Spring is an 1894 oil-on-canvas painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, which has been in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California, since 1972. The painting relates the Victorian custom of children collecting flowers on May Day back to an Ancient Roman spring festival, perhaps Cerealia or Floralia or Ambarvalia, although the details depicted in the painting do not correspond to any single Roman festival. It was the inspiration for the scene of Julius Caesar's triumphal entry into Rome in the 1934 film Cleopatra. Description The tall narrow painting depicts a procession of women and children along a Roman street and down some marble steps. Spectators cheer from the classical buildings of polychrome marble to either side, some throwing down flowers. The participants in the procession are garlanded with bright flowers, with some also bearing baskets of flowers or branches of blossom, and other playing musical instruments: a flute, pan pipes, and tambourines. The choice of flowers in the painting seems to be driven more by aesthetic and colour considerations than the symbolic meanings of the Victorian language of flowers. Towards the rear of the procession is a bearded priest holding a metal jug, with other attendants carrying a casket, a torch, and a large portable ivory altar which is emerging from the building to the right. Other attendants bear two silver sculptures of a horned satyr with a child and fruit, and two more hold poles with a banner slung between, bearing a Latin fragment (then attributed to Catullus, known as Carmina Catulli 8): "Hunc lucum tibi dedico consecroque, Priape / qua domus tua Lampsacist quaque silva, Priape/ nam te praecipue in suis urbibus colit ora / Hellespontia ceteris ostreosior oris" (loosely translated: "This enclosure I dedicate and consecrate to thee, Priapus / At Lampsacus where is thy home and sacred grove, Priapus / For thee specially in its coastal cities are you worshipped / Of Hellespont more abundant in oysters than all other coasts"). Many of the participants and spectators were modelled by Alma-Tadema's friends or members of his family. They include the bearded composer George Henschel and his daughter Helen, high on a balcony to the right. A bearded bust to the lower left may be a self-portrait of Alma-Tadema, beside the base of a column where the painting is signed and numbered: " L Alma Tadema Op CCCXXVI". The surrounding scene is an