“Garum was prepared from the intestines of small fishes, macerated in salt and cured in the sun…
Seneca, holding the old-fashioned line against the expensive craze, cautioned against it, even though his family was of Baetian Corduba:
Do you not realize that garum sociorum, that expensive bloody mass of decayed fish, consumes the stomach with its salted putrefaction?
—Seneca, Epistle 95.
In 2008, archaeologists used the residue from garum found in containers in Pompeii to confirm the August date of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, by detecting that it was made entirely of bogues, fish that congregate in the summer months.[14]”