In the Greece of the Heroic Age, meals revolve around *sîtos* (the cereal staple: barley flatbread *maza* or porridge) accompanied by *opson* (what 'enhances' it: olives, cheese, vegetables, sometimes fish or meat). Wine is drunk mixed with water. Apart from humans, the gods receive *popana*, barley and honey cakes burned on the altar or poured as libations. A princess like Alcmene, daughter of a king and mother of a demigod, lives by the rhythm of these simple daily tables and the great sacrifices that seal the alliance with Olympus.

Barley, the queen of grains in the Mycenaean world long before soft wheat, is the thread running through all this cuisine: roasted, ground, kneaded into *maza* or diluted into a drink. Honey from the Greek hills is its sweet companion, an ingredient of both the sacred and the dessert, the only sweetener known in this sugarless world.