Resumen de A description of the Aretai palace and its garden
The Byzantine garden is not an easy place to work in; the archaeological evidence is extremely sparse, while the literary evidence, on the other hand, is so overgrown with rhetoric as to be all but impenetrable. It is small wonder that the subject has been relatively ignored by scholars. The aim of this paper is to bring a hitherto neglected garden to the attention of Byzantinists and historians of gardens. The garden in question is described in panegyrical verses by the poet and rhetorician John Geometres, who was active in the second half of the tenth century. The poem is obscure and highly allusive, but, as we shall see, it is probably an ekphrasis of a specific estate, known from other sources. The text and its translation follow.
