Se ee et 
DESCRIPTION OF AMELLUS 125 
“There is also a flower in the meadows, on which the name 
amellus is bestowed by the farmers; a quick-found plant to the 
searcher; for from its base of tangled * sod it raises up a great 
forest of stalks. Golden it is itself, but in the rays which are 
abundantly shed round it, glows the purple of the dark violet. 
Often the altars of the gods are festooned with its woven gar- 
lands. Bitter in the mouth is its taste; in the-shorn autumn val- 
leys shepherds gather it; they cull it by the curves of the river o 
Mella. Boil its roots in odorous wine, and place it as food in full 
baskets in the doorways of the hives.”’ 
Est etiam flos in pratis, cui nomen amello 
Fecere agricolae, facilis quaerentibus herba ; 
Namque imo ingentem tollit de cespite silvam, 
Asper in ore sapor { ; tonsis in vallibus illum 
Pastores ; et curva legunt prope flumina Mellae.f — 
ujus odorato radices incoque Baccho, 
Pabulaque in foribus plenis adpone canistris. 
Wm. Sotheby, Esq., in his ‘‘ Translation of the Georgics,” 
London, 1815, p. 201, renders as follows : 
REE AE SOREN as pe er ENON APE 
*The root of Aster Amellus, says Martyn, Georgics, 389 (1741), ‘‘ consists of a 
great bunch of fibres,’’ adding that Vergil evidently meant here by cesfes not turf but 
‘tradix cespitosa,’’ ‘* a root whose fibres are thick matted together so as to form a kind 
of turf.’’ So the old Roman commentator Philargyrus had understood it, writing 
Ss. 
olia, or leaves, for rays, was a natural and probably common classical expres- 
sion. So Dioscorides calls the rays phyllaria, little leaves. So Palladius, bk. 7, c. 10, 
describing the preparation of the oil from chamomile blossoms, says: Take an 
ounce of the yellow center of the flower (auream medietatem), ‘‘ having thrown away 
the white /eaves by which the flower is encompasse' ,? as Owen renders it. 
{ Praised by Bodaeus as particularly applicable to Aster Amellus or Atticus, ‘* huic 
Sapor est asper,’’ Comm. on Theophrastus, p. 821-2. 
% This line is quoted by the grammarian, M. Valerius Probus, Grammaticae Institu- 
tiones, 16, 8; an interesting fact to those who believe this Probus to be the same as 
the grammarian, Valerius Probus, of about A.D. 100, who possessed a copy of a part 
of the Georgics with corrections upon it in Vergil’s own hand; but whose commentary 
on Vergil is now little known to us except through references in Servius. 
