“Roman Assimilation of Greek Myths and Botany” traces the absorption of Greek botanical thought by the Romans. Although Roman thinkers—Cato the Elder, Varro, Virgil and Columella—wrote about agriculture, theoretical botany was largely abandoned, while the one—sex model of plants remained entrenched. Roman myths, many syncretized with Greek, reinforced the gender bias by which plants were associated with women. Chloris, Greek goddess of flowers, was assimilated to Flora, and Ceres to Demeter. Ovid recounts a story concerning Flora and Juno that symbolically connects flowers to parthenogenesis. Of Greek derived works on plants, only Pliny’s Historia Natura and Nicolaus of Damascus’ De Plantis were widely available in the Middle Ages. One interpretation of flowers by Pliny the Elder, that they were created to delight human beings, endured into of the Christian era, while St. Augustine sited the “degeneration” of plants grown from seed as “palpable evidence” for original sin.
