What the Greek Reader tells of Sybaris is in three or four anecdotes, woven into that strange, incoherent patchwork of “Geography.” In that place are patched together a statement of Strabo and one of Athenæus about two things in Sybaris which may have belonged some eight hundred years apart. But what of that to a school-boy! Will your descendants, dear reader, in the year 3579 A.D., be much troubled, if, in the English Reader of their day, Queen Victoria shall be made to drink Spartan black broth with William the Conqueror out of a conch-shell in New Zealand?
A comment on the telescope of history as reported to and learned by schoolboys, and the juxtapositions that come about when summary goes a bit too far.
Spartan “black broth” was apparently abhorrent to anybody who wasn’t a Spartan: “No wonder the Spartans prefer to die, ten-thousand times.” But maybe that’s the winners writing the historical recipe books? It seems to be mythic indeed, for in the contrived folklore of the myth-hungry Nazis, it was thought the predecessor of a Schleswig-Holstein peasant soup. It is also discussed at an amusingly pedantic passage on Lacedaemonian Black Broth in this 1850 issue of Notes and Queries [search for black broth], including:
It would not have been unlike the Lacedaemonians purposely to have established a disagreeable viand in their system of public feeding. Men that used iron money to prevent the accumulation of wealth, and, as youths, had volunteered to be scourged, scratched, beat about, and kicked about, to inure them to pain, were just the persons to affect a nauseous food to discipline the appetite.