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Title Pages

Vergil's Green Thoughts: Plants, Humans, and the

Divine
Rebecca Armstrong

Print publication date: 2019

Print ISBN-13: 9780199236688
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199236688.001.0001

Title Pages
Rebecca Armstrong

(p.i) Vergil’s Green Thoughts (p.ii)

(p.iii) Vergil’s Green Thoughts

(p.iv) Copyright Page

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

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It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research,
scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade
mark of

Page 1 of 2
Title Pages

Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

© Rebecca Armstrong 2019

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First Edition published in 2019

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Page 2 of 2
Preface

Vergil's Green Thoughts: Plants, Humans, and the

Divine
Rebecca Armstrong

Print publication date: 2019

Print ISBN-13: 9780199236688
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199236688.001.0001

(p.v) Preface
Rebecca Armstrong

The production of an academic tome is often beset by trials—foreseeable and

unforeseeable—and prone to delay. This book has been particularly long in the
germination; its first impulse lay in my faint undergraduate intuition back in the
mid-1990s that there was more to Vergilian flora than most critics seemed to
acknowledge. Since then, as other projects of varied natures have intervened, I
have seen a garden of ‘green’ criticism—both Vergilian and more broadly
Classical—grow up around me, which I have viewed with the inevitable mixture
of relief that I am not alone, and despair at finding that my niche is less, well,
niche. I can only hope that what I have produced, while fitting into a fairly
recently established trend, nevertheless still has something new to offer.

I have incurred many debts in the writing of this book. The oldest, which pre-
dates the actual writing but is nevertheless the greatest, is to the late Oliver
Lyne, my undergraduate tutor, mentor, and friend. He was a brilliant and
sensitive reader of Vergil, yet when it came to the particular plants and trees
named by the poet he often seemed strangely silent, not to say shifty when
pressed. I took it upon myself, although no botanical expert then, and still far
from one now, to educate him a little, presenting him with some badly drawn
pictures of tamarisks and goose-grass. He took characteristic delight in the
implied rebuke from one so green (in various senses), and encouraged me then
to start thinking more deeply about the subject.

I would also like to offer thanks for academic or pastoral support, and in some
cases both, to Judith Armstrong, Bob Cowan, Stephen Harrison, Gregory
Hutchinson, Matthew Robinson, and Paul Tracey. St Hilda’s College and the
Classics Department at Oxford have both offered me a supportive environment,
and enduring thanks are owed to my colleagues and good friends Katherine

Page 1 of 2
Preface

Clarke and Emily Kearns, without whom both the job and life in general would
be much harder and far less fun. I would also like to thank Teresa Morgan and
Sarah Norman for helping me find a practical solution which made the final
completion of this book possible. My thanks too for helpful suggestions and
encouragement at the later stages to OUP’s anonymous reviewer, to the
publisher’s Georgie Leighton and Charlotte Loveridge for their cheerful
responses and clear advice, and to Christine Ranft and Elakkia Bharathi for
invaluable assistance in the final polishing.

This book is dedicated to my children, fellow lovers of the countryside. (p.vi)

Page 2 of 2
Introduction

Vergil's Green Thoughts: Plants, Humans, and the

Divine
Rebecca Armstrong

Print publication date: 2019

Print ISBN-13: 9780199236688
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199236688.001.0001

Introduction
Rebecca Armstrong

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780199236688.003.0006

Abstract and Keywords

The Introduction provides cultural, theoretical, and literary backgrounds for
approaches to plants in the ancient world in general, as well as setting out the
framework for this particular study of Vergil’s plants. Both scientific,
philosophical, and religious outlooks are outlined, as are some persistent trends
in ancient literary representations of plants, which often treat them as symbols
and metapoetic markers as much as entities in their own right. The twin themes
of this book—plants as part of the religious, or more broadly supernatural,
landscape, and plants as both representatives of and participants in the
relationship between humans and the natural world—are thus given wider
context, while brief sketches are also made of further aspects relevant to
Vergilian flora that are approached more tangentially in this work.

Keywords: botany, anthropocentrism, environmentalism, ecocriticism, religion, animism, plant

symbolism, plant poetics

In recent years, interest in the intersection of literature and the natural world
has grown exponentially. The flush of new nature writing frequently weaves
literary histories together with natural history and autobiography,1 and
ecocriticism has spread from literary criticism of English into a range of other
disciplines including Classics,2 alongside a burgeoning interest in environmental
historical approaches to the ancient world.3 So if I may still cause my students’
eyes to glaze over when expatiating on that willow tree in line 56, there feels far
less need than there once might have been to justify the inherent interest of
Vergil’s plants.4

Page 1 of 58
Introduction

Although plants may at a casual glance seem mere background details, or to

achieve only fleeting prominence, in fact they frequently evoke, illustrate, and
intersect with many of the great themes of Vergilian poetry and of literature
more widely: religion, science, politics, ethics, geography, ethnography, as well
as aesthetics and poetics. A vegetative thread—or tendril—once followed can
lead to a myriad different thoughts, associations, and interpretations. Thus, what
may at first seem a specialized and circumscribed field of study opens out into a
vast acreage. In order to attempt some clarity—and retain some degree of sanity
—therefore, I have limited the scope of this particular book. My primary interest
lies in the contrast and intersection of rational and non-rational (p.2) reactions
to plants: the emotional and superstitious associations they evoke, together with
scientific and pragmatic understandings of their properties.5 This has led to the
bipartite division of this book into the first chapters (under the general heading
of Numen) on the religious and supernatural connotations and complications of
Vergil’s plants, and the concluding chapters (under the general heading of
Homo) which turn to the human desire to categorize and interact with plants on
the basis of their real or perceived usefulness for mankind. Within these broader
divisions, each chapter is further sub-divided to allow scope for close readings of
particular sections and related passages, as well as the tracing of these broader
thematic connections, contrasts, and contradictions. There is, in a sense, no
overarching agenda to this study beyond the acknowledgement and celebration
of the multiple facets and possibilities of Vergilian plants. There are fascinating
patterns to be traced and parallels to be drawn, manifestations of one particular
attitude to be set against intimations of another, but there is no grand ‘Key to all
Vergilian Flora’. A poet so famously complex and hard to pin down in other
aspects of his work remains true to type in this arena too.

For all my attempts to embrace multiple nuance and suggest a range of

interpretations, some important aspects of Vergil’s plants—perhaps in particular
the political and metapoetical—will be given less attention than they might have
been, lest an already tangled briar patch become altogether impenetrable. This
Introduction aims to mediate a little between what will be said and what will
have to remain unsaid: it will offer some background to the scientific and
religious approaches with which the rest of the book is concerned; and it will
also outline further symbolic, metaphorical, and metapoetical ways of seeing
plants which are of great importance to an understanding of attitudes to plants
in Vergil’s poetry and in ancient culture more broadly, but which are more often
adumbrated than expanded in this particular book.

0.1. Ancient Botany and Ways of Seeing Plants

To trace the origins of ancient botany involves relaxing the modern
categorization of the subject among the life sciences, which does not reflect
ancient (p.3) ways of thinking—even systematic thinking—about plants and
trees.6 Greek and Roman views of both the wild and cultivated plant world
blurred what we now see as boundaries between science, herbal lore, folklore,
Page 2 of 58
Introduction

myth, and religion.7 Evidence of Greek and Roman understanding of plants is

often found in texts which deal directly or indirectly with agriculture, medicine,
and the various uses of timber. They focus on how different plants may help or
harm mankind, rather than attempting to catalogue and categorize in a neutral
way: ‘lists of beneficial and harmful plants and extracts are as old as
civilization’.8 Much of this knowledge was both derived from and echoed in
unwritten sources:9 the lore and experience of herbalists, root-cutters,10 and,
later, the plant collectors of empire.11 The influence of the poets, often regarded
uncritically as sources of botanical fact, was also strong from Homer through to
Vergil himself.12 Indeed, in the case of the learned Hellenistic works, there
appears to have been particular cross-fertilization between scientific and poetic
sources.13

With the development of rational thinking about the world spear-headed by the
pre-Socratic philosophers, the way was paved both for theorizing about the
place of plants within a universal system and for placing close observation of
plants within such overarching theories. For example, Anaxagoras, Empedocles,
and Democritus all appear to have reflected on plants within their wider
philosophies.14 Menestor of Sybaris, a fifth-century Pythagorean, was held to (p.
4) be the author of the first Greek works on inductive botany,15 and is cited
occasionally by Theophrastus, from whom we glean that Menestor apparently
considered factors such as plants’ habitat and climate.16 Aristotle may have
written a treatise specifically on plants,17 and in any case frequently mentioned
them in his biological works.18 Meanwhile, advances in medical thinking—
themselves influenced by philosophical theories—also entailed further
development in the understanding of plant life, as seen in the Hippocratic
writings.19 Diocles of Carystus, a physician, and perhaps a contemporary of
Aristotle, wrote on many subjects including botany, and his work may have been
a major source for the ninth book of Theophrastus’ Historia Plantarum.20

The importance of these (and doubtless many other) thinkers and practitioners
notwithstanding, Theophrastus’ appears to have been the most comprehensive
treatment of plants in Greece.21 A counterpart to Aristotle’s work on animals,
Theophrastus’ botanical studies offered a similarly systematic focus on the
identification of the parts and properties of plants (Historia Plantarum), as well
as their physiology, propagation, and cultivation (De Causis Plantarum).
Theophrastus’ own observations appear to have contributed to his studies, and
he may perhaps have used his garden in the Lyceum for research purposes.22 At
any rate, he insists that the study of such a varied subject as plants necessarily
rests on attention to the particular and he gives sense-perception priority over
the application of pure reason (e.g. HP 1.1.1; 1.2.3–4; CP 2.4.8). His combination
of a range of different aspects of plants—their appearance, their favoured
habitats, variations within related types, their uses and properties, the methods
of their cultivation by man, and their own natural propagation—marries a
thorough, scientific approach with disarming flashes of wonder, and even
Page 3 of 58
Introduction

bafflement, as when he admits the incompleteness of his understanding of the

pharmacological properties of plants, which he vaguely terms their ‘power’,
δύναμις (HP 9.19.4). His attempts to delineate and (p.5) categorize are always
qualified by his acknowledgement that plants are so varied that it is hard to
generalize even about broad categories, let alone about more intricate details
(HP 1.3.4). Subsequent generations regarded Theophrastus as the great
botanical authority,23 but his combination of attempts to systematize
understanding with an acknowledgement of the partial nature of that
understanding, and even a desire to preserve much of the wonder and mystery
of the plant world, seems to have been subtly influential too.

After Theophrastus, the field of botany became more restricted again to the
practical, with plants generally assessed from the perspectives of pharmacology,
agriculture, astrology, and magic. Nevertheless, the range of species under
study was increased both in Theophrastus’ own time and beyond by the
discovery of new plants in the wake of Alexander’s expeditions to the East, and
we have evidence in particular of the influx of various Indian spices used in both
cooking and medicine.24 Herbals began to emerge, the first probably to be
attributed to Crateuas around the end of the second century BC, although these
are criticized by Pliny as of limited use (HN 25.8) not least because copyists
often brought inaccuracies into the illustrations.25

Most of the developments in botany mentioned so far are from Greek sources,
but for the Romans of Vergil’s time study of these (or at least many of these)
could be combined with Roman sources, in particular the agricultural texts. The
treatises of Cato and Varro offered a recent, practical, and more Italian-focused
approach regarding cultivated plant species in particular. Botanical interest in
its purest form is naturally only tangential to these works, but they rehearse the
acts or attempts of categorization which both shape and reflect man’s
relationship with the vegetative environment. Their impetus may be more
practical than Theophrastus’,26 but these texts, like his, underline the
importance of environmental factors such as climate, soil types, or the
orientation of the land to the flourishing of plants, and also display an (p.6)
interest in differing characteristics of varieties of the same plant which, if only
partially, share some taxonomical impulse.27

After Vergil’s time, there was continued interest in botany, often within the
encyclopaedic tradition (as with Celsus and Pliny)28 as well as the agricultural:
Columella names over 400 plants, ‘mostly from his own observation’.29 Pliny also
mentions what seems to have been the first botanical garden (assuming we
disregard the possibility of Theophrastus’), established in the first century AD by
the centenarian Antonius Castor (HN 25.9). Moreover, in an interesting twist—
and another illustration of the permeable boundaries between scientific and
other modes of thought—Vergil’s own works had influence on some later

Page 4 of 58
Introduction

technical writers, even in cases where the poet has made self-consciously
unscientific use of his own scientific sources.30

0.1.1. Definitions of Nature

In Greek and Latin, as in English, ‘nature’ has a range of meanings: φύσις may
be a person or thing’s natural qualities, both outward appearance and inner
character, the order of nature, and even animals collectively; natura similarly
connotes natural qualities, appearance, and character, as well as the natural
power determining the qualities of living things, the power governing the
physical universe, and both the created world and the creator of the world.
Context thus plays a great role in determining which shade of meaning ‘nature’
is meant to evoke in any given case; slippage between different shades of
meaning is also often exploited to offer nuance and complexity.31 The familiar
Greek dichotomy between φύσις and νομός broadly delineates the difference
between the ‘natural’, that which occurs without the intervention of man, and
the ‘cultural’, that which is brought about by humans. Yet even so, the
recognition that humans are part of nature as well as set apart from it makes
drawing a clear, consistent distinction both impossible and undesirable.

A Roman discussion of the meaning of natura and its relation to Greek

philosophical conceptions of φύσις is voiced by Cicero’s Balbus, in a passage (p.
7) which incidentally conveys how, even when talking about ‘Nature’ as some
kind of governing force, other meanings of the word also come to mind:

namque alii naturam esse censent uim quandam sine ratione cientem
motus in corporibus necessarios, alii autem uim participem rationis atque
ordinis tamquam uia progredientem declarantemque quid cuiusque rei
causa efficiat quid sequatur, cuius sollertiam nulla ars nulla manus nemo
opifex consequi possit imitando; seminis enim uim esse tantam ut id,
quamquam sit perexiguum, tamen si inciderit in concipientem
conprendentemque naturam nanctumque sit materiam qua ali augerique
possit, ita fingat et efficiat in suo quidque genere, partim ut tantum modo
per stirpes alantur suas, partim ut moueri etiam et sentire et appetere
possint et ex sese similia sui gignere. sunt autem qui omnia naturae
nomine appellent, ut Epicurus, qui ita diuidit: omnium quae sint naturam
esse corpora et inane quaeque his accidant. sed nos cum dicimus natura
constare administrarique mundum, non ita dicimus ut glaebam aut
fragmentum lapidis aut aliquid eius modi sola cohaerendi natura, sed ut
arborem ut animal, in quibus nulla temeritas sed ordo apparet et artis
quaedam similitudo.

Cicero, De Natura Deorum 2.81–2

For some hold that nature is a certain force without reason which stirs
necessary movements in bodies, and others that it is a force which has

Page 5 of 58
Introduction

reason and order, proceeding as it were along a route and making clear
what is the cause of each thing and what follows, whose skill no art, no
hand, no craftsman could rival and reproduce. For, they say, there is such
great power in a seed that, however tiny it is, if it falls into a substance
[naturam] that conceives and holds it, and obtains material by which it can
be nurtured and increased, it shapes and finishes each thing according to
its own type, some so that they are nourished only through their roots,
others so that they can even move and perceive and desire and reproduce
offspring similar to themselves. There are those, again, who call the
entirety of existence by the name ‘nature’, like Epicurus, who divides it in
this way: that the nature of all things that are is bodies [atoms], void and
the accidents of these. But when we say that nature sustains and directs
the world, we do not mean that it is like a lump of soil or fragment of stone
or something of that type with only the natural property [natura] of
cohesion, but like a tree or an animal, in which no randomness but rather
order is displayed and a certain resemblance to art.

The first definition of nature as a non-rational force causing movement may

correspond to an Aristotelian conception of the nature-of-the-thing,32 while the
second, rational, and designing force is like the Platonic demiurge; Epicurus is
overtly identified as the proponent of the third, atomist view; the fourth, Balbus’
own, is the Stoic idea of nature as the world itself, a living, designed, and
rational thing.33 The distinctions between different types of nature as a force of
some kind often rest on broader conceptions of the universe as either
mechanistic or in some way designed or even self-designing; (p.8) they also
respond to differing characterizations of the earth as either an inert host of
living things, or herself a living, mother-like being.

For Vergil, the various forms of nature come to prominence in different ways at
different times. He uses the actual word natura most in the Georgics (indeed,
only once in the Aeneid and never in the Eclogues), there encompassing much of
the range outlined above: nature as a natural law or force (G. 1.61, 2.20), natura
as the physical universe (G. 2.483), the nature of a place (A. 10.366), natural
characters and qualities (G. 2.9, 2.178, 4.149), and natural force within a
particular living thing (G. 2.49). These various approaches to nature are also
implied more broadly throughout Vergil’s works: he interacts with Epicurean
formulations of the physical universe, the rerum natura; he reflects Stoic ideas
of nature as the world’s rational, guiding principle; he preserves mythical and
religious ideas of a ‘mother nature’ who brings forth bounty on the earth; he
echoes Theophrastus’ technical narrowing of the term to investigate the
essential characteristics of particular living things; he colludes in the old
dichotomy of nature opposed to culture.

