CHAP. 3.—WHO INVENTED THE ART OF MAKING GARLANDS: WHEN THEY FIRST RECEIVED THE NAME OF “COROLLÆ,” AND FOR WHAT REASON.
For in early times it was the usage to crown the victors in the sacred contests with branches of trees: and it was only at a later period, that they began to vary their tints by the combination1844 of flowers, to heighten the effect in turn by their colour and their smell—an invention due to the ingenuity of the painter Pausias, at Sicyon,1845 and the garland-maker Glycera, a female to whom he was greatly attached, and whose handiwork was imitated by him in colours. Challenging him to a trial of skill, she would repeatedly vary her designs, and thus it was in reality a contest between art and Nature; a fact which we find attested by pictures of that artist even still in existence, more particularly the one known as the “Stephaneplocos,”1846 in which he has given a likeness of Glycera herself. This invention, therefore, is only to be traced to later than the Hundredth1847 Olympiad.
Chaplets of flowers being now the fashion, it was not long before those came into vogue which are known to us as Egyptian1848 chaplets; and then the winter chaplets, made for the time at which Earth refuses her flowers, of thin laminæ of horn stained various colours. By slow degrees, too, the name was introduced at Rome, these garlands being known there at first as “corollæ,” a designation given them to express the remarkable delicacy1849 of their texture. In more recent times, again, when the chaplets presented were made of thin plates1850 of copper, gilt or silvered, they assumed the name of “corollaria.”