“Cīvitationem: Demandiōniō lactam! Boxi boxitiāque lactārum!”
[Citizens: I demand milk! Boxes and boxes of milk!]
—Pliny the Elder, 143 B.C.E.
Who among us has not long loved and often quoted that pithiest of epigrams? And yet, when Pliny stood atop the great marble steps of the Roman Senate and shouted his immortal petition, little did he know the road down which he would start the Roman Republic—and indeed, the whole Mediterranean world.
It was only months before the Republic would nd itself embroiled in the fateful Milk Wars of the Imperium (Bellī Lactae Imperiōniū), which, as any schoolchild knows, spilt over across the farthest reaches of the European Roman territories, from Hadrian’s Wall in Northern England all the way to Easternmost Cismontane Romania.
At the time, of course, Pliny had no way of knowing the seething cauldron of near annihilation into which he would plunge the whole of the European continent, excluding Transbaltic Scandinavia; at the time, he wanted nothing more than to be able to give his children a decent breakfast in the morning.
When Pliny gave his dramatic speech on the Senate steps, Romans took their milk in large, unwieldy wooden crates, which some Romans called “casks” (casquixiī), but which most called “boxes” (boxi). Some 20 years earlier, Roman milk had indeed come to Roman tables in casks, but with the sudden epidemic of Portuguese cask tree blight, which wiped out not only entire cask harvests, but all of Portugal’s orchards of cask-bearing trees as well, Romans had to turn to crates made from lower quality lumber harvested from Southern Bavarian forests.
This was unfortunate for three reasons: The rst was that the trees, rather than bearing fully formed casks, ready to be plucked, had to be cut down and sawn into boards, which were then tted together to make the boxes; this took time, required much hard work and thus cost much more. The Portuguese casks, on the other hand, could be plucked when ripe, right off the tree. All that the cask farmers had to do was drill a hole into the cask at the stem end, drain the cask juice (considered a delicacy by the still wild and warlike Portuguese Hill Tribes), and it was ready to be lled. Since this took much less time and work—though it must be admitted that plucking a fully ripened cask, which weighed between 60 and 80 pounds was no easy feat—the casks cost less than the crates, and were thus much less of a drain on the Roman treasury.
The second reason was that the new boxes, being so much more expensive to make, were much harder to come by. By the time of Pliny’s dramatic speech, only the richest and most influential of Roman families could get a steady supply of milk.
The last reason was that even when Romans could get the milk, the quality was considerably lessened by the boxes they came in. The new crates, made as they were from less desirable wood, imparted a distinct reddish tinge to the milk that was stored inside, as well as a rather unpleasant off-flavor, which one contemporary of Pliny’s described memorably as “reminiscent of singed bat hair.”
At this point, the reader might well ask why the Romans chose not to turn to putting their milk in thrown jugs. Earthenware jugs, after all, were made from clay, with which Italy abounded. Clay was cheap and easy to quarry, to form into jugs and to fire. The Romans’ curious unwillingness to turn to storing and moving their milk in earthenware jugs can be traced to two inter-related reasons, one militating against clay containers, and the other inclining them toward wooden ones: The first was that their historical foes, the Visigoths, whom the Romans regarded as little more than wild and filthy savages, took their milk in jugs. The second was that the Greeks, to whom the Romans turned for cultural guidance and inspiration, had for centuries taken their milk in Portuguese casks, the use of casks for milk having been claimed by no less an authority than Aristotle as being the sine qua non of a civilized society.1
And so it was that Pliny’s children could not even look forward to eating their oat flakes in pink, burnt-bat-hair-flavored milk, because even that was too hard for Pliny to obtain. Instead, Pliny’s family—like most Roman families—needed to use a low-grade milk substitute, called “lactamīssīma”. The word meant, literally, “very, very milk”, but, in truth, it would be hard to have imagined a less milk-like liquid, made, as it was, out of nely powdered pine sawdust dissolved in water, which was then mixed with ground lime, to give it a whitish tint. Needless to say, Pliny’s children were neither happy with their lactamīssīma, nor was their health improved by it. In desperation, Pliny had even turned to feeding them their oat flakes in wine, but this too, predictably, failed as a substitute, as they tended to turn up drunk to school.
1 It seemed to have escaped notice of both the Greeks, and, later, the Romans, that at the time Aristotle spake his immortal words: “Ἀϑῆνϊῷ: βίβατῇ βο λακτφϊμως ϊν κάσκΰς δε φλώεμβούν Πορτούγαλῆμοϊ—κέφαλοΰμϊδες-νῄοΰ πλενίαβίσον καπρίοῶσὶὸῧ φῖλίαραγγοὺὶοὺϊ! (Athenians: Drink ye your milk in casks of Portuguese wood, that ye be not thought by your neighbors that ye be overcome by an unseemly lust toward your goats!)” his mental faculties were badly compromised by the late stages of syphilis.
