I. Introduction
There are few subdisciplines in the study of the ancient world more innovative, rapidly growing or directly relevant to contemporary issues than ancient environmental studies. The variegated possibilities presented by the study of past human–environment relationships have only just begun to crystallize since the turn of the millennium, and the excitement generated by the infusion of entirely new evidence types and methodologies into classical studies has stimulated a steady stream of recent projects, conferences and publications. The past few years have also witnessed the publication of one of the first up-to-date introductory texts for ancient environmental studies,Footnote 1 though the breadth of material, themes and debates covered by this label continues to make entry into it difficult for the uninitiated.
The publications reviewed in this article represent a cross-section of the research strands that have been particularly prominent in studies of human–environment relations in the ancient Mediterranean world over the last decade; whilst only a few focus exclusively on the ancient Greek world, all devote attention to or touch on almost every aspect of Hellenic studies in some way, from poetics and economics to gender and medicine.Footnote 2 I have focused on text-based scholarship, largely omitting the vast body of research on ancient environmental studies conducted by archaeologists and environmental scientists, though I occasionally cite representative publications from these groups throughout. Many of the contributions surveyed integrate approaches and material derived from disciplines beyond those traditionally associated with classical studies, including geology, climatology, biology, neuroscience and anthropology, and attempt to identify shared aims and complementary methodologies between philologists, historians, archaeologists and scientists studying the ancient world; others seek to define the role that classical studies can or should play in environmental studies and the contemporary environmentalist movement more broadly.
The origins of interest in the relationship between humans and the environment in the ancient Greek world can be traced back to diverse 19th- and 20th-century intellectual movements, such as Romanticism in the German-speaking countries,Footnote 3 human geography in the English-speaking worldFootnote 4 and the Annales School in France.Footnote 5 The study of the environment in the ancient world only assumed a form recognizable today, however, with the rise of the environmentalist movement in the 1960s. That intellectual revolution was spurred by a recognition of humanity’s capacity to change the Earth system engendered by the widespread post-war exploitation of petroleum products and nuclear energy. As activists began to highlight the deleterious effects of such developments, scholars responded by examining the historical roots of large-scale anthropogenic environmental change.
1967 was a watershed year in ancient environmental studies. In that year, Lynn White, a prominent American medieval historian, published a brief but important article in Science, ‘The historical roots of our ecological crisis’.Footnote 6 In it, he argued that the origin of modern environmental crises could be traced to the break between the ‘pagan animism’ of ancient Graeco-Roman societies: the notion that natural features, phenomena and organisms were inhabited or impelled by spirits and Christianity’s assertion of human dominion over the natural world. Whilst this article has seldom been read by scholars of classical studies, White’s argument that ‘by destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects’ went on to be highly influential in many corners of environmental studies.Footnote 7 That same year, Clarence Glacken published his seminal book Traces on the Rhodian Shore, which delineated the relationship between conceptions of culture and nature in the Western tradition. The first quarter of this monumental tome (which, whilst similarly rarely read by scholars of classical studies, has come to be seen as a foundational text in environmental history)Footnote 8 is devoted to the Graeco-Roman world, making it the earliest comprehensive attempt to trace the ancient history of environmental thought.Footnote 9
In subsequent decades, ancient environmental studies slowly began to coalesce as a discipline, bringing together motley approaches to the study of human–environment relations in the distant Mediterranean past. The work now collected under this label can roughly be grouped into two strands: ecocriticism, the study of the representations of human–environment relations in literature (also called ‘storied ecology’ or ‘environmental philology’), and environmental history, the study of the realities of those relations (also termed ‘ecologized history’).Footnote 10
Ecocriticism was a product of the environmentalist foment in literary studies in the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote 11 Early ecocritical scholarship emerged from the tradition of studying discourses centred on ‘wilderness’ in modern ‘nature writing’;Footnote 12 as it has grown, however, the proponents of ecocriticism have recognized the value of examining all sorts of literature through an environmental lens in order to challenge anthropocentric conceptions of nature and illuminate discourses relating to the relationship between humans and the environment.Footnote 13 As such, in recent decades ecocriticism has come to serve as an umbrella term for a varied assortment of literary critical approaches to human–environment relations, such as new materialism and posthumanism, but one of its chief characteristics is the use of ecologically inflected literary analysis for political ends.Footnote 14 Ecocritical approaches to ancient Greek literature have only attracted attention in their own right since the turn of the millennium, in parallel with the development of Mediterranean ecocriticism, which examines this region as a ‘natural-cultural compound’.Footnote 15
Environmental history emerged slightly earlier, in the 1960s, among historians examining the broad ecological shifts of the early modern world.Footnote 16 Apart from Glacken, very few early environmental historians paid any attention to the premodern world; the notable exception was J. Donald Hughes, whose publications defined ancient environmental history’s research agenda for a generation.Footnote 17 Much of Hughes’ work reflects the declensionist narratives of the conservationist milieu in which he developed as a scholar, namely the overexploitation of natural resources, ecological degradation and societal collapse.Footnote 18 But whilst Hughes (Reference Hughes1994) and its revised edition, Hughes (Reference Hughes2014), are among the few overviews of ancient environmental studies available for decades, scholars of ancient Greek culture and society have been slow to take up the gauntlet thrown down by his work.Footnote 19 Much more influential has been Horden and Purcell (Reference Horden and Purcell2000), which embraced an historical-ecological approach as a means of exploring the defining features of ancient and medieval Mediterranean history. Their exploration of ‘microecologies’ as an important factor driving the exceptional connectivity of the premodern Mediterranean world has set much of the agenda of subsequent ancient Greek environmental history.Footnote 20
