CHAPTER VI.TREES AND FLOWERS IN HOMER.

Ifwe can accept as tolerably complete the view of early Achæan beliefs presented to us in the Iliad and Odyssey, they included but few legendary associations with vegetable growths. The treatment of the Homeric flora, like that of the Homeric fauna, is essentially simple and direct. One magic herb has a place in it, and the ‘enchanted stem’ of the lotus bears fruit of inexplicable potency over the subtly compounded human organism; but tree-worship is as remote from the poet’s thoughts as animal-worship, and flower-myths seem equally beyond his ken. He knew of no ‘love-lies-bleeding’ stories interpreting the passionate glow of scarlet petals; nor of ‘forget-me-not’ stories fitted to the more tender sentiment of azure blooms; nor of delicate calyxes nurtured by goddesses’ tears; nor of any other of the wistful human fancies endlessly intertwined with the beautiful starry apparitions of spring-tide on the blossoming earth. The simplicity of his admiration for themmight, indeed, almost have incurred the disapprobation of ultra-Wordsworthians. With the ‘yellow primrose’ he never had an opportunity of making acquaintance, by ‘the river’s brim’ or elsewhere; but crocuses or hyacinths, violets or poppies, drew him into no reveries; no mystical meanings clung about the images of them in his mind; he looked at them with open eyes of delight, and went his way.

The oak has been called the king of the forest, as the lion the king of beasts. But its supremacy is largely a thing of the past. To the early undivided Aryans, it was the tree of trees. Their common name for it, which survived with its original special meaning in Celtic and Greek, came, in other languages, to denote the generalised conception of a tree, showing the oak to have been pre-eminent in their common ancestral home. Traces of this shifting of the linguistic standpoint are preserved in some Homeric phrases. Thus,drûs—etymologically identical with the Englishtree—means, not only an oak, but, most probably, the particular kind of oak familiar to us in England—Quercus robur, ‘the unwedgeable and gnarled oak’ of Shakespeare. But the generic significance gradually infused into the specific term comes to the front in several of its compounds. A wood-cutter, for instance, is, in the Iliad, literally an ‘oak-cutter,’ and the ‘solemn shade’ round Circe’s dwelling was afforded, etymologically, by an oaken grove, although the meaning really conveyed by theworddrûmawas that of a collection of forest-trees of undetermined and various kinds. In later Greek, too, we find a woodpecker styled an ‘oakpecker’; and the Dryades, while in name ‘oak-nymphs,’ were, in point of fact, unrestricted in their choice of an arboreal dwelling-place. By a curious survival of associations, the name in modern Greek of this antique forest-constituent isdendron, a tree; yet it is now by no means common in Greece. Homer’s oaks were mountain-reared, sturdy, proof against most contingencies of climate. Of similar nature were Leonteus and Polypœtes, of the rugged Lapith race, who indomitably held the way into the Greek camp against the mighty Asius. ‘These twain,’ we are told, ‘stood in front of the lofty gates, like high-crested oak-trees in the hills, that for ever abide the wind and rain, firm fixed with roots great and long.’[188]

188.Iliad, xii. 131-34.

The species of oak at present dominant both in Greece and the Troad is the ‘oak of Bashan,’Quercus ægilops. Its fruit, the valonia in commercial demand for tanning purposes, was made serviceable, within Homer’s experience, under the almost identical name ofbalanoi, only as food for pigs. Homer’s name for this fine tree—extended, perhaps, to the closely alliedQuercus esculus—isphegos, signifying ‘edible,’ and denoting, in other European languages, the beech. How, then, did it come to be transferred, south of the Ceraunian mountains, to a totally different kind oftree? The explanation is simple. No beeches grew in the Hellenic peninsula when the first Aryan settlers entered it. A word was hence left derelict, and was naturally claimed by a conspicuous forest-tree, until then anonymous, because unknown further north, which shared with the beech its characteristic quality—so the necessities of hunger caused it to be esteemed—of producing fruit capable, after a fashion, of supporting life.[189]So, in the United States, the English names ‘robin,’ ‘hemlock,’ ‘maple,’ and probably many others, were unceremoniously handed on to strange species, on the strength of some casual or superficial resemblances.[190]The tradition of acorn-eating connected with the rustic Arcadians applied evidently to the fruit of the valonia-oak, or one of its nearest congeners;[191]and the oracular oak of Dodona, to which Odysseus pretended to have hied for counsel, appears to have been of the same description; as was certainly the tree of Zeus before the Scæan gate, whence Apollo and Athene watched the single combat between Hector and Ajax, and beneath which the spear of Tlepolemus was wrenched from the flesh of the fainting Sarpedon. These two are the only trees divinely appropriated in Homeric verse, and they command but a small share of the reverence paid by Celts and Teutons to their sacred oaks.

