previous next

CHAP. 25.—THE PETILIUM: THE BELLIO.

But, by Hercules! it is Italy herself that has given its name to the petilium,1 an autumnal flower, which springs up in the vicinity of thorny brakes, and recommends itself solely by its colour, which is that of the wild rose. The petals of it are small, and five in number; and it is a remarkable circumstance in this plant, that the head of it droops at first, and it is only after it becomes erect that the petals make their appearance, forming a small corolla of various colours, enclosing a yellow seed.

The bellio,2 too, is a yellow flower, formed of3 fifty-five filaments circularly arranged, in the shape of a chaplet. These are, both of them, meadow flowers, which are mostly of no use whatever, and consequently without names: even the flowers just mentioned are known sometimes by one name, and sometimes by another.

1 Sprengel says that this is the Geum rivale of Linnæus; but then the Geum is a spring, and not an autumn flower, its blossoms bear no resemblance to those of the eglantine, and its seeds are not yellow.

2 Generally supposed to be the Chrysanthemum segetum, or golden daisy.

3 "Pastillicantibus quinquagenis quinis barbulis coronatur." Pliny is unusually verbose here.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Latin (Karl Friedrich Theodor Mayhoff, 1906)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

hide References (2 total)
  • Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page (2):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: