THE ROMAN GARDEN

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 inter-
preting Roman gardens as physical sites and representations.
The Roman Garden: Space, Sense, and Society examines how the garden func-
tioned 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 environ-
mental history.

Katharine T. von Stackelberg is an Assistant Professor in the Department of

Classics, Brock University, Canada. Her research interests include the ancient
environment, Latin literature, Roman art, gender studies, and space theory.
THE ROMAN GARDEN
Space, sense, and society

Katharine T. von Stackelberg

 First published 2009
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2009 Katharine T. von Stackelberg
Typeset in Garamond by
Bookcraft Ltd, Stroud, Gloucestershire
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Stackelberg, Katharine T. von.
The Roman garden : space, sense, and society / Katharine T. von Stackelberg.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Gardens, Roman. I. Title.
SB458.55.S73 2009
712.0937-–dc22 2008054733
ISBN10: 0–415–43823–3 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–87519–2 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–43823–0 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–87519–3 (ebk)
 CONTENTS

List of figures viii

Acknowledgments ix

Imago Hortorum: introducing the Roman garden 1

1 Entering Roman garden space 9

The Roman garden: concept and object 9
The Roman garden: architecture, ornament, and design 24

2 The logic of Roman garden space 49

Social space and garden space, a theoretical perspective 50
Archaeology and garden space, a material perspective 59
The social and spatial logic of the Roman garden 66

3 Experiencing the Roman garden 71

Controlled space: gardens of power and influence 71
The roots of religio: gardens of awe 88
Pleasure gardens: amoenitas, otium, and luxuria 93

4 Space, sense, and society: three case studies 101

Passage and boundary: the House of Octavius Quartio
and the House of the Menander 101
A garden of letters: Pliny’s Tuscan villa 125
Politics and performance: Caligula and the Horti Lamiani 134

Conclusion: gardens bound and unbound 141

Appendix: Relative asymmetry values for the House of Octavius
Quartio and the House of the Menander 144
Notes 150
Bibliography 163
Index 176

vii
 FIGURES

1.1 Esquiline Venus, Rome 28

1.2 Terracotta figurine of a war elephant, Pompeii 29
1.3 Garden painting, House of the Golden Bracelet, Pompeii 31
1.4 Garden painting, Villa of Poppea, Oplontis 32
1.5 Ara Pacis Augustae detail, Rome 34
1.6 Lord Julius mosaic, Bardo Museum, Tunis 36
2.1 Simplified access analysis map 56
2.2 Simplified access analysis map, justified from exterior 57
2.3 Symmetrical and asymmetrical access analysis maps 58
2.4 Axes of differentiation in the Roman domestic house 63
4.1 House of Octavius Quartio, ground plan 103
4.2 House of the Menander, ground plan 108
4.3 House of Octavius Quartio, access map 114
4.4 House of Octavius Quartio, access map justified from exterior 116
4.5 House of the Menander, access map 118
4.6 House of the Menander, access map justified from exterior 119

viii
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All projects start with a question, and this one had its origins one spring
morning when my mother asked me what Roman gardens looked like.
Subsequent research to answer her question prompted a few of my own. This
book attempts to provide an answer to some of them.
Questions alone are not enough; eventually they must develop into a
dialogue. My thoughts have been immeasurably enriched by the conversa-
tions and guidance I received from Bettina Bergmann, Kathleen M. Coleman,
Karen Ní Mheallaigh, Ann Kuttner, Brian McGing, Hazel Dodge, and Herica
Valladares. I was also very fortunate early in my graduate career to have been
able to attend Susan Alcock’s W. B. Stanford Memorial Lectures at Trinity
College, Dublin. My colleagues at Dumbarton Oaks, where I was fortunate
to hold a Garden and Landscape Fellowship in 2004–5, provided a valuable
cross-cultural perspective.
Dialogue can only achieve so much without practical support. I wish to
acknowledge the financial support of Brock University Humanities Research
Institute, who paid for the image permissions and the work of Anthony Perri
on the maps and plans. In addition, the Trinity Trust and the Centre for Near
Eastern and Mediterranean Studies at Trinity College financed much of my
early research. I also am grateful to the editorial support of Richard Stoneman
and Lalle Pursglove. Nor could this book have been written without the valu-
able support of my family and friends. To all of you, my deepest gratitude and
highest thanks.

