CHAPTER VII.

HOMERIC MEALS.

HEROIC appetites were strong and simple. They craved ‘much meat,’ and could be completely appeased with nothing else; but they demanded little more. They needed no savoury caresses or spicy blandishments. Occasion indeed to stimulate them there was none, though much difficulty might arise about satisfying them. For they disdained paltry subterfuges. Fish, game, and vegetables they accepted in lieu of more substantial prey; but under protest. Hunger, in consenting to receive such trifles, merely compounded for a partial settlement of her claim.

The Homeric bill of fare was concise, and admitted of slight diversification. Day after day, and at meal after meal, roast meat, bread, and wine were set before perennially eager guests, in whose esteem any fundamental change in the materials of the banquet would certainly have been for the worse. Variety, in fact, was in the inverse ratio of abundance. Want alone counselled departures from the beaten track of opulent feasting, and compelled the reluctant adoption of inadequate expedients for silencing the imperative outcries of famine. Nevertheless it cannot be supposed that the epical setting forth of Achæan culinary resources was as exhaustive as the menu of a Guildhall dinner. For where would be the ‘swiftness’ of a narrative which could not leave so much as a dish of beans to the imagination? Homeric criticism is indeed everywhere complicated by the necessity of admitting wide gaps of silence; and in this particular department, so much evidently remains in those gaps, that our list of comestibles must be to a great extent inferential.

‘Butcher’s meat’ (as we call it) was the staple food of Greek heroes. Oxen, however, were not recklessly slaughtered. ‘Great meals of beef’ usually honoured solemn occasions. The fat beasts, reckoned to be in their prime at five years old, met their fate for the most part in connexion with some expiatory ceremony, as that employed to stay the pestilence in the First Iliad, or as the sacrifice for victory offered by Agamemnon in the Second Iliad. The gods were then served first with tit-bits wrapped in fat, and reduced by fire to ashes and steamy odours, peculiarly grateful to immortal nostrils. Portions of the haunches were often chosen for this purpose; the tongue might be added; while at other times, samples of the whole carcass at large seemed preferable. What remained was cut up into small pieces after a fashion still prevailing in Albania,[241] and these, having been filed upon spits, were rapidly grilled. Thickly strewn with barley-meal, they were then distributed by a steward, and eaten with utensils of nature’s providing. Specially honoured guests had pieces from the chine—‘_perpetui tergo bovis_’—allotted to them; and they might, if they chose, share their ‘booty’ (so it was designated) with any other to whom they desired to pass on the compliment, as Odysseus did to Demodocus at the Phæacian feast. The glad recipients of these greasy favours were obviously exempt from modern fastidiousness.

Footnote 241:

E. F. Knight, _Albania_, p. 225, 1880.

Sheep and goats were prepared for table precisely in the same way with oxen, and so likewise were pigs, save that they were not divested of their skins. ‘Cracklings’ were already appreciated. Roast pork appears, in the Iliad, only on the hospitable board of Achilles; but is less exclusively apportioned in the Odyssey. A brace of sucking-pigs were instantly killed and cooked by Eumæus, the swineherd of Odysseus, on the arrival of his disguised master. Yet he was very far from estimating at their true value the tender merits of the dish celebrated by Elia as perfectly ‘satisfactory to the criticalness of the censorious palate,’ actually apologising for it as ‘servants’ fare,’ wholly unacceptable to the haughty Suitors, for whose profuse entertainment a full-grown porker had to be daily sacrificed. Each man, however, despatched his pig, and was shortly ready for more. And so captivated was Eumæus, by the time his four underlings returned from the fields for supper, with his outwardly sorry guest, that, enlarging the bounds of his liberality, he ordered the slaughter of a noble hog, whose adipose perfections had been ripening during full five years of life. His cooking was promptly executed, and one share having been set aside for the local nymphs, the six men fell to, and left only such scraps as served for an early breakfast next morning. The performance would have been creditable in modern Somaliland.

Every Homeric hero was an accomplished butcher, and no despicable cook. Both offices were, indeed, too closely connected with religious ritual to have any note of degradation attached to them. Thus, animals were habitually understood to be ‘sacrificed,’ not killed in the purely carnal sense, and the preparation of their flesh for table was formalised as part of the ceremony of worship. The Suitors were marked out as a reckless and impious crew by discarding all sacerdotal functions from their meal-time operations; yet they reserved to themselves, as if it belonged to their superior station, the pleasing duty of cutting the throats of the beasts they were about to devour, passing with the least possible delay from the shambles to the banqueting-hall.

Homeric culinary art perhaps really covered a wider range than is attributed to it in the Poems, where it is designedly represented under a quasi-ritualistic aspect. Although meat, for instance, so far as can be learned from direct statement, was invariably roast or grilled, it by no means follows that it was never eaten boiled or stewed. The contrary inference is indeed fairly warranted by the frequent conjunction of pots, water, and fire; and was thought by Athenæus to derive support from the use as a missile, aimed at Odysseus in unprovoked savagery by Ctesippus, one of the Suitors, of an ox’s foot, which happened to be lying conveniently at hand in a bread-basket.[242] For who, asked the gastronomical sophist, ever thought of roasting an ox’s foot?[243] The casual display, too, in a simile of the Iliad, of a caldron of boiling lard,[244] assures us that some kind of frying process was familiar to the poet.

