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