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ANNETTE GIESECKE |
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BOOKS
The Epic City: Urbanism, Utopia, and the Garden in Ancient Greece and Rome (Hellenic Studies 21) Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA: 2007)
Combining a wide range of visual and literary sources, The Epic City traces the evolution of Greek and Roman attitudes towards the natural environment. The creation of gardens, nature appropriated for human use, is the means by which Greeks and Romans negotiated the relation of their towns to the surrounding countryside. In general, the Greeks from the time of Homer to the death of Alexander the Great approached nature as a violent, unpredictable force. Their ideal social order, constituted by the utopian polis ‘city-state’, depended on the exclusion or taming of nature. Urbanized Romans, meanwhile, came to experience an overwhelmingly nostalgic feeling towards nature in the face of protracted socio-political upheaval. As a result, they attempted to reintegrate nature into their lives in villas and gardens. Vividly expressed in the epic poems of Lucretius and Virgil, this sense of nostalgia also led to increasing concern about the negative impact of urbanism on the natural environment.
Atoms, Ataraxy, and Allusion: Cross-Generic Imitation of the De Rerum Natura in Early Augustan Poetry, Georg Olms Verlag AG (Hildesheim: 2000)
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