Arbor infelix
Arbor infelix As applied to trees, felix and infelix imply fruit-producing
or the reverse (Paul. ex Festo, p. 92; Verg. G. 2.81; Plin. Nat. 24.68). Infelices (se. arbores) autem existimantur damnataeque religione quae neque seruntur unquam neque fructum ferunt
(Plin. Nat. 16.108). Those trees also which bore black berries and black fruit, and were accordingly sacred to the gods of the lower world, were called infelices (Macr. 2.16.2). Such trees appear to have been used for the patibulum and crux (Cic. Rab. Perd. 4, 13; Liv. 1.26. See generally Rein in Pauly, s. v.).
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.