[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 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.
[262]. Hehn and Stallybrass, op. cit. p. 431.
[263]. Odyssey, vii. 104; Buchholz, op. cit. p. 118.