Amellus 



not extend into southern Italy, and it is clear that 

 Columella never saw it, and mistook Virgil's descrip- 

 tion of it. There seems to be no certain mention of 

 it in any other ancient author. 



The plant is the Aster amellus of Linnaeus, one of 

 the many species to which our gardeners have given 

 the name of Michaelmas daisies. Virgil had no 

 technical vocabulary for botanical descriptions, but 

 in this case he almost creates one. The flower is a 

 composite, the head consisting of disk flowers and 

 ray flowers. His name for the disk is flos ipse, and 

 his name for the ray flowers is folia, a word which 

 Ovid applies to the petaloid perianth of a lily, just 

 as (f)vX\.ov is one name for a petal. What gardeners 

 call the stool — that is, the mass of roots and sub- 

 terranean stems — is ' cespes,' and the stems which 

 rise from it are the ' ingens silva.' When Virgil 

 says that in the ray flowers purple shines under dark 

 violet, he seems to indicate a particular shade of 

 purple or violet for which there was no name. Our 

 earlier translators made sad work of a passage which 

 is as clear as Virgil's vocabulary could make it. 



The Mella is a tributary of the Po, which rises 

 in the mountains above Brescia, and Virgil here 

 refers to its upper course, for the plant does not 

 descend into the plains. It grows on the sides of the 

 valleys, and is conspicuous in August and September, 

 when the grass has been shortened by mowing or 

 grazing. We may take ' tonsis ' in either sense, for 

 the effect is the same. The latter sense seems more 

 likely, for, although the plant is not full grown at 



15 



