533 PEOSE HAilBTJTICS. 



eat with the different relishes ; cruets of oxymel for those 

 who wished to gargle preparatory to the coming course ; 



A great variety of breads at table was so muob thought of, that a 

 feast without such an assortment would have been held a failure, 

 for ' the sweet smells of divers breads and cakes are allowed to be 

 the proper perfumes of a banquet-room ;' and so farinaoeously dis- 

 posed were the guests in general, that the introduction of a cake 

 towards the end of a feast, when every other expedient had failed, 

 would frequently spur a jaded appetite to new efforts and desires. 

 It would be difficult, and, for the reader's sake and our own, we 

 will suppose it quite impossible, to recount the names of all the 

 misceUaneoua offspring which issued from the prolific womb of an 

 Athenian oven ; their shapes were endless, their complexions very 

 different : some came into the world half baked, others of a proper 

 crasis and sohdity ; these were fair, those brown ; some had a 

 smooth epidermis shining in white-of-egg, others a skin papOlated 

 and marred with coriander and poppy seeds, or gashed and cica- 

 trized with slips of dried orange-peel ; there was an excellent bread 

 called apTos dyopaios, or market-bread, made of white flour, for 

 the master, and an inferior kind for servants, which the baker 

 charged under the name of apros ayeXaios, i. e. herd or slave bread, 

 or the ' Cilician loaf.' The conmiorx pain de mSnage was another, 

 and had a different name, avrcmvpos, or 'downright bread,' as 

 Phny renders it. There was also a very digestible loaf (Kpi^a- 

 viTtjs), and one equally famed for disagreeing with the stomach, 

 called (but not often asked for) eyKpixpios ; there was boletus 

 bread, which had the pileus of a bun and the colour of smoked 

 cheese ! Ionian roUs rasped, ki/i)o-toi, and hasty cakes, named after 

 the impromptu mode of their fabrication; there was the apToKa- 

 yavov, a bread in which pepper, wine, and oil were incorporated 

 with the dough; apTOTrrlvos, a kind of cottage-bread baked in 

 a shape called aprmTqs ; 0|3eXiar, ' oubhes, or wafers, baked, as 

 now, between opposite plates of metal,'^ and sold for the small 

 Greek copper coin o)3oX6s, whence their name. The ia-xapirris^ 

 was very like the last in composition, 'but divinely tempered with 

 honey.' Lynceus says that the taste of this, as ' it uncurls in the 



' Caaaubon. 



^ These dainty Greek wafers certainly formed an exception to 

 the Latin poet's too indiscriminate censure, where he says ' omne 

 vqfer vitium ! ' 



