Hortus conclusus, soror mea, sponsa. A Garden Enclosed my Sister, Spouse

Julia Augusta and Julia Anicia. Two women very much alike in every aspect, even in the name they went by in past scholarship and by which they were widely known; although the former was born as Livia Drusilla, and gained the name Julia Augusta from her marriage with Octavianus, and the latter’s name was actually Anicia Juliana. Among other features the two had in common, the present contribution pinpoints the most evident one: their botanic interests and their commission of an hortus. A botanical garden mirrored in a stone garden, in the case of Julia Augusta: the first century frescoes of her Villa at Prima Porta, that can still be admired today, in their original form, at the National Roman Museum, re-enact with a sublime pictorial technique the scenes of real plant life. A parchment garden, in the case of the codex of Anicia, a book- garden: almost five-hundred sheets and 435 (today 383) full-page plates compose that equally illusionistic herbarium that is the Dioscorides of Vienna, illuminated at the beginning of the sixth century.