When Pliny the Elder introduces the discussion of gardens (Nat. 19.49), he claims that the subject is worth treating because of the intrinsic value of horticulture and because antiquity had admired and recorded famous gardens. The diversity and volume of material evidence for garden culture in the Roman world (as demonstrated in W.F. Jashemski, K. Gleason, K. Hartswick and A Malek [edd.], Gardens of the Roman Empire [2018]) certainly seems to reflect Pliny’s suggestion that gardens held a special place in the Roman imagination. Such a rich topic has inspired a series of recent publications (including, but not limited to, V. Pagan, Rome and the Literature of Gardens [2006]; K.T. von Stackelberg, The Roman Garden [2009]; and V. Austen, Analysing the Boundaries of the Roman Garden [2023]). And yet, until now, there has been no single comprehensive study of gardens within Latin literature. M.’s book, which examines the representation and function of garden descriptions primarily of the first centuries bce and ce, finally fills this gap.
This book is first and foremost a work of literary analysis, bucking the trend of the aforementioned recent studies, which have instead prioritised an intermedial approach to Roman gardens. M. is clear that, although her work is indebted to the recent surge of archaeological and art historical research, her goal is to gain a better understanding of the literary choice of representing the space; and she argues that Roman literary gardens, rather than responding to Roman horticultural reality and practice, ‘largely carry on their own intertextual discourses with the Greek and Latin literary models’ (p. x). Unsurprisingly, genre is one of the three organisational categories – along with gender and ‘geopoetics’ – that provide M. with a framework through which to marshal her diverse range of sources. Gardens may appear across the entire corpus of Latin literature, but their ‘form and function are largely determined by the genre in which they appear’ (p. 26). Such sensitivity to generic concerns reveals the particularly gendered power relations at play in Roman literary gardens. Although all of our surviving Roman garden texts are written by elite men, we are warned against viewing the ‘pervasive omission or condemnation of female agency in the garden’ (p. 13) as a reflection of reality. Instead, we should understand the skewed version of gender dynamics on display as a by-product of the rhetorical and self-fashioning aims of the men who imagine them. The inherent artificiality of such descriptions is thus ripe with metapoetic potential, and we are encouraged to view poetic garden descriptions as inviting a particular kind of self-reflexivity that M. terms ‘geopoetics’, signifying ‘poetics of the earth’ (p. x).
In line with this three-pronged framework, the book is organised thematically, rather than chronologically. This structure may pose more of a challenge for those less familiar with the entire corpus of Latin literature – surely likely readers of a survey such as this – and including a timeline of all the authors and texts mentioned (e.g. as an appendix) would have been a useful addition. However, M. does ‘attempt to provide some chronological perspective’ (p. 34) by outlining major cultural developments in garden design as part of Chapter 1, ‘Masculine Horticultural Self-Fashioning’, which examines how garden texts configure gardens and their associated activities in constructions of Roman masculinity – both to positive and negative effect. For Cicero, Statius and Pliny, for example, landscaped horti-villa estates are spaces that supplied the necessary otium litteratum (Tusc. 5.105) for the cultivation of aristocratic ‘learned leisure’ (or docta otia, p. 63); yet these same types of estates are also weaponised as invective against figures such as Lucullus (Tac. Ann. 11.1) and Nero (Ann. 15.53), configured as symbols of their ‘excessive indulgence in luxury … effeminacy, and … retirement from public life’ (p. 57). From the outset it is clear that male writers understood the flexibility, and thus potency, of the garden as a reflexive symbol. Chapter 2, ‘Vergil’s Garden’, continues M.’s exploration of the numerous potential associations of (male) gardening through an examination of the famous praeteritio at Georgics 4.116–48. Here, the humble hortus acts as a metaphorical and aestheticised representation of Virgil’s poetic labor, and M.’s analysis highlights the unresolved tensions embodied in a space that is ‘included only to be excluded’ (p. 83) from Virgil’s broader agricultural project.
In Chapter 3, ‘Women in the Garden’, the focus shifts away from male activity to examine poetic passages, often heavily indebted to the Greek tradition, in which the garden is characterised as both ‘a site of passive and contained virginity but also of natural fertility’ (p. 101). In Catullus’ wedding poems (61 and 62), for example, the bride is presented as an unplucked flower in a garden, a ‘potent image’ for the desirable and protected, but also potentially fertile, nature of female virginity (p. 114). Ovid, meanwhile, inverts the topos of the enclosed virginal garden in his descriptions of the disturbing sexual assaults against Pomona (Met. 14.622–771) and Flora (Fasti 5.183–376). In both instances, he exploits boundaries – of the body and of the space – in order to define the garden as a ‘metapoetic site for the exploration of the transgressions of genre and gender’ (p. 134).
Such transgressions spill over into Chapter 4, ‘Trampling in the Garden’, where M. discusses a wide range of texts (Horace’s Satires, Latin epigram collections, Petronius’ Satyricon and even the Vergilian Appendix) to explore the prolific use of gardens in the ‘lower’ genres of Latin literature. Across these texts, the positive moral ideals we have seen associated with gardens and horticulture – self-sufficiency, cultivated leisure, fertility, virginity – are all challenged, inverted and/or mocked; and no figure represents this undermining of ‘ethical, gendered, and generic pretensions’ (p. 137) better than Priapus. This crude rustic god delineates his garden as a space of obscenity: in direct contrast to the Catullan construction, the Priapic garden is a non virgineus locus (CP 2.1.5), and women who dare to enter it are defined as ‘sexually rapacious or as prostitutes’ (p. 146). In his unravelling of the once-passive construction of female sexuality Priapus alerts us once again to the potential of the garden as a space to test the limits of moral and generic codes. Martial, for example, challenges the very image of Priapus to signal his own literary refinement; no longer made in a rustic and crude manner (lignum rude, CP 10.4), Martial’s artistically refined Priapic statues (6.49; 6.72; 6.73) provide a ‘self-reflexive metapoetic dimension’ (p. 161) to his transformation of the Priapic tradition.
Chapter 5, ‘Columella and the Poetics of Horticulture’, is devoted to the double treatment of horticulture in De re rustica. Like Virgil, Columella incorporates gardens into his agricultural epic, only to simultaneously mark them out as distinct and separate spaces, and yet his ‘doubling of the subject belies its marginality within the treatise’ (p. 195). Columella’s poetic garden is ‘crammed to satiety’, and it is the generic contrast between poetry and prose in Books 10 and 11 that allows him to create a new kind of garden space, ‘cosmic and imperial’ in scope (p. 220), pushing the limits of poetic representation. Finally, in the epilogue, M. provides a brief but extremely interesting ‘look ahead’ to trends in literary gardens beyond the second century ce, when conceptions of the garden were altered dramatically by the influence of the Jewish and Christian traditions and new allegorical dimensions.
M. should be commended on this wide-ranging and insightful study; it is an exceptional sourcebook for anyone interested in Roman literary gardens and represents a significant intervention in the field.
