CHAPTER VI.
TREES AND FLOWERS IN HOMER.
IF we 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 them might, 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 English _tree_—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 the word _drûma_ was 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 is _dendron_, 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]
Footnote 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 of _balanoi_, only as food for pigs. Homer’s name for this fine tree—extended, perhaps, to the closely allied _Quercus esculus_—is _phegos_, 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 of tree? 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.
Footnote 189:
Schrader and Jevons, _Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryans_, p. 273.
Footnote 190:
Taylor, _Origin of the Aryans_, p. 27.
Footnote 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 from observation, 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 the _phegos_, or valonia-oak.
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]
Footnote 192:
Selby, _History of British Forest Trees_, pp. 309, 319.
Footnote 193:
Müller, _Geographi Græci minores_, t. i. p. 106.
Footnote 194:
Tozer, _Researches in the Highlands of Turkey_, vol. ii. pp. 122-23.
Footnote 195:
Way’s _Iliad_, 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, and huge, 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.
Footnote 196:
_Iliad_, xvi. 139-44.
Footnote 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 evergreen _under-garments_ of 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.
Footnote 198:
_Ib._ p. 122.
Footnote 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, and provided ‘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.
Footnote 200:
Daubeny, _Trees of the Ancients_, p. 19.
Footnote 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 tree in 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. The _thuon_, or ‘wood of sacrifice,’ burnt with cedar-wood on Calypso’s hearth, was identified by Pliny with the African _citrus_, extravagantly prized for decorative furniture in Imperial Rome, and thought to be represented by a coniferous tree called _Thuya articulata_, now met with in Algeria.[203]
Footnote 202:
Buchholz, _Realien_, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 232.
Footnote 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, was less explicit than that of the white poplar (_Populus alba_). This last tree, called by Homer _acheroïs_, 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]
Footnote 204:
_Odyssey_, x. 510.
Footnote 205:
Hayman’s ed. of the _Odyssey_, vol. ii. p. 174; Pliny, _Hist. Nat._ xvi. 46.
Footnote 206:
Gubernatis, _Mythologie des Plantes_, t. ii. p. 337.
Footnote 207:
_Descriptio Græciæ_, v. 14.
Footnote 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’ 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, from of 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 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.
Footnote 209:
Lord Derby’s _Iliad_, vi. 414-20.
Footnote 210:
Dierbach, _Flora Mythologica_, p. 34.
Footnote 211:
_Ib._ p. 49.
Footnote 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]
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 are entangled 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.
Footnote 213:
Lord Derby’s _Iliad_, xxi. 350-52.
Footnote 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 within the living compass of whose branches it had occurred.[216] Had the petrified snake been producible as well, the evidence would have been complete.
Footnote 215:
_Iliad_, ii. 305-29.
Footnote 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]
Footnote 217:
_Odyssey_, vi. 162.
Footnote 218:
Hayman’s _Odyssey_, 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:
Footnote 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]
Footnote 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 everywhere in 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]
Footnote 221:
_Odyssey_, xxiii. 190.
Footnote 222:
Schliemann, quoted in Hayman’s _Odyssey_, vol. iii. p. 15.
Footnote 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 scarcely dutiful 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]
Footnote 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, being heavy with fruit and the showers of spring, so bowed he aside his head laden with his helm.[225]
Footnote 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.
Footnote 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 of _quot 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]
Footnote 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 the _ringleted_ effect 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 the _suave rubens hyacinthus_ of the Third Eclogue, but not with the Homeric hyacinth, which is undistinguished in folk-lore.
Footnote 228:
Kruse, _Hellas_, Th. i. p. 359.
Footnote 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, in the 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.
Footnote 230:
_Synopsis Plantarum_, p. 114; Hayman’s _Odyssey_, 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 conceivably _grow 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 practically certain 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 frankly _black_.
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.
Footnote 231:
Hayman’s _Odyssey_, vol. ii. p. 116.
Footnote 232:
_Ecl._ iv. 42.
Footnote 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 form _karkom_ of the first,[234] the Arabic _sahafaran_ of the second, developed out of _assfar_, yellow, and represented by the Spanish _azafran_, 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.
Footnote 234:
Hehn and Stallybrass, _op. cit._ p. 199; De Candolle, however, inclines to believe that carthamine, not saffron, is indicated by the Hebrew _karkom_ (_Origin of Cultivated Plants_, p. 166).
Footnote 235:
Buchholz, _Realien_, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 220.
Some centuries after the material part of Homer had been reduced to
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.
Footnote 236:
Syme, _English Botany_, vol. ix. p. 151.
Footnote 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, _rhodon_ and _leirion_, 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 in Thrace 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.
Footnote 238:
Hehn, _op. cit._ p. 189.
Footnote 239:
_Hymn to Demeter._
Footnote 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, which became 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 the seductions 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.