The Seba library treats Olive in 7 passages, across 4 authors (including Harrison, Jane Ellen, Lattimore, Richmond, Onians, R B).
the salt sea-well and the trident-mark are 'tokens,' we are told, of the defeat of Poseidon; the olive is the 'token' of the triumph of Athena.
Harrison identifies the sacred olive on the Acropolis as the primary symbol of Athena's victory over Poseidon in the mythic contest for Attica, making it a token of divine sovereignty and civilizational order.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912thesis
the original apple-bough was superseded by the olive borrowed from the moon-goddess', possibly when the race of the young men was combined with that of the virgins... Even before it became the moon-tree, the holy olive probably belonged to Earth.
Harrison argues for a stratigraphic religious history of the olive: originally an earth-tree, then a lunar symbol, the olive absorbed successive layers of sacred meaning at Olympia and elsewhere.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912thesis
we can scarcely avoid the conclusion that the Bouphonia and the Hersephoria... had the same intent, to induce the sky to let fall upon the parched earth its rain or dew, that so the sacred olive, and with it all other plants and crops, might blossom and bear fruit.
Harrison reads the sacred olive as the focal object of Athenian rain-magic rituals, situating it at the center of fertility religion and the covenant between sky and earth.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912thesis
There was the bole of an olive tree with long leaves growing strongly in the courtyard, and it was thick, like a column. I laid down my chamber around this, and built it, until I finished it.
Odysseus's marriage bed, built around a living olive trunk rooted in the earth, functions as the indestructible symbol of conjugal fidelity, identity, and the permanent ground of the self.
, Odyssey of Homer, 2009thesis
if we must think of ambrosia as a divine counterpart to the ἀλείφαρ possessed by men, i.e. to animal grease or its equivalent, olive-oil, we may ask 'Did the Homeric Greeks eat olives or olive-oil?'
Onians proposes that olive oil functions as the mortal analogue of divine ambrosia, positioning it within a broader theory of life-substance transmitted through anointing and ingestion.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
anointing, the application to the body of oily liquids or unguents, practised from the Homeric age onwards usually after the bath... was, I suggest, thought to feed, to introduce into the body through the pores, the stuff of life and strength.
Onians contextualizes olive oil within an archaic physiology in which anointing with oil replenishes the body's vital substance lost through sweat, linking the olive to life-force and regeneration.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
I return to Olive, the book's exemplary sufferer, who gains much more sympathy as the novel flows on to her defeat by Ransom.
Bloom's analysis of Henry James's The Bostonians treats Olive Chancellor as a character study in suffering and defeat, entirely unrelated to the botanical or mythic olive but using the name as a proper noun.
, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015aside