Gardens of Lucullus

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The Gardens of Lucullus (Horti Lucullani) were an ancient patrician villa on the Pincian Hill on the edge of Rome; they were laid out by Lucius Licinius Lucullus about 60 BCE. The Villa Borghese gardens still cover 17 acres (69,000 m²) of green on the site, now in the heart of Rome, above the Spanish Steps.

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[edit] History

[edit] Lucullus

The fabled gardens of Lucullus were among the most influential examples in the history of gardening. Lucullus had firsthand experience of the Persian gardening style, in the satraps' gardens of Anatolia ('Asia' to the Romans) and in Mesopotamia and Persia itself. As Plutarch pointed out, "Lucullus [was] the first Roman who carried an army over Taurus, passed the Tigris, took and burnt the royal palaces of Asia in the sight of the kings, Tigranocerta, Cabira, Sinope, and Nisibis, seizing and overwhelming the northern parts as far as the Phasis, the east as far as Media, and making the South and Red Sea his own through the kings of the Arabians."

Lucullus' rural villas in the hills at Tusculum, near modern Frascati, and at Naples were also set in lavish garden settings. Plutarch, 'Lucullus' ch. 37 mentions "the chambers and galleries, with their sea-views, built at Naples by Lucullus, out of the spoils of the barbarians.", and Pliny writes of Lucullus cutting a channel through a mountain on his Naples estate to allow seawater to circulate in his fishpond, which recalled the channel that had been cut through the isthmus at Mount Athos by the Persian king.[1]

Lucullus received derision for Persian innovations. Pompey and Tubero mockingly nicknamed him "Xerxes togatus" (Xerxes in a toga, ie a Roman Xerxes), demonstrating that it was well understood in Rome that this new luxury of gardening originated in Persia.[2] Plutarch, like most of Lucullus' Roman contemporaries, thought these occupations of Lucullus' retirement unbecoming to a Roman, and mere play:

“ For I give no higher name to his sumptuous buildings, porticos and baths, still less to his paintings and sculptures, and all his industry about these curiosities, which he collected with vast expense, lavishly bestowing all the wealth and treasure which he got in the war upon them, insomuch that even now,[3] with all the advance of luxury, the Lucullan gardens are counted the noblest the emperor[4] has. Tubero, the stoic, when he saw his buildings at Naples, where he suspended the hills upon vast tunnels, brought in the sea for moats and fish-ponds round his house, and pleasure-houses in the waters, called him Xerxes in a toga. He had also fine seats in Tusculum, belvederes, and large open balconies for men's apartments, and porticos to walk in, where Pompey coming to see him, blamed him for making a house which would be pleasant in summer, but uninhabitable in winter; whom he answered with a smile, "You think me, then, less provident than cranes and storks, not to change my home with the season."[5] ”

Though a Lucullan feast has passed into proverb, Lucullus was not a mere conspicuous consumer. He formed a fine library and kept it open to scholars, wrote himself and supported writers. His garden was filled with works of art, particularly Greek sculpture, both originals and copies of “old masters”, and has thus been a rich archaeological source of ancient sculpture - the statue of the 'Scythian knife sharpener' (now thought to depict the executioner getting ready to flay Marsyas) which the Medici removed to Florence, for example, was found in this garden.

Lucullus is memorialized with a strain of Swiss chard.

[edit] Later history

These gardens became the favorite playground of Claudius' Empress Messalina (after she forced the current owner, Valerius Asiaticus, to commit suicide - Tac. Annals XI.1), and was the site of her murder on the orders of the Emperor Claudius, her husband. They were also owned by Felice della Rovere, daughter of Pope Julius II.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Pliny, IX.171 - also in this book are references to scientific observations carried out on Lucullus's fish.
  2. ^ Plutarch, Luc.39; Velleius Paterculus, II.33 - Cassius Dio LX.27 referred to the gardens as the horti Asiatici (probably referring to their being owned by Valerius Asiaticus rather than their being 'Asiatic').
  3. ^ AD 122, when Plutarch was writing
  4. ^ Then Hadrian
  5. ^ Plutarch, Life of Lucullus, 39

[edit] External links