Bread in Ancient Rome: Grains, Milling and Prison-Bakeries | Early European History And Religion

BREAD IN ANCIENT ROME

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Roman bread
Romans ate a lot of bread and snacks that were similar to sandwiches. Round loaves of bread were baked in circular brick ovens. The bread was light and airy and made with grain and yeast. A typical loaf of bread was about a foot across and five inches thick and weighed about a pound. There were two main kinds of bread: panis artopicius ("pan bread") cooked on top of a stove, and panis testustis ("pot bread"), baked in an earthenware vessel. Upper class women didn't like making bread. They usually left such work to their slaves. Bakeries in Pompeii are identified by by the presence of ovens and grinding stones.

Charles King wrote in his website “A History of Bread”: “The Greeks and Romans liked their bread white; colour was one of the main tests for quality at the time of Pliny (A.D. 70). Those who think the craze for white bread is a modern fad should note this. Pliny wrote: ‘The wheat of Cyprus is swarthy and produces a dark bread, for which reason it is generally mixed with the white wheat of Alexandria’. [Source: Charles King, “A History of Bread” |~|]

“The Romans enjoyed several kinds of bread, with interesting names. There was oyster bread (to be eaten with oysters); ‘artolaganus’ or cakebread; ‘speusticus’ or ‘hurry bread’. There was oven bread, tin bread, Parthian bread. There were rich breads made with milk, eggs and butter, but these of course, were only for the wealthy and privileged people. The Egyptian grammarian and philosopher Athenaeus, who lived in the third century A.D., has handed down to us considerable knowledge about bread and baking in those days. |~|

“He wrote that the best bakers were from Phoenicia or Lydia, and the best bread-makers from Cappadocia. He gives us a list of the sorts of bread common in his time-leavened and unleavened loaves; loaves made from the best wheat flour; loaves made from groats, or rye, and some from acorns and millet. There were lovely crusty loaves too, and loaves baked on a hearth. Bakers made a bread mixed with cheese, but the favourite of the rich was always white bread made from wheat.” |~|

Websites on Ancient Rome: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Rome sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Late Antiquity sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; BBC Ancient Rome bbc.co.uk/history; Perseus Project - Tufts University; perseus.tufts.edu ; Lacus Curtius penelope.uchicago.edu; The Internet Classics Archive classics.mit.edu ; Bryn Mawr Classical Review bmcr.brynmawr.edu; Cambridge Classics External Gateway to Humanities Resources web.archive.org; Ancient Rome resources for students from the Courtenay Middle School Library web.archive.org ; History of ancient Rome OpenCourseWare from the University of Notre Dame web.archive.org ; United Nations of Roma Victrix (UNRV) History unrv.com

Grains and Cereals in Ancient Rome

Grain was the main commodity in ancient Rome. It was used to make bread and porridge, the staples of the Roman diet. Poor people subsisted on a gruel-like soup of mush made from grain. The Roman grain goddess Ceres gave birth to the word "cereal." Chickpeas, emmer wheat and lentils were all eaten. Rice was imported from India and used as a medicine. Rice arrived in Egypt in the 4th century B.C. and around that time India was already exporting it to Greece. It was not widely consumed in the Roman Empire.

wheat field

The word frumentum was a general term applied to any of the many sorts of grain that were grown for food. The word frumentum occurs fifty-five times in Caesar’s Gallic War, meaning any kind of grain that happened to be grown for food in the country in which Caesar was campaigning at the time. Of those now in use barley, oats, rye, and wheat were known to the Romans, though rye was not cultivated, and oats served only as feed for cattle. [Source: “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932) |+|]

"Barley was not much used, for it was thought to lack nutriment, and therefore to be unfit for laborers. In very ancient times another grain, spelt (far), a very hardy kind of wheat, had been grown extensively, but it had gradually gone out of use except for the sacrificial cake that had given its name to the confarreate ceremony of marriage. In classical times wheat was the staple grain grown for food, not differing much from that which we have today. It was usually planted in the fall, though on some soils it would mature as a spring wheat. After grain ceased to be much grown in Central Italy and the land was diverted to other purposes, wheat had to be imported from the provinces, first from Sicily, then from Africa and Egypt, as the home supply became inadequate to the needs of the teeming population. |+|

Preparation of the Grain in Ancient Rome

In the earliest times the grain (far) had not been ground, but had been merely pounded in a mortar. The meal was then mixed with water and made into a sort of porridge (puls, whence our word “poultice”), which long remained the national dish something like the oatmeal of Scotland. Plautus (died 184 B.C.) jestingly refers to his countrymen as “pulse-eaters.” The persons who crushed the grain were called pinsitores, or pistores, whence the cognomen Piso, as was said above, was derived; in later times the bakers were also called pistores, because they ground the grain as well as baked the bread. In the ruins of bakeries we find mills as regularly as ovens. [Source: “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932) |+|]

