THE PEAR IN ANCIENT ROME
Italy, by common consent, is the garden of the world, and it would be strange if the pear had not been taken to this favored land with the earliest tillers of orchards, or if attempts had not been made to domesticate the wild pears found in the northern mountains. And so we may assume, with no very definite proofs, that the pear was cultivated in ancient Rome some hundreds of years before the Christian era. In Cato, the first book written in Latin on agriculture, the pear is discussed, and six varieties are named and described. What had this illustrious Roman, known generally as a statesman and scholar, to do with pomology?
Marcus Portius Cato (B.C. 235-150), called the elder Cato, besides serving Rome in state and army, wrote a treatise on farming, fruit-growing, and gardening, which, first of its kind in Latin literature, may be read with greater profit than the works of most writers of our own day in agriculture. Cato was preeminently the first agricultural philosopher, and no one who has followed him has packed more shrewd agricultural philosophy in a book than he. But it is as a pomologist that Cato concerns us most at this time. Cato describes almost every method of propagating, grafting, caring for, and keeping fruits known to twentieth-century fruit-growers. He describes, also, many varieties of fruits, as well as of vegetables, grains, and breeds of farm animals. Among Cato’s fruits are six varieties of pears. What is of especial interest in this history is that Cato writes as if the practices of agriculture and the plants and animals he described were not only established but ancient in his time.
Varro, whose standing as a Roman writer on agriculture is noted above, says nothing of varieties of pears, but gives directions for grafting pear-trees, among other methods that of inarching of which he seems the first ancient writer to take note, thereby justifying, in small degree, it is true, the appellation often given him, “the most modern of all the ancients.” Varro also tells how pears should be stored. While, therefore, he says nothing that helps in following the evolution of the pear, yet his accounts of grafting and storing make plain the fact that this fruit was a standard product of the times. Were it worth while, still other early Roman treatises on husbandry might be quoted to establish the place of the pear in the agriculture of ancient Rome, but it is chiefly in the evolution of the fruit we are concerned and so pass from Varro to Pliny, who, in his Natural History, adds to Cato’s six varieties thirty-five new sorts, giving a total of forty-one for the generation following Christ.
Pliny, more or less discredited as a scientist because he was a compiler and, as the men of science for science sake never forget to point out, at all times of a utilitarian bent of mind, makes a most important contribution to the history of the pear as a domesticated fruit. Indefatigable compiler as he was, few cultivated pears of his or more ancient times could have escaped his notice, and the thread of the utilitarian running through his Natural History makes all the more important what he has to say in this study of the domestication and improvement of the pear. A good authority says that there are sixty manuscript copies of Pliny and eighty different editions, no two of which are exactly alike. Allowing some latitude, therefore, to the translator, Pliny’s descriptions of pears run as follows:
“For the same reason (as in the case of apples) in the case of pears the name Superba (proud) is given; these are small, but earliest ripe. The Crustumia are most pleasant to all; next to these the Falerna, so called from the wine, since they have such abundance of sap or milk, as it is called; among these are those which others call Syrian from their dark color. Of the rest, some are called by one name in one place and by another in another. Some by their Roman names reveal their discoverers, as the Decimiana, and what they call the Pseudo-Decimiana, derived from that; the Dolabelliana with their long stalk; the Pomponiana of protuberant (full-breasted) shape; the Liceriana; the Seviana and those which spring from these, the Turraniana, distinguished by their length of stalk; the Favoniana of reddish color, a little larger than the Superba; the Lateriana; the Aniciana, which ripens in late autumn and has a pleasant acid flavor. The Tiberiana are so called because the Emperor Tiberius was very fond of them. They get more color from the sun and grow to larger size, but otherwise are the same as the Liceriana. These bear the name of the country from which they come; the Amerina, latest of all; the Picentina; the Numantina; the Alexandria; the Numidiana; the Greek and among them the Tarentine, the Signina, which others from their color call Testacea (like tiles, or brick-colored), like the Onychina (onyx) and Purpurea (purple). From their odor are named the Myrapia (myrrh-pear), Laurea (laurel), Nardina (nard); from their season the Hordearia (barley, at the barley-harvest); from the shape of their neck the Ampullacea (flask). The Coriolana and Bruttia have family-names (Coriolanus, Brutus); the Cucurbitina (gourd-pears) are so called from their bitter taste. The origin of the name is unknown in the case of the Barbarica and the Veneria which they call colored; the Regia, which are attached to a very short stalk; the Patricia; the Voconia, which are green and oblong. Virgil mentions also the Volema, taken from Cato, who names also the Sementiva and the Mustea.[2]”
It is pertinent to inquire, now, as to what types of pears the ancients had. Such an inquiry leads up to another and much more important question: Have new characters appeared in pears since Pliny wrote? If so, it may be possible that we shall be forced to assume that man’s dominancy over this fruit has produced the new characters, in which case search might be made for the key to unlock more new characters. For the present, however, only the first question can be considered, before going into which it is necessary to know what the most prominent characters of the pear are. Only those of the fruit need be named.
There are twenty outstanding characters which differentiate the varieties of pears now cultivated, not taking account of those introduced by the hybridization of P. communis with P. serotina which has given pomology the Kieffer-like varieties. These characters are: Smooth or russet skin; red, yellow, or green color; large or small size; early or late season; long or short stem; round, oblate, ovate, and pyriform shapes; granular, buttery, or breaking flesh; sweet or acid flavor. In the pears described by Pliny so many of these characters are mentioned or may be assumed to be present from inference, that the conclusion is forced that in the many new pure-bred pears of P. communis which have come into existence since Pliny’s time, showing a great shuffling of characters in pear-breeding, it is doubtful whether new characters have come into being in 2000 years. This, in turn, forces the conclusion that if this fruit is to be greatly changed, the change must come about through hybridization with other species.