Whilst a gulf remains between ecocritical philologists and environmental historians working on the ancient Greek world, recent years have witnessed signal efforts to bring the two fields into greater dialogue.Footnote 21 No single concept has been more stimulating in this regard than that of the Anthropocene. Whilst in the physical sciences the Anthropocene has been rather strictly defined as the period during which human activity has left a distinct global trace in the Earth System,Footnote 22 in the environmental humanities it has been embraced as a more expansive heuristic framework for studying the relationship between humans and the environment over long timescales.Footnote 23 Disagreements over how the term should be employed in the humanities have caused some friction,Footnote 24 but the Anthropocene has already proved fertile intellectual ground for Greek ecocritical philologists and environmental historians alike, and, as will be highlighted below, promising convergences in research aims are beginning to appear. I will focus on three themes that have emerged as key topics: sustainability, eco-theology and resilience.
II. Sustainability
Most of the earliest works of ancient environmental studies reflected the primary concerns of the contemporary environmentalist movement, conservation and sustainability. Most notable among these are Hughes’ publications, which collected evidence for deleterious ecological practices that echoed contemporary environmental issues, overgrazing, deforestation, overhunting, the exhaustion of mineral resources, pollution, in Greek and Roman written and material evidence.Footnote 25 In the recent wave of scholarship examining ecological themes in ancient literature, some scholars have continued this tradition, excavating the ancient origins of concepts that have been viewed by environmentalists as primary drivers of environmental degradation, such as anthropocentrism.Footnote 26 But many ecocritical classicists have now begun to take the opposite approach, examining ancient texts in an effort to excavate useful alternative ways of thinking about humans’ relationship to the environment.
A tenet of this approach is the contention that the modern perception of a divide between nature and society is a fiction of which we can be disabused by reading ancient authors. As its proponents argue, governmental initiatives and technological innovations have not brought about the drastic changes necessary to combat contemporary ecological crises because the ultimate driver of those changes is individuals’ attitudes to the environment. Societal paralysis in the face of looming ecological crises is thus at base a failure of the collective imagination, and crafting a new ecological ethos requires the dissemination of alternative ways of thinking. Classical literature continues to enjoy a cultural cachet in the Western world, but the world views of its authors, who were generally closer to, and more aware of, the boons and hazards of the environment than us today, are often alien to contemporary audiences.Footnote 27 This combination of familiarity and strangeness makes classical texts a potent source of material on which ecocritics can draw to encourage readers to escape the cultural blinders that have allowed us to sleepwalk into contemporary environmental crises.Footnote 28 Thus, a number of the ecocritical monographs reviewed here have argued that Greek environmental discourses, together with various other discourses from past societies, can and should serve as a pillar of a ‘new mythology’ for a more sustainable Anthropocene.Footnote 29
One particularly expansive treatise is Usher (2020), which examines ancient ‘environmental philology’ primarily through Greek texts.Footnote 30 Usher embraces the writings of Greek philosophers from Anaximander to Diogenes to compare ancient ecological reflections on human–environment relations to modern thought on sustainable systems.Footnote 31 His primary aim is to explore sustainability in ancient Greek philosophers’ works through the paired lenses of ecology and cybernetics,Footnote 32 arguing that their views illuminate the need to recognize the complex nature of the Earth as a system and use that recognition to achieve true sustainability, rather than just disparate eco-conscious practices. The title of this book, Plato’s Pigs and Other Ruminations, references the famous ‘city for pigs’ from the Republic,Footnote 33 and Plato has unsurprisingly been the subject of considerable interest in discussions of sustainability. Plato conceived of the world as a divine self-sufficient superorganism, but one that could only persist because of its endless recycling of all matter;Footnote 34 in this regard, he prefigured the Gaia Hypothesis, the theory that Earth and its biological systems comprise a single entity whose self-regulatory feedback loops keep the planet habitable.Footnote 35
But it is Plato’s concern with how best to shape and govern societies and his enduring cultural appeal that has made his corpus a rich vein of material for those seeking ancient Greek ecological wisdom. The Republic’s reflections on managing the public good and addressing threats to it has appealed in particular to politically minded ecocritical classicists,Footnote 36 and among the most stimulating entries in this field has been Lane (2011). As Lane has argued, Plato’s aim was ‘transforming the ethos of his own time’, and his writings are thus useful guides for expanding political imagination and overcoming collective inertia in the face of looming crises.Footnote 37 A key topic in both Usher’s and Lane’s analyses of Plato is the importance of addressing the relationship between private action and public good, in particular with regard to pleonexia (‘an immoderate, overreaching desire for more than one’s share’, as Lane defines it),Footnote 38 in order to ensure the sustainable exploitation of the environment.Footnote 39
The Histories of Herodotus, with its reflections on the myriad ways in which societies and their environments related to one another, has been the subject of another two monographs. Schlosser (2020) explores the relationships between society, politics and sustainability in this text, arguing that Herodotus’ nuanced engagement with human–environment relations prefigures the complex ecological dynamics that we have become increasingly aware of in recent decades.Footnote 40 He emphasizes the importance of nomoi, ‘the patterns or orders of collective life including both humans and nonhumans’,Footnote 41 in establishing the bounds of eleutheria, defined primarily as the political freedom to organize collectively.Footnote 42 But, Schlosser asserts, Herodotus viewed the ultimate goal of all societies to be not eleutheria in itself, but rather ‘the condition of dynamic equilibrium where human and nonhuman flourish equally well’.Footnote 43 The complexity of the Histories’ ecological vision thus illuminates the fluid connections between private life, public institutions and the environment; as Schlosser argues, a sensitive reading of this text can help readers from contemporary democracies in particular to expand their political imaginations with respect to environmental issues.