Footnote 242:

_Odyssey_, xx. 299.

Footnote 243:

Potter, _Archæologia Græca_, vol. ii. p. 360.

Footnote 244:

_Iliad_, xxi. 362.

Among the few secondary articles of diet specified by him was a sausage-like composition, of so irredeemably coarse a character, that ‘ears polite’ cannot fail to be offended at its literal description. It consisted, to speak plainly, of the stomach or intestines of a goat, stuffed with blood and fat, and kept revolving before a hot fire until thoroughly done. The Suitors, of noble lineage though they were, occasionally supped off this seductive viand, which may, nevertheless, be concluded to have engaged chiefly plebeian patronage.

No quality of game is known to have been rejected through prejudice or superstition by the Homeric Greeks. But even venison ranked in the second line after beef, mutton, and pork. It was sheer hunger that made the ‘sequestered stag’ brought down by Odysseus in Ææa a real godsend to his disconsolate crew; and hunger again reduced them, in the island of Thrinakie, to the necessity of supporting life with fish and birds, both kinds of prey equally being taken by means of baited hooks.[245] But they set about their capture only when the exhaustion of the ship’s store of flour and wine warned them to bestir themselves; and the regimen their ingenuity provided was so distasteful, and fell so little short, in their opinion and sensations, of absolute starvation, that the fatal temptation to seek criminal relief at the expense of the oxen of the Sun, proved irresistible. They succumbed to it, and perished.

Footnote 245:

_Odyssey_, xii. 332.

Small birds were, however, beyond doubt habitually eaten by the poor. The snaring of pigeons and fieldfares is alluded to in the Odyssey,[246] and was practised, we may be sure, in the interests of the appetite. Nor can we suppose that Penelope and the ‘divine Helen’ entirely abstained from tasting the geese reared by them, although curiosity and amusement may have been the chief motives for the care bestowed upon them. Poultry of other kinds, as we have seen in another chapter, there was none. But hares must have been used for food, since, like roebucks and wild goats, they were hunted with dogs,[247] certainly not for the mere sake of sport. As regards boars, the case stands somewhat differently. For their destructiveness imposed their slaughter as a necessity. The subsequent consumption of their flesh is left to conjecture. The remains of the Calydonian brute seem to have been contended for rather through arrogance than through appetite, Meleager and the sons of Thestius standing forth as the champions of antagonistic claims to the trophies of the chace. That the boar sacrificed in attestation of the oath of Agamemnon in the Nineteenth Iliad was afterwards flung by Talthybius far into the sea to be ‘food for fishes,’ is without significance on the point of edibility. Victims thus immolated never furnished the material for feasts; they belonged to the subterranean powers, and fell under the shadow of their inauspicious influence.

Footnote 246:

_Odyssey_, xxii. 468.

Footnote 247:

_Odyssey_, xvii. 295.

The fish-eating tastes of the Greeks were of comparatively late development. Homeric prepossessions were decidedly against ‘fins and shining scales’ of every variety. Eels were ranked apart. Etymological evidence shows them to have been primitively classified with serpents,[248] and they appeared, from this point of view, not merely unacceptable, but absolutely inadmissible, as food. The resemblance was thus protective, not by the design of nature, but through the misapprehension of man, and the ingenuity of hunger was diverted from seeming watersnakes to less repulsive prey. This was found in the silvery shoals and ‘fry innumerable’ inhabiting the same element, but differentiated from their congeners by the more obvious possession, and more active use of fins. The Homeric fishermen, however, were not enthusiastic in their vocation. Its meditative pleasures made no appeal to them, and they were very sensible of the unsatisfied gastronomic cravings which survived the utmost success in its pursuit. Nets or hooks were employed as occasion required. A heavy haul from the deep is recalled by the gruesome spectacle of the piled-up corpses in the banqueting-hall at Ithaca.

Footnote 248:

Skeat, _Etymological Dictionary_. Ἔγχελυς, an eel, is equivalent to _anguilla_, diminutive of _anguis_, a snake; cf. Buchholz, _Realien_, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 107.

But he found all the sort of them fallen in their blood in the dust, like fishes that the fishermen have drawn forth in the meshes of the net into a hollow of the beach from out the grey sea, and all the fish, sore longing for the salt sea-waves, are heaped upon the sand, and the sun shines forth and takes their life away; so now the wooers lay heaped upon each other.[249]

We do not elsewhere hear of net-fishing;[250] but rod-and-line similes occur twice in the Iliad, and once in the Odyssey. So Patroclus, after the manner of an angler, hooked Thestor, son of Enops.

Footnote 249:

_Odyssey_, xxii. 383-89.

Footnote 250:

Either birds or fishes might be understood to be taken in the net mentioned in _Iliad_, v. 487.

And Patroclus caught hold of the spear and dragged him over the rim of the car, as when a man sits on a jutting rock, and drags a sacred fish forth from the sea, with line and glittering hook of bronze; so on the bright spear dragged he Thestor gaping from the chariot, and cast him down on his face, and life left him as he fell.[251]

Footnote 251:

_Iliad_, xvi. 406-410.

