Chap, o.] 



THE PLANE-TEEE. 105 



interior, it forms a species of house eighty- one feet in width. 

 Its summit, too, presents the foliage of a grove, while it shields 

 itself with huge branches, each of which would equal an ordi- 

 nary tree in size, as it throws its lengthened shade across the 

 fields. In addition to this, that nothing may be wanting to 

 its exact resemblance to a grotto, there is a circle of seats 

 within, formed of stone, intermingled with pumice overgrown 

 with moss. This tree was looked upon as so worthy of remark, 

 that Licinius Mucianus, who was three times consul, and re- 

 cently the legatus of that province, thought it a circumstance 

 deserving of transmission even to posterity, that he, together 

 with eighteen persons of his retinue, had sat down to a banquet 

 in the interior of it. Its leaves afforded material for their 

 couches in the greatest abundance, while he himself, sheltered 

 from every gust of wind, and trying in vain to hear the pat- 

 tering of the rain on the leaves, took his meal there, and en- 

 joyed himself more than he would have done amid the resplen- 

 dence of marble, a multiplicity of paintings, and beneath a 

 cieling refulgent with gold. 



Another curious instance, again, was that afforded in the 

 reign of the Emperor Caius. 17 That prince was so struck with 

 admiration on seeing a plane in the territory of Yeliternum, 

 which presented floor after floor, like those of the several stories 

 of a house, by means of broad benches loosely laid from branch 

 to branch, that he held a banquet in it — himself adding 18 very 

 materially to the shade it threw — the triclinium being formed 

 for the reception of fifteen guests and the necessary attendants : 

 to this singular dining-room he gave the name of his "nest." 



At Gortyna, in the Isle of Crete, there is, in the vicinity of 

 a fountain there, a single plane-tree, which has been long cele- 

 brated in the records of both the Greek and the Latin language : 

 it never loses 19 its leaves, and from an early period one of the 

 fabulous legends of Greece has been attached to it, to the effect 

 that it was beneath this tree that Jupiter lay with Europa ; 

 just as if there had not been another tree of a similar nature 



17 Caligula. 



18 It is supposed that he here alludes sarcastically to the extreme cor- 

 pulence of Caligula. 



19 M. Fee, the learned editor of the botanical books in Ajasson's trans- 

 lation, remarks, that this cannot have been the Platanus of the botanists, 

 and that there is no tree of Europe, which does not lose its leaves, that at 

 all resembles it s 



