Classical Garden: Pliny and the Renaissance Garden

Subsequent winners of the games were honoured by statues that stood beside the hero's and the essential accents of the Classical Garden were established. The fullest development of the domestic arts requires a wealthy aristocracy competing in display, but the quarrelsome egalitarianism of the Greeks was constantly striving to pull down any who showed signs of wealth and power. The towns were small and restricted. There was little opportunity for the development of lavish private gardens, and whatever may have existed in the way of a leisured villa life in the countryside before the Persian Wars (there was probably none) would have suffered a severe set-back at that time. After the repulse of Asia there was the possibility of a luxurious outburst of rural or suburban life, but it was destroyed by the Peloponnesian Wars, which virtually made into a devastated no-man's-land the area between the cities where such a life might have flourished. The firm hand of Alexander and his successors of Macedon, and subsequently of the Romans, gave to the Greeks a degree of political stability they were incapable of giving themselves. Out of this unnatural condition arose a way of life deeply tinged by the luxuries of the East, but whatever luxuries the East taught them were still shaped and contained by the colonnaded courtyard or by the public park. Unlike the sea-faring volatile Greeks, the Romans were men of the soil. The tradition of their origin is that they were robbers turned farmers and they retained the characteristics of both professions throughout their history. Deep in their nature was a love of land, so that when they ceased to be farmers their appetite for acres still drove them on to build up vast estates. They understood the land, its varying nature and what it would grow, and it was always of far greater importance to them than to the city-loving Greeks. But, and this may have been one great source of their enduring strength, like the parvenus they always remained, the Romans lacked the self-confidence to be great innovators in the arts. By taking others for their model and imitating as closely as they could they produced by the inherent force of their personalities something new but traditionally new; it is by this route that cultures endure. In the days when Rome was a grasping town of bandits and outcasts struggling for hegemony over Italy, and when the conflict with Carthage still raged, she was not much concerned with the arts of peace and set herself no models. Etruscan forms were the accepted ones in the Roman mind no doubt because the Etruscans, a more advanced people, had been first their neighbours, for a time their masters, and finally their subdued allies.