Mythology
The usual story declares that a group of thieves during a European plague outbreak were robbing the dead or the sick. When they were caught, they offered to exchange their secret recipe, which had allowed them to commit the robberies without catching the disease, in exchange for leniency. Another version says that the thieves had already been caught before the outbreak and their sentence had been to bury dead plague victims; to survive this punishment, they created the vinegar. The city in which this happened is usually said to be Marseille or Toulouse, and the time period can be given as anywhere between the 14th and 18th century depending on the storyteller.
One interesting twist says that "Four Thieves Vinegar" is simply a corruption of the original "Forthave's Vinegar," a popular concoction created by an enterprising fellow by the name of Richard Forthave. Another source, the book Abregé de tout la médecine practique (published in 1741), seems to attribute its creation to George Bates, though Bates' own published recipe for antipestilential vinegar in his Pharmacopoeia Bateana does not specifically use the name 'thieves' or 'four thieves.'
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Famous quotes containing the word mythology:
“I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America; neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In the United States there’s a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)