Was Cicero Aware of Natural Beauty?

Abstract

It has long been fashionable to believe that the Romans had little conception of natural beauty, and to assume that any sympathetic awareness of nature which they displayed could be accounted for in terms of their moral or utilitarian preconceptions. The moral relationship which in much of classical Greek literature was assumed to exist between man and nature had been reflected in and strengthened by the philosophical theories of Plato and, later, the Stoics. Yet this conception was already an anachronism by the time of the appearance of Lucretius' theory of Voluptas, and appears to have been progressively weakened in the later Republic and early Empire until in Ovid natural processes become the mere backcloth of human activity and emotion. Professor Segal has recently illustrated the employment of nature by Ovid as a literary symbol for the reflection of human emotion, and earlier work had revealed the emotional and moral attitudes to nature of Virgil and other poets, but it is questionable whether awareness of natural beauty as such, unalloyed by moral or emotional symbolism, is to be detected in Roman poetry, much less in Roman prose writing. This view may be supported by a careful scrutiny of Roman literature, where the reader will find it difficult to locate any obvious similarity to some of the commonest modern reactions to natural beauty; and further practical confirmation of this attitude may perhaps be derived from the apparent disdain of the Roman road-builders for any of those concessions to natural contours made by twentieth-century rural conservationists.