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.
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