Athena's Gift, and the Branch of Peace

The olive, Olea europaea, is one of the founding cultivated trees of the Mediterranean, and its mythology follows its economic weight. In the Greek story Athena and Poseidon contested the patronage of Athens; Poseidon struck the rock and produced a spring or a horse, Athena planted the first olive tree, and the gods judged her gift the more useful, giving her the city. The olive branch as a token of peace is older than any single text and passed into universal use; in the Hebrew Bible the dove returns to Noah's ark with an olive leaf, the sign that the flood has receded and that God is reconciled with the earth.

At the ancient Olympic Games the victor's only prize was a wreath cut from a sacred wild olive tree said to grow beside the temple of Zeus at Olympia, the kotinos, a reward whose deliberate lack of material value was itself the point, glory rather than gain. Some individual olive trees are of extraordinary and partly verified age: the Olive Tree of Vouves on Crete, still bearing fruit today, is estimated by tree-ring and radiocarbon methods at somewhere between two and four thousand years old, a living witness, if the estimate holds, to the same Mediterranean world that first told the story of Athena's gift.