Bion Idyll, i, 66.
"Wide as her lover's torrent blood appears
So copious flowed the fountain of her tears;
The Rose starts blushing from the sanguine dyes,
And from her tears Anemones arise."
Polwhele's Translation, 1786.
But this legend was not followed by the other classical writers, who made the Anemone to be the flower of Adonis. Theocritus compares the Dog-rose (so called also in his day, κυνοσβατος) and the Anemone with the Rose, and the Scholia comment on the passage thus—"Anemone, a scentless flower, which they report to have sprung from the blood of Adonis; and again Nicander says that the Anemone sprung from the blood of Adonis."
The storehouse of our ancestors' pagan mythology was in Ovid, and his well-known lines are—
"Cum flos e sanguine concolor ortus
Qualem, quæ; lento celant sub cortice granum
Punica ferre solent; brevis est tamen usus in illis,
Namque male hærentem, et nimiâ brevitate caducum
Excutiunt idem qui præstant nomina, venti,"—
Thus translated by Golding in 1567, from whom it is very probable that Shakespeare obtained his information—
"Of all one colour with the bloud, a flower she there did find,
Even like the flower of that same tree, whose fruit in tender rind
Have pleasant graines enclosede—howbeit the use of them is short,
For why, the leaves do hang so loose through lightnesse in such sort,
As that the windes that all things pierce[15:1] with everie little blast
Do shake them off and shed them so as long they cannot last."[15:2]
I feel sure that Shakespeare had some particular flower in view. Spenser only speaks of it as a flower, and gives no description—
"In which with cunning hand was pourtrahed
The love of Venus and her Paramoure,
The fayre Adonis, turned to a flowre."