwall-Smith suggests, Vespasian did not intend his Templum Pacis to be a part of the existing imperial fora scheme, the propagandistic value of Vespasian’s combination of Pax and the gardens within his temple needs to be explained.

18 Comments by Josephus and Pliny about various pieces of artwork housed in the Tem-plum Pacis have led scholars to interpret the building primarily as an art museum (Darwall-Smith, Emperors and Architecture, pp. 58–61). Such an identifi cation does not adequately account for the garden beds to be discussed in this article.

19 Cassius Dio 72.24.20 The Forma Urbis Romae was found in sixteenth-century excavations. It had been

incorporated into the back wall of the Church of Cosmas and Damian. Drawings were made and housed at Vatican libraries. A few authoritative publications on the plan include H. Jordan, Forma Urbis Romae Regionum XIII (Berlin, 1874); G. Carettoni, A. Colini, L. Cozza, and G. Gatti, La Pianta Marmorea di Roma Antica (1955; repr., 1961); E. M. Steinby, ed., Lexicon Topigraphicum Urbis Romae (1993–2000); and most recently the Stanford Digi-tal Forma Urbis Romae Project (http://formaurbis.stanford.edu), which includes advanced digital imaging, discussion of the 1,186 slabs, and a searchable database. L. Taub, “The His-torical Function of the ‘Forma Urbis Romae,’” Imago Mundi 45 (1993): 17, argues that the Severan plan was a marble remaking of a painted plan that had been a part of the original Vespasianic structure, but suggests only generally that such a map would “inspire in viewers further admiration of the achievements of Vespasian.”


the third century c.e. It mapped out the entire city of Rome, showing everything from temples and theaters to the columns, rooms, and stair-cases that made up these structures.21 Although no more than 15 per-cent of the map survives, as luck would have it, a few fragments show parts of the Templum Pacis (Fig. 2). The map and excavations of the temple suggest that the entire structure was 110 by 135 meters.22 The temple enclosure was entered from the Argiletum, a street renowned for its shopping, which extended northward out of the Forum and con-

Figure 2. Fragments of the Severan marble plan showing the Templum Pacis proper (15a) and the open area of the templum enclosure with garden beds (15b and 15c) (FU 5920, from Fototeca Unione, American Academy in Rome).

21 Welcome Page, Stanford Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project (2002–2003), accessed May 2006.

22 See A. M. Colini for identifi cation of this structure. Detailed discussion of the Tem-plum Pacis can be found at LTUR IV.67–70, Stanford Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project; L. Richardson, A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Platner and Ashby, Topographical Dictionary, pp. 386–388; and E. Nash, Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Rome (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1961), 1:439 –445.


nected the Forum with the Subura, a crowded housing district. The Templum Pacis was enclosed by walls, and within those walls was a col-onnade with roughly twenty columns to a side. At the far end of the enclosure was the actual temple structure. In front of the temple was an open-air altar. Since there were not many temples to Peace in the Roman world, this structure cannot be compared to others, nor is the exact nature of the cult clear.23

On either side of the altar, the Severan marble plan depicts three lines of connected rectangles, which extend nearly the full length of the interior. Some have suggested that these may have represented pools of water.24 Robert Lloyd’s argument that these are garden beds, however, has gained general acceptance among scholars,25 but Lloyd could not determine what would have been planted in them. The beds would have measured fi ve meters in width and twelve or twenty meters in length.26 This makes for six strips of garden beds, longer than eighty meters each (when connectors between beds are also included). Nearly 40 percent of the area within the porticoed enclosure was devoted to these gardens, either as beds proper or the narrow walk-ing paths between beds (Fig. 3).27 As with other sacred enclosures, the

23 J. C. Anderson, “Domitian, the Argiletum and the Temple of Peace,” AJA 86, no. 1 (1982): 105.

24 Ibid., p. 105.25 Colini, writing before Lloyd, similarly thought of the structures in the Templum Pacis

as gardens but did not elaborate on the suggestion. Scholars since Lloyd have accepted his interpretation, but not added much to it (L. Farrar, Ancient Roman Gardens [Glouces-tershire: Sutton Publishing, 1998], p. 184 and Darwall-Smith, Emperors and Architecture, p. 58). Recent excavations have reportedly uncovered the structural remains of some of these fl owerbeds (Packer, “Plurima et Amplissima Opera,” p. 171 n. 31), but there has been no extensive publication of the planters to date. Capitolium.org, the website for the cur-rent excavations of the Roman Forum, reported a fi nd of a drainage pipe in the excava-tions of the Templum Pacis, which would support the garden bed hypothesis (Fori Imperiali, www.capitolium.org/eng/fori/news/index.htm, accessed December 2008). Farrar classifi ed the gardens of the Templum Pacis as among the fi ve public portico gardens at Rome, includ-ing also the Porticus Pompeii, Porticus Liviae, the Divus Claudius, and the Adonea.

26 R. B. Lloyd, “Three Monumental Gardens on the Marble Plan,” AJA 86, no. 1 (1982): 91.

27 There were 1,800 square meters of garden beds in a space measuring 14,850 square meters, meaning that the beds themselves made up roughly 12 percent of the internal space of the entire Templum Pacis area. The amount of space devoted to garden beds is even more signifi cant—almost 40 percent—if you count only the area of the porticoed enclosure (11,000 square meters) and recognize that two separate areas measuring 25 by 85 meters (4,250 square meters) were devoted to the gardens, counting beds, connectors, and walk-ways in between beds. Lloyd recounts how some modern reconstructions of the Templum Pacis have shown these as twenty-four separate beds or hedges of large trees, which these cannot be, according to Lloyd, because trees are represented with drill holes on the plan (ibid., p. 92).


gardens must have been as intentional and integral to the structure as the formal temple itself, with its statue of Pax, in order to have been included on the plan—especially given that such a large proportion of the area was devoted to the gardens.28 For example, efforts to explain the Adonea at Rome, a garden sacred to Adonis, take into account the role of trees and gardens in explaining the ritual function of the sacred enclosure.29 What would have been planted in such a garden to make it vital to the layout, meaning, and ritual of a temple of Peace? In

Figure 3. Line drawing of the Templum Pacis, with scale (FU 10327, from Fototeca Unione, American Academy in Rome). Note the proportion of the interior courtyard devoted to the garden beds.

28 J. W. Stamper, The Architecture of Roman Temples (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 158, following Vitruvius 5.9.5–6 on the value of gardens in civic spaces, has suggested that the functional purpose of such gardens would be “for providing space to walk in the open air, freshened and cleared by the vegetation, a space good for the eyes and lungs,” and also that the planters would have created an axis for heightening the perspective of viewing the temple.

29 Lloyd, “Three Monumental Gardens,” pp. 95–100. In addition to the gardens in the Templum Pacis, Lloyd discusses the gardens of the Claudianum and the Adonea, also marked on the Severan marble plan. It is not just these gardens, as discussed by Lloyd, that demon-strate the importance of plants in Roman religion. Plants and vegetal imagery were a central aspect of Roman cult, including, for instance, a farmer’s care before thinning a grove of trees


commenting on the fl ower beds, which he compares to the fl ower gar-dens of Pompeian houses, Lloyd postulates that “it was clearly upon the abundance of peace rather than the recollections of war, that Vespasian chose to concentrate.” 30 Evidence from Pliny and parallels with later colonial botany, to be discussed presently, suggest otherwise. War and conquest, more specifi cally the tangible fruits of it, were at the heart of this Temple of Peace.

