Culture, physical culture and cults of worship have all flowed to us on a golden wave of olive oil.
“Take a plate of walnuts, and as much salt as fits into an eggshell. Mix them in a heated mortar, crush them well and wring the mixture out in a cloth. Then it becomes oil,” the Vikings’ Libellus de arte coquinaria (Little book on culinary art) teaches us. While the collection, which exists in three languages, contains just 35 recipes, they’re top-shelf: full of exotic spices, expensive ingredients and culinary finesse. The earliest surviving manuscript is from the beginning of the thirteenth century, but the recipes are certainly older.
Aside from walnut oil, the everyday cooking of those in the North also included oil from seeds (flax, cannabis, poppies, rape, sunflowers etc.) and animal fats. But it is curious that the Libellus, which has recipes based almost entirely on imported additives such as saffron, Madagascarian aframomum and ginger, doesn’t include recipes that use olive oil.
After all, importing it from, let’s say, the Iberian Peninsula—since the Vikings had regular trade relationships with the Arabs—wouldn’t have been any problem. This is particularly true when we consider that from the Spanish province of Baetica alone (essentially today’s Andalusia)—considered one of the best producers of oil in the Roman Empire—saw about 30 million (!) shiploads of oil sent out over the course of its history.
A lack of information is, itself, information. The disappearance of the olive from the trade and culinary landscape of Europe is one of the clearest and most painful traces of the collapse of the Empire, the end of the Ancient world and the onset of the Dark Ages, from which only the invigorating Middle Ages allowed a gradual recovery. So, along with the Vikings and their crushed walnuts, we are at an inflection point, the slow and gradual creation of a new reality, in which the centers of power that decided on the fate of the world moved to the northwest, and the Empire was reborn north of the Alps. This is also when the slowly returning, by now “Christian” olive meets with other types of oil, sharing their roles, and sometimes even granting them their own sacred prerogatives. But to appreciate this moment, we first have to take quite a big step backwards.
Branch of the Covenant
In the countries of the Middle East’s Fertile Crescent, about twelve thousand years ago, the Neolithic revolution occurred and the hunter-gatherers gained the skills of farmer-herders. A little later, the symbolic farmer Cain took the life of the symbolic herder Abel, marking the dominance of his branch of agriculture over the less promising solutions proposed by his brother. In and of itself, Cain’s aggressive vegetarianism is culture- and state-creating. That’s because, while herds can be herded, a crop can’t be moved around—so next to crops, there spring up villages, settlements, towns and states. What used to (about 100,000 years BCE) grow wild and be gathered, was instead (about ninety thousand years ago) domesticated, and thus cultivated under control.
Until recently it was believed that cultivation a hundred thousand years before Christ was mainly limited to grasses and grains that hunters and gatherers picked and prepared. But today we know this was also around the time when people also started to enjoy the benefits of wild olives. This started, of course, as in the case of many other novelties, in North Africa. Earlier estimates dated the first use of olives to about sixty thousand years ago, but discoveries by archeologists and archaeobotanists last year established that Homo sapiens were using them another forty thousand years earlier, both for heating and most likely for food.
So it’s no surprise that olives and their oil had time to embed themselves in the mythologies of the countries of the Mediterranean basin. In each of these countries, the olive tree holds a special place: worthy, sanctified. According to biblical mythology, it may have something to do with the Tree of Life—the one that grew in the middle of Eden, right next to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Of course, nobody has investigated beyond all reasonable doubt the taxonomy of the tree in Paradise, but literature contains certain circumstantial evidence. Things look even more mysterious in the Apocrypha and traditions. Specifically, Adam—feeling that his life was nearing its end—sends his youngest son, Seth, back to Eden, to bring him oil from the tree of life, which supposedly heals the sick. So Seth sets out for Paradise (accompanied, according to some authors, by Eve), to obtain this oil. Some exegetes made completely serious attempts to systematically research the Biblical tree, usually circling around the primary, mythical trees of the Mediterranean lands: oak, cypress, pine or cedar. Oil can, of course, be pressed from all of them, except the oak. But history finds a continuation (in fact several of them) in the Apocrypha and biblical legends.
