Odysseus approaching the house of Circe in search of his companions (already, as he found out later, transformed into swine), was met on the road by the crafty son of Maia, and by him forewarned and forearmed against the wiles of the enchantress. Skilled in drugs as she was, a more potent herb than any known to her had been procured by the messenger of the gods. ‘Therewith,’ the hero continued in his narrative to the Phæacian king, ‘the slayer of Argos gave me the plant that he had plucked from the ground, and he showed me the nature thereof. It was black at the root, but the flower was like to milk. The gods call it moly, but it is hard for mortal men to dig; howbeit, with the gods all things are possible.’ It is thus evident that the Homeric moly is compounded of two elements—a botanical, so to speak, and a mythological. A substratum of fact has received an embellishment of fable. Before the mind’s eye of the poet, when he described the white flowers and black root of the vegetable snatched from the reluctant earth by Hermes, was a specific plant, which he chose to associate, or which had already become associated, with floating legendary lore, widely and anciently diffused among our race. The identification of that plant has often been attempted, and not unsuccessfully. The earliest record of such an effort is contained in Theophrastus’s ‘History of Plants.’ He there asserts the moly of the Odyssey to have been a kind of garlic (_Allium nigrum_, according to Sprengel), growing on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia (the birthplace, be it observed, of Hermes), and of supreme efficacy as an antidote to poisons; but he, unlike Homer, adds that there is no difficulty in plucking it. We shall see presently that this difficulty was purely mythical. The language of Theophrastus suggests that the association of moly with the Arcadian garlic was traditional in his time; and the tradition has been perpetuated in the modern Greek name, _molyza_, of a member of the same family. John Gerard in his Herbal, calls moly (of which he enumerates several species) the ‘Sorcerer’s garlic,’ and describes as follows the Theophrastian, assumed as identical with the epic, kind. Homer’s moly hath very thick leaves, broad toward the bottom, sharp at the point, and hollowed like a trough or gutter, in the bosom of which leaves near unto the bottom cometh forth a certain round bulb or ball of a green colour; which being ripe and set in the ground, groweth and becometh a fair plant, such as is the mother. Among those leaves riseth up a naked, smooth, thick stalk of two cubits high, as strong as is a small walking-staff. At the top of the stalk standeth a bundle of fair whitish flowers, dashed over with a wash of purple colour, smelling like the flowers of onions. When they be ripe there appeareth a black seed wrapt in a white skin or husk.