Of the form and structure of a baker’s establishment we may acquire some conception from the ruins of Pompeii, where the mills, the ovens, the kneading-troughs,[451] small and great, would appear to have been sometimes of stone, though generally, perhaps, of wood. When the dough had been properly kneaded and leavened,[452] it was removed to a table with a rim, and fashioned into a variety of forms by the hand or with moulds. The larger loaves were placed in rows in a capacious oven, in which wood had been burnt and raked out carefully. Sometimes, also, a fire would appear to have been kept up in an open space round the oven, having at the top a smoke vent. One kind of loaf was baked in a small fictile or iron oven, called cribanos,[453] which was either placed on the fire, or surrounded by hot coals. There was another which they toasted before the fire on a spit;[454] and a great variety of cakes were baked on the live coals, or in the ashes.[455] ----- Footnote 451: Schol. Aristoph. Nub. 660, 666. Footnote 452: Cakes of leavened bread were called ζυμίται, those of unleavened bread ἄζυμοι. Poll. vi. 32. Footnote 453: Schol. Aristoph. Acharn. 86. Footnote 454: Poll. vi. 75. Tzetz. Chiliad. vii. 770. Footnote 455: Athen. iii. 76. Some of these were reckoned so delicate as to create appetite, and to have the power of removing drunkenness, 74. At Athens one of the most thriving departments of the baker’s business must have been supplying the fleets and merchantmen with biscuits, ἄρτοι ναυτικοὶ ξηροὶ, a sample of which we find a sailor presenting to his mistress. Luc. Dial. Meret. xiv. § 2. Cf. Poll. vii. 23. Athen. iii. 74. ----- These it would require a separate treatise to enumerate and describe, since fashion appears to have been constantly varying the materials, the forms, and the appellations, of loaves. Upon the whole, however, the bread sold in the market-place of Athens was esteemed the whitest and most delicious in Greece; for the Rhodians, speaking partially of the produce of their own ovens, supposed they were bestowing on it the highest compliment when they said it was not inferior to that of Athens.[456] The dimensions of loaves depended, of course, on the object of the baker, and varied from those of the smallest roll, prepared for people of delicate appetites, to those of the enormous obeliæ, sometimes containing upwards of three bushels of flour, borne in procession at the festival of Dionysos.[457] ----- Footnote 456: Athen. iii. 74. Footnote 457: Poll. vi. 75. Tzetz. Chiliad. vii. 770. -----