Vanity to veneration

Even in its collapse the Roman empire has left us with its enthusiasm for the oysters. The trade in edible oysters may have collapsed, but the caches of pearls that the royal houses of Rome had assembled were ransacked and carried away by conquering Goths and scattered among the territorial lords of northern and western Europe bringing with them always their sense of value, treasure and importance.

From here, in the dark ages, the pearl found another expression, this time more pious as part of the religious jewellery of the first missals and manuscripts, adorning the covers of sacred bibles and texts …the pearl had passed from an item of vanity to veneration and became a symbol of all that was great in religion and could be found increasingly on altars, in sacred vessels, and as part of priestly sacraments.

For the ancient and more recent worlds the pearl had a singular value. It was natural and it was traded without artifice. Although diamonds would be known from the 8th century it was only after 1450 AD that jewellers understood how to cut and craft it and other gems and started to make them popular. Before that the pearl reigned without competition as an equal, even possibly of greater value than gold or silver.

Rutupians from Reculver

Before the Romans it seems that the oyster was not regarded as anything special in England especially if there was meat about or other foods, although one could say also that so little evidence remains of that period that there are very few examples of anything being perceived as being special. But to the Romans, the British oyster, especially the Colchester oyster, known as the Rutupian oyster, which came out of the port of Richborough, Kent , was a fabled delicacy. At a Roman camp at Silchester, near modern day Basingstoke, a million shells have been unearthed. Shells have been found as far north as Hadrian’s Wall. Both oysters from around Brittany and from England found their way to Rome in what appears to have been a regular and well known trade.

It was Gnaeus Julius Agricola, the Roman governor from AD 78-85 who first sent back quantities of oysters from Reculver to Rome, packed in snow. The Romans already had cellars built beneath their villas to store them.

The Romans moved on Cornwall to secure the trade in oysters and tin for themselves. They garrisoned Bodmin. They secured Caernarfon, Swansea, Cardiff and Newport. They made Colchester their base. They set up forts in Dorchester, Chichester, Reculver and round the Thames estuary. These were not the only settlements, far from it, but nor did the Romans seem to overlook any productive oyster bearing regions for their settlements and villas either.

800 ships, five legions amd 2,000 horses

Much of the vision of early Britain as a nation of cave dwelling, loin cloth, blue dyed savages stems from Ceasar’s own chronicles. Where he had the advantage of being a first hand reporter, he was also biased as a soldier and conqueror. The Celtic vision of pre Roman Britain being wealthy in trade, sophisticated in its crafts of pottery and metalwork; trading its cloth as far as Rome and as a largely settled agrarian string of communities would have been a more rational reason for Caesar to invade.

And Caesar’s invasion was a serious business. His first essays in 55BC involved 98 transport ships and 10,000 men. This was repulsed. He retreated to France but the next year returned with no less than 800 ships, five legions and 2,000 cavalry. Obviously the resource to find 800 ships was an indicator that shipbuilding itself and the timber to support it was readily available which is hardly a primitive achievement and presumably much of it would have been requisitioned from the Gauls.

Much of our historical inferiority complex stems from Ceasar’s opinions. Carbon dating shows us that megalithic Britain was a more sophisticated society from much earlier although some of this evidence is quite new. The archeologist Dr Francis Pryor records first his disbelief and then wonder at discovering an ancient pot at Flag Fen in East Anglia which added an extra 1500 years to British history in the area :

“In his hand was something I had not wished to see. It was a large piece of hand made pottery, hard and well finished, with a fine almost lustrous outer surface. I snapped a bit off the corner and looked closely at the broken face. The potter had crushed up sea shells, or fossil shells, and added them to the clay…The hardness, the finish and the thorough mixing together of the clay and shell temper led me to believe this sherd was more likely to be Middle Iron Age…

“The digger took another shallow scoop and Eb held the bucket in front of me, at eye level. My heart fell. There about three inches from my nose, were two freshly broken pieces of pottery, with their white shell temper shining like so many smiling teeth. One piece of Iron Age pottery could be discounted, but three…

“And then the truth hit me. The top of the rim had been decorated with a series of shallow diagonal grooves. This decoration and the heavily thickened rim could only belong to one pre-historic style, known as Mildenhall Ware. Mildenhall pottery belongs to the middle Neolihtic.”

The Veneti

Caesar also feared the sea-based might of the Brittany oystermen; coveted the Cornish tin trade and was anxious to stop eastern England offering refuge and sanctuary to kindred tribes he thought he had subjected in north west France and Belgium. Caesar may well have had better intelligence as to the emergence of the westerly countries than we do

The defeat of the Veneti proved decisive in the fall of Britain. Much of the westerly European trade and culture would seem to have been invested in the main seafaring race of Gaul, The Veneti, or the men of Vannes, who lived in Brittany off the Morbihan coast but had intimate dealings with Cornwall and Devon. Without their submission, Caesar faced a sea battle to control the English Channel. That he chose this as his primary military task is a further pointer to the importance of a westerly European seaborne power axis.

