FIGS.
Figs have from the earliest times been reckoned among the delights of the palate.
Moses, in the Pentateuch, enumerates among the praises of the promised land, (Deut.viii.8.) that it was a “Land of Fig Trees”.
The Athenians valued figs at least as highly as the Jews. Alexis (in the Deipnosophists) calls figs “Food for the Gods.” Pausanias says that the Athenian, Phytalus, was rewarded by Ceres for his hospitality, with the gift of the first fig-tree. Some foreign guest, no doubt, transmitted to him the plant, which he introduced into Attica. It succeeded so well there, that Athensæus brings forward Lynceus and Antiphanes vaunting the figs of Attica as the best on the earth. Horapollo, or rather his commentator Bolzair, says that when the master of a house is going a journey he hangs out a broom of fig-boughs for good luck.
By one of the laws of Solon all the products of the earth were forbidden to be exported from Athens; under this law the exportation of figs was prohibited, and it is from this circumstance we have the wordsycophantfrom the Greek; those who violated this law were subject to a heavy penalty, and the informer against thedelinquents was called a sycophant from the original word literally meaning an “exhibiter of figs,” as thereby substantiating his charge. The name was afterward more extensively applied, and is now associated with the ideas of meanness, servility, and calumny.
A taste for figs marked the progress of refinement in the Roman Empire. In Cato’s time but six sorts of figs were known; in Pliny’s twenty-nine. The sexual system of plants seems first to have been observed in the fig tree. Pliny in his Natural History alludes to this under the termcaprification.
In modern times the esteem for figs has been more widely diffused; when Charles the5thvisited Holland in 1540, a Dutch merchant sent him, as the greatest delicacy which Zuricksee could offer, a plate of figs. The gracious Emperor dispelled for a moment the fogs of the climate by declaring, that he had never eaten figs in Spain with more pleasure. Carter praises the figs of Malaga; Tournefort those of Marseilles; Ray those of Italy; Brydone those of Sicily; Dumont those of Malta; Browne those of Thessaly; Pocock those of Mycone; De la Mourtraye those of Tenedos and Mitylene; Chandler those of Smyrna; Maillet those of Cairo; and Lady Mary Wortley Montague those of Tunis. What less can be inferred from this conspiring testimony than that wherever there is a fig there is a feast?
It remains for Jamaica, and the contiguous Islands, to acquire that celebrity for the growth of figs, which yet attaches to the Eastern Archipelago; to learn to dry them as in the Levant, and to supply the desserts of the English tables.