Roman Gardens, Imperial Botany, and Pliny

To make the case that the gardens in the Templum Pacis were imperial botanical gardens rather than merely an aesthetically appealing peace-ful garden built as a refuge for a war-weary emperor, and that Pliny was writing about them in his Natural History, this section briefl y discusses Roman gardening in general, comparative examples of colonial botany, and the writing of natural history from other periods. Then, with the ground prepared by those examples, Pliny’s own discussions of plants will be studied for their colonial botanical elements and their link to the Templum Pacis and what it symbolizes for the Flavian emperors.

Gardening in the Villa and in the City

Some background on Roman gardens in general helps to set the scene for discussing the gardens in the Templum Pacis. Contemporary Romans were fond of transplanting fl ora from across the empire to gardens on the Italic peninsula. Roman gardens included citrus fruit from the Far East, cherry trees from the Pontic region of Asia Minor, peaches from Syria, and pomegranates from North Africa.31 Wilhelmina Jashemski’s monu-

to propitiate the proper numina that inhabited his property (see e.g., Cato, On Agriculture, pp. 139–140), the bountiful harvest imagery on the Altar of Peace built at Rome by the Senate to honor Augustus, and the cornucopia-laden statues of the goddess Fortuna / Tyche throughout the empire. See also Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, p. 414, for a Mediter-ranean-wide overview of “woodland religion.”

30 Lloyd, “Three Monumental Gardens,” p. 93. Lloyd looks to parallels from Pompeii, especially a painting from the House of Lucretius Fronto, as evidence for fl ower bed planting in porticoed enclosures.

31 J. P. Bowe, Gardens of the Roman World (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2004), pp. 48–49. Bowe also notes that the Romans followed in the pattern of Assyrians and Egyptians before them, “importing garden plants from the many countries they interacted with through conquest or trade” (p. 43). See Bowe, p. 8 for the range of sources available for Roman gardening, ranging from Cato’s De Re Rustica and other treatises by Varro, Colu-mella, and Palladius, to archaeobotanical evidence, to pictorial evidence of frescoes like those at Pompeii.


mental study of gardens at Pompeii includes pollen analyses of gardens that were sealed by the eruption of Vesuvius, making them coeval with the gardens of the Templum Pacis. At Pompeii, the vast majority of plants, both those shown on wall paintings and those for which there are paleobotanical remains, are indigenous to Europe. Some plants at Pompeii, however, such as the pomegranate, date palm, opium poppy, and almond, must have been transplanted from elsewhere.32

Apart from private gardens attached to villas in the Italian coun-tryside, like those at Pompeii, in Rome alone there were more than sixty named horti, or gardens, although not much is known of what was planted in them.33 These gardens are known from inscriptions, literary references, and the Severan marble plan. Some of the largest and more well known are the Horti Agrippae (in the Campus Martius), the Horti Luculliani (on Pincian Hill, also called the Horti Asiatici after Valerius Asiaticus), and the Horti Sallustiani (in the northern part of the city). Each of these famous gardens was created and fi lled as a result of the fruits of military conquest, by, respectively, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa (the military right-hand man of Augustus after the civil war, especially in Gaul and Spain), L. Licinius Lucullus in the East, and Sallust in North Africa.

The villa gardens at Pompeii demonstrate that the Romans were willing and able to grow nonindigenous plants on Roman soil, and the city gardens show that conquerors often built gardens to celebrate their conquests. Juxtaposing this gardening tendency in villas and city gar-dens against the context of Pliny’s Artistotelian impulse to defi ne and categorize plants as Rome increased her encounters with the rest of the known world yields an intriguing question. Could the gardens at the Templum Pacis have been colonial botanical gardens, with plantings from across the known and, indeed, as Vespasian might claim, con-quered world?

Comparative Parallels and Imperialism by Plant

Comparative parallels from other historical contexts are suggestive of what might be going on with Pliny’s Natural History and in the Templum

32 W. F. Jashemski, The Gardens of Pompeii, Volume II: Appendices (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1993), appendix III and various tables throughout vol. 2. The Getty Villa in Malibu, California, includes a beautiful reconstruction of what such a garden might have looked like.

33 Richardson, New Topographical Dictionary, pp. 195–204. Cassius Dio records that Vespasian enjoyed spending time and entertaining guests at the Horti Sallustiani more so than at the imperial palace (65.10.4).


Pacis gardens—namely a kind of colonial botany or botanical imperial-ism.34 Examples from fi fteenth-century b.c.e. Egypt, medieval Islamic areas, and later Spain, Italy, France, and England all suggest that natu-ral history, the collecting of specimens from throughout empire, and botanical gardens go hand in hand with a sort of “scientifi c politics” that has economic and ideological power.35

This scientifi c politics has a long history, as shown on the fi fteenth-century b.c.e. relief from Hatshepsut’s funerary temple at Deir el-Bahri, which depicts trade between Egypt and Punt. On the relief, Egyptians load myrrh trees onto their ships in order to plant them in the tem-ple at Deir el-Bahri, the idea being that the plants will fl ourish under Hatshepsut’s care and produce the desired myrrh. The text of the relief

34 “Colonial botany” and “economic botany” are formal, loaded terms for early modern and world historians; see P. De Vos, “Natural History and the Pursuit of Empire,” JWH 17 (2006): 400–406, for a detailed discussion, with notes, of colonial and economic botany and the related historiography. By colonial botany in its Roman context, I mean the process by which this imperial power collected and transported plants for study (i.e., the natural historical impulse), although the economic components often associated with this term are of a different scale and character at Rome than is usual in later historical periods. In more modern treatments, separating natural history from economic repercussion is diffi cult; see, for example, D. R. Headrick, “Botany, Chemistry, and Tropical Development,” JWH 7 (1996): 1–20, for a review of botanical gardens, plant stations, and experiment stations, as well as an argument about the deleterious impact on tropical countries of the twentieth-cen-tury shift from colonial botany to chemical synthetics. By botanical imperialism, I refer to the ideological and practical constructs and claims of cultural hegemony and military power that develop out of that transplantation and study, which I will discuss further in this article with respect to Flavian Rome. These terms are related to, but not to be confused with, “eco-nomic botany” and “ecological imperialism.” “Economic botany” is that process by which plant knowledge is gathered and manipulated in such a way as to facilitate plant-based industry. L. H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New York: Academic Press, 1979), and De Vos, “Natural History and the Pursuit of Empire,” lay out this process by which the British and Spanish empires, respectively, exploited their knowledge of plants to great scientifi c, economic, and political benefi t. This article will not argue that Roman colonial botany, or botanical imperialism, rose to the level of economic botany per se, although I will ultimately discuss the economic elements of Roman botanical interest in India and its limits. “Ecological imperialism,” popularized by A. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900 –1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), and to some extent earlier with respect to germs by W. H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor / Doubleday, 1976), suggests that European animals, plants, and diseases (not technology) made possible their conquest of the Americas by making them into “Neo-Europes.” Ecological imperialism, along the lines of Crosby and McNeill, is not the focus of this argument.