So too, Scylla exercised her craft:

As when a fisher on a jutting rock, With long and taper rod, to lesser fish Casts down the treacherous bait, and in the sea Plunges his tackle with its oxhorn guard; Then tosses out on land a gasping prey; So gasping to the cliff my men were raised.[252]

Footnote 252:

_Odyssey_, xii. 251-55 (W. C. Green’s translation in _Similes of the Iliad_, p. 259).

Spearing, not rod-fishing, is thought by some commentators to be here indicated; but a weighted line is plainly described where the ‘storm-swift Iris’ plunges into the ‘black sea’ on the errand of Zeus to Thetis.

Like to a plummet, which the fisherman Lets fall, encas’d in wild bull’s horn, to bear Destruction to the sea’s voracious tribes.[253]

Footnote 253:

_Iliad_, xxiv. 80-82. (Lord Derby.)

River-fishing is passed over in silence. Yet it was doubtless practised, since the finny denizens of Scamander are remembered with pity for the discomfort ensuing to them from the fight between Achilles and the River; and the admixture of perch with tunny and hake-bones in the prehistoric waste-heaps at Hissarlik[254] makes it clear that fresh-water fish were not neglected by the early inhabitants of the Troad.

Footnote 254:

Virchow, _Berlin. Abh._ 1879, p. 63.

Homeric seafarers did not resort to fishing as a means of diversifying the monotony, either of their occupations or of their commissariat. They got out their hooks and lines when famine was at hand, and never otherwise. Menelaus accordingly, recounting the story of his detention at Pharos, vivified the impression of his own distress, and the hunger of his men, by the mention of the piscatorial pursuits they were reduced to.[255] And Odysseus, in his narrative to Alcinous, similarly emphasised a similar experience. Fishermen by profession, it can hence be inferred, belonged to the poorest and rudest of the community. Among them were to be found divers for oysters. Patroclus, mocking the fall of Cebriones, exclaims:

Footnote 255:

_Odyssey_, iv. 368.

Out on it, how nimble a man, how lightly he diveth! Yea, if perchance he were on the teeming deep, this man would satisfy many by seeking for oysters, leaping from the ship, even if it were stormy weather; so lightly now he diveth from the chariot into the plain. Verily among the Trojans too there be diving men.[256]

The trade was then well known, and the molluscs it dealt in constituted, it is equally plain to be seen, a familiar article of diet. Their provision for the dead, in the graves of Mycenæ,[257] emphasises this inference all the more strongly from the absence of any other evidence of Mycenæan fish-eating.

Footnote 256:

_Iliad_, xvi. 745-50.

Footnote 257:

Schliemann, _Mycenæ_, p. 332.

Neither fish nor flesh was, in the Homeric world, preserved by means of salt or otherwise as a resource against future need. The distribution of superfluity was not better understood in time than in space. Meat, as we have seen, was killed and eaten on the spot; and the husbanding of fish-supplies was still less likely to be thought of. Salt was, however, regularly used as a condiment; it was sprinkled over roast meat,[258] and a pinch of salt was a proverbial expression for the indivisible atom, so to speak, of charity.[259] Only the marine stores of the commodity were drawn upon; those concealed by the earth remained unexplored—a circumstance in itself marking the great antiquity of the poems; and it was accordingly regarded as characteristic of an inland people to eat no salt with their food.[260] Its efficacy for ritual purification was fully recognised; and the ceremonial of sacrifice probably involved some use of it; but this is not fully ascertained.[261]

Footnote 258:

_Iliad_, ix. 214.

Footnote 259:

_Odyssey_, xvii. 455.

Footnote 260:

_Odyssey_, xi. 123, with Hayman’s note.

Footnote 261:

Buchholz, _Realien_, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 294.

The farinaceous part of Homeric diet was furnished, according to circumstances, either by barley-meal, or by wheaten flour. The former was lauded as the ‘marrow of men’; ship-stores consisted mainly of it; and it was probably eaten boiled with water into a kind of porridge, corresponding perhaps by its prominence in Achæan rustic economy, to the _polenta_ of the Lombard peasantry. Barley is called by Pliny ‘the most antique form of food,’ and its antiquity lent it sacredness. Hence the preliminary sprinkling with barley-groats, alike of the victim, and of the altar upon which it was about to be sacrificed. So essential to the validity of the offering was this part of the ceremony, that the guilty comrades of Odysseus, in default of barley, had recourse to shred oakleaves, in their futile attempt at bribing the immortal gods with a share of the spoil, to condone their transgression against the solar herds.

The favourite Homeric epithet for barley was ‘white,’ and the quality of whiteness is also conveyed by the name, _alphiton_, of barley-meal.[262] But our word ‘wheat’ has the same meaning, while the Homeric _puros_ was a yellow grain.[263] Nor can there be much doubt that it was a different variety, identical, presumably, with the small, otherwise unknown kind unearthed at Hissarlik. As the finest cereal then extant, its repute nevertheless stood high; its taste was called ‘honey-sweet’; its consumption was plainly a privilege of the well-to-do classes. Our poet is not likely to have ‘spoken by the card’ when he included wheat among the spontaneous products of the island of the Cyclops; yet the assertion of its indigenous growth there was repeated by Diodorus Siculus,[264] who had better opportunities for knowing the truth, and had taken out no official licence for its embellishment. Nevertheless there is much difficulty in believing that wheat had its native home elsewhere than in Mesopotamia and Western India.

