Impeach, Implum, Imkumquat?

 

And those aren’t the only choices - not by a long shot. They are just the most popular, predictable and obvious selections made by lazy politicians unfamiliar with the country’s obscurer organic output. The story about how it came to this is long and boring. I’ll instead share a tale that’s both short and sweet - not unlike the finest, ripest melon. 

The first person ever “impeached” was the Roman senator, Stultus Amentis, several hundred years before the birth of Christ. He was, like most senators of the era, a grape lover. But that’s unimportant. What is important is that Stultus took to pilfering milk straight from the udders of his constituents, filling up without permission on his morning commute. You can hardly blame the man. Before refrigeration, milk was mostly the luxury of farmers and their well-fed families. Stultus felt that by representing the region, he could skim a little off the top. And even more than that, too. When caught cream-handed by a farmer’s daughter, Stultus thought he was done for. But the Romans were more civilized than the barbarians – at least back then. 

They hauled him off to the neighborhood stockade and decided to pelt him with LVII peaches – the same number of milk pitchers he’d stolen. The thought of pouring milk on his head, while humorous and cathartic, seemed like both a waste and giving the Senator what he wanted – a dairy drenching. When the first farmer picked up a peach, according to Pliny recording the events many years later, Stultus apparently said “impeach” as in, “no, not a peach.” Though the veracity of this story can be questioned given that Romans referred to peaches as Persian apples, the fact remains that throwing fruit at politicians has remained an essential part of representative government for the subsequent two thousand years.

Some centuries later, the 17^th President of the United States Andrew Johnson welcomed several dozen fresh peaches from the Georgia delegation directly to his noggin. There were others, of course. But we should thank the Romans that they picked the peach and not some lesser fruit. Imagine if, in their rage, they chose something a bit more dangerous. Like a spiked Durian, a Horned melon or an 80-pound Jackfruit just to make a point. As it turns out, the Romans got things mostly right. The selection of the peach in matters of political malfeasance is no different.