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It looks like a small statue of the upper half of a Roman matron wearing elaborate clothes and long dangly earrings. Her hair is fantastically complicated, twisted and plaited: she is obviously a seriously grande dame and very fashionable. She’s about 10 centimetres (3 inches) high, the size of a pepper pot. Indeed that is exactly what she is – a silver pepper pot. On the underside there is a clever mechanism that allows you to determine how much pepper will come out. You turn the handle and you can either close it completely, have it fully open, or set it to a kind of sprinkling mode. This pepper pot would clearly have been owned by very wealthy people, and it’s obviously designed to amuse. Although the face is of silver, the eyes and the lips are picked out in gold so that, as the candles flickered, the eyes and the lips would appear to move. She must have been quite a talking point at Suffolk banquets.

Britain became part of the Roman Empire in the year 43, so by the time of our pepper pot it had been a Roman province for more than 300 years. Native Britons and Romans had intermingled and intermarried and in England everyone did as the Romans did. The Roman trade expert Dr Roberta Tomber elucidates:

When the Romans came to Britain they brought a lot of material culture and a lot of habits with them that made the people of Britain feel Roman; they identified with the Roman culture. Wine was one of these – olive oil was another – and pepper would have been a more valuable one in this same sort of ‘set’ of Romanitas.

The Romans were particularly serious about their food. Slave chefs would man the kitchens to create great delicacies for their consumption. A high-end menu could include dormice sprinkled with honey and poppy seeds, then a whole wild boar being suckled by piglets made of cake, in which were placed live thrushes, and to finish, quince, apples and pork disguised as fowls and fish. None of these opulent culinary inventions would have been created without ample seasoning – and the primary spice would have been pepper.

Why has this particular spice remained so constantly attractive for us? I asked the author Christine McFadden about the importance of a bit of pepper in your recipe:

They just couldn’t get enough of it. Wars were fought over it, and if you look at Roman recipes, every one starts with ‘take pepper and mix with …’.

An early twentieth-century chef said that no other spice can do so much for so many different types of food, both sweet and savoury. It contains an alkaloid called piperine, which is responsible for the pungency. It promotes sweating, which cools the body – essential for comfort in hot climates. It also aids digestion, titillates the taste buds and makes the mouth water.

The closest place to Rome where pepper actually grew was India, so the Romans had to find a way of sending ships to and fro across the Indian Ocean and then carrying their cargo overland to the Mediterranean. Whole fleets and caravans laden with pepper would travel from India to the Red Sea, then across the desert to the Nile. It was then traded around the Roman Empire by river, sea and road. This was an immense network, complicated and dangerous, but highly profitable. Roberta Tomber fills in the details:

Strabo in the first century AD says that 120 boats left every year from Myos Hormos – a port on the Red Sea – to India. Of course, there were other ports on the Red Sea and other countries sending ships to India. The actual value of the trade was enormous – one hint we have of this is from a second-century papyrus known as the Muziris Papyrus. In that they discuss the cost of a shipload estimated today at 7 million sestertia. At that same time a soldier in the Roman army would have earned about 800 sestertia a year.

Regularly filling a single large silver pepper pot like ours would therefore have taken a big chunk out of the grocery budget, yet the household that owned our pepper pot had another three