The oak has been called the king of the forest, as the lion the king of beasts. But its supremacy is largely a thing of the past. To the early undivided Aryans, it was the tree of trees. Their common name for it, which survived with its original special meaning in Celtic and Greek, came, in other languages, to denote the generalised conception of a tree, showing the oak to have been pre-eminent in their common ancestral home. Traces of this shifting of the linguistic standpoint are preserved in some Homeric phrases. Thus, _drûs_—etymologically identical with the English _tree_—means, not only an oak, but, most probably, the particular kind of oak familiar to us in England—_Quercus robur_, ‘the unwedgeable and gnarled oak’ of Shakespeare. But the generic significance gradually infused into the specific term comes to the front in several of its compounds. A wood-cutter, for instance, is, in the Iliad, literally an ‘oak-cutter,’ and the ‘solemn shade’ round Circe’s dwelling was afforded, etymologically, by an oaken grove, although the meaning really conveyed by the word _drûma_ was that of a collection of forest-trees of undetermined and various kinds. In later Greek, too, we find a woodpecker styled an ‘oakpecker’; and the Dryades, while in name ‘oak-nymphs,’ were, in point of fact, unrestricted in their choice of an arboreal dwelling-place. By a curious survival of associations, the name in modern Greek of this antique forest-constituent is _dendron_, a tree; yet it is now by no means common in Greece. Homer’s oaks were mountain-reared, sturdy, proof against most contingencies of climate. Of similar nature were Leonteus and Polypœtes, of the rugged Lapith race, who indomitably held the way into the Greek camp against the mighty Asius. ‘These twain,’ we are told, ‘stood in front of the lofty gates, like high-crested oak-trees in the hills, that for ever abide the wind and rain, firm fixed with roots great and long.’[188]
The species of oak at present dominant both in Greece and the Troad is the ‘oak of Bashan,’ _Quercus ægilops_. Its fruit, the valonia in commercial demand for tanning purposes, was made serviceable, within Homer’s experience, under the almost identical name of _balanoi_, only as food for pigs. Homer’s name for this fine tree—extended, perhaps, to the closely allied _Quercus esculus_—is _phegos_, signifying ‘edible,’ and denoting, in other European languages, the beech. How, then, did it come to be transferred, south of the Ceraunian mountains, to a totally different kind of tree? The explanation is simple. No beeches grew in the Hellenic peninsula when the first Aryan settlers entered it. A word was hence left derelict, and was naturally claimed by a conspicuous forest-tree, until then anonymous, because unknown further north, which shared with the beech its characteristic quality—so the necessities of hunger caused it to be esteemed—of producing fruit capable, after a fashion, of supporting life.[189] So, in the United States, the English names ‘robin,’ ‘hemlock,’ ‘maple,’ and probably many others, were unceremoniously handed on to strange species, on the strength of some casual or superficial resemblances.[190] The tradition of acorn-eating connected with the rustic Arcadians applied evidently to the fruit of the valonia-oak, or one of its nearest congeners;[191] and the oracular oak of Dodona, to which Odysseus pretended to have hied for counsel, appears to have been of the same description; as was certainly the tree of Zeus before the Scæan gate, whence Apollo and Athene watched the single combat between Hector and Ajax, and beneath which the spear of Tlepolemus was wrenched from the flesh of the fainting Sarpedon. These two are the only trees divinely appropriated in Homeric verse, and they command but a small share of the reverence paid by Celts and Teutons to their sacred oaks.