The Veneti had developed their own kind of ship. Where the English built light curraghs that could skip across the Channel waves and were flexible enough to bend in stormy seas, the Veneti ships were huge, built out of oak with timbers as much as a foot thick and bolted together with iron pins “as thick as a man’s thumb”. In place of sails they used thin skins from untanned hides. Everything was built for strength. Instead of hemp cables, they had iron chains for their anchors, something that would not be seen again until the 19th century. These ships were obviously built to travel long distances and to handle the mighty swells of the open Atlantic. They had broad beams and also shallow keels so they could also nip more easily into tidal inlets.

With these ships, they had tapped the tin trade at source and established trading posts at Falmouth, Plymouth, and Exmouth. From there they sailed by the inland route with their freight to the Seine, the Loire, and even the Garonne. Devon and Cornwall were in close alliance and seem to have sent auxiliaries to fight against the Romans. There is even conjecture that the Veneti were linked up to a much wider geographical spread of support from the relics of prehistoric boats found in the silt at Glasgow which may have shared similar designs.

Caesar describes his struggle with the Veneti and their British allies as one of the most arduous in his Gallic campaigns. At first the Veneti were content to let the legions march into their countryside. They withdrew to their coastal strongholds and if a Roman army appeared, they would move everyone by boat along the coast.

The Roman war galleys depended largely on ramming to win their sea battles. On a first sail past, they would pass close by and smash the oars and then come back to board the stranded enemy. The Veneti ships were so solidly built that such attacks were useless. The lofty prows and sterns allowed the Veneti to tower over enemy boats and shoot arrows and drop firey cauldrons on to assailants that got too close.

After several unsuccessful skirmishes, Caesar came up with a new plan. He armed his boats with billhooks and instructed his captains to sail past the Veneti boats, ripping the huge leathern mainsails down from the masts so they swamped the boats and allowed the legionnaires time to board. He faced a Veneti fleet 220 strong. This was 56 BC.

The Veneti were defeated at the battle off Quiberon. The mainsails were slashed “covering the ship as with a pall”, hopelessly crippling the vessel, whether for sailing or rowing. The whole Venetian fleet fell into Roman hands. In Celtic versions of this battle there are variations. The fleet was becalmed and the men chose to drown themselves rather than be captured. In legend they fled south and colonised another lagoon and came to be known as the Venetians. Either way, the strongholds on the coast were then stormed, and entire populations either slaughtered or sold into slavery, as a lesson to the rest of the confederacy of the fate in store for those who dared to stand out against the genius of Rome. The slave dealers typically were Levantine Jews or Syrians.

Celtic historians point to the sophistication of the Veneti as evidence of long standing civilisation. They had soap and bathed regularly. They dressed smartly and their clothes were admired, adopted and traded by the Romans. All of which underlines the point that before Caesar butchered and enslaved them, there was an active cultural and commercial activity between Brittany and Rome. The Veneti, especially, had respect for beauty of the human body. Obese men, or those unfit to fight, might be fined.

The women too were sexually liberated. The 4th century AD historian Sulpicius Severus reproached the wife of an aristocratic Celt for the wantonness of Celtic women, but the Celtic woman replied cuttingly: "We fulfil the demands of Nature in a much better way than do your Roman women: for we consort openly with the best men, whereas you let yourselves be debauched in secret by the vilest." By that time, the decadence of Rome was rampant, much of the wealth had been acquired by money lenders, so the proud Celt may have chosen her words well.

It used to be argued but archaeology has now proved, that the Celts had developed a productive level of agriculture. Possibly it was these crops that the Romans were anxious to secure for themselves. Farming seems to have been common in Wales as far back as 4,000BC.

One cruet of sharpe vinegar

The Roman enthusiasm for eating oysters did not stop them from equally appreciating the pearl though this may have had to wait for its full fanfare for Pompeys conquests towards the turn of the millennia. For one victory march Pompey himself brought back 33 crowns of pearls. For newly empowered Rome, the pearl or what the poet Manus called “the gems of the sea, which resembled milk and snow” became the first emblem of power and status. The aristocracy flaunted it. They wore it on their clothes, had it embroidered into their couches; Caligula had a pearl necklace for his horse; Nero made the actors in his theatre carry pearl encrusted masks.

