[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.
[231]. Hayman’s Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 116.
[232]. Ecl. iv. 42.
[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.
[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).