Varro and the Aesthetics of Agriculture

Britta K. Ager (University of Michigan)

In the late Roman Republic, agricultural produce was an ambivalent symbol in discussions of luxury and thrift. Agronomists, especially Varro, point to fresh produce and captive animals as things to be enjoyed for aesthetic reasons as well as for their market value. Varro, contrasting useful estates with luxurious ones, explicitly compares freshly-harvested fruit to collections of paintings as adornments for a villa (Res rustica 1.2.10). While the fruit is rhetorically superior, Varro still places farm produce in the same sphere of elite display as fine art.

Agriculture was a traditional locus of display for Roman landowners (Green; Purcell 1985; Purcell 1987). Ancient commentators and modern scholarship have both focused on examples of showy luxury, but throughout the Res rustica Varro discusses the display of produce as a more ambiguous type of self-presentation, capable of revealing either thrift or decadence. On one hand, Varro demonstrates, villa produce is valuable, useful, and displays an interest in agriculture which is salutary and old-fashioned. He describes dining rooms where guests can view aviaries, game preserves, and harvested fruit while they eat, and he implies that people visited estates specifically for these sights. On the other hand, a show of the owner’s harvest can easily turn to extravagance, as when landowners buy attractive fruit in Rome to display back in the countryside (Res rusticae 1.59), or indulge in costly fishponds.

These impermanent displays of produce take agriculture, at the heart of conceptions of old-fashioned Roman frugality, and bring it into the realm of urbane luxury. Many of the products mentioned by Varro as display objects—fresh fruit, boars in game preserves, birds in aviaries—were part of the specialized agriculture known as pastio villatica which catered to the urban luxury market. Staple crops, like wheat, vines, and olives, are only mentioned in passing as an attractive part of the scenery. Displays of fine produce allowed a landowner to ally himself with traditional Roman virtue at the same time as he showed off the elegance of his establishment.

Varro is conscious of the tension. He praises villas that are productive and condemns those that are beautiful but useless; but he also describes at length the aviaries he maintains for pleasure, the elegant dining room with its view of the birds, its duck ponds, its compass of the winds, celestial clock and mechanical serving contraption (Res rustica 3.5.8-18). Ultimately, he does not resolve the issue—the dialogue is interrupted by arrests in the forum before the other speakers can voice their opinions of his dining arrangements.

Purcell, N. (1985). "Wine and wealth in ancient Italy." JRS 75: 3f.

Purcell, N. (1987). Town in country and country in town. Ancient Roman Villa Gardens. E. B. MacDougall. Washington, D.C.: 185-203.

Green, C. M. C. (1997). "Free as a Bird: Varro de re Rustica 3." The American Journal of Philology 118(3): 427-448.

(Purcell 1985; Purcell 1987; Green 1997)