The sense of envy or even cynical disgust at this excess survives with us even if the artefacts themselves have mostly perished. There is an undertone to the writings of the time. Horace sarcastically remarked that a woman “loved her pearls more than her son”. Seneca wondered that earlobes could carry so many pearls at all. And possibly there is a political overtone to the much quoted line that Caesar wanted to invade Britain to find pearls at a time when other generals and campaigns were doing just that to the south and east.

Notwithstanding the excess, the value in the pearl was maintained. It remained a symbol of rank and prestige. Caesar banned women of lesser rank from wearing them at all, which was an edict that would be repeated many times in the ensuing 1500 years.

Pearls became so expensive that it was said general Vitellius raised the money to pay for a whole military campaign by selling one of his mother’s pearl earrings.

The legendary tale of Cleopatra betting Anthony she would spend more than 10 million sesteri on a dinner for him enshrined the myth.

“The servitors set before her only one cruet of sharpe vinegar…now she had at her ears hanging these two most precious pearls…as Anthony looked wistly upon her, she took one from her ear, steeped it in the vinegar, and soon as it was liquefied, drank it off…”

Whether the pearls would have dissolved in vinegar we can probably put down to artistic licence, but she could as easily have just swallowed it in wine.

These pearls would have come from Rome’s south eastern borders, the Persian Gulf, The Red Sea and even perhaps as far as Ceylon. For eating, consignments were delivered from further north. Much is made of how many oysters were consumed at banquets. The emperor Aulus Vittellius reportedly ate 1200 oysters at one go, but presumably these might have been shared among his guests and also it would have been a mark of high status that such abundance could be put before his guests. Or the writer was just flattering him. There would also have been the practical, obvious, culinary constraints. The boats arrived with their cargo and there was a need to eat them fresh on the shell. Even American settlers in Baltimore would buy by the gross – 144 at a time, for similar reasons. The rest would have been sent to the kitchen for cooking or preserving. Even with cold rooms that were constructed underneath some villas, the oysters would not have lasted indefinitely.

The enthusiasm pushed the occupation of France and Britain and in a trading sense underline the idea that such supplies would likely have come from the Atlantic. It is hard to tell how much of a factor they might have been, but Suetoneous, the Roman biographer, says Ceasar was looking for “pearls”, and given the trade that was to develop later it could well have been a factor.

Valeria Messalina and the harbour of vice

This early cultivation around Baiae has lent the oyster two of its more mythical reputations. First its repeated and continued association with the underworld and ancients. The neighbouring semi circular lake Fusaro (which was also to become important in oystering) was described by the Greek writer Lycophron in 28 BC as a "billowing and tempestuous lagoon", and later by Strabo as a "muddy expanse of sea". Mythology and poetry going back much further, place it in the centre of hell, in the area of Tartarus, "where kings were punished and the righteous passed through on their way to the Elysian Fields". Righteous or not it became a fertile and eventually historic oyster lagoon.

Baiae, by association, gave the oyster its reputation for licentiousness. It was a fashionable, decadent seaside town where rich Romans went to take the waters and misbehave. There are many references to debauchery.

The prominent socialite Marcus Caelius Rufus in 60 BC was accused of living the life of a harlot in Rome and in the “crowded resort of Baiae”, indulging in beach parties and drinking sessions.

Seneca the Younger, who died 65 BC, wrote a moral epistle on Baiae and Vice, describing the spa town as being a "vortex of luxury" and a "harbour of vice".

Things had obviously not changed much when Sextus Propertius, who died 15 BC, described the town as a “den of licentiousness and vice”.

It was here also that Caligula ordered a two mile bridge of pontoons be set across the bay for a stunt so he could ride his horse across the water in defiance of an astrologer’s prediction that he had “no more chance of becoming Emperor than of riding a horse across the Baiae”.

It was here that Emperor Claudius built a grand villa for his third wife, Messalina, who spent her days and nights revelling in debauchery and plotting to have her husband replaced by her lover, a thought for which she was eventually beheaded.

Messalina alone might single handedly have been responsible for both Rome and the oyster’s reputation for lascivious debauchery, although her promiscuity and intriguing must have been embellished over time. Married at 15, on the orders of Caligula to the 50 year old Claudius, Valeria Messalina was reputedly as beautiful as she was politically scheming as she was sexually voracious taking lovers seemingly as she pleased including one time, so the story goes, challenging the champion prostitute Scylla as to who could satisfy more men in one night. Scylla apparently retired before dawn after 25 men, but Messalina carried on through the morning. According to Juvenal she was “tired but never satisfied”. Anyone who spurned Messalina’s advances ran the risk of execution. She slept with the handsomest, the most powerful and even on occasion the ugliest men in Rome for her own diversion or for political and financial gain. Apologists suggest a variation where she was the victim of the intrigue, that her children were fathered by Caligula and that he then foistered her on to a marriage with the elderly Claudius to save his own reputation. Eventually she fell in love with the consul Caius Silius and was determined to marry him, even bigamously. Possibly this may have been a part of a wider failed coup attempt, and that her real motive was self protection in a post Claudius order. Claudius, who while thought of as a dumb but benign dictator, seems to have been genuinely been fond of her at the start of their union, was coerced into sending soldiers to the bigamous wedding feast to kill her. She was 23.

