Footnote 208: _Iliad_, xiii. 389; xvi. 482-84. The author of the Iliad ascribes no under-world relationships either to the white or to the black poplar. His sole funereal tree is the elm. Relating the misfortunes of her family, Andromache says: Fell Achilles’ hand My sire Aetion slew, what time his arms The populous city of Cilicia raz’d, The lofty-gated Thebes; he slew indeed, But stripp’d him not; he reverenc’d the dead; And o’er his body, with his armour burnt, A mound erected, and the mountain-nymphs, The progeny of ægis-bearing Jove, Planted around his tomb a grove of elms.[209] Now the elm, like the poplar and willow, had, from of old, the not-unfounded reputation of partial sterility, and was for this reason made the legendary abode of dreams[210]—things without progeny or purpose, that passing ‘leave not a rack behind.’ Virgil’s giant elm in the vestibule of Orcus, Quam sedem Somnia vulgo Vana tenere ferunt, foliisque sub omnibus hærent, is the literary embodiment of this popular idea. Evidently, then, the trees of mourning in the Iliad and Odyssey were singled out owing to their possession of a common, though by no means obvious peculiarity; yet their selection in each poem is different. This is the more remarkable because associations of the sort, once established, are almost ineradicable from what we may call tribal consciousness. Cypresses have no share in them, so far as Homer is concerned. Their appointment to the office of mourning the dead would seem to have been subsequently resolved upon. The connexion was, at any rate, well established before the close of the classic age, when funeral-pyres were made by preference of cypress wood, the tree itself being consecrated to the hated Dis.[211] And Pausanias met with groves of cypresses surrounding the tomb of Laïs near Corinth, and of Alcmæon, son of the ill-fated seer Amphiaraus, at Psophis in Arcadia.[212] The tradition survives, nowadays in the East, in the planting of Turkish cemeteries. Footnote 209: Lord Derby’s _Iliad_, vi. 414-20. Footnote 210: Dierbach, _Flora Mythologica_, p. 34. Footnote 211: _Ib._ p. 49. Footnote 212: _Descriptio Græciæ_, ii. 2, viii. 24. The vegetation along the shores of the Scamander (now the Mendereh) has undergone, so far as can be judged, singularly little alteration during nearly three thousand years. Homer sings of the willows, elms, and tamarisk shrubs, The lotus, and the reeds, and galingal, Which by the lovely river grew profuse.[213]