ix
 IMAGO HORTORUM
Introducing the Roman garden

In 1759, excavations at Castellammare di Stabiae in Campania discovered

Flora, one of the most haunting and popular icons of Roman art. Wearing a
yellow robe, seductively slipping off one shoulder, she turns her half-naked
back towards the viewer. Her left arm cradles a basket of flowers; her right
hand reaches out to pluck a spray of cream-colored blossoms. Her head is
angled so that she almost, but not quite, reveals her profile. It is this aura of
mystery, anticipating a moment of eternally deferred revelation, that makes
her the favorite among the quartet of sister-images discovered at the Villa
Arianna. The four frescoes are commonly, but by no means universally, iden-
tified as Leda, Medea, and Diana. Only Flora hides her face from the viewer.
Paradoxically, the very act of turning away connects the viewer to her. The
bend of her knee and the curve of her instep indicate that she is in motion,
and with her head half-turned as if to beckon, one feels drawn to follow.
The four women from Stabiae present numerous problems of identifica-
tion and interpretation,1 but one of the most striking, if least noted, elements
of their composition is that only Flora is presented within an environmental
context. Whereas Leda, Medea, and Diana are grounded within their frames
by only the briefest of lines, Flora is contextualized by a tall flowering plant
and the suggestion of a lawn. This detail, small as it is, nevertheless raises
the question: where should the viewer site Flora? Is she in the Elysian Fields,
a meadow, a garden? All of these are valid suggestions, and the appeal of
speculation for viewers at the panel’s original location within the villa (room
26) would have been intensified by the view from that room to the peristyle
garden. The vegetative detail of the Flora panel connects the imaginative space
within the painting to the physical space outside. It was a touchpaper to the
Roman imagination, triggering associations between the gardens of myth and
literature, and the gardens of personal and public experience.
That the Roman garden was as much a conceptual space as a physical place
is evident in the following, much quoted, passage by Pliny the Elder:

1
 THE ROMAN GARDEN

The lower classes of the city used to give their eyes a daily view of country
scenes by means of images of gardens [imagine hortorum] in their win-
dows.
(Pliny HN 19.59)

What exactly does Pliny mean by imago hortorum? The usual interpreta-
tion reads imago as referring to window boxes, although a case can also be
made for painted garden scenes (Kuttner 1999a; Linderski 2001). Yet I was
struck by the vast conceptual gulf between the Roman imago and the prosaic
window box. The imago was a resonant concept in Roman society, conveying
not only a visual image but also cultural information. An imago can indi-
cate a likeness, a ghost, a revered ancestral image, one’s own self-image, a
concept, a shadow, and the imagination itself. Material imagines were objects
of memory, designed to elicit planned responses (Favro 1996: 7). The imago
hortorum was therefore both an object and a concept saturated with cultural
content. A garden was not just a place, it was an idea of a place, experienced
on both a societal and individual level.
This book sets out to explore the Roman experience of gardens as
social spaces and cultural constructs. Pierre Grimal published a study on
the literary and historical sources for Roman gardens in 1943. But it was
Wilhelmina Jashemski’s pioneering work on garden archaeology in Pompeii
and Herculaneum during the 1960s that established archaeological aware-
ness of gardens as recoverable places. Relict gardens have been excavated
throughout the Roman empire in such diverse sites as Herodian palaces in
Judaea (Gleason 1987–8), private houses in Tunisia (Jashemski 1995), the
Villa of Livia at Prima Porta (Klynne and Liljenstolpe 2000; Pinto-Guillaume
2000), the sanctuary of Apollo at Pompeii (Carroll and Godden 2000), the
Palatine hill in Rome (Villedieu 2001), and the city of Petra (Bedal 2001). All
have added substantively to the body of knowledge on the content and design
of Roman gardens. As a result of their research data we are learning what the
Romans cultivated in their gardens and how they used them. But what we
know is only a static fragment of a complex, multilayered and animate space.
How can we hope to recover the experience of a living garden two thousand
years after the fact? What would it add to our knowledge if we could step into
Roman gardens and begin to perceive them through Roman eyes?
In answer to the first question, the experience of the Roman garden is not
as irrecoverable as it might initially appear. The physical reality of the Roman
garden may be gone but its representations flourish in literature and painting
(and a horticultural replanting program initiated in Pompeii during the 1990s
has been helpful in recreating their botanical identity). These representations,