Page 6 of 58
Introduction

In this book, I engage with many of these shades of meaning, and, indeed, the
‘nature/culture’ divide underpins the entirety of the second half, even though I
have chosen to frame the distinction, rather, in terms of the ‘wild’ and the
‘tame’. The discussion of numinous aspects in the first half looks to connections
between plants and particular (very often Olympian) deities, but also
encompasses vaguer ideas of immanent divinity in the natural world, whether
through consideration of animism, or still more nebulous intuitions of something
more than meets the eye.

0.2. Humans and Plants: From Anthropocentrism to Ecocriticism

0.2.1. Plants and an Anthropocentric Worldview
There is much in ancient botany and botanically interested works which betrays
an anthropocentric approach to the study of the natural world. Medical and
agricultural writers may be expected to focus on plants’ uses for mankind, but
other texts also offer explicit reflection on this way of viewing nature and man’s
place within it.34 Broadly speaking, the still familiar assumption that humans are
superior beings with the right to use nature’s bounty as they see fit was common
in the ancient world, if with less devastating effects than in the modern.35 (p.9)
This finds strongly implicit expression in the various mythological accounts of
the gods’ ‘gifts’ of cultivated plants to mankind—grain from Ceres, grapes from
Bacchus, olives from Minerva, and so on—and achieves explicit articulation in
some philosophical thought. Aristotle maintains it is the final cause of all living
things to serve higher, rational nature, with plants placed down the pecking
order from animals, and animals below humans.36 The Stoics held a similar view,
arguing that plants existed for their usefulness to animals and animals for theirs
in turn to rational beings, especially mankind,37 fitting with ideas such as
Posidonius’ doctrine of cosmic sympathy, the broad principle that nature
provides all for mankind within an interrelated universe.38 Aristotle’s contention
that plants have only the most basic type of soul,39 and his decision not to
categorize them as ζῷα (‘living creatures’) along with animals, humans, and
gods but rather as φυτά (‘growing things’, but the word more generally
corresponds to our ‘plants’ too)40 seems to separate them further from us.41
Plato grants plants sense-perceptions42 and sometimes classes them as ζῷα, but
again (p.10) underlines their ‘purpose’ as food for mankind in his account of
the creation of the world (Tim. 77a).43 In the Timaeus, there is a curious and
strikingly close connection made between plants and men,44 who are even
described as a ‘heavenly plant’ (φυτὸν…οὐράνιον) whose head is a ‘root’ which
tends upwards (Tim. 90a). Yet Plato’s argument may mark plants as a mirror
opposite of men rather than imply a meaningful affinity between them: created
at a similar time from the same elements, they nonetheless have very different
shapes, different perceptions, and different capacities. Man has at least the
potential to reach up to the divine region through reason, while plants are
emphatically rooted and downward-focused.45 Plotinus later goes further than
Plato, maintaining that plants have some share in reason and soul as well as life

Page 7 of 58
Introduction

(Enn. 3.2.7.36–7)46 and defending an idea of eudaimonia (‘flourishing’, ‘the

highest good’) for plants (1.4.1, 15–30).47 What might seem a more generous
view of plants does not amount to their exaltation relative to other beings,
however: a vegetative state is still for Plotinus a low one within his formulation
of the scala naturae (‘chain of being’). Centuries earlier, Empedocles contends
that plants have souls, and in the course of their transmigration a human could
have been reincarnated from or be reincarnated as a plant. This offers a more
complicated and potentially challenging picture, yet he too seems to have
believed that there were differences in superiority between plants and animals,
a view which has much in common with a standard scala naturae, where plant,
animal, and divine souls were formed from the same elements but ‘on a scale of
increasingly harmonious blends’.48

Although well aware of the uses to which plants can be put by mankind,49
Theophrastus, unlike Aristotle and others, does not hold that plants’ overarching
(p.11) purpose is to benefit the human race.50 For Theophrastus, the causal
chain stops a little earlier: all living things aim for their own goal, and for a plant
that goal is to produce seed and fruit in order to propagate its own species:
μέχρι γὰρ τῶν καρπῶν ἡ φύσις (‘a plant’s nature is for the production of fruit’,
HP 1.2.2).51 His observations on the formation of fruit, with the fleshy
pericarpion—the part which humans often like to eat—surrounding the ‘fruit
proper’ (αὐτῶν τῶν καρπῶν), meaning the seeds—which are of use to the plant
for reproduction, but generally not eaten by humans—also reveal his
understanding that a plant’s natural development is geared far more towards its
own propagation than towards the nourishment of mankind. After all, it is
broadly true that in wild plants the seeds are larger and the pericarpion smaller
and not as tasty (CP 1.16.1).52 Moreover, on Theophrastus’ reckoning, plants’
responses to environmental conditions—especially warmth, light, and moisture—
could imply a capacity for perception and awareness, which leads to the idea
that they are capable of acting out their likes and dislikes, or to put it in a
common ancient philosophical frame, they are aiming for their own good: ἡ
δ’ [φύσις] ἀεὶ πρός τε τὸ βέλτιστον ὁρμᾷ (‘and nature53 always aims to achieve
the best’, CP 1.16.11). Nevertheless, Theophrastus cannot be viewed as a proto-
plant liberationist, since he is also clear in his view that human cultivation of
plants can be equally in keeping with nature: immediately after his assertion
that plants aim for their own good, he adds, ταύτῃ δὲ τὰ ἐκ τῆς θεραπείας· ἅμα
γὰρ καὶ τελείωσις γίνεται τῆς φύσεως ὅταν ὧν ἐλλιπὴς τύγχάνει, ταῦτα
προσλάβῃ διὰ τέχνης (‘but what results from cultivation does likewise, for there
is also fulfilment of the plant’s nature when it is lacking in things which it can
gain through [human] craft’, CP 1.16.11).54 What emerges in Theophrastus’
works, then, is a spectrum of engagement between plants and humans, from the
wholly independent through to the interdependent, which fights shy of full
anthropocentrism while acknowledging the prominence of human influence and
interests in a large part of the plant world.

Page 8 of 58
Introduction

However, for some ancient philosophers, anthropocentric models are merely

evidence of the human capacity for a delusional sense of self-importance. (p.12)
The atomists reject any ordained hierarchy of living things with humans at the
top. As Lucretius puts it, nequaquam nobis diuinitus esse paratam / naturam
rerum (‘in no way is the nature of things divinely arranged for us’, DRN 5.198–
9); more stridently still, dicere porro hominum causa uoluisse parare /
praeclaram mundi naturam, proptereaque / adlaudabile opus diuom laudare
decere…desiperest (‘moreover, to say that the gods wished to set up the fine
nature of the world for the sake of mankind and for that reason it is fitting to
praise the praiseworthy work of the gods…is to be a fool’, DRN 5.156–8, 165). It
is the chance emergence of different species and humans’ chance engagements
with them, together with acquired knowledge, skills, and experience passed on
through the generations, which shape the relationship of mankind with the plant
world. Indeed, it can sometimes seem that, far from being created with humans
in mind, the earth is particularly poorly suited to mankind, while, by contrast,
generous and giving to the animals (e.g. DRN 5.233–4).55 Lucretius’ account of
the decline in the earth’s productivity (DRN 2.1150–74) also argues against a
vision of a natural environment set up for the benefit of mankind, yet allows an
element of the providential to slip into the enthusiastic description of the world
in earlier times: praeterea nitidas fruges uinetaque laeta / sponte sua primum
mortalibus ipsa creauit, / ipsa dedit dulcis fetus et pabula laeta (‘besides at first,
of her own accord, the earth herself created shining crops and fertile vineyards
for mortals, and herself gave forth sweet produce and fertile fodder’, DRN
2.1157–9).56 So, at least from time to time, the relationship between the planet,
its plants, and its human inhabitants need not be cold and impersonal even as it
is neither designed nor divinely ordained.

The place of plants within religious modes of thought also falls within a
spectrum which ranges from fairly hard-line anthropocentrism, to a recognition
that the furthering of human interests need not ride rough-shod over those of
plants, and a conception of (some) plants as independent and even associated
with higher orders of being. As mentioned above, myths relating to the
development of agriculture, viticulture, and arboriculture present human taming
and exploitation of plants as divinely sanctioned, and the frequent presence of
plants in sacrificial and other ritual contexts also implies mankind’s right to
make use of grain, foliage, and flowers as part of maintaining (p.13) good
relations between the human and the divine.57 The prominence of agricultural
concerns within the annual cycle of festivals and sacrifice in both Greece and
Rome reveals again gods assisting men in their project of taming the earth and
harvesting its fruits. Yet stories of sacred, inviolable groves and their related
Nymphs or more powerful divine sponsors, which find echo and manifestation in
the range of sacred precincts, woodlands, and particular specimens routinely
encountered in real life, speak to a different configuration of the hierarchy of
humans, gods, and plants. Furthermore, tales of humans transformed into plants

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Introduction

reveal an alternative set of relations, where the boundaries between plants,

humans, and semi-divine beings like Nymphs appear relatively fluid and the
assumption of a clear-cut distinction between ‘superior’ humans and ‘lower’
forms of life is challenged once again. Such myths and folklore share elements
familiar from animist religious thought, in which plants most fully achieve a kind
of personhood58 and their life force and well-being are set on a level with—or
even above—that of humans.

0.2.2. Ancient Environmentalism?

Modern scholars disagree whether there was what we might nowadays term
environmental awareness in the ancient world.59 The fact that the ancients did
not have a complex scientific understanding of chemistry, climate, biology, and
ecology might suggest that any apparent overlap between ancient thought and
modern ways of environmentalist thinking is coincidence rather than a marker of
even partially shared understanding. Moreover, the absence of large-scale
environmental degradation in ancient times could imply that the concept of a
natural world fundamentally threatened—or even very much altered—by human
activity was simply unthinkable.60 The modern consciousness of (p.14) humans’
very real potential to damage the natural world may not have been shared by
those who so often felt the power balance emphatically tip in the opposite
direction. Yet humans were frequently regarded as the tamers, farmers, and
gardeners of the earth,61 and their ability to change landscapes by cutting down
trees, draining marshes, even altering the shape of coastlines was
acknowledged, and often viewed with pride.62

Nevertheless, it is easy to find examples of a deep uneasiness in the face of

grand human acts and edifices which trespass on or challenge natural
boundaries,63 and there was some awareness of the fact of—and to a degree, the
effects of—changes to the environment such as deforestation,64 land drainage,65
localized extinctions,66 or even the dangers of lead pollution.67 Tacitus’ famous
characterization (in the mouth of the Caledonian Calgacus, Ag. 30.5) of the
Romans as plunderers of the world who make a desert and call it peace may
point in part to the real and immediate damage done to farmland by invading
armies,68 but also illustrates the Roman capacity to reflect on the broader
impact of imperialism on the environment. Many philosophical schools
advocated more and less extreme forms of simple living which, while by no
means an indicator of an ancient eco-ethical conscience, nevertheless
demonstrated a sense that greed, acquisitiveness, and hyper-consumption69 are
neither rational (p.15) nor desirable qualities for humans to display.70 Again,
the emphasis in religion on propitiatory sacrifice to ensure good harvests, or
offerings in advance of cutting down woods reveals a consciousness that the
relationship between man and the natural world is not necessarily one of
straightforwardly sanctioned exploitation, but rather a series of negotiations
between competing interests.

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Introduction

Although in a broader sense it seems important to acknowledge the complexity,

diversity, and (in some cases) apparent ‘modernity’ of ancient attitudes to
nature, it is fortunately not essential to the arguments of this book to decide
whether or not it makes any sense to regard Vergil himself as a kind of
environmentalist. His poetry displays a clear interest in the natural world and
how humans function both as a part of it and apart from it; yet it would be facile
to claim that an interest in nature necessarily entails a scientifically, morally, or
politically driven desire to understand and preserve it. Moreover, attitudes
towards the natural world vary greatly both within and between each of his
works: Vergil the author veers between the poles of tree-hugger and tree-cutter.
My aim to bring Vergil’s cultural context to bear on the discussion is part of a
move to recover his plants from being placed against a purely literary backdrop,
but I do not attempt to claim that either clear Vergilian opinions or clear
environmental realities are reflected in his work. Rackham observes that ‘[t]he
history of nature is not the same as the history of things that people have said
about nature’.71 Although on occasion I will stray into ‘real life’ territory,
hazarding thoughts on the identification of species or on Roman agricultural
practice, for the most part I am precisely interested in that grey area of the
varied, nuanced, and frequently inconsistent things that people—and Vergil in
particular—have said about nature.

0.2.3. Ecocriticism and Ancient Literature

What then is ecocriticism? Simply put, ecocriticism is the study of the
relationship between literature and the physical environment. Just as
feminist criticism examines language and literature from a gender-
conscious perspective, and Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes
of production and economic class to its reading of texts, ecocriticism takes
an earth-centred approach to literary studies.

Glotfelty, in Glotfelty and Fromm (eds) (1996) xix.

(p.16) The comparisons with feminism and Marxism in this definition appear to
set ecocriticism on the ‘political’ end of the literary-critical spectrum, and,
indeed, much ecocriticism would proudly espouse a political stance against
globalized capitalism’s effect on the environment.72 Yet it does not have to be
thoroughly political: as Buell points out, there is a strand of ecocriticism that
directly descends from earlier generations of studies with titles of the order,
‘Nature in X’.73 Works of this type can be open to the charge of offering
nostalgic or otherwise idealized accounts of the represented natural world in
literature, and as such may fall foul of more overtly politically engaged
ecocritics,74 yet their focus can still fulfil Glotfelty’s ‘earth-centred’ criterion.

A recent collection of essays75 reveals a range of possible ecocritical approaches

to the ancient world which also engage with the question of whether and how far
it is appropriate to apply modern theories and conceptions of ‘nature’ and the

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Introduction

‘environment’ to ancient texts. The book offers a strong defence of the interest
(even—dread term—the relevance) of looking at ancient culture and texts
through an ecocritical lens, while also acknowledging ‘the alterity of ancient
concepts’ (Schliephake (2016) 15). As Schliephake observes in his introduction,
ideas of the environment in the ancient world have often been either ignored by
ecocritics or misrepresented as part of a homogeneous premodern outlook.76
Nevertheless, the impulse to apply ecologically engaged theories to ancient
literature is growing, and Vergil himself has been drawn into the ecocritical
gaze, most prominently via the Eclogues’ status as representative of an early
form of pastoral against which later pastoral defines and distinguishes itself.
Pastoral in general occupies a patch of disputed ecocritical ground, sometimes
rejected as too artificial to be considered environmentally engaged literature, at
others rehabilitated and revalued as a central form for the ecocritic to
consider.77 Alpers’ (1996) influential characterization of the Eclogues as political
allegory in which the natural world is a mere backdrop is challenged by Hiltner
(2011) 34–42, who takes an ecocritical reading of Eclogue 1 to illustrate, rather,
a greater complexity in the presentation of the natural world: an all but invisible
backdrop for the politically awakened Tityrus who, ironically, still possesses his
land, it is, by contrast, very real for (p.17) the politically disenfranchised
Meliboeus, who has lost his.78 Meanwhile, Sayre’s (2016) study of the reception
of the Georgics in translation reveals possibilities for further ecocritical
examination of the original poem even while the main focus lies on the
interpretations of later ages.

It would be possible to offer an ecocritical ‘resistant’ reading of Vergil’s poetry.79

He—along with many other ancient poets80—often presents an idealized nature
not just in the flower-decked meadows of the Eclogues, but also in the Georgics’
farmlands and vineyards, well-tended and gleaming without the efforts of teams
of slaves,81 and in the implausibly pristine wildernesses of North Africa and Italy
pictured in the Aeneid, before the spread of the great urban civilizations.82 It
might be argued that to focus on this without continually resisting and
countering fantasy with reality perpetuates an aestheticized, even alienated view
of nature.83 To my mind, however, too large a dose of cold Hegelian water runs
the risk of obscuring some truths even as it reveals others: human interactions
with the natural world and, particularly, human literary interactions with the
natural world are complicated. They may—and more often than not do—contain
strong elements of fantasy, botanical inaccuracy, and either unthinking
romanticism or unenlightened exploitation, yet this is part of a tangled mixture
of love and fear, expertise and ignorance, wilful misrepresentation and ready
acceptance of realities. It is useful to build bridges between the purely fictional
and the real, and to allow a consciousness of social attitudes and social realities
to inform and sometimes challenge an idyll. Yet the question of which attitudes
and which realities and how much weight should be given to them at any stage is

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Introduction

a delicate (and largely subjective) one that militates against too stern and finger-
wagging an attitude.

Is this book, then, a work of ecocriticism? Yes and no. It does not wish or
attempt to approach the subject with a strict theoretical agenda, but if
ecocriticism can be deemed (as suggested above) to stretch over ecologically
interested (p.18) as well as more overtly theorized literary criticism, then this
book huddles under that umbrella. It occupies a fluctuating territory between
readings that are culturally engaged (even, to some degree, politicized) and
more loosely aesthetic and emotional. I expect that my views on modern
environmentalism—I am a tree-lover, a peat-free gardener, a supporter of
Greenpeace and a devout recycler—will be evident either between or full-centre
within the lines from time to time. I have to admit that my favourite ‘Vergil’
might resemble a New-Age naturalist who mourns the felling of an old tree and
sees heaven in a wild flower, but I hope I also give enough air time to other very
different ‘Vergils’: the bluff cultivator who embraces the idea of man’s duty to
tame the unruly wild, the rationalist who hopes to uncover the logical workings
of plant life, the devout worshipper who approaches nature with wary reverence,
the child still frightened by the nightmarish woods, and the urbane intellectual
whose plants come from books rather than the soil.

