ASTER TERMED GLOWING HT 
Saepe deum nexis ornatae torquibus arae. 
Indeed it may be claimed that Vergil wrote that line with this very 
Georgic of Nicander in mind. And Pausanias, the Greek traveller, 
is claimed to have meant the aster when he narrates how the plant 
called asterion at Mycenae (see nfra) was offered to Hera, and 
wreathed into garlands about her altars. 
2. Some may object, however, that gwt/fovra, luminous, is an 
unnatural epithet to use for any aster, and Nicander must have 
meant some more brilliant flower. This objection is met by these 
considerations : 
(a) pwrtiGovra, splendens, is here used not in scientific description 
but by a poet. The thought of shixing which was instantly called 
up in the Greek mind by the word for a star, was likely still to 
cling to the word when transferred to a flower, even though the 
reason for the transfer was a resemblance of shape and not par- 
ticularly of brilliancy. The brightness which the poet really meant 
by his gwrtZovra was probably no more than is indicated by our 
word glowing, always a current poet’s epithet, and which does not 
necessarily imply actual gleam or phosphorescence any more when 
used of a glowing flower than when used of a glowing cheek. 
(6) Nicander was not alone in calling Aster Amellus a glowing 
flower, for Vergil does so too when using of its flowers the verb 
sublucet. Nor did Vergil intend to suggest any very great degree 
of brilliancy, such as might be possible with a yellow flower: for 
Vergil’s phrase is: 
Violae sublucet purpura nigrae, 
or, ‘the aster glows with the purple of the dark violet.”’ 
The Hortulus ascribed to Vergil also makes use of the verb 
nitescunt in speaking of two-colored flowers, presumably of the Astr 
Alticus ; see infra, p. 132. 
(c) Instead of indicating that his Aster was not the same as 
that which the Greeks later called aster and which is identified 
as Aster Amellus L., Nicander’s phrase datépage tilovta, misun- 
derstood and stretched into meaning phosphorescent, may have 
been one of the very causes for the subsequent fable about As‘r 
Amellus as a flower which shines in the dark’; a fable believed 
among Greeks and Romans for six hundred years, from Cratevas 
to the pseud-Apuleius, and sagely set down to the credit of this 