2
 IMAGO HORTORUM

invested with social, intellectual and emotional responses, have only begun to
be explored.2 The difficulty lies in reconciling literary and visual material with
the physical evidence. Cultural symbols are only effective when they corre-
spond to a physical referent within their society. Without such a referent, the
symbol loses meaning, and no association or communication can take place.
Logically, there was a meeting point where the hortus of Vergil’s Corycian
gardener and the small garden of a domestic house in Pompeii coexisted,
where the iconographical and literary tradition of gardens transmitted infor-
mation reconcilable to the general values and social practices of garden inhab-
itants. That point is the imagination, not as the projection of fancy but as the
realization of garden space as an abstract concept, an ideal imago. Man-made
space consists not only of physical environmental organization but also of
the conceptual rules that govern its production. The investigation, identi-
fication, and codification of these rules are generally found in the fields of
sociology and geography. They are respectively identified as ‘space theory’ and
‘human geography’, and some of their methodologies have been already been
applied to Roman urbanization, but not to the Roman garden (Favro 1996;
Laurence 1994). Even in studies of the Roman house the garden is usually
represented as a blank lacuna of undifferentiated space. It is included, but not
integrated into the physical fabric of the house. By applying the principles
of space theory and access analysis to Roman gardens, this book initiates the
development of a theoretical framework to co-ordinate the interdisciplinary
study of Roman garden space as a cultural construct.
The second question, ‘How would understanding the experience of Roman
garden space contribute to our knowledge of Roman society?’, can be illus-
trated by a letter written in 1884 by Rodolfo Lanciani for The Athenaeum. In
it he described the recent excavation of the villa of Q. Voconius Pollio near
Marino and muses on the landscape aesthetics of the Romans:

The idea of an English park, of an English pleasure ground, in which

everything is left to nature, was unknown to them. The most famous
villas were wholly artificial: the terraces were laid out in regular squares
or parallelograms, with avenues crossing each other at right angles; the
walls supporting the terraces were straight and symmetrical; and even
vegetation, as Becker says, was forced into stiff geometrical figures, and
the knife and shears of the topiarius annihilated every trace of the free
impulse of nature. This tasteless fashion seems to have been so deeply
rooted among us that the Renaissance thought nothing better could be
done. The stiff, dreary style of the Farnese Gardens on the Palatine, of the
Villas Medici, Altieri, Ludovisi, Mattei, Negroni, in Rome, not to speak

3
 THE ROMAN GARDEN

of the Villa Bagnaia at Viterbo, of the Villa d’Este at Tivoli, and so forth
shows how differently from the English, and I dare say from the modern
point of view, rustic beauty was regarded among us.
(Cubberly 1988, 165–6)

