HKB
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 Chaonia[10] 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.
[Footnote 10: Tree of Chaonia.--Ver. 90. This was the oak, for the growth of which Chaonia, a province of Epirus, was famous.]
[Footnote 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.]
[Footnote 12: Virgin laurel.--Ver. 92. The laurel is so styled from the Virgin Daphne, who refused to listen to the solicitations of Apollo.]
[Footnote 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.’]
[Footnote 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.]
[Footnote 15: The tine tree.--Ver. 98. The ‘tinus,’ or ‘tine tree,’ according to Pliny the Elder, was a wild laurel, with green berries.]
[Footnote 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.]
[Footnote 17: Tufted foliage.--Ver. 103. The pine is called ‘succincta,’ because it sends forth its branches from the top, and not from the sides.]
EXPLANATION.