Wheat is a native of Asia,—some say, of Siberia; others, of Tartary; but it is a matter of doubt, whether it can now be found there growing in a wild state. The Romans created a corn-god, and then asked its protection. The powerful deity was called Robigus, and he was solemnly invoked, on every 25th of April, to keep mildew from the grain. The Romans had a reverence for corn, but barley was excepted from this homage; and to threaten to put an offending soldier on rations of barley, was to menace him with disgrace. The Italian antipathy still exists, if we may believe the Italian Professor, who, being offered a basin of gruel, (made from barley,) declared its proper appellation to be “acqua crudele.” He accounted of it, as Pliny did of rye, that it was detestable, and could only be swallowed by an extremely hungry man. Oats were only esteemed a degree higher by Virgil. The poet speaks of them almost as disparagingly as Johnson did, when he described them as “food for horses in England, and for men in Scotland.” The grain, however, found a good advocate in him who asked, “——where did you ever see such horses and such men?” The meal is, nevertheless, of a heating quality, and certain cutaneous diseases are traced to a too exclusive use of it. But oatmeal cakes are not bad eating,—where better is not to be procured,—though they are less attractive to the palate than those sweet buns made from sesame grain, and which the Romans not only swallowed with delight, but used the name proverbially. The lover who was treating his mistress to sugared phrases, was said to be regaling her with “sesame cakes.” This sort of provision was very largely dealt in by Latin lovers. It was to be had cheaply; and nymphs consumed as fast as swains presented.
If lovers gave the light bread of persuasion to win a maiden’s affection, the Government distributed solid loaves, or corn to make them with, to the people, in order to gain the popular esteem, and suppress sedition. In some cases, it was as a “poor’s rate” paid by the Emperors, and costing them nothing. In too many cases, it was ill applied; and if Adrian daily fed all the children of the poor, other imperial rulers showered their tens of thousands of bushels daily on an idle populace and a half-dressed soldiery. It was easily procured. Sixty millions of bushels—twenty times that number of pounds’ weight—were supplied by Africa; and those “sweet nurses of Rome,” the islands of the Mediterranean, also poured into the imperial granaries an abundant tribute of the golden seed. It is a fact, however, that neither Romans nor Gauls were, till a late period, acquainted with the method of making fermented bread.
Ambrosia, nine times sweeter than honey, was the food of the gods; the first men existed on more bitter fare,—bread made from acorns. Ceres has the honour of having introduced a better fare. Men worshipped her accordingly; and, abandoning acorns, took also to eating the pig, now allowed to fatten on them at his leisure. Ceres and King Miletus dispute the renown of having invented grinding-stones. The hand-mill was one of the trophies which the Roman eagles bore back with them from Asia. Mola, the goddess charged therewith, looked to the well-being of mills, millers, and bread. In Greece, Mercury had something to do with this. It was he, at least, who sent to the Athenian market-women, selling bread, their customers; and, as he was the God of Eloquence, it is, doubtless, from this ancient source that all market-women are endowed with shrewdness and loquacity.
The Athenian bread-sellers are said to have possessed both. Our ladies of the Gate, in Billing’s Ward, are, probably, not behind them; and I am inclined to think that a true old-fashioned Bristol market-woman would surpass both. Let me cite an instance.
Some years ago, an old member of this ancient sisterhood was standing at her stall, in front of one of the Bristol banks. She had a £10 Bank-of-England note in her hand; and as, in her younger days, she had been nurse-maid in the family of one of the partners, she thought she might venture to enter, and ask for gold for her note. She did so; but it was at a time when guineas were worth five-and-twenty shillings a-piece, and gold was scarce, and——in short, she met with a refusal. The quick-witted market-woman, without exhibiting any disappointment, thereupon asked the cashier to let her have ten of the bank’s £1 notes in exchange for her “Bank-of-Englander.” The cashier was delighted to accommodate her in this fashion. The exchange being completed, the old lady, taking up one of the provincial notes, read aloud the promise engraved upon it, to pay the bearer in cash. “Very good!” said she, with a gleesome chuckle, “now gi’ me goold for your notes, or I’ll run to the door, and call out, ‘Bank’s broke!’” There was no resisting this, and the market-woman departed triumphantly with her gold. Light-heeled Mercury could not have helped her better than she helped herself, by means of her own sharp wit.
Despite what Virgil says of oats, the Roman soldiery, for many years, had no better food than gruel made from oatmeal, and sharpened for the appetite by a little vinegar. The vinegar was an addition suggested by Numa, who also not only improved the very rude ideas which previously prevailed with regard to the making of bread, but turned baker himself, and sent his loaves to the ovens which he had erected, and to the bakers whom he had raised into a “guild,” placed under the protection of the goddess Fornax;—and a very indifferent, nay, disreputable, deity she was! The public ovens were to the people of Rome what a barber’s shop is to a village in war time,—the temple of gossip. It had been well had they never been any thing worse! The vocation of baker was hereditary in a family; the son was compelled to follow his father’s calling. Occasionally, a member of the fraternity was offered a senatorship; but then he was required to make over his property, realized by baking, to his successors; and, consequently, the honour was as deeply declined as the London mayoralty would be by the Governor of the Bank of England.
If Fornax was the goddess to whose patronage the bakers were consigned by the State, she suffered by the religious liberty exercised by the bakers themselves, who chose to pay adoration to Vesta. Vesta was the very antipodes in character and attributes to Fornax; and the selection of the former would seem to show, that the generally reviled bakers could not only praise virtue, but practise it.
Endless were the varieties of bread sold in the markets at Rome. There was Cappadocian bread for the wealthy; pugilistic loaves for the athletæ; batter-bread for the strong, and Greek rolls for the weak, of stomach: and there were the prepared bread poultices, which people who, like Pompey’s young soldiers, were afraid of injuring their complexion, were wont to keep applied to their cheeks during the hours of sleep. Anadyomene so slumbering, with Adonis at her side similarly poulticed, can hardly be said to be a subject for a painter; and yet many a blooming Caia slept on the bosom of her Caius, and more panis madidus than blushes on the cheeks of either.
Pliny ventures on a strange statement with regard to oats. He says that oats and barley are so nearly allied, that when a man sows the one, he is not sure that he may not reap the other! He also illustrates the prolificness of millet, by asserting that a single grain produced “innumerable ears of corn; and that a bushel (twenty pounds’ weight) of millet would make more than sixty pounds of wholesome bread!” The Romans and the Greeks also appear to have been acquainted with Indian corn.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, much as he affected to love nature,—and he was himself one of the most artificial of characters,—knew very little about her, or her productions. Some of our great men are described as being in much the same condition of ignorance. Three poets of the last century were one day walking through a field, promising a glorious harvest of grain. One of them extolled the beauty of the wheat. “Nay,” said the second, “it is rye.” “Not so,” remarked the third, “it is a field of barley.” A clown, standing by, heard and marvelled at the triple ignorance. “You are all wrong, gentlemen,” said he; “those be oats.” The poets were town-bred; or were of that class of people who go through a country with their eyes open, and are unable to distinguish between its productions. I have seen Londoners contemplating, with a very puzzled look, the “canary” crops growing in the vicinity of Herne Bay; and I was once gravely asked if it was “teazle!”