Le jardin dans l’Antiquité. Introduction et huit exposés suivis de discussions ed. by Kathleen Coleman (review)

This book, engaging in the current sustained interest in gardens in history and culture, derives from a conference held at the Fondation Hardt in August 2013 on the subject of gardens in antiquity. In a field of study dominated by the abundance of evidence from Pompeii, a specific place captured at a specific time, this volume incorporates and integrates material from across the Mediterranean, from the archaic period to late antiquity, and thereby significantly expands our knowledge.

The eight chapters of the volume are organized chronologically, beginning with Egypt during the reign of Amenhotep II, 1425–1400 bce, and ending with early Christianity. Christian E. Loeben (“Der Garten im und am Grab—Götter in Gärten und Gärten für Götter: reale und dargestellte Gärten im Alten Ägypten”) compares representations of gardens with those recovered by archaeology to explore the relationship between idealizations and realities. The second contribution, by Stephanie Dalley, “From Mesopotamian Temples as Sacred groves to the Date-palm motif in Greek Art and Architecture,” draws connections across cultures and demonstrates hitherto unnoticed continuities in imagery from Babylonian, Assyrian, and Syrian temples of the second millennium bce to Hellenistic and Roman sculpture and coins. In the third chapter, “Parler de jardins pour parler de créations littéraires,” Évelyne Prioux traces the origin of the garden as a metaphor for literary style. The identification of poems with different types of plants is a trope that can be traced to archaic lyric poetry and that survives deep into the Second Sophistic. The fourth chapter, Rabun Taylor’s “Movement, Vision, and Quotation in the Gardens of Herod the Great,” explores the gardens of this ambitious ruler. Although the palace designs at Jericho, Caesarea, Jerusalem, and Herodeion drew from native, Egyptian, and Near Eastern traditions, Herod’s gardens consciously evoked Roman prototypes and were not only influenced by, but may have even influenced, the contemporary designs of Agrippa and Messalla back at Rome.

From this chapter on the Roman period, the next three contributions focus on Italian or Roman gardens in particular, where the climate and soil were more conducive to gardening than were the arid, rocky soils of Greece and the Near East. In the fifth chapter, “Roman Gardens, Military Conquests, and Elite Self-Representation,” Annalisa Marzano takes as her starting point the phenomenon of imperial botanical gardens to explain elite interest in collecting species that was prompted in part by a concern to improve agricultural production. Giulia Caneva’s chapter, “Il giardino come espressione del divino nelle rappresentazioni dell’antica Roma,” analyzes various species depicted in wall paintings from Rome and Pompeii and catalogs their symbolic value to argue that gardens convey in religious or philosophical terms a concomitant sense of ephemerality and permanence.

Within this chronological and geographical framework, the contributions in this volume also adhere to two essential methodologies. The primary approach of Loeben, Dalley, and Taylor is to offer a series of lucid and imaginative interpretations, and even reconstructions when possible, of select surviving archaeological findings or artistic representations. In a second line of inquiry, Prioux, Marzano, and Caneva draw more extensively on literature to elucidate the influence of gardens on society. Bettina Bergmann’s sixth chapter, “The Concept of Boundary in the Roman Garden,” is perhaps the most theoretically sophisticated of the contributions, for she uses Bachelard’s study of space as a framework for interpreting both visual evidence (Pompeian wall paintings) and garden literature (especially Columella) to explain the presence of “artful violations of the boundary” (282) in gardens both real and represented. The volume closes with a witty contribution by Robin Lane Fox, “Early Christians and the Garden: Image and Reality,” which interrogates the vexed problem that the garden, often a site...