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Statius’ Silvae and the Villa of Miracles

In the second example, the focus shifts from architecture adapting to nature, to architect and nature actively working together to achieve a complete result. Compared to the Vit-

ruvian example, nature’s role here becomes more active. This example can be found in the first book of the Silvae of the Flavian poet Statius. This might surprise, since a Statian poem (Silvae 4.3) was used earlier to illustrate the ‘default’ situation of hostile nature suc- cessfully subdued by the engineer. However, when responding to diffent challenges, Sta- tius can change his tune. In the poem we are about to consider, nature is cast as very coop- erative indeed.19

In Silvae 1.3, he describes and praises the country villa of a friend, Manlius Vopiscus.20

Famously, the moral legitimacy of luxurious Roman country retreats was fiercely con- tested by philosophers, moralists and writers in Rome.21 A writer wanting to praise a lux-

urious country villa therefore found himself in a difficult position. He had to enter this debate, and address the moralist criticism voiced by other writers. For Statius, one such opponent in the debate is the poet Horace (65-8 BC), who wrote several odes condemning the luxurious villas of Roman nobles, criticizing them for their size, their disrespect of natural boundaries (for example between land and sea) and the use of expensive and unnecessary building materials.22 Newlands has argued that Statius in his villa poems

deliberately evokes Horace as a literary model, but answers the strictures against luxuri- ous building in various ways.23 For example, one of the most obvious of Statius’ reactions

to Horace is his bold assertion that a villa praised for its gilded beams (35) coloured mar- bles (36), and an art collection containing everything from bronze sculptures to ivory carving and gems (47-51), provides luxu (…) carentes deliciae (92-3) – “pleasure without luxury”, while all of these features are named by Horace as synonymous with despicable luxury.24

What Newlands does not note is that not only Horace, but also Seneca, is a formidable literary opponent for Statius. The younger Seneca devoted several of his Epistulae Morales to the topic of suitable living and the dangers of the country villa, as well as rag- ing against excesses of daring and luxurious architecture in general. Again, Statius spe- cifically addresses the points which Seneca puts forward as his strongest arguments against luxury living. One example of this literary response: Seneca argues at length that the luxurious surroundings of his villa encouraged in a man called Vatia not the produc- tive leisure of the philosopher (otium), but inertia, laziness (Ep. 55.3-5). It is no accident that Statius dwells extensively on the particular kind of otium and quies (quiet) enjoyed by Manlius Vopiscus and another friend, Pollius Felix (who features in Silvae 2.2), in their respective retreats and on the ways in which this state is a result of the architectural sur- roundings: not laziness, but precisely otium conducive to reflection and the writing of poetry.25

Among the different methods by which Statius counters Seneca and Horace to make a powerful case for the moral acceptability of building luxury villas,26 there is one strategy

of particular interest, designed to respond to both Seneca and Horace (among others): his use of the topos of cooperation between man and nature. Both Horace and Seneca stress that builders of luxurious dwellings interfere with natural boundaries (especially between water and land), and that artificiality and technology threaten to disrupt the ‘natural state’ of things. Horace, in the first of his so-called ‘Roman Odes’, depicts the building of a villa

into the sea as an illustration of sinful human desire for luxury, and stresses the shock it causes to the natural system, focalised through the fish who feel their natural habitat shrink.27

In Silvae 1.3, on the other hand, nature actively complements the activities of the architect through her own devices (Silvae 1.3.15-23):

How gentle the nature of the ground! What beauty in the blessed spot before art’s handiwork! Nowhere has Nature indulged herself more lavishly. Tall woods brooded over rapid waters. A deceptive image answers the foliage and the reflection flows unchanging in the long stream. Anio himself (what won- drous allegiance!), full of rocks above and below, here rests his swollen rage and foamy din, as though loath to disturb the Pierian days and song-filled slumbers of tranquil Vopiscus. (Translation: Shackleton-Bailey, adapted)28

The builder has only to help nature complete what she has already begun. Nature herself has made the site of the villa a luxurious space, and the builder is following nature’s lead in continuing in this luxurious vein.29 In Silvae 4.3, as we saw above, the river Volturnus

first had to be subdued and channeled by force, before he claimed now to flow more hap- pily under human control (4.3.72-84). The river Anio does not offer Vopiscus an oppor- tunity to demonstrate his ability to win the war against nature. In order to render the lands- cape suitable for Vopiscus’ poetic slumbers, he quietens down of his own accord. In the first line of this passage, the cooperation between nature and engineer is expressed most clearly. The ground has a gentle ingenium (15) – a clear personification, since ingenium is, in its most basic meaning, that with which man is born, and is only very rarely used of non-human agents.30 The ingenium of the ground is then complemented by the

artes (16) of the engineer. The classic combination of ingenium and ars, both of which the artist needs in order to create a great artefact, is a commonplace in ancient literature.31

Statius separates the pair, and distributes the necessary qualities between nature and the engineer. Only if they cooperate can the villa be truly perfect.32

The harmony and happy co-existence of cultivation and nature goes to quite extraordinary lengths. It is encapsulated in the exquisitely humorous image of the Anio going for a night-time swim in the clean waters of the nearby aqueduct, the Aqua Marcia (70-74), thereby cleansing the estate’s large-scale water-management (64-7) of its dangerous asso- ciations.33 In lines 59-63, the poet describes that a tree has been preserved in the middle

of the house (mediis servata penatibus arbor, 59), which passes through roofs and door- ways to emerge into the open sky (tecta per et postes liquidas emergis in auras, 60). This house carries no suggestion of having been won from nature: the rhetoric of war and vic- tory has here been replaced by that of harmonious and fruitful cooperation between archi- tect and nature. One of the main arguments of the moralising critics, that the luxurious villa violates natural boundaries though unnatural excess, has been effectively dis- proved.34

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