Roman Gardens: Pliny and the Renaissance Garden

The alleys and avenues provided the Greeks with shade in which they could stroll and talk comfortably; they were there for that purpose and their pleasure in the shade though undoubted was secondary; but to the Romans the fine growth of the trees, the contrast of the foliage, and the sensation of coolness and peace, were an end in themselves, which they enjoyed as countrymen. The urns and statues and names the Romans took from Greece are the symptoms of their admiration for a higher form of life; in taking them they were trying to rebuild something they had never personally known, they were acting a part and building scenery for it which had the antique flavour fashionable in their time and chic in their set. These gardens were not Greek, they could not be Greek, Italian skies were not Greek skies and the Greek countryside was sparse and gaunt and lean compared with the Italian; they could not be Greek, but they were Roman and all the better for that. (Appendix B.) The Roman villa is difficult for the modern mind to compass. In the first place it is necessary to remember the enormous wealth of their owners. It is said the estates of six men covered over half of Roman Africa; Cicero is known to have possessed seventeen villas; and the number of slaves in the possession of a Roman gentleman in the time of Nero might well exceed five thousand. A villa was not so much a building as a group of buildings, and indeed it should not be considered as separate from the estate on which it stood the whole unit was the villa. Yet the buildings did not necessarily present an orderly coherent whole; it is likely that they rarely did so and that at a distant view it looked much more like a village than like an eighteenth-century English mansion or a villa of the Renaissance. Even when villa building became a self-conscious imitation of the Greek private Gymnasium-cum-Social-Centre of the philosophers, the haphazard nature of that group of disconnected buildings was copied until it became something like a traditional form. The villas the younger Pliny described are some twenty or thirty years later than the Garden of the Vetii. We do not know how many such places Pliny owned; one was by the sea at Laurentum, others at Tusculum, at Tiber, at Praeneste, several at Como, including two of which he called one Tragedy because it was high on a rock and one Comedy because it was low by the lake shore, and his most favoured home, the Tuscan villa under the Apennines. His place at Laurentum was a week-end home for the busy man of affairs at Rome, seventeen miles away.