Better Homes (But No Gardens?): Housing, Horticulture, and Identity in Classical and Hellenistic Greece

This article argues that the apparent lack of highly designed recreational gardens within Greek homes in the Classical and Hellenistic periods (480-31 BCE) can be explained by the connotations of gardens within Greek culture. Material and literary evidence suggest that Greeks in this period viewed gardens as places of leisure and wanted gardens close to their homes. But what little evidence there is for the use of courtyard gardens within those homes suggests that such gardens were not the highly designed spaces found in Roman villas and Hellenistic royal palaces. This difference in gardening practice is explained by considering what message Greek homeowners hoped their houses would convey about themselves. The ornate enclosed courtyard of the elite Greek house was intended to convey both an ability to maintain a decorous separation between genders within the household, and a willingness to share wealth through hospitality. Gardens had a reputation as places of material and sexual excess that ran contrary to this message. Wealthy Greeks overcame this difficulty by placing their gardens near their homes rather than within them, and by conspicuously sharing the produce from those gardens with others.