The war was not an era of sweetness and light. Perhaps sugar was the article most missed. Maple sugar was of too limited production to meet the popular need. Sorghum was a horror then, is a horror to remember now. It set our teeth on edge and clawed off the coats of our stomachs. In the army sugar was doled out by pinches, and from the tables of most citizens it was banished altogether. There were those who solaced themselves with rye coffee and sorghum molasses regardless of ergot and acid, but nobler souls would not be untrue to their gastronomic ideal. Necessity is one thing, mock luxury another. If there had been honey enough, we should have been on the antique basis; for honey was the sugar of antiquity, and all our cry for sugar was but an echo of the cry for honey in the Peloponnesian war. Honey was then, as it is now, one of the chief products of Attica. It is not likely that the Peloponnesians took the trouble to burn over the beds of thyme that gave Attic honey its peculiar flavor, but the Peloponnesians would not have been soldiers if they had not robbed every beehive on the march; and, sad to relate, the Athenians must have been forced to import honey. When Dicæopolis makes the separate peace mentioned above, he gets up a feast of good things, and there is a certain unction in the tone with which he orders the basting of sausage-meat with honey, as one should say mutton and currant jelly. In The Peace, when War appears and proceeds to make a salad, he says,—
I'll pour some Attic honey in.
Whereupon Trygæus cries out,—
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.
Almost as touching as the pluralis maiestaticus of "those molasses" is the Scythian archer's personification of honey as Αττικὁϛ μἑλιϛ [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.