fueled the art and poetry of the Romantics found different outlets in antiquity. In
traditional polytheistic cultures, aesthetic appreciation of nature is inseparable from
awareness of the sacred in the landscape; special beauty means that the spot is the
abode of a god or gods (Motte 1973:27–8). Mountain peaks, groves, springs, caves,
and other landscape features were often regarded as inherently sacred, and their
symbolic fascination was closely bound up with their aesthetic appeal. Territorial
and economic reasons for the placement of sanctuaries certainly existed, and strategic
placement helps to account for the spectacular success of individual sanctuaries.
Yet any comprehensive model of sanctuary development must take account of an
irreducible, elusive, and subjective element: the apprehension of the sacred. Many
sanctuaries, such as those on mountain peaks and in caves, were relatively inaccessible.
Delphi is a good example of a stunningly beautiful yet rather impractical location.
Its sacred aura was enhanced by mysterious intoxicating vapors, long considered
fictional but now shown to be consistent with the geology of the place (de Boer
et al. 2001).
Even where beauty in the landscape was not a top criterion, as in crowded urban
areas, water for purifications, preferably from a running source, was always required in
sanctuaries (Cole 1988). This meant that vegetation was likely to be abundant. In
fact, the sanctuaries of both male and female deities were thought to be incomplete
without a sacred grove or some other vegetation. Even heroes had their gardens. The
grove of the Academy, shrine of a venerable Attic hero, became famous for its resident
philosophers, and the Healing Hero, or Heros Iatros, had his garden in Athens.
Apollo had a garden at Sunium, and Heracles had a garden on Thasos. Usually we
only hear of these gardens when their leases are mentioned in inscriptions, but they
were not exceptional. Of all the Greek deities, however, the nymphs were perhaps
most closely associated with gardens.
Gardens of the Nymphs
We might expect that nymphs, being denizens of the wild spaces, occupy a place in
the Greek mental map corresponding to the wild, the untamed, and the uncivilized:
‘‘nature’’ perceived as ‘‘other.’’ To some extent this is the case. Homer’s epithet for
the nymphs who dance with Artemis (Odyssey6.105–8) isagronomoi, ‘‘dwelling in
the wild places,’’ and Euripides speaks of nymphs inhabiting the snowy peaks of
mountains (Helen1323–6). Sophocles draws a sensitive portrait of the storm-beaten,
desolate landscape of Lemnos where Philoctetes is stranded, with the nymphs and the
wind as his only companions (Philoctetes1453–62). Yet against this concept of the
nymphs we can compare another model that contradicts it in some ways, but is just as
venerable and well attested in the sources. This is the idea that the nymphs inhabit a
pleasant garden. To the Greeks, a ‘‘garden of the nymphs’’ was a space intermediate
between the untamed wild and the carefully tended field of grain or pruned orchard.
The garden might exhibit signs of planned improvement, such as a built fountain, but
it was ideally a natural spot that already serendipitously possessed everything needed
to appeal to human tastes and comforts, like the sanctuary of the nymphs and
Achelous on the Ilissus river visited by Socrates and his friends in thePhaedrus
(229a–230c), which has shady trees, a cool spring, a grassy slope for reclining,
58 Jennifer Larson