However little benefit the votaries of trees and images derived from their observances, apart from the subjective strength and solace that flow from every act of worship, there was at least one tangible service their gods could render them—the right of sanctuary and asylum. For the sacred tree, sharing as it did in the protective power of the indwelling deity, offered an inviolable refuge to the persecuted and the god’s forgiveness to the sinner who implored it. To have touched it was regarded amongst the Greeks as equivalent to having touched an altar or statue of the god. A branch of it, entwined with the consecrated fillet, assured its bearer from persecution. Hence a possible explanation of the legend of the young Dionysus standing secure amongst the branches of the sacred tree whilst the flames raged around him. [Illustration: Fig. 23.—Sacred laurel of Apollo at Delphi, adorned with fillets and votive tablets; beneath it the god appearing to protect Orestes.(From a vase-painting, Bötticher, Fig. 2.)] Frequent references occur in the Classics to tree-sanctuaries. The Amazons, defeated by Hercules, found a safe asylum beneath the holy tree at Ephesus, which was worshipped both as the symbol and temple of Artemis, before her statue was set up in the tree or her temple built around it.[111] Herodotus relates how Cleomenes, having burnt the sacred grove of Argos, together with the five thousand conquered Argives who had taken refuge there, was visited by the gods with madness for his act of sacrilege.[112] Orestes, in his flight from the Furies, is represented on a Greek vase as seeking refuge beneath Apollo’s laurel.[113] The god appears out of the tree to succour him and scare away his pursuers. The cypress grove on the Acropolis at Phlius in Peloponnesus was another instance. Fugitives from justice on reaching it became inviolable, and escaped prisoners hung upon its trees the chains for which they had no further use,[114] just as the modern cripple, whose limbs have been freed from the prison of his palsy, dedicates his crutches to “our Lady of Lourdes.” CHAPTER III WOOD-DEMONS AND TREE-SPIRITS