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.’
[277]. Iliad, xiii. 588-92 (trans. by W. C. Green).
[278]. Buchholz, loc. cit. p. 269.
[279]. Rhind, Hist. of the Vegetable Kingdom, p. 315.
[280]. Virchow, Berlin. Abh. 1879, p. 69.
[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.