Footnote 262:

Hehn and Stallybrass, _op. cit._ p. 431.

Footnote 263:

_Odyssey_, vii. 104; Buchholz, _op. cit._ p. 118.

Footnote 264:

De Candolle, _Origin of Cultivated Plants_, p. 357.

Bakers were as little known as butchers to Homeric folk, whose bread-making was of the elementary description practised by the pile-dwellers of Robenhausen and Mooseedorf. The corn was first ground in hand-mills[265] worked by female slaves, of whom fifty were thus exclusively employed in the palace of Alcinous.[266] The loaves or cakes, for which the material was thus laboriously provided, were probably baked on stones, like those fragmentarily preserved during millenniums beneath Swiss lacustrine deposits of peat and mud.[267] Only wheaten flour was so employed in Achæan households; but wheaten bread was indispensable to every well-furnished table, and was neatly served round in baskets placed at frequent intervals. Barley-bread was the invention of a later age; the word _maza_, by which it is signified, does not occur in the Epics.

Footnote 265:

Blümner, _Technologie und Terminologie bei Griechen und Römern_, Bd. i. p. 24.

Footnote 266:

_Odyssey_, vii. 104.

Footnote 267:

Heer, _Die Pflanzen der Pfahlbauten_, p. 9.

They include, however, the mention of two additional kinds of grain, varieties, it is supposed, of spelt. And of these one, _olura_, is limited to the Iliad, the other, _zeia_, belongs properly to the Odyssey, occurring in the Iliad only in the traditional phrase ‘zeia-giving soil.’ The expression doubtless enshrined the memory of spelt-eating days, as did, among the Romans, the appropriation of this species of corn for the _mola_ of sacrifices.[268] But neither _zeia_ nor _olura_ served within Homer’s experience for human food; both were left to horses, whose fodder was moreover enriched by the addition of ‘white barley’ and clover, nay, in exceptional cases, of wheat and wine. With these restoring dainties the steeds of Hector were pampered by Andromache on their return from battle; while the snowy team of Rhesus shared with the ‘Trojan’ horses of Æneas, the generous wheaten diet provided for them in the opulent stables of their new master, the intrepid king of Argos.

Footnote 268:

Potter, _Archæologia Græca_, vol. i. p. 215.

One of the unaccountable Egyptian perversities enumerated by Herodotus[269] was that of rejecting wheat and barley as bread-stuffs, and adopting spelt (_olura_). The grain indicated, however, must have been either rice or millet, since spelt does not thrive in hot countries.[270] Millet, too, which was unknown in primitive Greece, was specially favoured by Celts, Iberians, and other tribes.[271] It was also cultivated with barley and several kinds of wheat, by the amphibious villagers of Robenhausen. And the discovery of caraway and poppy seeds mingled in the _débris_ of their food[272] suggests that varied flavourings were in prehistoric request. It suggests further a non-æsthetic, hence a probable, motive for the cultivation of the poppy by the early Achæans.[273] The flower was in fact actually grown in classical times for the sake of its seeds, which were roasted and strewn on slices of bread, to be eaten with honey after meals as a sort of dessert.[274]

Footnote 269:

Lib. ii. cap. 36.

Footnote 270:

De Candolle, _Cultivated Plants_, p. 363.

Footnote 271:

Hehn, _op. cit._ pp. 439-40.

Footnote 272:

Dawkins, _Early Man in Britain_, pp. 293, 301.

Footnote 273:

_Iliad_, viii. 306; cf. _ante_, p. 166.

Footnote 274:

Dierbach, _Flora Mythologica_, p. 117.

Vegetables figured very scantily, if at all, at Achæan feasts. One species only is expressly apportioned for heroic consumption. Nestor and Machaon were avowedly guilty of eating onions as a relish with wine.[275] Some degree of refinement has indeed been vindicated for their tastes on the plea that the Oriental onion is of infinitely superior delicacy to our objectionable bulb; but we scarcely wrong the Pylian sage by admitting the likelihood of his preference for the stronger flavour; nor can we raise high the gustatory standard according to which wine compounded with goats’ cheese and honey was esteemed the most refreshing and delightful of drinks. The same root, moreover, in its crudest form, seems to have recommended itself to refined Phæacian palates. There is persuasive, if indirect evidence, that ‘the rank and guilty garlic’ was privileged to flourish in the sunny gardens of Alcinous.[276] Socrates, indeed, eulogised the onion, whereas Plutarch contemned it as vulgar, and Horace did not willingly permit onion-eaters to come ‘between the wind and his nobility.’ The company of Nestor would not, then, have been agreeable to him.

Footnote 275:

_Iliad_, xi. 629.

Footnote 276:

Buchholz, _Realien_, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 216.

