Trustees of Boston University through its publication Arion: A Journal of Humanities and

the Classics
Trustees of Boston University

The "Locus Inamoenus": Another Part of the Forest

Author(s): Daniel Garrison
Source: Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Third Series, Vol. 2, No. 1
(Winter, 1992), pp. 98-114
Published by: Trustees of Boston University; Trustees of Boston University through its
publication Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20163508
Accessed: 15-10-2018 20:25 UTC

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The Locus Inamoenus:
Another Part of the Forest

DANIEL GARRISON

When I looked with half-closed eyes at the woods and

copses, those in the foreground and those in the middle dis
tance seemed to merge, and I could imagine the old endless
Germanic forests, which once covered the interior of this
continent, and in which anyone who had to read Caesar's
Gallic War, as I had, could picture as from a relic of race
memory all sorts of primitive and horrible happenings.
?Anthony Bailey,
Along the Edge of the Forest: an Iron Curtain Journey

I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first

came here.... Imagine the feelings of a commander ... in
the Mediterranean, ordered suddenly to the north;...
Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages,... cold, fog, tem
pests, disease, exile, and death ? death skulking in the air,
in the water, in the bush_Land in a swamp, march
through the woods, and in some inland post feel the sav
agery, the utter savagery, had closed round him ?all that
mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest...
? the beginning of Marlow's narrative
in Conrad's Heart of Darkness

TA he Romans never liked nature in the r

dearly loved their villas, parks, and messuages, and
ment to farm life, enriched by Hellenistic literary
the locus amoenus, confirmed their feeling for hum
ral settings. But sometime during the latter half of
tury B.C., the Roman love affair with nature be
nasty turn. The locus amoenus still commanded
mainstream Augustan poets, but in spite of
authority wielded by this "spiritual landscape,"1
lic undertones began to sound in the nature poetry
tan age.

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 Daniel Garrison 99

One of the last nature enthusiasts was Horace. In many ways

an old-fashioned poet, he professed a single-minded love of
nature, and he was prepared to say the same for all of his fellow
writers: scriptorum chorus omnis amat nemus et fugit urbem
(Epistles 2.2.77). But even Horace had mixed feelings. His half
comic adventure into the silva Sabina in Odes 1.22 where he
encounters a wolf (a neighbor's dog?) ultra terminum admits
that the wild silva is not as nice a place to be as the domesticated
nemus praised in the Epistles. The triste lignum that is roundly
cursed ?again with comic exaggeration ?for nearly falling on
his head in Odes 2.13 raises the possibility that Horace's
affection for trees at close range was mixed with distrust.2
Virgil was more than respectful of the traditional love of
nature. The Eclogues elevate nature into "an area beyond the
harsh facts of experience."3 His later work, though, does not
follow the lead of the Eclogues into a bright, purified realm of
benign and sympathetic nature. He gives his readers plenty of
romantic scenery in the Aeneid, but his descriptions have a more
somber coloring, with sometimes a hint of danger, as in this
description of Aeneas' Carthaginian landing place:

turn silvis scaena coruscis

desuper, horrentique atrum nemus imminet umbra;
(1.164-65)

then a backdrop of quivering leaves up above, and a dark

forest overhangs with gloomy shade.4

And even in the Eclogues, where sentiment reigns supreme, the

collection ends with Gallus renouncing his Arcadian paradise in
favor of the profession of arms while his love Lycoris goes off to
the Alpinas nives et frigora Rheni. This double change of venue
is significant, as I will argue that what the Romans found in the
forests of Europe permanently changed the way they perceived
nature as early as the middle of the first century B.c.

With the Augustan poets, the locus amoenus begins to appear

in an ironic framework. Propertius sets the scene of Tarpeia's
treachery and death in a tree-lined, ivied grotto, echoing with
the sounds of spring water and a sweet pipe that calls the sheep
to come out of the heat and take a drink:

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 100 THE LOCUS INAMOENUS: ANOTHER PART OF THE FOREST

There was a fruitful grove hidden in an ivied grotto, and

many a tree sounded with the springs that rose up there: a
bowered home of Silvanus, to which the sweet pipe bade
sheep come from the heat to drink.
(4.4.5?.)

