Neither fish nor flesh was, in the Homeric world, preserved by means of salt or otherwise as a resource against future need. The distribution of superfluity was not better understood in time than in space. Meat, as we have seen, was killed and eaten on the spot; and the husbanding of fish-supplies was still less likely to be thought of. Salt was, however, regularly used as a condiment; it was sprinkled over roast meat,[258] and a pinch of salt was a proverbial expression for the indivisible atom, so to speak, of charity.[259] Only the marine stores of the commodity were drawn upon; those concealed by the earth remained unexplored—a circumstance in itself marking the great antiquity of the poems; and it was accordingly regarded as characteristic of an inland people to eat no salt with their food.[260] Its efficacy for ritual purification was fully recognised; and the ceremonial of sacrifice probably involved some use of it; but this is not fully ascertained.[261] Footnote 258: _Iliad_, ix. 214. Footnote 259: _Odyssey_, xvii. 455. Footnote 260: _Odyssey_, xi. 123, with Hayman’s note. Footnote 261: Buchholz, _Realien_, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 294. The farinaceous part of Homeric diet was furnished, according to circumstances, either by barley-meal, or by wheaten flour. The former was lauded as the ‘marrow of men’; ship-stores consisted mainly of it; and it was probably eaten boiled with water into a kind of porridge, corresponding perhaps by its prominence in Achæan rustic economy, to the _polenta_ of the Lombard peasantry. Barley is called by Pliny ‘the most antique form of food,’ and its antiquity lent it sacredness. Hence the preliminary sprinkling with barley-groats, alike of the victim, and of the altar upon which it was about to be sacrificed. So essential to the validity of the offering was this part of the ceremony, that the guilty comrades of Odysseus, in default of barley, had recourse to shred oakleaves, in their futile attempt at bribing the immortal gods with a share of the spoil, to condone their transgression against the solar herds.