It was my birthday recently and a friend gave me an antique print of Varro’s aviary.  Like you, my first thought was “who was Varro?” – followed swiftly by –  that doesn’t look like any aviary I’ve ever seen before.

So first who was Varro?  Marcus Terentius Varro  (116–27 BC) was a contemporary of Caesar, Pompey, Cicero,  and Horace, and  one of the great polymaths of the Roman world. His literary output was prolific, with over  70 major texts to his name, although most only survive as fragments. However Rerum rusticarum libri tres (Three Books on Agriculture) survives complete and  includes a section about the extraordinary aviary which must have been one of the wonders of the ancient Roman world.

The quotes about the aviary come from the translation of Rerum rusticarum in the Loeb Classical Library, 1934

Varro was born into the equivalent of a “gentry” family and like most Romans of his class he became involved in both war and politics, becoming a military commander in the army of Pompey, the great rival of Caesar.  After Caesar had won the civil war Varro was pardoned and sent off to help out with a major agricultural reform scheme in southern Italy.  Later he gained the favour of Augustus the first emperor, which allowed him to become the administrator of Rome’s first public library then retire and live quietly and get on with his scholarly writing which included Rerum rusticarum written when he was about 80, for the benefit of his young wife, about how to run a large farm.

His account of the aviary begins with a discussion between two friends who ask Varro to tell them about it because they say he has “far surpassed not only the original type of aviary, the invention of our friend M. Laenius Strabo.”  According to Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, it was Strabo who began the practice of “imprisoning within bars living creatures to which Nature had assigned the open sky”.

Like many elite Roman villas Strabo’s had an exedra – a semicircular architectural recess  either free-standing  or set into a building’s façade – which in his case opened onto a colonnaded courtyard.  The aviary was formed by simply stretching a net in front of the entrance, so while walking round the colonnade, on one side would have been the courtyard garden while on the other one could look into the exedra through the netting to  admire the birds.

It’s known from other sources that often the spaces between the columns of a colonnade were hung with objets d’art, military gear etc rather like the backdrop of a theatre- perhaps along the lines of these fresco from Pompeii and Herculaneum. All that’s needed is the net, maybe some songbirds rather than dead fish and ducks to create the same effect: a pretty display of livestock intended to be admired and then consumed.

Like all known early civilisations the Romans kept birds for food in basic practical spaces – such as henhouses & dovecots – probably with little thought for ornament and pleasure, although particular breeds or varieties of chicken or other birds might have  been selected for their beauty without, presumably, preventing them from being eaten. However with the expansion of Roman rule across the Mediterranean and even wider trade routes exotic birds such as peacocks, guinea fowl, and pheasants also too began to be imported and kept.

As it happens these exotic birds were mainly ground dwellers and so relatively easy to keep in an enclosure since they were less likely to fly off, only needing shelter against inclement weather and predators.

Again there are frescoes from Pompeii, Herculaneum and other Roman towns, which if they are to be believed, show such birds roaming  freely in and around gardens and even domestic spaces.

The Romans also valued many songbirds such as thrushes, blackbirds, nightingales and ortolans as food  but most of such species cannot be easily  domesticated and do not breed in captivity.  Instead they had to be caught in the wild, so the aviary may have begun as a sort of living larder, half-way between a cage and living free.

There is a parallel with what was happening with other animals: aviaries can be seen as the equivalent of fishponds or parks for deer or other game animals.

Once the idea of an auiarium  or  ornithon [as they were known in Greek, the language often used to show the writers learned status]  was established what made it distinctive was that the birds were not only potential food but their flight and song could provide  potential entertainment.

Now let’s turn to Varro’s aviary.  It stood on his estate at Casinum, halfway between Rome and Naples, near the modern day Monte Cassino.  His description in Rerum rusticarum is lengthy and quite complicated and although it gives detailed measurements, it has no illustrations so the precise layout and scale are not always clear. As we’ll see this has given rise to considerable speculation and considerable differences in the various attempts to reimagine it.

The first major attempt to do that was in the mid-16thc when some archeological remains were found near Monte Cassino and which were thought to be part of Varro’s estate.  That led Pirro Ligorio an influential Italian architect and garden designer to publish an engraving of his reimagining of the aviary in  1558.

The renewed interest in Varro is then  thought to have given rise to a renewed interest in aviaries, most notably those  in the gardens of the Palazzo Farnese on the Palatine Hill in Rome.

 For more on this see The Aviaries of the Farnese Gardens by Natsumi Nonaka, 2016

 

The next major attempt was made about a hundred years ago by two Frenchmen, Charles  Des Anges, an architect and archaeologist Georges Seure. However as the academics from the University of Caen who are behind the most recent reimagining point out, Des Anges and Seure thought some of the measurements unlikely – notably the circular temple-like structure which they thought far too small – and so they altered them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Caen team of Philippe Fleury and Sophia Madeleine went back to Varro’s text and stuck to its measurements  meticulously, then reconstructed the aviary in 3D virtual reality.  They discovered that the measurements were based on the rules and ratios explained by Pythagoras which isn’t perhaps surprising since Varro was also a mathematician and there was an influential school of Pythagorean philosophy in Rome at the time.  Its quite complicated to explain but you can follow the argument  in   the public seminar they gave about it which is available on YouTube. The images in the next section are screenshots from that seminar.

