Both the word ‘crocus’ and its later equivalent ‘saffron,’ are of Semitic origin. Witness the Hebrew form _karkom_ of the first,[234] the Arabic _sahafaran_ of the second, developed out of _assfar_, yellow, and represented by the Spanish _azafran_, whence our ‘saffron.’ The plant was widely and profitably cultivated under Moorish rule in Spain, and was probably introduced by the Phœnicians into Greece, though the common vernal crocus is certainly indigenous there, its white and purple cups begemming all the declivities of ‘Hellas and Argos.’ The saffron-crocus, too, now grows wild in such dry and chalky soil as Sunium and Hymettus afford;[235] yet its name betrays its foreign affinities. Saffron-tinted garments had perhaps never, down to Homer’s time, been seen in Greece itself; he was beyond doubt unacquainted with the actual use of the dye, and distributed with the utmost parsimony the splendour conferred by it. Not only were mere mortals excluded from a share in it, neither Hecuba nor Helen owning a crocus-bordered peplos, but none such set off the formidable charms of the goddess-hostesses of Odysseus, in the fairy isles where he lingered, home-sick amid strange luxury. Saffron robes are, in fact, assigned by the poet of the Iliad, exclusively to Eos, the Dawn, while in the Odyssey, the crocus is never referred to, directly or indirectly. Footnote 234: Hehn and Stallybrass, _op. cit._ p. 199; De Candolle, however, inclines to believe that carthamine, not saffron, is indicated by the Hebrew _karkom_ (_Origin of Cultivated Plants_, p. 166). Footnote 235: Buchholz, _Realien_, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 220. Some centuries after the material part of Homer had been reduced to A drift of white Dust in a cruse of gold, crocus-coloured tresses came poetically into fashion. The daughters of Celeus, in the Hymn to Demeter, were endowed with them; Ariadne at Naxos, too, besides other mythical maidens. And Roman ladies realised the idea of employing saffron as a hair-dye, the stern disapproval of Tertullian and Saint Jerome notwithstanding.[236] The scent of the crocus was made part of the pleasures of the amphitheatre by the diffusion among the audience of saffron-wine in the finest possible spray, and Heliogabalus habitually bathed in saffron-water. The flower, too, was noted by Pliny with the rose, lily, and violet, for its delicious fragrance,[237] Homer’s apparent insensibility to which may well suggest a doubt whether, after all, he knew the late-blooming, golden crocus otherwise than by reputation. Footnote 236: Syme, _English Botany_, vol. ix. p. 151. Footnote 237: _Hist. Nat._ xxi. 17.