Pliny Natural History, Vol. V (Loeb Latin-English)

6 ...Crassus had already erected in the atrium of his house six columns of Hymettian marble, imported to decorate the stage for his aedileship, at a time when there were no marble columns in any public place: so recent is this wealth! At that time, trees brought so much prestige to houses that Domitius would not even settle the price of his enmity without including them.

7 In earlier times, people even took their surnames from trees: for instance, Frondicius, the soldier who performed remarkable deeds against Hannibal by swimming across the Volturno with a covering of leaves; or the Licinian family, the Stolones. A stolo is the term for a useless shoot on a tree, and it was from this that the first Stolo derived his name when he invented the process of trimming vines pampinatio. The care of trees was also a matter of early law; the Twelve Tables provided that anyone who unlawfully felled another person's trees should be fined 25 asses per tree. What are we to think? Did those ancients, who valued even fruit trees at such a low rate, believe that trees would ever reach the valuation mentioned above?

8 There is no less of a miracle in the fruit; many orchards around the suburbs have their annual produce sold for 2,000 sesterces, a larger return for a single tree than farms used to yield in the old days. Because of this, grafting and the "adulteration" of trees were devised, so that not even...