Love can hurt

The beautiful, thorny rose is a picture for it - Goethe's little rose flower comes to mind immediately.

There it is a boy who injures himself when he tries to break the flower, here the goddess Venus, who flees from the urging of her lover Mars and is stabbed in a meadow in order to then adorn her with her blood.

This is how the scent and color of the roses emerge from necessity.

Blossius Aemilius Dracontius took up an old myth with his poem.

At the end of antiquity, in the fifth century AD, he wrote verses in Latin.

Several poets had told a similar story, usually not about Venus but about Adonis, another lover whom Mars killed.

Roses emerged from the blood.

This more common version was certainly familiar to Dracontius, but he chose the more remote.

Dracontius readers probably appreciated that.

Because they were educated and knew the classic epithets of Venus, which were derived from islands with which the myth brought them into contact, Cyprus and Kythera.

You surely saw the poem's subtle literary allusions with much joy.

Violence under the varnish of elegance

The home of Dracontius, which roughly corresponds to today's Tunisia, was a rich center of Latin language art in Roman times. This is where Apuleius came from, who wrote the novel "The Golden Donkey", from which the famous story of Cupid and Psyche comes. Christian authors with powerful language such as Tertullian and Augustine also worked in this region.

When the latter died in 430, his episcopal city Hippo was besieged by the Vandals. Their name is now associated with anger for destruction, to which the brutal sacking of Rome in 455 contributed significantly. The basis for the attack on the Eternal City was the conquest of the former Roman North Africa, where the Vandals had built up a Christian kingdom since 429, which at times persecuted political and religious opponents with the greatest severity. Dracontius also spent some time in the prison of his Vandal masters, where he found the opportunity to write pious poems with skill. Released from prison, he wrote Christian texts as well as those that were in the tradition of classical poetry. Because this flourished under the rule of the Vandals, who were by no means just barbarians,but knew how to enjoy many of the conveniences of the ancient world.

One likes to think of the history of late antiquity as a linear development; an increasingly Christian and barbaric character seems to have ruined the richness of classical culture, but also the ease of a life of pleasure. However, non-simultaneities determined this world. The Vandals sacked Rome and promoted Latin poetry. Dracontius is one and the same poet, in his Christian poems as in those that put pagan deities at the center. Such verses allowed an allegorical understanding - Christian readers were quite familiar with the connection between suffering and mildness that Venus stands for here. But aesthetic enjoyment certainly played a role. This is how a mythological and elegant poem like “The Origin of the Roses” was created under a barbaric and Christian ruler.

But the poem is not only elegant: the proximity of beauty and injury, of love and violence is a classic theme that pervades the elegiac distiches of Dracontius.

The reader learns of a woman who flees from a violent man and injures herself in the process and whose wound then works well.

A conciliatory solution from Dracontius' point of view.

If you read these verses in a gender-sensitive manner, you will not overlook the fact that women are committed to the role of the benevolent victim who has to suffer when a man follows his urge.

As so often in antiquity, the violence of a social order is hidden under the varnish of elegance.