0.3. Gods and Plants

0.3.1. Approaches to numen
The ancient natural world was filled with supernatural powers. Even in the face
of the increasing urbanization of both Greece and Italy, there remained a strong
sense of nature’s divine connections, whether through ‘folk’ memory and beliefs,
or through more specific associations of different plants and trees with
particular gods and their festivals. The farmer of the Georgics is urged in primis
uenerare deos (‘first and foremost, worship the gods’, G. 1.338),84 and religious
significance is routinely attached both to wilder places and to the cultivated
landscapes of cornfield, vineyard, and garden.85 The imagined relationships
between man, the divine, and the environment were inevitably (p.19) varied
and complex: at times the gods were seen as party to, even sponsors of, man’s
efforts to tame nature; in other cases nature’s numina represent something
rather different, a world which works at a tangent to the human, and which may
accordingly baffle and even terrify the mortals who encounter it.86

The word numen was traditionally thought to derive from nuere, to nod, in
reference to the nod of assent given by a god.87 One sense of the word remains
particularly close to those roots and means ‘the will of the god’; beyond that,
however, it also comes to mean the god him/herself in the form of a spirit or
nebulous, but awesome, power, rather than in anthropomorphized aspect;
moreover, numen can also imply more generally the power or even presence of
specific, often named gods.88 I will take advantage of this breadth of meaning in
an attempt to convey the varied religious registers in Vergil’s representations of

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Introduction

plant life:89 thus, at times, I will focus explicitly on how a particular passage
intersects with recognizable cult practices,90 while at others I will explore the
vaguer sense of divine interest or presence, which lies somewhere between
deep-seated intuition (or superstition)91 and literary convention. Thus, the
distinction between the explicitly divine and the more nebulously supernatural
will be blurred in this study, in line with the intermittent lack of clarity within
Roman culture itself, and the word horror will often come into its own as kind of
hinge between a shuddering awe in the presence of the divine92 and a visceral
fear of the monstrous.

(p.20) There are elements of Vergil’s approach to the divine which chime with
the theories of animist religion that gained purchase in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.93 Bailey’s characterization is illustrative:

If magic was to Virgil mainly an object of curiosity, there can be no doubt

of his affectionate devotion to the old animistic religion of the Italians…[I]f
it is not possible to say that he believed in the existence of all and every of
these ancient deities, yet it may fairly be claimed that the sense of higher
powers behind the outward occurrences of life, which is the essential of an
animistic religion, was to Virgil a vivid reality.94

Elements of the now unfashionable ‘intentional fallacy’ aside, in many respects

Bailey’s impression of the Vergilian view of the old Italian gods, especially, and
their links with the natural world still rings true.95 Much of my discussion of
numinous habitats (Chapter 1) will have the idea of animism hovering in the
background, while the following chapter on gods’ special species will further
explore the overlap between impressions of the divine as essentially connected
with their favourite plants, and less integral forms of association. The majority of
scholars no longer accept the theory that ‘real’ Roman religion grew in a linear
fashion from original animist roots, and it is not my intention to disagree with
them.96 Nevertheless, animism conceived in the broadest terms—the idea of
something divine (however ill- or loosely-defined) resident within natural
landscapes, gardens, groves, even particular trees—remains useful to think with
from the modern perspective,97 while far from alien to many ancient reflections
on nature and the gods.

Alongside such broader notions of the divine in nature, there are other ritual
connections with plants where, more often than not, the relationship is less
emotionally freighted: we encounter not awe and horror, but instead a
paradoxically mundane harmony, even affection, between man and gods. The
approach to the relationship between the gods and the natural world can also be
made along a less mysterious and more intellectual path, with exploration (p.
21) of the philosophical and poetical alongside the religious. Vergil’s famous
splitting of scientific and religious stances in the Georgics—he who can
understand the physical workings of the cosmos is fortunate, but so too is he

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Introduction

who knows the country gods98—offers some insight into the importance of
reason as well as religion in his work; yet the notorious difficulty of deciding
whether Vergil actually implies the necessity of choosing one over the other also
underlines the elusive and partial quality of a reader’s understanding on this
matter—and quite probably a poet’s, too.

0.3.2. Plants and Everyday Religion

The use of wreaths and garlands in festival and sacrifice offers a useful
opportunity to stand back from numen perceived as mysterious and antique, and
to see instead an everyday working relationship between plants and religion.99
For Theophrastus, the idea that religious observance requires a year-round
supply of flowers and foliage is so obvious that it need not even directly be
stated: his section on the flowering times of various species (HP 6.8) contains a
brief nod to the fact that garland-makers (οἱ στεφανήπλοκοι, 6.8.1) know a
range of suitable varieties of flowers. Cato recommends that a garden near a
town be planted with both vegetables and coronamenta omne genus (‘all sorts of
plants for making garlands’, Agr. 8.2), but, again, this is regarded without fuss
or portentousness.100 A more complex reflection on the divine connotations of
garlands is of course possible: Nicander’s Georgica contain an extended section
setting the myths and divine associations of various flowers alongside details on
the differing appearances of different species and some horticultural
instruction.101 For example, we are plunged into the realm of relative
mythological obscurity in the claim that the Ionaid Nymphs themselves offer a
στέφος ἁγνὸν (‘holy wreath’, Fr. 74.4) of gilliflowers as a love-gift to Ion, and
Aphrodite’s rivalry with the lily is hinted at (74.28–9; cf. Nic. Alex. 407–9), but
we are also allowed to glimpse the everyday religious function of (p.22)
flowers, as humble offerings of elecampane and aster (ἑλένειον, ἀστέρα) are
made at roadside shrines by any passer-by (74.66–8). Other poetic approaches to
flower garlands are common, with a particularly close connection to bucolic and
lyric poetry;102 here the gods may be explicitly included as part of the floral
picture, even while a human perspective generally feels more dominant than the
divine. Given the generic importance of flowers to bucolic poetry, there is little
surprise that Vergil’s clearest gestures towards divine associations with
gathered flowers tend to cluster in the Eclogues, as when Corydon claims the
Nymphs gather a bouquet of viola, poppy, narcissus, dill, daphne, and marigolds
for his beloved Alexis, while he himself offers a range of fruit and fragrant
foliage.103

Nevertheless, and by contrast with his frequent reflections on the numinous

qualities of trees or the divine involvement in raising crops and vines, for the
most part Vergil keeps the idea of floral numen fairly muted, even to the point of
omitting any mention at all of Rome’s flower goddess, Flora.104 Garlands or
floral offerings themselves are mentioned in religious and semi-religious
contexts quite frequently, but often without specifying which flowers or leaves
are used,105 and in a relatively off-hand, functional manner that smacks more of
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Introduction

Cato than Nicander. Offerings of flowers to the dead sometimes venture greater
specificity, such as the poppies offered to Orpheus’ shade (G. 4.545) or the
‘purple flowers’ to the dead Anchises (A. 5.79) and Marcellus (together with
lilies, A. 6.883–4).106 Another interesting departure from the generally taciturn
pattern, the flowers by the shrine of Venus in Idalium, also illustrates Vergil’s
fascination with the combination of poetic and philosophical influence in his
vision of nature and the divine. Here, Venus is using her sacred precinct as a
temporary bedroom for the sleeping Ascanius, whose place at Dido’s feast has
been taken by Cupid:

at Venus Ascanio placidam per membra quietem

inrigat, et fotum gremio dea tollit in altos
Idaliae lucos, ubi mollis amaracus illum
floribus et dulci aspirans complectitur umbra.

A. 1.691–4

(p.23) But Venus irrigates Ascanius’ limbs with peaceful sleep, and
the goddess carries him, cuddled in her bosom, to the high Idalian
groves, where soft marjoram embraces him with its flowers,
breathing on him its sweet shade.

The importance of Idalium on Cyprus as one of that island’s cult centres for the
worship of Venus may be real,107 but this scene is an idyllic fantasy, reminiscent
both of the flowering brought on by the miracle child of E. 4.18–25 (especially
the cradle of flowers at 23) and of the tender care offered by Demeter to
Demophoon in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter 231–8.108 The whimsical, luxuriant
tone is in keeping with the Hellenistic flavour of this part of the poem and its
broader parallels with Eros’ attack on Medea in Apollonius’ Argonautica.109 Self-
conscious poetic reference likely also lies behind the use of marjoram in this
vignette: one of the very few earlier references to amaracus in Latin poetry
comes in a Catullan marriage song,110 giving the plant poetic-erotic associations
appropriate for Venus’ sacred precinct. Further literary echoes add
complication, however: the unusual metaphor of ‘irrigating’ someone with rest is
drawn from Lucretius’ discussion of the physics of sleep: nunc quibus ille modis
somnus per membra quietem / inriget atque animi curas e pectore soluat (‘now
[I will explain] in what ways sleep floods the limbs with rest and releases the
mind’s cares from the breast,’ DRN 4.907–8). Along with Catullus, Lucretius also
appears to be the only earlier Latin poet who mentions marjoram, in his case its
oil rather than the plant itself.111 The reference from his fourth book is the most
obviously relevant here, describing fragrant oil smeared on the beloved’s flower-
decked doorway by the locked-out lover. Yet taken together with the allusion to
Lucretius on the normal processes of sleep, and with the very unusual use of the
past participle of foueo (fotum), attested in verse only here and at DRN 1.692, we
begin to see an injection of this whimsical fantasy with particularly Lucretian
flavours. The presentation of Venus herself engages, too, with Lucretius’

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fractured Venus, who moves from her role as generative force and sublimated
erotic desire at the start of his poem, into a grittier, more mechanical sexual
urge in the fourth book.112 Thus, hints of philosophical interpretations of love
are added to Venus as both respectable ancestor of the Romans and the flippant
and cruel ‘laughter-loving Aphrodite’ of Homer and Apollonius. (p.24) The
marjoram itself adds further contribution to these layers of association: as an
aromatic plant, it is appropriately associated with the goddess of love, but,
unlike the rose or myrtle (for example), is not routinely pictured alongside her.
Its suitability for Venus’ sacred precinct is emphasized—it is soft (mollis), and its
perfumed shade is sweet (dulci)—but these words may, further, serve as a pun on
its name: amaracus is close to amarus (bitter), evoking the age-old cliché of
bitter-sweet love and delicately picking out the ominous undertones in this
badinage of the divergent poetic and philosophical elements in Venus’ numen.113

There need not always be an implied choice between an intuition of old animism
and more contemporary outlooks on religious ritual, however. For example, the
turf altar appears to offer a clear overlap between these different approaches.
The use of this simple religious apparatus may reflect practicality, taking
advantage of a relatively plentiful and easily assembled resource. Nevertheless,
its significance was generally held to be deeper than this, and the life-force in
still-growing grass offers its own numinous contribution.114 In the Aeneid, as the
Trojans and Rutulians prepare the ground for the duel between Turnus and
Aeneas, grass altars are set up:

campum ad certamen magnae sub moenibus urbis

dimensi Rutulique uiri Teucrique parabant
in medioque focos et dis communibus aras
gramineas. alii fontemque ignemque ferebant
uelati limo et uerbena tempora uincti.

A. 12.116–20

After measuring out the field of combat beneath the walls of the
great city, both Rutulian men and Trojans made them ready, setting
up grass altars and hearths in the middle for their shared gods.
Others brought water and fire, clothed in ritual aprons, their
foreheads garlanded with foliage.

The use of grass altars here is not simply a quaint gesture, an indication of the
early rustic simplicity of Italy, but also reflects real practice, or at least the
memory of real practice. The enjambment of gramineas (‘made of grass’) marks
the significance of the use of turf, while the mention of ritual uerbena (p.25)
seems to point to the use of herbs in the making of other treaties in Roman
history.115 The implicit acknowledgement of the immanent divine power in plants
complements the overt presentation of familiar ritual.

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0.3.3. Forms of Association: Nymphs and Trees

The idea that a certain species of tree or plant may have links with a particular
god is an old and familiar one.116 After remarking on the worship of trees in
general terms, Pliny states:

arborum genera numinibus suis dicata perpetuo seruantur, ut Ioui

aesculus, Apollini laurus, Mineruae olea, Veneri myrtus, Herculi populus;
quin et Siluanos Faunosque et dearum genera siluis ac sua numina
tamquam e caelo attributa credimus.

Pliny, HN 12.3

Different kinds of tree are kept forever dedicated to their particular

divinities, as the oak to Jupiter, the laurel to Apollo, the olive to Minerva,
the myrtle to Venus, the poplar to Hercules; indeed, we even believe that
the Silvani and Fauni and the different kinds of goddesses were assigned to
the woods and their powers by heaven.

Vergil himself evokes such catalogues at E. 7.61–4 and G. 2.15–19 and 63–7. The
associations are ancient and persistent, but they are not always exclusive: the
picture is complicated by local variations, alternative mythologies, and even
difficulties with the identification of species. Jupiter’s claim to the oak is strong,
but the tree also has links with Ceres and Diana; Jupiter and Venus have
affiliations with the vine as much as its most vigorous promoter, Bacchus; Pan,
Neptune, and Cybele all have special connections with pines, and so on.117
There is also, as implied by Pliny, the question of how the spheres of influence of
greater and smaller divine powers overlap: Silvanus, Faunus, and the Dryads are
intimately connected with the woods in general, and sometimes with the very
same trees to which an Olympian may lay claim. This need (p.26) not imply any
contest between gods and demi-gods: the lesser numina so often accompany the
greater that a strict demarcation of influence may be neither possible nor
necessary most of the time.118 Moreover, the exact ways in which a connection
or even identity with plants is thought to work are frequently hard to pin down. I
will address here a case which could be termed ‘extreme’—Nymphs and their
trees—which operates as a useful backdrop to Vergil’s varied, complex and yet
frequently understated presentations of gods in nature.

In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, the goddess herself offers one account of the
connection between Nymphs and trees:

τῇσι δ’ ἅμ’ ἢ ἐλάται ἠὲ δρύες ὑψικάρηνοι

γεινομένῃσιν ἔφυσαν ἐπὶ χθονὶ βωτιανείρῃ,
καλαί, τηλεθάουσαι, ἐν οὔρεσιν ὑψηλοῖσιν.
ἑστᾶσ’ ἠλίβατοι, τεμένη δέ ἑ κικλήσκουσιν
ἀθανάτων· τὰς δ’ οὔ τι βροτοὶ κείρουσι σιδήρῳ·
ἀλλ’ ὅτε κεν δὴ μοῖρα παρεστήκῃ θανάτοιο,

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ἀζάνεται μὲν πρῶτον ἐπὶ χθονὶ δένδρεα καλά,

φλοιὸς δ’ ἀμφιπεριφθινύθει, πίπτουσι δ’ ἄπ’ ὄζοι,
τῶν δέ θ’ ὁμοῦ ψυχὴ λείπει φάος ἠελίοιο.

Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 264–72

At the time of the Nymphs’ birth firs or high-topped oaks grow up

with them in the fertile soil, beautiful and luxuriant-growing in the
high mountains. They stand tall, and men call them the sacred places
of the gods, and no mortals ever cut them with the axe. But when the
time of death is near, first the beautiful trees wither in the ground,
and the bark shrivels away, and the twigs fall off, and the breath of
life of both tree and Nymph leaves the sun’s light as one.

As Olson (2012 ad 267–8) points out, there is potential ambiguity between the
notion that the grove of Nymph-trees is sacred to the Nymphs themselves and
the ‘correct’ idea that these trees are instead sacred to the immortal gods,
alongside whom the Nymphs also have their intimate association. From the
human perspective, whichever interpretation of the presiding deity of the grove
is adopted, the overriding message is clear: these places are holy, and the living
trees are not to be touched.119 It is not always the case that the sanctity of a
particular tree is overtly guaranteed by an Olympian sponsor, however: Nymphs
may exercise power on their own account. Apollonius of (p.27) Rhodes tells of a
curse inherited by Paraebius, whose father had (in that familiar pattern) ignored
the pleas of a Hamadryad not to cut down her oak tree, which was only lifted
when Paraebius took Phineus’ advice and made expiatory offerings to the Nymph
(Arg. 2.474–86).

There is a lack of clarity, however, on the precise question of how the Nymphs
and their trees are connected.120 Callimachus professes to be so confused that
he even asks the Muses for the answer:

ἡ δ’ ὑποδινηθεῖσα χοροῦ ἀπεπαύσατο νύμφη

αὐτόχθων Μελίη καὶ ὑπόχλοον ἔσχε παρειήν
ἥλικος ἀσθμαίνουσα περὶ δρυός, ὡς ἴδε χαίτην
σειομένην Ἑλικῶνος. ἐμαὶ θεαὶ εἴπατε Μοῦσαι,
ἦ ῥ’ ἐτεὸν ἐγένοντο τότε δρύες ἡνίκα Νύμφαι;
‘Νύμφαι μὲν χαίρουσιν, ὅτε δρύας ὄμβρος ἀέξει,
Νύμφαι δ’ αὖ κλαίουσιν, ὅτε δρυσὶν οὐκέτι φύλλα.’

Callimachus, Hymn to Delos 79–85

And the earth-born Nymph Melia spun around and stopped dancing
and went pale in her cheek as she gasped for her coeval tree,121
when she saw the locks of Helicon shaking. Tell me Muses, my
goddesses, is it true that Nymphs are born along with the trees?
‘Nymphs rejoice when the rain makes the trees grow, and Nymphs
lament when there are no longer leaves on the trees.’

