A History of Groves

Jan Woudstra, Colin Roth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317200161
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The grove, a grouping of trees, intentionally cultivated or found growing wild, has a long diverse history entwined with human settlement, rural practices and the culture and politics of cities. A grove can be a memorial, a place of learning, a site of poetic retreat and philosophy or political encampment, a public park or theatre, a place of hidden pleasures, a symbol of a vanished forest ecology, or a place of gods or other spirits. Yet groves are largely absent from our contemporary vocabulary and rarely included in today's landscape practice, whether urban or rural. Groves are both literal and metaphorical manifestations, ways of defining spaces and ecologies in our cultural life. Since they can add meaning to urban forms and ecologies and contribute meaningfully to the significance of place, critical examination is long overdue. The editors have taken care to ensure that the text is accessible to the general reader as well as specialists.

1 The sacred places of the immortal ones

Ancient Greek and Roman sacred groves

Maureen Carroll

Introduction

Many cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world acknowledged the close relationship between the divine world and the natural environment, with trees and vegetation being interpreted as a sign of God-given life. Accordingly, the temples and sanctuaries of many gods in ancient Assyria, Egypt, and Israel, to name but a few locations, included planted precincts that were considered holy and inviolable.¹ The ancient Greeks and Romans, like their neighbours, also maintained and worshipped in sacred groves. An early expression of the belief that ‘the sacred groves of the immortal ones’ were the dwelling places of semi-divine beings can be found in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite; in the groves of the Hymn lived the nymphs who were born as trees.² The Greeks also had notions of paradise in a mythical grove of plenty and immortality.³ The importance of the ancient sacred groves of the heroic past in the literature and thought of Roman Italy in the late first century BC also reflects a cultural and religious reverence for ancient trees and rustic landscapes.⁴ Although secular groves of trees and orchards also existed in Greco-Roman antiquity, this paper focuses on those connected with cult sites, simply because they are more abundantly attested.

The types of evidence available for the study of Greek and Roman sacred groves are varied, as this brief introduction attempts to show. One category of material is the textual evidence in the form of written accounts and inscriptions. Descriptions of venerable sacred groves of olives, pines, cypresses, oaks, laurels, and fruit trees can be found in Pausanias’ guide book of ancient Greece in the later second century AD, and he refers to them as some of ‘the most memorable and interesting things’ for Roman cultural tourists to visit.⁵ And because of the text of a Roman inscription of c. 300 AD, we know that the ancient sacred olive grove associated with the temple of Athena on the acropolis of Lindos on Rhodes was renewed with plantings donated by the priest Aglochartos.⁶

There is also the pictorial evidence. A marble funerary relief of c. 100 BC from the eastern Mediterranean, now in the Getty Museum, for example, depicts a woman and four young girls in a wooded grove.⁷ A single tree with five large leafy boughs is depicted, which is a common shorthand and space-saving reference to a whole grove in Greek sculpture and painting. That this grove is sacred is evident by the presence of a sacrificial altar and a pillar with a votive offering (a lekythos) from a mortal suppliant on top of it. A belted dress as another votive offering is suspended from the tree.

Finally, a valuable body of material for the study of sacred groves in the Greek and Roman worlds is the archaeological evidence. Excavations at the Greek temple of Zeus at Nemea, for example, revealed the planting pits for twenty-four trees dug into the rocky subsoil of the sanctuary’s precinct in the fifth and fourth centuries BC.⁸ Charred remains of cypress wood at the bottom of the pits actually confirmed Pausanias’ description of the grove as one consisting of this species of tree.⁹

In the subsequent sections, these main strands of evidence for sacred groves in Classical antiquity will be explored in more depth in an attempt to understand their function, use, location, and appearance.

Defining a sacred grove: the written sources

It is important at the outset to establish what ancient terms were used to refer to sacred groves and what properties such groves were thought to possess. In addition, it will be essential to this discussion to establish what activities took place in the groves ‘of the immortal ones’ and what provisions existed for their protection.

In the Greek texts, άλσος (alsos) is normally the word used for ‘sacred grove’, although this also could apply to a holy place, with or without trees.¹⁰ Κñπος (kepos) is generally used for ‘garden’, whether it was sacred or not.¹¹ The distinction between ‘grove’ and ‘garden’ is not always clear-cut; a grove of trees could be called a κñπος, especially if it had fruit trees. The Latin texts use either nemus or lucus for a grove. Although scholars do not always agree on the distinction between the two, a lucus generally appears to have been a grove that was created and inhabited by divine spirits and was left in a natural state, whereas nemus refers to a grove created or manipulated by man and furnished with sacred buildings and images.¹²Hortus refers to a garden, but it appears to be used only in reference to secular gardens.