So Seth is not allowed into Eden, and according to other versions he simply doesn’t get the healing oil for his father. But the archangel gives him a branch that he is to plant on the patriarch’s grave. According to another version, Seth receives three seeds, which during his father’s funeral he is to place under his tongue. Because from the seeds there will sprout a tree that will give Adam salvation and eternal life. From this same tree – it doesn’t matter whether it grows from a branch or from seeds – after millennia, the cross of Christ will be fashioned. Without going into details, this tree is extraordinary, because it’s made up of three (or more) species growing from a single root. And now, though according to various traditions specific elements of the cross were cut from various types of wood, the inscription with the description of Christ’s crime was carved on a board of olive wood. That’s a trace of olives which the exegetes don’t mention by name. But they do refer to the palm, cedar, cypress, pine, boxwood, fir and even—mainly in England—mistletoe and wild elderberry. The olive appears only with the board. We don’t know how it got into this story; it appears out of nowhere.
So was this the Tree of Life? Could it be one of the species that made up the plant that grew from the seeds, or the branch, of the tree from Paradise? It’s possible, particularly because, together with the cedar and the cypress, it’s one of the materials of the Temple in Jerusalem. But we know for certain that—sticking to the Biblical chronology—not long after these events, the olive branch appears triumphantly in human history. At the end of the flood, Noah, a direct descendant of Seth in the eighth generation, releases a dove, who returns to the Ark carrying in her beak an olive branch (or leaf).
Holy Oil
This is how the plant’s march through the Bible begins. It often shows up there as a metaphor and fuel for lamps, but two of the contexts in which it appears are particularly interesting. First of all, in the recommendations concerning offerings, olive oil is named among just a few of the most important first fruits of the crops and herds that the Levites are to offer in the temple (alongside grain, new wine and wool), which underlines its very fundamental character for Israelite civilization. Second, in the Bible story the olive is a legal tool: after all, there is no way to take the throne without anointing, the most important act in the process of assuming power. The Book of Samuel shows the precise moment when—for the first time—the Spirit of the Lord comes upon David; when oil from a horn is poured on the head of the young king.
A trace of this custom has actually been preserved until today, everywhere where coronations have preserved the attributes of a religious rite. The most holy recipe for oil (because it has to be used to anoint both the Tent of Meeting, the temporary temple, and the Ark of the Covenant) is actually dictated to Moses by God himself. Aside from liquid myrrh, cinnamon, cassia, and fragrant reeds, it’s made up of olive oil (in the amount of 1 hin, or, according to various calculations, 3.6 to 7 liters). More recently, in the second century BCE, the olive became the hero of events recalled in the holiday of Hanukkah—the rededication of the Temple after the Maccabean revolt. In the desecrated temple there is only one jug of kosher oil. This quantity usually lasts barely a day, but this time the lamp burns for as much as eight days.
The New Testament is awash with olive oil. It’s the basis for the fragrant oils used for anointings—from the descriptions of the welcoming of Jesus as a guest, to the fragrances that the three Marys bought and brought to his grave. Of course, in Christianity, anointing accompanies sacrament (anointing of the sick was until recently known as extreme—or final—unction). For the Church Fathers, oleum can even be something more than the sign of a sacrament; Ephrem the Syrian’s view, that Christ is present in the oil, isn’t an outlier. In each case the so-called matter of the sacrament—meaning its vehicle, its means and that without which it doesn’t exist—is almost always olive oil. Though for centuries in Christian literature, authors left it at the capacious term oleum, in the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas, doggedly specifying whatever he could, explained that the matter of the sacrament cannot be, for example, nut oil, because only olive oil symbolizes the Holy Spirit. This approach was binding until the time of Vatican II in the 1960s. When at the end of the nineteenth century in Kalocsa, Hungary, sesame oil was used to perform the sacraments, the Holy Office reminded the archbishop to use the proper substance. It was only Vatican II that allowed the concept of “natural oil, as similar to olive oil as possible.” The direct cause of this change was the frequent counterfeiting or dilution of the oil supplied to the Church, as well as the case of the Inuits and residents of other corners of the world for whom it’s particularly tough to get real olive oil.
