successive seasons, to the great damage of the plantations. A
species of coccus, C. oleae, attaches itself to the shoots, and certain
lepidopterous caterpillars feed on the leaves, while the “olive-fly”
attacks the fruit. In France the olivettes suffer occasionally
from frost; in the early part of the 18th century many trees
were cut to the ground by a winter of exceptional severity. Gales
and long-continued rains during the gathering season also cause
mischief.
The unripe fruit of the olive is largely used in modern as in ancient times as an article of dessert, to enhance the flavour of wine, and to renew the sensitiveness of the palate for other viands. For this purpose the fruit is picked while green, soaked for a few hours in an alkaline ley, washed well in clean water and then placed in bottles or jars filled with brine; the Romans added amurca to the salt to increase the bitter flavour of the olives, and at the present day spices are sometimes used.
The leaves and bark of the tree are employed in the south, as a tonic medicine, in intermittent fever. A resinous matter called “olive gum,” or Lucca gum, formed by the exuding juice in hot seasons, was anciently in medical esteem, and in modern Italy is used as a perfume.
In England the olive is not hardy, though in the southern counties it will stand ordinary winters with only the protection of a wall, and will bear fruit in such situations; but the leaves are generally shed in the autumn, and the olives rarely ripen.
The genus Olea includes several other species of some economic importance. O. paniculata is a larger tree, attaining a height of 50 or 60 ft. in the forests of Queensland, and yielding a hard and tough timber. The yet harder wood of O. laurifolia, an inhabitant of Natal, is the black ironwood of the South African colonist.
At what remote period of human progress the wild olive passed under the care of the husbandman and became the fruitful garden olive it is impossible to conjecture. The frequent reference in the Bible to the plant and its produce, its implied abundance in the land of Canaan, the important place it has always held in the economy of the inhabitants of Syria, lead us to consider that country the birthplace of the cultivated olive. An improved variety, possessed at first by some small Semitic sept, it was probably slowly distributed to adjacent tribes; and, yielding profusely, with little labour, that oily matter so essential to healthy life in the dry hot climates of the East, the gift of the fruitful tree became in that primitive age a symbol of peace and goodwill among the warlike barbarians. hi a later period, with the development of maritime enterprise, the oil was conveyed, as an article of trade, to the neighbouring Pelasgic and Ionian nations, and the plant, doubtless, soon followed.
In the Homeric world, as depicted in the Iliad, olive oil is known only as a luxury of the wealthy—an exotic product, prized chiefly for its value in the heroic toilet; the warriors anoint themselves with it after the bath, and the body of Patroclus is similarly sprinkled; but no mention of the culture of the plant is made, nor does it find any place on the Achillean shield, on which a vineyard is represented. But, although no reference to the cultivation of the oUve occurs in the Iliad, the presence of the tree in the garden of Acinous and other familiar allusions show it to have been known when the Odyssey was written. Whenever the introduction may have taken place, all tradition points to the limestone hills of Attica as the seat of its first cultivation on the Hellenic peninsula. When Poseidon and Athena contended for the future city, an olive sprang from the barren rock at the bidding of the goddess, the patron of those arts that were to bring undying influence to the rising state. That this myth has some relation to the first planting of the olive in Greece seems certain from the remarkable story told by Herodotus of the Epidaurians, who, on their crops failing, applied for counsel to the Delphic oracle, and were enjoined to erect statues to Damia and Auxesia (symbols of fertility) carved from the wood of the true garden olive, then possessed only by the Athenians, who granted their request for a tree on condition of their making an annual sacrifice to Athena, its patron; they thus obeyed the command of the Pythian, and their lands became again fertile. The sacred tree of the goddess long stood on the Acropolis, and, though destroyed in the Persian invasion, sprouted again from the root—some suckers of which were said to have produced those olive trees of the Academy in an after age no less revered. By the time of Solon the olive had so spread that he found it necessary to enact laws to regulate the cultivation of the tree in .Attica, from which country it was probably distributed gradually to all the Athenian allies and tributary states. To the Ionian coast, where it abounded in the time of Thales, it may have been in an earlier age brought by Phoenician vessels; some of the Sporades may have received it from the same source; the olives of Rhodes and Crete had perhaps a similar origin. Samos, if we may judge from the epithet of Aeschylus (ἐλαιόφυτος), must have had the fruitful plant long before the Persian wars.
It is not unlikely that the valued tree was taken to Magna Graecia by the first Achaean colonists, and the assertion of Pliny (quoted from Fenestella), that no olives existed in Italy in the reign of Tarquinius Priscus, must be received with the caution due to many statements of that industrious compiler. In Latin Italy the cultivation seems to have spread slowly, for it was not until the consulship of Pompey that the production of oil became sufficient to permit of its exportation. In Pliny’s time it was already grown abundantly in the two Gallic provinces and in Spain; indeed, in the earlier days of Strabo the Ligurians supplied the Alpine barbarians with oil, in exchange for the wild produce of their mountains; the plant may have been introduced into those districts by Greek settlers in a previous age. Africa was indebted for the olive mainly to Semitic agencies. In Egypt the culture never seems to have made much progress; the oil found in Theban tombs was probably imported from Syria. Along the southern shore of the great inland sea the tree was carried by the Phoenicians, at a remote period, to their numerous colonies in Africa—though the abundant olives of Cyrene, to which allusion is made by Theophrastus, and the glaucous foliage of whose descendants still clothes the rocks of the deserted Cyrenaica, may have been the offspring of Greek plants brought by the first settlers. The tree was most likely introduced into southern Spain, and perhaps into Sardinia and the Balearic Islands, by Phoenician merchants; and, if it be true that old olive trees were found in the Canaries on their rediscovery by medieval navigators, the venerable trees probably owed their origin to the same enterprising pioneers of the ancient world. De Candolle says that the means by which the olive was distributed to the two opposite shores of the Mediterranean are indicated by the names given to the plant by their respective inhabitants the Greek ἐλαία passing into the Latin olea and oliva, that in its turn becoming the ulivo of the modern Italian, the olivo of the Spaniard, and the olive, olivier, of the French, while in Africa and southern Spain the olive retains appellatives derived from the Semitic zait or scit; but the complete subjugation of Barbary by the Saracens sufficiently accounts for the prevalence of Semitic forms in that region; and aceytuno (Arab, zeitún), the Andalusian name of the fruit, locally given to the tree itself, is but a vestige of the Moorish conquest.
Yielding a grateful substitute for the butter and animal fats consumed by the races of the north, the olive, among the southern nations of antiquity, became an emblem not only of peace but of national wealth and domestic plenty; the branches borne in the Panathenaea, the wild olive spray of the Olympic victor, the olive crown of the Roman conqueror at ovation, and those of the equites at their imperial review alike typified gifts of peace that, in a barbarous age, could be secured by victory alone. Among the Greeks the oil was valued as an important article of diet, as well as for its external use. The Roman people employed it largely in food and cookery—the wealthy as an indispensable adjunct to the toilet; and in the luxurious days of the later empire it became a favourite axiom that long and pleasant life depended on two fluids, " wine within and oil without." Pliny vagtiely describes fifteen varieties of olive cultivated in his day, that called the " Licinian " being held in most esteem, and the oil obtained from it at Venafrum in Campania the finest known to Roman connoisseurs; the produce of Istria and Baetica was regarded as second only to that of the Italian peninsula. The gourmet of the empire valued the unripe fruit, steeped in brine, as a provocative to the palate, no less than his modern representative;
