Diodes, of Carystos, enumerates among wholesome vegetables the red beet, the mallow, the dock, the nettle, orach, the bolbos, or truffle, and the mushroom, of which the best kinds were supposed to grow at the foot of elm and pine trees.[[657]]

The sion[[658]] (sium latifolium), another of their vegetables, is a plant found in marshes and meadows, with the smallage.[[659]]

Another plant, of far greater celebrity, was the Silphion,[[660]] once extremely plentiful in Cyrenaica, as also, though of an inferior quality, in Syria, Armenia, and Media, but afterwards so rare as to be thought extinct. Besides being used in seasoning soups and sauces, and mixed with salt for giving a superior flavour to meat, its juice occupied a high place among the materia medica.[[661]] A single plant was discovered in the reign of Nero, and sent to Rome as a present to the Emperor. Its seed, according to Pollux,[[662]] was called magudaris, its root silphion, the stem caulos, and the leaf maspeton. Be this as it may, it communicated to the sauces in which it was infused a pungent and somewhat bitter taste, and was in no favour with Archestratos.[[663]]

We come now to the fruit,[[664]] and shall begin with that which was the pride of Attica, the fig.[[665]] According to traditions fully credited in Athens, figs were first produced on a spot near the city, on the road to Eleusis, thence called Hiera Sukè, “the sacred fig-tree.”[[666]] Like its men, the figs of Attica were esteemed the best in the world, and to secure an abundant supply for the use of the inhabitants it was forbidden to export them. As might have been expected, however, this decree was habitually contravened, and the informers against the delinquents were called sycophants, that is, “revealers of figs,”[[667]] a word which has been adopted by most modern languages to signify mean-souled, dastardly persons, such as informers always are. The fig-tree of Laconia was a dwarfed species, and its fruit, according to Aristophanes,[[668]] savoured of hatred and tyranny, like the people themselves.

There is no kind of fig,

Whether little or big,

Save the Spartan, which here does not grow;

But this, though quite small,

Swells with hatred and gall,

A stern foe to the Demos, I trow.[[669]]