These first showed themselves in the love of dress and the selection of ornaments. From the early ages of the world, too, spinning and weaving were feminine employments, in which undying germs of art were hidden; for it belongs to human nature never to be satisfied with what merely ministers to necessity.

Translated to "surprise spiced wine," Conditum Paradoxum was one of ancient Rome's most popular wine drinks, transformed with the aromas and flavors of mastic, honey, saffron, pepper, and dates. In the Levant of the 4th-century CE, a simplified version was made with just wine, honey and peppercorns.

Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading. They nearly all need study and comment before they yield their secret. And the Poetics cannot be accounted an exception. For one thing the treatise is fragmentary. It originally consisted of two books, one dealing with Tragedy and Epic, the other with Comedy. We possess only the first.