and was consequently without one of the favourite features with which æsthetic Northerns adorn their notions of Italy. They are of course absent from the frescoes. They were known to Pliny as foreign plants only. The “Median Apple” (citron) was cultivated in Italy no earlier than the third century after Christ; lemons came from the Saracens; oranges, last of all, were brought by the Portuguese from the East.
The white, or silk-worm mulberry, now the commonest of all trees in the richer parts of Italy, was also unknown to the Pompeians. Its cultivation on the peninsula began, according to Schouw, in the sixth century. Silken fabrics were scarce and expensive, and imported by the Romans from the East. Voltaire somewhere makes the great superiority of a femme de chambre of Madame de Pompadour over the Empress Livia consist in the unlimited enjoyment of silk stockings. It may, however, be questioned whether the Empress would have appreciated such a luxury, or whether, as the audacious French traveller, Monsieur Nodier, asserted respecting the Glasgow ladies not many years ago, she would not have got rid of such incumbrances whenever free from the restraints of company. The picturesque Carouba tree (Ceratonia siliqua), which now forms groves along many parts of the Italian coast, is also probably of modern introduction. We may add another more important plant which the Professor has omitted—the chestnut. Not, of course, that this magnificent native of Thessaly was unknown to Roman antiquity. It was, on the contrary, extensively cultivated in ancient Italy for its fruit. Naples was particularly famous for the excellence of its chestnuts—
“Quas docta Neapolis creavit,
Lento castaneas vapore tostas”—
such as Martial appetisingly describes, and such as that flâneur of a poet had doubtless often purchased, scalding hot, from the tripod of some hag-granddaughter of Canidia or Sagana, in the alleys of the learned city. But it was probably as yet a fruit-tree only. Introduced but two centuries before Christ,[[6]] it had not had time to form forests; to become, as it now is, the characteristic tree of the lower Apennines, supplanting its ancient but thriftless relative the beech, and driving the latter back to the narrow domain which it still occupies on the top of Monte Sant’ Angelo. The gnarled and twisted chestnut trunks, with their pointed foliage, under which Salvator Rosa studied his art when sojourning among the brigands at the back of Amalfi, have no counterpart in the drawings of Pompeii any more than in the poetry of Virgil.
Of cultivated crops, wheat and barley are represented in the Pompeian frescoes, and grains of them have been discovered in the houses. In one pretty sketch a quail is picking at an ear of barley; in another at a kind of millet. Other less known cereals seem to have been familiar to the ancients. But two of the most important, both in an economic and picturesque point of view, are missing from these sketches,—maize and rice. Both are of modern introduction. The “polenta” of the classical peasant was of barley. Cotton, it need scarcely be added, is of very modern introduction; it now covers extensive fields at the southern foot of Vesuvius.
After this long list of acquisitions, we must turn to some few instances of vegetable forms familiar to the ancient eye, and which the modern misses. The absolute extinction of a species is indeed a rare thing. Decandolle, in his ‘Geographie Botanique,’ likens the changes in vegetation to those which take place in a language: the appearance of a new word, or a new species, attracts observation at once; the disappearance of an old one is very gradual, and seldom total. We have already spoken of the comparative scarcity at present of deciduous trees, and of one—the æsculus—which modern botanists have been unable to define. But one or two ornamental foreigners, introduced in old times, have also disappeared, or nearly so. The most remarkable of these is the oriental Plane. Every Latin scholar is well aware of the modish passion for these trees which prevailed among the wealthy Romans, a preference not wholly æsthetic; it was partly a fashion, borrowed like other fashions from the despotic East, in days when republican millionaires at Rome, like those of Washington, had begun to discover that everything really meritorious came from lands possessing a “strong government.” The Platanus had been from hoary antiquity the object of veneration of Persian monarchs and Grecian heroes. No tree had anything like the same amount of historic and fabulous tradition attached to it. Marsyas was hanged on one, when duly skinned, by Apollo: Agamemnon and Menelaus planted a couple, each of which, a monstrous relic, was shown to Pausanias in his travels. Xerxes had caused his whole host to halt before a noble specimen in Lycia. “He was so enamoured of it,” says old Evelyn, “that for some days neither the concernment of his expedition, nor interest of honour, nor the necessary motion of his portentous army, could persuade him from it. He styled it his mistress, his minion, his goddess: and when he was forced to part from it, he caused a picture of it to be stamped on a model of gold, which he continually wore about him.” As it is now the glory of Ispahan and Shiraz, so it was of the Greek cities of yore. The groves of the Academe and Lyceum were composed of it. “By the Plane Tree” was the favourite oath of Socrates: the more shame to him, said his accuser Melitus, that he should blaspheme so fine a tree. The famous Plane of Buyukdéré on the Bosphorus is popularly said to serve even now as a tent for the Seraskier when he encamps there. The Romans took to it, as we have said, with that extravagant enthusiasm which characterised their follies; “the only tree,” says Pliny, in his sententious stoical way, “which ever was transplanted for the sake of its shade alone.” Julius Cæsar himself planted the first specimen in Spain, at Corduba; it was a noble tree in Martial’s time, and flourished, as he says, by being irrigated with wine.
“Crevit et affuso lætior umbra mero.”
It became so common in the Roman pleasances, that groves of planes, as well as laurels, are spoken of by the same poet as the ornaments of every citizen’s place of ordinary pretensions.
“Daphnones, platanones, et aëriæ cyparissi.”