35 P. H. Smith and P. Findlen, Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2002); D. P. Miller and P. H. Reill, Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary, eds., Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), contribute to the wider discussion of the relationship between imperialism and natural historical impulse. I thank my colleague Paula De Vos for directing me toward this body of scholarship.


proclaims, “Enduring trees bearing fresh myrrh [are] united in the fes-tival hall to be seen in the land of the gods.” 36 The representation of the transplanted trees in the temple shows them growing strong and tall. Another example comes from a tenth-century c.e. historian who recounts the unwillingness of an emir’s sister to travel from Syria to Spain, on the grounds that she is too old to travel such a distance.37 The sister sends pomegranates instead, which, although they die on the trip, are seeded and replanted to create a new Andalusian vari-ety. D. F. Ruggles notes that “such exchanges in which the fl ora of one landscape was encouraged to adapt and survive in a new environment precisely mirrors the process of human cultural adaptation,” 38 and, with Hatshepsut’s case, we might add, the transplantation delivers a political and religious message as well.

The success at transplanting trees, and all that conveys, is not the only germane issue; also important is the power relationship suggested by botanical transplantation and writing about it, namely the composi-tion of natural history. The itemizing, claiming, and transplantation of exotic species could have dramatic, power-shifting economic and polit-ical consequences. Some examples from later periods illustrate this. In the 1570s, Philip II of Spain funded eighteen volumes by Francisco Hernandez on the natural history of Mexico,39 laying the groundwork for exploration and exploitation of these relatively new-to-Europe lands. In the seventeenth century, a Jesuit priest named Giovanni Ferrari, horticultural specialist to the powerful Barberini family, began to grow exotic plants in Rome and in 1633 wrote De Florum Cultura, which included fl owers from the New World, attempting to establish a taxonomy of the new plants coming into the city.40 Louis XIV of France kept a botanical garden into which he transplanted an Arabian coffee tree. The seedlings of that tree, when transplanted by Europeans to the Americas, would sprout coffee-growing in Latin America.41 A

36 R. O. Steuer, “Stacte in Egyptian Antiquity,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 63, no. 4 (1943): 281.

37 D. F. Ruggles, Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain (Univer-sity Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 2000), p. 17, 226 nn. 7 and 9, offers this story of ‘Abd al-Rahman I and his sister, reported in the historians Al-Khushani and later in Al-Maqqari.

38 Ibid., p. 17.39 D. Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, his Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern

Natural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 60–61.40 Ibid., pp. 38–40. Freedberg’s book is an intriguing and well illustrated discussion of

the culture of collecting and its meaning among seventeenth-century Italians.41 K. Pomeranz and S. Topik, The World That Trade Created (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E.

Sharpe, 1999), pp. 86–89.


more recent example of economic impact of colonial botany was the illicit transplantation of rubber-tree seeds from Brazil to Kew Gardens in London in the late nineteenth century.42 Once nurtured in Queen Victoria’s gardens, the rubber trees were transplanted again to British territory in Southeast Asia, thereby breaking the Brazilian monopoly on rubber.43 These select examples from Egypt, Spain, France, Italy, and England illustrate that the composition of natural history and herbals, the transplantation of indigenous plants to new lands, and the creation of botanical gardens go hand in hand with discovery and increased contact with new lands. Transplantation, natural history composition, and botanical gardening serve three purposes: an economic purpose, allowing for an understanding of the products on which enterprising folk might capitalize; an ideological purpose, suggesting that the fruits of all lands can be cultivated in the dominant center of power; and a panegyric purpose, praising the ruler whose power makes such discov-ery and contact possible.

The Evidence from Pliny

This colonial botany, or even botanical imperialism—in which trans-plantation, natural history writing, and botanical gardening play so central a part in the economy, ideology, and panegyric of a ruling power—fi ts well with Pliny’s composition of his Natural History for the Flavian family and the contemporary construction of the Flavian Tem-plum Pacis and its gardens.

Pliny never directly states that the gardens in the Templum Pacis were colonial botanical gardens nor does he explicitly state that all the plants he describes were planted in such a garden. Would that scholars and students of ancient history were so lucky as to have all the pieces of the puzzle that they are attempting to put together! Regardless, there is no reason to expect that Pliny would make so specifi c a comment, espe-cially since his patron, Titus, Vespasian’s heir, was the audience and would have known as much.44 There are, however, a number of com-ments by Pliny in his Natural History that make more sense if placed into the context of colonial botany and the Templum Pacis gardens.

42 On the role of Kew Gardens in “economic botany,” see Brockway, Science and Colo-nial Expansion.

43 Pomeranz and Topik, World That Trade Created, pp. 119–121.44 The preface to the Natural History offers evidence for Pliny’s relationship to Titus

(HN preface 4–6, 12, and 20).


One topic that becomes clearer in the colonial botanical context is Pliny’s frequent discussion of the transplantation of trees from else-where and various attempts to grow them on Italian soil.45 These dis-cussions take place in Book 12, in which Pliny lists a range of exotic plants and plant products, and how much one could expect to pay for them at Rome. The economic ramifi cations of the botanical experi-ments hence were central to the discussion of transplantation. Pliny describes the diffi culties of transplanting citron and even gives advice about how best to pack a plant cutting for transport.46 In describing the transplantation of cassia, a spice closely related to cinnamon, Pliny notes that the cassia grown in his part of the world had neither the same color nor the same scent as the original.47 He also recounts con-fusion over what the frankincense tree was supposed to look like, and mentions in the context of this discussion sprigs of the tree that have been brought to Rome by ambassadors from Arabia.48 In his long dis-cussion of pepper, one of the products most sought by Romans in their trade with India, Pliny reports that Italy had a type of pepper tree in his time, but it neither looked nor tasted the same as the original.49 Just these few examples of citron, cassia, frankincense, and pepper demon-strate that colonial botany, namely the transplantation of pricy luxury imports, was taking place whether the plants were ending up in the Templum Pacis or not.50

Pliny’s religious view of nature puts this colonial botany together with the ritual function of the Templum Pacis. Indeed, there was much

45 Columella, Pliny’s contemporary, discusses transplantation and its diffi culties in his De Re Rustica 3.8.4 and in De Arboribus 1.3 (Sidebotham, Roman Economic Policy, pp. 42–43). Indeed there seems to be a trend in writing about plants in the second half of the fi rst century. Apart from Columella’s two treatises and Pliny’s Natural History, the army physi-cian Dioscorides was also writing his materia medica about the plants he was encountering and their medical properties. That a Roman military doctor and a panegyricist of Flavian conquest were both writing about plants illustrates the connection between botany and imperialism in fi rst-century c.e. Rome.

46 Pliny HN 12.7.16.47 Pliny HN 12.43.98. Pliny seems to have fi gured out by external observation what

modern pharmacology proves, namely that the properties of transplanted botanicals change. J. Scarborough, “Roman Pharmacy and the Eastern Drug Trade,” Pharmacy in History 24 (1982): 137, discusses the change in the pharmacology of aloe when it is grown outside its native locale.