Varro says his estate was divided in two by a river, much of it in a stone-lined canal-like channel crossed with  bridges and lined with broad walks.  Upstream from the villa  was the ornithon or aviary, “enclosed on both sides, to right and left, by high walls.” In plan it resembled  “a writing-board with a head-piece: the oblong part has. a width of forty-eight feet, and the round head twenty-seven.”

 

The entrance had bronze gates and opened onto a large open area with  colonnaded porticos in stone on both sides and were rows  of diminutive trees.

 

 

These colonnades were “full of all manner of birds” but Varro recognised that keeping wild birds was difficult. He thought they suffered a painful longing for their former free life, nostalgia for the outside world, and the despair brought on by captivity so he decided to hide the outside world from them as far as possible.

His aviary had few openings so the captive birds could not see those birds who were still free or even  the trees in which they nested.  Of course, we shouldn’t assume Varro shared any modern notions of animal welfare, but it does suggest that he imagined these birds to be psychologically affected by captivity.

At the far end were two narrow oblong fish-pools in front of a circular temple-like structure, supported on columns, known as a tholos. The pools were fed with water from an aqueduct outside the complex, which then ran down into the canal.

The tholos had two rows of columns, – a stone circle on the outside and a wooden circle inside. They were hung with nets with the space between them serving as another aviary  “like a miniature bird-theatre with  frequent brackets upon all the columns to serve as perches for the birds.”  Outside it was  “a wood of great shade trees, planted by hand, so that light shows only through its lower part, all shut in by high walls.”

So far quite impressive but fairly straightforward.  However for Varro the aviary was also  a place of entertainment of a different sort because it wasn’t just the birds that were fed and watered there.

The tholos was actually a dining room. In the centre was  a small pool and standing in the middle of that was a revolving table where food would be laid out.

Guests could lay on divans set out around the table and admire  the  living birds and fish while simultaneously consuming dead ones.  Nor was it an ordinary table. Since the Romans used their fingers to eat, rather than cutlery hands were frequently greasy or in need of washing, so  the tabletop was hollow and divided into sections, some filled with hot and some with cold water so guests could easily wash their hands.

The overall effect must have been highly theatrical. Diners sat at the centre while looking outward through successive layers of architecture, birds, and vegetation, with fish and waterbirds also to be seen beneath them.  The birds were neither hidden nor simply caged; they became part of a carefully staged visual display, like living elements in a landscape painting.

But that’s not all.  The dome of the tholos was a masterpiece of almost impossible-to-believe mechanical and hydraulic engineering. elaborately constructed with stars representing “Lucifer by day and Hesperus by night”  moving and revolving  “in such a manner as to show the time of day.” There was also “a compass of eight winds, just as there is in  Athens”.  The Athenian Tower of the Winds, is the only surviving horologium or clock tower from classical antiquity, with a water clock inside and  sundials on its exterior. It was rightly considered a marvel of science and engineering, so Varro’s version was clearly at the cutting edge of technology. The  hydraulic workings of his ceiling were concealed in a tower at the rear of the aviary but are too complicated to explain in a few words here. However you can check it all out on the Caen YouTube video.

The upkeep of the aviary and its livestock required huge amounts of care, labour and money and led to the creation a category of garden workers known as auiarii, “those who take care of the birds”.  But no expense was spared because  it reflected the concept of utile dulci the classic Latin phrase first used by the poet Horace, Varro’s contemporary, and  meaning “the useful with the agreeable” or “combining profit and pleasure”. Varro’s estate managers sold any surplus birds and fish to generate an additional income for the property.

But with Strabo and Varro’s aviaries the balance shifted from the purely economic towards favouring the ornamental. It’s not that its occupants would never be eaten but rather that was not their primary function.  In this they were copying what the 2ndc BC Ptolemy VIII of Egypt did. He stopped eating the exotic pheasants he kept and instead treated them   “as a kind of sacred treasure,”  Ptolemy, in turn, was echoing Alexander the Great who  during his Indian campaign, who was so taken by the peacocks he saw that he  threatened severe punishment for anyone who harmed one.

Varro’s Aviary was  a major monument of Roman garden design, but although rare  it was not unique. Evidence from other elite villas such as those of Pliny at Laurentium,  Lucullus at Tusculum or the complex built by Hadrian at Tivoli, shows the extraordinary luxury that was possible in such elite gardens.  However there is some evidence of domestic bird-keeping from sites like Pompeii. There is little literary or archaeological evidence that the vogue for pleasure aviaries—or aviary-dining rooms —was anything other than  a brief fashion, lasting at most a few decades. Indeed, the fashion was so short-lived that had Varro not written about it himself, we would probably never have heard of it.

For more information:  Apart from reading Varro’s own description, undoubtedly the best place for more information, if you understand French [the lecture is clear and not too fast and there are subtitles albeit in French]  is the University of Caen’s lecture about it on YouTube.  Other sources are the article in French “La Voliere de Varron” by Des Anges and Seurre in Revue de Philologie, de Litterature et d’Histoire Anciennes 1932;  “Varro’s Aviary at Casinum” by Burn and Kennedy inJournal of Roman Studies 1919