But this pastoral note clashes with the violent story

announced in the first line of the elegy, Tarpeium scelus,
underlining the discrepancy between the comfortable poetic cli
ch? and the tale of unpastoral sorrow that makes up the rest of
the poem.
Ovid made the irony of violence, cruelty, and arbitrary
suffering in pleasant natural settings a repeated note, almost a
theme in the Metamorphoses.5 Nature loses none of its beauty in
Ovid, but the beauty becomes sinister, "a kind of trap, suddenly
and unexpectedly sprung, which reveals the insecurity and dan
ger surrounding the dwellers in such a world."6 In writing about
nice places where bad things happen, Ovid is redressing the slip
page of Hellenistic sentiment into pastoral sentimentality. He is
also making the most of a special effect?a horror more striking
because it occurs in a pretty place that we lull ourselves into
thinking is also a safe one. Lovely scenes are a prelude to hideous
action in a way we now associate with scary movies.
The Augustan revision of the locus amoenus anticipated
changes in the uses of nature in poetry of the Silver Age. Seneca's
gothic dramas made the most of a fully realized locus inamoe
nus7 which Ovid's half-sinister springs, caves, and groves only
suggested. Here, for example, is the necromantic grove outside
Thebes where Creon sees the ghost of Laius and hears the
demand for Oedipus' exile:

Far from the city is a grove black with ilex-oak around the
place of Dirce, in a watery swale. A cypress lifts its head
above the lofty wood, and holds the forest beneath its trunk
of evergreen. An ancient oak holds out branches that are
bent and putrid with decay; its trunk is ruptured, eaten at
by age; the cypress, broken at the root, hangs fallen, bal
anced on another trunk. A laurel with its bitter fruit is here,
and flimsy linden trees, Paphian myrtle and alder to move
oars over the vast sea?and blocking out the sun, a pine tree
pits its naked trunk against the winds. In the center stands

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 Daniel Garrison ioi

a giant tree whose heavy shade bears down upon the lesser
woods; it spreads its limbs afar and all alone defends the
grove. Beneath it, grim and ignorant of light or sun, wells
up a water stiff with endless cold. A muddy swamp sur
rounds the sluggish pool-The place creates its night.
(Oedipus 530-49)

The decay, oppression, and gloom heaped upon us here are a

step beyond the somberly romantic glades of Virgilian epic: the
scene is not cool but icy, not restful but stiff with dread. Seneca
is farther from Theocritus' shady bank than he is from Shake
speare's "shadowy desert, unfrequented woods." These woods
are "ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull."8
Seneca works out the features of the gruesome grove more
elaborately in a passage in the Thyestes (650-82) describing the
oracular grove at Mycenae where Atreus butchers his brother's
children. The same ilex, cypress, and oak are there, the same
sluggish fen, the same nocturnal gloom (Thyestes 678 nox pro
pria luco est, cf. Oedipus 549 praestitit noctem locus). For
added effect, there are clanking chains, howling ghouls, triple
barking noises, and other Stygian fixtures.
The spiritual landscape suggested by this bizarre scenery was
not lost on the next generation of poets. Seneca's nephew Lucan,
never one to miss an awful scene, arranges a similar gloomy
wood outside the cave of the witch Erichtho, whom Sextus Pom
pey consults about the impending battle of Pharsalia:

Not far from the black caves of Dis the ground is sunk and
settles steeply down; a pale forest overbears the place with
hanging branches; and a yew, whose top can see no sky or
let in sun, makes darkness.
(Pharsalia 6. 642-45)

This is a less luridly impressionistic wood than Seneca's: the

fully shaded yew, adding gloom to shadow, suggests the double
canopy forests that still covered large areas of northern Europe.
What it shares with Seneca's woods and all of the ghastly groves
in Silver poetry is that it is a religious site, associated with spirits
of the dead, witches, and strange deities. Here is an ancient reli
gious grove which an impious Caesar lays waste in Pharsalia
3.399-425:

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 102 THE LOCUS INAMOENUS: ANOTHER PART OF THE FOREST

There was a wood that never was profaned for a long age,
its dark air fenced with tangled boughs, the light of day
kept distant from its chilly shades. This place did not
belong to rustic Pans or to Silvani, masters of the groves, or
to the Nymphs, but to barbaric sacraments of gods: altars
built for grim burnt-offerings, and every tree anointed with
the blood of human sacrifice. If antiquity, reverent of the
gods, has earned our trust, even the birds are afraid to perch
upon those limbs, and beasts to use those coverts for their
rest; nor has the wind applied its weight upon those woods,
or lightning bolts shaken from dark clouds. The trees pre
sent their foliage to no breeze; they shudder by themselves.
And water falls in quantities from black springs; grim, art
less images of gods are hideously carved from trunks of
trees. The sheer decrepitude and pallor of the rotten wood
was paralyzing; men are not so frightened of spirits wor
shipped in familiar form?but not to know the gods they
fear, so much adds to their fears. The story also was that
often hollow chasms boomed with motions of the earth,
and fallen yew-trees rose again, and forest-fires blazed in
woods that did not burn, and serpents twined and glided
round the oaks. The people did not gather near this spot for
worship, but left it to the gods. When the sun is in the mid
dle of its course or when black night is in the sky, the priest
himself fears their approach and will not surprise the mas
ter of the wood.