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The reference to Melia as ‘earth-born’ points towards Hesiod’s account of the

ash-Nymphs springing from the earth (Theog. 107), and distances her from an
alternative ancestry as one of the daughters of Oceanus (e.g. Pind., Pae. 7.4;
9.43); the reference to her ‘coeval tree’ points in a similar direction. The
narrator’s sudden doubts about this formulation imply direct reference to texts
such as the Homeric Hymn;122 the Muses may indeed be sources of knowledge
in a general way, but the emphasis on their relationship with the poet (‘my
goddesses’) rather invokes their store of poetic memories. Their answer appears
to be that the Nymphs relationship with trees is looser than syngenesis, and is,
instead, a sympathetic connection.123 In its way, this (p.28) formulation has
more kinship with the bucolic pathetic fallacy than with tales of trees-with-
spirits.

For all that Callimachus might consider the matter to be cleared up, the idea of a
more fundamental connection between Nymphs and trees persisted in some
Roman texts. Most famously, Ovid’s Erysichthon chops Ceres’ sacred oak, which
first grows pale and then begins to gush blood as the voice of the Nymph inside
predicts the king’s punishment before she dies (Met. 8.758–73).124 His story of
Dryope also hints at intimate connection, first in the bleeding lotus she
unwittingly harms while still in human form (Met. 9.344–9),125 and then in her
own rapid self-identification with the tree (possibly an oak)126 which she
becomes: uiximus innocuae; si mentior, arida perdam / quas habeo frondes et
caesa securibus urar (‘I have lived without sin; if I lie, may I dry out and lose the
leaves I have and be chopped down by axes and burned’ 373–4). Within the
rather different context of mannered praise-poetry, Statius notes with approval
that a tree has been left to grow through the middle of Manilius Vopiscus’ villa at
Tibur, which surely any other master would have felled: at nunc ignaro forsan
uel lubrica Nais / uel non abruptos tibi debet Hamadryas annos (‘but now
perhaps either a sleek Naiad or Hamadryad owes you, though you do not know
it, her unbroken years of life’, Silvae 1.3.63–4). The forsan adds an arch tone, and
I would certainly rest no claims for genuine religious beliefs about tree-Nymphs
on any of these examples, but the idea, at least, clearly remains attractive.

Vergil’s own treatment of the relationship between Nymphs and trees tends to
be oblique. Some traces of the story pattern of Nymphs avenging damage to
their special trees may lurk in the grove-clearing and Aristaeus episodes of the
Georgics;127 more overt variations on this pattern are found in Polydorus’ cornel
and myrtle thicket, Cybele’s pines and Faunus’ oleaster in the Aeneid.128
Evander’s account of the distant history of the site of Rome also offers a hint of
this story, but, again, shies away from a precise identification of numen and tree:

(p.29)

haec nemora indigenae Fauni Nymphaeque tenebant

gensque uirum truncis et duro robore nata,

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quis neque mos neque cultus erat…

A. 8.314–16

The indigenous Fauns and Nymphs used to occupy these groves, and
a race of men born from trunks and hard oak wood, who had neither
custom nor civilization…

Here the focus soon shifts from the Fauns and Nymphs to the primitive humans,
and their gradual taming under the rule of Saturn, but for a moment the picture
of rustic numina living alongside men born from trees hints at a particular
affinity.129 The idea of these tough aboriginals echoes the accounts of men born
of earth or stone,130 but it nevertheless seems pointed that here Vergil chooses
to emphasize arboreal rather than stony origin, intimating an especially close
connection between trees, primitive man and woodland numina.131

The vaguer sense of Nymphs as, simply, forest-dwellers is apparent in both the
Eclogues and Georgics,132 and recurs as an occasional motif in the Aeneid,
where several heroes are joined in a loose brotherhood of children raised by
woodland Nymphs in their early years. Hippolytus’ son Virbius is brought up in
the grove of Egeria133 (A. 7.763, echoing the earlier concealment of his father in
the same woods, 774–7);134 Arcens’ son is raised in his Nymph (p.30) mother’s
grove in Sicily (A. 9.584–5);135 the woodland Nymph Iaera brings up her sons
Pandarus and Bitias in a grove of Jupiter (A. 9.672–4); and Tarquitus is the son of
both a wood-dwelling Faun and the Nymph Dryope (A. 10.551–2). Vestiges of this
story-type are perhaps also present in the reference to Halaesus being
concealed in the woods by his father (A. 10.417) and the prediction of Silvius
Aeneas’ birth in the woods at A. 6.763–5. At this point, it is tempting to
remember that in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, the goddess engages Nymphs
on Mt Ida to care for the infant Aeneas himself until he is around four years old,
and instructs Anchises to claim that one of them is the child’s mother (257–8;
273–85). If this poetic memory is activated from time to time in the Aeneid,
especially in the reference to Silvius Aeneas, it adds another layer to the
complicated presentation of Aeneas: a representative of a new religious-political
order with little concern for the smaller numina, he is himself destined to be
intimately linked to those smaller gods, especially the indigites and their Italian
environments.136

0.4. Plants as Symbol and Metaphor

Within ancient texts plants can of course function just as plants: parts of the
natural environment used as backdrop, illustration, and even as protagonists
centre-stage. Although Hesiod gives little detail to plants in his Works and Days,
there are clear indications scattered throughout the work that his audience is
expected to be familiar with a range of flora, and Hesiod is naturally conscious
of the usefulness of various plants to mankind, setting them within their cultural
as well as natural context.137 Plants also play their part as nature’s timekeepers,

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giving mankind markers throughout the year: the flowering of the artichoke
heralds the hot season (WD 582), and the spring sailing is marked by the
unfurling of the topmost shoot of a fig tree to the size of a crow’s foot (WD 679–
80). Even within the rarefied environment of learned Hellenistic poetry,
straightforward presentation of plants within their own habitats and of their
practical relationships with mankind (p.31) is perfectly possible: Theocritus
anticipates Vergil in his close engagement with Theophrastus’ botanical
works,138 and his realistic presentation of vegetation within his poetry may
reveal his own observation of plants in their natural habitats, even as they are
frequently also freighted with metapoetic associations. Plants in literature, then,
need not always be ‘literary’ plants first and foremost; nevertheless, naturalistic
representations can often slide into the territory of symbol, metaphor, and poetic
technique. Indeed, a practical, plausibly ‘lived’ relationship of men with plants
was frequently combined with symbolism from the very earliest poetry, as in
Homer’s frequent use of the ‘man falls like tree’ simile pattern, which often
evokes familiar scenes of wood-cutting, and alludes to the use subsequently to
be made of a felled specimen.139 In this section I will set out just some of the
ways in which plants are drawn into a range of symbolic and metaphorical
tropes: a rich tradition which Vergil is more than ready to exploit.

0.4.1. Plants, People, and Analogy

Anthropocentric ways of seeing often emphasize differences between humans
and other living things, with the vegetable kingdom placed at the bottom of the
pecking order. Yet the human focus on itself can, conversely, result in the tracing
of parallels and comparisons between people and plants. Even within scientific
traditions, the temptation to draw analogies between plant and animal bodies is
often strong.140 The potential semantic fluidity between animal (or more
specifically human) body parts and the parts of plants is also welcomed by many
ancient poets.141 Trees lend themselves particularly well to this system of
imagery, their trunks, branches, and foliage analogized to human bodies, limbs,
and hair. The Homeric similes just mentioned, where falling warriors are likened
to felled trees, already gesture in this direction, and (p.32) in Latin the idea of
a tree’s ‘arms’, bracchia, may be unremarkable, but it is not bound to be a dead
metaphor.142 Indeed, the familiarity of such connections enables poets to
develop them in subtle and sometimes unexpected ways. Catullus’ Minotaur, a
murderous bull-headed beast, is humanized via use of a Homeric-style simile
comparing him to a storm-battered oak or pine in summo quatientem bracchia
Tauro (‘shaking its branches / arms on the heights of the Taurus mountains’,
64.105).143 If the power of such imagery to elide distinctions between plants and
people has, perhaps, to wait for the myriad human to plant transformations of
Ovid’s Metamorphoses to receive its most overt expression in Latin literature,
there is much already there for Vergil to respond to. Indeed, Vergil anticipates
Ovid with reference to the transformation of the daughters of the sun into trees:
E. 6.62–3: tum Phaethontiadas musco circumdat amarae / corticis atque solo

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proceras erigit alnos (‘then [Silenus] surrounds the sisters of Phaethon with
bitter mossy bark and raises them up from the ground as tall alder trees’, E.
6.62–3).

In the Eclogues, direct analogies of human bodies to plant parts are largely
avoided, but the broader comparison of attractive humans to beautiful plants is
common enough.144 There may be a hint of more specific human-body-as-plant
imagery in Eclogue 10, where Gallus worries how his beloved Lycoris will cope
with a trip through the Alps or Germany: a, te ne frigora laedant! / a tibi ne
teneras glacies secet aspera plantas! (‘ah, let the cold not harm you! Ah, let the
harsh ice not cut your tender feet!’, E. 10.48–9). A planta can be the young shoot
of a plant as well as the sole of a human foot, and we may recall Melioboeus’
careful protection of his myrtles against frost, dum teneras defendo a frigore
myrtos (‘while I was protecting the tender myrtles from the cold’, E. 7.6). Lycoris
emerges, thus, as both the high-maintenance elegiac woman unsuited to harsh
camp life, and a tender plant to be cared for by the would-be plantsman
Gallus.145 Within the Georgics, the plant–human connection tends to flow in the
opposite direction, as trees, vines, and crops are regularly anthropomorphized,
before the flow is reversed once more in the Aeneid, where humans again
become like crops, flowers, and trees.146

Another less specific human-as-plant metaphor can be detected in the frequent

use of vegetative ‘flourishing’ words to describe (usually) young (p.33) people:
florens, uirens, and so on. Lucretius even employs a combination of different
plant-related metaphors to illustrate dissatisfaction with life:

nec tamen explemur uitai fructibus umquam,

hoc, ut opinor, id est, aeuo florente puellas
quod memorant laticem pertusum congerere in uas,
quod tamen expleri nulla ratione potestur.

Lucr., DRN 3.1007–10

Nor do we ever have our fill of the fruits of life, this, as I believe, is
the story that they tell of the girls in the flower of youth who had to
gather water in a leaky vase, which however can never be filled by
any method.

The fruits of life are literally the earth’s produce (fetus, 1006) as well as
metaphors of human pleasures and fulfilment, while the fully metaphorical
flowering of the daughters of Danaus—which might even evoke imagery of
brides as flowers147—is blighted by the eternal futility of their task.148 Vergil’s
use of metaphors of flowers and burgeoning leaves may often be brief, as in his
description of Corydon and Thyrsis as florentes aetatibus (‘flowering in their
youth’, E. 7.4), but need not thus be insignificant. The metaphor returns at the
end of the Georgics when Vergil describes himself enjoying the writing of poetry

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in Naples while Caesar is off fighting: illo Vergilium me tempore dulcis alebat /
Parthenope studiis florentem ignobilis oti (‘at that time, sweet Parthenope
nourished me, Vergil, as I flowered in the pursuits of undistinguished leisure’, G.
4.563–4). The poet himself is a plant nourished by the southern Italian soil,
allowed to flower in both personal and poetic terms by the leisure he enjoys as a
result of (in spite of?) the vigorous military activities of the political elite. Vergil
even engages in a circular re-appropriation of the metaphor for plants
themselves: he appears to be the first to use the participle florens in its
adjectival sense to apply to plants, at E. 1.78, 2.64, 9.19, and 10.25.149 Thus, in
this context of invigorated plants, one might view it as more than a pat and
unreflective use of the ‘flowering’ metaphor when Vergil applies it again to
humans: Corydon and Thyrsis, and then Vergil himself share in the reinvigorated
imagery of flourishing plants.

With metaphors of humanized plants and plant-like humans so well established,

the associations can be found in more and less implicit suggestions, and the
connection develops from one of basic physical resemblance or physical
flourishing to a deeper kind of interconnection of humans and plants. In (p.34)
Horace’s Soracte ode, for example, trees’ experiences of severe and mild
weather can serve simultaneously as attractive scene-setting and as a promotion
of a more philosophical response to life’s vicissitudes: the woods of the snow-
covered mountain first appear to be overwhelmed, nec iam sustineant onus /
siluae laborantes (‘no longer can the labouring woods hold up their load’, Od.
1.9.3–4), yet as soon as the thaw has come and the gods have caused the winds
to drop, nec cupressi / nec ueteres agitantur orni (‘neither the cypresses nor the
ancient manna-ash are agitated’, 11–12). Their homogeneity (simply ‘woods’)
when under pressure reflects with subtle realism the visually muffling effect of
the snow but may also imply the dulling, de-individualizing effect of anxiety.
Pleasant individuality is later restored as particular species are named, and the
antiquity of the manna-ash reveals them as many-time survivors of winter’s
onslaught: they become a stalwart synecdoche of the sage not brought low by
life’s vicissitudes.150 Meanwhile, the human addressee Thaliarchus is, by
contrast, a mere boy, whose youthfulness is briefly reflected in vegetative terms
—uirenti (‘growing green’, ‘flourishing’, 17)—even as he is given a less positive
picture of old age from a human perspective (canities…morosa, ‘peevish grey
hair’, 17–18). Horace thus reflects in a variety of ways the possibilities of poetic
plants for reflections on life, landscape, poetics, symbolism, and the human
condition.151

To offer a final example on this theme, now broadening to a plant–animal

association, we find that even when plants are the overt subject matter, thoughts
about the similarity between animal and vegetable can creep in. Lucretius’
account of the evolution of plants offers a rich reworking of earlier philosophical

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theories on the emergence of plant life,152 but its poetic setting gives space for a
fluid combination of the metaphorical and the (theorized) real:

principio genus herbarum uiridemque nitorem

terra dedit circum collis camposque per omnis,
florida fulserunt uiridanti prata colore,
arboribusque datumst uariis exinde per auras
crescendi magnum immissis certamen habenis.
ut pluma atque pili primum saetaeque creantur
quadripedum membris et corpore pennipotentum,
sic noua tum tellus herbas uirgultaque primum
(p.35) sustulit, inde loci mortalia saecla creauit
multa modis multis uaria ratione coorta.

Lucr., DRN 5.783–92

Firstly, the earth gave forth the race of grasses and a green sheen
around the hills and over all the plains, and the flowering meadows
gleamed with green colour, and then to the different trees was given
the great contest of growing up through the breezes with free rein.
Just as feathers and hairs and bristles are made first on the limbs of
four-footed beasts and the body of the powerful-winged, so then the
new earth first bore grasses and bushes, and in turn created the
mortal generations which rose up in multitude, in many ways, by
varying methods.

The emphasis on colour and vigour offers a vividly imagined ‘reality’ of green
grasses, then trees, spreading over the new earth, while also drawing on the
broader metaphorical uses and symbolic connections of the words: nitor
(‘sheen’) is often transferred to connote human beauty or elegance, while
floridus (‘flowering’) is one of a range of vegetative words commonly used to
describe human flourishing. Indeed, the word genus—here used to mean ‘kind’
of grass—more commonly refers to human families or ‘races’ of beasts.153 This
intuited analogy between plant and animal life is made increasingly overt as,
first, the tall-growing trees are presented like charioteers vying to win a race,154
and then the emergence of vegetation on the land is compared with the growth
of fur, feathers, and bristles on individual animals and birds. Lucretius proffers
both an overt account of the evolution of plants and trees, and an implied
account of the evolution of linguistic and metaphorical cross-fertilization
between animal and plant life.

0.4.2. Plants and Politics

Bodily metaphor and politics combine in dramatic style when Sextus Tarquinius
sends a messenger to his father asking for advice how to proceed now he has
gained the loyalty of the Gabii:

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huic nuntio, quia, credo, dubiae fidei uidebatur, nihil uoce responsum est;
rex uelut deliberabundus in hortum aedium transit sequente nuntio filii; ibi
inambulans tacitus summa papauerum capita dicitur baculo decussisse…
Sexto ubi quid uellet parens quidue praeciperet tacitis ambagibus patuit,
primores ciuitatis criminando alios apud populum, alios sua ipsos inuidia
opportunos interemit.

Livy 1.54.6, 8

(p.36) To this messenger, because, I believe, he seemed of doubtful

trustworthiness, the king gave no reply in words; as if going to think things
over, he went out into the palace garden with his son’s messenger
following. As he strolled there, in silence, he is said to have struck the
heads off the top of the poppies with his staff.… When it became clear to
Sextus what his father wanted and what he was urging by means of these
silent riddles, he killed the foremost men of the community, some by
bringing charges against them before the people, while others were laid
vulnerable by their own unpopularity.

Decapitated poppies become decapitated people, and the elder Tarquin’s

message, if baffling to the messenger woefully unschooled in plant symbolism,
encapsulates in a clear and chilling moment the shared vulnerability of plant and
human life, especially in times of great political upheaval.

