them. However, two significant accounts are contained in the collection known as the Geoponica. One of these, ascribed to a certain Didymus, may be translated in part as follows: "The gypsos should be put into a broad vessel, and then the must should be poured on it so that it covers the gypsos. It should be shaken constantly and then left to stand, so that the coarser parts of the gypsos may sink to the bottom."512 In the other account in the Geoponica™ it is stated that when gypsos is added to wine, it makes the wine sharper at first, but in time this sharpness disappears. Apparently the practice of treating wine with gypsum or with lime was very common in antiquity. But Pliny shows that the practice was not always looked on with favor when he mentions wines treated with marble, gypsum, or lime, and asks in a characteristic manner: "Where is the man, however strong he may be, who has not stood in dread of them ?"514
Though lime or marble was evidently added to wines in ancient times to reduce trieir acidity, it is very probable that partly dehydrated gypsum was the material ordinarily added to grape juice before fermentation. The ancient writers who give full accounts of the practice all seem to specify this material. The second account in the Geoponica, which states that the sharpness of the wine increased after treatment with gypsos, clearly shows that the wine was treated with an excess of gypsum and not with lime or any otlier neutralizing agent. In these accounts gypsos always seems to mean partly dehydrated gypsum, not any of the other substances the ancients included under this name.
It is known that very early in modern times partly dehydrated gypsum, which is now called plaster of Paris, was often used in the preparation of wines in various Mediterranean countries. This practice is very common today in certain of these countries, where it has probably been in continuous use since ancient times. In Greece gypsum is frequently added to wine, though this does not seem to have been true at the time of Theophrastus. Stephanides515 shows the extent of this practice in modern Greece when he remarks that all the gypsum now mined on the island of Melos is used in tlie preparation of wine.
512 VI, 18. 513VII, 12, 5. 51* XXIII, 45.
516 The Mineralogy of Theophrastus, p. 144.