189.Schrader and Jevons,Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryans, p. 273.

190.Taylor,Origin of the Aryans, p. 27.

191.Kruse,Hellas, Th. i. p. 350; Fraas,Synopsis, p. 252.

The beech is an encroaching tree. Wherever it is capable of thriving, it tends to replace the oak, which has lost, apparently, a great part of its old propagative energy. Possibly its exposure to the attacks of countless insect-enemies, from which the beech enjoys immunity, may account for its comparative helplessness in the battle for life. The beech is, at any rate, now the typical tree of central Europe; it has aided in the extirpation of the ancient oak-forests of Jutland, and has established itself, within the historic period, in Scotland and Ireland.[192]Its habitat is, however, bounded to the east by a line drawn from Königsberg on the Baltic to the Caucasus; it is not found in the Troad, or in Greece south of a track crossing the peninsula from the Gulf of Arta to the Gulf of Volo. It grows freely, however, on the slopes of the Mysian Olympus, as well as on Mount Pelion in Thessaly. At the beginning of the Macedonian era, too, Dicæarchus[193]described the thick foliage of Pelion as prevalently beechen, though cypresses, silver firs, junipers, and maples, also abounded, the last three kinds of tree having since disappeared, while the beech seems to have only just held its ground.[194]Its relative importance, then, five hundred years earlier, is not likely to have been very different; yet Homer, who certainly knew a good deal about Pelion, whether by report, or fromobservation, never mentions the beech. It is true that we cannot argue with any confidence from omission to ignorance. An epic is not an encyclopædia. The illustrations employed in it are not necessarily exhaustive of all that the poet’s world contains. We can, then, be certain of nothing more than that Homer’s idea of a typical forest did not include the beech. Its appearance, then, in the following spirited lines from Mr. Way’s excellent translation of the Iliad, has no warrant in the original, where the third kind of tree mentioned is thephegos, or valonia-oak.

And as when the East-wind and South-wind in stormy contention striveIn the glens of a mountain, a deep dark forest to rend and rive,Scourging the smooth-stemmed cornel-tree, and the beech and the ash,While against each other their far-spreading branches swing and dashWith unearthly din, and ever the shattering limbs of them crash.[195]

And as when the East-wind and South-wind in stormy contention strive

In the glens of a mountain, a deep dark forest to rend and rive,

Scourging the smooth-stemmed cornel-tree, and the beech and the ash,

While against each other their far-spreading branches swing and dash

With unearthly din, and ever the shattering limbs of them crash.[195]

192.Selby,History of British Forest Trees, pp. 309, 319.

193.Müller,Geographi Græci minores, t. i. p. 106.

194.Tozer,Researches in the Highlands of Turkey, vol. ii. pp. 122-23.

195.Way’sIliad, xvi. 765-69.

