The olive was probably carried by Grecian colonists into Italy, Sardinia, Sicily and Gaul, although it is possible that the Phenicians anticipated them. According to Pliny, in the time of Tarquinius Priscus, 615 B. C., there were no olives in Italy, but five hundred years later Italy was able to export oil to the provinces. The Greeks, those ministers to luxury, taught the Romans its use in the gymnasium, and Pliny complains that the directors of those institutions in Rome had sold the scrapings of the citizens exercising there for sixty thousand sesterces. Ancient medicine was certainly nasty if nothing else. These scrapings of oil and sweat of athletes were supposed to be peculiarly endowed with curative properties and were largely used in plasters and emollients.
Cato thought that the more bitter the olive the better the oil, but at that time the olive in greatest favor in Italy was the Licinian which was the one olive the birds would never touch. This is in all probability the Italian variety known as the Leccino today.
The names of places in Palestine speak a language from which one learns the extensiveness and beauty of the Hebrew olive plantations. The Mount of Olives situated some three thousand paces from the temple, on the east side of Jerusalem, was among the places best cultivated. On its slopes was the plantation called Gethsemane (that is Gath-Semen which means the "oil press") because of the olives with which it was covered and those of the mountain above where they pressed out and made oil in great abundance.
The Bible gives us various glimpses of the mode of treatment in harvesting and gathering the olive in Palestine.
