Autopsy and empire: temporal collapse in the designed landscapes of ancient Rome

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Luke Morgan, Donald Dunham, the manuscript’s anonymous reader, and all fellow participants in the ‘Out of Time’ Symposium for invaluable criticism and questions that appreciably influenced the evolution of my thinking. I also wish to thank Stephen Forbes, Executive Director of the Adelaide Botanic Garden, for hosting this stimulating symposium.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. On the interplay of architecture and nature in the Roman villa, see Bettina Bergmann, ‘Art and Nature in the Villa at Oplontis’, Pompeian Brothels, Pompeii’s Ancient History, Mirrors and Mysteries, Art and Nature at Oplontis, & the Herculaneum ‘Basilica’, edited by Carol Stein and John H. Humphrey (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2002), pp. 87–120.

2. William L. MacDonald and John A. Pinto, Hadrian’s Villa and Its Legacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 196.

3. ‘Tiburtinam Villam mire exaedificavit, ita ut in ea et provinciarum et locorum celeberrima nomina inscriberet, velut Lyceum, Academian, Prytaneum, Canopum, Poicilen, Tempe vocaret. Et, ut nihil praetermitteret, etiam inferos finxit.’ The Latin text from Aelius Spartianus, ‘Hadrian’ 26.5, is taken from the edition and translation by David Magie, Ainsworth O’Brien-Moore, and Susan H. Ballou, Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Vol. 1 (The Loeb Classical Library, London: W. Heinemann, 1922), p. 78. For the more literal translation used in the body of this essay, see MacDonald and Pinto, op. cit., p. 7.

4. MacDonald and Pinto, op. cit., p. 132.

5. On the gymnasia of Athens and their development, see for example: John M. Camp, The Archaeology of Athens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 6, 64, 137, 149, 168, 170, 179, 184, 206–7; Annette L. Giesecke, The Epic City: Urbanism, Utopia, and the Garden in Ancient Greece and Rome (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 88–89; and John Travlos, Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Athens (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971).

6. Camp, op. cit., p. 27.

7. Plato, ‘The Apology’ 36 D. Translated by Harold N. Fowler, Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 1 (The Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 129.

8. Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), passim.

9. MacDonald and Pinto, op. cit., p. 109.

10. MacDonald and Pinto, op. cit., cautiously assess these identifications. See particularly pages 7 and 59. For discussion of the Roman creation of allusive landscapes that captured the spirit of a re-created place rather than its exact features, see Bettina Bergmann, ‘Meanwhile, Back in Italy …: Creating Landscapes of Allusion’, Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, edited by Susan E. Alcock, John F. Cherry and Jaś Elsner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 154–166. For the Roman re-interpretation of foreign architectural forms, see Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 169–209; and Timothy O’Sullivan, Walking in Roman Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 94 and passim. For the reinterpretation of Egyptian art and artifacts specifically, see Molly Swetnam-Burland, Egypt in Italy: Visions of Egypt in Roman Imperial Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 18–64.

11. On the distinguishing characteristics of sculpted personifications of rivers, see Janusz A. Ostrowski, Personifications of Rivers in Greek and Roman Art (Krakow: Nakladem Uniwersytetu Jagielloniśkiego, 1991). For a catalogue of the sculpture of the Villa Hadriana, see Joachim Raeder, Die statuarische Ausstattung der Villa Hadriana bei Tivoli (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1963).

12. Silens are satyrs (part human and part goat), though the term ‘silen’ and the name ‘Silenus’ came to be used particularly for satyrs of advanced age. On the evolution and characteristics of satyrs and silens, whose animal aspect was original equine rather than caprine, see J. Michael Padgett, The Centaur’s Smile: The Human Animal in Early Greek Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 3–46.

13. On the impulses behind Roman travel, places visited (including sites associated with myth), and optimum time periods for travel, see Lionel Casson, Travel in the Ancient World (Toronto: Hackert, 1974).

