J. Reynell Wreford.

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LACEDÆMONIAN BLACK BROTH.

Your correspondent "R.O." having inquired after the author of the
conjecture that the Lacedæmonian Black Broth was composed wholly, or in
part, of coffee, such an idea appearing to me to have arisen principally
from a presumed identity of colour between the two, and to have no
foundation in fact, I have endeavoured to combat it, in the first
instance by raising the question, whether it was black or not?

This has brought us to the main point, what the [Greek: zomos melas]
really was. And here "R.O." appears to rest content upon the probablity
of coffee having been an ingredient. Permit me to assign some additional
reasons for entertaining a different opinion.

We read nothing in native writers of anything like coffee in Greece,
indigenous or imported; and how in the world was it to get into Laconia,
inhabited, as it is well known to have been, by a race of men the least
prone of any to change their customs, and the least accessible to
strangers. Lycurgus, we are told, forbade his people to be sailors, or
to contend at sea[6], so that they had no means of importing it
themselves; and what foreign merchant would sell it to them, who had
only iron money to pay withal, and dealt, moreover, as much as possible
by way of barter?[7]

But it may be said they cultivated the plant themselves; that is, in
other words, that the Helots raised it for them. If so, how happens it