“Each person at table had as much barley-bread as he could eat; swine’s-flesh, or some other meat, to eat with it, with which the famous black-sauce[2] (whose composition, without any loss to culinary art, is evidently a mystery for us) was given round, and to close the meal, olives, figs, and cheese.”

In a note he continues:—­

“Some imagined that the receipt of its composition was to be found in Plutarch (De Tuenda Sanitate, t. vi. p. 487.), but apparently it was only imagination.  That [Greek:  zomos] signified not broth, as it has been usually translated, but sauce, is apparent from the connection in which Athenaeus used the word.  To judge from Hesychius, it appears to have borne the name [Greek:  bapha] among the Spartans.  How little it pleased the Sicilian Dionysius is well known from Plutarch (Inst.  Lacon. t. v. 880.) and from others.”

Sir Walter Trevelyan’s question is soon answered, for I presume the celebrity of Spartan Black Broth is chiefly owing to the anecdote of Dionysius related by Plutarch, in his very popular and amusing Laconic Apophthegms, which Stobaeus and Cicero evidently followed; this, and what is to be gathered from Athenaeus and Julius Pollux, with a few words in Hesychius and the Etymologicon Magnum, is the whole amount of our information.  Writers since the revival of letters have mostly copied each other, from Coelius Rhodiginus down to Gesner, who derives his conjecture from Turnebus, whose notion is derived from Julius Pollux,—­and so we move in a circle.  We sadly want a Greek Apicius, and then we might resolve the knotty question.  I fear we must give up the notion of cuttle-fish stewed in their own ink, though some former travellers have not spoken so favourable of this Greek dish.  Apicius, De Arte Coquinaria, among his fish-sauces has three Alexandrian receipts, one of which will give some notion of the incongruous materials admissible in the Greek kitchen of later times:—­

     “JUS ALEXANDRINUM IN PISCE ASSO.

     “Piper, cepam siccam, ligusticum, cuminum, orignum, apii semen,
     pruna damascena enucleata; passum, liquamen, defrutum, oleum, et
     coques.”

This question Vexata it seems had not escaped the notice of German antiquaries.  In Boettiger’s Kleine Shriften, vol. iii., Sillig has printed for the first time a Dissertation, in answer to a question which might have graced your pages:  “Wherewith did the Ancients spoon” [their food]?  Which opens thus:—­

“Though about the composition and preparation of Spartan Black Sauce we may have only so many doubts, yet still it remains certain that it was a jus—­boiled flesh prepared with pig’s blood, salt, and vinegar, a brodo; and, when it was to a certain degree thickened by boiling, though not like a Polenta or other dough-like mass (maza offa), eaten with the fingers.  Here, then, arises