Fashioned after a noble woman of the late-Roman period, the base of this gilded silver pepper pot could be turned from closed to open and had small holes to allow the pepper to be sprinkled. Imported from India, pepper was an exotic and expensive spice that had reached the Roman world only in the first century AD. To lift the siege of Rome in AD 410, Alaric, king of the Visigoths, had demanded five thousand pounds of gold, thirty thousand pounds of silver—and three thousand pounds of pepper (Zosimus, The New History, V.41).
