Note 147 — THE THEOGONY.

A laurel-bough.] Salmasius observes that they who aspired to skill in divination, chewed the leaf of the laurel. Its poisonous quality produced a preternatural action on the nerves, and a convulsion and frothing at the mouth, favourable to the idea of being possessed or inspired. As poets feigned a kind of divination, and a knowledge of supernatural things, the laurel was equally a symbol of poesy and prophecy: and held sacred to Phœbus, the god of verse and divination. We find from Pausanias that those poets who did not play on the lyre held a laurel-bough in their hand, during their public recitations, as the badge of their profession. Hence probably the term “rhapsodist:” επι ραβδω αδειν, “to sing to the branch.” and a rhapsody seems to have designated such a portion of verses as the bard would recite at one time. Salmasius seems therefore mistaken in deriving the word from ραπτειν τας ωδας, stitching together songs: in allusion to the centos which the Homeric rhapsodists were accustomed to recite from the works of Homer: although the derivation appears countenanced by Pindar’s expression of ραπτων επεων αοιδοι, singers of tissued verses.