Worse, for Claudius, it was at Baiae where he would be poisoned by his last wife, Agrippina, the controlling mother of Nero who wanted to put her son on the throne.

Baiae was just the sort of place, you might think, for a respectable oyster to lodge and find a reputation. The town even had its own well know stew named after it which is almost as rich and spicy as its own legends – a casserole of oysters, mussels, jellyfish, pine nuts, rue, celery pepper coriander, cumin, wine garum, date and oil.

The Romans demonstrably liked oysters. They baked a special bread to be served with them, a forerunner of the American enthusiasm for oyster crackers and oyster loaves.

Orgies or not, dinner was an important occasion to look forward to for the elite as this beguiling invitation from Martial suggests:

"You will dine well, Julius Cerialis, at my house...The first course will be a lettuce (a useful digestive aid), and tender shoots cut from leek plants, and then a pickled young tuna which is larger than a small lizard fish and will be garnished with eggs and rue leaves. And there will be more eggs, those cooked over a low flame, and cheese from Velabrum Street, and olives which have felt the Picene cold. That's enough for the appetizers...You want to know what else we are having? Fish, oysters, sow's udder, stuffed wild fowl and barnyard hens..."

Typically oysters were served on the shell with a famous dressing quoted by everyone writing of the time as of pepper, lovage, egg yolk, vinegar, liquamen (the salty sauce made from fermented fish), olive oil and wine.

Early cultivation

The Persian wars of the fifth century BC probably introduced the Greeks to the pearl and trade with the east. As shipbuilders and sailors the Greeks might have plundered oysters from further afield but by 400 BC they were laying out twigs and pottery in organised shallow ponds to attract larvae. At the time Taranto on the eastern boot of Italy was a Spartan port and is still even today an oyster growing area.

Homer had already observed in Book XVI of the Iliad written some 300 years earlier:

“How active he is and how well he dives. If we had been at sea this fellow would have dived from the ship’s side and brought up as many oysters as the whole crew could stomach…”

Aristotle in the third century BC noted that oysters would be moved from one bed to another to fatten them. The Greeks christened the oyster – ostreum and so the Latin derivation ostrea edulis literally means edible bones. One Roman writer Himilco referred to Brittany as the Ostrymnian promontory.

The oyster ingratiated itself to Greek society in other ways. Shells were used as ballot papers for elections. Voters etched their mark on the mother-of-pearl shell, from which act of choosing one faction or the other derives the usage ostracism.

Pliny records the first Roman attempt at oyster culture around the Bay of Naples probably around the turn of the first millennia.

“The fist person who formed artificial oyster beds was Sergius Orata, who established them at Baiae, in the time of Lucius Crassius the orator, just before the Marsic War. This was done by him, not for the gratification of gluttony, but of avarice, as he contrived to make a large income by this exercise of his ingenuity…; at a later date, however, it was thought worthwhile to fetch oysters all the way from Brindisium, at the very extremity of Italy; and in order that there might exist no rivalry between the two flavours, a plan has recently been hit upon, of feeding the oysters of Brindisium in Lake Lucrinus, famished as they must naturally be after so long a journey.”

A more charitable thesis is that the beds at Lucrinus were being eyed up as possible naval bases and Orata was anxious to save the oyster trade. Orata was a well known businessman who made other fortunes selling villas and inventing shower baths.

His procedures are still broadly followed today. He cleared the grounds of other marine life, placed seed oysters in their place and checked them constantly to be sure they had enough room to grow to a good size sorting them regularly, getting rid of pests that attached to their shells and keeping them clean of silt. More revolutionary, he arranged stones in a pile under the water and placed the mature oysters on them, then surrounded them with stakes and faggots suspended in the waters so as he could catch the spawn and they would be encouraged to attach where he wanted them.

Interestingly the lake at Baiae was also used to farm the admired gilthead bream which were also hand fed oysters to fatten them up.

The name Lucrino it is sometimes said therefore gives us lucrum, the gain made out of the oyster-culture, being a material gain, profit, but also with connotations of avarice which in turn was translated into filthy lucre. Pliny’s sarcastic quip at Orata has stuck down the years.

Lucrine oysters

“He, too, was the first to adjudge the pre-eminence of delicacy of flavour to the oysters of Lake Lucrinus…The British shores had not yet sent their supplies, at the time when Orata thus enobled the Lucrine oysters”
- Pliny