The Epic City
Subtitle: Urbanism, Utopia, and the Garden in Ancient Greece and Rome (Hellenic Studies Series)
Publisher: Center for Hellenic Studies
Published: January 15, 2008
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 220
ISBN-13: 9780674023741
Subjects: European history: BCE to c 500 CE; Ancient Greece - History; Ancient Rome - History; History; History - General History; History: World; Ancient Greece; Ancient Rome; Ancient - Greece; Ancient - Rome; Landscape; History / Ancient / Greece; Gardens; Greece; Rome; Symbolic aspects
Description: "As Greek and Trojan forces battled in the shadow of the Troy's wall, Hephaistos created a wondrous, ornately decorated shield for Achilles. At the Shield's center lay two walled cities, one at war and one at peace, surrounded by fields and pasturelands. Viewed as Homer's blueprint for an ideal, or utopian, social order, the Shield reveals that restraining and taming Nature would be fundamental to the Hellenic urban quest. It is this ideal that Classical Athens, with its utilitarian view of Nature, exemplified. In a city lacking pleasure gardens, it was particularly worthy of note when Epicurus created his garden oasis within the dense urban fabric.

The disastrous results of extreme anthropocentrism would promote an essentially nostalgic desire to break down artificial barriers between humanity and Nature. This new ideal, vividly expressed through the domestication of Nature in villas and gardens and also through primitivist and Epicurean tendencies in Latin literature, informed the urban endeavors of Rome."--Jacket.