‘The heralds dight the feast apart beneath a spreading oak, The ox they slew, and much white barley-meal the women folk Sprinkled, a supper for the thralls.’ The lord and his fellows feast on flesh-meat, the workmen have their supper of primitive porridge. So the Townley scholiast clearly understands the passage; he comments: πάλυνον, ἔμασσον ἢ ἔφυρον, ‘they sprinkle, i.e. they knead or mix together.’ It is noticeable that he employs the exact word, ἔφυρον, quoted by Athenaeus as in the text of Homer[226]. To explain the passage as ‘sprinkle on the heads of the victims or on the roast flesh’ is to miss the whole antithesis between master and man. Eustathius[227], that close observer of primitive fact, saw what was being done in Homer and doubtless still by the poor of his own days. He says ‘to sprinkle barley-meal does not mean bread-making but a sort of paste in ordinary use among the ancients.’ To any one who has watched the making of porridge, the shift of meaning from παλύνειν, to _sprinkle_, to φύρειν and μάσσειν, to stir and to knead, is natural and necessary. You first sprinkle the meal on the water, you then stir it, so far you have porridge; if you let it get thicker and thicker you must knead it and then you have oat-cake. It has of course frequently been noted that a _pelanos_ may be either fluid or solid, and herein lies the explanation. When the _pelanos_ is thick and subjected to fire, baked, it becomes a _pemma_, an ordinary cake. The Latin _libum_[228], a cake, is a strict parallel; it was primarily a thing out-poured, a _libation_, then a solid thing cooked and eaten. A _pelanos_ was then primarily the same as _alphita_, barley-meal. The food of man was the food of the gods, but the word was early specialized off to ritual use. There is, I believe, no instance in which a _pelanos_, under that name, is eaten in daily life or indeed eaten at all save by Earth and underworld gods, their representative snakes and other Spirits of Aversion[229]. The comic poet Sannyrion[230] puts it thus: ‘We gods do call it pelanos, You pompous mortals barley-meal.’ To us the pomposity seems on the side of the gods. As there was a time when leavened bread was not, and men ate porridge cooked or uncooked, so before the coming of the vine men drank a honey drink. And as the conservative gods, long after men ate fermented bread, were faithful to their porridge, so long after men drank wine they still offered to the gods who were there before the coming of the vine ‘wineless libations,’ nephalia[231]. The ritual of the underworld gods is in many respects identical with that of the ghosts out of which they are developed, but with this difference—ghosts are less conservative than fully developed gods; the habits and tastes of ghosts are more closely akin to those of the men who worship them. Quite early, it would appear, man offered to ghosts the wine he loved so well himself.