ABSTRACT
The ancient Byzantine text, The Symbolic Garden, presents us with a piece of rhetoric which nevertheless glorifies Creation in non-rhetorical terms. This essay examines the ancient work to demonstrate how the Byzantine world understood the garden landscape in connection with one’s faith. In linking the garden with spiritual knowledge and well-being, this work draws on earlier and contemporary material, and that the text seems to have been copied after the twelfth century, even if only once, indicates that this way of thinking about the world remained popular, or even useful, even although new ideas, and a new interest in science, were developing.
