The principle that the god fares as his worshipper is however crossed by another, _he sometimes fares worse_. This was noticed by writers on ritual such as Porphyry[211] and Eustathius[212], and they explain it as a sort of survival of a golden age of simple manners, dear to the conservatism of the gods. This conservatism of the gods mirrors, of course, the natural and timid conservatism of their worshippers. They have begun by offering just what they eat themselves, and, from the fact that they have once offered it, they attach to this food special sanctity. They advance in civilization, and their own food becomes more delicate and complex, but they dare not make any change in the diet of their gods; they have learnt to bake and eat fermented bread themselves, but the gods are still nurtured on barley grains and porridge. Porphyry[213] reduces the successive stages of sacrifice to a regular system of progressive vegetarianism. First men plucked and offered grass, which was like the ‘soft wool’ of the earth; then the fruit of trees and their leaves, the acorn and the nut; then barley appeared first of the grains, and they offered simple barley-corns; then they broke and bruised grain and made it into cakes. In like fashion they made libations first of water, then of honey, the natural liquid prepared for us by bees, thirdly of oil, and last of all of wine; but after each advance the older service remained ‘in memory of the ancient manner of life.’ Last, through diverse influences of ignorance and fear, came ‘the luxury of flesh and imported forms of diet[214].’ The incoming of the luxury of flesh diet was, it has already been noted, due not to ignorance and fear but to the inroad of a flesh-eating Northern race whose splendid physical stature and strength Porphyry was little likely to appreciate. They were not wholly flesh-eaters; hence, as has been seen, they offered the sacrifice of the barley grains (οὐλοχύται), and offered these at a time when they were themselves eating some form of manufactured bread. The primitive character of the rite is, I think, marked by the ritual precedence. The οὐλοχύται, the sprinkling of grains, has usually been explained as the sprinkling of meal on the heads of the victims, as the equivalent of the _mola salsa_ of the Romans; but Eustathius is probably right when, in commenting on the sacrifice of Nestor[215], he says, ‘the sprinkled grains are in memory of the food of old times which consisted in grains, i.e. barley-corns’. ‘Hence,’ he adds, ‘one of the ancient commentators explains the sprinkled grains as barley-corns.’ That οὐλοχύται were nothing more nor less than the actual barley-corns is also shewn by a passage from Strato[216]. A cook, who apparently from his use of archaic terminology is according to his master more like a male sphinx than a cook, calls for οὐλοχύται: ‘Οὐλοχύται—why what on earth is that?’ And the answer is ‘Just barley-corns.’