Silv. 2. 2 provides Statius' fullest meditation on the meaning of the villa in his poetry and its fashioning as a locus amoenus. The metaphorical topography of Pollius' estate vividly expresses the value of the intellectual and virtuous life set apart from the capital city. Pollius' villa is imagined as a separate refuge that is nonetheless culturally integrated with its larger regional environment, the Bay of Naples; it suggests a new political model for a state in which literature holds a central place. Written from Statius' homeland of Naples, the poem thus implicitly challenges the cultural authority of Rome.

The Silvae however provide other models for the intellectual life set apart from the court and yet located within Rome itself. In Silv. 2. 3, for instance, the garden of Atedius Melior, set on the Caelian Hill in the heart of Rome, is constructed as a realm apart from the anxieties of public life. Melior's artful garden provides a sort of horticultural counterpart to the home of Novius Vindex in Silv. 4. 6. It is symbolically, not geographically, separate from the court. The most unusual form of the locus amoenus, however, occurs in Silv. 1. 5, where the ideal site of friendship, safety and physical beauty is playfully and luxuriously actualised not in the country or a private home but in the enclosed space of Claudius Etruscus' private Roman baths.