The Roman Garden

Space, Sense, and Society

Katharine T. von Stackelberg

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134071647
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Architecture
• Categoría: Architecture General

This innovative book is the first comprehensive study of ancient Roman gardens to combine literary and archaeological evidence with contemporary space theory. It applies a variety of interdisciplinary methods including access analysis, literary and gender theory to offer a critical framework for interpreting Roman gardens as physical sites and representations.

The Roman Garden: Space, Sense, and Society examines how the garden functioned as a conceptual, sensual and physical space in Roman society, and its use as a vehicle of cultural communication. Readers will learn not only about the content and development of the Roman garden, but also how they promoted memories and experiences. It includes a detailed original analysis of garden terminology and concludes with three case studies on the House of Octavius Quartio and the House of the Menander in Pompeii, Pliny's Tuscan garden, and Caligula's Horti Lamiani in Rome.

Providing both an introduction and an advanced analysis, this is a valuable and original addition to the growing scholarship in ancient gardens and will complement courses on Roman history, landscape archaeology and environmental history.

1
ENTERING ROMAN GARDEN SPACE

The garden as a place occupies two spatial categories: the representational space described in Latin literature and painting, and the physical space inhabited by the designed garden. Prior to Wilhelmina Jashemski’s archaeological excavations of Campanian sites, Roman gardens were perceived almost entirely from a literary perspective. There are many landscape scenes in Latin and Greek literature, and each of these descriptions marks a different point of transition along the spectrum from inimical wilderness to cultivated field (ager) and the sensuous garden. The identification of these landscape[d] spaces—the terms used, the features described within them—is a substantial part of understanding Roman garden space, since for many the text is the first point of entry into the ancient garden.

The Roman garden: concept and object

The oldest and most commonly found Latin word signifying a domestic cultivated space is hortus.¹ Hortus probably derived from the Greek chortos, indicating an enclosed space used for growing food or fodder. Despite their initial similarity, the terms were semantically different. The Greek chortos was not primarily oriented towards people, but to animals. In the Homeric sense it was used to designate the area of the courtyard where cattle were kept (Homer Il. 11.774, 24.640). Consequently the produce from the chortos was primarily intended for livestock, and was differentiated from grain or food fit for human consumption (sitos) (Hdt. 9.41; Xen. Cyr. 8.6.12). In contrast, the Latin hortus was a space intimately connected with domestic space and human food production.

The very ubiquity of the term hortus presents problems of translation and signification. The Romans used hortus to signify a diverse range of cultivated spaces, from vegetable gardens to imperial parks. Although the relation between the two words is close enough to make the translation viable, between the actuality of the hortus and its translation as ‘garden’ lies an ambiguity of meaning that stands as an obstacle to understanding the role of garden space in Roman society. Two questions address this ambiguity: how did the hortus evolve as a discrete concept, and how did it relate to other green spaces that fall under the broad rubric of ‘Roman gardens’?

Conceptual evolutions: hortus, heredium, Horti

From its earliest appearance, and at each stage of its evolution, the hortus was concerned not only with property but also with Roman identity. In his encyclopaedic Natural History, Pliny the Elder called attention to the venerable meaning of hortus:

In our laws of the Twelve Tables the ‘farm’ [villa] is never named, instead the word ‘garden’ [hortus] is always used in that regard, while the garden proper is the ‘family estate’ [heredium].²

(Pliny HN 19.50)

The Twelve Tables, published in the fifth century BC, were the codification into statutory law of established customs.³ Therefore Pliny’s claim that hortus and heredium were definite concepts pre-dating the villa – a ubiquitous feature of Roman agricultural, social, and cultural life by his own era—accentuates their antiquity. By asserting that what contemporary Romans would recognize as a hortus was termed a heredium by their ancestors, Pliny establishes that the hortus and the heredium were conceptually related, an interconnection that suggests the importance of the hortus as a spatial signifier in Roman society. As the original Roman garden space, the heredium was an essentially productive and civic space; its practical dimensions measured two acres, as much land as could be ploughed by one man in a day, but its symbolic value was far higher. These two Roman acres (bina iugera) traditionally corresponded to the original land grant assigned by Romulus to each Roman citizen (Varro RR 1.10). The heredium symbolized the continuity between one generation of citizens and the next, since it was the inalienable portion of an estate and could not be broken up or bequeathed outside the family.

