Literate Greeks recalled that the culture hero Aristaeus, originator of the arts of bee-keeping, cheese-making and other innovations of the most distant past, was he who "first pressed the fruit of the oily wild-olive.

[10]In the fourth century BCE Theophrastus, the most prominent pupil of Aristotle, wrote an Enquiry into Plants that stands at the head of the literary tradition of botany.

Theophrastus noted the kinship of wild-olive with the cultivated olive,[11] but his correspondents informed him that no amount of pruning and transplanting could transform kotinos into olea.

[16] The ancient wild-olive at Olympia, from which the victors' wreaths were made, had an aition, or origin myth, that was preserved in the local tradition, though the testament to it that has survived in a fragment is a late one, of the poet Phlegon of Tralles, who wrote in the second century CE.

[18]On his return to Olympia, Iphitos found that one among the grove of wild-olives in the sacred precinct was wrapped in spider webs called the elaia kallistefanos.

An ancient wild-olive tree also gained a talismanic character at Megara, according to Theophrastus, who noted how the wood of a tree overgrows and buries within its wood a stone placed in a hole made in its trunk: This happened with the wild-olive in the market-place at Megara; there was an oracle that, if this were cut open, the city would be taken and plundered, which came to pass when Demetrius took it.

[22]Theocritus makes Heracles tell of his contest with the Nemean Lion: I held in one hand my darts and the cloak from my shoulders, folded; with the other I swung my seasoned club about my ears and smashed it down on his head, but split the wild-olive, rugged as it was, asunder on the invincible brute's maned skull.