to Sicily and Italy, where both commodities were made in abundance. The
homeland Greeks retained their position on the international scene as sup-
pliers of olive oil, and some Greek cities had to pass laws restricting the
amount that could be exported in order to ensure an adequate supply for
local needs. Wine, however, was a different story. Whereas the very best
Greek wines retained their market share and were imported into Rome itself,
from the middle of the second centuryBCEthe bulk wine business began to
shift away from Greece to Italy and Sicily. The great estates of Italy pumped
out massive amounts of wine that commonly circulated from Russia to
Nubia. Pliny recounts that in the early days of the Roman Republic wine
was so rare that women were not allowed to drink it, and a husband who
clubbed his wife to death after catching her imbibing from a vat was
acquitted of murder. By Pliny’s own time matters had changed so drastically
that he counted about 80 different kinds of wine“in the whole world,”of
which two-thirds came from Italy.
Exactly when Italian wine reached Gaul in significant quantities is uncer-
tain, but a wrecked Italian ship off the coast from the second centuryBCE
contained 15,000–20,000 gallons with the poorer quality stored in the hold
and the best on deck. Italian wines were shipped through Massilia to inland
distribution centers, and some of it reached as far as the Rhine River. Much
depended on overland shipping costs, which tended to limit theflow of
cheaper brands. Eventually viticulture was introduced to the soils of Gaul,
and by the Late Imperial period some regions including Bordeaux and the
Moselle Valley were exporting their own products. Interestingly, the Romans
made a major improvement in the packaging and preservation of wine in the
Early Imperial period when they borrowed from the Celts the use of metal-
hooped wooden casks to replace pottery amphorae.
Caesar reports on one German tribe, the Suebi, whom he describes as“the
largest and most warlike of the German nations,”as a people who“abso-
lutely forbid the importation of wine, because they think it makes men soft
and incapable of enduring hard toil.”Fortunately for Italianwine merchants, this
was not a prejudice shared by the Gauls. For them wine consumption was
especially important at lavish chiefly feasts where huge quantities were quaffed.
The Gauls paid for their Roman imports with animal products– Strabo
reportsflocks of sheep and herds of swine so large“they supply an abundance
of cloaks and salt-meat not only to Rome but to most parts of Italy as well.”
The most important Gaulish export was said to be slaves. Diodorus Siculus
reports on a wine-for-slaves trade that appears dreadfully uneven:“They
[Italian merchants] transport the wine by boat on the navigable rivers, and
by wagon through the plains and receive in return for it an incredibly large
price: for a jar of wine they receive in return a slave, a servant in exchange for
a drink.”Romans were trading for slaves with friendly tribes more than a
century before Caesar conquered Gaul, and after Pompey’s victory over the
pirates Gaul may have become the largest single source of Roman slaves.
80 Shifting cores and peripheries in the Imperial West