As a conceptual space, the hortus shared these associations with citizenship, identity, and legitimacy that were represented by the heredium. The Latin noun most closely related to hortus is cohors, a word that translates as both an enclosure and as a group of men who have banded together for a common purpose. Hortus and cohors both signify a root concept of ‘grouping together’, formulating a connection to heredium through the latter’s role in the Romulan tradition of Rome’s foundation. Hortus was able to replace heredium in common usage because both were lexicalized concepts that shared the same core meanings of cultivation and commonality. This time-honored conception of the hortus as part of the productive family farm is evident in the agricultural writings of Cato the Elder. Writing in the late second century BC, as Rome was entering its extended period of social and civic conflict, Cato promoted the traditional, conservative values of the republic. For Cato the hortus was a vital part of the profitable farm, its flowers and vegetables grown for sale and self-sufficiency (Cato Ag. 1.7, 8.2). Two centuries later, this concept of the hortus as an inherently virtuous allotment that promoted civic values and honest living was still current:

Indeed at Rome the garden itself was the poor man’s farm; the common folk provisioned themselves from a garden, how much more harmless their way of life was then!

(Pliny HN 19.52)

Yet, as Cato was writing his instructions on fertilizing the garden (Cato Ag. 36), another cultural force was at work, less interested in the mechanics of soil preparation and propagation than in the social and aesthetic impact of the garden site. The later identification of the hortus as villa established it as a pivotal space in a continuing process in which land ownership and social status were mutually interdependent. Although disparate concepts, both villa and heredium are linked by the hortus. In its original sense villa simply denoted a rural building that stood in opposition to the urban domus, with no prescribed set of meanings as to its size, amenities, or function. As the influence of the Roman republic spiraled into an Italian, and later Mediterranean, hegemony, the villa as both site and concept gained prestige. From the mid-second century BC it became the focus of social display between aristocratic Romans and an aspirational ideal for the non-elite.⁴ Since villa denoted a place that had originally been signified by hortus the villa site retained a marked emphasis on garden space, particularly as an appropriate medium for displaying social status and learning (Purcell 1995; Bergmann 2002: 87–90).

This role of the hortus in communicating status and prestige in the late republic is reflected in the writings of Cicero, who mentions horti in letters, legal speeches, political rhetoric and philosophical works.⁵ In almost every case the hortus is the object of acquisitive desire, his own or someone else’s. Once acquired, it becomes the locus for appropriate displays of educated taste and learning among a circle of friends, unless it belongs to a political opponent, in which case it is the site of dissipation and luxury.⁶ In contrast to the earlier writings of Cato, whose hortus was a subsidiary domestic area for growing herbs and produce (Cato Ag. 1.7, 8.2, 36), Cicero’s hortus synecdochically represents the whole of an elite estate. A new phenomenon, these urban and suburban horti were richly decorated with sculpture and were primarily the focus of leisure and competitive display. Their traditional productive aspect was not abandoned, but was scaled back or redirected towards luxury items (pastio villatica) (Hor. Carm. 2.15.1–10; Purcell 1995). Maintaining a garden on this scale required ample resources, and many eponymous sites were associated with the leading families of republican Rome. (Bearing this in mind, horti will be used to denote Roman gardens in the plural and Horti to denote the specific gardens of historic individuals located in and around the city of Rome.)

If Cato described the productive rationale of the hortus and Cicero its elite value, Pliny the Elder documented its cultural associations. Pliny’s hortus is essentially similar to Cato’s; it is a productive, irrigated space attached to a building and used to grow vegetables and useful plants.⁷ But the hortus in his Natural History has a mythic, historical and ethnographic dimension. It appears as the garden of the Hesperides and Alcinous, it can signify the exotic otherness of Egypt and Persia, and it has a historic part in Rome’s own past.⁸ Pliny reconfirms Cicero’s interest in the hortus as a medium for display; many of the great Horti of Rome are adorned with works of art, emphasizing the status of their imperial owner.⁹ As an encyclopedist, Pliny’s focus is on the minutiae of garden content, but his interest in the cultural value of the hortus, as a symbol of Rome’s agrarian innocence for example (HN 19.52), demonstrates the conceptual evolution of the hortus from a simple space of rural production to a complex space of social meaning.

