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.
[288]. Hehn and Stallybrass, op. cit. p. 463.
[289]. Odyssey, xx. 69.
[290]. Iliad, xi. 637-40. (Lord Derby.)
[291]. Odyssey, x. 234.
[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.
[293]. De Animal. lib. v. cap. 22.