BOOK XV. XXXVI. I20-XXXVII. 123 



For the shrine of Quirinus, that is of Romulus himself, 

 is held to be one of the most ancient temples. In it 

 there were two sacred myrtles, whicli for a long time 

 grew in front of the actual temple, and one of them 

 was called the patricians' myrtle and the other the 

 common people's. For many years the patricians' 

 tree was the more flourishing of the two, and was full 

 of vigour and vitahty ; as long as the senate flourished 

 this was a great tree, while the common people's 

 myrtle was shrivelled and withered. But after the 

 latter had grown strong while the patrician myrtle 

 began to turn yellow, from the Marsian war onward 9i 88 b.c. 

 the authority of the Fathers became weak, and by 

 slow degrees its grandeur withered away into 

 barrenness. Moreover there was also an old altar 

 belonging to Venus Myrtea, whose modern name is 

 Murcia. 



XXX\"II. Cato mentioned " three kinds of myrtle, Varietiesof 

 the black, the white and the ' union myrtle ' — per- '"^'■"^- 

 haps named after marriage unions — descended from 

 the stock of the Cluacina myrtle mentioned above ; § ii9. 

 but at the present day there is also another classi- 

 fication, which distinguishes the cultivated and the 

 wild myrtle, and in each of these also a wide-leaved 

 variety, while the variety called oxymyrsine occurs 

 only in the wild kind. Varieties of the cultivated 

 myrtle produced by landscape-gardeners are the 

 Taranto myrtle with a very sniall leaf, the Roman 

 myrtle with a broad leaf, and the ' six-row ' myrtle 

 with very thick foliage, the leaves growing in rows of 

 six. The last is not much grown, being bushy and 

 not lofty. I beheve that the union-myrtle is now 

 called the Roman myrtle. The myrtle with the 

 most powerful scent belongs to Egypt. Cato taught 



371 



