The Roman Warm Period, or Roman Climatic Optimum, was a 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 still the case today, which implies that South Aegean mean summer temperatures in the 4th and the 5th centuries BC were within a degree of modern ones. That and other literary fragments from the time confirm that the Greek climate was basically the same then as around 2000. Tree rings from the Italian Peninsula in the late 3rd century BC indicate a time of mild conditions there around the time of Hannibal's crossing of the Alps with imported elephants in 218 BC.