Chapter 16

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

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]

286.Kruse,Hellas, Bd. i. p. 368.

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 ofcheese, 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 firstA gen’rous measure mixed of Pramnian wine;Then with a brazen grater shredded o’erThe goatsmilk cheese, and whitest barley-meal,And of the draught compounded bade them drink.[290]

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 especiallywas 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.

288.Hehn and Stallybrass,op. cit.p. 463.

289.Odyssey, xx. 69.

290.Iliad, xi. 637-40. (Lord Derby.)

291.Odyssey, x. 234.

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; asMusarum volucres, they brought the gift of song to the sleeping Pindar; they were themselves nymphs and priestesses, intertwined more especially with the worship of Demeterand 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 wordmellifluous. 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-beepar excellence, ministered to the young Zeus on Ida.

293.De Animal.lib. v. cap. 22.

294.Preller,Griechische Mythologie, Bd. i. p. 105, 3te Auflage.

295.Iliad, i. 249.

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.

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.’

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 heplunged 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]

299.Odyssey, ix. 205.

300.Hist. Nat.xiv. 6.

301.Hayman’sOdyssey, 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 theresinous 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 aprototropum—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 thecause 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.

302.Classical Tour, vol. i. p. 212.

303.Leaf’sIliad, xi. 639.

304.Iliad, vii. 467; ix. 72.

305.Cf. Hayman’sOdyssey, vol. ii. p. 73; Gladstone’sStudies 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 interestsof 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 hishut 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—aristonanddeipnon—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 adeipnonto 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 everyavailable 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 amoreEgressi, optata potiuntur Troes arena.

Ac magno telluris amore

Egressi, optata potiuntur Troes arena.

Supper followed, and sleep.

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