Abstract

This book offers the first full and in-depth study of the representation of gardens in Latin Literature. Through close readings of the major Latin texts, primarily of the first centuries BCE and CE, it examines the function of garden descriptions in terms of their generic and literary codes and models, their gender constructions, and the ways in which garden descriptions function within the narrative structures of texts and reflect metapoetically on the work itself (geopoetics). Combining fresh dialogues with literary criticism, ancient garden studies, and close readings of poetry and prose, this study sheds new light on a number of central texts. Included are discussions of a broad range of Roman authors, such as Cicero, Catullus, Vergil, Varro, Horace, Ovid, Petronius, Columella, Statius, Pliny the Elder and Younger, the Carmina Priapea, and the Vergilian Appendix. The work shows that garden spaces in literature function in ways that are important to an understanding of the aesthetic and ethical values of a given literary work, while offering insights into ancient Roman attitudes towards gender, art, and human relationships with nature.