The Plan of St. Gall :: :: University of Virginia Library

Recent research has shown that the practice of storing and
moving wine in wooden casks made its appearance in
Europe in the first century B.C. in the territory of the Celts
and of the Illyrians. Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23/24-79) states
that "in the neighborhood of the Alps people put [wine]
into wooden casks and closed these round with hoops."[214]
Edward Hyams in an intriguing, but poorly annotated,
book ascribes this invention to the Allobroges, a Celtic
tribe that lived in and around the valley of one of the
principal alpine tributaries of the Rhone river, the Isère
(modern Dauphinois) where wine was first grown north of
Italy.[215] Strabo (64/63 B.C.-A.D. 21 at least) informs us that

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[ILLUSTRATION]

KONZ (CONTIONACUM)

241.B PERSPECTIVE RECONSTRUCTION

[by courtesy of the Landesmuseum, Trier]

241.A PLAN 1:600

[by courtesy of the Landesmuseum, Trier]

A summer residence of the Roman emperors in Trier, on a plateau above the confluence of the Saar and Moselle rivers, the palace consisted
of a central heatable audience hall with apse—a much smaller replica of the great aula of Trier (fig. 240), plus two outer wings running
parallel to the audience hall and separated from it by two inner courts. The wings were used as living quarters and included a bath. The
grouping of the principal building masses, in their perfect bisymmetry, bears striking resemblance to the layout of the Novitiate and Infirmary
complex of the Plan of St. Gall, except that in the villa of Konz the open courts were not colonnaded.

295

wooden casks "larger than houses" (πίθοι ξύλινοι μείζους
οἴκων) were used to store wine in Cisalpine Gaul,[216] and
that the Illyrians brought their wine from Aquileia to
various markets in wooden casks in exchange for slaves,
cattle and hides.[217]

[214]

Pliny, Hist. Nat., book XIV, chap. 27, ed. Rackham (Loeb Classical
Library), Harvard Univ.-London, IV 1952, 272-73: circa Alpes ligneis
vasis [vinum] condunt circulisque cingunt.

[215]

See Edward Hyams' interesting discussion of this subject in
Dionysos, A Social History of the Wine Vine, New York, 1965, 164ff
(a book brought to my attention by my colleague William B. Fretter, to
whom I owe much other valuable information bearing on the problems
raised by the Monks' Cellar).

Hyams (op. cit., 165) names Pliny the Elder as the source for his
contention "that the practice of storing and moving wine in wooden
casks was of Allobrogian origin." I am not sure that this may not be
straining the available evidence. But Hyams is surely on solid ground
when pointing out that the customs of storing and moving wine in
barrels has a prelude in the Near East, recorded by Herodotus (c. 484425
B.C.) who says that wine trade was carried on in palmwood casks
floated down the Euphrates river from Armenia on circular boats made
of skin (the source is quoted in full in Hyams, op. cit., 40).

[216]

Strabo, Geography, book V, chap. 1, ed. H. L. Jones (Loeb
Classical Library), Harvard Univ.-London, VIII, 1959, 332-33.

[217]

Strabo, op. cit., ed. cit., 316-17: κομίξουσι δ' οὗτοι μέν τὰ ἐκ θαλάττης,
καὶ οἶνον ἐπὶ ξυλίνων πίθων ἁρμαμάξαις ἀναθέντες καὶ ἒλαιον, ἐκεῐνοι δ'
ἀνδράποδα καὶ βοσκήματα καὶ δέρματα.