48 Pliny HN 12.31.57.49 Pliny HN 12.14.29.50 It is possible that the problem of growing plants in different environments is why,

just before he starts describing plants, Pliny goes into detail about the “parallels of the earth” where there are “shadows of equal length,” in which he describes which regions, from as far west as Britain to as far east as India, are in the same latitudinal zone (Pliny HN 6.39). The geographer Strabo also undertakes similar attempts to trace latitude (2.5.3-ff ).


ideological value to Pliny’s discussion of plants, in terms of both religious meaning and imperial power, more specifi cally the peace that Flavian power has brought. Pliny describes nature and peace in religious lan-guage in ways that are suggestive of a connection between botany and a religious devotion to nature and its relationship with peace. Other scholars have pointed to Pliny’s devotion to nature, although none has connected that devotion to the Templum Pacis. Mary Beagon, whose work on Pliny attempts to look at the whole of his Natural History to determine its underlying themes, argues that a central focus of Pliny’s writing was the divinity of nature.51 Andrew Wallace-Hadrill similarly argues that, for Pliny, describing nature was a form of worship.52 Given Pliny’s connections between nature and the divine, it fi ts within the scheme of his writing that the plants he described would be cultivated in a temple as a part of the worship there.

But there is more to it than just a general connection between nature and the divine. In terms of a connection between Pliny’s writings and temple offerings, in his dedicatory preface Pliny describes his own Natural History and refers to its trustworthiness and value, following up with a comment that “many things seem extremely valuable therefore, because they have been consecrated to temples.” The exact language of the last phrase is quia sunt templis dicata.53 Such language describing his own labor to complete an opus presented to Titus so soon after the dedication of the Templum Pacis suggests that Pliny meant his Natural History itself to be an offering to commemorate the temple’s comple-tion. Additionally, Pliny’s clear implication was that something about the book’s contents, in which the most prominent topic is botany, was connected to the Templum Pacis and its contents.

With respect to the Templum Pacis and what was kept in it, Jose-phus, a general of the Jewish forces conquered by the Flavian family just a few years prior to the temple’s completion, claimed in his Jew-ish War that at the conclusion of the confl ict with the Jews, “Vespa-sian decided to build a Temple to Peace . . . he had this temple adorned with drawings and statues; everything (panta) was gathered together and deposited in this temple, what things men would formerly wander all over

51 Beagon, Roman Nature, pp. 26–54 and passim. While she does discuss Pliny and gardening (pp. 79–91), Beagon limits her discussion to ordinary household gardens and does not mention the gardens of the Templum Pacis at all.

52 Wallace-Hadrill, “Pliny the Elder,” p. 83.53 Pliny HN Preface 19.


the inhabited world to see, when they had a desire to look at them one after another. . . .” 54 Josephus explicitly named pictures and statues as adornments in the Templum, but he referred also to “all things” (panta) now for the fi rst time assembled in one place. Although he did not say it outright, those additional things may well have been botanical in nature. Several comments from Pliny, including a prayer to nature and two botanical dedications by Vespasian, suggest that Josephus’s “all things” included plants.

At the beginning of the twenty-seventh book of his Natural History, a book that discusses exotic plants and the drugs derived from them, Pliny marvels at the abundance of nature and states that knowledge of plants was derived not only from man’s inspiration but also from the gods. He then lists plants from the farthest reaches north, south, east, and west. He launches into a prayer praising how plants were brought to Rome from Scythia in the northeast, from the Pillars of Hercules in the southwest, from Britannia in the northwest, and from Aethiopia in the southeast. In his prayer, he hopes that such importation will be eternal. He then writes that it was the peace brought by Roman power that made the gathering of such plants possible.55 One can hear in Pliny’s prayer an echo of the words that would accompany the sacri-fi ce of plants from the gardens in the Templum Pacis on the altar located in the center of that garden.

Is there any evidence of such offering of botanicals in the Templum Pacis? Two examples, cinnamon and balsam, are particularly telling. According to Pliny, Vespasian was the fi rst to dedicate garlands of cin-namon, a product from the East, interlaced with gold in the Templum Pacis.56 A second, less direct mention of plant offerings appears in his discussion of the balsam tree. Pliny reports that this tree had the fi nest scent and that until recently it had only grown in two gardens, both belonging to the king of Judea.57 Pliny states that the emperors Ves-pasian and Titus were the fi rst to show this tree to the city of Rome, although he did not specify where. Pliny further writes that since the time of Pompey the Great these trees were led in triumphal proces-

54 Josephus Jewish War 7.159–160. This quotation comes immediately after Josephus mentions the Roman triumphs celebrating the conquering of the Jewish people. Cassius Dio similarly juxtaposes the long siege of Jerusalem (Dio 65.1) with the dedication of the precinct of Peace in 75 c.e. (in the year of Vespasian’s sixth consulship, Dio 65.15).

55 Pliny HN 27.1.56 Pliny HN 12.42.93.57 Pliny HN 12.54.111–113 for the extended discussion of the balsam tree.


sion.58 Specifi cally, Pliny states, “this tree [the balsam, from Judea] now is a subject [of Rome] and offers tribute with its own race [meaning the recently conquered Jews].” According to Pliny, Roman soldiers saved the trees from extinction by burning at the hands of the Jews. Pliny then includes the strange note that “the treasury [ fi scus] now cultivates the plant;” although, Pliny continues, like other plants he had already described, it did not have the same properties once transplanted, only growing to a height of three feet on Roman soil. In the case of the cin-namon, the dedication in the temple of the exotic plant is explicit. In the case of balsam, the case is more circumstantial, with discussion of the tree being led in triumph over Judea (when we know from Josephus that the objects from that triumph ended up in the Templum Pacis), shown at Rome by Vespasian and Titus, and cultivated by Roman offi cials, but still quite suggestive, especially when the context of the temple’s dedication is brought into the picture.

The Templum Pacis and its forum were commissioned just after the crushing of the Jewish revolt (66–70 c.e.), complete with the burn-ing of the temple at Jerusalem and the circumvallation of Masada that concluded with the mass suicide of the rebels in the fortress as it was stormed by Titus and his troops. It is also important to remember the year of civil war that preceded Vespasian’s rise to imperial power. Both the civil war and the Judean War were brought to an end by Vespasian and his son Titus, that same Flavian family to whom Pliny dedicated his Natural History, with its seemingly endless catalogue of animal, veg-etable, and mineral from the world as he knew it. The list of botanicals in Pliny’s Natural History is a virtual triumph intended to celebrate the power of, and to offer panegyric to, the Flavian family and the peace they had won.59 Perhaps the image of the military leader who

58 One searches in vain for explicit mention of trees, balsam or otherwise, in Josephus’s description of the triumph at Rome to celebrate the Jewish War ( Jewish War 7.123–162). What Josephus does say, though, is that it would be impossible to enumerate everything led in triumph. He does refer generally to the share of riches and rareties of nature (7.132) that were led in the triumph, so it is possible that balsam could be included in that general category. That other depiction of Titus’s triumph, the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum, similarly does not include any trees, but this is not surprising since the reliefs on the arch focus on two other very important scenes, namely Titus in his chariot and a snapshot of the triumphal procession in which the menorah and other implements looted from the destroyed Jewish temple are displayed.

