flos scombri
- Civilization
- Roman Hispania
- Period
- c. AD 1 to 200
Flos is Latin for flower, and in the fish-sauce trade it marked the best of a batch, the first and clearest liquid drawn off rather than what came later or what was pressed out at the end. Scomber is the mackerel. Painted on an amphora, the abbreviated formula G F SCOMBRI opens out as gari flos scombri: the flower of mackerel garum.
The phrase belongs to a whole labelling habit. Roman fish-sauce jars were painted with tituli picti, running inscriptions that could name the product, the grade, the species, the age of the batch, a workshop or a merchant, and where the jar was going. This is a market in which a buyer chose by species and by grade, and paid accordingly, which is why mackerel garum turns up in Martial as a gift worth naming while a cheaper tuna sauce is the joke.
The jars carrying these labels were made and filled on the coasts of Baetica, in southern Spain, and shipped across the western empire. Fragments with painted grade marks have been recovered as far as Roman Britain and the Rhine frontier.