“In such mills the grain was ground into regular flour. The mill (mola) consisted of three parts, the lower millstone (meta), the upper stone (catillus), and the framework that surrounded and supported the latter and furnished the means to turn it upon the meta. The meta was, as the name suggests, a cone shaped stone (A) resting on a bed of masonry (B) with a raised rim, between which and the lower edge of the meta the flour was collected. In the upper part of the meta a beam (C) was mortised, ending above in an iron pin or pivot (D), on which hung and turned the framework that supported the catillus. The catillus (E) itself was shaped something like an hourglass, or two funnels joined at their necks. The upper funnel served as a hopper into which the grain was poured; the lower funnel fitted closely over the meta. From a relief in the Vatican Museum, Rome.The distance between the lower funnel and the meta was regulated by the length of the pin, mentioned above, according to the fineness of the flour desired. |+|

“The framework was very strong and massive on account of the heavy weight that was suspended from it. The beams used for turning the mill were fitted into holes in the narrow part of the catillus. The power required to do the grinding was furnished by horses or mules pulling the beams, or by slaves pushing against them. This last method was often used as a punishment, as we have seen. Of the same form but much smaller were the hand mills used by soldiers for grinding the frumentum furnished them as rations. Under the Empire, water mils were introduced, but they are rarely mentioned in literature.” |+|

See Milling Under INDUSTRIES IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE factsanddetails.com ; ###Ancient Rome and the Flow of Grain Jason Urbanus wrote in Archaeology magazine: In a sense, Rome’s growth had always relied on its capacity to connect with ever-broadening Italian and Mediterranean trade networks. The more Rome expanded, the more it turned to outside resources to feed its population.By the beginning of the empire at the end of the first century B.C., the population of Rome and its environs had reached well over a million people. [Source: Jason Urbanus, Archaeology magazine, March-April 2015] Olive oil, wine, garum (a popular fish sauce), slaves, and building materials were shipped from places such as Spain, Gaul, North Africa, and the Near East. However, the most important responsibility of the Roman emperor was ensuring the steady and continuous flow of grain. Grains and cereals were the staple of the Roman diet, either consumed in bread form or served as a porridge. It has been estimated that a Roman adult consumed 400 to 600 pounds of wheat per year. With a population of more than a million, this required Rome to stock a staggering 650 million pounds annually. Throughout Rome’s history, shortages in the grain supply led to riots. The city’s food supply was frequently interrupted by storms and bad weather, and grain ships could be lost at sea. Any such delay or loss created civil unrest. “From the second century B.C. onward, the Roman government took an increasingly active approach to monitoring and controlling the grain supply. First, the government began to regulate and subsidize the price, ensuring that grain remained affordable to the masses at all times. By the Augustan period, the emperor was doling out as much as 500 pounds of grain per head to as many as 250,000 households. The emperors realized that the key to Rome’s stability was keeping its population well fed. “Yet, by the first century A.D., Rome could no longer be sustained by Italian harvests alone. It began to exploit its newly annexed fertile provinces, especially North Africa and Egypt, which soon became the largest supplier of Roman grain. It took as many as a thousand ships, constantly sailing, just to support the demand for grain in the city. With large grain ships typically capable of hauling more than 100 tons, and sea transport at least 40 times less expensive than land transport, Rome desperately needed a deepwater port close to home. ###Re-Creating 2,000-Year-Old Pompeii Bread

Farrell Monaco, a culinary archaeologist, has researched bread-making in Pompeii and has re-created the recipe based on a loaf of panis quadratus — a kind of Roman bread named it four indentations and made with a string or reed so the loaf would more easily break into portions — that was found in an oven full of charcoal-like loaves in a Pompeii bakery. Monaco researched the ingredients and tools of the time to re-create the recipe for this bread.

Annie Roth wrote in National Geographic: The region’s bakers sometimes used leavens to incorporate live yeast into their bread dough. Unlike today’s typical starters of flour and water, those used by ancient Roman bakers often contained legumes or grape skins to boost fermentation. [Source: Annie Roth, National Geographic, May 4, 2021]

Triticum aestivum, bread wheat, was found alongside panis quadratus loaves during bakery excavations in Pompeii. As the Roman Empire grew, wheat became the main grain for baking. Dense, with a crunchy crust, the bread is ideal for soaking up wine, soups, and sauces, said Monaco, who ground the grain with a stone hand mill to match the coarseness of ancient Romans’ flour.

