‘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]]
[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]]
[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.
[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.
[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: