What is landscape? Was there a concept of landscape in ancient Rome? Analysing the cityscape is now an established trend in the study of Rome and, since the 1990s, scholarship has explored the idea that thinking about the topography of the city of Rome encourages a more wide-ranging exploration of what being Roman was all about. Taking a broader approach, this Survey tackles the semiotics of a set of described, depicted, and three-dimensional landscapes where the emphasis is on a collaboration between nature and humankind. The timeframe is the late Roman Republic and early Principate, an era of change and reconstitution, when defining what being Roman meant was high on many agendas. This is also an era that offers the best possible scope for exploring a fascinating and diverse range of emblematic natural and manmade environments, taking in some of the most famous (but also some more unexpected) scenes in Roman literature, art, and architecture, closing with Hadrian's out-of-town landscaped villa near Tibur.

Defining a space as landscape suggests that it is visually distinctive and interesting, that it attracts the eye, and engages the senses and faculties. Agriculture (or productivity) can be one important feature of what makes space into land and divides it up into -scapes and territories, but it is not always the main issue. Typically, classical texts featuring something akin to our ‘landscape’ showcase the natural environment supporting, threatening, or ornamenting human existence. So at the beginning of the Graeco–Roman tradition we see that the landscapes of Homeric epic, or pastoral verse (for example, the Hellenistic poets Bion and Theocritus), gain order and meaning from the inclusion of human figures, but they also contribute atmosphere and a distinctive sense of place that enriches the stories that play out against them. Chapter I introduced one particularly delightful and hugely popular topographic trope: an idyllic space where sensory and aesthetic qualities encourage harmony between humans and nature. The locus classicus or touchstone for this locus amoenus is Plato's dialogue Phaedrus. Famously, this dialogue riffs on a very specific landscape scene, one which was to have an intense and far-reaching effect on subsequent landscape discourse, and which provides an ideal point of departure.

Chapter II outlined how literary pastoral scenography makes for an often visually delightful but also heavily symbolic ethnoscape, ideally suited to the exploration of red-hot political, civic, and socio-cultural issues. The signs of pastoral provide props and a set for the rustic, artful, and occasionally (naïvely) politicized figures that populate and give Roman meaning to an imaginary and leisurely rural world, superficially very different from daily life. This chapter explores how pastoral imagery can also help us to think about a different aspect of what made for enjoyable Roman space: the sight of a productive agricultural landscape.

We have already thought about how Golden Age imagery influences understanding of what landscape should be about, and we will return later to issues of chronology and temporality. Here, we start with some strategies for reading landscape as a sequence of places that can be combined to tell a story. One definition of space makes it what we experience by moving through a series of places, which we connect up into patterns by picking particular routes to follow. Using this model, landscape stories invite us to move into and around them, offering different ‘ways of going out and coming back in’, depending on how we map our route. Following the narrative flow through a landscape takes time. Time, however, is relative – and culturally constructed; depending on context and terminology, time can move at different speeds and follow different logics. Bakhtin's chronotope is helpful here. Using the natural environment to create a structure for understanding how time passes gives meaning and order to the passage of the year. For agricultural communities, it was a matter of life and death: studding the calendar with legends and myths closely linked to places, seasons, and appropriate activities was one way to ensure that good and bad ways of doing things were remembered over time. Calendars therefore engage in a complex dialogue with religious and cultural assumptions, and they also respond to scientific advances in measuring the passage of time.

Luxury villas and working farms are crucial to Roman interest in what constitutes landscape, and they form the backdrop for this Survey's final two chapters. By the mid-first century BCE, lavishly designed and decorated villas represented not just a source of revenue qualifying their wealthy and educated owners for entering public life, but also an alternative performance venue to the traditional urban sites for political debate – Senate and Forum. Relationship with and management of land became a way of ‘defining what it meant to be a member of the Roman elite, in excluding outsiders from this powerful and privileged group and in controlling insiders.

Pictures and spaces, like literary texts, tell a story. This chapter, together with the Survey's envoi, tackles a range of these stories. At our first two sites we focus on painted landscapes in suburban villas (the Villa ‘Farnesina’, and the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta, near Rome). The next two, the famous but now mostly lost Horti Sallustiani and Porticus of Pompey, open a window onto the political and civic role of peri-urban Roman landscape gardens. Rounding off the survey, a stroll around the parkland of the emperor Hadrian's villa near Tibur (modern Tivoli) uses the contemporary site to reflect on villa visits then and now.