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By Sean CoughlinFor Thanksgiving, I thought I’d come up with a new English translation of a seasonal recipe from the Roman cook-book of Apicius. It comes from the third book of De re coquinaria. The Latin is cucurbitas cum gallina. In Joseph Vehling’s English translation: “Pumpkin and Chicken”.If only the Romans had turkeys. And pumpkins.I first learned that the Greeks and Romans were pumpkinless from Laurence Totelin earlier this year and it left me utterly confounded.I had been revising a translation andcommentary of the first book of the sixth-century CE physician Aetiusof Amida’s Medical Collections, and a question came up abouthow to identify different kinds of cucurbits, that immense botanical familyof vines which produce comically-large-berries, like cucumbers, melons,watermelons, pumpkins, squashes, gourds, and luffa sponges.Naively, I thought it would help to look athow authors like Aetius or Galen say cucurbits are prepared. And, since Galen (Onthe Properties of Foodstuffs, 2.3) tells us that people always ate theircucurbits cooked, I figured that Greco-Roman cucurbits must be something likezucchini.&#160; After all, who on earth would cook a melon?“But,” Laurence told me, “zucchinis are new world.”Now, before going into why I found this so shocking, I want to bring everyone up to speed.“Old world” cucurbits include a lot ofdifferent genera: Cucumis, thecucumbersand melons;Citrullus,the watermelons and colocynths;Lageneria,the bottle gourd orcalabash; and a few others like Luffa and Bryonia. No one isquite sure where in the old world they first evolved, but the recentconsensus is somewhere in Africa. In other words, they could haveexisted in the Greco-Roman world.Various old world cucurbits: cucumbers and melons. Photo from the author.“New world” cucurbits, however, are thevines descended from plants native to the Americas. They almost certainly couldnot have been known in antiquity, and the group includes all species of thegenus Cucurbita.This includes zucchini, courgettes,pumpkins,squashes, decorative gourds, and even those 1000kg monsters at fall fairs. None of them were known in Europe beforeColumbus.I would like to imagine that there is atleast one other kindred reader of classics in English who feels a bit anxiousat this news. It’s not just a problem for Apicius’ Thanksgiving casserole or myrehearsal of Epicrates’lampoon of Plato’s Academy.What aboutthe “Pumpkin Pirates” of Lucian’s TrueHistory (2.37)? Or Psyche’ssister’s husband who Apuleius says is “bald as a pumpkin” (Apuleius, Metamorphoses 5.9)? And what will become of Seneca’sApocolocyntosis divi Claudii - the Pumpkinification of theDivine Claudius? Englishtranslations are unusually problematic in the case of cucurbits. Pumpkins showup all over the place. And this isn’t merely because of translators’ license,or a confusion of names. As far asI’ve been able to sort out, it’s mainly the result of an unfortunatecoincidence between the rise of an influential but erroneous botanicalhypothesis, and the publication of two influential Greek and Latin Englishdictionaries.Apicius’ pumpkin? A pre-columbian melon, Cucumis melo L. Colour engraving after F. von Scheidl, 1776. Souce: Wellcome Collection. CCBY.Apicius’ pumpkin? A pre-columbian calabash, Lagenaria siceraria (Molina) Standl., with date palm. Source: Wellcome Collection. CCBYHere is thestory:Before the mid-19th century, the evidenceabout the origins of Cucurbita was mixed. The names of the plantssuggested they came from the “old world”, but depictions of Cucurbitaspecies don’t show up before the mid-1500s.For instance, in Leonhart Fuchs’1542 herbal, DeHistoria Stirpium, we get oneof the first European depictions of the pumpkin plant, the species Cucurbitapepo L. Fuchs, however, calls it cucumis turcicus, the Turkishcucumber, a name which might lead one to think the plant was native to the “oldworld”.Not long after Fuchs, in an herbal of Matthiolusfrom 1586, thesame plant appears again, but with a different name: cucurbitaindica – the Indian gourd. And “Indian,” Matthiolus tells us, meansAmerican: “they say these [new gourds] came into Italy from the West Indies,whence they are called by many ‘Indian’” (Matthiolus of Padua, Commentary on Dioscorides 1559, p. 292,my emphasis).“He has a pumpkin” (ipse cucurbita habet). Using pumpkins as camouflage. Woodcut, late 16th century, Netherlands. CCBYBoth Fuchs and Matthiolus agree that thesecucurbits are foreign (and probably even recent) imports to European markets.They disagree about where they came from: were they indigenous to the old orthe new world?This continued until the 1850s, when thehypothesis that Cucurbita species were indigenous to the old worldreached its most articulated form. It happened as part of a public debatebetween two great 19th century botanists: Alphonse deCandolle and Asa Gray. De Candolle argued that because people hadused the same names for cucurbits since ancient times, the plants with thosenames must have come from the old world.In response, Gray argued that new and‘foreign’ cucurbits only start showing up in 16th century herbals like those ofFuchs and Matthiolus. That, along with documentary evidence from the firstEuropean explorers, suggests a new world origin.The debate continued for over thirty years,only coming to an end in 1883 after a devastatingtwo-part review of De Candolle’s last book, The Origin ofCultivated Plants. In this review, Gray, along his colleague J.Hammond Turnball, presented almost documentary evidence from European explorersthat cucurbits were cultivated in the Americas before European explorers everreached it in 1492.These explorers recorded indigenous namesfor the plants they encountered, but they also used European ones, and these arethe names that stuck: in Latin, cucurbitae and cucumeres; inSpanish, calabaças, melones, pepinos and cogombros; in French, melons,concombres, citrouilles, and courges; in Italian, zucca; andin English, musk-melons, cowcumbers, and, -- most importantly -- thepompion, the source of our word, ‘pumpkin’. Only the name “squash” fromthe Algonquin vernacular made its way into English.Gray and Turnball’s review, however,appeared only after the work on the great Greek and Latin lexica had finishedup – A Greek-English Lexicon by Liddel and Scott, and A LatinDictionary by Lewis and Short. Both dictionaries identify some Greco-Romancucurbits with American pumpkins (Cucurbita pepo L. or Cucurbitamaxima L.), and pumpkins have shown up in English translations ever since.So for this recipe, I figure, why fight it?Tune in tomorrow for Apicius' recipe!The author with pumpkins, sometime in the late 2000s. Photo from the author.SeanCoughlin is Research Fellow in the history of philosophy, science and medicine atExcellence Cluster Topoi and the Institute for Classical Philology, Humboldt-Universitätzu Berlin. He is completing a revised translation and commentary on Aetius ofAmida, Medical Collections, Book I, an edition and translation fragmentsof the 1st century Pneumatist physician, Athenaeus of Attalia, and co-editing avolume on the concept of pneuma after Aristotle. 