The wild fig-tree is native in Greece, and is mentioned both in the Iliad and Odyssey. But the cultured fig occurs only in the latter poem, the author doubtless having made its acquaintance somewhere on the Anatolian seaboard, whither it would naturally have been conveyed from Phrygia. For Phrygia was in those days more renowned for its figs than Attica became later. Those of Paros were celebrated by Archilochus about 700 B.C.;[285] but none, it would seem, were produced on the mainland of Greece when Hesiod’s homely experiences took metrical form at Orchomenus. The ripe figs contributed by his garden to the frugal repasts of Laertes were then an anachronism to the full as glaring as turkeys in England, when Falstaff and Poins took purses ‘as in a castle, cock-sure,’ on Gadshill. The very idea, indeed, of archæological accuracy was foreign to the mind of either poet; nor could it, without detriment to the vigour and freedom of their conceptions, have been introduced. Footnote 285: _Ib._ p. 86. The pastoral section of the Achæan people drew their subsistence immediately, and almost exclusively from their flocks and herds. The commodities directly at hand were supplemented to a very slight extent, if at all, through the secondary channels of sale or barter. Milk and cheese hence formed the staple of their food, and were mainly the produce of sheep and goats. Cow’s milk never found favour in Greece; Homer ignored the possibility of its use; Aristotle depreciated its quality; and it is now no more thought of as an article of consumption than ewe’s milk in Great Britain or Ireland.[286] Those early herdsmen differed from us, too, in liking their simple beverage well watered. The part played occasionally by the pump in our London milk-supply would have met with their full approbation—unless, indeed, they might have preferred to add the qualifying ingredient at their own discretion. But the native strength of milk was, at any rate, too much for them. Only Polyphemus, a giant and a glutton, was voracious enough to swallow the undiluted contents of his pails. To him, as to his curious visitors from over the sea, butter-making was an unknown art, cheese being the sole modified product of Homeric dairies. That the first step towards its preparation consisted in the curdling of fresh milk with the sap of the fig-tree, we learn from the following allusion: Soon as liquid milk Is curdled by the fig-tree’s juice, and turns In whirling flakes, so soon was heal’d the wound.[287] Footnote 286: Kruse, _Hellas_, Bd. i. p. 368. Footnote 287: _Iliad_, v. 902-904. (Lord Derby.) The patient on this occasion was Ares himself, and the rapid closing of the gash inflicted by the audacious Diomed was brought about by the application of Pæonian simples, unavailable, it can readily be imagined, outside of Olympus.