This evolution of the hortus into a space with multiple levels of meaning is most apparent in the historical works of Tacitus.¹⁰ In the Germania, Tacitus describes a people that have the rudiments of civilization (agriculture and a calendar) but not the refinements (arboriculture, horticulture and the full complement of seasons):

In fact with the fertility and breadth of their land they do not exert themselves with labor so that they might plant orchards [pomaria], enclose meadows [prati] and irrigate gardens [horti]. Only corn is levied from the earth. Hence they do not arrange even the year itself into the same number of seasons we do. Winter, spring and summer are recognized and have names, they are equally ignorant of both the name and blessings of autumn.

(Tac. Ger. 26.2–3)

By calling attention to the rich soil and the absence of any other form of cultivation, Tacitus alludes to Homer’s account of the land of the Cyclopes, the powerful and savage beings who neither plant not sow (Homer Od. 9.105–111). For Tacitus, as for Homer, cultivation of the hortus is one of the natural occupations of a truly civilized people, one that the Germans, noble savages that they are, do not possess. In this instance the hortus is still visualized as the productive Catonian farm garden but there are other levels of meaning alluded to in the passage. By association, it is drawing on the early traditions of Rome’s foundation in which the allotment of the heredium (the early hortus) cements the mutual ties between the city and its citizens, an act of nation-building that the German tribes lack the capacity for in much the same way as they lack the word for autumn. Yet while the hortus in the Germania stands for civilization, in the Annals and Histories it is associated with surfeit and catastrophe, the focus of forced seizures, judicial murder, and corrupt luxury (Tac. Ann. 11.1, 12.59, Hist. 2.92, 3.14).

These apparently antithetical representations of the hortus converge in Latin poetry. The first significant appearance of the hortus in Latin poetry, in Vergil’s Georgics, describes an old man’s year-round labor and his admirable self-sufficiency:

For I recall how under the heights of Oebalia’s citadel, where the dark Galaesus waters golden fields, I saw an old Corycian man, who had a few acres of derelict farmland, not fertile enough for bullocks to plough for grain, nor fit for the flock, nor suitable to Bacchus’ vine. Yet here, as he planted scattered herbs among the briars, with white lilies round about, and pushy verbena, and slender poppy, he equalled in spirit the wealth of kings, and, returning home late in the evening, he used to load his table with an unbought feast. He was the first to pick roses in spring and apples in autumn, and when woeful winter was still breaking rocks with cold, and curbing running waters with ice, he was already clipping the soft leaves of the hyacinth, reproaching tardy summer and the dawdling zephyrs. Therefore he, too, was first to abound with fertile bees and a large swarm and the first to collect the frothing sweetness of the pressed honeycomb. His limes and wild laurels were the most plentiful, and however many fruits his plentiful tree clothed itself in young blossom, it kept just as many into the ripe autumn. He even spread slow elms in rows, tough pear trees, and thorns now bearing plums, and already a plane tree to furnish drinkers with shade.

(Ver. Geor. 4.129–146)

Although the description is idyllic, there is a darker note struck by the isolation of the old man, which stands in stark contrast to the communal normalcy of agriculture (the subject of the Georgics as a whole) and the society of bees (the specific subject of Book Four).¹¹ The old man’s garden is a refuge from the instability of human affairs, from the civil wars and proscriptions that tore the established social and political order apart, but it is also a relict of those turbulent times. No son or grandson will inherit this hortus as his heredium.

This tension between nostalgic utopianism and contemporary social pressures is maintained in the work of subsequent poets. Vergil’s presentation of the hortus as a poetic topos inspired something of a vogue among the other Augustan poets, particularly Horace and Ovid. Superficially, Horace’s hortus differs little from the gardens worked on Cato’s farm as part of the traditional rural economy, but this is a misleading impression (Hor. Ep. 1.14.40–44). For Horace the value of his garden lies not in its productive capacity, but in the respite from the irritations and concerns of city living (Hor. S...