Peas and beans keep out of sight in the Odyssey, but are just glanced at in the Iliad. The following simile explains itself:

As from the spreading fan leap out the peas Or swarthy beans o’er all the spacious floor, Urged by the whistling wind and winnower’s force; So then from noble Menelaus’ mail, Bounding aside far flew the biting shaft.[277]

Here there is evidently no thought of green vegetables. The elastic and agile pellets cleansed by winnowing were fully ripe. They can be identified as chick-peas and broad-beans—species, both of them, abundantly produced in modern Greece. The former even retain in Crete their Homeric name of _erebinthoi_, ground down, however, by phonetic decay to _rebithi_.[278] They afforded, under the designation ‘_frictum cicer_,’ a staple article of food to the poorer inhabitants of Latium; and, as the Spanish _garbanzo_, they derive culinary importance from the part assigned to them in every properly constituted _olla podrida_.[279] Beans were the first pod-fruit cultivated. They are mentioned in the Bible, and have been excavated at Hissarlik. Some pea-like grains, however, found in the same spot, proved on examination to be lentils.[280] These, too, were presumably in common use when Homer lived, as they certainly were some centuries later, yet he makes no allusion to them. More significant, possibly, is his silence on the subject of chestnuts. Although the tree covers wide tracts of modern Greece, it is held by some eminent authorities to have been introduced there from Pontic Asia Minor at a comparatively late period.[281] And the fact that the rural wisdom of Hesiod completely ignores the chestnut certainly inclines the balance towards the opinion of its arrival subsequent to the composition of the ‘Works and Days.’

Footnote 277:

_Iliad_, xiii. 588-92 (trans. by W. C. Green).

Footnote 278:

Buchholz, _loc. cit._ p. 269.

Footnote 279:

Rhind, _Hist. of the Vegetable Kingdom_, p. 315.

Footnote 280:

Virchow, _Berlin. Abh._ 1879, p. 69.

Footnote 281:

Hehn, _op. cit._ p. 294.

Grapes and olives are the only fruits of which the cultivation is recorded in the Iliad; but the list is greatly extended in the Odyssey. Alcinous had at perennial command, besides apples and pears, figs and pomegranates. Within the precincts of his palace, Odysseus cast his exploratory glances round ‘a great garden of four plough-gates,’ hedged round on either side.

‘And there grow tall trees blossoming, pear-trees and pomegranates, and apple-trees with bright fruit, and sweet figs and olives in their bloom. The fruit of these trees never perisheth neither faileth, winter nor summer, enduring through all the year. Evermore the west wind blowing brings some fruits to birth and ripens others. Pear upon pear waxes old, and apple on apple, yea, and cluster ripens upon cluster of the grape, and fig upon fig. There too hath he a fruitful vineyard planted, whereof the one part is being dried by the heat, a sunny spot on level ground, while other grapes men are gathering, and yet others they are treading in the wine-press. In the foremost row are unripe grapes that cast the blossom, and others there be that are growing black to vintaging. There, too, skirting the furthest line, are all manner of garden beds, planted trimly, and that are perpetually fresh, and therein are two fountains of water.’[282]

Footnote 282:

_Odyssey_, vii. 112-29.

The same fruits, the grape excepted, as being too low-growing to fulfil the required conditions, hung suspended above the head of Tantalus in his dusky abode, where alone the olive seems to be classed as food. They claimed, moreover, all but the pomegranate, the care of Laertes, occupying his chagrined leisure during the absence of his son from Ithaca.

Apples and pears are alike indigenous in Greece, and their discovery, dried and split longitudinally, among the winter-stores of the Swiss and Italian lake-dwellers, suggests that they may have been similarly treated, with a similar end in view, by Achæan housewives. The apple evidently excited Homer’s particular admiration; he, in fact, made it his representative fruit. That it should have been so considered in the North, where competition for the place of honour was small, is less surprising; and apples, accordingly, of an etherealised and paradisaical kind, served to restore youth to the aging gods of Asaheim.[283]

Footnote 283:

Grimm and Stallybrass, _Teutonic Mythology_, p. 319.

The pomegranate is believed to have been the ‘apple’ of Paris. Known to the Greeks by the Semitic name _roia_, it may hence be safely classed among Phœnician gifts to the West. And its associations were besides characteristically Oriental. The fruit, called from the Sun-god Rimmon, had a prominent place in Syrian religious rites; Aphrodite introduced it into Cyprus, and eventually transferred to Demeter her claims to the symbolical ownership of it.[284] But with its mythological history, the poet of the Odyssey did not concern himself.

Footnote 284:

Hehn and Stallybrass, _op. cit._ p. 180.

The wild fig-tree is native in Greece, and is mentioned both in the Iliad and Odyssey. But the cultured fig occurs only in the latter poem, the author doubtless having made its acquaintance somewhere on the Anatolian seaboard, whither it would naturally have been conveyed from Phrygia. For Phrygia was in those days more renowned for its figs than Attica became later. Those of Paros were celebrated by Archilochus about 700 B.C.;[285] but none, it would seem, were produced on the mainland of Greece when Hesiod’s homely experiences took metrical form at Orchomenus. The ripe figs contributed by his garden to the frugal repasts of Laertes were then an anachronism to the full as glaring as turkeys in England, when Falstaff and Poins took purses ‘as in a castle, cock-sure,’ on Gadshill. The very idea, indeed, of archæological accuracy was foreign to the mind of either poet; nor could it, without detriment to the vigour and freedom of their conceptions, have been introduced.

