62 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



Both tears and drops of blood were turned to flowers. 

 From these io crimeon beauty sprang the rose, 

 Cerulean bright anemones from those. 



Thorns are accounted for in an equally fanciful way. Cupid^ 

 stooping to kiss a new-blown dewy rose, was stung by a bee asleep in 

 its heart. To please the petulant boy, Venus strung his bow with 

 captive bees, and planted along the stem of the rose the stings torn 

 from them. 



Sappho, in one of the few fragments that remain to us of her epi- 

 grams, elegiacs and nine books of lyrical poems, sings the praises of 

 the rose in an ode which has suffered translation at the hands of 

 several poets : 



If Jove should give tbe happy bowers 



A queen for all their world of flowers, 



The rose would be the choice of Jove, 



And blush the queen of every grove. 



Sweetest child of weeping morning. 



Gem, the breast of earth adorning, 



Eye of flow'rets ! glow of lawns ! 



Bud of Beauty, nursed by dawns : 



Soft the soul of love it breathes, 



Cypria's brow with magic wreathes. 



And to the Zephyr's warm caresses 



Diff"uge3 all her verdant tresses. 



Till, glowing with the wanton play. 



It blushes a diviner ray." 



Anacreon, very nearly the contemporary of Sappho, 600 b. c, is 

 fairly redolent with roses. One ode after another demands tribute of 

 the rose to help the soft imagery of his verse, apart from those de- 

 voted specially to her praise.* 



The proverbial expression attributed to Aristophanes, " You have 

 spoken in roses," shows something of the feeling which the beauty- 

 loving Greeks felt toward the flower. 



Hippocrates, the god of silence, carries as his symbol a rose given 

 to him by Cupid. From the idea of secrecy or reserve that associates 

 itself with roses came the old custom recorded by the Greeks. When 

 the people of the North, they say, wished to preserve the most pro- 

 found secrecy in regard to what was said between themselves at their 

 feasts, a freshly gathered rose was hung from the ceiling above the 

 upper end of the table. It was considered not only dishonorable but 

 a crime to reveal that which had been said ^^ sub rosa." 



Roses were dedicated to Venus as the symbol of beauty, to Cupid 

 as the symbol of love, to Aurora, the rosy-iingered, to signify her 

 office of opening the portals of day, to youth and springtime. In the 



•The forty-fourth and flfty-flfth odes, as translated by Moore. 



