The porcine proclivities of modern Greeks are especially strong. Christian and Mahometan habitations were, in the days of Turkish domination, easily distinguished by the sty-accommodation attached to the former; while in certain villages of the Morea and the Cyclades, the pigs no longer occupied a merely subordinate position, and odours not Sabæan, wafted far on the breeze, announced to the still distant traveller the nature of the harbourage in store for him.[146] Footnote 146: Gell, _A Journey in the Morea_, p. 63. The most antique of domesticated birds is the goose, and Homer was acquainted with no other. Penelope kept a flock of twenty,[147] mainly, it would seem, for purposes of diversion, since the loss of them through the devastations of an eagle is treated from a purely sentimental point of view. They were fed on wheat, the ‘height of good living,’ in Homeric back-premises. The court-yard, too, of the palace of Menelaus sheltered a cackling flock,[148] the progenitors of which Helen might have brought with her from Egypt, where geese were prehistorically reared for the table. That the bird occurs _only_ tame in the Odyssey, and _only_ wild in the Iliad, constitutes a distinction between the poems which can scarcely be without real significance. The species employed, in the Second Iliad, to illustrate, by the tumult of their alighting on the marshy banks of the Cayster, the clangorous march-past of the Achæan forces, has been identified as _Anser cinereus_, numerous specimens of which fly south, in severe winters, from the valley of the Danube to Greece and Asia Minor. Footnote 147: _Odyssey_, xix. 536. Footnote 148: _Ib._ xv. 161.