The Gardens of Lucullus ( lat, Horti Lucullani) were the setting for an ancient

villa A villa is a type of house that was originally an ancient Roman upper class country house. Since its origins in the Roman villa, the idea and function of a villa have evolved considerably. After the fall of the Roman Republic, villas became s ...

on the

Pincian Hill The Pincian Hill (; it, Pincio ; la, Mons Pincius) is a hill in the northeast quadrant of the historical centre of Rome. The hill lies to the north of the Quirinal, overlooking the Campus Martius. It was outside the original boundaries of th ...

on the edge of

Rome , established_title = Founded , established_date = 753 BC , founder = King Romulus (legendary) , image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg , map_caption ...

; they were laid out by Lucius Licinius Lucullus about 60 BC. The Villa Borghese gardens still cover of green on the site, now in the heart of Rome, above the

Spanish Steps The Spanish Steps ( it, Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti) in Rome, Italy, climb a steep slope between the Piazza di Spagna at the base and Piazza Trinità dei Monti, dominated by the Trinità dei Monti church, at the top. The monumental stairwa ...

History

Lucullus

The fabled gardens of Lucullus were among the most influential in the

history of gardening The early history of gardening is largely entangled with the history of agriculture, with gardens that were mainly ornamental generally the preserve of the elite until quite recent times. Smaller gardens generally had being a kitchen garden as t ...

. For introducing the

Persian garden The tradition and style of garden design represented by Persian gardens or Iranian gardens ( fa, باغ ایرانی), an example of the paradise garden, has influenced the design of gardens from Andalusia to India and beyond. The gardens of the ...

Pompey Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (; 29 September 106 BC – 28 September 48 BC), known in English as Pompey or Pompey the Great, was a leading Roman general and statesman. He played a significant role in the transformation of ...

mockingly

nickname A nickname is a substitute for the proper name of a familiar person, place or thing. Commonly used to express affection, a form of endearment, and sometimes amusement, it can also be used to express defamation of character. As a concept, it is ...

Lucullus Lucius Licinius Lucullus (; 118–57/56 BC) was a Roman general and statesman, closely connected with Lucius Cornelius Sulla. In culmination of over 20 years of almost continuous military and government service, he conquered the eastern kingd ...

"the Roman Xerxes", and Tubero called him "Xerxes in a

toga The toga (, ), a distinctive garment of ancient Rome, was a roughly semicircular cloth, between in length, draped over the shoulders and around the body. It was usually woven from white wool, and was worn over a tunic. In Roman historical tra ...

". These comments demonstrate that it was well understood in Rome that this new luxury of gardening originated in Persia. Lucullus had firsthand experience of the Persian gardening style, in the satraps' gardens of

Anatolia Anatolia, tr, Anadolu Yarımadası), and the Anatolian plateau, also known as Asia Minor, is a large peninsula in Western Asia and the westernmost protrusion of the Asian continent. It constitutes the major part of modern-day Turkey. The ...

( "Asia" to the Romans) and in Mesopotamia and Persia itself. As Plutarch pointed out, "Lucullus asthe first Roman who carried an army over Taurus, passed the Tigris, took and burnt the royal palaces of Asia in the sight of the kings,

Tigranocerta __NOTOC__ Tigranocerta ( el, Τιγρανόκερτα, ''Tigranόkerta''; Tigranakert; hy, Տիգրանակերտ), also called Cholimma or Chlomaron in antiquity, was a city and the capital of the Armenian Kingdom between 77 and 69 BCE. It bore ...

, Cabira, Sinope, and Nisibis, seizing and overwhelming the northern parts as far as the Phasis, the east as far as

Media Media may refer to: Communication * Media (communication), tools used to deliver information or data ** Advertising media, various media, content, buying and placement for advertising ** Broadcast media, communications delivered over mass e ...

, and making the South and Red Sea his own through the kings of the Arabians." Lucullus' rural villas in the hills at

Tusculum Tusculum is a ruined Roman city in the Alban Hills, in the Latium region of Italy. Tusculum was most famous in Roman times for the many great and luxurious patrician country villas sited close to the city, yet a comfortable distance from Rome ( ...

, near modern

Frascati Frascati () is a city and ''comune'' in the Metropolitan City of Rome Capital in the Lazio region of central Italy. It is located south-east of Rome, on the Alban Hills close to the ancient city of Tusculum. Frascati is closely associated wit ...

