Pompeii's Peristyle Gardens
By the time that Vitruvius wrote his book, it was normal for Roman houses to have peristyle gardens, so Virtruvius doesn't try to explain what they are, he just focused on correct proportions for columns of the Doric order. It may come as a surprise that this attitude towards domestic architecture was only a few centuries old. It was only during the Hellenistic period that stone columns began to be used in private homes. During the Classical period, Doric columns were only used in temples and other public buildings.
Archeological evidence says that Hellenistic courtyards were paved like earlier Greek courtyards, no matter how grand the peristyles surrounding them. These courtyards may have been decorated with potted plants, but the peristyle garden seems to have been uniquely Italian.
We think of peristyle gardens as Roman, but they seem to have developed in southern Italy; before that area was conquered by Rome. We know that by the time of Vitruvius, courtyard gardens were a normal part of Roman houses, but during the first century BCE, most Roman Aristocrats lived in their old family homes along the via Sacra, beside the forum. These old houses all had the traditional arrangement of rooms opening onto an atrium, but many of them wouldn't have featured peristyle gardens. Most other Romans were living under rather congested conditions during this period, so we shouldn't assume that the city of Rome looked like Pompeii.
Pompeii was only conquered by Rome in about 80 BCE, before that, it had been a Samnite city since the 5th Century. Pompeii had probably never been a Greek colony, but it was strongly influenced by the Greek colonies of southern Italy. When Pompeii was destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, it was probably still more a part of Hellenistic civilization than the city of Rome was.
Because Vesuvius entombed Pompeii in a deep layer of volcanic ash and lapilli (pumice about the size of peach stones), we know more about the gardens of Pompeii in 79CE than we know about ancient Roman gardens of any other period. We would know much more if all of Pompeii's gardens had been excavated after the science of garden archeology had been developed. We should be glad that parts of the city are still unexcavated, because it is only from those gardens excavated during the second half of the 20th century that archeologists have really learned about how the gardens were planted.
What we do know is that Pompeii's oldest peristyle gardens seem to date from the second century BCE. Earlier gardens were at the rear of houses and seem to have been planted with vegetables. "Peristyle" is actually an English word, the Romans always said that they had a "peristylium", from the Greek word "Peristulon". Many of the rooms that opened onto a peristyle also had Greek names. The Romans were always aware that a peristyle was a Greek addition to their traditional Roman homes.
Because the earliest peristyle gardens were created centuries before the eruption of Vesuvius, we can't really know how they were first planted, but because many gardens were shaded by large trees in 79 CE, it is safe to assume that those trees had been planted many years earlier.
We know about Pompeii's trees because when the buried trees rotted, lapilli gradually filled the root cavities. Archeologists carefully remove the lapilli and fill the cavities with plaster. After the plaster is hard, the surrounding soil is removed, leaving a cast of the root.
Pompeii only got an aqueduct during the time of Caesar Augustus and at the time of the eruption, parts of Pompeii still did not have access to the the aqueduct's water. Some homes that had access to the water were not connected to it, so we know that earlier gardens were watered from cisterns. In the center of a traditional Roman atrium, there would be an opening in the roof, called a compluvium. Rainwater fell through this opening into a shallow collecting pool called a impluvium. Water from the impluvium was led by pipes to a cistern which served all of a household's needs before the aqueduct was constructed. Because of the limited supply of water, it is likely that Pompeii's peristyle gardens were originally planted with trees and grapevines, which needed very little water once established.
We tend to picture Pomeii's peristyle gardens as formal because such gardens became fashionable after water from the aqueduct was available. Water from Pompeii's aqueduct doesn't seem to have been used in many homes to flush toilets; it's main use seems to have been to irrigate gardens and supply garden pools and fountains. Some peristyle gardens were so dominated by ornamental pools that they became water gardens with narrow planting strips between the pools and the surrounding peristyles.
Almost all of the gardens which were watered from cisterns had irregular, informal plantings within the geometric enclosure of their peristyles. Some of the trees were grown for shade while others were valued for their fruits and nuts. Southern Italy's intense sunlight allowed grapevines to fruit well when trained among the branches of trees; they are still grown that way near Pompeii.
My next article will delve into the relationship between Pompeii's houses and their gardens.
Bibliography
Articles in this Topic