59 A sidenote on Flavian coinage adds to the bigger picture of the theme of Flavian peace. The Temple of Peace does not appear on Flavian coinage (H. Mattingly and E. A. Sydenham, Roman Imperial Coinage, vol. 2, Vespasian to Hadrian [London: Spink and Son, 1926], p. 5, and H. Mattingly, Coins of the Roman Empire in the British Museum, vol. 2, Vespa-sian to Domitian [1930; repr., London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1966], p. xxxvi), but


leaves war behind and settles into a life of peaceful gardens and fl owers has been too appealing for modern scholars to see this Templum Pacis and its gardens for what they really are: statements of domination and conquest.

It has already been noted that to a Roman religious mindset, gar-dens in a sacred precinct such as the Templum Pacis would have been connected in some way with the function of the precinct. Botanical gardens on either side of the altar in the forum of the Templum Pacis would have supplied the fi rst-fruits offering on that very altar, accom-panied by a prayer similar to that recited by Pliny in his Natural His-tory.60 Based on the evidence from Pliny, one could imagine offerings of cinnamon, balsam, and pepper, botanicals transplanted into the Tem-plum Pacis from Arabia, Judea, and India, respectively.61 Such an offer-ing would be symbolic of the literal fruits of empire, fruits on which the emperor himself was profi ting at his spice market located in the building next door.

Flavian HORREA PIPERATARIA

The foregoing examination of the economic, ideological, and panegy-ric value of colonial botany that this article argues is playing out in Pliny’s Natural History and the Templum Pacis gardens would be incom-plete without a discussion of another Flavian construction, the Horrea

Pax in various forms occurs quite frequently on coinage throughout the reign of Vespasian. On these coins Pax appears seated and standing, usually holding what is interpreted as an olive branch (see also Darwall-Smith, Emperors and Architechture, pp. 62–63 for a list of Pax coin types). While it might be tempting to link this Peace holding her olive branch to the idea that cuttings of plants from across the empire were ending up in her temple, such temptation must be resisted. It is worthwhile to keep in mind that sometimes an olive branch is just an olive branch. The prevalence of Pax on Flavian coinage could be due to the end of the civil war of 68–69 or to the quelling of the Jewish Revolt (although the latter was celebrated specifi cally with Judea Capta coins). Given that the Templum Pacis was the centerpiece of Vespasian’s forum, Pax on coinage could be a celebration of that templum. Since the temple may itself be a celebration of the end of civil war and /or the Jewish Revolt, however, this third option might amount to the same thing. Either way, the Pax being cel-ebrated on the coinage would allow for the trade that facilitates the foreign interaction that would bring such exotic botanical products to Rome.

60 Pliny HN 27.1–3.61 In a presentation at the University of California Multi-Campus Research Unit for

World History at the University of California, Riverside in May 2006, Willeke Wendrich, one of the excavators of the Roman Red Sea port at Berenike located on the trade route between Rome and India, described a fi nd of pepper pots located in the fl oor of the Temple of Serapis there. This fi nd offers a parallel for the use of pepper in religious-trading con-texts.


Piperataria (pepper warehouse),62 a spice market located adjacent to the Templum Pacis. These buildings, when taken together, suggest a Flavian imperial program of controlling and promoting access to exotic goods from the known world.63 While the Templum Pacis made religious ideo-logical claims to control over plant products from the known world, the Horrea Piperataria next door asserted direct economic control over their distribution.

The Horrea Piperataria was destroyed by fi re twice in less than a cen-tury and was later built over by the Basilica of Constantine, the ruins of which are still visible in Rome today.64 Horrea, or warehouses, at Rome were generally named after the family that owned them, hence horrea Sempronia, Postumiana, or Agrippiana.65 There are only a few attested warehouses that instead were named for the goods processed there. Two are the Horrea Candelaria, a wax market attested on the marble plan, and the Horrea Chartaria, a market for paper made from papyri. Helen Jefferson Loane has argued that these horrea distributed what she called tribute in kind, or taxes, from the Pontic region in the case of wax and,

62 The word piperataria derives from the Latin Piper, piperis. OLD defi nes piper as “fruit of the pepper-plant” and offers references from Vitruvius, Ovid, Persius, Horace, and Pliny.

63 Scholars argue over whether Vespasian built the horrea (H. J. Loane, “Vespasian’s Spice Market and Tribute in Kind,” Classical Philology 39, no. 1 [1944]: 10–21) or whether they were fi nished or built de novo by his son Domitian (e.g., Nash, Pictorial Dictionary, 1:485; Richardson, New Topographical Dictionary, pp. 194–195; and LTUR 3.45–46). Dis-cussion of the excavations of these horrea and their interpretation can be found in E. van Deman, “The Neronian Sacra Via,” AJA 27 (1923), and A. Minoprio, “A Restoration of the Basilica of Constantine, Rome,” PBSR 12 (1932): 23–24. According to Richardson, the complex, excavated in the early twentieth century and evidenced in part on the marble plan, consisted of “parallel courts, or naves, fl anked by chambers of uniform size and plan opening to them.” G. Rickman, Roman Granaries and Store Buildings (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1971), p. 106, notes the unusual water tanks found in the excava-tion of the building and suggests that these may well have been used to dampen the spices (esp. pepper) in order to make the air breathable. Describing the fi re that consumed this storehouse and the adjoining Templum Pacis, Dio 72.24 calls it a “storehouse of Egyptian and Arabian goods.” The fi re was clearly quite impressive, perhaps as a result of the spices in the storehouse and the botanical garden in the templum. The Severan marble plan (Slab VII-11, Stanford 17, known from a Renaissance drawing) includes what might be a separate horrea Vespasiani, located across the via sacra from the Horrea Piperataria (LTUR 3.49). The Horrea Piperataria may be seen on slab 15a, behind the templum proper.

64 Rickman, Roman Granaries, p. 106, argues that the horrea may have been quite large and that perhaps they were as large as the area later occupied by the Basilica. The two fi res took place in 191 under Commodus (Dio 72.24.1–2) and in 284 under Carinus; Nash, Pic-torial Dictionary, p. 485. See Chronographus AD 354 (Mommsen Chronica Minora 1892–98) I:146.

