Conclusion and Epilogue

Abstract

Abstract This chapter offers an overview and summary of the study. It also provides an Epilogue that traces briefly some major changes and continuities in later Latin literature that bring out some of the distinctive features of these earlier representations and remind us that many of our conceptions of the garden are post-Classical. Most notably, the later literary tradition of gardens in Greek and Latin literature is dramatically altered by the influence of the Jewish and Christian traditions, which introduce new allegorical dimensions to the representations of gardens. There is, however, at the same time a remarkable continuity in the techniques and functions of garden descriptions, due to the similar writing and reading practices of late Latin poets with those of the classical past and their desire to associate themselves with the earlier literary tradition. The classical texts and their garden depictions surveyed in this study remained important models for the Latin poets of late antiquity. The cultural value of the villa and its grounds and gardens continues as an important feature of later Roman masculine self-definition. Garden imagery endures as a self-reflexive symbol of aesthetics and poetics, but it gains a Christian interpretation, either as a metaphor for the cultivation of the soul or as an earthly image of the Garden of Eden or Heavenly Paradise.