‘Butcher’s meat’ (as we call it) was the staple food of Greek heroes. Oxen, however, were not recklessly slaughtered. ‘Great meals of beef’ usually honoured solemn occasions. The fat beasts, reckoned to be in their prime at five years old, met their fate for the most part in connexion with some expiatory ceremony, as that employed to stay the pestilence in the First Iliad, or as the sacrifice for victory offered by Agamemnon in the Second Iliad. The gods were then served first with tit-bits wrapped in fat, and reduced by fire to ashes and steamy odours, peculiarly grateful to immortal nostrils. Portions of the haunches were often chosen for this purpose; the tongue might be added; while at other times, samples of the whole carcass at large seemed preferable. What remained was cut up into small pieces after a fashion still prevailing in Albania,[241] and these, having been filed upon spits, were rapidly grilled. Thickly strewn with barley-meal, they were then distributed by a steward, and eaten with utensils of nature’s providing. Specially honoured guests had pieces from the chine—‘_perpetui tergo bovis_’—allotted to them; and they might, if they chose, share their ‘booty’ (so it was designated) with any other to whom they desired to pass on the compliment, as Odysseus did to Demodocus at the Phæacian feast. The glad recipients of these greasy favours were obviously exempt from modern fastidiousness. Footnote 241: E. F. Knight, _Albania_, p. 225, 1880. Sheep and goats were prepared for table precisely in the same way with oxen, and so likewise were pigs, save that they were not divested of their skins. ‘Cracklings’ were already appreciated. Roast pork appears, in the Iliad, only on the hospitable board of Achilles; but is less exclusively apportioned in the Odyssey. A brace of sucking-pigs were instantly killed and cooked by Eumæus, the swineherd of Odysseus, on the arrival of his disguised master. Yet he was very far from estimating at their true value the tender merits of the dish celebrated by Elia as perfectly ‘satisfactory to the criticalness of the censorious palate,’ actually apologising for it as ‘servants’ fare,’ wholly unacceptable to the haughty Suitors, for whose profuse entertainment a full-grown porker had to be daily sacrificed. Each man, however, despatched his pig, and was shortly ready for more. And so captivated was Eumæus, by the time his four underlings returned from the fields for supper, with his outwardly sorry guest, that, enlarging the bounds of his liberality, he ordered the slaughter of a noble hog, whose adipose perfections had been ripening during full five years of life. His cooking was promptly executed, and one share having been set aside for the local nymphs, the six men fell to, and left only such scraps as served for an early breakfast next morning. The performance would have been creditable in modern Somaliland.