page_title: Rosalia (festival)
section_title: Roses and violets as funerary flowers
hierarchical_section_title: Rosalia (festival) / Roses and violets as funerary flowers
caption_attribution_description: English: Maenad and Cupid. Français&#160;: Ménade et Cupidon. Italiano: Menade e Amorino.
context_page_description: In the Roman Empire, Rosalia or Rosaria was a festival of roses celebrated on various dates, primarily in May, but scattered through mid-July. The observance is sometimes called a rosatio or the dies rosationis, "day of rose-adornment," and could be celebrated also with violets. As a commemoration of the dead, the rosatio developed from the custom of placing flowers at burial sites. It was among the extensive private religious practices by means of which the Romans cared for their dead, reflecting the value placed on tradition, family lineage, and memorials ranging from simple inscriptions to grand public works. Several dates on the Roman calendar were set aside as public holidays or memorial days devoted to the dead.
  As a religious expression, a rosatio might also be offered to the cult statue of a deity or to other revered objects. In May, the Roman army celebrated the Rosaliae signorum, rose festivals at which they adorned the military standards with garlands. The rose festivals of private associations and clubs are documented by at least forty-one inscriptions in Latin and sixteen in Greek, where the observance is often called a rhodismos.
context_section_description: Roses had funerary significance in Greece, but were particularly associated with death and entombment among the Romans. In Greece, roses appear on funerary steles, and in epitaphs most often of girls. In Imperial-era Greek epitaphs, the death of an unmarried girl is compared to a budding rose cut down in spring; a young woman buried in her wedding clothes is "like a rose in a garden"; an eight-year-old boy is like the rose that is "the beautiful flower of the Erotes" ("Loves" or Cupids). As a symbol of both blooming youth and mourning, the rose often marks a death experienced as untimely or premature. In the Iliad, Aphrodite anoints Hector's corpse with "ambrosial oil of roses" to maintain the integrity of his body against abuse in death. In Greek and Latin poetry, roses grow in the blessed afterlife of the Elysian Fields.
  Bloodless sacrifice to the dead could include rose garlands and violets as well as libations of wine, and Latin purpureus expressed the red-to-purple color range of roses and violets particularly as flowers of death. In ancient etymology, purpureus was thought related to Greek porphyreos in the sense of suffusing the skin with purple blood in bruising or wounding. The Augustan epic poet Vergil uses the metaphor of a purple flower to describe the premature, bloody deaths of young men in battle: the death of Pallas evokes both the violet of Attis and the hyacinth generated from the dying blood of Apollo's beloved Hyacinthus. Claudian writes of the "bloody splendor" of roses in the meadow from which Proserpina will be abducted to the underworld, with hyacinths and violets contributing to the lush flora. Roses and the ominous presence of thorns may intimate bloodshed and mortality even in the discourse of love.
  Conversely, roses in a funerary context can allude to festive banqueting, since Roman families met at burial sites on several occasions throughout the year for libations and a shared meal that celebrated both the cherished memory of the beloved dead and the continuity of life through the family line. In Roman tomb painting, red roses often spill bountifully onto light ground. These ageless flowers created a perpetual Rosalia and are an expression of Roman beliefs in the soul's continued existence.
  
  The bones or ashes of the deceased may be imagined as generating flowers, as in one Latin epitaph that reads:
  Here lies Optatus, a child ennobled by devotion: I pray that his ashes may be violets and roses, and I ask that the Earth, who is his mother now, be light upon him, for the boy's life was a burden to no one.
  Roses were planted at some tombs and mausoleums, and adjacent grounds might be cultivated as gardens to grow roses for adornment or even produce to sell for cemetery upkeep or administrative costs. In the 19th to the 21st centuries, a profusion of cut and cultivated flowers was still a characteristic of Italian cemeteries to a degree that distinguished them from Anglo-American practice. This difference is one of the Roman Catholic practices criticized by some Protestants, especially in the 19th century, as too "pagan" in origin.
caption: A wreathed maenad (attendant of Dionysus) holds Cupid as he extends a rose, in a wall painting from the House of Lucius Caecilius Iucundus, Pompeii
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