The ash, on the other hand, though abundant on many Greek mountains, no longer waves along the ridgy heights of Pelion. Yet it was here that the ashen shaft of the great Pelidean spear was cut by the Centaur Chiron. For in the Homeric account of the arming of Patroclus, after we have been told of his equipment with the shield, cuirass, and formidably nodding helmet of Achilles, it is recounted:

Then seized he two strong lances that fitted his grasp, only he took not the spear of the noble son of Aiakos, heavy, andhuge, and stalwart, that none other of the Achaians could wield, but Achilles alone availed to wield it: even the ashen Pelian spear that Chiron gave to his father dear, from the crown of Pelion, to be the bane of heroes.[196]

The shaft in question could certainly have been hewn nowhere else; the fact of the Centaur’s residence being attested, to this day, by the visibility of the cavern inhabited by him, dilapidated, it is true, but undeniable.[197]Here, surely, is evidence to convince the most sceptical. Its conclusive force is scarcely inferior to that of the testimony borne by the graves of Hamlet and Ophelia at Elsinore to the reality of the tragic endings of those distraught personages.

196.Iliad, xvi. 139-44.

197.Tozer,Researches, vol. ii. p. 126.

The Homeric epithet, ‘quivering with leaves,’ is fully justified, Mr. Tozer informs us,[198]by the dense clothing of all the heights and hollows of Chiron’s mountain with beech and oak, chestnut and plane-trees, besides evergreenunder-garmentsof myrtle, arbutus, and laurel-bushes. Yet the ash, as we have said, is missing, nor have the pines felled to build the good ship ‘Argo’[199]left, it would seem, any representatives.

198.Ib.p. 122.

199.Medea, 3.

In the Iliad and Odyssey, too, pine-wood is the approved material for nautical constructions. It was probably derived from the mountain-loving silver-fir, some grand specimens of which grew nevertheless conveniently near the sea-shore in remote Ogygia, andprovided ‘old Laertes’ son’ with material for his rapidly and skilfully built raft. Homer distinguishes, in a loose way, at least two species of pine, but their identification in particular cases is to a great extent arbitrary. The trees, for instance, employed in conjunction with ‘high-crested’ oaks, to fence round the court-yard of Polyphemus, may have been the picturesque stonepines of South Italy, but they may just as well, or better, have been maritime pines, such as spring up everywhere along the sandy flats of modern Greece.[200]The stone-pine was sacred to Cybele.[201]Her husband, Atys, was transformed into one, with the result of bringing her as near the verge of madness as might be consistent with her venerable dignity; for actually bereft of reason a goddess presumably cannot be. This, however, was a post-Homeric legend, and a post-Homeric association.

200.Daubeny,Trees of the Ancients, p. 19.

201.Dierbach,Flora Mythologica, p. 42.

What might be called the ornamental part of the Ogygian groves consisted of black poplars, aromatic cypresses, and alders. Indigenous there, likewise, although heard of only as supplying perfumed firewood, were the ‘cedar’ and ‘thuon,’ split logs of which blazed within the fragrant cavern where Calypso was found by Hermes tunefully singing while she plied the shuttle. The cedar here mentioned, however, was no ‘cedar of Lebanon,’ but a description of juniper which attains the full dimensions of a treein the lands bordering on the Levant.[202]The resinous wood yielded by it was highly valued by the Homeric Greeks for its ‘grateful smell’; store-rooms for precious commodities, and the ‘perfumed apartments’ of noble ladies were constructed of it. This, at least, is expressly stated of Hecuba’s chamber, and can be inferred of Helen’s and Penelope’s. Thethuon, or ‘wood of sacrifice,’ burnt with cedar-wood on Calypso’s hearth, was identified by Pliny with the Africancitrus, extravagantly prized for decorative furniture in Imperial Rome, and thought to be represented by a coniferous tree calledThuya articulata, now met with in Algeria.[203]

202.Buchholz,Realien, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 232.

203.Daubeny,op. cit.pp. 40-42.

