Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 2, No. 64. Saturday, 23 Feb 1991. Date: Sat, 23 Feb 91 11:39 EST From:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Subject: Sidon's flowers Although I've nosed around in all sorts of emblem and herbal sources, and although I've had various friends on the lookout for years, I've yet to come up with the definitive gloss for the following moment in Middleton's *Ghost of Lucrece*. Maybe it will ring a bell with someone on SHAKSPER. I reproduce the edited stanza from *Ghost*, and my current annotation. Lucrece is speaking: O hell-eyed lust, when I behold thy face Prefigured in my ghost, drawn in my mind, I think of Sidon's flowers that grow apace And favour thee by quality and kind. They look like faith before, and fame behind, But if thou savour these well-favoured evils, They have the sight of gods, the scent of devils. 381. Sidon's flowers] ADAMS compares *Ciceronis Amor*, p. 123: "the flowers in *Sydon* as they are pretious in the sight so they are pestilent in savour." In another context, Greene later refers to withered lilies as "faire and unsavourie"(165), and in *Greene's Vision* (1592?) he speaks of "flowers of *Egipt* [which] please the eye, but infect the stomack"(12.203). LARSON considers the trope to be of Greene's inventing; but Middleton's version goes beyond Greene, perhaps through dependence on an unknown source. The content of the figure is a commonplace, of course: all the way from Dead Sea Apples to Hector's hapless victim, "Most putrefied core, so fair without" (*T&C* 5.8.1). But if anyone out there has ever heard it located in flowers in Sidon, I'd love to hear about it. Thanks. Skip Shand