, and at

Naples Naples (; it, Napoli ; nap, Napule ), from grc, Νεάπολις, Neápolis, lit=new city. is the regional capital of Campania and the third-largest city of Italy, after Rome and Milan, with a population of 909,048 within the city's adminis ...

were also set in lavish garden settings. Plutarch, 'Lucullus' ch. 37 mentions "the chambers and galleries, with their sea-views, built at Naples by Lucullus, out of the spoils of the barbarians.", and Pliny writes of Lucullus cutting a channel through a mountain on his Naples estate to allow seawater to circulate in his fishpond, which recalled the channel that had been cut through the isthmus at Mount Athos by the Persian king. Plutarch, like most of Lucullus' Roman contemporaries, thought these occupations of Lucullus' retirement unbecoming to a Roman, and mere play: Though a ''Lucullan feast'' has passed into proverb, Lucullus was not a mere conspicuous consumer. He formed a fine library and kept it open to scholars, wrote himself and supported writers. His garden was filled with works of art, particularly Greek sculpture, both originals and copies of “old masters”, and has thus been a rich archaeological source of ancient sculpture – the statue of the '' Scythian knife sharpener'' (now thought to depict the executioner getting ready to flay

Marsyas In Greek mythology, the satyr Marsyas (; grc-gre, Μαρσύας) is a central figure in two stories involving music: in one, he picked up the double oboe ('' aulos'') that had been abandoned by Athena and played it; in the other, he challenged ...

), which the Medici removed to Florence, for example, was found in this garden. Lucullus is memorialized with a strain of

Swiss chard Chard or Swiss chard (; ''Beta vulgaris'' subsp. ''vulgaris'', Cicla Group and Flavescens Group) is a green leafy vegetable. In the cultivars of the Flavescens Group, the leaf stalks are large and often prepared separately from the leaf blade; ...

Later history

These gardens became the favorite playground of Claudius' Empress

Messalina Valeria Messalina (; ) was the third wife of Roman emperor Claudius. She was a paternal cousin of Emperor Nero, a second cousin of Emperor Caligula, and a great-grandniece of Emperor Augustus. A powerful and influential woman with a reputatio ...

(after she forced the current owner, Valerius Asiaticus, to commit suicide �
Tac. Annals XI.1
, and was the site of her murder in 48 AD on the orders of the Emperor Claudius, her husband. From shortly afterwards, in around 55 AD, mosaics excavated in the gardens have provided the earliest known use of

tesserae A tessera (plural: tesserae, diminutive ''tessella'') is an individual tile, usually formed in the shape of a square, used in creating a mosaic. It is also known as an abaciscus or abaculus. Historical tesserae The oldest known tessera ...

made with the technique of gold sandwich glass, which was to remain an essential component of

Byzantine The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantium, was the continuation of the Roman Empire primarily in its eastern provinces during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital city was Constantinopl ...

and Western mosaics.Conventi, 1-3; specifically,
the earliest known use of gold tesserae was in 55 AD, in the Gardens of Lucullus by the Spanish Steps in Rome
/ref> In the 16th century they were owned by

Felice della Rovere Felice della Rovere (c. 1483 – 27 September 1536), also known as Madonna Felice, was the illegitimate daughter of Pope Julius II. One of the most powerful women of the Italian Renaissance, she was born in Rome around 1483 to Lucrezia Normanni ...

, daughter of

Pope Julius II Pope Julius II ( la, Iulius II; it, Giulio II; born Giuliano della Rovere; 5 December 144321 February 1513) was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 1503 to his death in February 1513. Nicknamed the Warrior Pope or th ...

. The Villa Borghese portion was a vineyard in 160-5, when it was returned to be a grand garden.

Notes

References

*Conventi, A et al., "SEM-EDS analysis of ancient gold leaf glass mosaic tesserae. A contribution to the dating of the materials", OP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering Volume 32 conference 1, 2012, A Conventi, E Neri, and M Verità. IOP Conf. Ser.: Mater. Sci. Eng. 32 012007 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/32/1/012007
paper online
*von Stackelberg, Katharine T. "Performative Space and Garden Transgressions in Tacitus' Death of Messalina," American Journal of Philology 130.4 (2009) 595-624.

External links

in ''

A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome ''A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome'' is a reference work written by Samuel Ball Platner (1863–1921). The first edition was published in 1904; the second edition ('revised and enlarged') was published in 1911 (both: Allyn and Bacon, B ...

'', 1929. (on

LacusCurtius LacusCurtius is a website specializing in ancient Rome, currently hosted on a server at the University of Chicago. It went online on August 26, 1997; in July 2021 it had "3707 webpages, 765 photos, 772 drawings & engravings, 120 plans, 139 maps." T ...

) *
Gardens of Lucullus at Rome Reborn Digital Project, University of Virginia
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gardens Of Lucullus Buildings and structures completed in the 1st century BC