< PreviousCQ10Cahn’s Quarterly 4/2018tation made by Symmachus, that “among all those things the earth yields, we find no such things as salt, which we can have only from the sea.” (QC 4.4).Salt was, however, produced using many oth-er methods in Antiquity, some of which were already employed in prehistoric times. Salt could be harvested from salt lakes that dried up seasonally – Pliny mentions the Lake of Tarentum which “is dried up by the heat of the summer sun, and the whole of its waters, which are at no time very deep, not higher than the knee in fact, are changed into one mass of salt.” Furthermore, it could be made by evaporating natural brine from springs. “In Chaonia,” for instance, “there is a spring, from which they boil water, and on cooling obtain a salt that is insipid and not white.” Rock salt was also exploited, both in open cast and un-derground mines. “There are also mountains of natural salt, such as Oromenus in India, where it is cut out like blocks of stone from a quarry, and ever replaces itself, bringing greater revenues to the sovereigns than those from gold and pearls. It is also dug out of the earth in Cappadocia, being evidently formed by condensation of moisture.” (NH 31.39).Salt was used in a wide variety of ways in Ro-man cuisine and became so intimately associ-ated with the very idea of food that Cicero, in his dialogue on friendship, Laelius de amici-tia, could observe: “And the proverb is a true one, ‘You must eat many a modius of salt with a man to be thorough friends with him.’" (67). This metaphor for a long span of time be-comes surprisingly concrete on reading Cato the Elder’s recommendation that farm hands should be issued “a modius [ca. 8.7 litres] of salt a year per person.” The salt ration is men-tioned in the section on “relish for the hands” and thus numbers amongst those foods that added some variety to labourers’ otherwise fairly bland diet: pickled windfall olives, ripe olives that were unsuitable for oil production, the residues from the manufacture of garum (allec), vinegar, a sextar (ca. 550 ml) olive oil per month and the above-mentioned modius of salt. (De agri cultura 58).Some of this salt was surely used to season food such as the cabbage salad so highly rec-ommended by Cato in his chapter on the me-dicinal value of cabbage:Recipe from Antiquity “A Civilised Life is Impossible without Salt!” Salt in Ancient Rome “By Hercules,” Pliny the Elder exclaims in his Naturalis historia, “a civilised life is impossi-ble without salt! Indeed, so highly necessary is this substance to mankind, that the plea-sures of the mind, even, can be expressed by no better term than the word ‘salt,’ such being the name given to all effusions of wit. All the amenities, in fact, of life, supreme hilarity, and relaxation from toil, can find no word in our language to characterise them better than this.” (31.41). Symmachus, one of the dinner companions in Plutarch’s Quaestiones convi-vales, likewise stresses the importance of salt, arguing that “there would be nothing eatable without salt […] salt is the most desirable of all relishes. For as colours need light, so the tastes need salt.” (4.4).Salt was, however, much more than a taste-bud tickler. Not only was it essential for the preservation of foodstuffs and a component of many medicinal formulations, but it also played a significant role in animal husband-ry as well as in numerous artisanal processes. Accordingly, it was of great importance to en-sure a constant supply of salt. Titus Livius re-lates that when Ancus Marcius, the legendary fourth king of Rome (r. 640-616 B.C.), founded the town of Ostia he also built salt works there. (Ab urbe condita 1.33). The aim was to avoid dependence on the Etruscans, who produced salt in Veii on the opposite bank of the Tiber.The salines at the mouth of the Tiber could produce up to an estimated 10,000 tonnes of salt a year by means of the solar evapora-tion of sea water that had been channelled into large basins. (S.A.M. Adshead, Salt and Civilization, 1992, 29). This method is also described by Pliny: “The usual [salt], and the most plentiful, is made in salt pools by run-ning into them sea water not without streams of fresh water, but rain helps very much, and above all much sunshine, without which it does not dry out.” (NH 31.39). Why fresh wa-ter and rain were necessary remains puzzling, but possibly they were used to wash out the bitter magnesium salts also contained in sea water. (Adshead 31). Sea salt was produced in countless other salt works along the Mediter-ranean coast, and its predominance, also in the minds of men, is reflected by the asser-Anchovies and sea salt for the preparation of garum and allec. From left to right: A BOWL WITH STAMPED DEC-ORATION. Dm. 17 cm. Clay, black glaze. Campanian, 4th cent. B.C. CHF 800. A SALT CELLAR. H. 3.1 cm. Bronze. Roman, 1st-3rd cent. A.D. CHF 480. A JUG. H. 18.3 cm. Silver. Roman, 2nd-3rd cent. A.D. CHF 7,800. A SMALL BOWL. Dm. 12.2 cm. Clay, black glaze. Campanian, ca. 330 B.C. CHF 240.By Yvonne YiuCQ11Cahn’s Quarterly 4/2018However, the salt ration was so large that it was, in all likelihood, also used to preserve foodstuffs. In addition to the salting and cur-ing of meat and fish, salt was used to pickle