n his house except that
in the bed.]

[Footnote 128: It would seem, as Gibbon says of the Empress Theodora,
that this passage could be left "veiled in the obscurity of a learned
language"; but it may be noted that the _locus classicus_ for the
play on the word is the incident of the Megarian "mystery pigs" in
Aristophanes' _Acharnians_, 728 ff. Cf. also Athenaeus, IX, 17, 18.]

[Footnote 129: Cf. Pliny (_H.N._ VIII, 77): "There is no animal that
affords a greater variety to the palate of the epicure: all the others
have their own peculiar flavour, but the flesh of the hog has nearly
fifty different flavours."]

[Footnote 130: In his stimulating book, _Comment la route cree le type
Social_, Edmond Desmolins submits an ingenious hypothesis to explain
the pre-eminence of the Gauls in the growing and making of pork,
and how that pre-eminence was itself the explanation of their early
success in cultivating the cereals. He describes their migrating
ancestors, the Celts, pushing their way up the Danube as hordes of
nomad shepherds with their vast flocks and herds of horses and cattle,
on the milk of which they had hitherto subsisted. So long as they
journeyed through prairie steppes, the last of which was Hungary, they
maintained their shepherd character, but when they once passed the
site of the present city of Vienna and entered the plateau of Bavaria,
they found new physical conditions which caused them to reduce and to
separate their herds of large cattle--an unbroken forest affording
little pasture of grass. Here they found the wild boar subsisting upon
the mast of the forest, and him they domesticated out of an economic
necessity, to take the place of their larger cattle as a basis of food
supply. Until then they had not been meat eaters, and so had known no
necessity for cereals, for milk is a balanced ration in itself. But
this change of diet required them also to take to agriculture and so
to abandon their nomad life.

'By reason of the habits of the animal, swine husbandry has a tendency
in itself to confine those engaged in it to a more or less sedentary
life, but we are about to see how the Celts were compelled to
accomplish this important evolution by an even more powerful force.
Meat cannot be eaten habitually except in conjunction with a
cereal ... and of all the meats pork is the one which demands this
association most insistently, because it is the least easily digested
and the most heating of all the mea