This grove is set in Spain outside Saguntum, but for Lucan's

Roman audience it could be anywhere in Europe.9 The terror of
strange places encountered by Romans in the service of the
empire was being absorbed into their literary conventions.
Lucan assures us at the beginning of his purple passage that
there is nothing pastoral about this dark and chilly spot?hunc
non ruricolae Panes nemorumque potentes Silvani Nymphaeque
tenent. As in the passage in Book 6 previously quoted, he
emphasizes the density of the forest canopy and the resultant
gloom ?features that are conspicuous also in the Senecan pas
sages.10 The mortification of nature through decay is another
Senecan feature of Lucan's Spanish wood: situs putrique ...
robore pallor (414) recalls putres situ... ramos in Oedipus 534f.
Not only do birds, animals, and the wind itself avoid Lucan's

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 Daniel Garrison 103

wood, but weird and unnatural things happen: caverns boom,

fallen trees rise, and trees appear to burn without fire (420, non
ardentes fulgere incendia silvae), recalling the clanking chains,
gibbering ghouls, and fireless flames in Seneca's Thyestes 673
75: "Throughout the forest a flame is wont to flicker, and high
tree-trunks burn without fire."
These fireless flames may be literary exhalations of natural
phenomena more common in the damp forests of northern
Europe where decaying wood emits the eerie phosphorescent
glow of fox fire, and decomposing organic matter gives off meth
ane that burns with a bluish-yellow flame: ignis fatuus or will-o'
the-wisp. The prominence of decaying wood here and in Sene
ca's Oedipus passage is circumstantial evidence for such an
explanation; in any case, dead and decaying wood would not be
as common a feature of Mediterranean forests, which were reg
ularly stripped for firewood and wood for charcoal, as it would
have been in the vast, damp, and lightly populated forests of
western Europe.
Wood decays and emits strange fires when it is not harvested
in a way that any inhabitant of the Mediterranean would see as
normal. A forest that is not thinned by settled agricultural use11
is an unhealthy place, suitable only for Silver poetry's eldritch
doings, as can be seen in this description by Statius of the grove
where Tiresias holds "Stygian rites" to learn for Eteocles the
outcome of the Theban war:

A forest full of years and bent with mighty age, its foliage
forever uncut, stands accessible to no sunlight; no winter
storms have cut it back, no south wind rules, or Getic Bor
eas, driven by the Bear. Beneath is hidden quiet, and empty
terror keeps the silences; the phantom of excluded light is
scarcely pale.
(Thebais 4.419-24)

A familiar Mediterranean forest, having been thinned by a

variety of harvesting, would be bright and open to the wind.
This is an unused forest, a monstrous perversity like Hamlet's
unweeded garden. It is likely that in preparing his poem about
Domitian's German wars Statius had learned about the uncut
woodlands of the north, but several features of these lines are
demonstrably literary in their provenience. Statius' uncut

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 104 THE LOCUS INAMOENUS: ANOTHER PART OF THE FOREST

foliage (aeternum intonsae frondis) has roots in Seneca's Thy

estes 652f.: nulla qua laetos solet: praebere ramos arbor aut
ferro coli. The forest's age has a precedent in Seneca's vetustum
nemus (Thyestes 651), in his quercus... annosa which is broken
by edax vetustas (Oedipus 534-36), and in Lucan's lucus ...
longo numquam violatus ab aevo (3.399). That the darkness is
already a literary convention can be shown by comparing Sta
tius' pervia nullis solibus to Seneca's Phoebo obvia (Oedipus
540), Lucan's summotis solibus (3.401), and Phoebo non pervia
(6.645). The windlessness is another feature right out of the
Neronian Gruesome Groves parts bin, to wit Seneca's Zephyris
pinus opponens lotus (Oedipus 541) and Lucan's nee ventus in
illas: incubuit silvas (3.408f.).
Groves have gone together with caves and grottoes since
Homer described Calypso's cave in the Odyssey; Virgil gives us
a scenic combination of these at Aeneas' landing place in Aeneid
1.164-68, and another at Avernus where Aeneas enters the
Underworld (6.237ff.). The grove outside Erichtho's cave in
Lucan's Pharsalia 6.642-45 can be compared with the noisome
wood surrounding a serpent's lair in Libya described by Silius
Italicus:

A sluggish grove nearby stood guard upon a sunless Stygian

wood with pallid shadows, and a heavy vapor belching
forth into the air breathed out a fetid stench. Within, an
awful house and monstrous pit within a hollow cave
beneath the earth, and gloomy shadows without light.
(P?nica 6.146-51)