A Noble Idea
But getting back to the ancient world, a truly valuable clue is found in the Epistle to the Romans, in which St. Paul, using a metaphor of olives, talks about cultivation techniques. “For if you were cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree,” (Rom. 11:17) the apostle notes in passing, pointing out the existence of wild and cultivated olives, genetic modification (“a cultivated olive tree”), and the universality of grafting techniques.
St. Paul’s observation requires us to step a bit further back to capture the moment when people started to cultivate olives. The fact that the oldest known archeological olive presses come from the Chalcolithic (the era of copper, which came at different times in different parts of the world) still doesn’t mean olives were domesticated at that time. After all, you can press oil from wild fruits, which most likely actually happened. An additional research problem consists in the fact that when discarded, cultivated olives very quickly go wild again. It’s believed that the olive was domesticated about five millennia before Christ, somewhere south of the Caucasus and west of Iran (what’s truly strange is that neither Assyria nor Babylon introduces olives, but it’s known that sesame oil was used in cosmetics in Mesopotamia, and we owe its present-day form to genetic modifications carried out by generations of farmers in Palestine and Syria. So the biblical line of inquiry is most appropriate here, particularly as the oldest vessels bearing traces of olive oil (from about 5800 BCE) were found a kilometer from Nazareth, and the oldest living olive tree, which is between four- and five-thousand years old, grows in Bethlehem.
Olives were often mentioned in Ancient Egypt; depictions of them aren’t rare; and the remnants of olive-wood decorations were found in Tutankhamun’s grave. But the Greek geographer and traveler Strabon astutely notes that in Egypt, with the exception of the area right around Alexandria, olives aren’t cultivated. The conditions aren’t right.
From the third millennium before Christ we have various testimonies that olive oil-based perfumes were desirable presents for wives and lovers. However, the author of a letter from nineteenth century BCE Anatolia writes: “There is no olive oil anymore, bring some of the highest quality.”
Protected by Gods and Earthlings
Olive oil arrives in Greece surprisingly late, particularly when we consider its role in mythology, where it may be even more important and culture-forming than in Judaism. Olive seeds were brought to the islands by the Phoenicians around the sixteenth century BCE; to the Greek mainland only a few centuries later.
In Hellas, the olives are a gift from the immortals. Athena, bestowing olive trees on Attica, wins a duel with Poseidon, who can only offer salt water (according to other versions, a warhorse). So the main city of Attica is named after the goddess, and she herself plants the first olive seedling in the Acropolis. In this place the Erechtheion is built, next to which for millennia, despite the vicissitudes of history, there always grows at least one olive tree. King Cecrops, the one who weighs the gifts of Athena and Poseidon and in the end chooses the goddess, is essentially the founder of a civilization, just like Seth. He introduces monogamy, imposes the cult of the gods, builds altars. He teaches writing and sailing, orders cremation burials and bans human sacrifice. Olives are in Attica for good. Heracles, Athena’s protege, plants them in Olympia (which is what puts wreaths from this plant onto the heads of winning Olympic athletes, though they were also used to crown other distinguished people, such as Themistocles), and he carves a club from its wood. Odysseus uses an olive branch to blind Polyphemus; in Delphi, Theseus offers them as a sacrifice (wound in woolen thread), after which he kills the Minotaur. He certainly would have known that Apollo himself was born under an olive tree.
Much more interesting than the myth in this case is daily life. First and foremost, olive oil was an integral element of bathing in Greece. Unlike in Palestine, anointing wasn’t a ritual, but a hygiene practice, and one that served to stress social position. Jean-Pierre Brun of the Collège de France, an archeologist and researcher on the history of oil, also points out the status-related nature of men’s visits to the gymnasium, particularly to the palaestra – the wrestling school. Each of these visits required diligent rubbing of the body with olive oil, and cleaning it with a strygil (a long hygiene tool used to scrub the skin, including removing oils). The Greek aesthetic canon was also an ethical one. A muscular, slender profile informed one’s surroundings of willpower and fortitude. For this purpose alone, a Greek of status would use up to 10 liters of the highest quality olive oil each year. Brun also notes that using oil for show was a priority, and poorer citizens used lamp or cooking oil. During the year a well-off Greek household would go through 350 to 500 liters of oil, mainly for lighting.
