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.
[209]. Lord Derby’s Iliad, vi. 414-20.