As suggested by this brief analysis of Greek and Latin terms, sacred groves could be natural woodlands or entirely man-made plantings of trees. Both types of sacred groves are attested by literary descriptions and by archaeological enquiry, although, as Edlund points out, even so-called natural open-air cult sites were generally shaped by man, be it through their enclosure within a boundary wall or their embellishment with an altar or sacred images and so on.¹³ A relevant inscription from Rome sheds light on the creation of a sacred grove. The city of Rome was laid out on seven hills, each of the separate hills originally distinct and occupied by population groups, the Montani (hill dwellers). The Montani of the Oppian Hill had an inscription carved in the first century BC which recorded that the mayor (magister) and priests (flamines) of this community had been responsible for enclosing their central shrine and planting trees in it.¹⁴

Throughout the Greek and Roman worlds, sacred groves were religious spaces, marked out of the landscape from non-sacred land, and they were places where mortals worshipped and communicated with the divine. The ancient Greek verb τέμνειν, to cut out or to mark off, is reflected in the word temenos, used for sanctuary space marked off by a wall or a boundary stone.¹⁵ In Roman religious law, ownership of the land was transferred ritually through consecratio to the deity, thereby removing it from secular access.¹⁶ In these spaces, not only the trees but also, on some occasions, the living inhabitants of the groves possessed sanctity. The sacred grove (lucus) of Lacinian Juno six miles from Croton in southern Italy, for example, was enclosed by dense woods and tall fir trees, and in the midst of the grove were pastures for cattle sacred to the goddess.¹⁷

Some inscriptions record measures taken to protect sacred groves. Particularly interesting in this regard are two Greek decrees from the island of Kos, one dating to the end of the fifth century, the other to the fourth century BC.¹⁸ The texts reveal that the cypress trees in the sanctuary of Apollo Kyparissios and Asklepios were not to be cut down and it was prohibited to remove wood from the precinct; any infringement was punished with a stiff monetary fine of 1000 drachmas to the authorities and offenders were deemed guilty of impiety against the temple. These measures had, in the first instance, a practical aim, the preservation of the trees in a time of general deforestation in Greece and an increased demand for sources of timber, but they also had a religious aim in protecting the sanctity of the temple’s property.¹⁹ Also Roman epigraphic evidence allows us to recognise rules and principles for preserving sacred groves, and these have much stronger religious aims. According to inscriptions and literary references, the Romans considered violations of sacred groves religious offences.²⁰ A municipal decree from Spoletium, dating to the period after 241 BC, for example, prohibited the removal of anything belonging to the sacred grove and the cutting of wood in it, except on the day of an annual festival.²¹ Any violation of the grove was punished by an expiatory animal sacrifice directly to Jupiter and the payment of a fine. Cutting wood in a sacred grove might even be punishable by death, as it was for Decimus Turullius who felled trees in a sacred grove on Kos to acquire timber for the fleet of Mark Antony in 32–31 BC; the victor over Mark Antony, Octavian, had the man executed.²²

Although the destruction or mutilation of sacred wooded sites was unacceptable and punishable, there are recorded incidents of this kind of intentional damage during times of war, and there is no information on how any rules or laws governing the protection of sacred groves might have been applied in these cases. King Philip V of Macedon, for example, attacked Pergamon on the western coast of Asia Minor in 201 BC, ordering his army to cut down the trees in the sanctuary of Athena Nikephoros, the city’s presiding deity and dynastic protectress of Pergamon’s Attalid kings.²³ The Greek gymnasia and schools in the suburbs of Academy, Lykeion, and Kynosarges outside Athens were situated from the fifth century BC along the banks of the Kephissos, Eridanos, and Ilissos rivers in the midst of ancient sacred groves and shrines, some of which were ‘natural’, others man-made.²⁴ The plane, elm, poplar, and olive trees in the Academy district, in particular, were praised in many ancient sources.²⁵ These institutions were highly revered even much later by aristocratic Romans seeking tuition in rhetoric and philosophy there, but not all Romans viewed these sacred groves as inviolable. The Roman general Sulla, in his attack on Athens in 86 BC and in need of timber for his siege engines, felled the trees in the shady groves of the Academy and Lykeion distric...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The sacred places of the immortal ones: ancient Greek and Roman sacred groves
• 2 Seeing the wood for the trees: the long-term aesthetics of woodland in England
• 3 The sacredness of groves
• 4 The history and development of groves in English formal gardens (1600–1750)
• 5 Colourful groves: the origins of the woodland garden
• 6 Groves as metaphor for the fragmented redwood forests of California
• 7 Sacred groves in African contexts (Benin, Cameroon): insights from history and anthropology
• 8 Groves in Chinese gardens and beyond them
• 9 Korean village groves
• 10 The shrine groves of modern Japan
• 11 Nature mystification and the example of the ‘heroes’ groves in early twentieth-century Germany
• 12 Dan Kiley: groves, space and complexity
• Index