The favourite Homeric epithet for barley was ‘white,’ and the quality of whiteness is also conveyed by the name, _alphiton_, of barley-meal.[262] But our word ‘wheat’ has the same meaning, while the Homeric _puros_ was a yellow grain.[263] Nor can there be much doubt that it was a different variety, identical, presumably, with the small, otherwise unknown kind unearthed at Hissarlik. As the finest cereal then extant, its repute nevertheless stood high; its taste was called ‘honey-sweet’; its consumption was plainly a privilege of the well-to-do classes. Our poet is not likely to have ‘spoken by the card’ when he included wheat among the spontaneous products of the island of the Cyclops; yet the assertion of its indigenous growth there was repeated by Diodorus Siculus,[264] who had better opportunities for knowing the truth, and had taken out no official licence for its embellishment. Nevertheless there is much difficulty in believing that wheat had its native home elsewhere than in Mesopotamia and Western India. Footnote 262: Hehn and Stallybrass, _op. cit._ p. 431. Footnote 263: _Odyssey_, vii. 104; Buchholz, _op. cit._ p. 118. Footnote 264: De Candolle, _Origin of Cultivated Plants_, p. 357. Bakers were as little known as butchers to Homeric folk, whose bread-making was of the elementary description practised by the pile-dwellers of Robenhausen and Mooseedorf. The corn was first ground in hand-mills[265] worked by female slaves, of whom fifty were thus exclusively employed in the palace of Alcinous.[266] The loaves or cakes, for which the material was thus laboriously provided, were probably baked on stones, like those fragmentarily preserved during millenniums beneath Swiss lacustrine deposits of peat and mud.[267] Only wheaten flour was so employed in Achæan households; but wheaten bread was indispensable to every well-furnished table, and was neatly served round in baskets placed at frequent intervals. Barley-bread was the invention of a later age; the word _maza_, by which it is signified, does not occur in the Epics. Footnote 265: Blümner, _Technologie und Terminologie bei Griechen und Römern_, Bd. i. p. 24. Footnote 266: _Odyssey_, vii. 104. Footnote 267: Heer, _Die Pflanzen der Pfahlbauten_, p. 9.