Food is, with great precision, divided by Aristotle into moist and dry, that is, into meat and drink.[526] A classification, the credit of which, as Feith contends, belongs to Homer.[527] In this poet, bread (σίτος), the principal article of provision, is made indiscriminately both from wheat and barley, though the latter grain is thought to have been first in use.[528] Herodotus found, in the matter of bread, a peculiar taste among the Egyptians; barley and wheat they despised, though in no country are finer produced than in Egypt; giving, very strangely, the preference to the _olyra_, by some supposed to be the spelt, but more probably Syrian _dhourra_, ears of which I observed sculptured on the interior of the pronaos of Leto’s temple at Esneh. Bread, in the Homeric age, was brought to table in a reed basket, the use of silver bread-baskets, or trays, not having been then, as Donatus thinks, introduced. But in this the learned commentator is mistaken; or, if they had no silver trays, at least they had them of brass and gold, to match their tables of massive silver.[529] ----- Footnote 526: Problem. x. 56, 58. Footnote 527: Iliad. α. 496. β. 432, seq. Footnote 528: Iliad. ε. 196, et 341. The scholiast on this verse, observes that, before the invention of mills, men used to eat the raw grain. (Cf. on Iliad. α. 449, and Etym. Magn. v. οὐλόχυται, 641, 29.) But this is merely an absurd conjecture; for they could, at least, have roasted the young ear as in the East they still do, while it is full of juice, and have eaten it thus with salt, when it is both pleasant and nutritive. Besides, some means of reducing the grain to meal appears to have been known almost from the beginning. Footnote 529: Iliad. λ. 629. Odyss. κ. 355. See, too, Theocrit. Eidyll. xxiv. 135, sqq. Virgil. Æneid. i. 705. -----