GARLANDS.
All crown'd their heads with their queen's precious work,—
The Nymphs and Graces, and the golden Venus,—
And raised a tuneful song round Ida's springs.
31. Nicander also, in the second book of his Georgics, gives a regular list of the flowers suitable to be made into garlands, and speaks as follows concerning the Ionian nymphs and concerning roses:—
And many other flowers you may plant,
Fragrant and beauteous, of Ionian growth;
Two sorts of violets are there,—pallid one,
And like the colour of the virgin gold,
Such as th' Ionian nymphs to Ion gave,
When in the meadows of the holy Pisa
They met and loved and crown'd the modest youth.
For he had cheer'd his hounds and slain the boar,
And in the clear Alpheus bathed his limbs,
Before he visited those friendly nymphs.
Cut then the shoots from off the thorny rose,
And plant them in the trenches, leaving space
Between, two spans in width. The poets tell
That Midas first, when Asia's realms he left,
Brought roses from th' Odonian hills of Thrace,
And cultivated them in th' Emathian lands,
Blooming and fragrant with their sixty petals.
Next to th' Emathian roses those are praised
Which the Megarian Nisæa displays:
Nor is Phaselis, nor the land which worships
The chaste Diana,[1] to be lightly praised,
Made verdant by the sweet Lethæan stream.
In other trenches place the ivy cuttings,
And often e'en a branch with berries loaded
May be entrusted to the grateful ground;
- * * * *[2]
Or with well-sharpen'd knife cut off the shoots,
And plait them into baskets,
High on the top the calyx full of seed
Grows with white leaves, tinged in the heart with gold,
Which some call crina, others liria,
Others ambrosia, but those who love
The fittest name, do call them Venus' joy;
, white, and [Greek: ophrys], an eyebrow.]
- ↑ Phaselis is a town in Lycia. The land which worships Diana is the
country about Ephesus and Magnesia, which last town is built where
the Lethæus falls into the Mæander; and it appears that Diana was
worshipped by the women of this district under the name of Leucophrys,
from [Greek: leukos - ↑ The text here is hopelessly corrupt, and indeed is full of corruption
for the next seven lines: I have followed the Latin version of
Dalecampius.
