Food and dining in the Roman Empire and a pesto-like preparation, somewhat similar to pizza or focaccia. Maintaining a bread oven is labor-intensive and requires space, so apartment dwellers probably prepared their dough at home, then had it baked in a communal oven. Mills and commercial ovens, usually combined in a bakery complex, were considered so vital to the wellbeing of Rome that several religious festivals honored the deities who furthered these processes—and even the donkeys who toiled in the mills. Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, was seen as complementary to Ceres, the goddess of grain, and donkeys were garlanded and given a rest on the
The White Goddess of the moon, who lies behind the faces of the diverse goddesses of various European and pagan mythologies. Graves argues that "true" or "pure" poetry is inextricably linked with the ancient cult-ritual of his proposed White Goddess and of her son. Many of the book's themes are also explored in a fictional form, through his depiction of a future society dominated by Great Goddess religion in the 1949 novel "Seven Days in New Crete". Graves first wrote the book under the title of "The Roebuck in the Thicket" in a three-week period during January 1944, only a month after finishing