Describing the crucial trading venture of his career, Trimalchio says that he loaded his ships with bacon and beans as well as with wine, perfume, and slaves.65 We can unfortunately gain very little idea of the extent or patterns of Roman trade in meat, fish, dairy products, vegetables, or fruit over moderate or long distances. Some foodstuffs were too perishable to travel very far, but demand was considerable in the great centres ofpopulation, and meat and fish could be preserved by salting. Strabo says that salted meat was supplied to Rome and Italy from Belgica, and also mentions that Italy was supplied with Cisalpine pork.66 Not only Trimalchio but also real-life merchants might concern themselves with legumes: some of the documents from Murecine (Pompeii) in which the main commodity is grain, also mention chickpeas and lentils.67 Vegetables were a major element in the diet of the poor.68 Dates were inexpensive in Italy, even though they | were undoubtedly imports.69 These fragments of information help to suggest that in fact trade in foodstuffs other than wheat was a vast and complex affair. But neither the trade in ordinary foodstuffs nor the luxury trade which transported all manner of exotic edibles across the Empire can be even approximately quantified.
The popularity of garum and other fish sauces is indicated by the numbers of the surviving amphorae which carried them; at Ostia under the Flavians these amphorae outnumbered those containing oil.70 It is clearly established that a large part of the western Mediterranean production of these commodities came from Baetica and Mauretania Tingitana.7i
World History
