The Phœnicians, who were not idolaters, in the ordinary acceptation of the word--inasmuch as they did not worship images of their deities, and regarded the ever-burning fire on their altars as the sole emblem of the Supreme Being,--paid adoration to this Sacred Tree, effigies of which were set up in front of the temples, and had sacrifices offered to them. This mystic tree was known to the Jews as _Asherah_. At festive seasons the Phœnicians adorned it with boughs, flowers, and ribands, and regarded it as the central object of their worship. The Mother Tree of the Greeks, Romans, and Teutons. The Greeks appear to have cherished a tradition that the first race of men sprang from a cosmogonic Ash. This cloud Ash became personified in their myth as a daughter of Oceanos, named Melia, who married the river-god Inachos, and gave birth to Phoroneus, in whom the Peloponnesian legend recognised the fire-bringer and the first man. According to Hesychius, however, Phoroneus was not the only mortal to whom the Mother Ash gave birth, for he tells us distinctly that the race of men was “the fruit of the Ash.” Hesiod also repeats the same fable in a somewhat different guise, when he relates how Jove created the third or brazen race of men out of Ash trees. Homer appears to have been acquainted with this tradition, for he makes Penelope say, when addressing Ulysses: “Tell me thy family, from whence thou art; for thou art not sprung from the olden tree, or from the rock.” The Ash was generally deemed by the Greeks an image of the clouds and the mother of men,--the prevalent idea being that the Meliai, or nymphs of the Ash, were a race of cloud goddesses, daughters of sea gods, whose domain was originally the cloud sea. But besides the Ash, the Greeks would seem to have regarded the Oak as a tree from which the human race had sprung, and to have called Oak trees the first mothers. This belief was shared by the Romans. Thus Virgil speaks “Of nymphs and fauns, and savage men, who took Their birth from trunks of trees and stubborn Oak.” In another passage the great Latin poet, speaking of the _Æsculus_, a species of Oak, sacred to Jupiter, gives to it attributes which remind us in a very striking manner of Yggdrasill, the cloud-tree of the Norsemen. “_Æsculus in primis, quæ quantum vortice ad auras Ætherias, tantum radice in Tartara tendit._”--_Georg._ ii. “High as his topmost boughs to heaven ascend, So low his roots to hell’s dominion tend.”--_Dryden._