This owes a whiff of bad air to the haiitus that keeps the birds
away from the cave of Avernus in Virgil {Aeneid 6.240),12 but the
heavy, adjectival texture is mostly Senecan. The nemus within a
lucus followed by a specus inside an antrum is pure Silver
artistry.
In the absence of more documents, it is not possible to ascer
tain just where the macabre grove or forest became a topos of
Roman literature, but one likely guess is that the process began
about the time of Caesar's much-publicized campaigns in Gaul.
The Gauls themselves were known to the Romans since their
sack of Rome in 390 B.c., and those who lived along the Mediter
ranean coast and in the valleys of the Rhone and the Loire were

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 Daniel Garrison 105

established trading partners before the middle of the first cen

tury B.c. The northern reaches of their European habitat, on the
other hand, were terra incognita, with a different climate and a
different ecology. Instead of the dry, light soils of the Mediterra
nean basin where the original evergreen and hardwood forests
were giving way to cleared land, maquis, and low scrub forest,
Caesar's legionnaires in the 50s found heavy, wet alluvial soils
crowded with heavy deciduous forests. Instead of dry weather
during the summer campaigning season, they found rainy
weather. Instead of open country in which to draw up their
battle lines, they were often obstructed by swampy lowlands and
densely forested plateaus. This was particularly true of the
country disputed in the campaigns of 55-53. The Ardennes For
est, which hampered American troops during the Battle of the
Bulge in 1944, stretched westward from the Rhine a distance of
over five hundred Roman miles, by Caesar's estimate (B.G.
6.29). To appreciate the immensity of this and neighboring
European forests, one must try to imagine a Europe whose mass
is 80 percent forested, as opposed to about a third today.13
Caesar's account of his Gallic campaigns acknowledges these
difficulties. Even at the beginning, he reports that his men pan
icked in the summer of 58 B.c. at the thought of pursuing Ario
vistus over narrow trails through the forests near Vesontio:

Qui se ex his minus timidos existimari volebant, non se

hostem vereri, sed angustias itineris et magnitudinem sil
varum, quae interc?d?rent inter ipsos atque Ariovistum...
timere dicebant.
(B.G. 1.39)

Those among them who wished to be thought less timid

said that they did not fear the enemy, but were afraid of the
narrow places along the way and the size of the forests that
lay between themselves and Ariovistus.

Ariovistus was able to avoid combat by hiding his army in the

swamps, while Caesar made a long detour through open coun
try to avoid a forest ambush on his way to the Rhine (1.40f.).
The native resistance followed similar lines in subsequent
campaigns. The Nervii would attack suddenly from the forest
and hide out in the swamps (2.19, 28), as did the Morini and

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 IO? THE LOCUS INAMOENUS: ANOTHER PART OF THE FOREST

Menapii, drawing any Romans foolish enough to pursue into

obstructed ground:

They had continual forests and swamps; there they retired

with all their possessions... . They suddenly came swoop
ing out of all parts of the forest and attacked our troops.
Our men quickly took arms and drove them back into the
forests, and after killing many of them and pursuing them
for some distance into very dense areas, lost a few of their
own number.
(3.28)14

Such are the classic lines along which natives have resisted orga
nized invaders even into our own time, and one can scarcely help
wondering if Caesar's reported kill ratio in this account was as
inflated as the body counts claimed by the American command
in Vietnam.
Like the Americans in Southeast Asia, Caesar attempted stra
tegic deforestation to deprive the Morini and Menapii of their
cover, but was impeded by weather. Here, it would appear, the
victor was General Rain:

During the remaining successive days, Caesar began cut

ting down the forests, and to prevent any attack from the
flank on unarmed and unprepared troops, he turned all the
cut material around to face the enemy and built it up on
either flank to serve as a rampart. After this had been
accomplished with incredible speed over a great area
within a few days, since their cattle and the rear of their
supply train were already in our hands, they headed for
denser forests, and such heavy storms followed that work
had to be interrupted; in the continual rains, our soldiers
could not be kept any longer under their hide tents.
(3.29)
The Britons used forest ambushes for harassment and inter
diction of Caesar's Seventh Legion in 55 B.c. (4.32), and again in
the following year (5.9). The greatest horror that year took
place in the Ardennes forest, when the Eburones fell upon
Roman forces under Sabinus and Cotta as they passed through
a narrow defile. The Gallic leader Ambiorix had persuaded the

