Wooden Cupboard-Shrine in the House of the Wooden Shrine at Herculaneum. The shrine, in the form of a little temple with finely carved Corinthian
colonnettes at the corners, contains statuettes of the household gods, the Lares and Penates. Below is a cupboard containing glassware and
ornaments. The lighter coloured parts of the woodwork are modern restorations.
Gardens
Ornamental gardening was not invented by the Romans: shrubs and trees had been used by the Greeks to beautify temple precincts and gymnasia, and
a late-Hellenistic landscaped park has recently been identified outside Rhodes. But it was only in the Roman period that pleasure gardens became a
major facet of the arts of living.
The term used by the Elder Pliny for ornamental gardening is opus topiarium, whose derivation from the Greek word topia (landscapes) reveals both
the Greek origins of the art and one of its main themes. The original aim of the gardener was, in fact, to create attractive natural settings: in a famous
passage Pliny seems to list varieties of landscape gardens as 'groves, woods, hills, fish-pools, canals, rivers, coasts'. But the artificial element soon
came to play a predominant role, and we find increasing evidence for the use of statuary and garden furniture, the introduction of formal layouts and
the shaping of trees, and the combination of plants with water displays.
The association of statuary and landscape began with works such as the Victory of Samothrace (above, p. 504), set on a ship in a rock-filled pool, and
continued with the sculpture-grottoes of the Rhodian park, a theme later carried to extremes of grandiloquence by Rhodian artists working in the
service of the emperor Tiberius at Sperlonga and on Capri. But the combination of statues with foliage soon became equally fashionable. When the
word topiaria first appears in Latin literature, in a letter of Cicero dated to 54 B.C., it is in connection with the growing of ornamental ivy as a
backdrop to Greek statuary in one of his brother's villas at Arpinum. Such effects were doubtless employed by many of Cicero's illustrious
contemporaries in the parks which they created in the area of Rome itself and round their luxury villas in the country; it was for Italian garden settings
that the sculptured marble bowls and candelabra produced in Neo-Attic workshops were primarily designed.
Formal planning and topiary in the modern sense probably began in the time of Augustus. This is when, according to Pliny, one C. Marius invented
nemora tonsilia ('barbered groves'). As the desire to impose formal shapes almost certainly went hand in hand with the desire to create formal plans,
we can assume that the same period saw the first symmetrically planned gardens, especially as the improvements in the water-supply of Rome and
other parts of Italy undertaken by Agrippa and his successors would have favoured the cultivation of low, ornamental plants. The first formal gardens
in wall-painting belong to the first half of the first century A.D., laid out in plots framed by hedges or trellis fences: an example in the tablinum of the