The associations of plants with politics are myriad, and range from the literal to
the symbolic, and across both visual and literary arts. The Ficus ruminalis was a
wild fig tree said to have offered shade and shelter to the infant Romulus and
Remus when their floating cradle reached the shores of the Tiber. In it were
combined elements of both sacredness and memorial, helping to define Roman
identity, and watching over public life.155 The whole city was dotted with trees,
or sometimes groups of trees, with particular historical, religious, and political
connections, and the powerful could engage in a spot of tree-planting to enhance
their public image.156 Particular trees, whether real or imagined, were often
intimately linked with the fortunes of political dynasties or even of whole
communities. Julius Caesar is reported to have decided to adopt Octavian after a
palm tree he spared from the axe grew a shoot which overshadowed the parent
tree (Suet., Div. Aug. 94.11); a further plant-related omen marked the auspicious
betrothal of Octavian and Livia when an eagle dropped into her lap a hen,
unharmed, carrying a sprig of berried laurel in her beak (Plin., HN 15.136–7).157
Connections between the vegetative and political realms are reflected in the
‘statement trees’ of the Aeneid, the manna-ash toppled by the axe which stands
for the falling city of Troy (A. 2.626–31), or the ancient laurel tree in the palace
of Latinus from which the Laurentine people take their name (A. 7.59–70).158
From the time of Pompey the Great on, when the Romans led representatives of
their conquered nations in triumph, they sometimes included trees to symbolize

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their newly exerted control over natural as well as human assets,159 and more
generally the successful transplantation of exotic species to Rome could be an
expression (p.37) of political power as much as horticultural prowess.160 The
fasces themselves, the ultimate symbols of political authority, were made from
rods of elm or birch,161 sometimes combined with a laurel crown.162

Politically significant plants naturally made their way into artistic

representations.163 The spica (ear of corn) and individual grains were common
images on coins, often denoting the aediles’ part in the distribution of corn to
the people. Political—and politicized—honours were frequently marked by the
award of crowns of grass, laurel, or oak leaves, together with the right to
represent these in artistic images, whether coins, reliefs, or statuary.164 The
fluidity of associations evoked by plants could also be exploited in this context;
when Vergil presents Octavian as cingens materna tempora myrto (‘wreathing
[his] brows with [his] maternal myrtle’, G. 1.28) he simultaneously draws on
associations of the myrtle crown with the ouatio, a form of ‘lesser’ triumph
granted in contexts where the conflict is relatively easily won,165 and with
Octavian’s family link to Venus (hence ‘maternal’), together with the broader
connection between the goddess and this plant.166 Octavian/Augustus certainly
came to appreciate the political power of vegetative symbolism, and the Ara
Pacis perhaps most consummately reveals his ability to exploit representations
of plant life to enhance his project of political renewal.167

Even gardens, supposed places of otium (‘leisure’) and rest from politics, could
become arenas for political one-upmanship. The wealthy and powerful were able
to control the symbolic messages of their gardens in a way not so serenely
achieved by the erection of statues or monuments in public areas already
crowded with other men’s marmoreal statements.168 Although much of this was
achieved via the positioning of the gardens and the creation of impressive
features like porticoes, shrines, and pools, the garden plants themselves were
inevitably made complicit in their masters’ striving for dominance and
popularity. Nevertheless, and in contrast with stereotypes of the green-fingered
English aristocracy, gardening itself was not necessarily an appropriate
occupation for the Roman upper classes. While the image of men like
Cincinnatus, a statesman and a farmer, remained powerful,169 pottering in the
garden might rather be associated with oriental and tyrannical forms of
kingship.170 For a reader of the Georgics alert to political messages, the poet’s
ostentatious skirting around the topic of gardens may reflect this (p.38)
squeamishness, even as it challenges it via the portrayal of the old man in the
garden as a paragon of self-sufficiency.171

0.5. Poetic Plants

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0.5.1. Poetic Plants Before and Beside Vergil

The association of plants and vegetative environments with the production of
literature stretches back long before Vergil.172 In the Phaedrus, Plato depicts an
ideal spot for philosophizing by the river Ilissos where the shade of a plane tree
in full bloom provides comfort and delight for the senses, and even the grass is
κομψότατον (‘most refined’, ‘particularly clever’).173 Earlier still, Hesiod’s
encounter with the Muses while herding his sheep implicitly occurs in close
proximity to a laurel tree from which a shoot is plucked and given to the young
poet as symbol of his poetic talent (Theog. 30–1). Many subsequent scenes of
poetic initiation and inspiration occur quite explicitly within a grove (e.g. Theoc.
Id. 7.131–47; Hor., Od. 1.1.29–34; Prop. 3.1.1–8; Ov., Am. 3.1.1–6). Sappho (fr.
55) characterizes a lack of poetic education as being without a share in the roses
of Pieria (i.e. the Muses). Philitas seems to have cultivated a particular
connection between trees and poetry too, whether sitting under an old plane
tree (fr. 14 Powell)174 or (possibly) ventriloquizing an alder-wood staff passed on
as symbolic of his poetry (fr. 10 Powell).175 Indeed, even the old analogy of poets
and bees naturally entails, again, a close relationship between plants and the
composition of poetry.176 The poems themselves can be viewed in equally
vegetative terms. Collections of epigrams were put in ‘garlands’ or ‘anthologies’,
affirming the metaphor of poems as beautiful leaves and flowers.177 Works of
august poets could also be compared with woods, siluae, their larger stature
evoking both the respect owed to poetic forebears and their poems’ longevity.178

(p.39) Horace announces, scriptorum chorus omnis amat nemus et fugit urbem
(‘the whole chorus of writers loves the grove and flees the city, Epist. 2.2.77),
affirming this cliché of poets’ symbolic (if not necessarily literal) dwelling among
the trees. The poet, he continues, is rite cliens Bacchi somno gaudentis et umbra
(‘duly a devotee of Bacchus, rejoicing in sleep and shade’, Epist. 2.2.78),
pointing to the similarly familiar theme of Dionysiac inspiration. This association
of Bacchus and poetics is of long standing,179 and one of the god’s favourite
plants, the ivy, is often drawn in to the picture too:180 so, for example, Propertius
rejects Ennius’ ‘shaggy crown’ of unspecified foliage and asks instead to be
wreathed with Bacchus’ ivy (4.1.61–2), and associates ivy berries with Philitas at
4.6.3.181 Ivy can also be used independently of Bacchus (or, at least, without
explicit inclusion of the god) to mark the triumph of poetic inspiration, as with
Horace’s own ivy crown (Odes 1.1.29), the one Ovid grants to Catullus’ ghost
(Am. 3.9.61–2), or the one Vergil’s Thyrsis awards to himself at E. 7.25.182 The
association can even, to the refined, seem hackneyed: Callimachus regards
Bacchus’ ivy wreath as a popular reward, but the epigrammatist Theaetetus will
achieve more lasting fame, Epigr. 7.1–2 Pf. (= AP 9.565).

Along similar lines, poets’ claims of inspiration by Apollo are frequently

accompanied by reference to the god’s laurel,183 and, once again, laurel comes
to stand by itself as a symbol of poetic inspiration,184 even as its connections
with athletic and military victories often add complexity to the image. Thus,
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particular poetic and broader cultural connections unite within these symbolic
plants; and this is not something solely reserved for the ‘obvious’ candidates,
laurel and ivy. Compare, for example, Horace’s use of roses (e.g. Od. 1.5, 1.36,
3.19) simultaneously to stand for real, familiar flowers grown in Roman
gardens,185 as symbols of love and of the brevity of life,186 and for the traditions
of Greek erotic poetry.187

Callimachus’ fourth Iambus evokes the fable of the contest between the laurel
and the olive and propels this humble tale of talking trees188 into the (p.40)
elevated realm of literary discourse.189 The laurel aggressively lampoons the
olive, drawing attention to her two-tone leaves, like the belly of a water snake
below and sunburned (like a slave, it is implied) on top (Iamb. 4.22–3), and
disparaging her connection with the dead (37–8) while promoting the laurel’s
own religious importance. She becomes the epitome of old-style iambic poets
like Hipponax—aggressive and self-aggrandizing190—while also evoking
connections with Callimachus’ own works in her references to Brancus and the
ritual of the Daphnephoria.191 The olive, by contrast, is quiet and superficially
more modest, representing more restrained literary styles, choosing to ‘report’ a
conversation between two crows in her branches to offer the main defence of
her virtues, in which the olive comprehensively wins out over the laurel. Yet this,
too, evokes Callimachus’ own work, the crows alluding to the talking birds of his
Hecale. The two trees, in other words, appear to represent at once very different
kinds of poetry and differing aspects of the works of the self-same poet,
Callimachus.192 At the end of the tale, however, comes a poetic vegetable
punchline, as a bramble overhearing the quarrel urges them to make peace,
speaking of himself and the trees as one, μὴ χαρταί / γενώμεθ’ ἐχθροῖς (‘let us
not become sources of joy to our enemies’, Iamb. 4.98–9).193 The laurel then
vents her spleen on the bramble instead of the olive: a mere shrub should not
identify herself with trees. In poetic terms, the bramble (perhaps) represents the
uninspired traditional poet of the sort snobbishly reviled by Callimachus,194
setting the apparent conflict between the equally, if differently, Callimachean
laurel and olive into relief.195

In short, there existed both broad traditions and particular treatments of the
poetic nuances of plants ripe for Vergil’s exploration and exploitation. Within the
Eclogues it is arguably harder to find a plant without any potential metapoetic
significance than to identify those which have it;196 and although plants and
trees have traditionally been kept on the fringes of much Vergilian (p.41)
criticism, the metapoetic significance of flora in the Eclogues has received
enough attention to become itself mainstream.197 This is the phase of Vergil’s
poetic production when he engages most concertedly with such ideas, but the
associations, like many plants, do not necessarily stay within the ground where
they were first planted, and it is still common within the Georgics and Aeneid for
certain plants to invite self-conscious reflections on poetic affiliation.

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0.5.2. Plants and Poetics in Vergil (a glimpse of a road not much taken)
In this book, for the most part, any metapoetical interpretations of plants will be
brief and often relegated to footnotes in order to keep the ground clear for
discussion of the other aspects which are my main concern. However, it seems
important to acknowledge a little more fully here the importance of the
metapoetic strand both to Vergil’s presentation of plants, and to previous critical
analyses of his work. I offer a discussion of two species—the beech and the
tamarisk—which are both imbued with strong metapoetic connotations by the
poet, but whose metapoetic functions are developed in rather different ways.
The intention is for these to act as brief case studies to situate the idea of
metapoetic readings of Vergilian plants within the context of existing
scholarship, yet also to point towards ways in which the metapoetic can shade
into the symbolic and even the botanical and thus act as a bridge between the
project of cultural engagement which underpins this whole book and these
particular types of interpretation that I will elsewhere avoid or only sketch out.

From the very first line of the collection, where the shepherd Tityrus reclines
under a fagus (beech), the idea is introduced of trees and plants as
representative of Vergil’s poetic project:

Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi

siluestrem tenui Musam meditaris auena;
nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arua.
nos patriam fugimus; tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra
formosam resonare doces Amaryllida siluas.

E. 1.1–5

Tityrus, reclining under the cover of a spreading beech you rehearse

your woodland Muse on a slim straw; we leave the borders and sweet
fields of our fatherland. We flee our fatherland; you, Tityrus,
stretched out in the shade teach the woods to echo ‘beautiful
Amaryllis’.

(p.42) The beech tree provides the first, programmatic, patch of shade (umbra)
with which the collection begins, and acts as a necessary—and far from
incidental—presence in the bucolic world.198 The choice of this particular
species of tree is something of a programmatic departure: a characteristic
inhabitant of Italy,199 but not found in Greece south of Thessaly, the beech is not
a familiar feature of Greek poetic tradition,200 and comes to represent Vergil’s
adaptation of Theocritean pastoral for a new time and context.201 In fact, a
whole group of different trees is evoked and displaced by the beech: in sound,
the word fagus resembles Theocritus’ oak, φηγός,202 and both trees are large
and spreading, but, of course, different. Yet the opening of Idyll 1, to which these
opening lines of the Eclogues also allude, has the pine (πίτυς) as the model, its
whispering as sweet as the herdsman’s piping. Further allusion to Meleager (AP

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7.196), where a cicada sings a rustic song203 from a plane tree under which the
poet reclines, adds another to the list—that shade tree par excellence204—and
we find yet another species evoked and displaced by the beech: an elegant,
economical and botanical expression of Vergil’s relationship with his
predecessors.

Having established such complex poetic implications in his beech tree, Vergil
periodically recalls and modifies them as he goes through the Eclogues: the love-
sick Corydon wanders in a beech grove, tantum inter densas, umbrosa cacumina,
fagos / adsidue ueniebat (‘he just used to keep on wandering between (p.43)
the thick beeches, their shady tops’, E. 2.3–4);205 old beech trees bear witness to
Menalcas’ spiteful breaking of Daphnis’ bow and arrows (E. 3.12–15);206 beech
wood is used for the highly metapoetic cups (pocula…fagina) staked in the
singing contest between Damoetas and Menalcas (E. 3.36–43);207 Mopsus’ song
is carved into the bark of a beech tree (E. 5.13–15);208 and beech trees, now
both old and broken, mark the boundary of lost land at E. 9.7–10.209

It is perhaps fitting in generic terms that the fagus does not appear at all in the
Aeneid, either as a growing tree or as the wood from that tree: as a primary
symbol of Vergil’s bucolic verse, it has no place within martial or even
foundation epic.210 The Georgics, though, offer a half-way house between the
extremes of bucolic and epic: there, the fagus appears just once in each book. In
its first appearance (G. 1.173), it is to be felled, along with the tilia (lime) for
making a plough, while in the third book it returns as the wood of the plough’s
axle, now hard at work (G. 3.172). The plough itself is symbolic of the didactic
project of the Georgics: the first piece of instruction proper self-consciously (p.
44) positions the act of ploughing as simultaneously the act of beginning the
poetic work (G. 1.45–6),211 and the importance of the section on plough-building
(G. 1.169–75) for establishing Vergil’s Hesiodic-didactic credentials has long
been noted.212 It is no great stretch, then, to see the beech used for making the
plough as representative of the very different emphasis of the didactic project—
the tree which had symbolized otium (‘leisure’) and pastoral composition, is now
co-opted for the world of labor (‘work’) and georgic poetics. It may be a mark of
just how different this world is for the beech tree that now it is not even singled
out, but one of three types of wood (elm and lime in addition) needed to make
this essential item of farming equipment.

In its appearance in Georgics 2 the beech once again is not singled out, but
belongs to a short catalogue of trees best propagated in a range of ways. The
beech is here appreciated not in and of itself, but as the stock onto which sweet
chestnuts are grafted, falling within a section on adding benefit to otherwise less
immediately ‘useful’ trees (G. 2.69–72). In addition to a possible metapoetic
element in grafting per se,213 we find the beech forced to conform again to a
change of emphasis from otium to labor. Difference between the poetic projects
of the Eclogues and Georgics is underlined even as their landscapes are

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populated by the same or very similar flora. Yet shifting the focus between the
Eclogues and Georgics also entails, to some degree, a re-writing of the Eclogues:
for a beech tree to be put to work bearing chestnuts is theoretically possible,214
but in poetic terms implies an amalgam of the shade/landmark tree that is the
beech with the chestnut as provider of bucolic love-gifts.215 The resulting
specimen is thus, at least potentially, both a symbol of the move from otium to
labor and a man-made über-pastoral tree, beech and chestnut combined.

In its final appearance at the close of the Georgics (and thus in Vergil’s entire
oeuvre), the beech appears to be emphatically re-established as the bucolic tree:
while Octavian is off thundering by the Euphrates, Vergil has been enjoying his
otium in Naples and the poet who sang of the cultivation of fields and herds and
trees in the Georgics (4.559–60) now explicitly signs off as the very same poet of
the Eclogues: carmina qui lusi pastorum audaxque iuuenta, / Tityre, te patulae
cecini sub tegmine fagi (‘I who played at the songs of shepherds and, bold in my
youth, sang of you, Tityrus, under the cover of a spreading beech tree’ G. 4.565–
6). These lines offer both overt and more oblique reflection on the poetic project
just completed: for example, the contrast with Octavian points to the non-
combatant poet as a more trivial (p.45) person, yet can also be seen in poetic
terms as a competitive contrast between an un-Callimachean type of bombastic
epic (‘written’ by Octavian) and the small-scale, playful poetry of the Hellenistic
type achieved by Vergil.216 For the poet of the Georgics to underline his identity
with the poet of the Eclogues can, on one level, be read as a simple statement of
biographical and bibliographical fact; on another level it appears to re-cast this
didactic project as something rather similar to the bucolic (and thus, inevitably,
rather further from epic). On the micro-level of the beech tree itself this
potentially contradicts the apparent distance elsewhere asserted between
pastoral and didactic mind-set and poetics. Nevertheless, the re-emergence of
the Eclogues need not serve, as it were to re-write the Georgics: the polarities
could be reversed and we might, rather, re-read the Eclogues in light of the
Georgics, and thus consider whether a clear identification of the fagus as the
tree of Vergilian bucolic was ever giving us the full picture.217

I would like to pursue Vergil’s deconstruction of the very concept of

metapoetically significant plants a little further, this time with reference to the
tamarisk (myrica). Within Vergil’s poetry, they are confined to four references,
all in the Eclogues; like beeches, tamarisks are not particularly common plants
to find in earlier poetic texts, but they do have the distinction of appearing
several times in Homer,218 as well as twice in Theocritus. First:

λῇς ποτὶ τᾶν Νυμφᾶν, λῇς, αἰπόλε, τεῖδε καθίξας,

ὡς τὸ κάταντες τοῦτο γεώλοφον αἵ τε μυρῖκαι,
συρίσδεν;

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Theoc. Id. 1.12–14

Will you, by the Nymphs, will you, goatherd, sit here where this hill
slopes down and the tamarisks grow, and play your pipes?

