It is now perhaps possible to appreciate more justly Pindar's twice delivered maxim, ‘water is the best thing’ (ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ, εἰ δʾ ἀριστεύει μὲν ὕδωρ), ‘best’ not in comparison with wine or other liquids which in its widest sense it included but best of all things. For it is the elemental liquid, the life-substance. Homer tells us that the hair which Achilles put into the hand of Patroklos was to have been offered to the river Spercheios in his fatherland. It is a custom reported elsewhere in early Greece that on attainment of puberty a lock at least of a youth's hair was cut off and offered to the neighbouring river. We can now see why. At puberty the αἰών of the body, the liquid that is life and that issues in new life, has been brought to fullness, thanks mainly to the local god of liquid, the life-giving stream, which has in fact produced not only the water he has drunk but also in large degree that which he has absorbed in plants—‘wine and barley-groats, the marrow of men’, etc.—and animals nourished thereby.