Lanciani opines that Roman gardens were stiff, formal spaces, reflecting a
dry, lifeless indifference to ‘free nature’. His view reflects the change in popular
environmental aesthetics between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The
sixteenth-century perception of Roman villa gardens, based mainly on the
letters of Cicero and Pliny the Younger, formed the basis of both the Italian
and the Franco-Dutch formal garden style (Conan 2002a, 9). The Medici
villas and Villa d’Este, condemned by Lanciani as ‘stiff and dreary’, aspired
to re-establish the perceived order, harmony, and prosperity of the Roman
Empire. Had Renaissance princes been able to excavate Roman gardens
their assessment of the aesthetics would have been favorable. Instead, the
bulk of house and villa excavation occurred during the nineteenth century,
when English landscape gardening was seen as not only the finest but also
the ‘purest’ style of gardening. Lanciani notes that there has been a change
of taste, but his assessment of Roman garden space both reflects and propa-
gates the dominant landscape aesthetic of the nineteenth century that drew
a moral distinction between the formal European garden tradition and the
romantic naturalism of the English garden. The former was held to represent
the baroque excesses of corrupt oligarchies, the latter a Rousseauean return
to the egalitarian purity of nature. We are heirs to this perception, and it
obscures our view of the Roman garden.
As one of the leading archaeologists of the nineteenth century, Lanciani’s
opinion of Roman gardens as tasteless, stiff and dreary spaces was influential.
The alleged ‘stiffness’ of the Roman garden contributed to its general percep-
tion as an inert space, with a correspondingly passive role in Roman culture
and society. Yet even a cursory familiarity with Latin literature and Roman
art indicates a strong emotional investment in the representation of gardens.
Despite its impressive urban centers Roman society was, at its heart, an agri-
cultural society, and its gardens were as much an expression of aesthetic and
cultural ideals as a practical amenity. An experiential perspective on Roman
garden space can trace its role as a vehicle of cultural communication.
The first part of this book addresses the question of how to approach
the recovery of something as elusive as the experience of the Roman garden,
while the second half explores experiential perspectives. The first chapter
presents literary and material data establishing the limits of Roman garden
space. These limits are both conceptual and physical: conceptual limits being

4
 IMAGO HORTORUM

defined by the literature and terminology applied to garden spaces, physical

limits by architectural and horticultural content. Where possible, botanical
terms have been provided to help the reader identify specific plants used in
ancient gardens. Where the Linnaean appellation is in doubt only the generic
Latin term is provided.
Chapter 2 explores the spatial logic of the limitations discussed in Chapter
1. It establishes a theoretical framework for interpreting the garden as an active
space of movement and memory, not as a place of physical and temporal
stasis. This chapter introduces the fundamentals of space syntax and access
analysis used in the case study of the House of Octavius Quartio and the
House of the Menander (see Chapter 4 and the appendix).
Chapter 3 explores the principal set of experiences generated within
Roman garden space, defined as power, awe, and pleasure. These are catego-
ries adopted for the sake of clarity, although the reader will quickly note that
some gardens promote all these experiences in various degrees of intensity,
depending on the historical context of their representation or reception.
Finally, Chapter 4 presents three case studies of Roman gardens – physical,
fictional, and historical – and seeks to understand what they communicated
to readers and visitors. The study of the House of Octavius Quartio and the
House of the Menander combines their archaeological evidence with space
syntax analysis to analyze the manner in which these houses incorporated
their prominent gardens into the overall fabric of the domestic structure. The
next study examines the spatial logic of garden for which we have no material
evidence whatsoever, Pliny’s Tuscan garden. The third and final study inves-
tigates the Horti Lamiani, a site for which we have fragmentary physical and
literary evidence, and asks why Caligula chose this site in particular to receive
the Alexandrian embassy.
With some exception, most of the gardens discussed date from the late
second century  to the late third century AD. Much of the theoretical frame-
work discussed can be applied to late antique gardens. Although Byzantine
gardens referenced canonical gardens from the poetry of Horace and Vergil,
they promoted a different set of social, political and cultural expectations.
There is no shortage of wonderful gardens created by Rome’s metamorphosis
into the Byzantine Empire, but Christianity’s profound impact on the experi-
ence of the ancient garden is beyond the scope of this book.
One last task remains before entering Roman garden space. The Roman
garden was not a tabula rasa, but part of a long gardening tradition associ-
ated with concepts of sacred space, royal power, civic pride and philosophical
engagement. Evidence for the ancient antecedents of Roman gardens can
readily be found in the art, archaeology, and literature of Egypt, Asia Minor,

5
 THE ROMAN GARDEN

and the Aegean.3 This evidence poses a number of interpretive problems.