Theocritus’ tamarisks have symbolic potential as shrubs forming part of the

bucolic landscape and thus the bucolic genre;219 their presence in the first Idyll
and inclusion in the first invitation to play the pipes add to an impression of
significance. All the same, the goatherd’s response to Thyrsis’ request for (p.
46) piping is to say that he is concerned not to anger Pan, asks instead for
Thyrsis to sing, and prefers to sit under an elm tree near a shrine of Priapus set
amongst oaks and springs (Id. 1.15–23). Here, at least, a distinction is made
between different aspects of pastoral musicality—piping and singing—and
between the implicit preference for the large tree (whether for its shade or
greater suitability for leaning against) over the smaller.220 The tamarisks
reappear only once in Theocritus’ collection, this time themselves becoming the
preferred environment, but for goats as much as herdsmen:

σίττ’ ἀπὸ τᾶς κοτίνω, ταὶ μηκάδες· ὧδε νέμεσθε

ὡς τὸ κάταντες τοῦτο γεώλοφον αἵ τε μυρῖκαι.

Theoc. Id. 5.100–1

Get away from the oleaster, she-goats; graze here where this hill
slopes down and the tamarisks grow.

Theocritus’ self–quotation (5.101 = 1.13) is pointed, and Lacon’s response (102–

3) that his sheep should come away from the oak tree’s shadow to graze in the
sun perhaps shows that he has detected Comatas’ use of Idyll 1’s tamarisks, and
caps that by reference to the oak, which is included in the preferred setting of
the earlier poem. Nevertheless, the reference might equally serve as further
gentle downgrading of the tamarisk from the status of a plant with potential
poetic significance into one which is rather more simply part of the landscape.

When Vergil first refers to myricae, however, they are once again—rather more
so than in Idyll 1—clear symbols of the pastoral poetic project:

Sicelides Musae, paulo maiora canamus!

non omnis arbusta iuuant humilesque myricae;
si canimus siluas, siluae sint consule dignae.

E. 4.1–3

Sicilian Muses, let’s sing slightly greater things! Not everyone

delights in coppices and humble tamarisks; if we sing of woods, let
the woods be worthy of a consul.

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The invocation of the Muses of Sicily points to Theocritus’ Sicilian background,

and the ‘humble tamarisks’ thus appear not only to indicate the ‘smallness’ of
pastoral in general, but of Theocritean pastoral in particular.221 While the
ensuing song about a politically significant and magical baby is to be taken as a
generic step up, it is not by that token a clean break with Theocritus: the
Theocritean Muses can cope with singing about more than just tamarisks, and
(p.47) the broader (and in any case larger?) category of bucolic siluae can be
accommodated to a more courtly style of poetry.222 Thus, Vergil takes myricae to
symbolize Theocritean pastoral in a manner which arguably over-emphasizes the
plant’s importance to his predecessor’s literary programme, but does so in a
context which reveals his understanding that in any case it only represents a
part of Theocritus’ poetic output. He might also offer a quiet reminder of the
tamarisk’s status not merely as an instance of the generic flora of Theocritus,
but also as one which appears within the context of preferring one thing, place
or activity to another.

The next poem in which Vergil as explicitly offers comment on his own poetic
output and ambitions also invokes the myricae:

non iniussa cano. si quis tamen haec quoque, si quis

captus amore leget, te nostrae, Vare, myricae,
te nemus omne canet; nec Phoebo gratior ulla est
quam sibi quae Vari praescripsit pagina nomen.

E. 6.9–12

I do not sing what has been forbidden. But if anyone, anyone reads
these too and is seized by love, our tamarisks, the whole grove will
be singing about you, Varus; nor is any page more pleasing to
Phoebus than that with the name of Varus written at the top.

These lines follow the famous re-working of Callimachus’ encounter with Apollo
from the start of the Aetia, in which the Vergilian poet is urged to reject the idea
of moving on to write epic and content himself with the slender reed on which to
play his rustic song. Here once again we see a specific reference to tamarisks
coupled with a broader idea of woodland, but now tamarisks and the grove are
seen as unified, rather than contrasted, as in the case of the ‘woods worthy of a
consul’ in E. 4.223 Praise poetry can be about upping the game—paulo maiora
canamus (E. 4.1)—but it can equally entail redefinition of what actually counts as
praise poetry, so that a work which still presents itself as humble can
nevertheless confer a kind of glory. Yet Eclogue 6 then perpetrates generic
ascent (or at the very least radical difference) rather than overtly pastoral
continuity in its concerted use of scientific and mythological poetry;224 it thus
hints once more that the tamarisk as poetic symbol contains far more complexity
than initial impressions imply. Furthermore, (p.48) that the singing of
tamarisks and the grove is here associated with verse that is read rather than

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heard implicates these plants in yet another rupture of the bucolic conceit of
oral, often extempore, composition.225 Perhaps, alongside these elements, the
myricae even enter into the realm of a gentle parody of the metapoetic use of
plants: their symbolic credentials within Theocritus himself are, as I have said,
possible to establish yet hardly central to an understanding of his work. For
these plants to appear fully-grown as shorthand for the pastoral project without
being mentioned as parts of the Vergilian pastoral landscape before Eclogue 4
also offers a potentially humorous, pre-packaged air. Vergil winks that
generalized trees and tamarisks are ‘the sort of thing you think I talk about’, the
self-ironizing punch-line being that, ultimately, they actually are.

Thus, by Eclogue 8 tamarisks can be included in a list of other pastoral plants

and animals to achieve a very Theocritean adunaton in Damon’s response to the
remarriage of his ex-wife Nysa to Mopsus:226

nunc et ouis ultro fugiat lupus, aurea durae

mala ferant quercus, narcisso floreat alnus,
pinguia corticibus sudent electra myricae,
certent et cycnis ululae, sit Tityrus Orpheus,
Orpheus in siluis, inter delphinas Arion.

E. 8.52–6

Now let the wolf flee the sheep of its own accord, let hard oaks bear
golden apples, let the alder bloom with narcissus, and tamarisks
sweat rich amber from their bark, and let screech-owls compete with
swans, let Tityrus be Orpheus, Orpheus in the woods, and Arion
among the dolphins.

The tamarisk here suffers a ‘demotion’ to become part of the landscape rather
than play an overtly symbolic role, even though it is a mixed-up landscape and
one doubly ‘poetic’, via both the pointed Theocritean allusion and the direct
examination of Tityrus’ place as a pastoral poet contrasted with Orpheus.
Competition with Orpheus has been mooted twice before in the Eclogues, firstly
at E. 4.46–59, where the poet hopes to be able to defeat him, and then at E. 6.30,
where Silenus’ song causes even greater astonishment to the natural world than
Orpheus’.227 It may be more than just coincidence that the tamarisk now
reappears in proximity to Orpheus in E. 8, following its prominence as poetic
symbol in both E. 4 and 6: the shrub of Vergil’s verse is getting above its station
if it imagines it can produce the amber of poetry like Orpheus’. Nevertheless, in
this fantasy of tamarisks dripping amber, there (p.49) lurks a more complex
combination of botanical, mythological, and literary allusion than was found in
their previous appearances. The tamarisk is prevalent as a coastal species in the
Mediterranean, and tolerates saline environments by exuding salt from its
leaves; Vergil hints at these secretions with the verb of (salty) sweating
(sudent)228 alongside his allusion to the ‘proper’ source of amber, the poplars,

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transformed sisters of Phaethon whose (salty) tears became the trees’ dripping
sap.229 The tamarisk, thus, is characterized, factually, as not being a source of
amber, but also, symbolically, as belonging to a more mundane, less mythically
charged field of reference than a tree like the poplar.230

In the tamarisk’s final appearance in Vergil’s poetry, an association with tears is

made explicit, but placed once more within a standard bucolic context as the
countryside unites in an outpouring of sympathetic tears for the suffering Gallus:
illum etiam lauri, etiam fleuere myricae (‘even the laurels, even the tamarisks
wept for him’, E. 10.13). Here, any hint of botanical saline secretions is replaced
by the stylized anthropomorphism of trees’ tears, and the tamarisk combines
with the laurel (Apolline poetic plant par extraordinaire) to participate in the
‘pathetic fallacy’ which is so characteristic of bucolic verse.231 So in the space of
four references, the tamarisk is first established as an instant symbol of Vergil’s
Theocritean bucolic (E. 4), maintained as that symbol while being offered the
potential for more ambitious poetic scope within a faux-modest frame (E. 6), and
then returns to (more and less nuanced) use as fodder for the bucolic clichés of
adunaton (E. 8) and pathetic fallacy (E. 10): a self-conscious and wittily ironic
snapshot of Vergil’s vegetative metapoetics in the Eclogues. (p.50)

Notes:
(1) E.g. Macfarlane (2003); (2007); Stafford (2016).

(2) For the emergence of ecocriticism, Buell (2005) 1–28. For ecocriticism and
the ancient world, Schliephake (ed.) (2016). See Introd. 0.2.3.

(3) Concerted interest in the ancient Mediterranean environment was perhaps

kick-started by Glacken (1967); to this can be added (e.g.) Hughes (1994);
Horden and Purcell (2000); Grove and Rackham (2001); Harris (ed.) (2005);
Thommen (2012); McInerney and Sluiter (eds) (2016). The study of landscape is
related to this movement: e.g. Osborne (1987); Spencer (2011); Gilhuly and
Worman (2014), and has a long tradition of cross-fertilization with literary
studies: e.g. Segal (1969); Leach (1974), (1988).

(4) They have received handbook treatment several times: e.g. Paulet (1824),
Bubani (1869–70), Paglia (1877–8), Sargeaunt (1920), Abbe (1965) (the Georgics
alone) and also Maggiulli (1995), combining the handbook aspect with
interpretative material. Numerous articles attempt identification of particular
species in Vergil. Others move beyond taxonomy to consider the broader cultural
or poetic significance of particular plants, trees, or groups of species, but (to my
knowledge) the only other discursive treatment of a full range of Vergilian plants
from the past few decades is that of Maggiulli.

(5) I repeatedly use words such as ‘scientific’ or ‘rational’ to connote certain

systematized ways of thinking about plants and, often, to offer a contrast with
more ritually or emotionally motivated religious or superstitious outlooks. A
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straightforward equation is neither intended nor possible between what is meant

by ‘science’ and ‘rationality’ in ancient and modern contexts, so I trust the
reader will accept these terms as useful approximations and forms of short-
hand, rather than any strong claim to the direct comparability of ancient and
modern scientific outlooks and methods.

(6) Hardy and Totelin (2016) offer an accessible and enjoyable introduction to
ancient botany. See also (e.g.) Pease (1952); Morton (1981) 19–81; Stannard
(1999); Amigues (2002).

(7) Scarborough’s OCD entry on botany is sanguine: ‘[m]oderns need not

untangle this medley of beliefs about botany: the ancient mind did not wall
magic away from pure philosophy, any more than there were strict divisions
between botany and herbal lore’.

(8) Scarborough (1978) 357.

(9) Even in the first century AD, following several centuries of botanically
engaged literature, Dioscorides underlines the need to draw information from
sources beyond written treatises (Materia Medica Pref. 1).

(10) Root-cutters are mentioned as sources by Theophrastus, who includes

elements of the superstition and ritual in their collection and use of plants, both
with and without overt scepticism: he may bracket such information as reported,
‘they say that…’ (e.g. HP 9.8.4–8), but is also ready to mine facts even from
apparently unbelievable sources: ‘fabulous tales are not made up without
reason’, HP 9.18.2. On Theophrastus and the rhizotomoi, Lloyd (1983) 119–49;
Irwin (2006); for his relationship with folklore more broadly, Scarborough
(1991), esp. 146–51.

(11) Hardy and Totelin (2016) 33–62.

(12) Hardy and Totelin (2016) 10–11. Musaeus and Hesiod are cited by
Theophrastus at HP 9.19.2, e.g. Homer’s moly (Od. 10.302–6) was one of the
ancient world’s most famous plants, without even having with certainty existed.
Theophrastus compares a plant called All-heal (πανάκεια) with moly (HP 9.15.7),
which cannot be identical with it since it is not, as Homer says of moly, difficult
to dig up. Stannard (1962); Amigues (2002) 429–52.

(13) For Theocritus and Theophrastus, Lindsell (1937); on Nicander’s sources,

Knoefel and Covi (1991); Overduin (2014) 7–8. We might place Sophocles’ lost
Rhizotomoi in a related category, given its apparent use of lore on noxious plants
possibly drawn from root-cutters: Scarborough (1991) 144.

(14) E.g. Anaxagoras argued that the origins of plant life—as of animal life—were
in the ‘seeds of all things’ contained in the air (Theophr. HP 3.1.4); Empedocles’

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views on egg-laying trees are related by Aristotle (Gen an. 731a5); Democritus’
ideas are discussed by Theophrastus at (e.g.) CP 1.8.2, 2.11.7–9, 6.6.1.

(15) Iambl. VP 267.

(16) E.g. HP 1.2.3; CP 1.21.6; 1.22.1–7. See Viano (1992).

(17) Senn (1929); Regenbogen (1937); Drossaart Lulofs (1957).

(18) Wöhrle (1997).

(19) Stannard (1961); Lloyd (1983) 119–49.

(20) Scarborough (1978).

(21) Some do not like to see Aristotle relinquish the crown: ‘the fact that
Theophrastus’ two great works…have survived has led to the popular idea that
Theophrastus was the father of scientific botany—a title which should in all
justice be attributed rather to his master Aristotle’, Forster (1936) 97.

(22) Evidence of his ownership of a garden appears in Diogenes Laertius’

account of Theophrastus’ will (5.2.52), although it is there referred to as a place
for the study of literature and philosophy rather than as a source of scientific
knowledge in its own right. The claim that Theophrastus’ was the first botanical
garden may originate from a creative reading of this passage put together with
the emphasis on observation in his written work. For a sceptical assessment, see
McDiarmid (1976).

(23) Pavord (2005) 21–43 outlines Theophrastus’ importance in the development

of botanical taxonomies.

(24) Recorders of such finds include Iollas of Bithynia, Andreas, Heraclides of

Tarentum, Crateuas, and Asclepiades of Bithynia. Their texts are preserved only
in quotations by Dioscorides, Pliny, and Galen.

(25) On ancient herbals, Singer (1927).

(26) Varro’s Stolo offers barbed judgement on Theophrastus’ use to the farmer:
isti…libri non tam idonei iis qui agrum colere uolunt, quam qui scholas
philosophorum (‘those books are not so well-suited to those who want to tend the
field as to those who want to attend the philosophers’ schools’, RR 1.5.2). He
softens this immediately, however, with the concession that there are
nevertheless many useful things to be learned from Theophrastus. Varro’s
characterization of agriculture as both an art (ars) and a science (scientia) (RR
1.3) may primarily be prompted by the emphasis of other agricultural writers on
experience (on which, White (1970) 18), but the idea bears faint echoes of
Theophrastus’ combination of the practical (for him, observation as much as

Page 38 of 58
Introduction

cultivation) and the theoretical. Varro does, further, advocate a combination of

inherited practices with systematic experiment: RR 1.18.7–8.

(27) E.g. Cato Agr. 6, Varro RR 1.24.1–2 on varieties of olive best planted in
different soils.

(28) These authors perhaps had less of a claim to be botanists than compilers of
existing knowledge: Pease (1952) 49 calls Pliny’s work ‘that of an industrious
compiler…rather than of a first hand observer’. In defence of Pliny, Stannard
(1965).

(29) Pease (1952) 49.

(30) Thomas (1987) 246. Vergil and Varro are the only Latin authorities cited in
the Geoponica: Rodgers (1978). On Pliny and Vergil, Bruère (1956); for influence
on Celsus and Columella as well as Pliny, Thibodeau (2011) 218–24; on Vergil,
Columella and Pliny, Doody (2007).

(31) A much fuller list of the nuances of φύσις can be found in Lovejoy and Boas
(1935) 447–56; see also Glacken (1967); Beagon (1992); French (1994); Hughes
(1994) 45–72.

(32) French (1994) 15–18, and 81–2 on the unmoved mover.

(33) French (1994) 163–6.

(34) Carone (2003); Moore (2017) 47–62. Coccia (2016) rejects modern
anthropocentric and zoocentric views, reinstating plants as fundamental to a
metaphysical conception of the world, just as they are essential to its physical
flourishing.

(35) Clichés of human superiority and right to rule are elegantly evoked in Ovid’s
creation: sanctius his animal mentisque capacius altae / deerat adhuc et quod
dominari in cetera posset: / natus homo est (‘there was still lacking an animal
more sacred than these [birds, fish, beasts, and gods(!)], one which could reign
over everything else: mankind was born’, Met. 1.76–8).

(36) Pol. 1256b 15–26. Cf. Sedley (1991). The earliest explicit philosophical
articulation of an anthropocentric view of creation is attributed to Socrates (Xen.
Mem. 4.3.8–12).

(37) E.g. Epict., Diatr. 1.16; Cic., ND 2.156; Plin. HN 21.2; 22.1. Cf. Beagon
(1992) 55–7.

