Salt was in great use in the Homeric age, and by the poet sometimes called divine.[556] Plato, also, in the Timæos,[557] speaks of salt as a thing acceptable to the gods, an expression which Plutarch quotes with manifest approbation in a passage where he grows quite eloquent in praise of this article, which he denominates the condiment of condiments, adding, that of some it was numbered among the Graces.[558] By the most ancient Greeks salt was, for this reason, always spoken of in conjunction with the table, as in the old proverb, where men were advised “never to pass by salt or a table,” that is, not to neglect a good dinner.[559] Poor men, who probably had no other seasoning for their food, were contemptuously denominated “salt-lickers.”[560] But, in Homer’s time, there existed certain Hellenic tribes who had not yet arrived at a knowledge of this luxury; among whom, accordingly, even the most aristocratic personages were compelled to go without salt to their porridge.[561] The poet has, indeed, omitted to mention their names; but Pausanias supposes him to have alluded to the more inland clans of Epeirots, many of which had not yet, in those ages, acquired a knowledge of salt, or even of the sea.[562] ----- Footnote 557: Opera, t. vii. p. 80. Footnote 558: Sympos. v. 9. Footnote 559: Erasm. Adag. Chil. i. Cent. vi. Adag. 10. Footnote 560: Ἅλα λείχειν. Erasm. Adag. iii. vi. 33, or, as Persius expresses it, “digito terebrare salinum.” Sat. v. 138. Footnote 561: Od. λ. 122. Footnote 562: Paus. i. 1. 12. ----- It appears to be agreed on all hands, that the primitive races of men were mere water-drinkers. Accordingly they had neither poets nor inn-keepers, nor excisemen,—three classes of persons who never flourish but where wine, or at least beer, is found. Homer more than once alludes to this vicious habit of the old world, where, with a sly insinuation of contempt,—for he was himself partial to the blood-red wine,—he tells us that this or that nation drank, like so many oxen or crocodiles, of the waters of such or such a river. Thus, when enumerating the allies of Ilion, he describes the Zeleians as those who sipped the black waters of the Æsepos.[563] Pindar, too, in the hope of obtaining a reputation for sobriety, says, he was accustomed to drink the waters of Thebes, which, in his opinion, were very delicious,[564] though Hippocrates would unquestionably have been of a totally different way of thinking. The Persian, and afterwards the Parthian kings, appear in many cases to have entertained a temperate predilection for the water of certain streams, of which Milton has given eternal celebrity to one:— “Choaspes, amber stream, The drink of none but kings.”[565]