The Gardens of Sallust: A Changing Landscape

During the 1st century BC the historian Sallust developed a spectacular garden which occupied a large area in the north-western section of the city of Rome. It gave pleasure to the people of Rome for several hundred years. This is not a book about Roman horticulture, instead Hartswick approaches the gardens as a work of art, considering the cultural context of the gardens, the changes made to it by a succession of emperors after Sallust's death and the large number of sculptures the gardens contained. Hartswick even takes the story up to the present day, discussing the influence of the gardens and `the memory of beauty' that they represented on post-Antiquity, particularly on the architects and historians of the 19th century. Fully illustrated sections examine the building fever that followed the discovery of numerous sculptures from the gardens in the 1880s, the evidence, now much destroyed, of the original garden architecture, the location of Sallust's house, and numerous other features, including the base of an obelisk, an elaborate vestibule and the `circus of flora'. Sculptures have been discovered from the gardens for centuries and they are now widely dispersed. One section of the book gathers these together and illustrates statues of deities, youths and maidens, Amazons, defeated Gauls and other barbarians, nymphs, friezes and Egyptian sculptures. Throughout, Hartswick draws on archaeological and historical evidence and in addition to lots of photographs of the sculptures, the book includes reproductions of Renaissance and post-medieval paintings and plans of Sallust's gardens.