Chapter 14

231.Hayman’sOdyssey, vol. ii. p. 116.

232.Ecl.iv. 42.

233.Odyssey, iv. 135.

The crocus of Mount Ida—the crocus that ‘brake like fire’ at the feet of the three Olympian competitors for the palm of beauty—was the splendid golden flower (Crocus sativus) yielding, through its orange-coloured stigmas, a dye once deemed magnificent, a perfume ranked amongst the choicest luxuries of Rome, and a medicine in high ancient and mediæval repute. But its vogue has passed. Saffron slippers are no longer an appanage of supreme dignity; the ‘saffron wings’ of Iris are folded; the ‘saffron robes’ of the Dawn retain the glamour only of what they signify; to the chymist and the cook, the antique floral ingredient, so long and so extravagantly prized, is of very subordinate importance.

Both the word ‘crocus’ and its later equivalent ‘saffron,’ are of Semitic origin. Witness the Hebrew formkarkomof the first,[234]the Arabicsahafaranof thesecond, developed out ofassfar, yellow, and represented by the Spanishazafran, whence our ‘saffron.’ The plant was widely and profitably cultivated under Moorish rule in Spain, and was probably introduced by the Phœnicians into Greece, though the common vernal crocus is certainly indigenous there, its white and purple cups begemming all the declivities of ‘Hellas and Argos.’ The saffron-crocus, too, now grows wild in such dry and chalky soil as Sunium and Hymettus afford;[235]yet its name betrays its foreign affinities. Saffron-tinted garments had perhaps never, down to Homer’s time, been seen in Greece itself; he was beyond doubt unacquainted with the actual use of the dye, and distributed with the utmost parsimony the splendour conferred by it. Not only were mere mortals excluded from a share in it, neither Hecuba nor Helen owning a crocus-bordered peplos, but none such set off the formidable charms of the goddess-hostesses of Odysseus, in the fairy isles where he lingered, home-sick amid strange luxury. Saffron robes are, in fact, assigned by the poet of the Iliad, exclusively to Eos, the Dawn, while in the Odyssey, the crocus is never referred to, directly or indirectly.

234.Hehn and Stallybrass,op. cit.p. 199; De Candolle, however, inclines to believe that carthamine, not saffron, is indicated by the Hebrewkarkom(Origin of Cultivated Plants, p. 166).

235.Buchholz,Realien, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 220.

Some centuries after the material part of Homer had been reduced to

A drift of whiteDust in a cruse of gold,

A drift of white

Dust in a cruse of gold,

crocus-coloured tresses came poetically into fashion. The daughters of Celeus, in the Hymn to Demeter, were endowed with them; Ariadne at Naxos, too, besides other mythical maidens. And Roman ladies realised the idea of employing saffron as a hair-dye, the stern disapproval of Tertullian and Saint Jerome notwithstanding.[236]The scent of the crocus was made part of the pleasures of the amphitheatre by the diffusion among the audience of saffron-wine in the finest possible spray, and Heliogabalus habitually bathed in saffron-water. The flower, too, was noted by Pliny with the rose, lily, and violet, for its delicious fragrance,[237]Homer’s apparent insensibility to which may well suggest a doubt whether, after all, he knew the late-blooming, golden crocus otherwise than by reputation.

236.Syme,English Botany, vol. ix. p. 151.

237.Hist. Nat.xxi. 17.

As regards the rose and the lily, the doubt becomes wellnigh certainty. Both gave rise to Homeric epithets; neither takes in the Homeric poems a concrete form. The Iranic derivation of their Greek names,rhodonandleirion, shows the native home of each of these matchless blossoms to have been in Persia.[238]Thence, according to M. Hehn, they travelled through Armenia and Phrygia into Thrace, and eventually, by that circuitous route, reached Greece proper. Commemorative myths strewed the track of their progressive transmissions. Thus, the mountain Rhodope inThrace took its name from a ‘rosy-footed’ attendant upon Persephone, in the ‘crocus-purple hour’ of her capture by ‘gloomy Dis;’ and in the same vicinity were located the Nysæan Fields—the scene of the disaster—then, for a snare of enticement to the damsel, ablaze with roses and lilies, ‘a marvel to behold,’ with narcissus, crocuses, violets, and hyacinths.[239]Moreover, roses, each with sixty leaves, and highly perfumed, were said to blossom spontaneously in the Emathian gardens of King Midas;[240]Theophrastus places near Philippi the original habitat of the hundred-leaved rose; and roses were profusely employed in the rites of Phrygian nature-worship.

238.Hehn,op. cit.p. 189.

239.Hymn to Demeter.

240.Herodotus, viii. 138.

Dim rumours of their loveliness spread among the Homeric Greeks. The standing Odyssean designation of Eos as ‘rosy-fingered,’ alternating, in the Iliad, with ‘saffron-robed,’ heralded, it might be said, the European advent of the flower itself. For rose-gardens can have lain only just below the Homeric horizon. Their ambrosial products did not indeed come within mortal reach, but were at the disposal of the gods. By the application of oil of roses, Aphrodite kept the body of Hector fresh and fair during the twelve days of its savage maltreatment by Achilles; and oil of roses was later an accredited antiseptic. Archilochus seems to have been the first Greek poet to make living acquaintance with the blushing flower of Dionysus and Aphrodite, whichbecame known likewise only to the writers of the later books of Scripture. The ‘Rose of Sharon’ is accordingly believed to have been a narcissus.

Allusions to the lily do not occur in the Odyssey, and are vague and ill-defined in the Iliad. The flesh of Ajax might intelligibly, if not appropriately, be designated ‘lily-like’; but the same term applied to sounds conveys little or no meaning to our minds. Even if we admit a far-fetched analogy between the song of the Muses, as something uncommon and tenderly beautiful, and a fragile white flower, we have to confess ourselves bewildered by the extension of the comparison to the shrill voices of cicadas, rasping out their garrulous contentment amidst summer foliage.

The slenderness, then, of Homer’s acquaintance with the finer kinds of bloom introduced gradually from the East, is apparent from his seeming ignorance of their ravishing perfumes, no less than from the inadequacy of his hints as to their beauty of form and colour. His love of flowers was in the instinctive stage; it had not come to the maturity of self-consciousness. They obtained recognition from him neither as symbols of feeling, nor as accessories to enjoyment. Nausicaa wove no garlands; the cultivation of flowers in the gardens of Alcinous is left doubtful; Laertes pruned his pear-trees, and dug round his vines, but reared for his solace not so much as a poppy. No display of living jewellery aided theseductions of Circe’s island; Calypso was content to plant the unpretending violet; Aphrodite herself was without a floral badge; floral decorations of every kind were equally unthought of. Flowers, in fact, had not yet been brought within the sphere of human sentiment; they had not yet acquired significance as emblems of human passion; they had not yet been made partners with humanity in the sorrows of death, and the transient pleasures of a troubled and ephemeral existence.

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