V.V.(4) "under the rose" (23.24)

[David Morris]

UNDER THE ROSE

>From Noah S Baer: "How did a rose come to mean confidentiality, as in sub 
rosa?"

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.



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