The trees shadowing, in the Odyssey, the entrance by the ‘deep-flowing Ocean’ to the barren realm of death,[204]appear to have been selected for that position owing to a supposed incapacity for ripening fruit. The grove in question was composed of ‘lofty poplars’ and ‘seed-shedding willows’; and poplars and willows were alike deemed sterile and, because sterile, of evil omen.[205]Even among ourselves, the willow retains a dismal significance, and it is prominent in Chinese funeral rites.[206]The black poplar continued to the end sacred to Persephone; but its connexion with Hades, in the traditions of historic Greece, wasless explicit than that of the white poplar (Populus alba). This last tree, called by Homeracheroïs, had its especial habitat on the shores of the Acheron in Thesprotia, whence, as Pausanias relates,[207]it was brought to the Peloponnesus by Hercules; and the same hero, in a variant of the story, returned crowned with poplar from his successful expedition to Hades. In the Odyssey the white poplar does not occur, and in the Iliad only in a simile employed to render more impressive, first the collapse of Asius under the stroke of Idomeneus, and again the overthrow of Sarpedon by Patroclus. ‘And he fell, as an oak falls, or a poplar, or tall pine tree, that craftsmen have felled on the hills, with new-whetted axes.’[208]

204.Odyssey, x. 510.

205.Hayman’s ed. of theOdyssey, vol. ii. p. 174; Pliny,Hist. Nat.xvi. 46.

206.Gubernatis,Mythologie des Plantes, t. ii. p. 337.

207.Descriptio Græciæ, v. 14.

208.Iliad, xiii. 389; xvi. 482-84.

The author of the Iliad ascribes no under-world relationships either to the white or to the black poplar. His sole funereal tree is the elm. Relating the misfortunes of her family, Andromache says:

Fell Achilles’ handMy sire Aetion slew, what time his armsThe populous city of Cilicia raz’d,The lofty-gated Thebes; he slew indeed,But stripp’d him not; he reverenc’d the dead;And o’er his body, with his armour burnt,A mound erected, and the mountain-nymphs,The progeny of ægis-bearing Jove,Planted around his tomb a grove of elms.[209]

Fell Achilles’ hand

My sire Aetion slew, what time his arms

The populous city of Cilicia raz’d,

The lofty-gated Thebes; he slew indeed,

But stripp’d him not; he reverenc’d the dead;

And o’er his body, with his armour burnt,

A mound erected, and the mountain-nymphs,

The progeny of ægis-bearing Jove,

Planted around his tomb a grove of elms.[209]

Now the elm, like the poplar and willow, had, fromof old, the not-unfounded reputation of partial sterility, and was for this reason made the legendary abode of dreams[210]—things without progeny or purpose, that passing ‘leave not a rack behind.’ Virgil’s giant elm in the vestibule of Orcus,

Quam sedem Somnia vulgoVana tenere ferunt, foliisque sub omnibus hærent,

Quam sedem Somnia vulgo

Vana tenere ferunt, foliisque sub omnibus hærent,

is the literary embodiment of this popular idea. Evidently, then, the trees of mourning in the Iliad and Odyssey were singled out owing to their possession of a common, though by no means obvious peculiarity; yet their selection in each poem is different. This is the more remarkable because associations of the sort, once established, are almost ineradicable from what we may call tribal consciousness. Cypresses have no share in them, so far as Homer is concerned. Their appointment to the office of mourning the dead would seem to have been subsequently resolved upon. The connexion was, at any rate, well established before the close of the classic age, when funeral-pyres were made by preference of cypress wood, the tree itself being consecrated to the hated Dis.[211]And Pausanias met with groves of cypresses surrounding the tomb of Laïs near Corinth, and of Alcmæon, son of the ill-fated seer Amphiaraus, at Psophis in Arcadia.[212]The tradition survives, nowadays in the East, in the planting of Turkish cemeteries.

209.Lord Derby’sIliad, vi. 414-20.

210.Dierbach,Flora Mythologica, p. 34.

211.Ib.p. 49.

212.Descriptio Græciæ, ii. 2, viii. 24.

