The story
In Aeschylus’s Greek play Agamemnon, first staged in 458 BC, a king returns home after long years at war. At his palace he finds a path of rich crimson cloth laid out for him to walk on.
He hesitates. Walking on such costly cloth, he says, is an honor fit for gods, not for a man. In the end he is persuaded to step onto it anyway. Ancient audiences would have felt the danger of that pride.
Red cloth stayed a sign of rank for centuries. In 1821, a red carpet was rolled out to welcome President James Monroe on a visit to South Carolina.
In 1902, the New York Central Railroad laid plush crimson carpets for passengers boarding its luxury train, the 20th Century Limited. That treatment is credited with giving us the phrase “red-carpet treatment,” and soon anyone given grand hospitality was getting the red carpet.
