The groves and the gardens as horticultural strategies for urban environmental resilience in ancient Rome: a multidisciplinary analysis of green oases as mitigation of stressors

This paper examines the Roman conception of gardens and sacred groves not only from aesthetic point of view as luxuries, eccentric whim of rich elites, but as vital and purposeful refuges from stress factors of Ancient City of Rome. Through the philological analysis of Latin texts, including prose authors like Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, Columella, Seneca, and poets like Vergil, Horace, Catullus and Martial, who provide us with depictions of Roman villas and the idea of idyllic way of living, this paper tries to explain the mitigation of Romans towards the abiotic and social stressors like heat, air pollution, noise, and dense overcrowding of the City. The article to lesser extent explores the design, plant selection and function of spaces that served as a form of any ancient urban resilience, by analyzing the arboreal choices, hydrological features and other instruments employed and described to create the final cooler and cleaner microclimates. Furthermore it also tries to engage philosophical aspect of the retreat, concerning the Epicurean and Stoic ideals as the ones associated in Rome with rural seclusion and well-being ( otium et salus ). The findings demonstrate that the sources consistently present these green enclaves as effectively countering urban ills: they are depicted as noticeably cooler, shaded retreats that temper oppressive heat ( aestus ) and dampen the din of the city ( strepitus ), while integrated aquatic features and dense canopies were credited with purifying the air and restoring both bodily health and mental tranquility, thus constituting a deliberately cultivated and textually celebrated form of urban resilience. By understanding the Roman approach to creating the green oases within the City the present study shall give a glimpse of ancient precedent for modern urban greening initiatives to achieve a more habitable and sustainable reality, in a typical Roman sophisticated attempt. It also shows that the problem of polluted city is does not concern the present day only. As one can see on the example of this study, man had already been struggling with it for millennia. Ultimately, what the Roman perspective demonstrates is that the deliberate cultivation of urban green spaces was not only a mere luxury, but a time-tested form of resilience, one from which the modern world still has much to learn.