ttps:////»https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd»> Portrait of Augustus Caesar ()
The plant represented victory in ancient Greece and Rome. The origin of the symbol is in the mythology common to both cultures. According to her, the god Apollo would have fallen in love with the beautiful nymph Dafne, but she did not have the same feeling for him and fled to the mountains, trying to escape her pursuit. Dafne ended up asking her father, the god Peneio, for protection, who chose to transform her into a laurel tree: that’s how the nymph defeated Apollo. “For this reason, the winners of any type of competition were crowned with leaves from this plant. Among the Romans, when a commander won a battle, he also sent a parchment wrapped in laurel leaves to the Senate, informing what had happened,” says historian Maria Corassim, from the University of São Paulo (USP).