Footnote 285:

_Ib._ p. 86.

The pastoral section of the Achæan people drew their subsistence immediately, and almost exclusively from their flocks and herds. The commodities directly at hand were supplemented to a very slight extent, if at all, through the secondary channels of sale or barter. Milk and cheese hence formed the staple of their food, and were mainly the produce of sheep and goats. Cow’s milk never found favour in Greece; Homer ignored the possibility of its use; Aristotle depreciated its quality; and it is now no more thought of as an article of consumption than ewe’s milk in Great Britain or Ireland.[286] Those early herdsmen differed from us, too, in liking their simple beverage well watered. The part played occasionally by the pump in our London milk-supply would have met with their full approbation—unless, indeed, they might have preferred to add the qualifying ingredient at their own discretion. But the native strength of milk was, at any rate, too much for them. Only Polyphemus, a giant and a glutton, was voracious enough to swallow the undiluted contents of his pails. To him, as to his curious visitors from over the sea, butter-making was an unknown art, cheese being the sole modified product of Homeric dairies. That the first step towards its preparation consisted in the curdling of fresh milk with the sap of the fig-tree, we learn from the following allusion:

Soon as liquid milk Is curdled by the fig-tree’s juice, and turns In whirling flakes, so soon was heal’d the wound.[287]

Footnote 286:

Kruse, _Hellas_, Bd. i. p. 368.

Footnote 287:

_Iliad_, v. 902-904. (Lord Derby.)

The patient on this occasion was Ares himself, and the rapid closing of the gash inflicted by the audacious Diomed was brought about by the application of Pæonian simples, unavailable, it can readily be imagined, outside of Olympus.

Although the keeping of bees was strange to Homer’s experience, the product of their industry was pleasantly familiar to him. The ideal of deliciousness was furnished by honey, and Homeric palates reached their acme of gratification with things ‘honey-sweet.’ But Homeric bees were still in a state of nature, their ‘roofs of gold’ getting built in hollow trees or rocky clefts. Artificial dwellings were provided for them, by interested human agency, considerably later. The use of bee-hives in Greece is first attested in the Hesiodic Theogony; and in Russia and Lithuania, wild honey was still gathered in the woods little more than a century and a half ago.[288] Alike in the Iliad and Odyssey, honey figures in a manner totally inconsistent with our notions of gastronomic harmony. We, in our unregenerate condition, should seek to be excused from partaking of the semi-ambrosial diet of cheese, honey, and sweet wine supplied by Aphrodite to the divinely brought-up daughters of Pandareus;[289] nor do we envy to ‘Gerenian Nestor’ and his wounded companion the posset brewed for them on their return from the battle-field by the skilful Hecamede. The palates indeed must have been hardy, and the constitutions robust, of those upon whom it acted as an agreeable restorative. The process of its preparation was as follows. In a bowl of such noble capacity that an ordinary man’s strength scarcely availed to raise it brimming to his lips,

Their goddess-like attendant first A gen’rous measure mixed of Pramnian wine; Then with a brazen grater shredded o’er The goatsmilk cheese, and whitest barley-meal, And of the draught compounded bade them drink.[290]

Nothing loath, they obeyed, nor did they shrink from adding piquancy to the liquid concoction by simultaneously devouring a dozen or so of raw onions! A precisely similar drink, designed as a vehicle for the ‘evil drugs’ mingled with it, was treacherously served round by Circe to her guests, and imbibed with the debasing and transforming results one has heard of.[291] Only the onions were absent, and with good reason, the crafty sorceress being fully aware of their antidotal power against malign influences. The practice of sweetening and thickening wine was handed on from heroic to classic times. Old Thasian especially was considered, when tempered with honey and meal, to be of most refreshing quality in the heats of summer; and Athenæus relates, without surprise or disapproval, that the islanders of Thera preferred, for the purpose of making porridge of their wine, ground pease or lentils to barley.[292] The tolerant motto, _De gustibus_, needs now and then, as we study the past of gastronomy, to be recalled to mind.

Footnote 288:

Hehn and Stallybrass, _op. cit._ p. 463.

Footnote 289:

_Odyssey_, xx. 69.

Footnote 290:

_Iliad_, xi. 637-40. (Lord Derby.)

Footnote 291:

_Odyssey_, x. 234.

Footnote 292:

Athenæus, x. 40.

