Gardens of Lucullus

Description

The fabled gardens of Lucullus were among the most influential in the history of gardening. Lucullus had first-hand experience of the Persian gardening style, in the satraps' gardens of Anatolia ("Asia" to the Romans) and in Mesopotamia and Persia itself. As Plutarch pointed out, "Lucullus [was] the 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, Cabira, Sinope, and Nisibis, seizing and overwhelming the northern parts as far as the Phasis, the east as far as Media, and making the South and Red Sea his own through the kings of the Arabians." These comments indicate that it was well understood in Rome that this new luxury of gardening originated in Persia.

Lucullus's rural villas in the hills at Tusculum, near modern Frascati, and at Naples were also set in lavish garden settings. Plutarch, in '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. Because of the massive piles which he built in the sea at his villa in Naples, Pompey mockingly nicknamed Lucullus "the Roman Xerxes", and Tubero called him "Xerxes in a toga".

Plutarch, like most of Lucullus's Roman contemporaries, thought these occupations of Lucullus's retirement unbecoming to a Roman, and mere play: …

Later history

The gardens became the favourite playground of Claudius's Empress Messalina (after she forced the then owner, Valerius Asiaticus, to commit suicide – Tac. Annals XI.1), and was the site of her execution 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 made with the technique of gold sandwich glass, which was to remain an essential component of Byzantine and Western mosaics. In the 16th century they were owned by Felice della Rovere, daughter of Pope Julius II. The Villa Borghese portion was a vineyard in 160–5, when it was returned to be a grand garden.