Another quotation from Pliny shows that the Romans valued pears as a medicine as well as a food, had curious notions as to their digestibility, and, as with most plants, ascribed other marvelous qualities to them. Thus, Pliny says:
“All kinds of pears, as an aliment, are indigestible, to persons in robust health, even; but to invalids they are forbidden as rigidly as wine. Boiled, however, they are remarkably agreeable and wholesome, those of the Crustumium in particular. All kinds of pears, too, boiled with honey, are wholesome to the stomach. Cataplasms of a resolvent nature are made with pears, and a decoction of them is used to disperse indurations. They are efficacious, also, in cases of poisoning by mushrooms and fungi, as much by reason of their heaviness, as by the neutralizing effects of their juice.
“The wild pear ripens but very slowly. Cut in slices and hung in the air to dry, it arrests looseness of the bowels, an effect which is equally produced by a decoction of it taken in drink; in which case the leaves are also boiled up together with the fruit. The ashes of pear-tree wood are even more efficacious as an antidote to the poison of fungi.
“A load of apples or pears, however small, is singularly fatiguing to beasts of burden; the best plan to counteract this, they say, is to give the animals some to eat, or at least to show them the fruit before starting.”
There is in the books of these old farmer-writers a mass of sagacious teachings which can never be outlived—will always underlay the best practice. Followed carefully, except in the matter of pests, the precepts of Cato and Varro would as certainly lead to success as the mandates of the modern experiment stations with all the up-to-date appliances for carrying out their commands. Sagacity fails, however, in one respect in these Roman husbandmen—all are fettered by superstitions. In these old books on the arts of husbandry, woven in with the practical precepts, which stand well the test of science, superstitions abound beyond present belief. Thus, whenever the discourse turns to pears, from Diophanes, who lived in Asia Minor a century before Christ, down through the ages in Greece, Italy, France, Belgium to the eighteenth century in England, runs the superstition, with various modifications, that to grow the best pears you must bore a hole through the trunk at the ground and drive in a plug of oak or beech over which the earth must be drawn. If the wound does not heal, it must be washed for a fortnight with the lees of wine. As the superstition waned, the apologetic injunction usually follows, that, in any event the wine-lees will improve the flavor of the fruit. Another superstition, current for centuries, accepted by Cato and Varro, and handed on with abiding faith almost to modern times was, as stated by Barnaby Googe, a farmer and writer subject of Queen Elizabeth, “if you graffe your peare upon a Mulbery, you shall have red Peares.” Stories of promiscuous grafting abound in the old books. Another is that if an apple be grafted on the pear, the fruit is a “pearmain.”
After Pliny follows a dreary and impenetrable period of 1500 years, in which time but few new facts regarding the evolution of the pear come to light in what is now Italy. The pear is mentioned, it is true, by many Roman writers, but all copy Theophrastus, Cato, and Pliny. Dioscorides, a learned Greek physician and botanist, who may be said to have been the author of the first book of “applied science” in botany, was the great botanical and pomological authority for the first 1600 years of the present era, many editions of his book appeared and in several languages, and it is he who is most often quoted by writers on fruits even until the seventeenth century, but he adds nothing new on the pear, and does not even extend the list of known varieties. During these 1600 years a great number of voluminous commentaries on Dioscorides appeared, in several of which names of new pears are mentioned, but, with the exception of one writer, the descriptions are so terse that the new sorts cannot be connected with older or later periods. The exception is Matthiolus (1501-1577), but since the English herbalists, in their turn, largely copy Matthiolus, with valuable amplifications, it is better to give space further on to them.
Perhaps one more name should be mentioned among the Roman writers. Messer Pietro de Crescenzi, an Italian born at Bologna in 1230, wrote a book on agriculture in which the chapters on fruits are especially well written. For reasons to be mentioned, this book had a remarkable influence on the horticulture of Europe for the next three or four centuries. With the discovery of printing, nearly two centuries after the book was written, Crescenzi was published in numerous editions and in several languages to the great enlightenment of pomologists on the cultivation of fruits, but with small additions to the knowledge of the fruits themselves. Whether because the book was really the most serviceable of its kind in the world for four centuries, or whether by virtue of the happy circumstance of being many times printed, it had absolute supremacy over other agricultural texts, is now too late to judge. There is good reason to suspect that Crescenzi’s is the precedence of circumstance, for he stole page after page from Palladius, of the fourth century, who, to be sure, in his turn, copied Columella and the Greeks. Most of these borrowings, however, meet the requirement of being “bettered by the borrower” that separates adoption from plagiarism.
One other landmark, though a somewhat inconspicuous one, in the history of the pear in Italy, is deserving brief mention. Toward the middle of the sixteenth century Agostino Gallo, an Italian, wrote The Twenty Days of Agriculture and the Charms of Country Life. With the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, agriculture was reduced to the production of the necessities of life and pomology all but perished. It required a thousand years to recover from the domination of the barbarian conqueror of Rome. Hence, it is not surprising that Gallo names but twelve varieties of pears instead of the forty-one of Pliny. Gallo says that he does not name all of the summer pears, but leaves the inference that his list is complete for autumn and winter sorts. There probably was a greater number under cultivation at this time in Italy, but Gallo’s list shows that the number was small. Gallo is regarded as the restorer of agriculture in Italy after the dark ages, and as one of the most enlightened men of his time, so that we may accept him as an accurate historian. Besides furnishing a list of the pears of his day in Italy, Gallo names two that are now under cultivation—Bergamot and Bon Chrétien.