For the full recipe see Tavola Mediterranea.com tavolamediterranea.com

Bread-Sellers and Bakers in Ancient Rome

Dr Joanne Berry wrote for the BBC: A wall-painting from Pompeii “depicts the sale of bread - loaves of bread are stacked on the shop counter, and the vendor can be seen handing them to customers. It is thought that the inhabitants of Pompeii bought their daily bread from bakeries rather than baked it themselves at home, since ovens rarely are found in the houses of the town.” The high “number of bakeries that have so far been excavated tends to support this belief. Bakeries are identified by the presence of stone mills to grind grain, and large wood-burning ovens for baking. [Source: Dr Joanne Berry, Pompeii Images, BBC, March 29, 2011 |::|]

“Bread may have been bought directly from the bakery, but it is likely that it was also sold from temporary stalls set up at different parts of the town. Two graffiti discovered on the precinct wall of the Temple of Apollo are an indication of this. They read Verecunnus libarius hic and Pudens libarius, which can be roughly translated as 'Verecunnus and Pudens sell sacrificial bread here'. |::|

Charles King wrote in his website “A History of Bread”: “A Bakers’ Guild was formed in Rome round about the year 168 B.C. From then on the industry began as a separate profession. The Guild or College, called Collegium Pistorim. did not allow the bakers or their children to withdraw from it and take up other trades. The bakers in Rome at this period enjoyed special privileges: they were the only craftsmen who were freemen of the city, all other trades being conducted by slaves. [Source: Charles King, “A History of Bread”]

Bakeries in Ancient Rome

Dr Joanne Berry wrote for the BBC: Lava mills and the large wood-burning oven identify” a building “as a bakery. Each mill consists of two mill-stones, one stationary and one hollow and shaped like a funnel. The funnel-shaped stone had slots, into which wooden levers could be inserted so that the stone could be rotated. Each mill would have been operated either by manpower or with the help of a donkey or horse (in one bakery, the skeletons of several donkeys were discovered). In order to make flour, grain was poured from above into the hollow stone and then was ground between the two stones. In total, 33 bakeries have so far been found in Pompeii. The carbonised remains of loaves of bread were found in one, demonstrating that the oven was in use at the time of the eruption in A.D. 79.” [Source: Dr Joanne Berry, Pompeii Images, BBC, March 29, 2011 |::|]

According to Archaeology magazine: In the first century B.C., leavened bread production was confined to several large houses outfitted with domed ovens. According to archaeologist Nicolas Monteix of the University of Rouen, it’s unclear whether these early bakers produced bread solely for their own households or, at least in part, for sale to customers. [Source: Benjamin Leonard and Jarrett A. Lobell, Archaeology Magazine, July-August 2019]

By the first century A.D., however, these domestic bakeries had been shuttered and larger-scale commercial bakeries had popped up across the city. Although most Pompeians’ diet consisted largely of cereal-based porridges, and bread still wasn’t widely available to the poor, “I would consider this shift a democratization of bread consumption,” says Monteix, who led a recent project aimed at documenting Pompeii’s 39 excavated bakeries. The rise of commercial bakeries reflected not only a jump in the city’s population, he explains, but perhaps also an increase in grain imports from Egypt and North Africa during the Pax Romana, a period of peace and prosperity in the Mediterranean that was ushered in by the emperor Augustus. The presence of specialized technology in a few of the bakeries, such as hydraulic systems for soaking grain and vessels for dough rising, enabled Pompeii’s bakers to produce high-quality bread for wealthier residents.

“The members of the Guild were forbidden to mix with ‘comedians and gladiators’ and from attending performances at the amphitheatre, so that they might not be contaminated by the vices of the ordinary people. We suppose that the bakers, instead of being honoured by the strict regulations, must have felt deprived by them.” |~|

An oven was discovered in Pompeii that was big enough to produce 100 loaves of bread a day. Archaeologist Gennaro Iovino told the BBC roughly 50 bakeries have already been found in Pompeii. The building with the oven couldn’t have been a shop because there is no shop front. It's more likely to have been a wholesaler, distributing bread across town, perhaps to the many fast-food joints in Pompeii, he said. [Source: Jonathan Amos, BBC, July 19, 2023]

Milling Grain for Bread — One of the Worst Jobs in Ancient Rome

ancient Roman bread seller

The Romans had no public mills distinct from bakeries; each baker was also a miller. Candida Moss wrote in Daily Beast: Working a mill was one of the most feared and laborious tasks in the ancient world. It was a punishment for rebellious enslaved workers and a mere step up from the death-sentence of working in the mines. Archeological evidence shows that mill workers and miners may have even worked together to select materials and ease their burden. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, October 3, 2021]