65 For discussion of the various family-named horrea, see Richardson, New Topographical Dictionary, pp. 192–195. Loane, “Vespasian’s Spice Market,” pp. 19–20: “most of the ware-houses belonged originally to prominent families and passed slowly through the processes of inheritance and confi scation into governmental control e.g. the Seiana, Lolliana, Volusi-ana, Petroniana, Faeniana, and Ummidiana.”


of course, from Egypt in the case of papyrus.66 Along these same lines, the Horrea Piperataria, the third warehouse in Rome named for a trade product, pepper, that was sold there, was likely used for emperor-con-trolled distribution of spices from the East.67

In the fi rst century c.e., Roman trade with the East was thriving, facilitated by the very peace that the Templum Pacis celebrated. The distribution of Roman pottery, bronzes, and coinage in India all point to this century as the height of the trade between Rome and India that brought spices such as pepper to Rome.68 Three routes linked Rome with India and the spice products that were marketed in the Horrea Piperataria: one route overland through Parthia (always complicated by tenuous Roman-Parthian relations), another through the Red Sea, and a third through the Persian Gulf (after a caravan across the des-ert).69 In his early imperial Parthian Stations, Isidore of Charax recorded the overland route from Antioch in Syria to the western borders of India.70 The Periplus Maris Erythraei, a fi rst-century c.e. handbook for merchants sailing the route from the Red Sea to the southern tip of India, informed merchants what could be bought and sold at each port along the way.71 This trade is recorded not only in Roman sources, such as Isidore, Pliny, and the Periplus, but also in contemporary Tamil poems from India describing Roman ships that arrived with gold and left with pepper.72 Philip Curtin has argued that there was something

66 For the wax market, see Loane, “Vespasian’s Spice Market,” p. 16 and for the paper market, pp. 15–16.

67 See also Rickman, Roman Granaries, p. 106 who suggests that the horrea would work well for storage and for “the convenient retailing of them in one place where adequate control would be exercised.”

68 K. W. Slane, “Observations on Mediterranean Amphoras and Tablewares found in India,” in Begley and de Puma, Rome and India, p. 212; Parker, “Ex Oriente Luxuria”; and Parker, Making of Roman India, pp. 147–202, for Roman-Indian commodities exchange.

69 Chinese silk trade falls outside the discussion of Rome’s imperial botany, but it is use-ful to note that two routes connected Rome with China: one overland through Parthia and another more northerly route that could avoid Parthia altogether. For further discussion of these routes, see P. D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 96.

70 A good text, translation, and commentary of Isidore’s work is Parthian Stations by Isidore of Charax, ed. Wilfred Schoff (Philadelphia: Commercial Museum, 1914).

71 Casson, Periplus Maris Erythraei, offers a critical Greek text and translation as well as thorough commentary on the Periplus. Sidebotham, Roman Economic Policy, uses the Periplus among other sources to determine what economic policy, if any, Rome developed for Red Sea trade.

72 See for example, Charlesworth, “Roman Trade with India,” p. 133; Wheeler, Rome beyond the Imperial Frontiers, pp. 132–133; Casson, Periplus Maris Erythraei, p. 296; and M. A. Selby, “Representations of the Foreign in Classical Tamil Literature,” in Ancient India in Its Wider World, ed. G. Parker and C. M. Sinopoli (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), pp. 79–90.


of a trade diaspora of Roman businessmen at strategic points along the route between Rome and modern Sri Lanka.73

There is indeed much intriguing evidence for a Roman presence along the west coast of India participating in this trade. A second-century c.e. papyrus from Greco-Roman Egypt, for example, records a shipping contract between an Egyptian shipper who made the India run (probably following the Periplus or something like it) and a Roman businessman at Muziris in India.74 The Peutinger Table, a Roman map dating to the third or fourth century c.e., even depicts a Templum Augusti near Muziris, yet more evidence of an entrenched Roman pres-ence in India.75 The several routes and the clear evidence that business-men were exploiting them suggest a large-scale prestige goods network. The peace celebrated by Vespasian with his Templum Pacis would have magnifi ed the scale of contact, made it easier to conduct this trade, and necessitated the regulation of it.

What kinds of products would have made their way back to Rome along these routes? From southeast Asia, spices such as cassia, myrrh, and frankincense were sent west. According to the Periplus, the botani-cal products that merchants could pick up in northwest India included costus, bdellium, lykion, nard, and long pepper. From southwest India, nard, malabathron, and black pepper were acquired for shipment west-ward.76 Pepper seems to have been in highest demand. In his Natural History, Pliny marveled at why people liked the taste of pepper, even wondering at who would have been the fi rst to try it, and concluding

73 Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade, pp. 96–101.74 L. Casson, “P.Vindob G 40822 and the Shipping of Goods from India,” BASP 23, no.

3–4 (1986): 76–79. Muziris recently made headlines because of new claims by archaeologists of having found the site of ancient Muziris in a small town named Pattanam on the south-west coast of India (BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/hi/south_asia/497042.stm, 11 June 2006).

75 Scholars often note that the Templum Augusti on this map suggests a Roman commu-nity in southern India and that it might have served as a sort of meeting place for Romans in southern India (e.g., Charlesworth, “Roman Trade with India,” p. 142). What is not pointed out is that this is the only Templum Augusti on the entire map and that it is the easternmost icon of its sort. The map is probably using such a temple to illustrate the extent of Roman imperial infl uence, especially since the only other similar item that far to the east shows the extent of Alexander’s route into India. K. Miller, Die Peutingerische Tafel (Stuttgart: F. A. Brickhaus Komm-Gesch., 1962), provides a reproduction of the map, and A. Levi and M. Levi, Itineraria Picta (Rome: L’Erma’ di Bretschneider, 1967) offers thorough discussion of the various symbols on the map, including a list of the forty-four temples on the map (pp. 221–222).

76 Periplus 39 and 49 for the trade goods available in northwest India; Periplus 56 for southwest India; Periplus 56 and 63 for northeast India. These are discussed thoroughly in Parker, “Ex Oriente Luxuria”; Parker, Making of Roman India, pp. 147–202; Casson, Periplus Maris Erythraei; Miller, Spice Trade, pp. 34–109; and Warmington, Commerce between the Roman Empire and India, pp. 226–228 for a list and pp. 180–234 for full discussion.


“yet it is for this that we import it all the way from India.” 77 Rome’s taste and desire for pepper was enduring, so much so that three thou-sand pounds of it were included among the terms by Alaric for lifting his siege of Rome in the early fi fth century c.e.78

What did the Indian spice suppliers want in exchange? It appears that what they desired above all was gold, arguably accepting Roman coin as bullion.79 Both the Periplus, which lists gold coinage as one of the desired imports at the Indian ports, and a number of impres-sive coin hoards found in excavations in India offer evidence that in the fi rst century c.e. Roman coinage was fl owing in large quantities to India.80 This drain of Roman coinage created the possibility of an eco-nomic crisis that needed to be dealt with at Rome, but also an ideologi-cal crisis that needed resolution. Rome had to deal with the problem that it had no export, apart from its money, that was desired as much by the people with whom it traded for substances, pepper especially, that they wanted so much and in such great quantities.

With respect to the economic problem, during his reign Vespasian sought to correct the fi scal consequences of Nero’s spendthrift reign

77 Pliny HN 12.14.78 Zosimus Nova Historia 5.41 (for the full episode, see 5.35–42), writing about one

hundred years after the event, states that the Visigothic leader Alaric demanded, along with the pepper, 5,000 pounds of gold, 30,000 pounds of silver, 4,000 silk tunics, and 3,000 scarlet-dyed fl eeces. The payment was raised by a levy from Roman citizens according to their means. Clearly the Romans passed their taste for Eastern goods on to their own con-querors.

