because it seasons wine, for among the pines
they say the sweetest and most delicious grapes grow. The cause of this
Theophrastus thinks to be the heat of the soil; for pines grow most in
chalky grounds. Now chalk is hot, and therefore must very much conduce
to the concoction of the wine; as a chalky spring affords the lightest
and sweetest water; and if chalk is mixed with corn, by its heat it
makes the grains swell, and considerably increases the heap. Besides,
it is probable that the vine itself is bettered by the pine, for that
contains several things which are good to preserve wine. All cover the
insides of wine casks with rosin, and many mix rosin with wine, as the
Euboeans in Greece, and in Italy those that live about the river Po.
From the parts of Gaul about Vienna there is a sort of pitched wine
brought, which the Romans value very much; for such things mixed with
it do not only give it a good flavor, but make the wine generous,
taking away by their gentle heat all the crude, watery, and undigested
particles. When I had said thus much, a rhetorician in the company, a
man well read in all sorts of polite learning, cried out: Good Gods! was
it not but the other day that the Isthmian garland began to be made of
pine? And was not the crown anciently of twined parsley? I am sure in a
certain comedy a covetous man is brought in speaking thus:--

The Isthmian garland I will sell as cheap
As common wreaths of parsley may be sold.

And Timaeus the historian says that, when the Corinthians were marching
to fight the Carthaginians in the defence of Sicily, some persons
carrying parsley met them, and when several looked upon this as a
bad omen,--because parsley is accounted unlucky, and those that
are dangerously sick we usually say have need of parsley,--Timoleon
encouraged them by putting them in mind of the Isthmian parsley garland
with which the Corinthians used to crown the conquerors. And besides,
the admiral-ship of Antigonus's navy, having by chance some parsley
growing on its poop, was called Isthmia. Besides, a certain obscure
epigram upon an earthen vessel stopped with parsley intimates the same
thing. It runs thus:--

The Grecian earth, now hardened by the flame,
Holds in its hollow belly Bacchus blood;
And hath its mouth with Isthmian branches stopped.

Sure, he continued, they never read these authors, who cry up the pine
as anciently wreathed in the Isthmian garlands, and would