Trees, Shrubs, and Plants of Virgil 



colours he was doubtless in part right. It seems, 

 however, that none of these uses would make it 

 impossible for a Roman to apply the word to some 

 shade of red. On the hyacinthus we cannot rule reds 

 out on the ground that Virgil writes of ' ferrugineos 

 hyacinthos.' 



Another difficulty is that we are not always sure 

 whether Virgil's epithet applies to the whole of a 

 blossom or part of it, whether to the blossom at all 

 or to the leaves or some other part. Sometimes we 

 can see him using an epithet as we should not. 

 Thus to a Latin the important part of a poppy is 

 the seeds, and, because the seeds are small, Virgil 

 writes of the small poppy, though the plant will 

 out-top a man. Again, as we see in Theophrastus, 

 when the stamens and pistils of a flower were large 

 they were regarded as a second flower within the 

 other. The Greek writes thus, for instance, of the 

 lily and the rose. Thus when Virgil writes ' pur- 

 pureo narcisso ' he seems to me to refer to the 

 shining white of the outer perianth ; but to some 

 he seems to speak of the cup, which Arcangeli calls 

 scarlet, and Nicholson, perhaps more correctly, 

 scarlet-edged. There can be no doubt that in 

 ' pallentes hederae ' the epithet applies solely to the 

 fruit. 



From the writers on country affairs, especially 

 Pliny and Columella, some help is obtained on these 

 points. They also aid us to ascertain things which 

 were probably known to Virgil, though they are not 

 mentioned in his works. 



6 



