Common dogwood

Plutarch, Greek biographer of the imperial era, reporting the legend of Romulus (with a variant in the Latin poet Ovid) · Rome; accounts put into writing in the 1st–2nd century AD, concerning an episode attributed to the city's legendary founder, in the 8th century BC

In his Life of Romulus, Plutarch recounts that the founder of Rome threw from the Aventine a javelin whose shaft was of cornel (in Greek κρανεία); the iron sank so deep that no one could pull it out, the shaft took root and became a tree that the Romans venerated and protected as sacred. Ovid takes up the episode in the Metamorphoses, but sets it on the Palatine and names there a tree of osier ('lenti viminis arbor'), and not a cornel: the identification with the cornel is therefore specific to Plutarch. This episode should be read as a foundation legend, not as an attested historical fact. Finally, the wood reputed for ancient javelins is that of the cornelian cherry (Cornus mas), very hard, the same genus as the common dogwood (Cornus sanguinea), but a neighbouring species: the warlike and sacred prestige of this account does not transfer to the plant of this sheet.

Plutarque, Vie de Romulus, 20 (Ier–IIe s. apr. J.-C.) ; Ovide, Métamorphoses, livre XV, v. 560-564.

A legendary account and not an established fact: what is attested are the texts of Plutarch and Ovid, not the episode itself, and the two authors diverge (place, tree species). The tradition concerns the cornelian cherry (Cornus mas), not the common dogwood (Cornus sanguinea): the prestige of one is not to be transferred to the other. No medicinal or botanical use is presented here as a fact; it's a Roman cultural motif, cited here without essentialising it.