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.
[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, 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.
[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 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]]
[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, 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]]