ries, except or the occasion of some great festival, or on the arrival of a stranger. If the guest be a common person, bread is baked and served up with ayesh; if the guest be a person of some small consequence, coffee is prepared for him, and also the dish called behatta, (rice or flour boiled with sweet camels milk,) or that called fteta, (baked paste, kneaded up thoroughly with butter;) but for a man of some rank, a kid or lamb is killed."
25. In process of time, however, the use of animal food became much more prevalent, particularly in temperate and cold climates; and there is every reason to believe that cruelty, immorality, and disease, marked the progress of man in this unnatural diet. This period is characterized by the poets as the brazen and iron ages, when—
"Truth, modesty, and shame the world forsook;
Fraud, avarice, and force, their places took.
Then sails were spread to every wind that blew;
Raw were the sailors, and the depths were new:
Trees, rudely hollowed, did the waves sustain,
Ere ships in triumph ploughed the watery plain.
The land-marks limited to each his right,
For all before was common as the light;
Nor was the ground alone required to bear
Her annual income to the crooked share;
But greedy mortals, rummaging her store,
Digged from her entrails first the precious ore,
(Which next to hell the prudent gods had laid,)
And that alluring ill to sight displayed.
Thus cursed steel, and more accursed gold,
Gave mischief birth, and made that mischief bold
And double death did wretched man invade,
By steel assaulted, and by gold betrayed:
Faith flies, and piety in exile mourns;
And justice, here oppressed, to heaven returns."[1]
26. The various changes to which the earth and its inhabitants have been subjected, are alluded to in the fables of Chaos, Tellus, (or Terra,) Cœlus, Oceanus, Hyperion, Rhea, Japetus, Saturn, Jupiter, Prometheus, &c.
27. Prometheus (Προμηθεὺς)—one who uses forethought, a contriver—is represented as having stolen fire from heaven, (which would be necessary to render animal food at all palatable to man;) for which crime he was chained to Mount Caucasus, where a vulture continually devoured his liver, which was never diminished, but continued to increase as it was fed upon. Hesiod says that, before the time of Prometheus, mankind were exempt from suffering, enjoying a vigorous youth; and that when death did arrive, it was
- ↑ Metamorphoses, Book i, L. 165.