Honey is now, to a great extent, a superannuated article of food. The sugar-cane has usurped its place and its importance. But to the ancients, its value, as the chief saccharine ingredient at their disposal, was enormous. It could not then be expected that the myth-making faculty should remain idle in regard to it. The nectar of the earth was accordingly believed to drop down from heaven into the calyxes of half-opened flowers; it fell from the rising stars, or, at any rate, near the places, so Aristotle averred,[293] whence they rose, and was distilled from rainbows upon the blossoming plains they seemed to touch. Nature’s winged agents, too, for the collection of what must have seemed to the first rude experimenters in diet, an almost supersensual dainty, had a niche assigned to them in the edifice of fancy. Bees were connected with poetry, music, and eloquence; as _Musarum volucres_, they brought the gift of song to the sleeping Pindar; they were themselves nymphs and priestesses, intertwined more especially with the worship of Demeter and Cybele.[294] The germ of some of these imaginative shoots and sprays seems to be laid bare in the simple Homeric metaphor by which the discourse of Nestor was said to flow with more than the sweetness of honey from his lips.[295] The same idea—a very obvious one—is embodied in the English word _mellifluous_. But a figure, in older times, was often only the beginning of a fable; and hence the hovering of bees about the lips of the infant Plato, and round the head of Krishna, when he expounded the nature of the divinity. A genuine Homeric trace, moreover, of the legendary associations of bees is supplied by their installation in the Nymphs’ Grotto at Ithaca,[296] where they gathered honey for the local divinities, ministering to them as Melissa, the Nymph-bee _par excellence_, ministered to the young Zeus on Ida.

Footnote 293:

_De Animal._ lib. v. cap. 22.

Footnote 294:

Preller, _Griechische Mythologie_, Bd. i. p. 105, 3te Auflage.

Footnote 295:

_Iliad_, i. 249.

Footnote 296:

_Odyssey_, xiii. 106.

Homer was fully acquainted with the virtue of honey for propitiating the dead. A vase of honey was placed by Achilles on the pyre of Patroclus,[297] and Odysseus poured a due libation of milk and honey as part of his apparatus of enticement to the shade of Tiresias. Subsequent experience showed this beverage to be acceptable even to the Erinyes; nor was Cerberus proof against a lure of honey-cakes. Luckily for himself, however, Odysseus escaped an encounter with the Dog of Hades, for whom he brought no pacifying recipe.

Footnote 297:

_Iliad_, xxiii. 170.

The earliest European intoxicant was made from honey, but was in Greece quickly and completely discarded on the introduction of vine-culture. Floating reminiscences of its primitive use, however, were preserved by Plutarch and Aristotle,[298] and survived unconsciously in the tolerably frequent substitution, by Homer, of the word ‘mead,’ under the form μέθυ, for ‘wine.’ The survival was indeed linguistic only. No mental association with honey clung to the term ‘mead.’ The fermented juice of the grape is the sole Homeric stimulant, and excites a fully corresponding amount of Homeric enthusiasm. From the old epics, accordingly, Pindaric praises of water are wholly absent. The crystal spring occupies in them a strictly subordinate place. The merits allowed to it are purely relative. That is to say, it exercises, like the nitrogen of our atmosphere, a qualifying function. The exuberant energy of a more fiery element is modified by its innocuous presence, and it helps to neutralise some of the heady virtue inherent in the ‘subtle blood of the grape.’

Footnote 298:

Lippmann, _Geschichte des Zuckers_, p. 6.

A draught of clear water was a luxury unappreciated by the early Greeks. On the other hand, they freely watered their wine, counting its full strength scarcely less redoubtable than that of raw spirits appears to ordinary Englishmen. Polyphemus alone drank—in post-Homeric phraseology—’like a Scythian’—that is, swallowed his liquor ‘neat’; and he plunged thereby into disastrous drunkenness. The wine provided for him, it is true, was of unusual and overweening potency. Of Thracian growth, it was supplied to Odysseus by Maron, a priest of Apollo at Ismarus, in grateful acknowledgment of protection afforded during the Odyssean sack of the Ciconian metropolis. The secret of its manufacture was jealously guarded in the Maronian family;[299] its bouquet was irresistible; its power against sobriety formidable. Even if the statement that it required, or at least tolerated, a twenty-fold admixture of water, be taxed as hyperbolical, we can still fall back upon Pliny’s assurance that the Maronian wine of his epoch was commonly diluted with eight measures of water;[300] and the proportion of twenty-five to one of Thasian wine from the same neighbourhood was recommended by Hippocrates for invalids.[301]

Footnote 299:

_Odyssey_, ix. 205.

Footnote 300:

_Hist. Nat._ xiv. 6.

Footnote 301:

Hayman’s _Odyssey_, vol. ii. p. 96.

