under the rose

[Doug Millison]

Q. How did a rose come to mean confidentiality, as in 'sub rosa'?
[Noah S Baer]

A. The allusion goes back to classical times. The Romans adopted the
Egyptian sun-god Horus as part of a cult of Isis and Serapis that
reached them through Greece. The Greeks had taken him over as Horus
the child (whose name in Egyptian was 'her-pa-khrad'), Greeking his
name to Harpocrates. The Egyptian hieroglyph for a child was a
seated boy sucking his finger; the Greeks thought this showed him
with his finger to his lips and so made him the god of silence and
secrecy.

He became popular among Romans once the cult had been officially
sanctioned during the reign of Caligula in the first century AD.
There's a famous story from those times in which Cupid - the Roman
god of love - was said to have given a rose to Harpocrates as a
little thank-you bribe for not letting on what his mother Venus, the
goddess of sensual love, was up to (very filial, that).

So the rose became the symbol of confidentiality in the classical
Roman world. The ceilings of Roman dining rooms were decorated with
roses to remind guests that what was said there under the influence
of wine ('sub vino') was also 'sub rosa', under the rose, privileged
and not to be made public.

The symbol of the rose was well-known throughout the post-classical
period and is recorded in particular in old German writings, which
is how it may have got into English. The first use of the English
translation of the phrase occurs in the State Papers of Henry VIII
in 1546 (though the writer had to explain what it meant). The rose
was used in medieval times and later much as the Romans did, and at
one time appeared as a symbol in the confessional. The tag in Latin
or English is still to be heard, especially among people who prize
confidentiality.

from:
WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 164         Saturday 30 October 1999
<http://www.quinion.com/words/>

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