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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.
List of contents
- Introduction: Gardens, Gender, Genre, Geopoetics
- Chapter 1: Masculine Horticultural Self-Fashioning: Hard and Soft Labor
- Chapter 2: Vergil's Garden (Georgics 4.116-48): A Literary Paradigm
- Chapter 3: Women in the Garden: Catullus, Ovid, and the Greek Poetic Tradition
- Chapter 4: Trampling in the Garden: Satiric Verse and Epigram
- Chapter 5: Columella and the Poetics of Horticulture
- Conclusion and Epilogue
About the author
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.
Summary
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.
Additional text
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.
