Cultivated plants and domestic animals in their migration from Asia to Europe / by Victor Hehn ; edited by James Steven Stallybrass.
- Victor Hehn
- Date:
- 1891
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Cultivated plants and domestic animals in their migration from Asia to Europe / by Victor Hehn ; edited by James Steven Stallybrass. Source: Wellcome Collection.
451/530 page 451
![Schriften, p. 35, 1863), could they have meddled with vine-shoots, that only bear fruit after many years ? And surely the wandering folk that invaded Italy had reached no higher stage of culture than the earliest Germans of history, but rather a lower; they brought with them cattle, swine, and stone axes, but assuredly no vines. The difference in the development of the great national groups of Europe only consists in their earlier or later entrance on particular phases of culture ; the Greeks received their impulse from the East, the Italians from the Greeks; the Celts turned their attention to agriculture, and the building of towns, roads, and bridges, centuries later than the Graeco-Italian nations, from whom they learnt much ; again centuries afterwards, the Germans did the same, having meanwhile experienced the civilizing influence of the Celts; still later the Slavs, under the constant educating influence of the Germanic West. Make every allowance for difference of race and climate ; yet climate itself imposes a gradual advance of the vine from the south-east, and forbids any idea of its having come down from beyond the Alps. We admit that, from the point of view of Roman documents and traditions, the cultivation of the vine in Italy looks very old ; the only question is, how old ? For the establishment of the Roman ritual, and for Italy in general—as seen from Rome— the period of Greek influence is quite an ancient, indeed a primitive, period. If the ancestral god of the Sabines, Sancus, was imagined as a vine-dresser, viti-sator, with a bent sickle, yet these same Sabines professed to be descended from Sabus the Lacedaemonian ! Note 28, page 75. The Greek word KapaZ (already used by Homer and Hesiod) only meant the light, reed-like rod or pole along which the vines climbed, or were led from tree to tree ; the vineyard on the shield of Herakles in Hesiod (v. 897) swings, with leaves and napaKeg, hither and thither : otiopivog (pvWoKTi icai dpyvpiycn Kapa%C and the £<tttiku in the corresponding verse of the Iliad 18, 563 : E(jTt]iCEL Sk Kapci^L diapTreptQ dpyvpkyaiv— only means that canes were stuck in the ground in continuous rows to support the vines. And the later name x“Pa* (from which Diez thinks the French echalas is derived), really a pointed cutting of a plant, was used originally in the sense of cane or shoot; the x“i°aKfC, for example, which the five rich Corcyraeans in Thucydides (3, 70) are said to have cut from the grove of Zeus and Alcinous, can only have been twigs, for when the culprits had to pay a stater for each, the fine was](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24874309_0451.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
