The rose, flower of Venus: from Greek myth to the Romance of the Rose

Among flowers, none has played a romantic role in European culture comparable to that of the rose. Cultivated for millennia in Persia, Greece and Rome, it was associated with Aphrodite and then with Venus, celebrated by poets, turned into allegory by medieval romance writers and finally codified in the nineteenth-century manuals of the language of flowers. Its history shows how a natural object can take on ever new meanings over the centuries without losing the old ones.

The rose of Aphrodite

In the Greek world the rose was linked to Aphrodite. According to a tradition reported by later authors, roses, originally white, were stained red by the blood of the goddess, wounded by thorns as she ran to help the dying Adonis. The story exists in several variants, and other versions have the anemone spring from that blood. What remains in every case is the close bond between the flower, beauty and the pain that accompanies passion.

In Rome the rose was everywhere at banquets, festivals and funerary cults: the Rosalia were celebrations in which roses were laid on tombs. The flower was dear to Venus, and Latin poets made it an image of fleeting youth. Virgil recalls the rose gardens of Paestum that bloomed twice a year, and Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, devotes pages to cultivated varieties and to places famous for their roses.

The garden of the Romance of the Rose

The rose's great literary moment came in the thirteenth century with the Roman de la Rose, a French allegorical poem begun by Guillaume de Lorris around 1230 and completed by Jean de Meun some forty years later. The protagonist dreams of entering a walled garden, where he falls in love with a rosebud: the flower represents the beloved woman and the conquest of love. Allegorical characters such as Fair Welcome, Danger and Jealousy hinder or help the lover on his way.

The poem enjoyed extraordinary success, surviving in hundreds of manuscripts, and influenced writers such as Chaucer, who translated part of it into English. It also circulated widely in Italy: Il Fiore, a reworking in sonnets that many scholars attribute to Dante, follows its plot. From then on the rose became the symbol par excellence of courtly love.

Sub rosa and the language of flowers

Alongside its romantic meaning, the rose acquired one linked to secrecy. The Latin expression sub rosa, “under the rose”, indicated what had to remain confidential; one tradition connects it to a rose hung or carved on the ceiling of banqueting halls, but its precise origin is uncertain. In the nineteenth century, manuals on the language of flowers, such as the one published in France in 1819 under the pseudonym Charlotte de La Tour, assigned different meanings to each colour: red to passion, white to purity.

From the goddess wounded by thorns to the bud in the allegorical garden, and on to the nineteenth-century bouquets laden with coded messages, the rose has passed through history while remaining the lovers' flower. Its double nature, splendid and prickly, has made it a perfect image of a feeling that brings with it both joy and suffering.