Gardens are a curious hybrid of art and nature, otium and negotium, inside and outside, country and city, pleasure and utility. They can embody the fetish of frugality—but horti can also show off status and power. In this excellent book, K. Sara Myers brings these marginal spaces back into the centre of focus and discusses how gardens are used and viewed in a wide range of literary sources.
After a helpful Introduction, the first chapter (‘Masculine Horticultural Self-fashioning’) shows us the masculine character of Roman literary gardening. Male icons such as Cincinnatus and Dentatus exemplified the image of men as the cultivators: women found in a garden were seen as suspect (vamps and/or hags) or else innocent virgins stumbling into danger—and Pliny enjoyed his estate as a ‘wife-free zone’ (p.79). Men exercised control, even when—especially when—the uilicus did all the actual work, and later in the book Myers shows (p.215) how grotesquely sexist and violent gardening imagery could be: gardening in Columella is like rape, but the earth is ‘asking for it’ (10.95). Successful men built up large horti or estates and used them to demonstrate their power and wealth, feeling no shame that these estates were built with the work of enslaved persons (who were seen as ‘prostheses of their master’s body’ (p.40)). They imported exotic plants in a show of ‘botanical imperialism’ (p.10) akin to the importing of exotic beasts for the arena.
Statius and Pliny present estates as an acceptable form of elite masculine self-display. Statius praises the estates of his patrons as reflecting well on their character and culture, and wealth and villa-culture allow for ‘the otium necessary for the literary studies which both poet and patrons pursue’ (p.65): he also uses these landscapes and structures as ‘symbols of his own poetry’. Pliny similarly sees his villa as reward for his hard work (p.69) but also realises that literary work is the only safe way to glory now that the emperor is in charge (Ep. 3.7.14).
Not all Romans agreed, of course. Importing foreign features such as the palaestra and gymnasium into the Roman estate could be seen as replacing agricultural productivity with literary and philosophical fecundity but could also seem to represent effeminate luxuria. The Stoic-leaning Manilius (5.254–268) castigates those who cultivate ‘soft arts’ of flower-growing and gardening, and Seneca—a man who had extensive gardens of his own—is rude (Ben. 4.13.1) about those who spend their time in gardens ‘to fatten [their] bodies, pale from inaction’ (p.51). For some Romans—especially if a hortus was decorative rather than productive and if it took a man away from politics—‘wealth and withdrawal’ made a man mollis. That said, for every fishpond-owning Lucullus, you had a Cicero using his garden as a place to do hard philosophy—with macho historical Romans such as Cato in the cast-list. Writers enjoyed the literary potential of the hortus, from the locus amoenus trope to the metaphorical use of gardens and flowers and the literary appropriation of the ‘simple life’ in Callimachean terms of ‘poetic poverty’ (p.33).
Chapter 2 looks at the ‘literary paradigm’ which is Virgil Georgics 4.116–148, in which the poet describes an old Corycian at work on his plot. Virgil’s brief digression (‘narratologically fenced off’ (p.85)) raises many questions. Why does Virgil introduce this tantalising glimpse only to dismiss it? Why is the man (a) old and (b) Corycian? How does it position itself in the Greek poetic tradition? This gardener is in harmony with nature—while the farmer is often at war with it—and he may represent ‘the creation of order in nature’ (p.94), especially since his garden is productive rather than merely decorative and delivers produce which is edible (apples) and marketable (roses). His garden, furthermore, is no trite locus amoenus, the old man does not ‘sing’, the poet brings in no gods and no leering Priapus, the plot is small and humble, and the poet describes himself as exclusus from it (4.147)—all of which hint at this garden as being a ‘metaphorical and aestheticized representation of the poet’s own poetic labor’.
Chapter 3 (‘Women in the Garden’) offers detailed and insightful readings of Catullus and Ovid which also shows how these Roman authors look back to a long Greek tradition of where women fit into this landscape. Catullus’ wedding poems (61 and 62) make use of horticultural imagery to show, in the case of the bride, ‘the shelter provided by her parents, the briefness of her youth and her latent fertility’ (p. 108)—the bride and her virginity are flowers to be plucked, whereas the male chorus respond with their own imagery of the vine in need of ‘marriage’ to the sturdy elm tree. Myers perhaps underplays the playful tone of these poems: the occasion is a joyful one and the emotions are to a large extent expected without being wholly serious: people do (after all) cry at weddings without being unhappy. With Ovid we enter a very different and very disturbing world where gardens are places of doubt and danger. Ovid’s Pomona (Metamorphoses 14.623–771) takes on the male role of garden cultivator, but is faced by the rapist Vertumnus disguised as an old woman. In a tale which today would be uncomfortably triggering, Pomona succumbs readily to the charms of Vertumnus even as he prepares to force himself on her (14.770–771). The goddess Flora in the Fasti (5.183–376) is similarly disturbing in Ovid’s treatment, being raped by Zephyrus and rewarded with a garden and an offer of marriage which she is happy to accept (5.205–206). Her garden is sexually ambiguous: Flora engenders Mars by giving Juno a flower—thus facilitating all-female childbirth while undermining the macho Mars—and her garden is full of flowers denoting sexually frustrated people of both sexes. The tale is generically transgressive in that it is in the wrong book of the Fasti—and Flora’s garden significantly has no walls, reflecting ‘her own lack of control over the boundary of her raped body’ (p.135).