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 Daniel Garrison 107

Romans to abandon their camp with rumors of a larger attack

from across the Rhine, and as Sabinus and Cotta attempted to
march to Quintus Cicero's camp at Charleroi, he massacred the
entire force. Seeking a wider victory in the Ardennes, Ambiorix
pressed on to Cicero's camp, cutting off and killing parties for
aging in the forest for lumber to build fortifications. Ambiorix's
siege of Cicero's camp was finally lifted by Caesar himself, who
was prudent enough to decline a pursuit into country where sil
vae paiudesque intercedebant (5.52). Although the Gauls were
forced to retire to nocturna in locis desertis concilia to rethink
their thwarted offensive (5.53), the events of 54 B.c. established
once again that forests and swamps were as safe to the Gauls as
they were perilous to the Romans.
In the following year the Menapii and the Treveri took refuge
in these forests and swamps, where they were left unmolested
(6.5, 8). The Suebi likewise retired across the Rhine to the
Bacenis forest, a fastness of infinita magnitudino, where Caesar
prudently decided not to advance (6.10, 29). The only Roman
success of that year was a surgical strike into the Ardennes where
an advance cavalry detachment under L. Minicius Basilus sur
prised a forest settlement where Ambiorix was living during the
summer months.15 Ambiorix, however, was able to lose his pur
suers in the wood and escape the onslaught (6.30). The iron law
of forest warfare again worked to native advantage as forest and
swamp closed around the Eburones. There was no one to be
found for a battle, and nowhere but cramped and murky forest
trails to fight should battle be joined. Caesar's exasperation
shows through in this account of his vain attempts to find and
destroy the Eburones:

There was, as we showed before, no definite armed force,

no town, no garrison to defend itself by arms, but every
where a scattered multitude. Wherever a hidden valley or a
wooded area or an impassible bog offered hope of protec
tion or some kind of safety, the enemy had made camp.
(6.34)

For the Gauls of the Ardennes, Fortress Europe was a haven of

forest and swamp impervious to the massed formations and
siegecraft of Mediterranean warfare:

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 I08 THE LOCUS INAMOENUS: ANOTHER PART OF THE FOREST

The forests, with their vague and obscure trails, prevented

massed formations from entering. If Caesar wanted to con
centrate his maniples near their standards as the established
system and habit of the Roman army required, the place
itself acted as a protection to the savages, and as individuals
they lacked no audacity for attacking from hidden ambush
and surrounding our men when they were scattered.
(ibid.)

The campaign of 53 was a political rather than military victory.

Caesar exhausted the Eburones by setting other Gallic tribes
against them to exact a revenge Romans were unable to inflict.
His resentment at this tribe, which refused to fight him on his
own terms, is implicit in the language he uses: their courage is
audacity (audacia), their resistance a crime (facinus), their war
fare a kind of innate brigandage unchecked by wood or swamp:
non hos palus in bello latrociniisque natos, non silvae morantur
(6.35).
It was the good fortune of Caesar and his legions that his Gal
lic campaigns ended in the south where forest and swamp gave
way to the open valleys and large settlements of the Loire region.
Vercingetorix and Caesar both used swamps and other features
of the land to protect their camps (e.g., near Bourges, 7.16-17),
but they fought in the open because the smaller forested or
swampy enclaves south of B?lgica were subject to encirclement
by the Romans.16
Caesar's frustration in the forests of Belgium and Germany
was also that of his officer staff, which included articulate, edu
cated, and wealthy Romans of Catullus' generation. These wit
nesses of the horrors of the northern forests were no doubt as
glad to return to a civilized landscape as Catullus was after his
misadventures in Bithynia in 57-56. What they had to tell is not
recorded, but the effect of Bithynia's forested slopes on Catul
lus' imagination is strongly suggested in Poem 63, where we are
constantly reminded (eleven times in the poem's ninety-three
lines) of the silva and nemus where the madness and captivity of
Attis take place.
The poem tells how Attis crosses the sea to Asia, where, as
soon as his foot touches the Phrygium nemus and he enters the
opaca silvis redimita loca belonging to Cybele, he is struck with
furente rabie and unmans himself. The centerpiece of the poem

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 Daniel Garrison 109

is the monologue which Attis speaks when he wakes from his

frenzy to find himself cut off?both geographically and anatomi
cally ? from his former life in Greece:

Egone a mea remota haec ferar in nemora domo?

Ego vitam agam sub altis Phrygiae columinibus,

ubi cerva silvicultrix, ubi aper nemorivagus?
(58,71f.)

Am I borne from my home into these distant forests? Will I

lead my life beneath the high peaks of Phrygia, with the
forest-dwelling doe and the boar that roams the wood?

The goddess's response to this change of heart is to send one of

her lions to the beach where he has been looking out over the
maria vasta, to chase him back into her forests:

Fac ut furoris ictu reditum in nemora ferat!

Make terror stampede him back into the woods!