(38) In the Stoic conception, although mankind enjoys a privileged status in the
hierarchy of species, the overall view of nature may not always be strictly
anthropocentric, since (e.g. for Cleanthes) man is still only part of the ordered

Page 39 of 58
Introduction

universe; cf. Sen. De Ira 2.27.2, where it is explicitly denied that natural
occurrences which help or harm us are directed at us personally. Chrysippus,
however, argues that for man to live in accordance with nature is to live in
accordance with man’s nature (Diog. Laert. 7.89). For Seneca’s similar placing
of humans at the top of the hierarchy by virtue of their unique rational capacity,
Epist. Mor. 124.20. Cf. Steiner (2005) 85–6. For ways to reconcile Stoicism with
social ecology, Stephens (1994). The idea of the universe as an ordered whole
has some overlap with modern Gaia theory, although Donahue (2010) holds that
Gaia theory entails rejection of anthropocentrism.

(39) The nutritive or vegetative soul, which means just that they are alive, eat,
and reproduce; in Aristotle’s view, plants have no perceptions and thus no
desires, and certainly no reason: e.g. De an. 413a–b. Such a view may draw
criticism: e.g. Hall (2011) 24, ‘Aristotle’s strict divisions remove the sense of a
kin-based relationship between humans and plants. The voices of plants are
completely silenced in Aristotle’s work—reducing their lives to nothing more
than feeding and reproduction.’

(40) De an. 411b29; On Youth and Old Age 467b24; Gen. an. 741a10–13.

(41) This implication of unbridgeable difference between plants and animals is

modified in Aristotle’s natural historical work, where he places living things on a
comparative scale from the wholly lifeless through to animal life, with plants
seeming lifeless in comparison with animals, but endowed with life in
comparison with other bodies: e.g. Part. an. 4.5 681a 10–15. The division
between each step on the scale can be hazy too, as in the case of some sea-
animals which are rooted to the spot and cannot survive movement, much like
plants: Hist. an 8.1 528b27. Aristotle may yet be guilty of ‘zoocentrism’ in these
works, however, especially in his implication of deficiency on the part of plants
which do not eat, move, and excrete as animals do (Part. an. 655b; cf. Hall
(2011) 26–7). In implicit correction of his mentor, Theophrastus establishes early
on that comparison between animal and plant physiology may not always be
helpful (HP 1.1.2–3) and that analogies drawn between plants and animals are
an aid for those more familiar with animals, not claiming any strict equivalence
(HP 1.2.3–4).

(42) Although this marks a difference from Aristotle’s views, admitting that if
plants can feel pleasure and pain they will therefore desire the pleasurable and
dislike the painful, Skemp (1947) 55 argues Plato is still not granting much: ‘[a]ll
our [man’s] sensations penetrate to the higher “kinds” of soul in us. Those of the
plants cannot do so, and therefore must be “other”’. Conversely, Carpenter
(2010) maintains that by granting plants perceiving souls, Plato also grants them
some kind of intelligence.

Page 40 of 58
Introduction

(43) For inclusion of plants among ζῷα as exception rather than rule in both
Plato and wider Greek thought, Renehan (1981) 242–3.

(44) In this case apparently not meaning mankind, but men, as opposed to
women, who emerge later along with animals by a form of degeneration. Got to
love Plato.

(45) Philosophers must know as well as poets and politicians, however, that
analogies are slippery things: it is perhaps just as possible to put plants at the
normative centre, whereby Plato classifies humans as upside-down plants:
Marder (2014) 26.

(46) This contrasts with Plato’s contention in the Timaeus that they do not have
reason, but may be compatible with hints in the Philebus (22b 3–9) that they
might: Yount (2017) 185, 187.

(47) For Plotinus’ interest in plants as metaphor as well as on their own account,
Marder (2014) 43–56.

(48) Trepanier (2004) 93. Indeed, Empedocles even saw a hierarchy among
plants, with the laurel being the superlative form of plant incarnation: B127.

(49) A plant’s use is sometimes a distinguishing feature in Theophrastus’

establishment of categories: e.g. HP 6.6.1–2: garland plants straddle his general
distinction between under-shrubs and herbs and these he categorizes instead as
those with useful flowers, and those with pleasant-smelling foliage.

(50) Hughes (1988) 68; Amigues (2002) 37–42. For a broader summary of
Theophrastus’ agreements and disagreements with Aristotle, French (1994) 92–
103. By contrast, Vallance (1988) 39 maintains that Theophrastus’ departure
from the Aristotelian path has been overstated, and he is, rather, attacking the
less flexible views of the Academy: ‘an anthropocentric teleologist Theophrastus
certainly was’.

(51) Cf. CP 1.16.3. Hughes (1988) 68: ‘Aristotle would not have denied this, of
course, but would have made it a subsidiary cause in his hierarchical
organization of nature. For Theophrastus it is the whole point.’

(52) Hall (2011) 30–2 sees here implicit recognition of plants as autonomous
beings.

(53) Theophrastus has just made clear that what he means by a plant’s nature is
that which has a starting point in itself, not that forced by external influences
such as human cultivation techniques.

(54) I discuss Theophrastus’ theories on wild and tame plants at 4.1.

Page 41 of 58
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Without even looking about or inquiring for Burke or Riley,
Kennedy rather ostentatiously went directly to the hotel office on our
arrival at the Harbor House.
“Our rooms are at the north side of the hotel,” he began. “I wonder
if there are any vacant on the bay side?”
The clerk turned to look at his list and I took the opportunity to
pluck at Kennedy’s sleeve.
“Why don’t you get rooms in the rear?” I whispered. “That’s the
side on which the garage is.”
Kennedy nodded hastily to me to be silent and a moment later the
clerk turned.
“I can fix you up on the bay side,” he reported, indicating a suite
on a printed floor-plan.
“Very fine,” agreed Craig. “If you will send a porter I will have our
baggage transferred immediately.”
As we left the desk Kennedy whispered his explanation. “Don’t
you understand? We’ll be observed. Everything we do is watched, I
am convinced. Just think it over. Selecting a room like this will disarm
suspicion.”
In the lobby of the hotel Riley was waiting for us anxiously.
“Where’s Mr. Burke?” asked Kennedy. “Hasn’t he returned?”
“No, sir. And not a word from him yet. I don’t know where he can
be. But we are handling the case at this end very well alone. I got
your wire,” he nodded to me. “We haven’t missed Sanchez since he
got back.”
“Then he didn’t make any attempt to get away,” I remarked,
gratified that I had lost nothing by not following him on the earlier
train. “Is Paquita back?”
“Yes; she came on the train just before yours.”
“What has she done—anything?”
Riley shook his head in perplexity.
 “If it didn’t sound ridiculous,” he replied, slowly, “I would say that
that fellow Sanchez was on the trail of Paquita more than we are.”
“How’s that?”
“Why, he follows her about like a dog. While we’re watching her
he seems to be watching us.”
“Perhaps he’s part of her gang—her bodyguard, if there is such a
thing as a gang,” I remarked.
“Well, he acts very strangely,” returned Riley, doubtfully. “I’m not
the only one who has noticed it.”
“Who else has?” demanded Kennedy, quickly.
“Mrs. Maddox, for one. She went up to the city later—oh, you
know? Miss Walcott went with her. You know that, too? They
returned on the train with Paquita.”
“What has Mrs. Maddox done since she came back?” inquired
Craig.
“It wasn’t half an hour before they returned that Paquita came
down-stairs,” replied the Secret Service man. “As usual Sanchez
was waiting, in the background, of course. As luck would have it, just
as she passed out of the door Mrs. Maddox happened along. She
saw Sanchez following Paquita—you remember she had already
paid him off for the shadowing he had done for her. I don’t know
what it was, but she went right up to him. Oh, she was some mad!”
“What was it all about?” asked Craig, interested.
“I didn’t hear it all. But I did hear her accuse him of being in with
Paquita even at the time he was supposed to be shadowing her for
Mrs. Maddox. He didn’t answer directly. ‘Did I ever make a false
report about her?’ he asked Mrs. Maddox. She fairly sputtered, but
she didn’t say that he had. ‘You’re working for her—you’re working
for somebody. You’re all against me!’ she cried. Sanchez never
turned a hair. Either he’s a fool or else he’s perfectly sure of his
ground, as far as that end of it went.”
 “I suppose he might have double-crossed her and still made
honest reports to her,” considered Kennedy; “that is, if he made the
same reports to some one else who was interested, I mean.”
Riley nodded, though it was evident the remark conveyed no
more idea to him than it did to me.
“Shelby Maddox has returned, too,” added Riley. “I found out that
he sent that Jap, Mito, with a note to Paquita. I don’t know what it
was, but I have a man out trying to get a line on it.”
“Mito,” repeated Kennedy, as though the Japanese suggested
merely by his name a theory on which his mind was working.
There seemed to be nothing that could be done just now but to
wait, and we decided to take the opportunity to get a late dinner.
Winifred Walcott and Mrs. Maddox had already dined, but Frances
Walcott and her husband were at their table. They seemed to be
hurrying to finish and we did the same—not because they did, but
because we had work to do.
Dinner over, Hastings excused himself from us, saying that he
had some letters to write, and Kennedy made no objection. I think he
was rather pleased than otherwise to have the opportunity to get
away.
Outside we met Riley again, this time with one of his operatives.
“What’s the matter?” inquired Kennedy.
“Matter enough,” returned Riley, much exercised. “You know I told
you that Shelby had come ashore from the Sybarite with Mito? Well,
we’ve been following them both pretty closely. I think I told you of his
sending a note to Paquita. Both Shelby and Mito have been acting
suspiciously. I had this man detailed to watch Shelby. That
confounded Jap is always in the way, though. Tell Mr. Kennedy what
happened,” he directed.
The operative rubbed his back ruefully. “I was following Mr.
Maddox down to the beach,” he began. “It was rather dark and I tried
to keep in the shadow. Mr. Maddox never would have known that he
was being followed. All of a sudden, from behind, comes that Jap.
Before I knew it he had me—like this.”
The man illustrated his remark by lunging forward at Kennedy and
seizing both his hands. He stuck his crooked knee upward and
started to fall back, just catching himself before he quite lost his
balance.
“Over he went backwards, like a tumbler,” went on the man,
“threw me clean over his head. If it had been on a stone walk or
there had been a wall there, it would have broken my head.”
“Jiu-jitsu!” exclaimed Kennedy.
“I wonder why Mito was so anxious to cover his master?”
considered Riley. “He must have had some reason—either of his
own or orders from Maddox. Anyhow, they both of them managed to
get away, clean.”
Riley looked from Craig to me in chagrin.
“Quite possibly orders,” put in the man, “although it’s not beyond
him even to be double-crossing Mr. Maddox, at that.”
“Well, try to pick them up again,” directed Kennedy, turning to me.
“I’ve some rather important business just now. If Mr. Burke comes
back, let me know at once.”
“You bet I’ll try to pick them up again,” promised the Secret
Service man, viciously, as we left him and went to our room.
There Craig quickly unwrapped one of the two packages which he
had brought from the laboratory while I watched him curiously but did
not interrupt him, since he seemed to be in a great hurry.
As I watched Kennedy placed on a table what looked like a
miniature telephone receiver.
Next he opened the window and looked out to make sure that
there was no one below. Satisfied, he returned to the table again and
took up a pair of wires which he attached to some small dry cells
from the package.
 Then he took the free ends of the wires and carefully let them fall
out of the window until they reached down to the ground. Leaning far
out, he so disposed the wires under the window that they fell to one
side of the windows of the rooms below us and would not be noticed
running up the side wall of the hotel, at least not in the twilight. Then
he took the other package from the table and was ready to return
down-stairs.
We had scarcely reached the lobby again when we ran into
Hastings, alone and apparently searching for us.
“Is there anything new?” inquired Kennedy, eagerly.
Hastings seemed to be in doubt. “None of the Maddox family are
about,” he began. “I thought it might be strange and was looking for
you. Where do you suppose they all can be? I haven’t seen either
Paquita or Sanchez. But I just saw Winifred, alone.”
“What was she doing? Where is she?” demanded Kennedy.
Hastings shook his head. “I don’t know. I was really looking for
Shelby. I think she was going toward the Casino. Have you heard
anything?”
“Not a thing,” returned Kennedy, brusquely. “You will pardon me, I
have a very important matter in hand just now. I’ll let you know the
moment I hear anything.”
Kennedy hurried from the Lodge toward the Casino, leaving
Hastings standing in the hotel, amazed.
“Nothing new!” he almost snorted as he suddenly paused where
he could see the Casino. “Yet Hastings sees Winifred going out in a
hurry, evidently bent on something. If he was so confounded eager
to find Shelby, why didn’t it occur to him to stick about and follow
Winifred?”
It was quite dark by this time and almost impossible to see any
one in the shadows unless very close. Kennedy and I took a few
turns about the Casino and along some of the gravel paths, but
could find no trace of any of those whom we were watching.
 “I oughtn’t to let anything interfere with this ‘plant’ I am laying,” he
fretted. “Riley and the rest ought to be able to cover the case for a
time. Anyhow, I must take a chance.”
He turned and for several minutes we waited, as if to make
perfectly sure that we were not being watched or followed.
Finally he worked his way by a round-about path from the Casino,
turned away from the Lodge into another path, and at last we found
ourselves emerging from a little hedge of dwarf poplars just back of
the little garage, which had evidently been his objective point.
Mindful of my own experience there, I looked about in some
trepidation. I had no intention of running again into the same trap
that had nearly finished me before. Nor had Kennedy.
Cautiously, in the darkness, he entered. This time it was deserted.
No asphyxiating gun greeted us. He looked about, then went to work
immediately.
Back of the tool-box in a far corner he bent down and unwrapped
the other package which he had been carrying. As nearly as I could
make it out in the darkness, there were two rods that looked as
though they might be electric-light carbons, fixed horizontally in a
wooden support, with a spindle-shaped bit of carbon between the
two ends of the rods, the points of the spindles resting in hollows in
the two rods. To binding screws on the free ends of the carbon rods
he attached wires, and led them out through a window, just above.
“We don’t want to stay here a minute longer than necessary,” he
said, rising hurriedly. “Come—I must take up those wires outside and
carry them around the wing of the Harbor House, where our room
is.”
Without a word we went out. A keen glance about revealed no
one looking, and, trusting that we were right, Kennedy picked up the
wires and we dove back into the shadow of the grove from which we
came.
Carefully as he could, so that no one would trip on them and rip
them out, Kennedy laid the wires along the ground, made the
connection with those he had dropped from the window, and then,
retracing our steps, managed to come into the hotel from the
opposite side from the garage and the other wing from our room.
“Just had a wire from Mr. Burke,” announced Riley, who had been
looking all over for us, a fact that gave Craig some satisfaction, for it
showed that we had covered ourselves pretty well. “He’s coming up
from the city and I imagine he has dug up something pretty good.
That’s not what I wanted to tell you, though. You remember I said
Shelby Maddox had sent Mito with a note to Paquita?”
Kennedy nodded. No encouragement was necessary for Riley to
continue his whispered report.
“Well, Shelby just met her on the beach.”
“Met Paquita?” I exclaimed, in surprise at Shelby’s secret meeting
after his public ignoring of the little adventuress.
“On the beach, alone,” reiterated Riley, pleased at retailing even
this apparent bit of scandal.
“What then?” demanded Craig.
“They strolled off down the shore together.”
“Have you followed them?”
“Yes, confound it, but it’s low tide and following them is difficult,
without their knowing it. I told the men to do the best they could,
though—short of getting into another fight. Mito may be about, and,
anyhow, Shelby might give a very good account of himself.”
“You’re not sure of Mito, then?”
“No. No one saw him again after he threw my operative. He may
have disappeared. However, I took no chance that Shelby was
alone.”
For a moment Kennedy seemed to consider the surprising turn
that Shelby’s secret meeting with the little dancer might give to the
affair.
“Walter,” he said at last, turning to me significantly, “would you like
to take a stroll down to the dock? This matter begins to look
interesting.”
We left Riley, after cautioning him to make sure that Burke saw us
the moment he arrived, and again made our way quietly from the
Lodge toward the Casino, in which we now could hear the orchestra.
A glance was sufficient to reveal that none of those whom he
sought were there, and Kennedy continued down the bank toward
the shore and the Harbor House dock.
 XII

