Columella (c. 4–70 CE)
Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella was born in Cadiz in southern Spain to wealthy Roman parents, and grew up to become an authority on agriculture. He apparently spent much time in his youth with a favoured uncle, an expert farmer, in the Baetic province (more or less equivalent to Andalusia).
He left Spain at some time in his youth and pursued a military career and appears to have served in Syria. He spent much of his later life in the vicinity of Rome, and may have died at Tarentum (Taranto) in the heel of Italy, based on an inscription found there.30His main legacy is the twelve-volume work De Re Rustica, which has been completely preserved, and is a treatise on Roman agriculture. From the point of view of herbs and spices, our main interest is in Books X–XII. Book X, ‘On the Culture of Gardens’, is a dramatic contrast to the previous nine, which were prose texts describing practical aspects of agriculture, in that it was written in hexameters of verse in the style of Virgil giving praise to his (Columella’s) garden. His lyrical garden includes mandrake flowers, giant fennel, poppies, chervil, garlic, wild parsnip, capers, elecampane, mint, dill, rue, mustard, alexanders, onion, Lepidium, green parsley, marjoram, sweet cicely, cress, savory, pomegranate tree, coriander, fennel flowers, saffron flowers, sweet cassia, horehound, houseleek, buckthorn, butcher’s broom and purslane, in addition to numerous vegetables, fruits and vines.
Book XI deals with the duties of the farmer and calendar of work, and specifies when and how vegetables and herbs should be sown and planted within a garden. Book XII covers the tasks of the farmer’s wife and is valuable for a number of recipes, many of which include (mainly) locally available herbs and spices. This is an extremely useful record of Roman cuisine from the first century CE, much more prosaic than those of Apicius, and focused on pickling, preserving and wine-making.
Recipes include pickled herbs; oxygal (sour milk seasoned with herbs); lettuce pickled with dill, fennel, rue and leek; pickled purslane and garden samphire; dried figs mixed with parched sesame, Egyptian anise, fennel and cumin seeds; spiced wine using flower-de-luce, fenugreek and sweet rush with boiling of the must, also adding spikenard leaf, dates, costum, cyperus, sweet rush, myrrh, calamus, cassia, amomum, saffron and melilot; preserves for wine; horehound wine; squill wine and squill vinegar; wormwood, hyssop, fennel and pennyroyal wines; squeezed must using rosemary; myrtle wine; pickled elecampane; olives pickled with fennel seeds and mastic seeds; pickled black olives using aniseed, mastic and fennel seed, rue and parsley; a marmalade of olives using fenugreek, cumin, fennel seed and Egyptian aniseed; gleucine oil (made from oil and must) with calamus, sweet-smelling rush, cardamom, palm bark, Egyptian anise and others; prepared mustard; pickled alexanders and skirret roots; spicy salad with garum and vinegar.