14. See, for example, MacDonald and Pinto, op. cit., p. 197; and Bergmann, 2001, op. cit. On the collection of statues whose style recalled diverse periods and decoding stylistic visual language of sculpture collections in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, see Tonio Hölscher, The Language of Images in Roman Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

15. The classic publication of this house is M. Della Corte, ‘I MM. Lorei Tiburtini di Pompei’, Atti e memorie della Società tiburtina di storia e d’arte 11–12, 1931–1932. Its gardens and garden accoutrements are also described in John R. Clarke, The Houses of Roman Italy, 100 bc–ad 150: Ritual, Space, and Decoration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 193–210; and Wilhelmina F. Jashemski, The Gardens of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the Villas Destroyed by Vesuvius, Vol. II: Appendices (New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1993), pp. 78–83.

16. On the foreign associations of this house’s garden décor, see also Annette Giesecke, ‘Outside in and Inside Out: Paradise in the Ancient Roman House’, Earth Perfect? Nature, Utopia, and the Garden, edited by Annette Giesecke and Naomi Jacobs (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2012), pp. 119–121, on portions of which this essay builds.

17. Heracles was a son of Zeus and a product of one of that god’s many illicit affairs, which naturally angered his wife, Hera.

18. This, at least, is the picture presented in Euripides’ play The Bacchae, which is the source of much of what is believed to be true of the worship of Dionysus.

19. The Mouseion was founded either by Ptolemy I Soter or by Ptolemy II Philadelphus in the first half of the third century bce.

20. On the Persian kings, their palaces, and their lifestyle, see Pierre Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire, translated by Peter T. Daniels (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2002), and Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, King and Court in Ancient Persia 559 to 331 bce (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

21. The historical and/or anthropological origins of classical myth is an enormous topic. Classic works include the writings of Troy’s nineteenth-century excavator Heinrich Schliemann on his campaigns in Turkey, and of Sir Arthur Evans, Schliemann’s younger contemporary, on his findings at the Palace of Minos at Knossos, Crete. On the Trojan War specifically, Michael Wood’s In Search of the Trojan War (London: British Broadcasting Corp., 1985) still has much of interest to offer. Seminal works on the anthropological truths underlying classical myths include Walter Burkert’s Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) and Greek Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). On the history of the worship of Dionysus and its character, see E. R. Dodds’ introduction to Euripides’ Bacchae (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1960), pp. xi–xxv. See also Richard Seaford, Dionysos (London: Routledge, 2006) for an overview.

22. The characterization of myth as essentially atemporal is synonymous with the work of religious historian Mircea Eliade. See, for instance, the critical assessments of Eliade in John A. Saliba, ‘Homo Religiosus’ in Mircea Eliade: An Anthropological Evaluation (Leiden: Brill, 1976), pp. 51–53; and in Douglas Allen, Myth and Religion in Mircea Eliade, Theorists of Myth, Vol. 11 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), pp. 236–242. Reflections on the continuous adjustments to myth resulted from conversation with architect and theorist Donald Dunham.

23. Comments here on time in narrative have been informed by David Wood’s assessment of atemporality and narrative vis-à-vis Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, and other theorists in The Deconstruction of Time (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989), pp. 348–360.

24. On the Hanging Gardens, see Donald J. Wiseman, ‘Mesopotamian Gardens’, Anatolian Studies, 33, 1983, pp. 137–144. Disputing Nebuchadnezzar’s authorship of the Hanging Garden is Stephanie Dalley’s The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Dalley’s argument is countered by Timothy Potts’ balanced review of Dalley’s book, ‘Looking for the Hanging Gardens’, The New York Review of Books, 26 September 2013, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/looking-hanging-gardens-babylon/. The classic archaeological publication of Cyrus’ garden at Pasargadae is David Stronach, Pasargadae: A Report on the Excavations Conducted by the British Institute of Persian Studies from 1961 to 1963 (Oxford: the Clarendon Press, 1978). See also David Stronach’s ‘Cyrus and Pasargadae’, Cyrus the Great: An Ancient Iranian King, edited by Touraj Daryaee (Santa Monica, CA: Afshar Publishing, 2013) and Stronach’s ‘The Garden as a Political Statement: Some Case Studies from the Near East in the First Millennium bc’, Bulletin of the Asia Institute, N.S. Vol. 4, 1990, p. 178. For reconstructions of the garden, see Farzin Rezaeian, editor, Recreating Pasargadae (Canada: Sunrise Visual Innovations Ltd., 2012); and Giesecke, 2012, op. cit., p. 130. Disputing Stronach’s interpretation of the site as possessing a chahar-bagh is Rémy Boucharlat, ‘Pasargadae’, Iran, 40, 2002, pp. 279–282; and Christophe Benech, Rémy Boucharlat, and Sébastien Gondet, ‘Organisation et aménagement de l’espace à Pasargades, Reconnaissances archéologiques de surface, 2003–2008’, Arta, 3, 2012, pp. 1–37.

25. Annette Giesecke, The Mythology of Plants: Botanical Lore from Ancient Greece and Rome (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2014), passim.

26. The same may be said of the Roman house, though this tendency logically reached its fullest expression where open space was readily available. It should also be noted that, generally speaking, the garden became an increasingly integral part of the house and vice versa. See Giesecke, 2012, op. cit.

27. The fullest description of the House of the Ceii and its garden paintings appears in Dorothea Michel, Casa dei Cei, Haüser in Pompeji, Band 3 (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 1990). See also Miguel J. Versluys, Aegyptiaca Romana: Nilotic Scenes and the Roman View of Egypt (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 97–99.

28. In the Roman mind, pygmies, existing ‘somewhere between myth and reality’, were the dwarf inhabitants ‘of remote parts of the world, often at the limits of areas with which Romans traded or had contact, including India, Thrace, and the regions near the source of the Nile’. In Pompeii, pygmies tend to appear in Nilotic contexts and thus conjure the fertile, sacred and/or mystical landscapes of Egypt. See Maria R. Swetnam-Burland, Egypt in the Roman Imagination: A Study of Aegyptiaca from Pompeii, PhD dissertation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan, 2002), pp. 144–153 and p. 147 for the quoted material. See also John R. Clarke, ‘Three Uses of the Pygmy and the Aethiops at Pompeii’, pp. 155–169, and Paul G. P. Meyboom and Miguel J. Versluys, ‘The Meaning of Dwarfs in Nilotic Scenes’, pp. 170–208, both in Nile into Tiber: Egypt in the Roman World, Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference of Isis Studies, Leiden, May 11–14, 2005 (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

29. The sculptural decoration of this house is catalogued in Eugene J. Dwyer, Pompeian Domestic Sculpture: A Study of Five Pompeian Houses and Their Contents (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider, 1982), pp. 17–52.

30. Ibid, p. 40, for the quote.

31. See Dodds, op. cit., and Giesecke, 2012, op. cit.

32. This inscriptional material is catalogued in Lewis Richard Farnell’s classic work, The Cults of the Greek States, Vol. 5 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1901), pp. 280–283. A discussion of his agrarian as well as plant-specific powers may be found on pp. 85–124 of the chapter devoted to Dionysus.

33. The bibliography on the link between Dionysus and drama is enormous. A volume of essays devoted to illuminating the origins of theatrical performance in the context of the worship of Dionysus is Eric Csapo and Margaret C. Miller, editors, The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). The convergence of myth and ritual nicely explored by Barbara Kowalzig in her essay ‘“And Now All the World Shall Dance!” (Eur. Bacch. 114) Dionysus’ Choroi between Drama and Ritual’, pp. 221–251, especially the summary on pp. 245–246.

34. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, edited by P. E. Easterling (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997) is especially useful. On civic engagement and the politics of tragedy in particular, see the following essays: Paul Cartledge, ‘“Deep Plays”: Theatre as Process in Greek life’, pp. 3–35; P. E. Easterling, ‘A Show for Dionysus’, pp. 36–53; Simon Goldhill, The Audience of Athenian Tragedy’, pp. 54–68; and Edith Hall, ‘The Sociology of Athenian Tragedy’, pp. 93–126.

35. See Matthew D. Wagner, ‘Time and Theatre’, Shakespeare, Theatre, Time (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 12–33, and pp. 12–13 for the quoted material. Time in Greek plays is discussed, for example, by Richard Buxton, Myths and Tragedies in their Ancient Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 145–148, in the chapter ‘Time, Space, and Ideology: Tragic Myths and the Athenian Polis’.

36. So, too, the influential essay by Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, 16/1, Spring 1986, pp. 22–27, translated by Jay Miskowiec, with heterotopias, including gardens and the theater, defined in pp. 24–26.

37. Wallace-Hadrill, op. cit., p. 25.

38. Ibid, p. 26.

39. Accounts consulted here include: Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Margaret M. Miles, Art as Plunder: The Ancient Origins of Debate about Cultural Property (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Ida Östenberg, Staging the World: Spoils, Captives, and Representations in the Roman Triumphal Procession (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Steven H. Rutledge, Ancient Rome as a Museum: Power, Identity, and the Culture of Collecting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

40. The bibliography on the rise of the Roman villa is vast and is collected in Giesecke, 2007 and 2012, op. cit. Good starting points are the following foundational works: John H. D’Arms, Romans on the Bay of Naples: A Social and Cultural Study of the Villas and Their Owners from 150 bc to ad 400 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970); Maddalena M. Cima and Eugenio L Rocca, editors, Horti romani: atti del convegno internazionale: Roma, 4–6 maggio 1995 (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1998); and Alfred Frazer, editor, The Roman villa: Villa Urbana, First Williams Symposium on Classical Architecture held at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, April 21–22, 1990 (Philadelphia: University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, 1998). More recent discussions, include: Maddalena Cima and Emilia Talamo, Gli horti di Roma antica (Rome: Electa, 2008) and Carol C. Mattusch, editor, Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture Around the Bay of Naples (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2008).

41. The villa is thought to have belonged to the family of the emperor Nero’s wife, Poppaea.

42. Varro, ‘De Re Rustica’ 2 Prolog 2, Cato and Varro: De Re Rustica (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979) with the Latin text based on that of Georg Goetz, M. Terenti Varronis Rerum Rusticarum libri tres (Leipzig: Teubner, 1912).

43. These examples and others are recounted in O’Sullivan, op. cit., pp. 105–107.

44. Hetero-chorism is a neologism based on the ancient Greek word for ‘land’, ‘site’, ‘locus’: χώρα (chōra).

45. See, for example, Inge Nielsen, ‘Types of Gardens’, A Cultural History of Gardens in Antiquity, edited by Kathryn Gleason (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 42–74; and Mantha Zarmakoupi, ‘The Architectural Design of the Peristylum-Garden in Early Roman Luxury Villas’, Städtisches Wohnen im östlichen Mittelmeerraum 4. Jh. v. Chr.-1. Jh. n. Chr.: Akten des Internationalen Kolloquiums vom 24.–27. Oktober 2007 an der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2010), pp. 621–631.

46. For further discussion of, and bibliography on, Cyrus’ garden at Pasargadae and the gardener-kings of Babylon, Sumer, and Akkad, see Annette Giesecke, ‘The Good Gardener and Ideal Gardens of State’, The Good Gardener? Nature, Humanity, and the Garden, edited by Annette Giesecke and Naomi Jacobs (London: Artifice books on architecture, 2015), pp. 78–95.

47. For the full text from which the quoted line is drawn, see Irving Finkel, ‘Translation of the Cyrus Cylinder’, Cyrus the Great: An Ancient Iranian King, edited by Touraj Daryaee (Santa Monica, CA: Afshar Publishing, 2013), pp. 78–84, and for the cited words, p. 80.

48. See Lauren H. Petersen, The Freedman in Roman Art and Art History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

49. Wallace-Hadrill, op. cit., p. 323.

50. See Bianca Bosker, Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013), from which the observations here on the meaning of China’s replicas are drawn.

51. The quoted phrase is from Rutledge, op. cit., p. 33, used in the context of the Romans’ collection of art from various parts of their empire.

52. The quote is taken from Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), p. 32. Nagel and Wood’s thesis regarding the potency of visual artifacts (versus texts) aligns ideally with Bosker’s observations on replicas.

53. Following similar reasoning, Bergmann, 2001, op. cit., has suggested that copies of Greek landscape and architectural monuments in a Roman context served to ‘transpose’ those places to Italy, allowing the Roman an ‘interactive’ experience with these foreign monuments. And O’Sullivan, op. cit., has suggested that such replicas allowed for the simulation of travel; in particular, the ‘Odyssey Landscape’ frieze (which illustrates portions of the wanderings of Odysseus and is now in the Vatican collection) allowed the viewer to reenact the hero’s wanderings in his or her own home (p. 122).

54. See Arthur Keaveney, Lucullus: A Life (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 143–165.

55. See, for example, the following: Simone Frank, Alexander-Vorbild Roms: Alexanderverehrung von Pompeius bis Nero (Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 2008); Angela Kühnen, Die Imitatio Alexandri in der römischen Politik: 1. Jh. v. Chr. - 3. Jh. n. Chr. (Münster: Rhema 2008); J. D. Martin, ‘Did Pompey Engage in Imitatio Alexandri?’, Studies in Latin Literature and History, IX (Brussels: Éditions Latomus, 1998), pp. 23–51; Myles A. McDonnell, Roman Manliness: Virtus and the Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Diana Spencer, The Roman Alexander: Reading a Cultural Myth (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002).

56. Ancient sources include Cassius Dio, History of Rome, XLVIII.39.2 and Plutarch, ‘Life of Antony’, 54.9, both cited in Günther Hölbl, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 291.

57. Propertius, Elegies 4.1.64, on which see, for example, Jeri B. Debrohun, Roman Propertius and the Reinvention of Elegy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), p. 68; and Horace, Odes 1.1.34, 1.26.11, and 1.32.5, on which see Gian Biagio Conte, Latin Literature: A History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 303–306. Many thanks to John D. Morgan, II, for reminding me of these important literary comparanda.

58. This is an understatement. The number of sources referenced and imitated by Virgil is irretrievable, as much of this material is no doubt lost. On imitation in Latin literature, see the seminal works of Wendell Clausen, among them ‘Callimachus and Latin Poetry’, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, 5, 1964, pp. 181–196.

59. Suetonius, ‘The Deified Julius’ 37.2, Suetonius in Two Volumes, Vol. 1, translation by John C. Rolfe (The Loeb Classical Library, Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).

60. See Ida Östenberg, ‘Veni Vidi Vici and Caesar’s Triumph’, The Classical Quarterly, 63/2, December 2013, pp. 813–827.

61. In the Greco-Roman world, Herodotus, the so-called father of history and anthropology, famously pointed to personal observation (opsis) paired with reasoning (gnōmē) as vital aspects of his method of inquiry (historiē) and the establishment of truth. Herodotus’ methodology is much discussed, but see, for example, Mathieu de Bakker, ‘Herodotus’ Proteus: Myth, History, Enquiry, and Storytelling’, Myth, Truth, and Narrative in Herodotus, edited by Emily Baragwanath and Mathieu de Bakker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 107–126.

62. Similarly, the interesting remarks of Carol Crawshaw and John Urry, ‘Tourism and the Photographic Eye’, Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, edited by Chris Rojek and John Urry (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 176–195.