[*]"Odyssey,” IX. 5-10.

156.  The Staple Articles of Food.—­However, the Athenians have honest appetites, and due means of silencing them.  The diet of a poor man is indeed simple in the extreme.  According to Aristophanes his meal consists of a cake, bristling with bran for the sake of economy, along with an onion and a dish of sow thistles, or of mushrooms, or some other such wretched vegetables; and probably, in fact, that is about all three fourths of the population of Attica will get on ordinary working days, always with the addition of a certain indispensable supply of oil and wine.

Bread, oil, and wine, in short, are the three fundamentals of Greek diet.  With them alone man can live very healthfully and happily; without them elaborate vegetable and meat dishes are poor substitutes.  Like latter-day Frenchmen or Italians with their huge loaves or macaroni, bread in one form or another is literally the stuff of life to the Greek.  He makes it of wheat, barley, rye, millet, or spelt, but preferably of the two named first.  The barley meal is kneaded (not baked) and eaten raw or half raw as a sort of porridge.  Of wheat loaves there are innumerable shapes on sale in the Agora,—­slender rolls, convenient loaves, and also huge loaves needing two or three bushels of flour, exceeding even those made in a later day in Normandy.  At every meal the amount of bread or porridge consumed is enormous; there is really little else at all substantial.  Persian visitors to the Greeks complain that they are in danger of rising from the table hungry.

But along with the inevitable bread goes the inevitable olive oil.  No latter-day article will exactly correspond to it.  First of all it takes the place of butter as the proper condiment to prevent the bread from being tasteless.[*] It enters into every dish.  The most versatile cook will be lost without it.  Again, at the gymnasium we have seen its great importance to the athletes and bathers.  It is therefore the Hellenic substitute for soap.  Lastly, it fills the lamps which swing over very dining board.  It takes the place of electricity, gas, or petroleum.  No wonder Athens is proud of her olive trees.  If she has to import her grain, she has a surplus for export of one of the three great essentials of Grecian life.

[*]There was extremely little cow’s butter in Greece.  Herodotus (iv. 2) found it necessary to explain the process of “cow-cheese-making” among the Scythians.

The third inevitable article of diet is wine.  No one has dreamed of questioning its vast desirability under almost all circumstances.  Even drunkenness is not always improper.  It may be highly fitting, as putting one in a “divine frenzy,” partaking of the nature of the gods.  Museus the semi-mythical poet is made out to teach that the reward of virtue will be something like perpetual intoxication in the next world.  Aeschines the orator will, ere long,