What if . . . that Roman didn't know what a monkey or a banana was!
Blue monkeys are depicted in a wall painting on the island of Thera (mid-second millennium BC), a good likeness of a species found in East Africa as far north as Ethiopia.
Pliny describes the banana in his Natural History, calling it either ariera or ariena (the reading is uncertain). The word banana as a Latin word is found in an author writing in 1606, according to the Latin-language Wikipedia article on bananas.
Yes! We have no bananas, we have no bananas today!