Ho, there, I warn you use some other honey.
Be sparing of the Attic. That costs sixpence.
Attic honey has the ring of New Orleans molasses; "those molasses," as
the article was often called, with an admiring plural of majesty.
[Note: Almost as touching as the _pluralis maiestaticus_ of "those
molasses" is the Scythian archer's personification of honey as [Greek:
Attikos melis], Ar. Thesm. 1192.]
But a Confederate student, like the rest of his tribe, could more
readily renounce sweetness than light, and light soon became a serious
matter. The American demands a flood of light, and wonders at the
English don who pursues his investigations by the glimmer of two
candles. It was hard to go back to primitive tallow dips. Lard might
have served, but it was too precious to be used in lamps. The new
devices were dismal, such as the vile stuff called terebene, which
smoked and smelt more than it illuminated, such as the wax tapers which
were coiled round bottles that had seen better days. Many preferred the
old way, and read by flickering pine-knots, which cost many an old
reader his eyes.
Now, tallow dips, lard, wax tapers, terebene, pine-knots, were all
represented in the Peloponnesian war by oil. Oil, one of the great
staples of Attica, became scarcer as the war went on. "A bibulous wick"
was a sinner against domestic economy; to trim a lamp and hasten
combustion was little short of a crime. Management in the use of
oil--otherwise considered the height of niggardliness--was the rule, and
could be all the more readily understood by the Confederate student when
he reflected that oil was the great lubricant as well; that it was the
Attic butter, and to a considerable extent the Attic soap. Under the
Confederacy butter mounted to the financial milky way, not to be scaled
of ordinary men, and soap was also a problem. Modern chemists have
denied the existence of true soap in antiquity. The soap-suds that got
into the eyes of the Athenian boy on the occasion of his Saturday-night
scrubbing were not real soap-suds, but a kind of lye used for desperate
cases. The oil-flask was the Athenian's soapbox. No wonder, then, that
oil was exceeding precious in the Peloponnesian war, and no wonder that
all these little details of daily hardship come back even now to the old
student when he reopens his Aristophanes. No wonder that the ever
present Peloponnesian war will not suffer him to forget those four years
in which the sea of trouble rose higher and higher.