In this country and in those with which we are best acquainted, that large part of the human diet which is derived from grain is mainly eaten in the form of bread. Bread, in order to be palatable and digestible, must be leavened; and this means that the dough must be able to retain some of the carbon dioxide gas produced in it by the agency of yeast or some similar substance. Its capacity for doing this depends upon the presence (...) in the grain of a sufficient amount of proteins of such a kind that when mixed with water they form the elastic substance known as gluten. It is largely because wheat—and especially the species of triticum vulgare to which all our bread wheats belong—is superior to all other grains in this respect that wheat has become the main bread grain of a large part of the world. (shrink)

When classical scholars use the term ‘spelt’ to translate such words as and in Greek, and far, odor, semen , arinca, and the like in Latin, they seldom realize that all these words denote grains which are nowadays included in the genus wheat. Within this genus a distinction is made between ‘husked’ and ‘naked’ species: naked wheat can be ‘threshed out’ on the threshing-floor, the grain being separated from the chaff and left ready for milling; husked wheat has before milling (...) to undergo a separate hulling operation to free the grain from the husks, or cover glumes, by which it is enclosed and which so tightly adhere to it that the rachis breaks before the grain is freed. The term ‘spelt’, when used in the way described, denotes the husked wheats, while ‘wheat’ is reserved for the translation of the names of the naked species. (shrink)

As we read these lines we are inevitably reminded of the old adage ab love principium, . Horace here conforms to the ancient precept, as many other poets, at least since Pindar, had done before him. But in his works as a whole, and in the first collection of Odes as a whole, he begins not with Jupiter but with his patron Maecenas.3 Perhaps, therefore, Horace's own practice may help to justify the division of this Horatian article into two separate (...) but interdependent parts of which the first takes Maecenas as its starting-point while the second is concerned with Jupiter and with Augustus, his vicegerent on earth. (shrink)