When Xerxes was marching through Asia to invade Greece, says Herodotus, he had to pass through the town of Kallatebos, not far from the crossing of the river Maeander. At this place (where, by the way, men make their living by preparing honey from tamarisk and wheatmeal) the king saw by the roadside a magnificent plane-tree, which on account of its beauty he presented with golden ornaments, and arranged that a man should stay there as its keeper or guardian for ever after. He then proceeded to Sardis.

The story became famous, and later centuries thought it rather silly. Aelian in particular declares that Xerxes, who ‘thought nothing of the works of God's hands, but must go and build himself newfangled roads and unusual ship-canals’—so he sneers at the eminent engineering feats of the Hellespont Bridge and the Athos Canal—made himself ridiculous (γɛλoīoς) by falling in love with a plane-tree, and decking it with golden necklets and bangles, and setting a guard over it, as he might set a slave to keep an eye on his harem. ‘What good did it all do the tree?’ Aelian rhetorically asks. ‘The apposititious ornament nothing suiting with it, hung there in vain… For to the beauty of a tree are requisite fair branches, leaves thick, a body strong, roots deep,… wideness of shadow, the successive seasons of the year, the nourishment of water by channels and rain.’ The criticism is rational. But Aelian, who though he wrote in Greek is recorded never to have left his native Italy, could hardly appreciate the feelings of admiration and delight, even of religious awe, shown by the dwellers on the arid plateaux of Asia for large and shady trees, feelings shared by the Greeks, and by any modern traveller in Greece who on a dusty summer's day has spied far-off a whitewashed chapel with trees at hand, and known that there he would also find a spring of cold dear water and rest from the road.