The "Locus Inamoenus": Another Part of the Forest

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The "Locus Inamoenus": Another Part of the ForestAuthor(s): Daniel GarrisonSource: Arion, Third Series, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Winter, 1992), pp. 98-114Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20163508 .

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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

T A he Romans never liked nature in the raw. They dearly loved their villas, parks, and messuages, and their attach

ment to farm life, enriched by Hellenistic literary conventions of the locus amoenus, confirmed their feeling for humanized natu

ral settings. But sometime during the latter half of the first cen

tury B.C., the Roman love affair with nature began to take a

nasty turn. The locus amoenus still commanded the loyalty of mainstream Augustan poets, but in spite of the canonical

authority wielded by this "spiritual landscape,"1 some less idyl lic undertones began to sound in the nature poetry of the Augus tan age.



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:



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



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:




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



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




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



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



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



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:



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



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).



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.



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




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.



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:




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."



The "Locus Inamoenus": Another Part of the Forest

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