Appendix Vergiliana. De rosis nascentibus: un celebru carpe diem antic

A famous poem, included in the Appendix Vergiliana, although subsequently attributed to Ausonius, as well, De rosis nascentibus is written in elegiac couplets and centres on the theme of the rose – a deeply fascinating theme, approached, throughout time, in various writings in the western and eastern spaces. The admiration for roses, intensely coloured and fragrant, and for their beauty in spring, is, however, contextually intertwined with melancholic reflections on the fragility of this flower, which becomes a symbol of transience, of universal temporality: fugit inreparabile tempus (Vergil, Georgica, III,
284). The notion of the passage of time – illustrated by the short life of roses – ties in naturally, in the final couplet, with the motif of fully living the present moment. The latter is seen as the only solution in the face of the inescapable end, the famous Horatian carpe diem being a widely circulated motif in Latin literature.