Roman and Greek Botany j 241241 241
Although Bacchus is the Roman god of wine, grapes themselves are identified with the
breasts of the nature goddess. Columella also compared flowers to maidens, as when he
describes the rose as “full of maiden blush.”^22
The vexing question of sex in plants was never broached by any of the major Roman
agricultural writers, who were content to accept the pronouncements of Aristotle and
Theophrastus on the subject. However, as the following dialogue illustrates, Varro’s com-
parison of fruit production to female pregnancy clearly genders plants female:“Tell us now,” said Agrius, “of the third step, the nurture and feeding of the plant.”
“All plants, “ resumed Stolo, “grow in the soil, and when mature conceive, and when
the time of gestation is complete bear fruit or ear, or the like; and the seed returns
whence it came. Thus, if you pluck the blossom on an unripe pear, or the like, no sec-
ond one will grow on the same spot in the same year, as the same plants cannot have
two periods of gestation. For trees and plants, just as women, have a definite period
from conception to birth.”^23The phrase “and when mature conceive” implies that Varro regarded conception as occur-
ring at a specific point in development. In the absence of any mention of pollen as a fertil-
izing agent, we infer that Varro, like his Greek predecessors, thought of seed production as
female parthenogenesis, which occurs naturally when the plant reaches maturity.Pliny’s Historia Natur a
Caius Plinius Secundus, or Pliny the Elder, was born in Gaul (the region of France and
Belgium), but his father took him to Rome at an early age to be educated. As a young
man, he practiced law before beginning his military career as a junior officer in Germany
during the reign of Claudius. Two years after the volatile and unpredictable Nero came
to power (~56 ce), Pliny prudently left military service to live a quiet, unassuming life in
Rome. More than a decade later, under the Emperor Vespasian, Pliny served as Procurator
in Spain and elsewhere. In the course of his duties, he traveled throughout much of the
ancient world, including Gaul, Africa, and probably Judaea and Syria. Pliny the Younger,
his nephew, described his uncle as an incessantly voracious reader. Whether dining at
home or, more comically, while being carried through Rome in a sedan chair, Pliny always
arranged to have one servant read aloud to him while another took dictation of passages
he wished to excerpt.
Precisely when Pliny began organizing and synthesizing his readings into his great com-
pendium, Natural History, is not known. This encyclopedic compilation, comprising 37 vol-
umes (of which Books XII– XXVI deal with plants) has been characterized as a “storehouse
of ancient errors,” for Pliny was a compulsive and uncritical compiler of information— both
valid and apocryphal. He was, to use a modern metaphor, a one- man Internet. Until the
rediscovery in the Vatican library of Theophrastus’s lost works, Historia Plantarum and De
Causis Plantarum, in 1453, Pliny’s error- prone accounts of plant biology remained the only
available records of the great synthesis of Greek botany produced by Theophrastus.
A wonderful example of Pliny’s use of the fabulous to spice up his factual reporting is his
oft- quoted description of love among the date palms: