Overview

"Gardens are not central in Latin literature, but usually somewhere off to the side, as was often the real garden. They appear, however, in some form in nearly all literary genres of Latin literature--history, satire, epigrams, epics, letters, lyric poetry, elegies, and novels--and often edge their way into larger socio-economic and political discussions about Roman identity, gender, wealth, and land use. Through an analysis of ancient garden studies and close readings of major Latin texts from the first centuries BCE and CE, K. Sara Myers examines the function and representation of garden descriptions in the work of a broad range of Roman authors, such as Cicero, Catullus, Vergil, Varro, Horace, Ovid, Petronius, Columella, Statius, and Pliny the Elder and Younger. While most of the sources in this study are poetic and their gardens fictional, it is still important to situate these works in their cultural and historical contexts. By understanding how to interpret the importance of these spaces in the literature in which they appear, readers will not only better comprehend the aesthetic and ethical values of the work in question, but they will also gain a better insight into ancient Roman attitudes toward gender, art, and human relationships with nature. Myers shows how some Romans constructed the garden as a space under male control: Men are cultivators, while women are cultivated. Literary gardens can symbolize a range of positive masculine ideals and identities for elite men--from the rustic farmer to the philosopher--but can also represent unmanly luxury and leisure. Women in gardens are usually sexualized, depicted as virginal or sexually transgressive, especially when they attempt to express ownership over these spaces. In almost all these texts, the artificial and artistic arrangement of the raw material of nature invites self-reflexivity, which Myers calls ""geopoetics,"" or a ""poetics of the earth."""

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9780197773208

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Reviews

This attractive book treats the rich topic of gardens, a significant theme in Latin literature, and illumines some key central texts with acute and rewarding analysis; its interests in gender, genre, and garden studies also make it impressively contemporary and interdisciplinary. * Stephen Harrison, University of Oxford * This important literary and geopolitical study moves the Roman garden as reflected in works of literature from the cultural margins to the center stage of classical studies. Myers shows how the garden cuts across all major Roman literary genres and contributes to current critical thinking about space, gender, ethics, and politics. In an abundant series of innovative readings of Roman texts extending over three centuries, Myers explores the paradoxes and the generic tensions of Roman gardens as sites of old-fashioned virtue and decadent luxury, of philosophical retreat and political engagement, of female submission and female mastery. Ancient Roman Literary Gardens makes a major contribution to Roman literary and cultural studies. * Carole E. Newlands, University of Colorado Boulder *

Author Information

K. Sara Myers is Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia and the author of Ovid's Causes and a commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses 14.

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