Locusts and Wild Honey | Page 9

ruling traits. When a bee marks the place
of his hive, or of a bit of good pasturage in the fields or swamps, or of

the bee-hunter's box of honey on the hills or in the woods, he returns to
it as unerringly as fate.
Honey was a much more important article of food with the ancients
than it is with us. As they appear to have been unacquainted with sugar,
honey, no doubt, stood them instead. It is too rank and pungent for the
modern taste; it soon cloys upon the palate. It demands the appetite of
youth, and the strong, robust digestion of people who live much in the
open air. It is a more wholesome food than sugar, and modern
confectionery is poison beside it. Besides grape sugar, honey contains
manna, mucilage, pollen, acid, and other vegetable odoriferous
substances and juices. It is a sugar with a kind of wild natural bread
added. The manna of itself is both food and medicine, and the pungent
vegetable extracts have rare virtues. Honey promotes the excretions,
and dissolves the glutinous and starchy impedimenta of the system.
Hence it is not without reason that with the ancients a land flowing
with milk and honey should mean a land abounding in all good things;
and the queen in the nursery rhyme, who lingered in the kitchen to eat
"bread and honey" while the "king was in the parlor counting out his
money," was doing a very sensible thing. Epaminondas is said to have
rarely eaten anything but bread and honey. The Emperor Augustus one
day inquired of a centenarian how he had kept his vigor of mind and
body so long; to which the veteran replied that it was by "oil without
and honey within." Cicero, in his "Old Age," classes honey with meat
and milk and cheese as among the staple articles with which a
well-kept farmhouse will be supplied.
Italy and Greece, in fact all the Mediterranean countries, appear to have
been famous lands for honey. Mount Hymettus, Mount Hybla, and
Mount Ida produced what may be called the classic honey of antiquity,
an article doubtless in no wise superior to our best products. Leigh
Hunt's "Jar of Honey" is mainly distilled from Sicilian history and
literature, Theocritus furnishing the best yield. Sicily has always been
rich in bees. Swinburne (the traveler of a hundred years ago) says the
woods on this island abounded in wild honey, and that the people also
had many hives near their houses. The idyls of Theocritus are native to
the island in this respect, and abound in bees--"flat-nosed bees," as he
calls them in the Seventh Idyl--and comparisons in which comb-honey
is the standard of the most delectable of this world's goods. His

goatherds can think of no greater bliss than that the mouth be filled
with honeycombs, or to be inclosed in a chest like Daphnis and fed on
the combs of bees; and among the delectables with which Arsinoë
cherishes Adonis are "honey-cakes," and other tidbits made of "sweet
honey." In the country of Theocritus this custom is said still to prevail:
when a couple are married, the attendants place honey in their mouths,
by which they would symbolize the hope that their love may be as
sweet to their souls as honey to the palate.
It was fabled that Homer was suckled by a priestess whose breasts
distilled honey; and that once, when Pindar lay asleep, the bees
dropped honey upon his lips. In the Old Testament the food of the
promised Immanuel was to be butter and honey (there is much doubt
about the butter in the original), that he might know good from evil;
and Jonathan's eyes were enlightened by partaking of some wood or
wild honey: "See, I pray you, how mine eyes have been enlightened,
because I tasted a little of this honey." So far as this part of his diet was
concerned, therefore, John the Baptist, during his sojourn in the
wilderness, his divinity-school days in the mountains and plains of
Judea, fared extremely well. About the other part, the locusts, or, not to
put too fine a point on it, the grasshoppers, as much cannot be said,
though they were among the creeping and leaping things the children of
Israel were permitted to eat. They were probably not eaten raw, but
roasted in that most primitive of ovens, a hole in the ground made hot
by building a fire in it. The locusts and honey may have been served
together, as the Bedas of Ceylon are said to season their meat with
honey. At any rate, as the locust is often a great plague in Palestine, the
prophet in eating them found his account in the general weal, and in the
profit of the pastoral bees;