“Concerning those offerings and wreaths and chaplets, a multiplicity of Greek and Latin extracts might here be adduced, and illustrated by means of the devices on medals, and sculptured marbles, the paintings on vases, and other precious monuments of antiquity. But the limits usually assigned to an appendix admit few quotations.”
Sir William proceeds to notice those lines wherein, mentioning the intended consecration of a shady plane-tree to Helen (who was daughter of Jupiter, and worshipped as a goddess in the Troad, in Rhodes and Lacedemon), Theocritus[11] describes the Spartan virgins declaring that they would begin the ceremony by placing on it a twisted or woven wreath of the humble growing lotus.
And Ovid’s[12] mention of the wreaths hanging from a sacred tree, and the addition of recent offerings; and his story of Eresicthon,[13] who impiously violated the ancient woods of Ceres, cutting down the sacred oak, which was in itself equal to a grove, and hung round with garlands, fillets and other votive offerings.
And those lines in which Statius[14] records a vow, promising that an hundred virgins of Calydon, who ministered at the altars, should fasten to the consecrated tree chaplets and fillets, white and purple interwoven.
And the same poet’s account of the celebrated Arcadian oak, sacred to Diana, but itself adorned as a divinity, and so loaded with rustic offerings that there was “scarcely room for the branches.”
The palm was deemed sacred in Egypt according to Porphyry; and Herodotus mentions those palms that surrounded the temple of Perseus (Lib. II., cap. 91); the grove of immense trees, and the trees reaching to heaven, about the temple of Bubastis or Diana (Lib. II., c. 138); and those at the great temple of Apollo (Lib. II., c. 156).
Sir William Ousley says—“We may believe, also, that a sacred mulberry tree gave its name, Hiera Sycaminos, to a town or station near the river Nile.
“Hiera Sycaminos, fifty-four miles above Syene, according to Pliny, Nat. Hist., Lib. VI. c. 29; also in Ptolemy’s Georgr., Lib. IV., c. 5; and in the Peutingerian or Theodosian tables.”