New Classicists (Jan 2021)
Rus ‘Becomes’ Urbs: Hard and Soft Landscape Elements in the Gardens of Pompeii
Abstract
From the late Republic to early Imperial period, the Roman garden occupied a liminal space between the notions of rus and urbs, characterised as the ‘cultural faultline’ by Spencer in her study of Roman landscape in 2006 (p.246). During this period, horti came to typify permeable boundaries between the countryside and the urban centre, the former characterised values of rusticity and subsistence-living, while the latter represented standards of political endeavour and social integration. Yet despite this conflation of meaning and use in the Roman hortus, and the difficulty for the historian in defining their intentions and receptions with certainty, it is still possible to find levels of delineation and spatial organisation within the urban garden, including both defined and merged areas of function. In order to achieve this, defined concepts of spatial organisation are required, to act as signifiers of boundaries and content in an analysis. This paper therefore argues for the epistemological application of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ landscape elements to the spatial analysis of Roman urban gardens, in order to establish patterns of organisation, if any, in relation to the ideological concepts of ‘rus’ and ‘urbs’. ‘Hard’ features will be defined as the ‘bones’ of a landscape, the immovable elements which shape it, such as water, earth, and architecture. ‘Soft’ elements will be classified as those which are changeable, the living entities making up the landscape, i.e. plants. In delineating the two categories, it will be possible to establish boundaries in the garden space, as means of division, obstruction, privatisation, and social direction, subsequently allowing the definition of space by function. Within this paper, case studies from Pompeii and Herculaneum will be applied to domestic and commercial structures in order to better establish non-elite constructions of garden space on a local scale.
