and he supports it with the reasonable surmise that the epithet ‘hyacinthine,’ applied to the locks of Odysseus, referred, not to colour, but to form, their closely-set curls recalling forcibly enough the _ringleted_ effect of the congregated flowerets. The dry soil of Greece is particularly suitable to the hyacinth, sundry kinds of which—one of them so deeply blue as to be nearly black—are found all over the Peloponnesus, in the Ionian islands, and high up on the outlying bulwarks of Olympus.[228] The ‘flower of Ajax,’ legibly inscribed with an interjection of woe, sprang up for the first time in Salamis, it was said, just after the hero it commemorated had met his tragic fate.[229] Another story connected it similarly with the death of Hyacinthus; and it was probably identical with the scarlet gladiolus (_Gladiolus byzantinus_), almost certainly with the _suave rubens hyacinthus_ of the Third Eclogue, but not with the Homeric hyacinth, which is undistinguished in folk-lore. Footnote 228: Kruse, _Hellas_, Th. i. p. 359. Footnote 229: Pausanias, i. 35. The ‘violet-crowned’ Athenians of old, could they recross the Styx to wander by the Ilissus, would be struck with at least one unwelcome change. For violets no longer grow in Attica. They are nevertheless found, although sparingly, in most other parts of Greece, and up to an elevation of two thousand feet on the slopes of Parnassus. Homer often mentions them allusively, but introduces them directly only once, and then, as Fraas has remarked, in the incongruous company of the marsh-loving wild parsley (_Apium palustre_).[230] Unjustifiable from a botanical point of view, the conjunction may have had an æsthetic motive. In the festal garlands of classic Greece, violets and parsley were commonly associated, and their association was perhaps dictated by a survival of the taste displayed in the embellishment of Calypso’s well-watered meadow. Footnote 230: _Synopsis Plantarum_, p. 114; Hayman’s _Odyssey_, vol. i. p. 175.