Roman Warm Period
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The Roman Warm Period, or Roman Climatic Optimum, is a proposed period of unusually warm weather in Europe and the North Atlantic that ran from approximately 250 BC to AD 400.
Theophrastus (371 – c. 287 BC) wrote that date trees could grow in Greece if they were planted, but that they could not set fruit there. That is the case today, which suggests that southern Aegean mean summer temperatures in the 4th and 5th centuries BC were within a degree of modern temperatures. That and other literary fragments from the time confirm that the Greek climate then was basically the same as it was around AD 2000. Dendrochronological evidence from wood found at the Parthenon shows variability of climate in the 5th century BC that resembles the modern pattern of variation.
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