CHAPTER VII.HOMERIC MEALS.

Heroicappetites 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. Wantalone 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.

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 entertainmenta 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.

242.Odyssey, xx. 299.

243.Potter,Archæologia Græca, vol. ii. p. 360.

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, whichmay, 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.

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 carebestowed 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.

246.Odyssey, xxii. 468.

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 thispoint 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.

248.Skeat,Etymological Dictionary. Ἔγχελυς, an eel, is equivalent toanguilla, diminutive ofanguis, 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.

249.Odyssey, xxii. 383-89.

250.Either birds or fishes might be understood to be taken in the net mentioned inIliad, 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]

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 fishCasts down the treacherous bait, and in the seaPlunges his tackle with its oxhorn guard;Then tosses out on land a gasping prey;So gasping to the cliff my men were raised.[252]

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]

252.Odyssey, xii. 251-55 (W. C. Green’s translation inSimiles 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 fishermanLets fall, encas’d in wild bull’s horn, to bearDestruction to the sea’s voracious tribes.[253]

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]

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-heapsat Hissarlik[254]makes it clear that fresh-water fish were not neglected by the early inhabitants of the Troad.

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:

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.

256.Iliad, xvi. 745-50.

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]

258.Iliad, ix. 214.

259.Odyssey, xvii. 455.

260.Odyssey, xi. 123, with Hayman’s note.

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 thepolentaof 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 Homericpuroswas 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 knowingthe 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.

262.Hehn and Stallybrass,op. cit.p. 431.

263.Odyssey, vii. 104; Buchholz,op. cit.p. 118.

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 wordmaza, by which it is signified, does not occur in the Epics.

265.Blümner,Technologie und Terminologie bei Griechen und Römern, Bd. i. p. 24.

266.Odyssey, vii. 104.

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, occurringin 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 themolaof sacrifices.[268]But neitherzeianoroluraserved 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.

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 thedébrisof 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]

269.Lib. ii. cap. 36.

270.De Candolle,Cultivated Plants, p. 363.

271.Hehn,op. cit.pp. 439-40.

272.Dawkins,Early Man in Britain, pp. 293, 301.

273.Iliad, viii. 306; cf.ante, p. 166.

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, andHorace 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.

275.Iliad, xi. 629.

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 peasOr 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]

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 oferebinthoi, ground down, however, by phonetic decay torebithi.[278]They afforded, under the designation ‘frictum cicer,’ a staple article of food to the poorer inhabitants of Latium; and, as the Spanishgarbanzo, they derive culinary importance from the part assigned to them in every properly constitutedolla podrida.[279]Beans were the first pod-fruit cultivated. They are mentioned in the Bible, and have been excavated atHissarlik. 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.’

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

278.Buchholz,loc. cit.p. 269.

279.Rhind,Hist. of the Vegetable Kingdom, p. 315.

280.Virchow,Berlin. Abh.1879, p. 69.

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, andfig 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]

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]

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 nameroia, 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.

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 700B.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 ofeither poet; nor could it, without detriment to the vigour and freedom of their conceptions, have been introduced.

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 thecurdling of fresh milk with the sap of the fig-tree, we learn from the following allusion:

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