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.
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