22 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
poor village, before the time of Pericles. They reserve all the 
pleasures of comfort and luxury for their country mansions, and 
the Pireus alone, which is the quarter of the exchange and the 
port of Athens, is embellished with the spoils of the enemy and 
the wonders of the arts. We may judge how strong their love of 
horticulture, by the explosion of universal despair commemorated 
in the comedies of Aristophanes, at the fatal epoch when the 
Peloponnesian war obliged all the neighboring proprietors to im- 
prison themselves in the city. These unknown gardeners, unknown 
like most of the useful servants of humanity, had transplanted to 
their ungrateful territory, and cultivated with love, from time im- 
memorial, the myrtle and orange of Media, and the double roses 
of Rhodes. To them remounts the art of cutting and dressing 
the ivy, the box, and the linden, continued to the present day. 
At Athens, during the winter, a considerable trade in violets was 
carried on. The violet, cardinal emblem of friendship — a sweet 
flower, born from the purest aromas of the earth, and whose per- 
fume our planet leaves after her in space — the violet was the favor- 
ite flower of the Athenian. The city of Athens was represented 
under the figure of a majestic woman, her brow wreathed with a 
garland of violets. It was indeed impossible that a people so 
strong in analogy should not do wonders in horticulture, and sur- 
pass its rivals in all branches of the arts. 
Who. invented tragedy, the song of the goat? Naturally the 
Egycores, goat-hunters of Diacria, the best game country in Attica. 
These Egycores, the most renowned of the Athenian hunters, cov- 
ered themselves with immortal glory on the field of Marathon. 
As the transitions of the seasons were abrupt, and the Avinters 
severe, in Attica, the Athenians were incessantly observing the 
state of the sky, the direction of the winds, the color of clouds, 
the arrival and departure of birds of passage, the flight of cranes, 
swallows, and especially of kites, to which Aristophanes reproaches 
them with paying a superstitious homage. 
Thence the astonishing historical knowledge of this people in 
natural history and in meteorology. The knowledge of Aristotle 
frightens, me for his epoch, but it is evident that this Geoffroi St. 
Hilaire of antiquity could have found no fit auditory, except amid 
