124 AsTER History; VERGIL 
de predilection,” so much so that the plant was sometimes called 
Vergil’s flower. It grew near his Mantuan home, but not south- 
ward, except in the mountains. When robbed of his paternal es- 
tate and sojourning in Rome or Naples, the poet no longer saw 
his home flower about him. The flower seems to have become 
entwined in his affection with the memory of that twice lost patri- 
mony which had been Vergil’s devotion, where he had spent his 
boyhood among his father’s bees, gathering Amellus flowers along 
the rocks of the river ; a patrimony from which he was an exile 
now in this year 30 B, C., when completing at Naples * this fourth 
book of the Georgics. 
Vergil’s description of Amellus—Vergil’s subject in this fourth 
Georgic, both before and after the reference to Amellus, is that of 
bees—a subject associated again with Amellus at a later time in the 
writings of Columella ; an association between Amellus and the bees 
which may have been greatly strengthened in the Roman mind by 
the identity of the middle syllable of the plant name with the Latin 
word for honey. In his genial discursive way Vergil has been re- 
ferring to the hardships of bees in winter and severe weather, a sub- 
ject of which Vergil’s youth had brought him practical experience, 
his father deriving no small profit from the apiary on his farm. 
Next he alludes to methods of aiding the bees when languishing 
from disease, Then, says he, “burn odorous galbanum, and put 
honey in their troughs through pipes of reed, mixing it with the 
flavor of powdered gallnuts and dried roses, or must boiled down 
over a slow fire, or raisins from the Psithian vine, or Cecropian thyme 
or strong-smelling rosemary.” Then follows the classic passage 
recommending boiled amellus roots and wine as a nourishing food 
for bees when ailing, the ninth of his remedies for languishing bees, 
as Wedel observes ; a passage so often quoted that Sprengel calls 
it ‘‘ tritissimus,”’ but its beauty has borne quotation well, and we 
cite it here entire, first translating : 
7 
et ee _ 
, M. Tenore is quoted by Fée in his Flore de Virgile ‘as having recently (1835) 
looked in vain for As'er Amellus near Naples ; just as Vergil perhaps did when at Naples, 
ears before. The smaller flowered Aster acris L. (Gatlatella punctata 
DC.) which abounds in wet lands about Naples, was far from satisfying 
Se Ie ET EASE NS EE ~~ SSI eM tenesaa tpi pte 
y' 
angustifolia 
eith 
middle Russia ; besides Attica and Luxembourg; and Asia. Kay, — 
I: 268 (1686), cited Sicily also as a habitat for Aster Amellus.— 