First there is the problem of distribution: the evidence is spread over a wide
geographic area and spans a period of nearly two millennia. Any comprehen-
sion of ancient gardens is fragmentary, episodic, and localized. Gardens devel-
oped through a process of evolution whereby certain elements of landscape
resolved themselves into discrete parcels of space that were set apart from the
surrounding area. This process must originally have occurred around farms,
orchards, and kitchen gardens. Yet the historical development of gardens is
usually traced from above, from temples, palaces, and royal enclosures. This
approach is not unreasonable. Palaces and temples were generally large struc-
tures intended to be permanent and therefore utilized stone in their construc-
tion. This makes them archaeologically more visible, but the prominence of
temples and palaces as a source of evidence for early gardens should not be
allowed to outweigh the fact that there was an equally important develop-
ment from lower social strata.
Second, the question of what constitutes a garden is culturally defined. At
what point does a cultivated plot of land become a garden? The visual distinc-
tion between ancient garden, grove and orchard is not always readily discern-
ible. There is even the question of whether one should make such a distinction
between productive and ornamental horticulture, since doing so, as Lanciani,
did risks applying contemporary cultural preconceptions to sites that reflect
entirely different aesthetic values. In addition, the literary evidence that
constitutes the bulk of our cultural comprehension of ancient gardens reflects
the needs and preoccupations of a relatively small literate section of society.
Literary and pictorial sources for gardens also blur the distinction between
fact and fiction, real and ideal. To navigate these difficulties it is important to
establish some working guidelines for what constitutes a garden.
Like most complex spaces, the garden is a disarmingly simple concept. Its
basic requirements are that it can be cultivated, has access to readily available
water, and is enclosed with boundaries to keep out pests (both animal and
human) and act as windbreak. Nevertheless, from these elementary principles,
the garden as a material object demonstrates protean complexity. Gardens
across the world, both ancient and modern, display a vast range of diversity
from the verdant prospects of the English landscape garden to the dry abstrac-
tion of the Japanese karesansui garden. Their appearance is almost infinitely
variable; they scale in size from a couple of meters to multiple hectares. They
can include terraces, walls, gates, buildings, loggias, pools, lakes, streams,
canals, and jetties.4 They can grow any combination of moss, grass, flowers,
vegetables, shrubs, and trees. Gardens, therefore, are not defined either by
their form, scale, content, or location. What unites such a disparate variety

6
 IMAGO HORTORUM

of cultivated spaces under the concept of ‘garden’ is their creation stemming

from a general impulse to adapt the surrounding landscape to human ideas
(Wilkinson 1998: 4; Porteous 1996: 45–88). In doing so, they share a basic
set of requirements to fulfill certain, culturally variable, needs that may range
from simple food production to spiritual epiphany.
A garden is created through the process of cultivating natural space that
has been visually segregated from the surrounding landscape. This segrega-
tion is usually signified by enclosure. Enclosures can be established by a wall
or fence, hedges, closely planted rows of trees, and even ditches. The area
under cultivation should also be either contiguous to, or in the vicinity of, a
man-made structure. A house, tomb, temple, or palace puts the garden within
its cultural context. A garden intended to provide offerings to a god and the
experience of communicating with the divine, for example, would lose much
of its significance without an accompanying temple or shrine.
Finally, a garden has a symbolic value in addition to its productive value
(Dixon Hunt 1999). This is usually indicated by the activities that take place
within the garden. By definition the garden is a space of horticultural labor:
hoeing, planting, weeding, watering, pruning, feeding, and mulching. But
it is also a space of recreation, spiritual communication and social display.
The more a garden promotes human experience, the more it differentiates
itself from generically similar, but conceptually distinct spaces such as the
orchard and the grove. An orchard, a stand of cultivated fruit trees, even if
enclosed, has a predominantly productive value. A grove may have symbolic
value as a sacred space dedicated purely to the gods, but that very sacred-
ness defines the limits of its potential for symbolic diversity. Only the garden
adapts to reflect multiple levels of sacred and profane meaning. Therefore,
while the form, content or location of a garden is almost endlessly mutable,
an essential characteristic is its ability to elicit multiple emotional responses.
These four precepts constitute a set of identifying guidelines flexible enough
to accommodate the diversity of gardens both ancient and modern: a garden
is a cultivated space; it is distinguished from the surrounding landscape either
by enclosure or another visual indication of spatial transition; it is contiguous
to or in the vicinity of a man-made structure; it bears a symbolic value in
addition to its productive value.
Flora of Stabiae beckons us to follow her into the garden.