(OUP) 202 (h/b) 314pp £59 (ISBN 978019777320)
This book proudly declares itself to be ‘the first comprehensive study of the representation of gardens in Latin Literature’ (Preface p.ix). It offers a methodical examination of mainly fictional garden descriptions in the major texts of the first centuries BC and AD, a period when there was a growth of interest among elite male estate owners both desiring practical knowledge of agriculture and also keen to use garden design as a tool to convey their status and political aspirations. The book is meticulously documented with extensive footnotes and bibliography, not merely to elucidate what these gardens can tell us about their owners’ views of ‘gender, art and human relations with nature’, but also to show how they reflect Roman attitudes towards society, ethics, economics, politics and even geopoetics (poetry of the earth).
In the introduction M. sets out the scope of her study by defining a garden, be it a small vegetable plot or a larger showpiece, as a bounded space under cultivation to distinguish it from agricultural farming on a broader scale. She does also make clear the inevitable bias of our extant texts, which deal mostly with male-owned gardens as a result of the dearth of female-authored Classical literature, and also the limitations of even these male-authored texts, since they represent only certain (elite male-centred) uses for gardens, unlike other activities such as washing, dining, cooking, weaving and religious rites as evidenced by archaeological discoveries (p.226).
Chapter One commences the investigation with texts about real gardens, documenting the complex ways in which ‘new men’ like Cicero in the late Republic used gardens as a means of self-representation, not just as symbols of status and wealth, but also to declare their cultural aspirations and justify their participation in political life through their cultivation of the old Roman virtues of hard work and frugal self-sufficiency. These gardens promote positive masculine ideals for wealthy men as productive farmers and may also justify otium and exclusion from active political life, which could be criticised as the self-indulgence of unmanly Lucullan luxury, as being places of literary and philosophical productivity instead. Then as times changed, M. shows how in the writings of Statius and the Younger Pliny a garden retreat could even be seen as safer than a political career and equates artistic skill in the construction of a garden with the artistic skill of composing a work of literature itself.
Chapter Two provides a detailed textual analysis of Vergil, Georgics 4.116-48 (concerning the humble garden plot of the old Corycian in Tarentum), as the Latin model upon which so many later authors drew. The author also examines the complex interpretations that this garden has engendered among scholars: literary, aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and political as well as its use as a metapoetic symbol of Vergil’s task in his cultivated allusions to the literature of Hellenistic poets.
Chapter Three addresses the subject of women’s association with gardens chiefly in the poetry of Catullus and Ovid, who draw upon the Greek poetic traditions of lyric poetry and tragedy. Thus Catullus in his epithalamia (61, 62) shows the virginal bride protected in a walled garden. Then M. considers the intertextual dialogue between two passages of Ovid: Met. 14.622-771 where the virginal Pomona usurps the male role of gardening in her walled orchard and Vertumnus only wins favour by gender role switching as an old woman, and Fasti 5.183-376 where Flora, the victim of rape, cultivates the garden she is given as compensation, her worship also being concerned with the transgression of boundaries.
Chapter Four deals with Latin satire and epigram, in which gardens appear more frequently than in other genres of literature and which often use sophisticated literary parody to make fun of idealised country life and mock both poverty and excessive wealth. The Carmina Priapea show females as a threat to male control in the garden, while Horace in Sat 1.8 also demonstrates the violation of its boundaries by women as the statue of Priapus tries to exclude two unruly witches from his plot. Martial condemns unproductive gardens, but also writes laudatory garden descriptions while Petronius employs references to Homeric, Platonic and Ovidian landscapes in the Satyricon to undermine literary pretensions in gardens where his disreputable ‘hero’ Encolpius experiences failed sexual encounters. Likewise the Moretum and Copa parody Vergilian ideals through the contrast of their epic tone and language with the low status of female prostitutes and foreigners.
Finally, Chapter Five discusses Columella’s inclusion of two different accounts of horticulture, one in poetry, one in prose, modestly aiming to supplement Vergil’s Georgics with a literary poem full of learned allusions to garden literature, while also demonstrating how prose is better for conveying practical instruction in horticulture to help the landowner increase his revenue.
The conclusion provides an overview and summary of the function of garden spaces (p.222) and an epilogue presents a brief survey of the major continuities and changes in the treatment of gardens in later Classical literature up to the 6th c. AD and thence the influence of Jewish and Christian traditions. This is a very painstakingly researched book and all Latin is translated, making it suitable for able sixth formers and university students, but chiefly relevant to scholars of Classical studies in literature, art and archaeology.
Claire Gruzelier