The vegetation along the shores of the Scamander (now the Mendereh) has undergone, so far as can be judged, singularly little alteration during nearly three thousand years. Homer sings of

the willows, elms, and tamarisk shrubs,The lotus, and the reeds, and galingal,Which by the lovely river grew profuse.[213]

the willows, elms, and tamarisk shrubs,

The lotus, and the reeds, and galingal,

Which by the lovely river grew profuse.[213]

And there they have continued to grow. The swampy district below Hissarlik bristles with reeds and bulrushes; the whole plain is thick with trefoil (the ‘lotus’ of the Iliad); while the banks of the famous stream, once choked with Trojan dead, are fringed—Dr. Virchow relates—with double rows of willows intermixed with tamarisks and young elms. If no such robust trunk is now to be seen as that of the elm-tree, by the help of which Achilles struggled out of the raging torrent, the deficiency is accidental, not inherent. Potential trees are kept perpetually in the twig stage by the unsparing ravages of camels and browsing goats. To judge of the former sylvan state of the Troad, one must ascend the valley of the Thymbrius—the modern Kimar Su.[214]There the valonia-oak, the ilex, the plane, and the hornbeam, attain a fine stature; pine-groves clothe the declivities; hazel-bushes and arbutus, hops and wild vines, trail over the rocks, and cluster in the hollows. Along the Asmak, dense growths of asphodel send up flower-stalks reaching a horse’s withers; the elm-bushes areentangled with roses and arums; the turf is sprinkled with coronilla, dandelion, starry trefoil, red silene; fields are sheeted white with the blossoms of the water-ranunculus; the ‘flowery Scamandrian plain’ that gladdened the eyes of the ancient bard is still visibly spread out before the traveller of to-day. Homer, indeed, as Dr. Virchow remarks, knew a good deal more about the Troad than most of his critics, even if he did, on occasions, subordinate topographical accuracy to poetical exigency.

213.Lord Derby’sIliad, xxi. 350-52.

214.Berlin. Abhandlungen, 1879, p. 71.

The plane-tree nowhere shows to more splendid advantage than in Greece and Asia Minor; but the only specimen commemorated in the Greek epics grew at Aulis, and sheltered the altar upon which the hecatombs of the expeditionary force were offered during the time of waiting terminated by the sacrifice of Iphigenia. It was the scene, too, of a portent; for one day, in full view of the astonished Achæans, a serpent crept up its trunk to devour the nine callow inmates of a sparrow’s nest among its branches, and on the completion of a sufficiently ample meal by the deglutition of the mother-bird, was then and there turned into stone.[215]The decade of consumed sparrows—mother and chicks—signified, according to the interpretation of Calchas, the ten years of the siege of Troy; and the reality of the event was attested to later generations by the display, in the temple of Artemis at Aulis, of some wood from the identical tree withinthe living compass of whose branches it had occurred.[216]Had the petrified snake been producible as well, the evidence would have been complete.

215.Iliad, ii. 305-29.

216.Pausanias, ix. 20.

The legendary plane-tree had, however, when Pausanias visited Aulis, been replaced by a group of palms imported from Syria, the nearest home of the species, whence the Phœnicians had not failed to transport it westward. It accordingly, as being derived from the same prolific source of novelties, shared the name ‘Phœnix’ with the brilliant colour produced by the Tyrian dye. But its introduction seems to belong to the later Achæan age. For the palm is unknown in the Iliad, and emerges only once in the Odyssey,[217]although then with particular emphasis. The individual tree seen by Homer was probably the first planted on Greek soil. It spread its crown of leaves above the shrine of Apollo, at Delos. And when the storm-tossed Odysseus set his wits to work to win the protection of Nausicaa—a matter of life or death to him at the moment—he could think of no more flattering comparison for the youthful stateliness of her aspect, than to the vivid upspringing grace of the tall, arboreal exotic. A tradition, not reported by Homer, who nowhere localises the birth of a god, asserted Apollo to have come into the world beneath that very tree, or one of its predecessors in the same spot; and it still had successors in the Augustan age.[218]

217.Odyssey, vi. 162.

218.Hayman’sOdyssey, vol. i. p. 226.

The laurel, although exceedingly common in Greece, is found only in one of the semi-fabulous regions of the Homeric world. The entrance to the cavern of Polyphemus was shaded by its foliage, not as yet sacred to the sun-god. Equally detached from relationship to Athene is the olive, with which, however, acquaintance is implied both in its wild and cultivated varieties. The latter Pindar asserts to have been introduced into his native country, from the ‘dark sources of the Ister,’ by Hercules,[219]who showed unexpected skill in the difficult art of acclimatisation; and the value in which it was held can readily be gathered from the following beautiful simile:

219.Olymp.iii. 25-32.

