All dates are "AE" - "After Empire" - meaning that they are relative to Octavian's taking the title "Augustus" in 27BC.
Fragment One: 2AE
Augustus looked dubiously at the lumpy yellow-brown object held before him. It made an odd contrast with his spy mistress's hands, for Aspasia matched her namesake (the great Solon's celebrated mistress) in her looks and her intellect. Aspasia's skin was pink, perfectly clean, finer than the finest Cathayan silk and was so alabbastorly-translucent that it seemed to glow in the bright early morning light. Her fingers could have been carved by a great sculptor as an illustration of grace, and each of the nails that surmounted them was a perfectly cultured pearl. The object, otoh, was rough skinned, warty, unpleasantly irregular without being complex enough to be interesting, and very essence of brooding opaqueness.
"And you say that my father found this..." Aspasia was one of the few people Augustus both respected as having an intelligence equal to his own - and he was fond of her for other decidely non-intellectual reasons too. So he paused and struggled to find a more neutral term than the "repellent mud-clump" that sprang to mind. "This *root* when he conquered the Gauls?"
"Yes, my lord. Among the Veneti in particular."
Augustus reflected. The Veneti had been a special challenge for his adoptive father - but then, unfortunately for the Veneti, the great Julius Caesar had thrived on special challenges. The Veneti had lived in coastal strongholds islets strongholds protected by the tides. When the tides came in, then Roman siege works were destroyed, and when they withdrew Roman naval attackers were left stranded or wrecked. So Caesar had thrown out raised siege works - only to see them evacuate from the threatened fortresses in their ships. And a Veneti ship was almost a fortress in itself - their vessels were built to sail the great Atlantic instead of the tideless and comparatively tame Our Sea. Their thick oak sides had made them almost immune to ramming, while their propulsion came more from their leather sails and less from oars, reducing the usefulness of the old trick of breaking a galley's oars.
Of course Caesar had still won - and even won elegantly - in the end. He was Caesar.
And so, Augustus reminded himself, am I.
"So this is a Veneti root - "
Aspasia nodded, causing her blonde her to shimmer interestingly. "Your father's records say that they called it a potato, my lord."
"A po-tay-toe? A potato. Quite. And what did the Veneti do with it, that so caught my father's interest, and now your own? Is it - " Augustus pursed his lips in thought - a less than manly mannerism he had tried to eliminate, until he realized that he had the Senate so thoroughly cowed that he could have address them in a dress and they would only have complimented him on his choice of colour and fabric. "..Perhaps a source of dye? Or thrown as a weapon?" He could imagine a shower of potatoes being quite formidable through sheer bulk - and perhaps it was poisonous? A man could always use a good cheap poisonous projectile.
Aspasia shook her head.
"No, my lord. They ate it." She carried on quickly. "I know, I know! It looks repulsive - but so do the fish guts used to make garum sauce! And would you ever think to eat raw dough? Like dough, this potato transforms if cooked." She gestured to a waiting slave, who brought forwards and uncovered a serving dish. "This one has been baked whole, with cheese and herbs... These have been boiled and mashed with more cheese and herbs... These, these are especially good my lord! Will you try one?"
Steeling himself, Augustus reached forwards and picked up a yellow finger-like object - which at least had the virtue of not being recognizably derived from the raw potato. It was hot, had been lightly coated with both salt and vinegar, and smelt pleasantly but faintly of the fat it had evidently been cooked in. Biting into it was surprisingly enjoyable.
"Now that it is really quite good! Perhaps it would dip well into garum?"
"The Veneti ate them with their fish, my lord. They called them 'chips'. Or sometimes 'fries'."
"Not an imaginative bunch the Veneti, hmm?" Augustus ate another chip, and then several more, while he thought. "So now I have two mysteries to wonder about, Aspasia." He ate yet *another* chip - this time dipping it into the fishy-smelling thick black garum that a slave had hurried to fetch.
"Two, my lord?"
