Greek Gardens: Pliny and the Renaissance Garden

But by the time Rome was rich and leisured enough to step up from a heroic to a civilized age Etruria had been forgotten; Asiatic Carthage decisively rejected; and the clear, luminous art of the Greeks taken as a model. Not unnaturally the gardens when they came were in outward form Greek gardens. But although the outward form was Greek the spirit was not. Cicero, a very superior person at whom it has always been the fashion to laugh a little . . . `And what did Cicero say?' . . . `He spoke Greek' . . . with his set of Hellenophile intellectuals, imitated what they believed to have been the gardens of the Greek philosophers. But even Cicero and his friends doubted whether the times were ripe for this sort of living, and if we go to the core we shall see that Cicero's villa gardens could not have been as the Academy and the Lyceum were, because the story of their growth was very different. Where in any of Cicero's villas was the nucleus of a sacred grove that was really sacred? Cicero might plant one, but could that be the same? Where were the gods and heroes whose statues lined the walks? The statues were undoubtedly there; Cicero's friend Atticus sent him many shiploads from Greece, but Atticus could not send the gods themselves. Where were the games played in honour of heroes? There were buildings called gymnasiums and palaestra, but Cicero and his friends did not share the delight of the Greeks in the rhythms of the human body, and they neither amused themselves with high jumping and discus-throwing nor encouraged others to perform for their pleasure the gymnasium was one in name, but in nothing else. All this might have resulted in a sort of barren pastiche, and that it did not do so was because in place of the Greek intangibles which they could not imitate they introduced Roman intangibles of their own. Thus although the Academies of Cicero (he had one in nearly all of his many villas) were not sacred to Academus, they were sacred to the idea of Greece; and, though no naked athletes disported themselves in the open spaces, those wide expanses themselves gave to the Roman a sensual pleasure which would have been but slightly felt by the Greek or perhaps totally outside his experience.