The lion, spotting Attis by the marble sea (prope marmora pel
agi), makes his attack, with the desired result: she/he flees in
panic into the wild woods (Ilia d?mens fugit in nemora fera),
doomed to spend the rest of his life as a feminized slave of
Cybele.
The poem deserves rereading with the forest symbolism in
mind. An important part of the symbolic structure of Catullus
63 is the contrast on the one hand of the sea, associated here
with light, warmth, Hellenism, the masculine, and rationality,
and on the other of the forest, associated with rabies (4, 38,44,
57, 93), furor (94, 31, 38, 54, 78, 79, 920), the feminine, dark
ness, chilliness,17 and bestiality. When the sun rises (39-43) on
the day after Attis' self-mutilation, he sees his new situation liq
uida mente (46), and he goes to the sea which he had left at the
beginning of the story to voice his lament. The goddess's lion,
suggestive of the instinctive ferocity of her cult, drives Attis from
the moist region of the shining shore (umida albicantis loca
litoris) into the savage woods (nemora fera, 89).

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IIO THE LOCUS INAMOENUS: ANOTHER PART OF THE FOREST

Catullus 63 takes on additional meaning when it is read as a

translation into fictive narrative of a personal encounter with
strange and distant forests. This insight suggests that besides the
objective difference between the heavy forestation of distant
regions and the lighter woods of the central Mediterranean,
there is the subjective feeling of unease that Romans in the ser
vice of the empire felt on unfamiliar ground. Ruskin comments
as follows on the affective difference between the romantic land
scapes of the Swiss Alps and similar scenes in North America:

It would be difficult to conceive a scene less dependent upon

any other interest than that of secluded and serious beauty;
but the writer well remembers the sudden blankness and
chill which were cast upon it when he endeavored, in order
more strictly to arrive at the sources of its impressiveness, to
imagine it, for a moment, a scene in some aboriginal forest
of the New Continent. The flowers in an instant lost their
light, the river its music; the hills became oppressively deso
late; a heaviness of the boughs of the darkened forest
showed how much of their former power had been depen
dent upon a life which was not theirs, how much of the
glory of the imperishable, or continually renewed, creation
is reflected from things more precious in their memories
than it, in its renewing. Those ever springing flowers and
ever flowing streams had been dyed by the deep colors of
human endurance, valor and virtue; and the crests of the
sable hills that rose against the evening sky received a
deeper worship, because their far shadows fell eastward
over the iron wall of Joux and the four-square keep of
Granson.18

The difference Ruskin perceived between a landscape on famil

iar ground and a similar scene imagined in a strange and distant
land throws light upon the Roman experience of forests far from
the seat of empire. The double discomfort felt by Catullus in
Bithynia and Caesar's legionnaires in northern Gaul is on the
one hand the dread of the unfamiliar, and on the other the physi
cal differences of the northern rain forests contrasted with the
dry, thinner southern woodlots incorporated in the pastoral
tradition.

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 Daniel Garrison in

The dread of distant forests was kept alive in the principate of

Augustus by new disasters on the German frontier: a legionary
standard lost to Sugambri raiders in the clades Lolliana of 17
B.c., and, for the next generation, a much worse disaster far
across the Rhine in the Teutoberg Forest?the massacre of three
legions, nine auxiliary regiments, and a large number of women
and children under the command of P. Quinctilius Varus: the
clades Variana of A.D. 9. The ancient sources call attention to the
setting of this atrocissima calamitas deep in enemy territory:
"the army, hemmed in by forests, swamps, and ambushes, was
butchered by this enemy to the point of extermination" (exerci
tus... inclusus silvis, paludibus, insidiis ab eo hoste ad inter
necionem trucidatus est). So Velleius Paterculus (2.119) in his
short account. Dio tells how the Germans under Armenius put
Varus off his guard, then fell on his army

in nearly inescapable forest;... the trees grew densely, and

to enormous height_At this point also rain and a great
wind came along,... and the ground, which was slippery
around the roots and the bases of the trunks, made their
walking very treacherous, and the treetops, breaking off
and falling down, threw them into confusion. Then, while
the Romans were in such a helpless state, the barbarians,
who were acquainted with the trails, suddenly surrounded
them from all sides.
(56.19-21)

As there was no hope of drawing up a conventional massed

defense, the Germans were able to kill soldiers and camp follow
ers alike at will through swamp and forest (per paludes perqu?
silvas, Florus 2.30.36, cf. Tac. Annals 1.61). On the third day of
a stumbling retreat which bore no resemblance to a battle, Varus
and his officers committed suicide. Only a few of those who set
out got back to the Rhine to tell their story.
The news of this defeat, which had the effect of undoing the
work of Tiberius and Drusus to extend the Roman frontier to the
Elbe, so shook Augustus that he made no effort to win back the
lost territory. Spotty as it is, the testimony of antiquity indicates
that the inclemency of summer weather, the density of the for
ests, and the impenetrability of the swamps had an emotional
effect on the Romans that aggravated the military disadvantages