Chapter 4 examines how satiric verse and epigram exhibit ‘varying combinations of invective, obscenity, philosophical diatribe and literary parody of higher genres’ (p.136) and so ‘trample’ on the literary gardens, staining the virgin plots with obscenity and sordid realism. Myers shows how these literary gardens are often seen as being under the aggressive control of Priapus ‘whose rusticity also mocks literary pretentiousness’ (p.193). This grotesque libidinous scarecrow threatens with penetration anyone who comes in, and his aischrological crudity perhaps appealed to urban nostalgie de la boue, while also affording the contrast of sophisticated form and crude content. The poems purport to be as rough-hewn as the statue but this fututor gloriosus (in Plantade’s glorious phrase[1]) is no mean poet. His garden becomes a text, his poma are poemata, and so, although Priapus does not invite the shockable virgin Muses into the garden (p.145) he manages to create (in)decent poetry without them. Myers also discusses Horace Satires 1.8, in which Priapus tells us how he scared two hags out of his garden. On the face of it, this is a jolly enough tale: the scary witches Canidia and Sagana are themselves scared out of their wits and end up losing their false teeth and false hair along with their stolen goods and their dignity. The new idyllic garden turns out to be a reclaimed graveyard, the scary witches are pantomime dames, and Priapus’ threat is mere wind—which reflects both on his own capabilities and also on the pathetic terror of the women. Myers, however, offers more rewarding insights into the poem’s programmatic artistry, seeing it using ‘the newly defined (and defied) boundaries of the garden to mark a space for poetic definition and exclusion in his reconfiguration and refinement of satire’ (p.151). Those renovated gardens (where the remains of the less salubrious past are still evident) are a metapoetic symbol of Horace’s poetic clean-up of Lucilius (p.158), and Priapus may represent the ‘recreated’ Horace, now finding himself in Maecenas’ circle just as Priapus is in Maecenas’ garden.
This chapter also shows how a variety of other writers used gardens to good effect. Martial (11.18) pleads literal poverty and his invitations to meagre dinners look to the poetics of the small-scale (p.166)—and what could be smaller-scale than epigram? In Petronius, Encolpius and Circe (127.9) meet for alfresco sex near sterile plane-trees which have flowers around them which are ‘soft’ like Encolpius, who also bookishly alludes to laurel as ‘Daphne’ and the swallow as ‘Procne’—not seeing perhaps that these women’s unhappy outcomes hint at his own frustration (p.172). The Appendix Vergiliana provides two excellent poems to conclude this chapter. Moretum (detailing the life of a poor rural labourer) is a virtuoso piece of work: epic treatment of very unepic content, realism mixed with moral ideals, literary pastiche and elevation of the sordid. Simulus grows crops not to eat but to sell at market (77–78)—and his lettuce is there to ease rich stomachs bloated with cuisine way out of his humble reach. Copa is another low-life tale showing us Syrisca the sexy inn-keeper, enticing customers with her lascivious ways and her wonderful garden; a female Priapus exerting control over her garden, using Epicurean themes of ‘live for today’ as a marketing slogan with travesty of the rural idyll transferred to what sounds like a pleasure-palace brothel. Here, as Myers shows us, we have urban verismo meeting Arcadian pastoral, ‘vulgarising elegy and Virgilian bucolic’ (p.193).
Most Roman writers only mentioned gardens incidentally. The only one who wrote exclusively about gardens was Columella, and he did so in both verse (dealing with flowers) and then in prose (on herbs and vegetables)—one in colour, as it were, and the other in monochrome. Myers devotes an eye-opening chapter (‘Columella and the poetics of horticulture’) to this somewhat neglected text.[2] For Columella, horticulture is an ancillary but profitable area of expertise (p.198), and the cost of living makes ‘growing your own’ an economic necessity for poor people—although Emily Gowers memorably summed up his attitude as ‘let them eat kale’ and his rustics sell their flowers and come home drunk and rich (p.201). [3] For Columella ‘the pleasure principle transforms the garden and makes it into a metapoetic image of its own decorative function within the De Re Rustica’ (p.206), while also allowing the author to ‘celebrate the benevolence and fecundity of nature in a concentrated space of topography and text’ (p.214). Columella also displays his Ennian, Callimachean and Hesiodic language (p.217), and his ‘cosmic and imperial scope’ (p.220) makes a fitting end to the sequence of authors discussed in this fine and thought-provoking book.
In the Conclusion, Myers pulls together some of the many threads which this book has uncovered and makes some general remarks, and in a brief Epilogue she looks at some later writers: Greek novelists and some wonderful pagan and Christian poets. Myers is to be thanked and congratulated for her remarkably interesting and stimulating book, whose long gestation is shown in her astonishing range of reference and command of the literature. She has the rare ability to present (often contradictory) material with clarity and insight, and her book deserves to be read by all who study Latin—and all who enjoy their gardens.
[1] Plantade Emmanuel, ‘Priapus Gloriosus; Poétique d’un Discours Compensatoire,’ in Les Vers du plus nul des poètes…: nouvelles recherches sur les Priapées: actes do la journée d’etude organiséee le 7 novembre 2005 a l’université Lumière-Lyon 2 edited by F. Biville, E Plantade and D Vallat (2008) 99–119: cited at Myers p.145n.52
[2] Interest in this writer is however picking up: see for instance Lars Mielke, Spaliere für Silvinus: Charakterschulung in Columellas Werk über die Landwirtschaft. Hypomnemata, 219. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2024
[3] E. Gowers ‘Vegetable Love: Virgil. Columella and Garden Poetry’ Ramus 29 (2000) 136.