DoUey.] H'^ [Feb. 17, 



The date palm, like the Dionysiac cult, was unknown to the early Greeks, 

 to which Victor llehu" refers as follows : "The Iliad never mentions the 

 palm, which was as foreign on the Anatolian coast as in Greece proper ; 

 but in the oldest and most beautiful part of the Odyssey, the palm at 

 Delos is described in words that express the admiration excited in the 

 Greeks of the Epic period by a figure so novel and strange in the vegeta- 

 ble world. Ulysses has approached Nausicaa on the strand, and flatter- 

 ingly beseeches her assistance : 



" ' Never, I never viewed till this blest hour 

 Such fluished grace ! I gaze and I adore ! 

 Thus seems the palm with stately honors crowned 

 By Phcebus' altars; thus oulooks the ground ; 

 The pride of Delos. (By the Delian coast 

 I voyaged, leader of a warrior host ; 

 But ah, how changed ; from thence my sorrow flows ; 

 Oh fatal voyage, sum of all my woes.) 

 Raptured I stood, for earth ne'er knew to bear 

 A plant so stately, or a nymph .so fair.' 



The far-traveled Ulysses had nowhere else on earth seen a tree like this, 

 to the slender form of which he compares the figure of the royal maiden, 

 just as Solomon does in his song, 'This thy stature is like to a palm tree,' 

 and as the daughters of kings in the Old Testament bear the name of 

 Tamar, the date palm. The palm tree, the pride of Delos, is also men- 

 tioned in Homer's hymn to the Delian Apollo ; at its foot, clasping its 

 stem with her arms, Leto was said to have given birth to her glorious son. 

 The fame of the Delian palm grew with the increasing fame of the island, 

 both as a resort of Apollo's pilgrims and as an emporium, especiallj' as its 

 fame had been echoed in the Odyssey. In later times, palm leaves were 

 used at the four great festivals as symbols of victory. They were some- 

 times worn as wreaths on the head, sometimes carried in the hand 



In the middle of the seventh century B. C, the tyrant Kypselus, ruler of 

 semi-Oriental Corinth, dedicated a bronze palm tree to the temple at 



Delphi, where there were no living palms The Athenians also 



erected a bronze palm tree at Delphi in honor of their double victory on 

 the Eurymedon, and another at Delos through Nikias. Palms are found 

 figured on the coins of Ephesus, of Hierapytna and Priansus in Crete, of 

 Karystos in Euboea, and on painted vases."** 



From the evidence before us, I am convinced that the conical flower 

 cluster of the palm, as conventionalized in sculpture, and as the thyrsus 

 tip, was mistaken by the later Greeks for the pine cone, and that they and 

 subsequent writers have been ignorant of the peculiar relations of the 

 date palm to the primitive Dionysiac cult. 



*' Wanderings of Plants and Animals from their First Home, by Victor Hehn, London, 

 1885, p. 204. 



<8Cf. Imhoff Bloomer and Otto Keller, Thier-und Pflanzmbilder avf Munzen und Gem- 

 men des KluiSiscken Altertums, PI. i. Fig. 8; ii, 13 ; x, 2-4. 



