There’s a story in Procopius’ Wars about a pearl that ended up in the crown of the Sassanian Shah Piroz. It’s a pretty big one, visible from the surface, but guarded, as pearls usually are (Pliny testifies to this) by vicious sharks. A satrap, the Shah’s agent, tracks down the best pearl diver he can find and says “if you bring back that pearl, you can have whatever you want.” The diver takes one look at the shark and figures out how things are likely to go down. “Take care of my kids,” he says, then goes down for the pearl. Going down, he gets past the shark by a stratagem; on the way back up, though, the diver gets caught by the shark and devoured. With the last of his strength, he pitches the pearl up onto the beach. No word on whether Piroz keeps up his end of the bargain.
That’s one way to trade pearls for people. There are others, too. The genre of trade is one that I’m interested in because it speaks to how the Romans thought about problems of production and reproduction, which–since most goods that circulated in the ancient economy came from animals or plants, which produce as they reproduce–the Romans tended to think about together.
So caught were the Romans within this metonymy that they understood pearls not (in “correct” modern terms) as accidental byproducts of the oyster’s immune response, but as a kind of oyster baby. That conception obviously lies behind Pliny’s story about where pearls come from:
“Origo atque genitura conchae sunt, haut multum ostrearum conchis differentes. has ubi genitalis anni stimularit hora, pandentes se quadam oscitatione impleri roscido conceptu tradunt, gravidas postea eniti, partumque concharum esse margaritas pro qualitate roris accepti. si purus influxerit, candorem conspici; si vero turbidus, et fetum sordescere; eundem palere caelo minante.” (NH 9.54.107)
“Their origin and conception is from shellfish, a kind not much different from the oyster. When the time of year for conception arrives and stimulates them, they are said to open up with a kind of yawning and are filled with a dewy impregnation, such that they later become pregnant and bear young. The offspring of the shellfish is a pearl that has the character of the dew that was taken in. If it was pure, the pearl will be white; but, if turbid, the offspring too will be dirty. But the same will wax pale if the sky threatens a storm.”
Nor is this language of birth and conception merely analogical. Toward the end of the passage just quoted, you can see that Pliny uses it to generate an explanation of the varied coloration that differentiates some pearls from others. Pliny actually spends a couple more paragraphs drawing connections between weather patterns and pearl colorations according to a logic that will remind classicists of the Roman belief that children will turn out to look like whatever their mothers were looking at (or imagining) at the moment of conception.
If oysters generate pearls by recapitulating the sexual role of Roman women, then women complete the circuit by wearing pearls. For Pliny, this is a pinnacle of feminine luxuria – a word that covers the meanings of English “luxury” and “lust.” Women establish their status and their identity by wearing pearls. Biggest is best, but each is unique: the Latin word for pearl (margarita being a borrowing from Greek) is unio, which etymologizes as “something of which there is only one.” So, for the Roman woman, in other respects so identity-poor (e.g., while male children received actual names, female children were just called the feminine form of their family name, so that in effect all the daughters of a given family had one name to share), acquiring a pearl was also a way of acquiring a self.
Of course, the “normal” way of acquiring a self was to be born. That’s something else that humans share in common with oysters, according to Pliny: they produce unique offspring. But human children, unlike oyster babies, are things without value. As Pliny and plenty of other Roman authors attest, children could be bought (most of the time) very cheaply. If you were willing to bear the cost and the trouble of raising them, you could buy a household full of slaves for a pittance.
The really valuable thing (and not coincidentally, by Roman standards, a mirabilium) was to find two human children who weren’t unique. Pliny has an interesting anecdote about that, too:
“Toranius mango Antonio iam triumviro eximios forma pueros, alterum in Asia genitum, alterum trans Alpis, ut geminos vendidit: tanta unitas erat. postquam deinde sermone puerorum detecta fraude a furente increpitus Antonio est, inter alia magnitudinem preti conquerente (nam ducentis erat mercatus sestertiis), respondit versutus ingenii mango, id ipsum se tanti vendidisse, quoniam non esset mira similitudo in ullis eodem utero editis; diversarum quidem gentium natales tam concordi figura reperire super omnem esse taxationem” (NH 7.12.56)
“Toranius the slave dealer sold two children to Antony the Triumvir, one born in Asia and the other born across the Alps, as though they were twins: so great was their identity (unitas). Later, when the fraud had been discovered through the differing languages of the children and Toranius was assailed by a furious Antony, who complained among other things of the high price (for the children had been sold for two hundred sestertii), the wily slave dealer replied that he had sold them at so high a price just for that reason, since there was nothing miraculous about the likeness of children born from the same womb, but to discover children so alike belonging to two completely different peoples was a marvel beyond all price.”
I’ll come back to thinking about this passage, and about the broader connection between pearls and people, production and reproduction, in a future post.