Ancestral Fruits: Strawberries, ʻStrawberriesʼ and Acorns in Roman Gardens and Texts

By drawing together miscellaneous textual and visual sources on foraged fruits and nuts named often in the literary texts on the Golden Age and Arcadia, I would like to build on the work started by Emily Gowers in The Loaded Table by adding the considerations of medical practitioners (as based on the medical texts), too. This paper will reconstruct not only the Classical image of “simple,” “natural,” “raw,” “better” Golden Age bounty represented by the fruits and nuts said to have been consumed, but also reconsider the debates and the very much ambivalent attitudes towards what that image probably meant for the Romans of the Hellenistic and Roman eras.