Although the keeping of bees was strange to Homer’s experience, the product of their industry was pleasantly familiar to him. The ideal of deliciousness was furnished by honey, and Homeric palates reached their acme of gratification with things ‘honey-sweet.’ But Homeric bees were still in a state of nature, their ‘roofs of gold’ getting built in hollow trees or rocky clefts. Artificial dwellings were provided for them, by interested human agency, considerably later. The use of bee-hives in Greece is first attested in the Hesiodic Theogony; and in Russia and Lithuania, wild honey was still gathered in the woods little more than a century and a half ago.[288] Alike in the Iliad and Odyssey, honey figures in a manner totally inconsistent with our notions of gastronomic harmony. We, in our unregenerate condition, should seek to be excused from partaking of the semi-ambrosial diet of cheese, honey, and sweet wine supplied by Aphrodite to the divinely brought-up daughters of Pandareus;[289] nor do we envy to ‘Gerenian Nestor’ and his wounded companion the posset brewed for them on their return from the battle-field by the skilful Hecamede. The palates indeed must have been hardy, and the constitutions robust, of those upon whom it acted as an agreeable restorative. The process of its preparation was as follows. In a bowl of such noble capacity that an ordinary man’s strength scarcely availed to raise it brimming to his lips, Their goddess-like attendant first A gen’rous measure mixed of Pramnian wine; Then with a brazen grater shredded o’er The goatsmilk cheese, and whitest barley-meal, And of the draught compounded bade them drink.[290] Nothing loath, they obeyed, nor did they shrink from adding piquancy to the liquid concoction by simultaneously devouring a dozen or so of raw onions! A precisely similar drink, designed as a vehicle for the ‘evil drugs’ mingled with it, was treacherously served round by Circe to her guests, and imbibed with the debasing and transforming results one has heard of.[291] Only the onions were absent, and with good reason, the crafty sorceress being fully aware of their antidotal power against malign influences. The practice of sweetening and thickening wine was handed on from heroic to classic times. Old Thasian especially was considered, when tempered with honey and meal, to be of most refreshing quality in the heats of summer; and Athenæus relates, without surprise or disapproval, that the islanders of Thera preferred, for the purpose of making porridge of their wine, ground pease or lentils to barley.[292] The tolerant motto, _De gustibus_, needs now and then, as we study the past of gastronomy, to be recalled to mind. Footnote 288: Hehn and Stallybrass, _op. cit._ p. 463. Footnote 289: _Odyssey_, xx. 69. Footnote 290: _Iliad_, xi. 637-40. (Lord Derby.) Footnote 291: _Odyssey_, x. 234. Footnote 292: Athenæus, x. 40.