Rome: A Scent Worth Two Days' Wages, and the Business Freed Slaves Built

Early republican Rome did not look on oriental luxury — including perfume — with any enthusiasm. In 189–188 BC the censors even issued an (ineffective) ban on exotic scents, which is itself proof of how quickly perfume's popularity was spreading across the social classes despite the prohibition. After the conquest of the eastern Mediterranean and the war with Antiochus III, the floodgates opened fully. And if you look at exactly where, in the Roman world, perfume was actually made, you end up at an excavation in Paestum in southern Italy, at frescoes in the House of the Vettii in Pompeii, and at dozens of funerary inscriptions of freed slaves who grew rich on scent.

The Workshop on the Forum Where No One Would Have Pressed Olives

In the northwest corner of the forum at Paestum — a Greek foundation originally called Poseidonia, turned into a Roman colony in 273 BC after the war with Pyrrhus — archaeologists excavated a marble pressing bed as early as the 1920s. In October 1995 the French archaeologist Jean-Pierre Brun ran a new sounding there with a clear goal: establish the dating, the type of press, and the workshop's purpose. The result: the business had operated since the colony's founding — heaps of sherds from perfume bottles (unguentaria) date back as far as the 3rd century BC — but the marble press itself was installed only in the second half of the 1st century AD, and remained in use at least into the 3rd century AD.

The location alone is telling: by the 2nd century AD the forum served as a public marketplace, not agricultural land, so the press could not have been producing ordinary table oil. Add to that the extremely careful stone-working — utilitarian press blocks are usually left rough — a deep mortar found during earlier excavations, and erosion grooves on the stone's surface caused by oleic acid from long, slow pressing. Archaeologists recognize exactly this kind of wear from the deeply eroded limestone presses of Tunisia. This was, without doubt, oil pressed slowly and over a long time — precisely as the Roman agronomist Columella advises: "Crush the olives in a hanging mill and set them on the press discs so as not to overload the vessels, but let them drip only little by little under the press's own weight."

Cupids at Work: What the Pompeian Frescoes Show

The type of press that stood at Paestum can be identified thanks to a match with another source — paintings. In the House of the Vettii in Pompeii, a frieze survives on a black background in which cupids and Psyche carry out various economic crafts: grape harvesting, winemaking, blacksmithing, flower gathering — and in the final panel, the entire process of making perfume, running right to left. The painting shows a wedge press: two upright posts joined by a beam, between which wooden wedges were driven in with hammers, gradually compressing a basket filled with crushed olives. This is exactly the type Heron of Alexandria describes in the mid-1st century as the standard perfumer's press. David Mattingly (1990) showed that a similar press in a Pompeian workshop on the Via degli Augustali, previously mistaken for a screw press, was in fact also a wedge press — direct screw presses did not spread through the Roman world until a century later.

A painting from the House of the Deer in Herculaneum shows a further step: a cupid stirs a liquid in a bowl set on a tripod over a fire — heating oil together with raw materials (hot enfleurage). In the frieze from the House of the Vettii, two more cupids grind ingredients in a mortar — dyes, resins, fixatives — while a third stands at a counter with a spatula and a scent bottle; in front of him lies a scroll with the recipe, and scales for measuring out the ingredients according to it. Behind him is an open cabinet with glass bottles and a statuette of Venus. The final scene: a cupid has just applied perfume to the wrist of a seated Psyche, who lifts her hand to her face to smell the scent.

Capua, Capital of the Perfumers

While Delos was a port and Paestum a smaller local workshop, the real center of Roman perfumery lay in Campania. Capua was called the "capital of the perfumers" — and the very word for the perfumers there, seplasiarii, derives from Seplasia, the square where they kept their shops. Campania had two advantages at once: a rich production of olive oil (the oil from Venafrum was especially prized; Pliny writes that "in fragrance it suits perfumery so well that it takes the palm of victory") and an endless supply of roses. According to Pliny, "in spring, after a rest, the fields bear a rose of sweeter scent than the garden one — which is why it's said the Campanians produce more scent than others produce oil." Virgil, Ovid, Propertius and Martial all praise Campania's rosaria — rose fields blooming twice a year, extensive enough that this was clearly commercial cultivation, not an ornamental garden.

What Perfume Cost, and Who Made Money From It

Pliny left behind a price list of raw materials: the most expensive was balm of Judea, up to 1,000 denarii per sextarius (about 0.55 liters), cinnamon 300 denarii per pound, while cheaper ingredients like styrax, henna, or cardamom cost one to seventeen denarii. For finished perfumes, a more precise figure comes from the Egyptian papyrus Graux 10 (a letter addressed to a leading citizen of the Fayum, 1st century AD): a kotyle — about 0.24 liters — of the finest Italian rose oil sold in Egypt for eight drachmas, roughly eight sesterces, which, set against the period wage of an agricultural laborer, amounted to a bit more than two days' work. Diocletian's Price Edict of AD 301 later fixed a pound of the finest rose oil at 80 denarii — more than three times the price of iris oil (30 denarii), but well below myrrh (400–600 denarii).

Perfumery was lucrative but socially low-ranking — the Historia Augusta places the profession of seplasarius on the same level as an innkeeper or a brothel-keeper. Yet it enriched people who otherwise had no chance of rising socially. Of five Capuan inscriptions mentioning perfumers, four are freed slaves, and the fifth is probably the son of a freedman. The family of L. Faenius Rufus, of equestrian rank, had freedman clients running perfume businesses across the empire — in Rome, Pozzuoli, Bovillae, on Ischia. The typical arrangement: a wealthy family financed the business and in return received interest on the loan, half the profit, or — from the mid-1st century BC — half the freedman's estate. Some went far: in Pompeii, M. Decidius Faustus became minister Augusti and donated a gift to the Temple of Apollo; in Lyon, Pisonius Asclepiodotus became an Augustal seviro — an honorary office reserved for wealthy freedmen.

Series on ancient perfumery: part 0 — Tappūtī, the first recorded perfumer · part 1 — Mesopotamia: trade in old Larsa · part 2 — Egypt: kyphi and the expedition to Punt · part 3 — Greece: Delos and Theophrastus

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Further reading: Jean-Pierre Brun, "The Production of Perfumes in Antiquity: The Cases of Delos and Paestum," American Journal of Archaeology 104.2 (2000), 277–308 — the same study used for the piece on Delos, with a detailed account of the Paestum workshop and the Pompeian frescoes, plus an appendix of 56 Latin inscriptions naming Roman perfumers. David J. Mattingly, "Painting, Presses and Perfume Production at Pompeii," Oxford Journal of Archaeology 9 (1990), 71–90, for identifying the type of press shown in the Pompeian paintings.