CHAP. 1. (1.)—THE NATURE OF FLOWERS AND GARLANDS.
Cato has recommended that flowers for making chaplets should also be cultivated in the garden; varieties remarkable for a delicacy which it is quite impossible to express, inasmuch as no individual can find such facilities for describing them as Nature does for bestowing on them their numerous tints—Nature, who here in especial shows herself in a sportive mood, and takes a delight in the prolific display of her varied productions. The other[1837] plants she has produced for our use and our nutriment, and to them accordingly she has granted years and even ages of duration: but as for the flowers and their perfumes, she has given them birth for but a day—a mighty lesson to man, we see, to teach him that that which in its career is the most beauteous and the most attractive to the eye, is the very first to fade and die.
Even the limner’s art itself possesses no resources for reproducing the colours of the flowers in all their varied tints and combinations, whether we view them in groups alternately blending their hues, or whether arranged in festoons, each variety by[1838] itself, now assuming a circular form, now running obliquely, and now disposed in a spiral pattern; or whether, as we see sometimes, one wreath is interwoven within another.
CHAP. 2. (2.)—GARLANDS AND CHAPLETS.
The ancients used chaplets of diminutive size, called “struppi;”[1839] from which comes our name for a chaplet, “strophiolum.” Indeed, it was only by very slow degrees that this last word[1840] became generalized, as the chaplets that were used at sacrifices, or were granted as the reward of military valour, asserted their exclusive right to the name of “corona.” As for garlands, when they came to be made of flowers, they received the name of “serta,” from the verb “sero,”[1841] or else from our word “series.”[1842] The use[1843] of flowers for garlands is not so very ancient, among the Greeks even.
CHAP. 3.—WHO INVENTED THE ART OF MAKING GARLANDS: WHEN THEY FIRST RECEIVED THE NAME OF “COROLLÆ,” AND FOR WHAT REASON.
For in early times it was the usage to crown the victors in the sacred contests with branches of trees: and it was only at a later period, that they began to vary their tints by the combination[1844] of flowers, to heighten the effect in turn by their colour and their smell—an invention due to the ingenuity of the painter Pausias, at Sicyon,[1845] and the garland-maker Glycera, a female to whom he was greatly attached, and whose handiwork was imitated by him in colours. Challenging him to a trial of skill, she would repeatedly vary her designs, and thus it was in reality a contest between art and Nature; a fact which we find attested by pictures of that artist even still in existence, more particularly the one known as the “Stephaneplocos,”[1846] in which he has given a likeness of Glycera herself. This invention, therefore, is only to be traced to later than the Hundredth[1847] Olympiad.
Chaplets of flowers being now the fashion, it was not long before those came into vogue which are known to us as Egyptian[1848] chaplets; and then the winter chaplets, made for the time at which Earth refuses her flowers, of thin laminæ of horn stained various colours. By slow degrees, too, the name was introduced at Rome, these garlands being known there at first as “corollæ,” a designation given them to express the remarkable delicacy[1849] of their texture. In more recent times, again, when the chaplets presented were made of thin plates[1850] of copper, gilt or silvered, they assumed the name of “corollaria.”
CHAP. 4. (3.)—WHO WAS THE FIRST TO GIVE CHAPLETS WITH LEAVES OF SILVER AND GOLD. LEMNISCI: WHO WAS THE FIRST TO EMBOSS THEM.
Crassus Dives[1851] was the first who gave chaplets with artificial leaves of silver and gold, at the games celebrated by him. To embellish these chaplets, and to confer additional honour on them, lemnisci were added, in imitation of the Etruscan chaplets, which ought properly to have none but lemnisci[1852] made of gold. For a long period these lemnisci were destitute of ornament:[1853] P. Claudius Pulcher[1854] was the first who taught us to emboss[1855] them, and added leaves of tinsel to the laminæ[1856] of which the lemniscus was formed.