Wheat

Ancient Rome, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, describing the patrician rite of the confarreatio · Rome; a rite attributed to Romulus, described by a Greek author of the 1st century BC

In his Roman Antiquities (book II, chapter 25), Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek author writing in Rome in the 1st century BC, reports that the most sacred patrician marriage, the confarreatio, takes its name from far, the hulled wheat of the Ancients. Before witnesses and priests, the spouses shared a cake of far, and this communion of 'the holiest and first food' sealed a religious union held to be indissoluble, uniting the goods and the cult; the rite was accompanied by a sacrifice to Jupiter Farreus, the 'Jupiter of wheat'. The grain itself there carries and grounds the marriage bond. The rite and its etymology are attested; its attribution to Romulus, on the other hand, belongs to the reconstruction of an author writing several centuries after the origins he describes.

Denys d'Halicarnasse, Antiquités romaines, II, 25 (Ier s. av. J.-C.), traduction Loeb sur LacusCurtius (penelope.uchicago.edu) ; Pline l'Ancien, Histoire naturelle, XVIII ; Gaius, Institutes, I, 112.

Botanical nuance: the Latin far designates emmer (Triticum dicoccum), an old hulled wheat; the common translation as 'spelt' is imprecise, for it is neither Triticum spelta nor modern bread wheat. A fact against rhetoric: the rite and its etymology (far → confarreatio) are corroborated by several independent ancient authors, but Dionysius's assertion that no marriage of this kind was ever dissolved for 520 years is a moral idealisation, not a historical fact. This is not about 'the Romans' in general, but a rite specific to the patrician aristocracy, and the text contains no health claim.