[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.
[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 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