vegetables, and in his agricultural treatise De re rustica Columella provides numerous reci-pes including one for pickled onions:Salt was also an indispensable ingredient for the manufacture of the ancient Romans’ fa-allec, was given to Cato’s farm hands as a relish. Viewed today with a mixture of fas-cination and revulsion, this “liquid of a very exquisite nature” was, according to Pliny, “prepared from the intestines of fish and var-ious parts which would otherwise be thrown away, macerated in salt; so that it is, in fact, the result of their putrefaction.” The highly sought after garum sociorum that was made from mackerel could fetch exorbitant prices similar to those commanded by precious un-guents. But many other fish – mostly small ones – were also used to produce garum. “Fi-nally,” Pliny observes, “everything became a luxury, and the various kinds that are now made are infinite in number.” There was even a kosher garum “prepared from fish with-out scales [for] the sacred rites of the Jews.” (NH 31.43-44). Nonetheless, ordinary garum seems to have been generally affordable. In Pompeii, for instance, garum containers were found throughout the city in the houses of both wealthy and poor or average citizens, as well as in the many taverns. The Price Edict of Diocletian (301 A.D.) paints a similar pic-ture, the price for fish sauce being approx-imately that of oil. (R. Curtis, In Defense of Garum, in: The Classical Journal 78 (1983) 232-240).Garum was manufactured mainly in large production centres (cetariae) located espe-cially in southern Spain, North Africa and the Black Sea. These factories were remark-ably uniform in design with a central patio, storage facilities, rooms for cleaning fish and fermentation vats made of cement set into the floor and sealed with opus signinum or carved into the rock. (A. Trakadas, Evidence for Fish Processing in the Western Mediterranean, in: Ancient Fishing and Fish Processing, ed. T. Bekker-Nielsen, 2005, 47-82). Many fami-lies, however, produced their own fish sauce in small quantities for home use. The Roman Egyptians Syra and Psias, for instance, wrote to their son Ision that they would prepare it for his homecoming. (P. Oxy. 1299). The most detailed instructions on how to make garum are recorded in the Geoponika, a Byzantine text of the 10th century A.D. that stands in the tradition of the Roman agricultural treatises and has close links to numerous ancient texts. That in one of the four garum recipes the ratio of fish to salt is given is of particular interest: “But the Bithynians prepare it in this man-ner: they indeed take small, or large mendole, which are more eligible; but if they cannot get them, anchovy or scad or mackerel […]; and they throw them into a baking-trough […], and having applied two Italian sextarii salt to a modius of fish, they mix them well [this is a ratio of 1:8 or 15 per cent salt]. Having suffered them to lie during one night, they put them into an earthen vessel, and they set this in the sun during two or three months, stirring them with a stick at stated periods; Salt was also an indispensable ingredient for the manufacture of the ancient Romans’ fa-vourite condiment: the fermented fish sauce garum, also called liquamen, whose sediment, Columella’s Pickled Onions (RR 12.10)“Choose Ascalonian or Pompeian onions […] put them in a jar together with thyme or savory and pour a liquid consisting of three parts vinegar and one part strong brine over them. Place a small bundle of savory on top of the onions to keep them submerged.”To make strong brine hang a small basket of salt in a vessel filled with rain-water. Keep refilling the basket until the salt no longer dissolves. The brine is ready for use if a piece of sweet cheese floats on it. (RR 12.6).Cato’s Cabbage Salad (AC 157)“If you eat cabbage chopped, washed, dried, and seasoned with salt and vinegar, nothing will be more wholesome.”Garum and allec (based on Geoponika 20.46)Lacking the heat of the Mediterranean sun, garum and allec can still be made with the aid of an incubator. Take 1 kg fresh ancho-vies and 150 g sea salt, place a layer of fish in a container, sprinkle liberally with salt, continue until all the ingredients are used up, ending with a layer of salt (photo on left). Incubate for 7-10 days at 40 °C, stir-ring occasionally. Once the fish have more or less dissolved (photo on right) strain through a sieve to remove the bones. Then filter through a cloth to separate the gar-um from the residues (allec).then they take and stop them and lay them by. Some indeed pour two sextarii of old wine on a sextarius of fish.” (20.46).Both in the Geoponika as well as in other an-cient sources, the fish from which the garum is made are not gutted. Occasionally the in-testines of other fish are even added. This is crucial for the successful fermentation of the fish as the innards contain large quantities of proteolytic enzymes that break down the proteins into water-soluble amino acids and peptides in a process called autolysis: the fish is literally liquified. Besides helping to draw out the liquid from the fish, the salt supresses the growth of undesirable bacteria. As a re-sult, the clear, amber-coloured sauce has an almost unlimited shelf-life. (O. Mouritsen