Olive oil jar — dating back 1,800 years — hid quote from ‘extremely popular’ Roman

Archaeologists found part of an ancient clay jar containing a cryptic, first-of-its-kind inscription: a quote from one of Rome’s greatest poets.

The 3-inch piece of pottery was discovered along the banks of a stream in southern Spain, according to a study published on June 5 in the Journal of Roman Archaeology.

The piece was once part of an amphora — an olive oil container — archaeologists, affiliated with universities in Spain and France, said.

The region it was found in, about 250 miles southwest of Madrid, may have been home to a rural Roman settlement, which would have included ceramics workshops.

Etched inside the fragment, which is around 1,800 years old, are several lines written in Latin, the lingua franca of the Roman world.

While some lines are indecipherable, others appear to be taken from Virgil, a celebrated Roman poet who lived during the first century B.C.

“Virgil was extremely popular with the Romans,” Jane Draycott, an ancient historian, archaeologist and lecturer at the University of Glasgow, told McClatchy News in a Twitter message. “His Aeneid was the Latin equivalent of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, an epic masterpiece that everyone read.”

The epic poem, which centered on the fall of Troy and the founding of Rome, is not the source of the fragment’s quotation, though.

Instead, the lines appear to be lifted from one of Virgil’s lesser known poems called the Georgics.

The inscribed verse, taken from the beginning of the poem, references acorns, wheat and wine.

The fragment only contains a few words, but the full sentence, according to a modern English translation, reads:

“O you brightest lights of the universe

that lead the passing year through the skies,

Bacchus and kindly Ceres, since by your gifts

fat wheat ears replaced Chaonian acorns,

and mixed Achelous’s water with newly-discovered wine,

and you, Fauns, the farmer’s local gods,

(come dance, together, Fauns and Dryad girls!)

your gifts I sing.”

The poem “makes sense as far as an amphora containing olive oil is concerned,” Draycott said. “It’s about the invention of farming, so a suitable topic for one of the Roman dietary staples.”

As to who inscribed the lines, which constitute the first-ever poem found inside an amphora, archaeologists are not certain. It could be the handiwork of a ceramics worker or child learning to write.

Its discovery indicates that, despite a widespread belief that literacy was uncommon in the ancient world, working class inhabitants of far-flung Roman provinces could read and write.

“There are debates about Roman literacy levels because a lot of ordinary people’s literary efforts would have been written on perishable material that doesn’t survive today,” Draycott said.

But ancient scribblings discovered on papyrus, wooden tablets — and now most recently on this clay fragment — “make it clear that plenty of ordinary people, even enslaved people, could be literate and have a degree of education,” Draycott said.

Google Translate was used to translate the study published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology.

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