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[118] Gerlach suggests that the special mention of oaks may be significant, as the ritual use of that wood is found both among Greeks and Germans. The latter acc. to Tacitus burnt their famous dead certis lignis. It is safer to see no more than an allusion to the fact that, if we may judge from modern times, the forests of the Troas were almost exclusively of oaks. ‘The road from Bounarbashi to Alexandria Troas leads through an almost uninterrupted forest of these [valonea] oaks,’ Barker Webb in Schliemann Ilios p. 116, where three other species are mentioned.

The Iliad, edited, with apparatus criticus, prolegomena, notes, and appendices. Walter Leaf. London. Macmillan. 1900.

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