Orpheus, retiring to Mount Rhodope, by the charms of his music, attracts to himself all kinds of creatures, rocks, and trees; among the latter is the pine tree, only known since the transformation of Attis.

There was a hill, and upon the hill a most level space of a plain, which the blades of grass made green: all shade was wanting in the spot. After the bard, sprung from the Gods, had seated himself in this place, and touched his tuneful strings, a shade came over the spot. The tree of Chaonia10 was not absent, nor the grove of the Heliades,11 nor the mast-tree with its lofty branches, nor the tender lime-trees, nor yet the beech, and the virgin laurel,12 and the brittle hazels, and the oak, adapted for making spears, and the fir without knots, and the holm bending beneath its acorns, and the genial plane-tree,13 and the parti-coloured maple,14 and, together with them, the willows growing by the rivers, and the watery lotus, and the evergreen box, and the slender tamarisks, and the two-coloured myrtle, and the tine-tree,15 with its azure berries.

You, too, the ivy-trees, with your creeping tendrils, came, and together, the branching vines, and the elms clothed with vines; the ashes, too, and the pitch-trees, and the arbute, laden with its blushing fruit, and the bending palm,16 the reward of the conqueror; the pine, too, with its tufted foliage,17 and bristling at the top, pleasing to the Mother of the Gods; since for this the Cybeleïan Attis put off the human form, and hardened into that trunk.

Footnotes:

10. Tree of Chaonia.]—Ver. 90. This was the oak, for the growth of which Chaonia, a province of Epirus, was famous.

11. Grove of the Heliades.]—Ver. 91. He alludes to the poplars, into which tree, as we have already seen, the Heliades, or daughters of the sun, were changed after the death of Phaëton.

12. Virgin laurel.]—Ver. 92. The laurel is so styled from the Virgin Daphne, who refused to listen to the solicitations of Apollo.

13. Genial plane-tree.]—Ver. 95. The plane tree was much valued by the ancients, as affording, by its extending branches, a pleasant shade to festive parties. Virgil says, in the Fourth Book of the Georgics, line 146, ‘Atque ministrantem platanum potantibus umbram,’ ‘And the plane-tree that gives its shade for those that carouse.’

14. Parti-coloured maple.]—Ver. 95. The grain of the maple being of a varying colour, it was much valued by the ancients, for the purpose of making articles of furniture.

15. The tine tree.]—Ver. 98. The ‘tinus,’ or ‘tine tree,’ according to Pliny the Elder, was a wild laurel, with green berries.

16. The bending palm.]—Ver. 102. The branches of the palm were remarkable for their flexibility, while no superincumbent weight could break them. On this account they were considered as emblematical of victory.

17. Tufted foliage.]—Ver. 103. The pine is called ‘succincta,’ because it sends forth its branches from the top, and not from the sides.