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Hellenistic gardens.

by Eugenia Salza Prina RicottiI

THE HELLENISTIC GARDENS
The Hellenismus, connected both to the Greek civilization and to the Near Eastern world, developed different forms of art and architecture, and this also influenced its gardens that were many and famous. The contacts that the Hellenistic world had with the the Egyptians and the Mesopotamic gardeners were certainly very important and splendid parks were created. They were certainly derived from the ancient ones but the spirit that inspired them was different.
Today we know them only through the literary sources that are very schematic, and that don’t help us very much. Of course they tell us that Alexandria had beautiful parks and that they covered a quarter of the ancient town’s area. We also learn that in Alexandria, as in Greece, gardens were set near the town’s walls and some time even outside them, and they also inform us that those gardens were all connected between them and thus encircled the town in a large green belt.
Most beautiful were also the gardens of Antiochia, the Seleucids’ capital; splendid Antiochia and, for some estimators, even better than Alexandria. This town, built on a plain, was cut in two by a colonnaded road. On one side of it stood the buildings and on the other the gardens adorned by pavilions, baths and fountains, a park that extended itself to the hills, stopping only at their slopes. A second road directing itself toward the Oronte then crossed a splendid suburban district called Heraclea.
More far away, following for 7 km and a half a lane that, flanked by vines and roses, went toward south, one reached a park called Daphne. It occupied a large property circled by a 80 stadia long enclosure that, from the park’s name, was called Epidaphne (around Daphne). Originally here there was a Temenos (sacred precinct) dedicated to Apollo and Artemis, a holy wood rich of springs and dominated by 300 hundred very tall cypress trees that were believed to have been planted by the Seleucids themselves. Everybody praised the beauty of this park: here there were extremely elegant baths; a famous portico and many entertainment places. There were also luxurious hotels in which rooms vines were grown, while the perfume of the flowers planted in the flowerbeds under the clients’ windows reached their nostrils. Thus it was not difficult to imagine why this park was considered to be one of the most beautiful place in all the world.
Very like those garden must have also been the Hellenistic ones existing in Magna Grecia. In the sources we find some notes on them, but sketchy ones and even more brief than the precedent. We can only imagine that they must have been adorned by beautiful Nymphaea, sheet of waters, rivulets and thickets and, probably, as Maria von Gothein, the great ancient gardens scholar, advises us, it is only studying the hellenistic bas.- reliefs that in their mythological scenes presents beautiful landscapes that we succeed to get an idea on how they were at those times,.
Famous among the Magna Grecia’s gardens was the one that Hieron II ordered to be implanted on his ship, a large boat where, with some help by Archimedes, Archias of Corinth created it. The garden was set on the upper deck. Here on both sides of the walks every kind of rare plants were set in lead lined cases, while ivy and vines, grown in ceramic pots, shaded the lanes with their green trellis. But that did not seem to be enough. Thus in this garden Archias put also a sea water fishpond and besides it a fresh water one. As we can easily see it was a huge realization. When all the halls, the works of art, the ponds and the rest was set in it, the ship became so gigantic that it could not be moored in Syracuse’s harbour. Then Hieron was obliged to get rid of it, and, with a splendid beau geste, he gave it as a gift to Ptolemy III Euergetes. I always suspected that this act was due to the realisation that only Euergetes was able to accept this token, because in all the Mediterranean only Alexandria’s had a harbour large enough to contain the monster.
All those literary descriptions do not however help us very much to understand the Hellenistic garden. There are no excavations of them. It is only at Rhodes that we find something. Here it is still possible to visit some grottoes, natural ones or excavated in the flanks of the island rocky valleys, places evidently dedicated to he Nymphs. Today we can reach them using steps cut in the rocks. Also if now they are no more tended, we are pretty sure that in ancient times they were well arranged and decorated by green plants like ferns or ivies, and, of course, with sculptures. It is a kind of gardening that we could describe as romantic, a landscaping totally free from the rigid geometric schemes used up to then. Thus it is only in the island of Rhodes that we can get an idea of the Hellenistic garden and of the revolution that was brought with their landscaping.
For the rest a lot is told us by the garden sculptures. Roman copies of the Hellenistic ones that were left to us and that today we can see in the Museums. Nearly always they were fountain statues: Nymphs holding conches from where water felt down in the fountains; drunk Satyrs who laid asleep over a rock while hanging from their relaxed hand a leather bag let its stream slip gaily in a small pond; little Heros strangling a goose and making it project a high jet of water and so on. All those statues were set on natural or artificial rocks and placed near all the gardens sheet of waters in which their reflections were pleasurably duplicated. Statues that were certainly framed by the foliage and with tufts of flowers at their feet underlining the scene with their colours. Here everything imitated as possible the nature free from the symmetry of old times and following the landscaping tastes proper to the Hellenism, an Hellenism that afterward was passed to the Roman parks and triumphed in them as it did in the immortal Sperlongan grotto (for Sperlonga see “Sperlonga, villa del litorale” in this site)