Gardens as spaces of physical and mental well-being in ancient literature

Abstract

In this paper, we concentrate on the garden as a place capable of offering physical protection from danger, as well as fostering psychological or physical well-being through relaxation and soothing activities in a variety of ancient Greco-Roman sources, including not just poetry but also philosophical, medical, and specialist literature generally. In the first part, we consider the environment in Greco-Roman medical discourses with specific reference to gardens. Various themes in what are sometimes called ‘enviromental’ medical approaches are illustrated to narrow the analysis to the case of gardens and cultivated land as a space for therapeutic activity, relaxation, diversion, and intellectual and philosophical exchange. The inclusion of the garden, we propose, within the range of the medically useful is indebted to the stereotyping of gardens in philosophical genres, but also to a wider understanding and exploitation, literal and metaphorical, of the garden as ‘controlled nature’. The latter point emerges more clearly in the second part of the chapter in which we focus on two poetic texts (Ovid, Metamorphoses 14.623–771; Columella, De Re Rustica 10.255–310). In our conclusions, we bring together these two strands of observations and offer remarks about the conceptual parallel between the human body (including its health and safety) and landscaped vegetation in ancient cultures.