79 Wheeler, Rome beyond the Imperial Frontiers, p. 140, for coinage as bullion, noting in particular a consistent mutilation of the coins (an incision on the head) that seems to have marked them as out-of-circulation. Coinage as bullion is a topic of debate (see Casson, Periplus Maris Erythraei, p. 209), but regardless it appears that Roman coinage was a desirable import in India. Charlesworth, “Roman Trade with India,” p. 137, underscores that “pottery, glass, wine, metals, silverware [and] human cargo [especially slaves]” came east on Roman ships. Warmington, Commerce between the Roman Empire and India, pp. 261–272, lists the few products that Rome had to offer the East, but comments on the relative “smallness” of the list, especially when examined in comparison with Roman imports. Roman Arretine pottery has been found in excavations at sites on the coast of India, but not in large enough amounts to suggest its importation as a trade good. Conversely, S. B. Deo, in “Roman Trade: Recent Archaeological Discoveries in Western India,” in Begley and de Puma, Rome and India, p. 43, argues that although “there is very little concrete archaeological evidence of Roman imports in western India . . . the extant objects should not be considered an accurate indicator of trade volume.” Deo rightly points out that much more extensive and systematic excavation of Indian ports would be needed to resolve the question of trade imbalance.

80 Periplus 49 for the market for Roman money. Casson, “P.Vindob G 40822,” pp. 17–18, for his agreement with the comments from Tacitus and Pliny that bemoan the cash drain to India. Begley and de Puma, Rome and India, p. 2, and Wheeler, Rome beyond the Imperial Frontiers, pp. 137–143, for location and temporal distribution of coin hoards in India. Deo, “Roman Trade,” p. 40, offers an updated list of coinage fi nds in India, concluding that the additional fi nds only further underscore Wheeler’s conclusions (n. 79, above) about the coins being used as bullion.


that had depleted imperial coffers.81 Evidence from Pliny has generated debate about whether or not there was a trade defi cit with the East.82 Pliny records that India, China, and Arabia took away a minimum of 100 million sesterces a year.83 At another point in his Natural History, Pliny writes that every year India alone exhausted fi fty million sesterces of the empire’s wealth.84 If the income of the empire is rated at 1.2 bil-lion sesterces,85 this would mean that 8 percent of the empire’s income went eastward, and half of that went to India alone. Although the one fi gure (1.2 billion) represents imperial income and the other (100 mil-lion) enumerates money spent not by the government directly but by merchants and consumers, putting these two numbers together offers a scale for comparing the exchange. An arguably high percentage of wealth was fl owing into just one trade outlet. Several scholars warn against uncritical acceptance of Pliny’s fi gures since they might indicate a “moralist strain.” 86 Loane, however, argues that, given Pliny’s close relationship with Vespasian, his concerns about the trade imbalance would have been a close refl ection of Vespasian’s concerns.87 Others argue that while the fl ow of coinage to India never became a crisis, there was a palpable danger that Rome could have run low on gold reserves.88

Regardless of whether or not the fl ow of Roman coinage into India was technically a trade defi cit or whether the coinage was paying for the goods or was passed over as a commodity, Vespasian’s business acumen would have made him aware of the economic threat of hard

81 T. Frank, An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome, vol. 5, Rome and Italy of the Empire (Paterson, N.J.: Pageant Books, 1959), p. 45 for the range of problems faced and solutions offered by Vespasian.

82 See for example, Loane, “Vespasian’s Spice Market,” pp. 11–12. See Parker, Making of Roman India, pp. 165–171, 183–189; Young, Rome’s Eastern Trade, p. 25; and Sidebotham, Roman Economic Policy, pp. 36–39, for a discussion of whether Pliny’s numbers should be seen as rhetorical fashioning or as a genuine trade defi cit.

83 Pliny HN 12.41.84; “take away” is a translation from Pliny’s adimunt.84 Pliny HN 6.26.101. Pliny continues that the Indian goods are sold at one hundred

times their original cost. Frank, Economic Survey of Ancient Rome, p. 51, noted that the demand for gold described by Pliny would have required much prospecting for sources of ore during Vespasian’s reign.

85 Frank, Economic Survey of Ancient Rome, p. 53, for a range of 1.2–1.5 billion sesterces as the annual income of the empire under Vespasian’s concerted attempts to raise money.

86 Charlesworth, “Roman Trade with India,” p. 137, for “moralist strain”; Sidebotham, Roman Economic Policy, p. 38, also warns about over-interpreting Pliny’s numbers, but accepts that coinage may have been fl owing into India as bullion (though Sidebotham sees this as just another commodity).

87 Loane, Industry and Commerce, p. 138.88 Miller, Spice Trade, p. 230.


currency loss in exchange for ephemeral products (spices digested as condiments, burned as incense, or worn as perfume).89 He would also have recognized the business opportunity and revenue potential that the control of access to spices would produce. One way of controlling the importation was the long-established 25 percent tax that was lev-ied on goods entering the empire at the Red Sea port of Leuke Kome.90 Another way to control the cost of the spices would have been to man-age, or at least oversee, the prices for the sale of eastern goods at Rome. That Pliny was able to cite prices for the various eastern spices for sale at Rome suggests that their sale was regulated to some extent.91 The most likely place for such regulation would have been Vespasian’s Hor-rea Piperataria.92

That the same emperor who built the Templum Pacis, with what this article has argued are botanical gardens, also built the Horrea Pipera-taria, and built both in such close proximity to one another at the heart of Roman symbolic, political, and commercial power was surely sig-nifi cant. While the spice market would have enabled direct economic control over Roman contact with the East, the Templum Pacis, with botanical gardens, would have made more of an ideological impact. The gardens in the Templum Pacis would not have been large enough to supply the spice market next door; however, they would have provided a symbolic religious framework for Romans to make sense of their reli-ance on these luxury items from India—a framework that preserved their own sense of world dominance. Gardens would show that these rareties could be grown on Roman soil and that it was Flavian-deliv-

89 For Vespasian’s ties to business, see Frank, Economic Survey of Ancient Rome, pp. 44–45, and Loane, “Vespasian’s Spice Market,” p. 11: “His grandfather had been an auctioneer’s assistant, his father a tax-farmer . . . and he himself had overcome the poverty from an hon-est governorship by trading in mules” (drawing from Suet. Vesp. 1 and 4).

90 Periplus 19.91 Pliny HN 12 passim for prices of imported spices at Rome. Frank, Economic Survey of

Ancient Rome, pp. 285–286, offers a convenient list of spices and their price as cited by Pliny. Diocletian’s Price Edict from 301 c.e. lists the maximum prices one could charge. These can be compared to Pliny’s prices to demonstrate the infl ation that occurred in just over two hundred years. Some examples: Pliny cites the cost of ginger at 6 denarii per pound, the Price Edict lists 250 denarii for a pound of dry ginger (50 for prepared ginger) (32.80–81); Pliny prices bdellium at 3 denarii per pound, the Price Edict at 100 denarii per pound (32.39); and Pliny’s prices for frankincense range from 3 to 5 denarii per pound, whereas the Price Edict caps the price of the best frankincense at 100 denarii per pound (32.42). Sadly, pepper prices, which are listed in Pliny (4–15 denarii per pound, depending on the variety, black, white, and long pepper), are not preserved in the Price Edict.