“Small hand-mills — which were used by domestic bakers in antiquity as well — aren’t too cumbersome and they are a step up from a mortar and pestle. But the larger hourglass and rotary mills used in Roman bakeries involved physical strength and were often powered by donkeys and “chained convicts” (as Pliny noted in his Naturalis Historia). The hourglass mills, which can still be seen in the bakeries at Pompeii, were comprised of a solid bell-shaped stone over which a hollow hourglass shaped stone was placed. The hourglass stone both functioned like a hopper that fed grain into the mill and was also turned around the base stone to grind the grain. The worker (human or donkey) would circle the mill turning the hourglass stone as he walked.

“Working in a mill was so tough that it was a form of punishment. Messenio, a character in the playwright Plautus’ Menaechmi, lists being sent to the mill alongside being whipped or placed in fetters as a punishment for laziness. In the mill, Messenio says, the disobedient enslaved worker would find himself hungry, exhausted, and cold. As Professor Sarah Bond writes in her book Trade and Taboo, “laboring in the mill was better than being sent to the mines, [but] it was still a terrible punishment. ” Mill prisons, she writes, remained a reality in the Roman empire though, and from the fourth century A. D., they were sometimes staffed by a mix of enslaved and penal workers. With much of the Roman empire being sustained by a grain-based diet, there was always a demand for workers.

“Even enslaved children learned to fear the mill. A beautiful piece of graffiti etched into the wall of a school for enslaved children in second-century Rome shows a donkey turning a mill. The child who wrote the inscription — in lettering worthy of a high-quality manuscript — expresses the hope that having worked hard in school, he will, as an educated scribe or copyist, be able to escape the threat of the mill.

Archaeologists Find a Bakery–Prison in Pompeii

In December 2023, archaeologist announced they had discovered an ancient bakery in Pompeii in which enslaved people and donkeys were locked up together and used to power a mill to grind grain for bread. Barbie Latza Nadeau of CNN wrote: The site consists of a narrow room with no external view but only small, high windows covered by bars through which minimal light passed. There were also indentations in the floor “to coordinate the movement of the animals, forced to walk around for hours, blindfolded,” the statement said. [Source: Barbie Latza Nadeau, CNN, December 9, 2023]

The discovery was made in the Regio IX section of Pompeii, which has an ongoing archaeological dig. Archaeologists discovered the bakery while excavating an ancient Pompeiian home that was being renovated. The bodies of three victims of the Vesuvius eruption were found in at the site, believed to be residents of the home rather than slaves. The house was divided into a residential section with “refined frescoes” on one side, and a commercial bakery on the other.

Next to the bakery was the dimly lit prison area, Pompeii Archaeological Park director Gabriel Zuchtriegel said. “What has emerged is testimony of the backbreaking work to which men, women, and animals were subjected in the ancient mill-bakeries,” he added. Zuchtriegel said these prison bakeries were previously described by the Roman writer Apuleius in the 2nd century A.D., in his novel “Metamorphoses” (also known as “The Golden Ass”), in which the protagonist, Lucius, “transformed into a donkey and was sold to a miller.” Zuchtriegel said the episode was based on the writer’s direct knowledge of the animals and humans living and working together.

The newly discovered prison area had no doors to the outside, only to the inner atrium. “It is, in other words, a space in which we must imagine the presence of people of servile status whose owner felt the need to limit the freedom of movement,” Zuchtriegel said. “It is the most shocking side of ancient slavery, the side devoid of relationships of trust, where it was reduced to brute violence, an impression which is fully confirmed by the closing of the few windows with iron grates.”

Archaeologists also believe that the indentations in the slab flooring were not made by repetitive movement but were carved to prevent the donkeys and other animals from slipping on the pavement and to force them to only walk in a circular motion to grind the grain, almost like a clockwork mechanism. “The iconographic and literary sources, in particular the reliefs from the tomb of Eurysaces in Rome, suggest that a millstone was normally moved by a couple made up of a donkey and a slave,” Zuchtriegel said. “The latter, in addition to pushing the grindstone, had the task of encouraging the animal and monitoring the grinding process, adding grain and removing flour.”

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons and “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Rome sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Late Antiquity sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; “Outlines of Roman History” by William C. Morey, Ph.D., D.C.L. New York, American Book Company (1901) ; “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932); BBC Ancient Rome bbc.co.uk/history/ ; Project Gutenberg gutenberg.org ; Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Live Science, Discover magazine, Archaeology magazine, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, The New Yorker, Wikipedia, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopedia.com and various other books, websites and publications.

Last updated October 2024