ch disgusted with Spartan Black
Broth as Dionysius was {243} with the first mouthful, I beg leave to
submit a few supplementary words to the copious indications of your
correspondents "R.O." and "W."

Selden says:--

"It was an excellent question of Lady Cotton, when Sir Robert
Cotton was magnifying of a shoe, which was Moses's or Noah's, and
wondering at the strange shape and fashion of it: 'But, Mr.
Cotton,' says she, '_are you sure it is a shoe?_'"

Now, from the following passage in Manso's _Sparta_, it would seem that
a similar question might be put on the present occasion: _Are you sure
that it was broth?_ Speaking of the _pheiditia_, Manso says:--

"Each person at table had as much barley-bread as he could eat;
swine's-flesh, or some other meat, to eat with it, with which the
famous black-sauce[2] (whose composition, without any loss to
culinary art, is evidently a mystery for us) was given round, and
to close the meal, olives, figs, and cheese."

In a note he continues:--

"Some imagined that the receipt of its composition was to be found
in Plutarch (_De Tuenda Sanitate_, t. vi. p. 487.), but apparently
it was only imagination. That [Greek: zomos] signified not broth,
as it has been usually translated, but _sauce_, is apparent from
the connection in which Athenaeus used the word. To judge from
Hesychius, it appears to have borne the name [Greek: bapha] among
the Spartans. How little it pleased the Sicilian Dionysius is well
known from Plutarch (_Inst. Lacon._ t. v. 880.) and from others."

Sir Walter Trevelyan's question is soon answered, for I presume the
celebrity of Spartan Black Broth is chiefly owing to the anecdote of
Dionysius related by Plutarch, in his very popular and amusing _Laconic
Apophthegms_, which Stobaeus and Cicero evidently followed; this, and
what is to be gathered from Athenaeus and Julius Pollux, with a few words
in Hesychius and the _Etymologicon Magnum_, is the whole amount of our
information. Writers since the revival of letters have mostly copied
each other, from Coelius Rhodiginus down to Gesner, who derives his
conjecture from Turnebus, whose notion is derived from Julius
Pollux,--and so we move in a circle. We sadly want a Greek Apicius, and
then we might resolve the knotty question. I fear we must give up the
notion of cuttle-fish stewed in their own ink, though some former
travellers have