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 112 THE LOCUS INAMOENUS: ANOTHER PART OF THE FOREST

to the point of demoralization. The Black Forest was a danger

ous salient into the Roman Empire, a dagger pointing at the
heart of Roman Gaul. But such was the dread of the northern
woodlands that the emperors preferred to tolerate the danger of
that alien world rather than reenter its confines. Writing at the
end of the first century, Tacitus had much to say about the
people of Germany but little about its landscape save that it
was "altogether either bristling with forests or foul with
swamps" (in Universum... aut silvis h?rrida aut paiudibus
foeda, Germania S).
For the literary tradition that took root in those years, the
horror silvestris beyond the Rhine became generalized into a
region of the imagination. The spiritual landscape of the
Romans and their literary heirs was permanently altered by the
addition of a "Senecan" dimension that can be traced as far back
as Catullus, Caesar, and the Augustan poets. With the Silver
poets, the dark and dangerous forests of the north hardened into
a rhetorical topos suitable for gothic scenes in which counter
pastoral nature could be as evil as pastoral nature had been
benign.

NOTES
I am grateful for suggestions made by the anonymous referees of Arion in the
final preparation of this article.
1. The phrase originates in Bruno Snell's article in Antike und Abendland
(1945), "Arkadien. Die Entdeckung einer geistigen Landschaft," later incorpo
rated as Chapter 13 of Die Entdeckung des Geistes (Hamburg: Ciaassen und
Goverts, 1948). See T. G. Rosenmeyer's English translation The Discovery of the
Mind (Harvard University Press, 1953), pp. 281-309. Snell's observation that
Virgil's Arcadia is a remote and artificial outgrowth of Theocritus' Sicily resem
bles my own argument that the forests of northern Europe provided material for
a similarly fanciful dystopia, an imaginary scenery or "spiritual landscape" of
studied horror instead of artful pleasantness.
2. Cf. also Odes 2.17.27ff., 3.4.27, 3.8.7f. Horace's close call with a falling
tree seems to have been a real event and to have elicited in him a sense of personal
crisis. See Nisbet and Hubbard, A Commentary on Horace: Odes Book II
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), pp. 201ff.
3. Snell, op. cit. (1953) p. 295. Philippe Borgeaud calls Virgil's Arcadia "a
kind of stage set" (The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece. Chicago, 1988, p. 5). In
creating his mythic Arcadian scene, Virgil was inverting some older associations
of rural landscape, particularly of Arcadia and its native god Pan, with wildness
and violence. Note also how Horace employs Pan/Faunus as a buffer against
Bacchic and sexual violence in his Tyndaris Ode, 1.17.