As when a man reareth some lusty sapling of an olive in a clear space where water springeth plenteously, a goodly shoot fair-growing; and blasts of all winds shake it, yet it bursteth into white blossom; then suddenly cometh the wind of a great hurricane and wresteth it out of its abiding-place and stretcheth it out upon the earth; even so lay Panthoös’ son, Euphorbos of the good ashen spear, when Menelaos, Atreus’ son, had slain him, and despoiled him of his arms.[220]

220.Iliad, xvii. 53-60.

Olive-wood was the favourite material for axe-handles and clubs; and the bed of Odysseus was carved by himself out of an olive-tree still rooted within a chamber of his palace.[221]In the modern Ithaca, the olive alone of all the trees that once flourished there has resisted extirpation, and everywherein the Ionian Islands attains a size entitling its assemblages to rank as forests, rather than as mere groves.[222]Thus, the olive planted at the head of the bay where Odysseus landed after his long wanderings, was ‘wide-spreading’ in point of simple fact, needing no poetical licence to make it so. Olive-oil does not appear to have been then in culinary employment; its chief use was for anointing the body after bathing. This indispensable luxury was provided for, in opulent establishments, by laying up a goodly stock of oil among such household treasures as were entrusted by Penelope to the care of Eurycleia.[223]

221.Odyssey, xxiii. 190.

222.Schliemann, quoted in Hayman’sOdyssey, vol. iii. p. 15.

223.Odyssey, ii. 339.

The Homeric poems contain no allusion to the perfume of either flowers or fruit. This is the more surprising from the extreme sensitiveness betrayed in them to olfactory impressions of other kinds. We hear of ‘scented apartments,’ ‘sweet-smelling garments,’ of the aromatic quality of the cypress, of the spicy air wafted through Calypso’s island from the juniper and citron-logs serving her for fuel, even of the barely appreciable fragrance of olive-oil. Offensive odours excite corresponding horror. Menelaus and his comrades were utterly unable to endure, without the solace of an ambrosial antidote, the ‘ancient and fish-like smell’ of the sealskins disguised in which they lay in wait for Proteus, under the tutelary guidance of the sea-nymph Eidothea, his scarcelydutiful daughter. The Spartan king, relating the incident to Telemachus, was confident of meeting with fellow-feeling when he said:

There would our ambush have been most terrible, for the deadly stench of the sea-bred seals distressed us sore; nay, who would lay him down by a beast of the sea? But herself she wrought deliverance, and devised a great comfort. She took ambrosia of a very sweet savour, and set it beneath each man’s nostril, and did away with the stench of the beast.[224]

224.Odyssey, iv. 441-46, and Hayman’s notes.

As we read, the tradition that Homer’s last days were prolonged by the perfume of an apple, grows intelligible. And yet the balmy breath of Pierian violets and Cilician crocuses drew no comment from him!

The flowers distinctively noticed by him are: poppies, hyacinths, crocuses, violets, and, by implication, roses and white lilies. And it is somewhat remarkable that, while all the items of this not very long list can be collected from the Iliad, only two of them recur in any shape in the Odyssey. The former poem recognises the artificial cultivation of the poppy, probably, as we shall see, for gastronomic purposes, since there could be no question at that epoch, in Greece or Asia Minor, of the preparation of opium. The death, by an arrow-shot from the bow of Teucrus, of the youthful Gorgythion, son of Priam and Castianeira, is thus described.

Even as in a garden a poppy droopeth its head aside, beingheavy with fruit and the showers of spring, so bowed he aside his head laden with his helm.[225]

225.Iliad, viii. 306-308.

Crimson poppies now bloom freely along the Mendereh valley; they were symbolical, in classical Greece, of fruitfulness, love, and death, and were associated with the cult of Demeter.[226]Their fabled origin from the tears of Aphrodite for the death of Adonis, was shared with anemones.

