This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Table of Contents:
Why was it not permitted for the priest of
Jupiter, whom they call the Flamen Dialis, to touch
either flour or yeast?1
Is it because flour is an incomplete and crude
food? For neither has it remained what it was,
wheat, nor has it become what it must become,
bread; but it has both lost the germinative power
of the seed and at the same time it has not attained
to the usefulness of food. Wherefore also the Poet
by a metaphor applied to barley-meal the epithet
mylephatosas,2 if it were being killed or destroyed
in the grinding.
Yeast is itself also the product of corruption, and
produces corruption in the dough with which it is
mixed ; for the dough becomes flabby and inert,
and altogether the process of leavening seems to
be one of putrefaction3; at any rate if it goes too
far, it completely sours and spoils the flour.
[p. 163]
Plutarch. Moralia. with an English Translation by. Frank Cole Babbitt. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1936. 4.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com