et al., Garum revisited, in: International Jour-nal of Gastronomy and Food Science 9 (2017) 16-28; S. Grainger, Roman Fish Sauce, in: Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery, 2010, 121-131).CQ12Cahn’s Quarterly 4/2018HighlightA nude, apparently male torso that is sponta-neously appealing and seems to make sense immediately – but it is nowhere near as sim-ple as that! The head and neck are missing, as are both arms from the shoulders down, the legs from a line just below the genitals and the genitals themselves. All the now lost body-parts were once carefully joined to the torso by means of dowels and pins and the holes and recesses into which they were once inserted are still clearly visible. The evidence is sufficient to reconstruct the motif of the statue: the figure of a youth (without pubic hair) was designed to be viewed frontally; his body formed a distinctive s-shaped curve; the right arm was lowered, as was the left arm, although the latter appears to have rested on a very high support (this is the only expla-nation for the steeply sloping shoulder axis and the compressed flesh and muscles next to the armpit); the right leg was engaged and the hip raised whereas the thigh of the free left leg was slightly advanced and the lower leg somewhat set back. As yet, no conclusions can be drawn regarding the attributes.What immediately springs to mind is the Apollo Sauroktonos, the lizard slayer, of Arndt’s estate of unknown provenance (he himself wrote “wo” [“where?”] on its edge); Arndt probably bought the image without knowing (any more) where the object was located. It shows a sculpture of Ganymede. Closer inspection reveals that it is the very same torso as that now in the Cahn Gallery in its reconstructed state. The breaks and ad-ditions on the photograph match all those places where the limbs of the torso end after the removal of later additions. Several dowel holes above the left waist, at the left upper arm, below the right armpit and at the right hip are located exactly where the eagle to the figure’s left and the lowered arm on the right were attached.There are indeed parallels to be found in an-cient sculptures of Ganymede, such as the Roman marble group in Naples (Museo Nazi-onale, inv. no. 6355) from the Farnese Collec-tion. Thus, the historical reconstruction may indeed be correct (interestingly the lower sec-tion of the figure was not executed; instead the torso was placed on a moulded base at the level of the beginnings of the thighs). The sculpture would then represent the innocent shepherd boy who was abducted by Zeus in the guise of an eagle and carried off to Mount Olympus where he was assigned the office of cupbearer to the gods. Ancient sources testify to the androgyny of Ganymede, even explicit-ly calling him a “hermaphrodite”. Stylistically the torso is close to post-Praxitelian sculptures such as the so-called Eros/Genius Borghese. A LIFE-SIZE TORSO OF A YOUTH. H. 60 cm. Marble. Roman, 1st-2nd cent. A.D. after a Greek model probably of the 3rd cent. B.C. Price on requestwhich numerous Roman copies are known. This is a youthful, playful version of the otherwise often brutally punitive god with bow and arrow created by the late Classical sculptor Praxite-les, presumably as early as the 360s B.C. The bronze original, which is generally assigned too late a date, may have been made at the peak (akmé) of Praxiteles’ artistic career during the 104th Olympiad (364-361 B.C.), as reported by Pliny – on the basis of sources available to him – in the book on metals in his Natural History (34.50). The similarities are evident: a beau-tiful (very) young man with that distinctive, pronouncedly curved posture and a very sim-ilar sculptural organisation. But it soon becomes clear that this cannot be the type of the tor-so belonging to the Cahn Gal-lery. There are two (significant) differences: Although the left shoulder is pushed up, the arm clearly pointed downwards, whereas that of the Sauroktonos reaches up the tree trunk he is leaning against and which the lizard he is about to impale is climbing. Secondly, the youthful Apollo is generally not as sweet and feminine.Another solution must therefore be found. The femininity, the hermaphroditic appear-ance of the torso is striking. And the gently curved buttocks are reminiscent of those of an adolescent girl. As the sculpture must rep-resent a mythological figure, Narcissus, Eros or Hermaphroditus are all possible candidates. The famous statue of Hermaphroditus from Pergamon dating from the 2nd century B.C. has an unequivocally female breast but wears a cloak slung around the hips, which cannot have been the case with the Cahn torso. The work of the Munich-based archaeologist, collector and art dealer Paul Arndt (1865-1937) offers a promising line of inquiry here. Arndt had close ties to some of the most eminent authorities on ancient sculpture of the age, especially Heinrich Brunn and Adolf Furtwängler, and is known to have procured sculptures for numerous collections, too. Of particular interest to us is a photograph from The Two Sides of GanymedeBy Martin FlasharThe torso in its reconstructed state. Historical pho-tograph, before 1937, from the estate of Paul Arndt (Erlangen University)Next >