At the beginning of the Roman Principate, there was no self-evident model for the residence of the Roman emperor. During a long period of experimentation, emperors and their architects attempted to fashion spaces appropriate to the social rituals of their courts and to the self-image they aimed to project. By the end of the first century, a viable palace model was established in Rome, and elements of this were then redeployed in the palaces of the Tetrarchic period. This chapter presents a selection of literary sources, archaeological plans, photographs, and computer visualizations to illustrate the developing Roman palace model, its Hellenistic forerunners, and its afterlife in the Tetrarchic period. It also contains a selection of sources relating to imperial villas in Italy for which there are archaeological remains. This collection shows that imperial villas did share some common features, even if a clear ‘imperial villa model’ never developed.

A ‘social’ definition of the ‘court’ implies that a court society existed only where the ruler was personally present; the functions and business of the court therefore shifted with the person of the emperor. This chapter systematically analyses the changes and potential difficulties faced by the Roman court when travelling either in Italy or in the provinces. Attention is given to the composition of the travelling court; to its ceremonial entrances to and exits from major cities (the adventus and profectio); and to the logistics of travel arrangements (and moral reactions to them). Imperial journeys provided important opportunities for members of local elites to interact with the court, but also disrupted routines of communications between the emperor and the Roman aristocracy and people. The chapter also stresses the importance of individual emperors’ character traits in prompting travel, and cautions against the overstatement of structural factors in explaining journeys.

This introduction discusses the kinds of evidence available for the study of the Roman imperial court and the kinds of historical knowledge of the court that are possible.

In this chapter, the literary, documentary, and archaeological evidence pertaining to horticulture and arboriculture in eastern Gallia Cisalpina and in Campania is investigated. The chapter argues that these two regions of Roman Italy played an important role for horticultural developments in the late Republic and early imperial era, both as producers of fruit and vegetables and possibly also as developers of new cultivars. The archaeobotanical record of Gallia Cisalpina also clearly shows that, from the Augustan era throughout the whole of the first century AD, the frequency and diversity of recovered remains of fruit greatly increased. These two regions had very important ports, Puteoli and Aquileia, which handled a large amount of trade coming from the rest of the Mediterranean and it is possible that these ports were entry routes into the wider region first, and the rest of Italy later, for new fruit trees coming from the eastern Mediterranean regions such as the peach, the apricot, and the citron/lemon.

This chapter discusses the appearance of the peach in Roman Italy as a locally cultivated plant. The peach, a plant originating from the East, had reached the eastern Mediterranean sometime in the Hellenistic period via Persia, but it was introduced to Italy only in the late first century BC/start of the first century AD. The chapter discusses the archaeobotanical and other archaeological evidence related to the cultivation of the peach and examines a large early imperial fruit farm discovered in Rome in recent years as an example of financial investment in large-scale fruit cultivation. The archaeological evidence provided by this site suggests how Rome’s aggregate demand for fresh products created the right conditions in the early Julio-Claudian period for financial investment in irrigation technology and in recent horticultural introductions such as the peach.

This chapter focuses on the appropriation and transplantation of new plants encountered during military campaigns abroad. This phenomenon, which was not exclusive to Roman generals but had various antecedents in earlier civilizations, forcefully entered Roman discourse on imperialism when even trees were displayed as spoils of war during triumphal celebrations. In elite versions of agricultural history such as Pliny’s, both the horticultural products of Roman Italy and of its new ‘imperial’ imports were considered as somehow instances of Roman civilizing processes of so-called barbarian landscapes. The chapter also discusses the possible modes of diffusion of new plants and cultivars around the empire: wealthy landowners who had properties in Italy and in various provinces, the military, who had notable geographic mobility, and traders.

This book has investigated Roman fruit cultivation from a dual perspective: the ‘idea’ of arboriculture that can be found in the ancient literary texts and the ‘reality’ of arboriculture and horticulture more generally, as revealed by archaeological data. The various sections of this study have led the reader from the examination of how plants became means of elite self-representation and how literary texts discuss the engagement with the cultivation of fruit trees and transplantation of plants, to the archaeological and archaeobotanical record for arboriculture and the arrival and diffusion of new plants in Italy and the West. This journey has revealed the distinct and charged way in which arboriculture was used in elite discourse and the notable advances in horticultural practices that characterize the first century ad.

This chapter examines the changes in agricultural practices and the dispersal of new plants in the Iberian Peninsula and in the Gallic provinces after their incorporation into the Roman empire. It investigates the effects colonization may have had on agricultural practices. The provinces chosen as case studies were the object of large colonization programmes organized by Caesar and Augustus.Although the available archaeobotanical data for these regions is uneven, it is possible to detect in these provincial territories similar trends to those observed for Roman Italy: an increase, in the late first century BC, with notable peaks in the early first century AD, in the number and variety of horticultural produce available. The evidence from northern and northeastern France and the western Netherlands suggests a connection between the presence of the army and the import of new plant foods first, and the local cultivation of some of these new plants later. Such evidence offers a compelling picture for the diffusion of cultivation techniques and dietary changes that took place in the early empire.

The introduction presents the topic of the book, its aims and type of primary material examined, discussing the problems and limitations inherent to the archaeobotanical data available. It then gives an overview of the book structure and chapter content.