Roll out the red carpet

The literal red carpet has ancient precedents: the earliest known reference is in Aeschylus' play Agamemnon (458 BC), where Clytemnestra lays a crimson path for her returning husband, although he balks, saying such honour befits the gods. In the United States a red carpet was laid for President James Monroe as he stepped off a riverboat at Georgetown, South Carolina, in 1821, after which the practice became standard for political dignitaries. The idiomatic 'red-carpet treatment' is usually traced to 1902, when the New York Central railroad rolled out a crimson carpet for passengers boarding its flagship 20th Century Limited train in New York; both the Smithsonian and the BBC date the phrase to this railroad custom. Hollywood then cemented the association, with a long red carpet at the Egyptian Theatre premiere of Robin Hood in 1922 and the Academy Awards adopting one from 1961. The ancient and 19th-century uses are documented facts about the carpet itself; the idiom's direct ancestry is the 1902 railroad practice, as the sources note it 'appears to mark' the phrase's origin rather than proving it outright.