Olive Oil in Antiquity: Lamps, Athletes, Amphorae and the Liquid That Ran the Mediterranean
The ancient Mediterranean ran on olive oil the way the modern world runs on petroleum, and the comparison is not loose. Oil lit every lamp in every house and temple from Jerusalem to Marseille. It was the soap, rubbed onto the skin and scraped off with a curved bronze blade. It was the base of every perfume and most medicines. It was the prize at the games, the anointing of kings, the fuel of the sacred flame and, only after all of that, something you poured on food. The bottle on our shelf is the last surviving use of a substance that once did everything. Our olive oil buying guide covers the bottle; this is the six thousand years behind it.
The tree
The wild olive grows around the Mediterranean, and it was domesticated somewhere in the Levant, in what is now Syria, Israel and Jordan, roughly six thousand years ago; the oldest evidence of oil pressing, crushed pits and stone basins, comes from the Carmel coast of Israel. The domesticated tree spread west with every seafaring people, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, and it is one of the few crops that defines a climate: where the olive grows, the Mediterranean is, and where it stops, the Mediterranean ends. The trees live for centuries, some for more than a thousand years; there are trees in Puglia, Crete and the West Bank that were bearing fruit when Rome was a republic, and our Puglia guide describes the laws that protect them.
Athena's gift
The Athenians said their city was won with an olive tree. In the myth, Athena and Poseidon competed for the patronage of the city; Poseidon struck the rock and produced a spring of salt water, and Athena planted an olive tree, and the citizens chose the tree. A sacred olive grew on the Acropolis, said to be that one, and when the Persians burned the city in 480 BCE the tree was said to have sprouted again the next day. Olive oil from the sacred groves was the prize at the Panathenaic games, given in painted amphorae that survive in museums. Cutting down an olive tree in Attica was a crime against the state. For the Greeks, the tree was not agriculture. It was identity.
The oiled body
Greek athletes competed naked and slick with olive oil, which was rubbed on before exercise and, mixed with the dust and sweat of the gymnasium, scraped off afterward with a strigil. The scrapings of famous athletes were collected and sold as medicine. Oil was the ancient world's soap, its moisturizer and its sunscreen, and a Roman bath was a sequence of oiling, sweating, scraping and plunging; the wealthy carried their own oil in small flasks. It was also perfume, the base into which rose, iris, myrrh and frankincense were steeped, and every medicine that had to be rubbed on was rubbed on in oil. The word for the Messiah, in Hebrew and Greek, means "the anointed one," and the anointing was with olive oil.
Light
Every lamp in antiquity burned olive oil. Clay lamps, small, flat, with a spout for the wick and a hole for filling, are among the most common objects archaeologists find, because every household had many; the oil lasted, gave a steady flame and did not smoke badly. The temple lamps of Jerusalem burned it, which is the miracle behind Hanukkah. Roman streets, theaters and baths were lit with it. The demand for lamp oil was enormous and was met largely with the lower grades, the second pressings and the oil from bruised fruit, while the first cold pressing went to the table and the perfumer, a grading system the modern trade still follows.
Amphorae and a hill of broken jars
Oil moved by sea in amphorae, tall two-handled clay jars with pointed bases for packing in a ship's hold, each holding around seventy liters, stamped with the maker and the estate. Roman Spain, in the valley of the Guadalquivir around modern Seville, became the great producer, and its oil fed Rome by the hundreds of thousands of amphorae a year. In Rome, near the river port, the empty jars, which could not be reused for oil because it turned rancid in the porous clay, were broken and piled, systematically, for two centuries. The result is Monte Testaccio, a hill more than a hundred feet high and nearly a kilometer around, made entirely of the shards of an estimated fifty million amphorae, and it is still there, with restaurants dug into its base. It is the largest single monument to a food in the world, and it is a garbage dump.
The table
The ancients did eat olive oil, on bread, on vegetables, in the sweet-sour sauces of Roman cooking, and the Roman writers graded it with a connoisseur's care: green oil from unripe fruit was the finest and most expensive, oil from ripe fruit the everyday, and the agricultural writers gave instructions on harvest timing and pressing that a modern producer would nod at. They understood that oil was best fresh and that heat and light ruined it, that the first gentle pressing was the best, and that oil from a particular estate tasted of that estate. What they lacked was the vocabulary of fruitiness, bitterness and pepper that a modern panel uses; what they had was the same tongue.
What the history explains
Why olive oil is graded by pressing: because the Romans did it that way for lamps and tables. Why "extra virgin" means the first cold pressing: because it always did. Why an olive tree in the wrong place is an insult to a landscape: because for three thousand years it was the marker of civilization. Why the Mediterranean diet is an olive oil diet: because the Mediterranean is an olive oil place, and always was. And why a good bottle is worth what it costs: because the oil that lit the temples and anointed the kings is the same liquid, from the same tree, made the same way, and the Athenians would have recognized a Puglian Coratina on a piece of bread. The olive oils are at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com. Pour it on bread first, the way they did, and let a lamp be a lamp.
