An important preservative as well as sweetener, honey was an indispensable ingredient in the Classical kitchen. The honey of Hybla, in Sicily, is among the most famous.

Hybla honey and the classical world

Along with the bees of Mount Hymettus and Mount Ida in Greece, the wild bees of Mount Hybla in Sicily were the most celebrated source of honey in Antiquity. The honey of Hybla became a literary byword for all things exceptionally sweet and good. Citing Theocritus (c. 300 BC), also Sicilian and the founding father of the pastoral idyll, the American 19th-century nature writer John Burroughs expanded on the subject in his Locusts and Wild Honey: ‘Sicily has always been rich in bees.’

bees in classical literature

The poetry of Theocritus abounds in bees: ‘flat-nosed’ as he calls them in his Seventh Idyll. He claims that comb-honey is the standard by which we can measure the most delectable of the world’s goods. His goatherds can think of no greater bliss than that their mouths be filled with honeycombs. In addition, among the delectables which Arsinoë lavishes on Adonis, at the festival she instituted in his honour, are ‘honey-cakes’. In Sicily, ancient customs die hard. When a couple are married, it was customary for the attendants to place honey in their mouths, to symbolise the hope that their love may be ‘as sweet to their souls as honey to the palate.’ The honey of Hybla, naturally. In his first Eclogue, Virgil describes the ideal lullaby for old age to be the murmuring of Hybla bees. Ovid compared women’s hairstyles to the bees’ numberlessness.

the honey of hybla in later centuries

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, with some sarcasm, Cassius remarks that Mark Antony’s fine words ‘rob the Hybla bees and leave them honeyless’. In one sonnet, John Keats longs to sweeten his song by sipping the dew on ‘Hybla’s honied roses’. Fanny Trollope, disappointed in business in the US, makes euphemistic use of the honey’s proverbial qualities in her Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832): ‘During nearly two years that I resided in Cincinnati…I neither saw a beggar, nor a man of sufficient fortune to permit his ceasing his efforts to increase it; thus every bee in the hive is actively employed in search of that honey of Hybla, vulgarly called money.’ This same search was possibly not far from the mind of James Leigh Hunt, when in 1848 he published a popular volume of Sicilian divertimenti entitled: A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla.

And what about today?

The good news is that you can still purchase the honey of Hybla, in different varieties according to the flora of the season. The satra honey comes from wild thyme; zagara honey from citrus flowers.

Blue Guide Sicily (10th ed.), by Ellen Grady, came out earlier this year. All Rights Reserved. For more Sicily posts, see here.