THE EAVESDROPPERS
It was a clear, warm night, but with no moon. From the Casino the
lights shone out over the dark water, illuminating here and seeming
to deepen the already dark shadows there.
A flight of steps ran down to the dock from the dance pavilion, but,
instead of taking this natural way, Kennedy plunged into the deeper
shadow of a path that wound around the slight bluff and came out on
the beach level, below the dock. From the path we could still hear
the sounds of gaiety in the Casino.
We were about to emerge on the beach, not far from the spiling
on which the dock platform rested, when I felt Kennedy’s hand on my
elbow. I drew back into the hidden pathway with him and looked in
the direction he indicated.
There, in a little summer-house above us, at the shore end of the
dock, I could just distinguish the figures of two women, sitting in the
shadow and looking out intently over the strip of beach and the
waves of the rising tide that were lapping up on it. It was apparent
that they were waiting for some one.
I turned and strained my eyes to catch a glimpse down the beach,
but in the blackness could make out nothing. A look of inquiry toward
Kennedy elicited nothing but a further caution to be silent. Apparently
he was determined to play the eavesdropper on the two above us.
They had been talking in a low tone when we approached and we
must have missed the first remark. The answer was clear enough,
however.
“I tell you, Winifred, I saw them together,” we heard one voice in
the summer-house say.
 Instantly I recognized it as that of Irene Maddox. It needed no
clairvoyancy to tell precisely of whom she was talking. I wondered
whether she was trying to vent her grudge against Paquita at the
expense of Shelby and Winifred. At least I could fancy how Shelby
would bless his sister-in-law as a trouble-maker, if he knew.
“I can’t believe that you are right,” returned the other voice, and it
was plainly that of Winifred.
There was a quiver of emotion in it, as though Winifred were
striving hard to convince herself that something she had heard was
not true.
“I can’t help it,” replied Mrs. Maddox. “That is what I used to think
—once—that it couldn’t be so. But you do not know that woman—
nor men, either.”
She made the last remark with unconcealed bitterness. I could not
help feeling sorry for her in the misfortune in which her own life with
Maddox had ended. Yet it did not seem right that she should poison
all romance. Still, I reflected, what, after all, did I really know, and
why should I rise to the defense of Shelby? Better, far, that Winifred
should learn now than to learn when it was too late.
“I have been watching her,” pursued Irene. “I found that I could
not trust any man where that woman was concerned. I wish I had
never trusted any.”
“I cannot believe that Shelby would deliberately deceive me,”
persisted Winifred.
Irene Maddox laughed, hollowly. “Yet you know what we
discovered this afternoon,” she pressed. “Why, I cannot even be sure
that that detective, Kennedy, may not be working against me. And as
for that lawyer of my husband’s, Hastings, I don’t know whether I
detest him more than I fear him. Let me warn you to be careful of
him, too. Remember, I have been observing for a long time. I don’t
trust him, or any other lawyer. You never can tell how far they may
be concerned in anything.”
There was a peculiar piquancy to the innuendo. Evidently Irene
Maddox suspected Hastings of much. And again I was forced to ask
myself, what did I really so far know?
I fancied I could detect that the poor woman had reached a point
where she was suspicious of everybody and everything, not an
unnatural situation, I knew, with a woman in her marital predicament.
“What has Mr. Hastings done?” inquired Winifred.
“Done?” repeated Mrs. Maddox. “What has he left undone? Why,
he shielded Marshall in everything, whenever I mentioned to him this
Paquita woman—said it was not his business what his client’s
private life was unless he was directed to interest himself in it by his
client himself. He was merely an attorney, retained for certain
specific purposes. Beyond that he was supposed to know nothing.
Oh, my dear, you have much to learn about the wonderful
freemasonry that exists among men in matters such as this.”
I caught Kennedy’s quizzical smile. We were having a most telling
example of freemasonry among women, into which Irene was
initiating a neophyte. I felt sure that Winifred would be much happier
if she had been left alone, and events might have a chance to
explain themselves without being misinterpreted—a situation from
which most of the troubles both in fact and in fiction arise. In her
watching of her errant husband, Irene had expected every one
immediately to fall in line and aid her—forgetting the very human
failing that most people possess of objecting to play the rôle of
informer.
“What fools men are!” soliloquized Irene Maddox a moment later,
as though coming to the point of her previous random remarks. “Just
take that little dancer. What do they see in her? Not brains, surely.
As for me, I don’t think she has even beauty. And yet, look at them!
She has only to appear up there in the Casino at this very moment to
be the most popular person on the floor, while other girls go begging
for partners.”
I could feel Winifred bridling at the challenge in the remark. She
had tasted popularity herself. Was she to admit defeat at the hands
of the little adventuress? Criticize as one might, there was still a
fascination about the mystery of Paquita.
 One could feel the coolness that had suddenly risen in the
summer-house—as if a mist from the water had thrown it about. Nor
did the implication of the silence escape Irene Maddox.
“You will pardon me, my dear,” she said, rising. “I know how
thankless such a job is. Perhaps I had better not be seen with you.
Yes, I am sure of it. I think I had better return to the hotel.”
For a moment Winifred hesitated, as if in doubt whether to go,
too, or to stay.
Finally it seemed as if she decided to stay. I do not know which
course would have been better for Winifred—to accompany the elder
woman and imbibe more of the enforced cynicism, or to remain,
brooding over the suspicions which had been injected into her mind.
At any rate, Winifred decided to stay, and made no move either to
detain or accompany the other.
Irene Maddox arose and left Winifred alone. If she had been
watching Paquita there was no further need. Winifred would watch
now quite as closely.
As her footsteps died away, instead of remaining near the dock
Kennedy turned and, keeping back in the shadows where we could
not be seen by the silent watcher in the summer-house, we went
down along the shore.
In the shelter of a long line of bath-houses that belonged to the
hotel we paused. There was no one in bathing at this hour, and we
sat down and waited.
“What did you make of that conversation?” I whispered,
cautiously, lowering my voice so that we might not be eavesdropped
upon in turn.
“Not strange that Mrs. Maddox hates the little dancer,” replied
Craig, sententiously. “It’s quite evident Riley was right and that
Shelby must be with her. I wonder whether they will return this way
or on the land? It’s worth taking a chance. Let’s stay awhile,
anyway.”
 He lapsed into silence, as though trying to motivate the actors in
the little drama which was unfolding.
It was not long before, down the beach, we saw a man and a
woman coming toward us rapidly. Kennedy and I drew back farther,
and as we did so I saw that the figure above us in the summer-house
had moved away from the edge so as to be less conspicuous.
The crackle of some dry sea-grass back of the bath-house
startled us, but we did not move. It was one of the Secret Service
men. There was no reason why we should conceal from him that we
were on a similar quest. Yet Kennedy evidently considered it better
that nothing should happen to put any one on guard. We scarcely
breathed. He passed, however, without seeing us, and we flattered
ourselves that we were well hidden.
A few minutes later the couple approached. It was unmistakably
Shelby Maddox and Paquita.
“It’s no use,” we heard Shelby say, as they passed directly beside
the bath-houses. “Even down here on the beach they are watching.
Still, I have had a chance to say some of the things I wanted to say.
From now on—we are strangers—you understand?”
It was not said as brutally as it sounds on paper. Rather it gave
the impression, from Shelby’s tone, that they had never been much
more.
For a moment Paquita said nothing. Then suddenly she burst
forth with a little bitter laugh.
“It takes two to be strangers. We shall see!”
Without another word she turned, as though in a fit of pique and
anger, and ran up the flight of steps from the bath-houses to the
Casino, passing within five feet of us, without seeing us.
“We shall see,” she muttered under her breath; “we shall see!”
In surprise Shelby took a step or two after her, then paused.
“The deuce take her,” he swore under his breath, then strode on
in the direction of the steps to the dock and the summer-house.
 He had scarcely gained the level when the figure in the summer-
house emerged from the gloom.
“Well, Shelby—a tryst with the other charmer, was it?”
“Winifred!”
Miss Walcott laughed sarcastically. “Is that all that your fine
speeches mean, Shelby?” she said, reproachfully. “At the Lodge you
scarcely bow to her; then you meet her secretly on the beach.”
“Winifred—let me explain,” he hastened. “You do not understand.
She is nothing to me—never has been. I am not like Marshall was.
When she came down here the other night she may have thought
she could play with me as she had with him. I met her—as I have
scores of others. They have always been all the same to me—until
that night when I met you. Since then—have I even looked at her—at
any one else?”
“Another pretty speech,” cut in Winifred, icily. “But would you have
met her now, if you had known that you would be watched?”
“I should have met her in the lobby of the hotel, if that had been
the only way,” he returned, boldly. “But it was not. I do not
understand the woman. Sometimes I fear that she has fallen in love
with me—as much as her kind can fall in love. I sent for her, yes,
myself. I wanted to tell her bluntly that there could never be anything
between us, that we could not—now—continue even the
acquaintance.”
“But you knew her before—in the city, Shelby,” persisted Winifred.
“Besides, was it necessary to take her arm, to talk so earnestly with
her? I saw you when you started.”
“I had to be courteous to her,” defended Shelby, then stopped, as
though realizing too late that it was not defense he should attempt,
but rather confession of something that did not exist and a prayer of
forgiveness for nothing.
“I did not believe what I heard,” said Winifred, coldly. “I was foolish
enough to listen to you, not to others. It is what I see.”
 “To others?” he asked, quickly. “Who—what have they told you
about me? Tell me.”
“No—it was in confidence. I cannot tell you who or what. No, not
another word of that. You have opened my eyes yourself. You have
only yourself to thank. Take your little Mexican dancer—let us see
what she does to you!”
Winifred Walcott had moved away toward the steps up to the
Casino.
“Please!” implored Shelby. “Why, I sent for her only to tell her that
she must keep away. Winifred!”
Winifred had turned and was running up the steps. Instead of
waiting, as he had done with Paquita, Shelby took the steps two at a
time. A moment later he was by her side.
We could not hear what he said as he reached her, but she took
no pains to modulate her own voice.
“No—no!” she exclaimed, angrily, choking back a sob. “No—leave
me. Don’t speak to me. Take your little dancer, I say!”
A moment later she had come into the circle of light from the
Casino. Pursuit meant only a scene.
At the float at the other end of the pier bobbed one of the tenders
of the Sybarite. Shelby turned deliberately and called, and a moment
later his man ran up the dock.
“I’m not going to go out to the yacht to-night,” he ordered. “I shall
sleep at the Lodge. Tell Mito, and come ashore with my things.”
Then he turned, avoiding the Casino, and walked slowly up to the
Harbor House, as we followed at a distance.
I wondered if he might be planning something.
 XIII

THE SERPENT’S TOOTH

We were approaching the hotel when we met Riley’s operative with
whom we had been talking shortly before. He was looking about as
though in doubt what to do next.
“So you managed to pick them up again on the beach?” greeted
Kennedy.
“Yes,” he replied in surprise. “How did you know?”
“We were back of the bath-houses as they came along. You
passed within a few feet of us.”
The detective stared blankly as Kennedy laughed.
“What happened?”
“Nothing very much. I missed them at first, because of the delay
of that fellow Mito. But I reasoned that they must have strolled down
the beach, though I didn’t know how far. I took a chance and made a
short cut overland. Fortunately I caught up with them just as they
were about to turn back. I was a little careful, I suppose—after what
happened.”
He hesitated a bit apologetically, then went on: “I couldn’t hear
much of what they said. Queer fellow, that Shelby. First he sends to
meet the girl, then they quarrel nearly all the time they are together.”
“What did the quarrel seem to be about?” demanded Kennedy.
“Couldn’t you get any of it?”
“Oh yes, I caught enough of it,” returned the operative,
confidently. “I can’t repeat exactly what was said, for it came to me
only in snatches. They seemed to be arguing about something. Once
he accused her of having been the ruin of his brother. She did not
answer at first—just laughed sarcastically. But Shelby wasn’t content
with that. Finally she turned on him.
“‘You say that I ruined Marshall Maddox,’ she cried. ‘His wife says
I ruined him. Oh, Shelby, Shelby, he wasn’t a man who had reached
the age of discretion, I suppose—was he? Oh, it’s always I who do
things—never anybody else.’”
“Yes,” prompted Kennedy. “What else did she say?”
“She was bitter—angry. She stopped short. ‘Shelby Maddox,’ she
cried, ‘you had better be careful. There is as much crime and hate
and jealousy in every one of you as there is in Sing Sing. I tell you,
be careful. I haven’t told all I know—yet. But I will say that wherever
your house of hate goes and whomever it touches, it corrupts. Be
careful how you touch me!’ Say, but Paquita was mad! That was
when they turned back. I guess Shelby sort of realized that it was no
use. They turned so suddenly that they almost caught me listening.”
“Anything else?” inquired Kennedy. “What did Shelby have to say
about himself? Do you think he’s tangled up with her in any way?”
“I can’t tell. Most of what they said was spoken so low that it was
impossible for me to hear even a word. I think both of them realized
that they were being watched and listened to. It was only once in a
while when their feelings got the better of them that they raised their
voices, and then they pretty soon caught themselves and
remembered.”
“Then it was no lovers’ meeting?” I asked.
“Hardly,” returned the detective, with a growl. “And yet she did not
seem to be half as angry at Shelby as she did at the others. In fact, I
think that a word from him would have smoothed out everything. But
he wouldn’t say it. She tried hard to get him, too. That little dancer is
playing a game—take it from me. And she’s artful, too. I wouldn’t
want to be up against her—no, sir.”
There was something incongruous about the very idea of this bull-
necked flatty and the dainty little adventuress—as though the
hippopotamus might fear the peacock. I would have laughed had the
business itself not been so important. What was her game? In fact,
what was Shelby’s game? Each seemed to be playing a part.
“How about Mito?” I asked. “Have you seen him again since you
were jiu-jitsued?”
The detective shook his head. “No,” he returned, reminiscently.
“He seems to have disappeared altogether. Believe me, I have been
keeping an eye peeled for him. That Jap is a suspicious character.
And it’s just when you can’t put your fingers on him that he is plotting
some deviltry, depend on it.”
We left the Secret Service operative and continued toward the
hotel. In the lobby Kennedy and I looked about eagerly in the hope of
finding Winifred, but she was nowhere to be seen.
Our search was partly rewarded, however. At the end of the
porch, in the shadow, we did find Frances Walcott and Irene
Maddox. It was evident that they had seriously disagreed over
something, and it did not require much guessing to conclude that it
had to do with Winifred. Though Frances Walcott was really a
Maddox and Irene Maddox was not, one would have scarcely
guessed it. The stamp of the house of hate was on both.
Just a fragment of the conversation floated over to us, but it was
enough.
“Very well, then,” exclaimed Mrs. Maddox. “Let them go their own
way. You are like all the rest—you seem to think that a Maddox can
do no wrong. I was only trying to warn Winifred, as I wish some one
had warned me.”
The answer was lost, but Mrs. Walcott’s reply was evidently a
sharp one, for the two parted in unconcealed anger and suspicion.
Everywhere the case seemed to drag its slimy trail over all.
Look about as we might, there was no sign of Paquita. Nor was
our friend Sanchez about, either. We seemed to have lost them, or
else, like Mito, they were under cover.
“I think,” decided Kennedy, “that I’ll just drop into our rooms,
Walter. I haven’t much hope that we’ll find anything yet, but it will be
just as well to be on the watch.”
Accordingly we mounted by a rear staircase to our floor, and for a
moment Kennedy busied himself adjusting the apparatus.
“A bit early, I think,” he remarked, finally. “There are too many
people about to expect anything yet. We may as well go down-stairs
again. Perhaps Burke may return and I’m rather anxious to know
what it is he has been after.”
For a moment, as we retraced our steps down-stairs, I attempted,
briefly, a résumé of the case so far, beginning with the death of
Maddox, and down to the attack on Hastings and then on myself. As
I viewed the chief actors and their motives, I found that they fell into
two groups. By the death of Maddox, Shelby might profit, as might
his sister, Frances. On the other hand were to be considered the
motives of jealousy and revenge, such as might actuate Irene
Maddox and Paquita. Then, too, there was always the possibility of
something deeper lying back of it all, as Burke had hinted—an
international complication over the telautomaton, the wonderful war
engine which was soon likely to be the most valuable piece of
property controlled by the family. Into such calculations even Mito,
and perhaps Sanchez, might fit, as indeed might any of the others.
It was indeed a perplexing case, and I knew that Kennedy himself
had not yet begun to get at the bottom of it, for the simple reason
that when in doubt Kennedy would never talk. His silence was
eloquent of the mystery that shrouded the curious sequence of
events. At a loss for a means by which to piece together the real
underlying story, I could do nothing but follow Kennedy blindly,
trusting in his strange ability to arrive at the truth.
“One thing is certain,” remarked Kennedy, evidently sensing that I
was trying my utmost to arrive at some reasonable explanation of the
events, “and that is that this hotel is a very jungle of gossip—sharper
than a serpent’s tooth. In my opinion, none of us will be safe until the
fangs of this creature, whoever it may be, are drawn. However, we’ll
never arrive anywhere by trying merely to reason it out. This is a
case that needs more facts—facts—facts.”
 Following out his own line of thought, Craig decided to return
down-stairs to the seat of operations, perhaps in the hope of running
across Hastings, who might have something to add. Hastings was
not about, either. We were entirely thrown upon our own resources.
If we were ever to discover the truth, we knew that it would be by our
own work, not by the assistance of any of them.
Attempts to locate Hastings quickly demonstrated that we could
not depend on him. Having worked secretly, there seemed to be little
else to do now but to come out into the open and play the game
manfully.
“What was the matter?” inquired Riley, as Kennedy and I
sauntered into the lobby of the Harbor House in such a way that we
would appear not to be following anybody.
“Why?” asked Kennedy.
“First it was Paquita,” continued Riley. “She bounced into the
hotel, her face flushed and her eyes flashing. She was as mad as a
hornet at something. Sanchez met her. Why, I thought she’d bite his
head off! And he, poor shrimp, took it as meekly as if he were the rug
under her feet. I don’t know what she said, but she went directly to
her room. He has been about, somewhere. I don’t see him now. I
guess he thought she was too worked up to stay up there. But I
haven’t seen her come down.”
“Shelby must have been telling her some plain truth,” said Craig,
laconically.
“Shelby?” echoed Riley. “Why, it wasn’t five minutes afterward that
Winifred Walcott came through, as pale as a ghost. She passed
Irene Maddox, but they scarcely spoke. Looked as if she had been
crying. What’s the matter with them? Are they a bunch of nuts?”
Kennedy smiled. Evidently Riley was unacquainted with the softer
side of life.
“Where’s Shelby?” inquired Craig. “Have you seen him—or Mito?”
“Down in the café, the last I saw him,” replied Riley. “Shelby’s
another nut. You know how much he loves the rest. Well, he came in