BOOK XXII
I. NATURE and our earth might have filled the measure of our wonder at them in anyone who reviews even the preceding volume only, with all Nature's gifts in it, and all the kinds of plants created for the needs or pleasures of mankind. But how many more kinds remain, and how much more wonderful they are in their discovery! For of the plants mentioned already the greater number, owing to their excellence as food, perfume or ornament, have led to repeated experiments; of the rest it is their efficacy that proves that nothing is created by Nature without some more hidden reason than those just mentioned.
II. Now I notice that some foreign peoples use certain plants on their persons both to make themselves more handsome and also to keep up traditional custom. At any rate among barbarian tribes the women stain the face, using, some one plant and some another; and the men too among the Daci and the Sarmatae tattoo their own bodies. In Gaul there is a plant like the plantain, called glastum; with it the wives of the Britons, and their daughters-in-law, stain all the body, and at certain religious ceremonies march along naked, with a colour resembling that of Ethiopians.
III. Moreover we know that clothes are dyed with a wonderful dye from a plant, and, to say nothing of the fact that, of the berries of Galatia, Africa, and Lusitania, the 'coccum' is specially served to colour the military cloaks of our generals, Transalpine Gaul can produce with vegetable dyes Tyrian purple, oyster purple and all other colours. To get these nobody seeks the murex oyster in the depths, offering his person as bait to sea monsters while he hastens to snatch his booty, and exploring a bottom that no anchor yet has touched, merely to discover the means for a matron to charm her paramour more easily and for a seducer to ensnare another's wife. There one stands on land to harvest dyes as we harvest crops; and though there is a complaint that the dye washes out with use, except for this defect luxury could have bedecked itself in brighter colours, and certainly with less risk to life. It is not my intention now to treat this subject fully, but I shall not pass it over entirely, so that I may, by suggesting cheaper materials, curb luxury by expediency, and on another occasion I shall tell how walls are dyed instead of being painted in mosaics. Yet I should not have left out the craft of dyeing altogether, had it ever been included among the liberal arts. In the meantime I shall take a bolder line, and there shall be assigned even to dull, that is to say, lowly plants all the dignity that is their due, since it is a fact that the founders and enlargers of the Roman Empire derived from this source also an immense advantage, because it was from them that came the tufts used when the State needed cures, and also the vervains required in holy ceremonies and in embassies. At any rate both names mean the same thing, that is, a turf from the citadel pulled up with its own earth; and on every occasion when envoys were sent to the enemy to perform clarigatio, that is to demand in loud tones the restitution of plundered property, one in particular was called vervain bearer.
IV. No crown indeed has been a higher honour than the crown of grass among the rewards for glorious deeds given by the sovereign people, lords of the earth. Jewelled crowns, golden crowns, crowns for scaling enemy ramparts or walls, or for boarding men-of-war, the civic crown for saving the life of a citizen, the triumph crownthese were instituted later than this grass crown, and all differ from it greatly, in distinction as in character. All the others have been given by individuals and personally by generals and commanders to their soldiers, or occasionally to their colleagues, or have been decreed in triumphs by a Senate freed from the anxiety of war and by a people enjoying peace; the grass crown has never been conferred except upon the leader of a forlorn hope, being voted only by the whole army and only to him who rescued it. The other crowns have been conferred by commanders, this alone on a commander by his soldiers. The same crown is called the siege crown when a whole camp has been relieved and saved from awful destruction.