He nodded. "As I said, the first is why you - and apparently my father - found this root so interesting. Yes, its tasty enough - but that's sufficient reason to give it to my chefs, not to present it an intelligence briefing! Oh, I'm sure you'll solve that mystery for me in a moment. But you will solve the second?" He dipped and munched again. "I don't know! Fortunately I can't see that the answer is likely to be important, so I can treat as an enjoyable scholar's-puzzle kind of mystery, rather than the are-we-still-going-to-be-alive-at-the-end-of-the-week type that we usually discuss here."
Aspasia nodded sincerely and enthusiastically. Her personal commitment to the regime and to Augustus were as complete as could be desired. Even Agrippa was no greater an Augustus enthusiast than Aspasia, and she had the scars from the occasion she had blocked an assassin's knife with her own body to prove it. But beyond that, as an ex-slave who had incited, arranged and even, on occasion, personally executed and tortured Romans of senatorial rank, Aspasia would be fortunate if Augustus's enemies merely flogged her to death with the barbed whip, or crucified her.
"And this safe mystery is...?"
"Why a perfectly edible - if odd looking - vegetable isn't grown everywhere. You don't find, oh, turnips or wheat in just a few gardens in Gaul. It's in the nature of plants to grow and to spread. And plants that produce a useful crop spread still faster, because humans spread them."
Aspasia looked impressed yet willing to tease - a familiar combination. He had originally bought her for use a mistress, before first making her a librarian-secretary and then, as her greater talents became more evident, promoting her to her current role.
"Yet Rome doesn't have silk trees, my lord."
"Or bushes. Or roots. Or whatever silk grows on. Yes. But that's because silk comes from very, very far away. As far as we know it grows all over Cathay... Ah-hah! So your potato -"
"Comes from *very* far away, my lord. Yes."
"Further than Cathay?"
"Very possibly, yes!" They both looked at the raw root with respect. "The men that your father questioned among the Veneti told him a story of a ship that disappeared for several years. When it was found again only a few members of the original crew were on-board - and most of those few were dead. There were other men too, men like no one among had ever seen before - men with red skins and what seemed to be naturally beardless faces. And several *very* odd things indeed. These potatoes, strange leaves that made men cheerful and able to stay awake much longer when then chewed them, something that is called "tobacco" - which I will tell you more of later - and knives and weapons made from sharp flakes of obsidian."
Augustus raised his eyebrows. "As if the makers didn't have the use of iron - or even bronze!"
"Exactly, my lord."
"So wherever the ship went, it definitely wasn't Cathay - we know that they use iron at least as well as we do. How very strange and fascinating... Did they find anything else on this ship?"
"Just gold, my lord - great quantities of gold!" They both laughed - stories like this *always* claimed that great quantities of gold had been found. It was human nature to add "gold - in lumps as big as a man's fist!" to a story of mysterious voyaging, and therefore something that professionals knew to discount utterly.
Aspasia continued: "None of the Veneti found on the ship lived long enough to talk coherently. One of the red men did live. He never learned to speak Gallic well, but he was respected as a warrior and taught the Veneti how to grow and use the potatoes and tobacco. He had descendents among the Veneti when your father conquered them; there might be some among Rome's slave population today. Some of them *might* know something, so some of my people are chatting to slave auctioneers and breeders."
"How, very, fascinating... To think that perhaps somewhere over the seemingly infinite Atlantic there might be other lands we have no idea exist. Lands as vast as Europe or Asia, with their own peoples, histories and philosophies - kept totally separate by the impassible Atlantic, except for this one chance contact... And yet you said the potato itself, and not this vast - if purely philosophical - revelation was the focus of this meeting. You were, as I remember, extremely precise in this."
"I was, my lord."
"And you're an extremely precise woman. Even for a Greek"
"Even," Aspasia pointed out, exercising one of her few - or at least the most decided - vanities, "For a descendent of Socrates."
"The potato is really that important?"
Aspasia nodded. "Augustus, the potato will change everything."