92 Galen had his offi ce in Rome at the Horrea Piperataria in the second century c.e. Loane, “Vespasian’s Spice Market,” p. 21, notes that by Galen’s time “imperial procurators were shipping rare drugs and spices directly to the horrea from all corners of the Empire.”


ered peace that made the importation of these goods possible. By con-trolling botanicals and their products at the heart of Roman power, Vespasian was both practically and ideologically controlling Rome’s access to and understanding of these exotic goods.

Conclusion

This article has discussed two Flavian structures at the heart of Rome, the Templum Pacis and the Horrea Piperataria, and what they, when combined with Pliny’s Natural History and notions of colonial botany and a kind of botanical imperialism, suggest about Roman interactions with the East in the second half of the fi rst century c.e. Based on this evidence, we are left with several possible conclusions, ranging from the minimalist and safe to the maximalist and daring. The maximal-ist and daring interpretation, which this article has set forth, would be that Pliny wrote his Natural History as a dedicatory offering to the completion of the Templum Pacis, categorizing the botanical gardens therein or at the least the fl ora and fauna that Rome was encounter-ing as a result of the Flavian peace. This interpretation is suggested by comparative parallels of later colonial botanical gardens and natural historical projects and supported by evidence, both direct and indirect, from Pliny. The minimalist interpretation would be that Pliny wrote his Natural History as a part of a Flavian discourse of Roman ideological and economic imperialism of which the Templum Pacis, gardens or no, and the Horrea Piperataria were also a part. Either way, both extremes of interpretation encourage thinking of Rome not only as a Mediter-ranean power but also as a part of a larger world system.

Such a change in perspective, from Mediterranean focus to broader Indo-Mediterranean lens, encouraged by world historical thinking, can offer insight into the picture of the Roman economy. Many have chal-lenged the traditional picture of the Roman economy, “masterminded by A. H. M. Jones and Sir Moses Finley . . . [which] stresses the cellular self-suffi ciency,” at various levels from farm to region, of an agriculture-based economy in which “the scale of inter-regional trade was very small.” 93 The Finley/Jones model allows for the long-distance trade of

93 K. Hopkins, introduction to Trade in the Ancient Economy, ed. P. Garnsey, K. Hop-kins, and C. R. Whittaker (London: Hogarth Press, 1983), p. xi. Woolf, “World-Systems Analysis,” pp. 52–53, reviews challenges to the Finley/ Jones model; also, Horden and Pur-cell, Corrupting Sea, pp. 143–152, for a critique of the Finley/ Jones model.


luxury goods, but sees such commerce as a “side-issue compared with land-owning.” 94 If, however, India really were a sinkhole for Roman coin owing to Romans’ insatiable desire for spices such as pepper, and if Vespasian did set up a storehouse for control over access to and cost of foreign spices, these are just two more reminders that the total pic-ture of the Roman economy must expand, going beyond the cellular model and examining more closely the interregional interaction not just within the Mediterranean basin or with the immediate neighbor, Parthia, but also reaching to India and beyond.

Greg Woolf has incorporated world history models, in particular Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems model, in order to challenge existing views of the Roman economy, interregional trade, and the process of Romanization. Woolf explores the extent to which Rome was a “world empire” and how Rome might fi t into a “world economy,” but he does not fully resolve the question of “whether the archaeologi-cal traces of long-distance exchange are to be interpreted in terms of a pre-modern world economy, or as characteristic of a world-empire.” 95 In another article, dealing primarily with Roman Gaul, Woolf adds to the debate about Romanization /exploitation of the periphery by the center and argues that the relationship is a dialectic that runs both ways,96 but more scholarship is needed to push the debate still further, to look at how Rome dealt with territory beyond the periphery. This present discussion of botanical imperialism in the Templum Pacis and Horrea Piperataria is a start to answering the challenge left by Woolf, offering fodder for the discussion and reason to expand the scope of the question to include India. Such a broadened scope, beyond cellular agriculture and beyond center-periphery, encourages differing views on the Roman economic crisis of the third century c.e. or the transre-gional economic ramifi cations of Rome’s “fall” in late antiquity.

Most world-systems and global analyses deal with capitalist societ-ies after 1500 c.e., but pushing these models earlier allows us to ask new “why not” and “what if ” questions of the Roman evidence. Most are familiar with the world historical question that wonders why China did not experience an industrial revolution centuries before similar circum-stances generated that revolution in Western Europe. Similar questions can be explored for Rome. For instance, nineteenth-century England’s

94 Hopkins, introduction to Trade in the Ancient Economy, p. xii.95 Woolf, “World-Systems Analysis,” p. 52.96 G. Woolf, “Beyond Romans and Natives,” World Archaeology 28 (1997): 339–350.


dependence on tea from China is not dissimilar to Rome’s dependence on pepper. Both imperial powers were losing huge amounts of currency to the East, since they had no desirable goods to offer in exchange. England, of course, discovered that opium grown in their colonies in India would provide them with the product they needed to correct the trade imbalance.97 Although the Periplus does offer a guide for what goods could be picked up in one area and taken further along to Indian ports, why was Rome unwilling, unable, or not savvy enough to develop a product that could be grown in Roman territory and then cultivate a taste for that product that could then be exploited in eastern markets? Eighteenth-century Portuguese sugar farming in Brazil spurs another question. The Portuguese exploited Brazilian territory, conquered and defended by Portuguese soldiers and worked by African slaves, to grow the sugar which their home economy demanded but their homeland could not grow.98 Given the strength of the Roman military at the height of imperialism and the slave-based economy, why did Rome not use its military to carve out foreign territory favorable for growing the spices that the home market demanded and then work that territory with slaves transported there for that purpose? Perhaps that was the goal of Aelius Gallus’s unsuccessful military expedition into Southern Arabia, with 80 warships, 130 transport vessels, and 10,000 troops, in the late fi rst century b.c.e.? 99 Such questions are made possible only by taking a comparative and transregional world historical approach to the Roman economy.100 Broad questions and implications aside, the Templum Pacis and the spice market at the heart of Roman power were, along with Pliny’s Natural History, imperial attempts to control and process the ever expanding world of which Rome was a part, giving to the forum a place in the Mediterranean, and to the Mediterranean a place in the world as Pliny and the Flavians knew it.

97 Pomeranz and Topik, World That Trade Created, p. 86.98 Ibid., p. 117.99 Sidebotham, Roman Economic Policy, pp. 120–130 for a thorough treatment of this

expedition. He disagrees with scholars who have suggested that the goal of this expedition was to monopolize control of the Rome-India transit trade (p. 121 n. 36 for scholars arguing that it was an attempt to control the route).

100 For additional arguments on the value of looking beyond the Mediterranean, see P. Horden and N. Purcell, “The Mediterranean and ‘the New Thalassology,’” AHR 111 (2006): 740.

\"Pliny ’s Natural History and the Flavian Templum Pacis: Botanical Imperialism in First Century CE Rome\" in JWH (2009)

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