Revel in the last rays of Sunday with this passage about roses, courtesy of Diane Ackerman's "Natural History of the Senses. Perfect summer reading!"Cleopatra knew her guest [Mark Antony]. Few people have been as obsessed with roses as the ancient Romans. Roses were strewn at public ceremonies and banquets; rose water bubbled through the emperor's fountains and the public bths surged with it; in the public amphitheaters, crowds sat under sun awnings steeped in rose perfume; rose petals were used as pillow stuffings; people wore garlands of roses in their hair; they ate rose pudding; their medicines, love potions, and aphrodisiacs all contained roses. No bacchanalia, the Romans' official orgy, was complete without an excess of roses. They created a holiday, Rosalia, to formally consummate their passions for the flower. At one banquet, Nero had silver pipes installed under each plate, so that guests could be spritzed with scent between courses. They could admire a ceiling painted to resemble the celestial heavens, which would open up and shower them in a continuous rain of perfume and flowers. At another, he spent the equivalent of $160,000 just on roses - and one of his guests smothered to death under a shower of rose petals."
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