Trees, Shrubs, and Plants of Virgil 



shrub itself is never tall, whereas sometimes it is 

 almost a tree. 



It must be admitted that even in his more mature 

 work Virgil sometimes accepted statements from 

 others, and took no pains to see that they were true. 

 Thus he had heard that any scion could be success- 

 fully grafted on any stock. On the strength of this 

 information he fancied pear blossoms covering with 

 white the branches of the manna ash, and swept away 

 by his poetic fervour conceived of swine champing 

 acorns under an elm. Columella tried to save his 

 master's credit in this matter by showing how such 

 grafting could succeed. It is, however, manifest 

 that in Columella's subterranean grafting the scion 

 makes roots not in the stock, but in the ground, and 

 is, in fact, not a grafted scion, but a cutting. 



The names of colours present great difficulties. 

 The colour sense, especially in reds and blues, seems 

 to have developed rather late in man's history. The 

 yellows are fairly clear, except that there seems to 

 be no word which clearly indicates the shining 

 yellow of the buttercup. Both croceus, which comes 

 from the stigmata of the saffron crocus, and luteus or 

 luteolus, which come from the dye of weld, seem to 

 have a dash of orange in them. Virgil in one place 

 combines them and speaks of saffron weld. The 

 yolk of an egg was always called luteum. Then comes 

 flavus, which is used most of fields of ripe corn, but 

 also of the yellow sands, an auburn head of hair, and 

 gold. Gold is also called fulvum, much as we speak of 

 red gold ; for of this hue is the tawny hide of the 



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