| 词汇 | rose |
| 词源 | rose. The rose may take its name from the Celtic word rhod, “red,” in reference to its typical color. There are 100 to 4,000 species of roses, depending on which botanist you believe, not to mention the 8,000 or more rose cultivars. That great teller of tall tales Sir John Mandeville, who wrote of anthills of gold dust and fountains of youth, told the best story about the origin of the rose in his 14th-century Voyage and Travels. It seems that a beautiful Jewish maiden of Bethlehem rejected the brutish ad- vances of a drunken lout named Hanauel. In revenge Hanauel falsely denounced her as a witch, and she was condemned to burn at the stake. But God answered her prayers and extin- guished the flames; the stake itself budded and the fair maiden stood there unharmed under a rose tree of red and white blos- soms, “the first on earth since Paradise was lost.” Legends abound about the rose. One says that the white rose was turned red when Eve kissed one in the Garden of Eden; another tells of Cupid’s blood shed upon it. Still another story holds that the rose bursts into bloom when a nightingale sings. Edward Phil- lips in Sylva Florifera tells this tale of the birth of the rose: Flora [the Roman goddess of flowers] having found the corpse of a favorite nymph, whose beauty of person was only surpassed by the purity of her heart . . . resolved to raise a plant from her precious remains . . . for which purpose she begged the assistance of Venus and the Graces, as well as of all the deities that preside over gardens, to assist in the transformation of the nymph into a flower, that was to be by them proclaimed queen of all the vegetable beauties. The ceremony was attended by the Zephyrs, who cleared the atmosphere in order that Apollo might bless the new-created progeny by his beams. Bacchus supplied rivers of nectar to nourish it; and Vertumnus [the Roman god of orchards] poured his choicest perfumes over the plant. When the metamorphosis was complete, Pomona [the Roman goddess of fruit] strewed her fruit over the young branches, which were then crowned by Flora with a diadem, that had been purposely prepared by the celestials, to distinguish this queen of flowers. Since the beginning of time, it seems, roses have been the flow- ers of love, the true flowers of Venus. Cleopatra carpeted a room with red rose petals so that their scent would rise above Mark Antony as he walked toward her. Dionysius, the tyrant of Syra- cuse, filled his house with roses for the frequent compulsory or- gies he held with the young women of his city; Nero used mil- lions of the blooms to decorate a hall for a single banquet, and rose water–saturated pigeons fluttered overhead to sprinkle the guests with scent. In fact, roses were so popular in ancient times that they actually became a symbol of the degeneracy of later Roman emperors, and it took the Church, to which the rose be- came a symbol of purity, to rescue it from oblivion during the Dark Ages. According to one ancient story, a number of noble Romans were suffocated under tons of rose petals dropped on them during one of Emperor Heliogabalus’s orgies. The Romans so loved the flower that they imported bargefuls of rose petals and hips from Egypt, where the growing season was longer, and they believed in the flower’s powers so fervently that they used rose water in their fountains. Long before this the Greek physi- cian Galen had used a full pound of rose oil in a facial cosmetic he invented, and “attar of roses” remains a much-valued cos- metic ingredient to this day. For centuries the rose has been em- ployed to invoke love in some rather strange ways. Persian women thought that rose water was a philter that would bring back straying lovers; one old Chinese love recipe drunk during the fourth-month rose festivals consisted of prunes, sugar, ol- ives, and rose petals; and colonial ladies made “rose wine” to stimulate their lovers by marinating rose petals in brandy. Final- ly we have Napoleon’s empress Josephine, who, when her teeth turned bad, always carried a rose in her hand with which to cov- er her mouth when she laughed. See also sub rosa. |
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