[235]. Buchholz, Realien, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 220.
Some centuries after the material part of Homer had been reduced to
A drift of white
Dust in a cruse of gold,
crocus-coloured tresses came poetically into fashion. The daughters of Celeus, in the Hymn to Demeter, were endowed with them; Ariadne at Naxos, too, besides other mythical maidens. And Roman ladies realised the idea of employing saffron as a hair-dye, the stern disapproval of Tertullian and Saint Jerome notwithstanding.[[236]] The scent of the crocus was made part of the pleasures of the amphitheatre by the diffusion among the audience of saffron-wine in the finest possible spray, and Heliogabalus habitually bathed in saffron-water. The flower, too, was noted by Pliny with the rose, lily, and violet, for its delicious fragrance,[[237]] Homer’s apparent insensibility to which may well suggest a doubt whether, after all, he knew the late-blooming, golden crocus otherwise than by reputation.
[236]. Syme, English Botany, vol. ix. p. 151.
[237]. Hist. Nat. xxi. 17.
As regards the rose and the lily, the doubt becomes wellnigh certainty. Both gave rise to Homeric epithets; neither takes in the Homeric poems a concrete form. The Iranic derivation of their Greek names, rhodon and leirion, shows the native home of each of these matchless blossoms to have been in Persia.[[238]] Thence, according to M. Hehn, they travelled through Armenia and Phrygia into Thrace, and eventually, by that circuitous route, reached Greece proper. Commemorative myths strewed the track of their progressive transmissions. Thus, the mountain Rhodope in Thrace took its name from a ‘rosy-footed’ attendant upon Persephone, in the ‘crocus-purple hour’ of her capture by ‘gloomy Dis;’ and in the same vicinity were located the Nysæan Fields—the scene of the disaster—then, for a snare of enticement to the damsel, ablaze with roses and lilies, ‘a marvel to behold,’ with narcissus, crocuses, violets, and hyacinths.[[239]] Moreover, roses, each with sixty leaves, and highly perfumed, were said to blossom spontaneously in the Emathian gardens of King Midas;[[240]] Theophrastus places near Philippi the original habitat of the hundred-leaved rose; and roses were profusely employed in the rites of Phrygian nature-worship.
[238]. Hehn, op. cit. p. 189.
[239]. Hymn to Demeter.