A Roman’s Garden of Verses: Beauty, Utility, and the Compromises of Cultivation

Our theme for the autumn and winter terms is ‘An Open Book: Gardens in Literature and Letters’.

The impressive remains of Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli or the villa of Poppaea at Oplontis speak to a Roman elite unabashedly embracing re-shaped landscapes and a highly manicured and ‘curated’ form of nature in their pleasure gardens. The literature of Rome, however, evokes a far more nuanced – and often anxious – relationship between humans and both cultivated and uncultivated flora. The upper class penchant for display – and especially for the display of mastery over nature – was balanced by a concern to remember a humbler past and a closer relationship between cultivation and necessity: the earliest Romans, so the cliché went, had been small-scale farmers and soldiers, their gardens full of useful cabbages rather than showy exotics. Even as more sophisticated interests emerged, the entanglement between cultivation, aesthetics, and morality continued. This talk will take as its focus three poetic gardens from the Augustan period (in the last third of the first century BCE): an old man’s market garden in Vergil’s Georgics, the poet’s own estate in Horace’s Epistles, and the mythical walled garden of the nymph/goddess Pomona in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. All three illustrate in different ways the Roman interest in negotiating compromises between the useful and the beautiful, and in contemplating the blurred dividing lines between the wild and the tame.

Rebecca Armstrong is a Fellow of St Hilda’s College, and Associate Professor in Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Vergil’s Green Thoughts: Plants, Humans, and the Divine (OUP, 2019) and continues to work on representations of plants in a range of Latin literature, including, most recently, Ovid’s Fasti.