[210]. Dierbach, Flora Mythologica, p. 34.
[211]. Ib. p. 49.
[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.
[213]. Lord Derby’s Iliad, xxi. 350-52.
[214]. Berlin. Abhandlungen, 1879, p. 71.