As when an entertainment was given the host necessarily expected his guests to make a good dinner, they usually commenced the business of the day with an antecœnium or whet, consisting of herbs of the sharpest taste. At Athens, the articles which generally composed this course were colewort, eggs, oysters, œnomel—a mixture of honey and wine—all supposed to create appetite.[[653]] To these even in later times were added the mallow and the asphodel, king’s-spear or day-lily, gourds,[[654]] melons, cucumbers. The melons of Greece are still delicious, and famous as ever in the Levant. Antioch was celebrated for its cucumbers, Smyrna for its lettuces. Mushrooms were always a favourite dish;[[655]] and they had receipts for producing them, which even now, perhaps, may not be wholly unworthy of attention.
The use, however, of this kind of food was always attended with great danger, there being comparatively few species that could be safely eaten. Persons were frequently poisoned by them, and a pretty epigram of Euripides has been preserved, commemorating a mother and three children who had been thus cut off, in the island of Icaros:
Bright wanderer through the eternal way,
Has sight so sad as that which now
Bedims the splendour of thy ray,
E’er bid the streams of sorrow flow?
Here, side by side, in death are laid
Two darling boys, their mother’s care;
And here their sister, youthful maid,
Near her who nursed and thought them fair.[[656]]