GARDENS

The homes of wealthy Romans often contained enclosed outdoor areas that were elaborately landscaped. These private gardens typically featured flower beds, shade trees, marble benches, artworks, ponds, and sometimes plots of herbs, fruits, or vegetables. The frequency with which these gardens appear in Roman houses demonstrates that the Romans had a great love for this sort of natural environment and would go to considerable lengths to provide one for themselves.

During the republic, the wealthiest Romans began to construct estates immediately outside the central built-up portion of the city. These generally included a large expanse of land that was attractively landscaped, within which would be their villa. Julius Caesar, for example, owned a large estate in the Transtiberim. Thus the city of Rome became surrounded by a kind of greenbelt. Over time, many of these estates passed into the hands of the emperor and were opened up to the public for their use and enjoyment.

The generic Roman term for a garden was horti, although this is a somewhat ambiguous term because it was applied to a range of things from large estates, including the villas within them, to much smaller garden patches. One of the earliest of the elaborate gardens, constructed by the fabulously wealthy Lucullus, was known as the Horti Luculliani. Covering the top of the Pincian hill and stretching down into the Campus Mar-tius, it featured a number of separate dining rooms, each of which had a fixed budget for the dinners served in it. One of the more expensive of these was the Apollo dining room. Lucullus's gardens also included large libraries that he made available to the public, and these libraries became a kind of unofficial headquarters for literary-minded Greeks who were living in Rome.

The most famous republican gardens were the Horti Sallustiani, constructed by the historian Sallust. They were situated on and around the Quirinal and Pincian hills, and he is said to have spent much of his accumulated wealth on them. Nestled in and around the elaborately landscaped gardens were fishponds, baths, a porticus (covered walkway) supposedly a mile in length, an obelisk from Egypt, works of art, and a vault containing the bones of two giants said to be three and a half meters tall. The gardens of both Lucullus and Sallust eventually became imperial property and were made available to the public.

Eventually, green spaces open to the public showed up in even the heart of the city. This trend seems to have been started by Pompey, who attached an enclosed garden to his theater in the Campus Martius. Thus theatergoers could stroll about the covered walkways beneath shade trees and view ponds, flower beds, fountains, and statues. Agrippa similarly seems to have had some sort of gardens surrounding his bath complex, which he willed to the people of Rome upon his death.

The presence of such beautiful and peaceful gardens so close to the city, and which were open to the general public, offered the poor inhabitants of Rome a pleasant escape from the squalor of their apartments, and the gardens were probably one of the areas where they would choose to spend their idle time. Even more luxurious surroundings were made available to the people of the city by the emperors, who constructed gigantic and sumptuous public bath complexes.