Red wines only were quaffed by Homeric heroes. ‘Golden,’ or ‘white’ kinds were unknown to them; and it may be suspected that the pleasure of sharing their potations would have been qualified, to modern connoisseurs, by strong gustatory disapproval. We do not know that the practice of using turpentine in the preparation of wine prevailed so early, but it was in full force when Plutarch wrote, and it subsisted too long for the comfort of Mr. Dodwell, who warmly protested his preference of sour English beer to the resinous wines of Patra and Libadia.[302] Some of their worst qualities were probably shared by the famous ‘Pramnian,’ described by Galen as ‘black and austere.’[303] This was the leading component of the draught administered by Hecamede and Circe; but traditions as to its local origin are obscure and contradictory. The credit of its production was now assigned to a mountain in Caria, now to the Icarian Isle, or to some favoured section of Lesbian territory. Others again held that its distinction resided, not in the place of its growth, but in the method of its manufacture. A particular variety of grape perhaps yielded it; at any rate, Dioscorides says that it was a _prototropum_—that is, a product of the first running of self-expressed juice, making it, among wines, what a proof before letters is among engravings. It took rank, however this might have been, as a choice vintage, meet for the refreshment of heroes, and strictly reserved for exceptional use; while the ordinary demand of the army before Troy was met by the importation of Lemnian and Thracian wines of commonplace quality, brought in ships to the shores of the Hellespont, and purchased with the spoils of war—copper and iron, cattle and slaves.[304] A night’s carouse might sometimes ensue upon the arrival of a wine-fleet; but temperance was the rule of old Achæan life. Excess was reprobated, and often figured as the cause of misfortune. Thus, the ‘Drunken Assembly,’ held immediately after the sack of Troy, was the first link in the long chain of disasters incurred by the returning Achæans;[305] Elpenor, one of the crew of Odysseus, preceded him to Hades ‘on foot,’ as it is quaintly said, having broken his neck by a fall from a roof-top when overcome with wine in the house of Circe; the ungovernable rage of Achilles could find no more opprobrious epithet than ‘wine-laden’ to be hurled, in lieu of a javelin, at Agamemnon; and in Polyphemus, vinous excess assuredly took on its least inviting aspect. The Homeric ideal of life was indeed a festive one, but the conviviality it included was kept within the bounds of moderation and decorum. Moreover, the pleasures of the table, however keenly appreciated, were redeemed from grossness by the finer touches of social sympathy and æsthetic enjoyment. Minstrelsy formed a regular part of a well ordered entertainment, and the rhythmical movements of the dance accompanied, on occasions, or alternated with chanted narratives of adventure.

Footnote 302:

_Classical Tour_, vol. i. p. 212.

Footnote 303:

Leaf’s _Iliad_, xi. 639.

Footnote 304:

_Iliad_, vii. 467; ix. 72.

Footnote 305:

Cf. Hayman’s _Odyssey_, vol. ii. p. 73; Gladstone’s _Studies in Homer_, vol. ii. p. 447.

In the palace of Ithaca, guests were served at separate small tables; but this may not have been the case everywhere. An erect posture was maintained by them. The Roman fashion of reclining at meals came in much later. An opening formality of ablution was designed for ceremonial purification; in the interests of corporeal cleanliness, a repetition of the process after the meal was concluded would have been desirable, but appears to have been neglected. As regards the food-supply, a stewardess, or housekeeper, brought round bread in a basket; a carver sliced and distributed the grilled meat; a herald filled the goblets in orderly succession; and good appetites did the rest. Women habitually ate apart. So Penelope sat by, spinning and silent, though feverish with eagerness for news of her absent lord, until Telemachus and Theoclymenus had concluded their repast; and Nausicaa supped in retirement while her father feasted with the Phæacian elders. But the rule of seclusion appears to have had no application to nymphs and goddesses. Wine, however, was freely allowed to women and children. Arêtê, the mother of Nausicaa, supplied a goat’s skin full for her pic-nic by the seashore; and it was with wine that the tunic of Phœnix was wont to be soiled as he fed the infant Achilles upon his knee.

Three meals a day made the full Homeric complement, reduced, nevertheless, to two under frequently recurring circumstances. Breakfast—_ariston_—was not always insisted upon, and we hear only twice of its formal preparation. It consisted ordinarily, there is reason to believe, of nothing more than bread soaked in wine; but Eumæus, who, for all his vigilant husbandry, loved talk and good cheer, offered better fare to his wily, unknown guest. A fire was lit in his hut at dawn; some cold pork, left from supper the night before, got re-broiled, and was barely hot when Telemachus made an appearance more welcome than looked for, having run the gauntlet of the Suitors’ sea-ambuscade on his return from Pylos. Hence a considerable amount of weeping for joy was indispensable before they could all three—seeming beggar, prince, and swineherd—sit down comfortably to breakfast together.

But when life ran out of its accustomed groove, and opportunities for eating became precarious, breakfast and dinner—_ariston_ and _deipnon_—were apt to coalesce. Noon, the regular dinner-hour, might, under such circumstances, be anticipated. Thus, when Telemachus and Pisistratus were setting out from Sparta towards Pylos, Menelaus, who was the soul of hospitality, ordered a _deipnon_ to be hastily got ready, and it had certainly been preceded by no lighter repast. The third Homeric meal—_dorpon_—was taken at, or after sundown. Its status fluctuated. Of primary importance to those busily engaged in out-of-door occupations, it counted for relatively little with idle folk like the Suitors, whose feasts and diversions might be prolonged, if they so willed it, from dawn to dusk. Supper, on the other hand, was naturally the chief meal of soldiers and sailors. ‘Perils will be paid with pleasures,’ says Verulam; and when the rage of battle was spent, or the ship brought safely into port, a banquet was spread with every available luxury, and enjoyed to the utmost. At sea, cooking was reduced to a minimum, even to zero, the probability being small that fires were ever kindled on shipboard. So that the hardships of long voyages were very great, if rarely incurred. When possible, land was made by nightfall, the vessel moored, and the crew disembarked.

Ac magno telluris amore Egressi, optata potiuntur Troes arena.

Supper followed, and sleep.