Note 478 — Chapter XIV
Reading edition
Sammonicus Serenus, a savant of the early third century a.d., states that the acipenser was brought to table to the accompaniment of flutes by servants crowned with flowers. Cf. Macrob. III. 16, 7 f. Cf. Athen. VII. 44, and Ælian, VIII. 28.
In describing this imaginary Attic supper, Badham certainly lets himself go. The allusion to “the present of the God of Love” he may have taken from an anonymous epigram in Burmann’s Anthologia (1773), Bk. V. 217.
“Est rosa flos Veneris; cuius quo furta laterent Harpocrati matris dona dicavit Amor. Inde rosam mensis hospes suspendit amicis, Convivæ ut sub ea dicta tacenda sciant.”
These lines, of which several variants exist (notably that of the Rose Cellar in the Rathskeller of Bremen), are founded on the legend that Cupid bribed the God of Silence with his mother’s flower not to divulge the amours of Venus. Hence a host hung a rose over his table as a sign that nothing there said was to be repeated. A quaint and touching legend runs that in the beginning all roses were white, but when Venus walking one day among the flowers was pricked by one of their thorns, these roses “drew their colour from the blood of the goddess,” and remained encarmined for ever. Cf. Natal. Com. Mythol., V. 13. See also A. de Gubernatis, La Mythologie des Plantes (Paris, 1882), II. 323, and R. Folkard, Plant Lore, Legends, and Lyrics (London, 1884), 516 ff.