Honey is now, to a great extent, a superannuated article of food. The sugar-cane has usurped its place and its importance. But to the ancients, its value, as the chief saccharine ingredient at their disposal, was enormous. It could not then be expected that the myth-making faculty should remain idle in regard to it. The nectar of the earth was accordingly believed to drop down from heaven into the calyxes of half-opened flowers; it fell from the rising stars, or, at any rate, near the places, so Aristotle averred,[293] whence they rose, and was distilled from rainbows upon the blossoming plains they seemed to touch. Nature’s winged agents, too, for the collection of what must have seemed to the first rude experimenters in diet, an almost supersensual dainty, had a niche assigned to them in the edifice of fancy. Bees were connected with poetry, music, and eloquence; as _Musarum volucres_, they brought the gift of song to the sleeping Pindar; they were themselves nymphs and priestesses, intertwined more especially with the worship of Demeter and Cybele.[294] The germ of some of these imaginative shoots and sprays seems to be laid bare in the simple Homeric metaphor by which the discourse of Nestor was said to flow with more than the sweetness of honey from his lips.[295] The same idea—a very obvious one—is embodied in the English word _mellifluous_. But a figure, in older times, was often only the beginning of a fable; and hence the hovering of bees about the lips of the infant Plato, and round the head of Krishna, when he expounded the nature of the divinity. A genuine Homeric trace, moreover, of the legendary associations of bees is supplied by their installation in the Nymphs’ Grotto at Ithaca,[296] where they gathered honey for the local divinities, ministering to them as Melissa, the Nymph-bee _par excellence_, ministered to the young Zeus on Ida. Footnote 293: _De Animal._ lib. v. cap. 22. Footnote 294: Preller, _Griechische Mythologie_, Bd. i. p. 105, 3te Auflage. Footnote 295: _Iliad_, i. 249. Footnote 296: _Odyssey_, xiii. 106. Homer was fully acquainted with the virtue of honey for propitiating the dead. A vase of honey was placed by Achilles on the pyre of Patroclus,[297] and Odysseus poured a due libation of milk and honey as part of his apparatus of enticement to the shade of Tiresias. Subsequent experience showed this beverage to be acceptable even to the Erinyes; nor was Cerberus proof against a lure of honey-cakes. Luckily for himself, however, Odysseus escaped an encounter with the Dog of Hades, for whom he brought no pacifying recipe. Footnote 297: _Iliad_, xxiii. 170.