----- According, moreover, to a tradition preserved to later times, the seasons of the year, which in remote antiquity were but three, they symbolically represented by a rose, an ear of corn, and an apple.[1278] This division is thought to have been borrowed from the Egyptians, in whose country, however, the apple was never sufficiently naturalised to be taken as an emblem of one of the seasons of the year. ----- Footnote 1278: “Les Egyptiens, selon le département de leur Roy Horus, n’en mettaient que trois (saisons): le printemps, l’esté, et l’automne: leur attribuans quatre mois à chacune, et les figurans par une rose, une espy, et une pomme, ou raisin.” Les Images de Platte Peinture des deux Philostrates, par Vigenère, Paris, fol. 1627, p. 555. ----- But, at whatever period the rose began to be cultivated, it evidently, as soon as known, shared with the violet the admiration of the Athenian people, whose extensive plantations of this most fragrant shrub recall to mind the rose gardens of the Fayoum, or Serinaghur. The secret, moreover, was early discovered of hastening or retarding their maturity, so as to obtain an abundant supply through every month in the year.[1279] Occasionally, too, numbers of rosebuds were laid among green barleystalks, plucked up by the roots, in unglazed amphoræ, to be brought forth and made to blow when wanted. Others deposited them between layers of the same material on the ground, or dipped them in the liquid dregs of olives. Another mode of preserving the rose was exceedingly curious,—cutting off the top of a large standing reed, and splitting it down a little way, they inserted a number of rosebuds in the hollow, and then bound it softly round and atop with papyrus in order to prevent their fragrance from exhaling.[1280] How many varieties of this flower[1281] were possessed by the ancients it is now, perhaps, impossible to determine; but they were acquainted with the common, the white, and the moss rose, the last, in Aristotle’s[1282] opinion, the sweetest, together with the rose of a hundred leaves,[1283] celebrated by the Persian poets. Even the wild rose was not wholly inodorous in Greece.[1284] Roses were artificially blanched by being exposed while unfolding to powerful and repeated fumigations with sulphur.[1285] The roses which grew on a dry soil were supposed to be the sweetest, while their fragrance was augmented by planting garlic near the root.[1286] To cause them to bloom in January, or in early spring (for even in the most southern parts of Greece the rose season only commences in April)[1287] various means were resorted to; sometimes, the bushes were watered twice a-day during the whole summer; on other occasions, a shallow trench was dug at a distance of about eighteen inches round the bush, into which warm water was poured morning and evening;[1288] while a third, and, perhaps, the surest, method was to plant them in pots, or baskets,