226.Buchholz,Realien, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 250.

Mount Gargarus, the loftiest peak of Ida, blossomed, according to the Iliad, with hyacinths, crocuses, and lotus. This last term designates, however, not the lily of the Nile, but a kind of clover, much relished by the steeds, not only of heroic, but of immortal owners. The fragrant yellow flowers borne by it are not expressly adverted to; the function of the Homeric lotus-grass was rather to supply herbage than to evoke delight.

The identification of the hyacinth of Mount Ida has employed much learning and ingenuity, and the result of learned discussions is not always unanimity of opinion. The case in point is indeed very nearly one ofquot homines, tot sententiæ. The gladiolus, larkspur, iris, the Martagon lily, the common hyacinth, have all had advocates, each of whom considers his case to be of convincing, not to say, of irresistible strength. The last-mentioned and most obvious solution of the problem is that favoured by Buchholz,[227]

227.Loc. cit.p. 219.

and he supports it with the reasonable surmise that the epithet ‘hyacinthine,’ applied to the locks of Odysseus, referred, not to colour, but to form, their closely-set curls recalling forcibly enough theringletedeffect of the congregated flowerets. The dry soil of Greece is particularly suitable to the hyacinth, sundry kinds of which—one of them so deeply blue as to be nearly black—are found all over the Peloponnesus, in the Ionian islands, and high up on the outlying bulwarks of Olympus.[228]The ‘flower of Ajax,’ legibly inscribed with an interjection of woe, sprang up for the first time in Salamis, it was said, just after the hero it commemorated had met his tragic fate.[229]Another story connected it similarly with the death of Hyacinthus; and it was probably identical with the scarlet gladiolus (Gladiolus byzantinus), almost certainly with thesuave rubens hyacinthusof the Third Eclogue, but not with the Homeric hyacinth, which is undistinguished in folk-lore.

228.Kruse,Hellas, Th. i. p. 359.

229.Pausanias, i. 35.

The ‘violet-crowned’ Athenians of old, could they recross the Styx to wander by the Ilissus, would be struck with at least one unwelcome change. For violets no longer grow in Attica. They are nevertheless found, although sparingly, in most other parts of Greece, and up to an elevation of two thousand feet on the slopes of Parnassus. Homer often mentions them allusively, but introduces them directly only once, and then, as Fraas has remarked, inthe incongruous company of the marsh-loving wild parsley (Apium palustre).[230]Unjustifiable from a botanical point of view, the conjunction may have had an æsthetic motive. In the festal garlands of classic Greece, violets and parsley were commonly associated, and their association was perhaps dictated by a survival of the taste displayed in the embellishment of Calypso’s well-watered meadow.

230.Synopsis Plantarum, p. 114; Hayman’sOdyssey, vol. i. p. 175.

Homeric violets, at any rate, flourished nowhere else ostensibly; but from their modest retirement within the poet’s mind supplied him with a colour-epithet, which he employed, one might make bold to say, without over-nice discrimination. The sea might indeed, under certain aspects, be fitly so described; but iron makes a very distant approach to the hue indicated; and Nature must have been in her most sportive mood when she clothed the flock of Polyphemus in violet fleeces. Polyphemus, to be sure, lived in a semi-fabulous world, where it has been suggested[231]that wool might conceivablygrow dyed, as in the restored Saturnian kingdom imagined by Virgil;[232]and the dark-blue material attached to Helen’s golden distaff[233]was evidently a far-travelled rarity, such as might be produced by the use of a foreign dye. But there is no evidence of primitive acquaintance with a blue dye; indeed, if one had been known, it is practicallycertain that the colour due to it would have been named, either, like indigo, from the substance affording it, or, like ‘Tyrian’ purple, from its place of origin. The hue of the violet, however, as it appeared to Homer, does not bear to be more distinctly defined than as dusky, while with Virgil it was franklyblack.

Et nigræ violæ sunt, et vaccinia nigra.

Not preternaturally blue, but naturally black sheep, may then be concluded to have been tended by the Cyclops.

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