Before refrigeration, the production of cheese was somewhat of an agricultural necessity, and seen as so central to civilisation that even the Cyclopes were imagined by Homer to have some goat cheese maturing in caves. This being so, the people of the Mediterranean who would come to be united by the Empire had millennia to develop and perfect their local cheeses, and we can safely assume that Roman cheese can be best characterised by its sheer variety, temporally and geographically.

The Romans, if we can approach them as having a unified culinary culture, sure did love their cheese, and, fortunately for us (as cheese survives much less often than the material involved in its production), also loved writing about it.

Both Varro in De Agricultura (writing in the second/first century BC) and Pliny (the first century AD) in Natural History describe two types of cheese; young, soft cheese, and hard, aged cheese. Pliny even comments on the nature and uses of mare's, camel's, asses', cow's, hare's, fawn's and goat's milk in relation to the production of cheese, among other uses, and notes on the superiority of the smoked goat's cheese made at Rome during his lifetime.

Columella, with his De Re Rustica (also of the first century AD) has left us comprehensive instructions for and explanations of varieties of cheesemaking.

To add to the aforementioned types of cheese (smoked and unsmoked, hard and soft cow's and goat's cheese), in the above Perseus Natural History chapter, the translator has noted the Alpine 'Vatusican' may be an ancient fromage de Passi, which I believe is something resembling ricotta. This would make sense as Romans dined on multiple kinds of cheese cakes sweetened with honey during the Principate - the chef and author Apicius even (at least as reported by Athenaeus, writing centuries later) had a variety of cheesecake named after him.

Something resembling contemporary Pecorino Romano, a hard, salted sheep's cheese, is referred to both in Columella and in a poem in the Appendix Vergiliana, which includes it as an ingredient in a herb cheese dip.

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