Note (return) — OUR PROGRESS
Reading edition
We read nothing in native writers of anything like coffee in Greece, indigenous or imported; and how in the world was it to get into Laconia, inhabited, as it is well known to have been, by a race of men the least prone of any to change their customs, and the least accessible to strangers. Lycurgus, we are told, forbade his people to be sailors, or to contend at sea6, so that they had no means of importing it themselves; and what foreign merchant would sell it to them, who had only iron money to pay withal, and dealt, moreover, as much as possible by way of barter?7