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 Daniel Garrison 113

4. See also the landscape surrounding Allecto's specus horrendum in Aeneid

7.563ff., and the murky gulch in 11.522ff. where Turnus plans to ambush
Aeneas.
5. See Hugh Parry,"Ovid's Metamorphoses: Violence in a Pastoral Land
scape," TAPA 95 (1964), 268-82, and C. P. Segal, Landscape in Ovid's Metamor
phoses: A Study in the Transformations of a Literary Symbol. Hermes
Einzelschrift ?23. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1969. Segal (p. 15) notes the transi
tional character of Ovid's landscapes, which "are akin to the sheltered pastoral
bower; but they are also the ancestors of the dangerous wild wood of later litera
ture: Dante's selva selvaggia ed aspre e forte, Ariosto's selve spaventose e scure,
Shakespeare's 'ruthless, vast, and gloomy woods.'" (Titus Andronicus IV i.53,
paraphrasing Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.521, stabula alta ... silvis obscura vet
ustis). In the series of rapes that take place in a locus amoenus, Ovid's Metamor
phoses pays special attention to the sexual forms of rustic violence. Marcel
D?tienne remarks "the hunter's terrain [becomes] the privileged place in myth
for marginal sexual behavior.... As a liminal place where socially dominant
sexual relations are as if suspended, the land of the hunt is open to the subversion
of amorous pursuits ..." (Dionysos Slain, Baltimore, 1979, 26). See also
Barbara E. Stirrup, "Techniques of Rape: Variety of Wit in Owi?*s Metamorpho
ses," G&R 24 (1977) 170-84; Leo Curran, "Rape and Rape Victims in Ovid's
Metamorphoses " Arethusa 11 (1978), 213-41.
6. Segal, op. cit., p. 18.
7. The adjective inamoenus can justly be called Silver (Statius, Thebaid 1.89,
Silvae 2.2.33; Pliny, Epistles 9.10.3), but the first use cited in OLD is in Ovid,
Metamorphoses 10.15, where Orpheus enters the inamoena regna of Hades.
8. Two Gentlemen of Verona V iv.2; Titus Andronicus ? i. 128.
9. J. F. Drinkwater in fact calls it "a splendid description of a Gallic primeval
forest." Roman Gaul (Cornell University Press, 1983) p. 30, n. 19. But it is a mis
conception that Gaul in Roman times had "vast tracts of virtually impenetrable
forest," as (by at least one account) "by the end of the Iron Age much of Gallia
B?lgica and Lugdunensis has as little natural forest as exists today." See Anthony
King, Roman Gaul and Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990), p. 102. For the literary pedigree of Lucan's description, cf. Propertius
4.4.3-6, particularly the opening formula Lucus erat and the reference to
Silvanus, Propertius line 5 and Pharsalia 3.403.
10. Seneca, Oedipus 530 lucus ilicibus niger; 540f. Phoebo obvia: enode
Zephyris pinus opponens lotus-, 545f. lucis et Phoebi inscius: ... umor; 549
praestitit noctem locus. Thyestes 61% nox propria luco est. Lucan Pharsalia
6.644?. nullo v?rtice caelum: suspiciens Phoebo non pervia taxus.
11. For a summary of ancient agricultural uses of forest products, see Russell
Meiggs, Trees and Timber in the Ancient Mediterranean World (Oxford Univer
sity Press, 1982), pp. 260-78. Besides lumber for construction of buildings, fur
niture, and equipment, the forest supplied forage for pigs and leaf-fodder for
other stock, firewood, and stakes, poles and props for fencing and trellising.
12. Silius' curvoque immanis in antro may also owe something to Virgil's
vastoque immanis hiatu, 6.237, and the verbless couplet intus dira domus ...
sine luce tenebrae recalls the structure of Virgil's grotto in Aeneid 1.166-68:

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 114 THE LOCUS INAMOENUS: ANOTHER PART OF THE FOREST

Fronte sub adversa scopulis pendentibus antrum,

intus aquae dulces vivoque sedilia saxo,
Nympharum domos.
13. George W. Hoffman, A Geography of Europe (1969), p. 18. See also A.
Aymard, ?tudes d'histoire ancienne (Paris: Presses universitaires de France,
1967), 560f.; R. Dion, "Usines et for?ts," Revue des eaux et for?ts 16 (1938),
771 ff.; W. Groenman-van Waateringe, "The Disastrous Effect of Roman Occu
pation," Roman and Native in the Low Countries, eds. R. Brandt and J. Slofstra
(Oxford: B. A. R., 1983), 147f.; L. Musset, "Les for?ts de la Basse Seine," Revue
arch?ologique 36 (1950), 84f. In a similar way, Livy had to ask his readers to
imagine the Ciminian Forest in the central Apennine massif at the time of the
Battle of the Caudine Forks in 321 B.c. as being magis turn invia atque horrenda
quant nuper fuere Germania saltus, probably thinking of Caesar in 55 and 53.
14. In the following year the weather was dry, and no longer able to take ref
uge in swamps, they surrendered to Labienus. Their allies the Menapii retreated
into denser forest, permitting Titurius and Cotta to lay waste their land, build
ings, and crops (4.38).
15. The Gauls anticipated the living habits of Roman and modern exurban
ites: vitandi aestus causa plerumque silvarum atque fluminum petunt propin
quitates (6.30).
16. See, for example, 7.32: Ad hostem [Caesar] proficisci constituisset, sive
eum ex paludibus silvisque elicere sive obsidione premere posset.
17. The positive end of the thermal scale is hinted in the animo aestuante
with which awakened Attis goes back to the sea in 47, and is articulated when he
remembers the threshold warm with his lover's tears: mihi limina tepida, 65.
The negative, chilly side is suggested first in the niveis manibus of the newly cas
trated Attis (8), later and more expressively in the chill of the Phrygian forest
where Attis finds himself aput nivem et ferarum g?lida stabula (53); cf. 70 ?lgida
Idae nive amicta loca.
18. The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Ch. VI ? 1. Ruskin adds in a note, "And
when I got to the edge of the ravine,... and the solemn roar of the water came up
from beneath, mixed with the singing of the thrushes among the pine branches, I
felt it more than usual, but it struck me suddenly how utterly different the
impression of such a scene would be, if it were in a strange land, and in one with
out history; how dear to the feeling is the pine of Switzerland compared to that
of Canada."

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