At the turn of the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, the great reformer Solon reveals a clear weakness for olives. He offers detailed procedures for cultivating them, describing elements including the spacing from other plants; he also sets the distance from the neighbor’s land. But first and foremost, he puts them under the protection of the state. It’s not enough that—on pain of death—olive trees can’t be cut down or transplanted, even when they’re growing in an inconvenient place; the land can only be cultivated a certain distance away from them. That’s because Solon wanted to change agriculture-based Attica into a trade economy, and the olive is the principal tool to achieve this goal. The archon prohibits the export from Attica of any food products other than olives. That may be why even years later, the import of olive oil by the Greek colonies on the Black Sea was quite limited, and the costly golden liquid had to be paid for with honey, livestock and slaves. Most likely this was also the reason why olive cultivation spread out over the entire Mediterranean basin: the residents of the islands and Greater Greece didn’t want to pay staggering sums to import the ready product.
Luxury and Fad
Solon’s laws lasted for centuries almost unchanged, but in certain aspects they put down even deeper roots in Athens. Almost three hundred years later, Aristotle (or one of his students), in his Constitution of the Athenians, points out that although the death penalty for destroying olive trees is no longer carried out, it’s still on the books. Toward the end of the great lawgiver’s life he managed to hold the Athens games, which also revolved around olive oil. The victor in the Olympics could count on an olive wreath, and in Athens during the Panathenaic Games organized in honor of the goddess, some of the prizes were top-quality olive oil. Based on the capacity of the black-figure vases presented to the victors (around 40 liters) we can conclude that these were very valuable trophies, all the more so because it wasn’t just one vessel. The boxing champion received 40 amphora, and the chariot driver as many as 140, containing 5,500 liters of oil, which would radically change his material status.
But the Greek paradox consists in this, that with all the great consumption of olive oil (for lighting and cosmetics), we don’t know much about its use in the kitchen. Perhaps it was so obvious that this type of use simply wasn’t noted. But we can’t rule out that it was simply too expensive and—this we know for sure—not available to everyone. Hippocrates, a great admirer of olive oil for external use or as a component of medicines, does in fact mention adding it to vegetables and notes that consuming even small amounts may have a medicinal effect. But the tone of his writings indicates that using olive oil in the kitchen is a fad of the wealthy, and a doctor should rather keep them from excess consumption of this luxury product.
An Empire Flowing With Olive Oil
During Roman times, olive cultivation was in full swing across the Mediterranean basin. The olive branch became a symbol of the goddess Minerva, who according to the myth gave olive oil to humanity. But the Romans’ relationship to the liquid was significantly less devotional. First of all, new cultivation methods appeared, so widespread that even Seneca describes them in his Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, which covers completely different matters. Second, the exchange of goods between the provinces and the equipping of garrisons in the far-flung corners of the empire would have their effect, and soon it was known what kind of oil was produced in which region. Third, the Roman specialty, division and categorization, dictated a more utilitarian approach to olive oil. In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder divides the types of oil precisely into categories based on production technology; time of harvest and maturity of olives at that moment; pressing time; and application. Finally, in Rome, food stops being something overlooked, not often called to mind or simply an instrument of mortification (as in Sparta), and knowledge about cooking goes beyond the medical domain.
This is perfectly illustrated by the case of Athenaeus, a Greek born in the second century in Roman Egypt. This rhetorician and writer was the author of the monumental dialog Deipnosophistae, variously translated as The Sophists at Dinner, The Learned Banqueters and other versions. In it he relates an anecdote about Democritus, who, when asked about the secret of good health, is said to have replied: “Wet your insides with honey and your skin with oil!” There is no way to make a final judgment on whether the native of Abdera, who lived six-hundred years earlier, really said this. We find a similar motif in Pliny, more contemporary to Athenaeus, who tells this story about Caesar Augustus (though the emperor used wine with honey to anoint himself internally). Athenaeus’s dialog relates the course of the feast and is full of gastronomic details. Olive oil appears there as an additive to cheese from Chersonesus in Crimea, and to fry onions, fish and lamb. But first and foremost the author supports the Greek conviction that the best oil comes from the island of Samos (as was written by Theophrastus, Pedanius Dioscorides and many others).
