However idyllic the Academy may have been, Epicurus, whose Garden the friends passed along the way, eschewed it as a location for his school, taking the radical step of creating a garden oasis for his pupils within the city itself. Just how significant a step it was that Epicurus established his horti ‘garden(s)’ within the city versus in its outlying suburbium can be recognized if one recalls that in its prime—as even to this day—Athens was not a garden city. Indeed, the suburban gymnasia provided the closest thing to pleasure gardens, and within the city’s walls, gardens of any variety were few and far between. Classical Athens, with scattered intra-mural plantings limited to public spaces such as sanctuaries and the Agora, was testimony of the triumph of humankind over wild Nature. Girt by the raw beauty of the sea, which was harvested for its wealth of fish, and the mountain triad of Penteli, Parnes, and Hymettos, which yielded marble, game, and pasturage, Athens was secured by its circuit walls against human and animal foe alike. Meanwhile, marking the “urban center,” a massive temple dedicated to the city’s patron goddess rose from and unabashedly appropriated a colossal rock in the midst of the Attic plain. The message of Athena’s temple was unambiguous: the city protected by this goddess had fought against and prevailed over the bestial, the monstrous, the barbarian—in short, every potential threat to a perfect, civilized, anthropocentric order.

Athens’ exclusion of “menacing” Nature from the city’s heart was a phenomenon mirrored by the dwelling house. Closely clustered along narrow, labyrinthine roads, Athenian houses presented a blank, fortress-like façade to the outside world. Their source of light and air was an interior courtyard, which served as a space for work, play, and worship, but not as a place to test one’s green thumb. Inner city, domestic gardens were limited, in the main, to ephemeral container plantings perched on rooftops and displayed in honor of Aphrodite’s beloved Adonis. In Classical Athens, the ideal garden was extra-mural and utilitarian. Outside the fortified urban center lay market gardens in which fruit, vegetables, herbs, and flowers were grown. Here too were orchards, vineyards, and fields of grain, and, beyond them, pasturelands.

Beginning with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the pages that follow will examine the impulse underlying the development of the particular and carefully designed anthropocentric order that would become pivotal in the ideological self-fashioning of the Athenians and the Hellenes more generally. These pages will also address the causes underlying the “retreat” into the garden—first into groves that lay beyond the city walls and then into inner city gardens—as a vantage point from which to reflect on the optimal ordering of society. Why did Epicurus subvert the age-old order by bringing Nature within the city’s walls, and why had Plato before him established his school in the groves of the Academy? Why, in turn, was the Roman sensibility towards Nature that emerged as the Republic set out to dominate the world so very different from that of Classical Greece? It is true that early Roman houses had garden spaces at their rear, evidence of an innate affinity for, or acknowledged dependence on, Nature, but the garden would eventually become a key feature fully integrated into the fabric of the Roman house. Exposure to the Hellenized East in the last centuries before the Common Era was attended by the assimilation of peristyle courts, but unlike their Greek counterparts, these peristyles were lushly planted. Outfitted with statuary and splashing fountains, the peristyle garden became the focal point of the Roman house. Now Nature was center stage. Planted gardens were “expanded” by paintings that mimicked their ornate hedges and bright blooms, and garden scenes, illusionistically painted, even appeared on the walls of interior living spaces. In short, the garden became a ubiquitous presence in the Roman house.