Ian Hamilton Finlay, a Scottish poet and conceptual artist known for his neo-Classical-style sculptures inscribed with poetic texts as well as for his home and garden, an imaginative echo of ancient Rome in the Pentland Hills of Lanarkshire, died on Monday at a hospital in Edinburgh. He was 80.
The cause was cancer, said Katherine Chan, director of the Nolan/Eckman Gallery, which represents Mr. Finlay in New York.
The famously contentious Mr. Finlay began calling his home Little Sparta in 1980, partly to symbolize his refusal to compromise with the local authorities over whether a building dedicated to Apollo should be taxed as a religious or a commercial structure.
Now maintained by a foundation, Little Sparta resembles the home of an ancient Roman philosopher-poet. Rustic and Classical-style stone carvings bearing literary quotations have been carefully placed throughout the property. One stone block, seemingly antique and tilted in the ground as if it were a ruin, presents the neatly chiseled words of the French revolutionary Louis de Saint-Just: "The world has been empty since the Romans."
But the grounds are not completely given over to nostalgic traditionalism. Images of 20th-century warfare are also distributed about. The two posts of a stone-and-brick gateway, for example, are each topped by an oversize stone carving of a hand grenade.