The Roman authors are also in agreement on this point: the empire’s best olive oil is from Venafrum. Everyone confirms this: Cato, Pliny, Horace in his Satires and Martial in his Epigrams. Horace, in the famous second book of the Satires, almost completely devoted to food, even stresses that he’s talking about extra virgin olive oil. And though in the later works of the tome he mocks the gourmands, for Venafrum olive oil he makes an exception, highlighting it as an important ingredient in a complicated sauce made of moray eel.
Just like the contrarian Gaius Terentius Varro, Martial presents an individual culinary exploration. He doesn’t really question the quality of oil from Venafrum, but he writes that the oils from Istria and Liburnia are comparable. Where was Venafrum? Near today’s Molise, on the Adriatic, not the Tyrrhenian Sea. Just like Liburnia, in today’s Croatia, and the Croat/Slovenian Istria. Marcus Gavius Apicius, whose texts made it into a cookbook that’s a compilation of recipes from ancient Rome, unabashedly gives a detailed recipe for counterfeit Liburnian oil—a costly kind, we can assume. By macerating cheap oil from Spain with select herbs, you can achieve a flavor that will fool anyone.
Exports to garrisons and distant provinces came mainly from Africa and Spain. Imported oil, as everywhere, was used both for lighting and for food, but also, as the sources show, for maintaining footwear (the product from Venafrum would never be used this way). Today, the amphoras we dig up all the time, once sent to Roman camps, are significantly smaller than the ones for wine, or for the garum fermented fish sauce that was exceptionally popular in Roman cooking. Even cheap oil was simply expensive and it was used sparingly. Cato shudders at the recollection of a miser who used olive oil “drop by drop.”
Pliny leaves us a very detailed description of medicines based on oil, actually with recipes for medications prepared from other oils (castor, almond, bay, myrtle, dropwort). He notes that the oil used for preparing medicines isn’t as spicy as what’s used in the kitchen. He also points out that extra virgin oil, which he calls “flower” (flos) oil, is the best.
Horace tells of the standard, everyday use of oil: mixed with wine or garum, it’s added to vegetables, especially cabbage. Marcus Gavius Apicius uses oil to fry fish and beans, for ragouts and sauces, and Columella, in a chapter of his book De re rustica (On Agriculture) dedicated to olive cultivation, gives detailed recipes for growing, harvesting and processing them, precisely describing the flavor and character of oils from olives gathered and pressed at different times of the year and using different methods. The multiplicity of flavors, of course, affects the variety of flavors of the dishes.
Olives on Monte Cassino
The Romans’ “technical,” utilitarian approach to farming and using olives spread across Europe—both the part that belonged to the Empire, as well as the part that remained outside the līmes. Here it’s worth mentioning the general, librarian and author of his own De re rustica, Marcus Terentius Varro (first century BCE), who in opposition to most people’s tastes like oil from Casinum the best. Macrobius agrees with Varro’s opinion, but he does so about three and a half centuries later, and at the same time just less than a century and a half before the Benedictines settled there. Olives are still cultivated on Monte Cassino today, with a break under Lombard rule around the end of the sixth century.
In the early Middle Ages, the monks rebuilt the monastery and its farms: this is the beginning of a renaissance for which the North will still have to wait for a long time. The early seventh-century encyclopedist Isidore of Seville seems to follow in Columella’s footsteps, when he connects the months of harvest and pressing with various applications. For at least the next six centuries, Isidore’s Etymologies will be read all over the Christian West. The new Christians of the North will also learn about olives.
Today, Victor Arguinzoni of the Basque Asador Etxebarri, one of the best restaurants of the world, is still using olive wood as fuel for his grill – because the smoke guarantees a certain flavor. In our time, the olive picking world championships are held on the Croatian island of Brač, once Roman Liburnia, and for the second year in a row, the title is shared by newcomers: people from the North, Poles.
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