Bosak-Schroeder (2020) similarly analyses what might be termed Herodotus’ political ecology, but she also broadens the scope of her examination in two ways. First, she draws on ethnographic anthropology and the analogy of the modern museum to examine the many interactions among humans, non-human species and the ecosystems they shared in the Histories; second, she juxtaposes this text with Diodorus Siculus’ Historical Library, another relatively completely preserved work of Greek historiography with wide-ranging coverage of non-Greek settings. Bosak-Schroeder explores in particular the ways Herodotus and Diodorus discuss ‘natural’ categories or units, such as continents, species, sexes and foodways, and the boundaries between them, noting that characters within these texts and the authors themselves constantly alter ‘natural’ bounds.Footnote 44 By presenting a smorgasbord of alternative ecologies, these texts demonstrate that sustainability is highly contingent on changeable societal structures.Footnote 45 For Herodotus, there was no politics without ecology, and no economy without sustainability.
A related but more traditional strand of scholarship on ancient sustainability has examined how individuals and communities in the Graeco-Roman world conceived of ecological sustainability and acted to conserve natural resources.Footnote 46 This approach has been especially popular in recent German scholarship,Footnote 47 reflecting a long-standing interest in the history of sustainability (Nachhaltigkeit) in German environmental studies.Footnote 48 This scholarship has been heavily influenced by economic history, which is reflected in its focus on the tensions between the exploitation of natural resources for profit and their long-term conservation. What is most striking about these contributions is that whilst ecocritical analyses of Greek texts emphasize ecological sensitivities that ranged beyond immediate human self-interest, evidence of sustainable practices that directly conflicted with economic interests is meagre; almost all of the chapters in Olshausen and Sauer (2012) and Schliephake et al. (2020), for instance, discuss the sustainable treatment of environmental elements that were valued economically, such as marble, fish or soil.Footnote 49 Schliephake’s case study of the cultural value of olive trees is a case in point: olives were of obvious economic value, so their conservation was of economic interest; if less profitable trees had been the focus of such conservation efforts, a stronger case could be made for cultural imperatives divorced from economic incentives driving sustainability.Footnote 50 Furthermore, as Grassl (Reference Grassl, Olshausen and Sauer2012) and Thommen (Reference Thommen, Schliephake, Sojc and Weber2020) have observed, there seems generally to have been little awareness that inert natural resources such as metals did not regenerate over human timescales.
One of the most interesting topics in this regard is the exploitation of wild vegetation, especially forests. Hughes’ drastic assessments of the extent of deforestation in the classical and Hellenistic Greek world based on literary evidence, such as Plato’s oft-quoted description of the eroded slopes of Mount Parnes in Attica,Footnote 51 has given way to the conclusion that the clearance of Aegean forests in the first millennium BC was probably not nearly as severe or consequential as once thought.Footnote 52 Nonetheless, Akrigg’s recent study of the demographic history of Classical Athens suggests that its fuel demands and those of other large poleis may have been very high, perhaps even requiring the large-scale importation of fuel.Footnote 53 Burgeoning interest in the archaeology of fuel consumption in the ancient Mediterranean is notable in this regard; whilst work in this area has so far largely been restricted to Roman Italy,Footnote 54 the application of recent developments in anthracology (the study of charcoal remains) to Greek material promises to move the deforestation debate beyond the scant written evidence on which it has heretofore centred.
One promising avenue for future research on sustainability in the ancient Greek world is thus working to marry the prescriptive or descriptive discussions of the organization of human–environment relations in literary sources on the one hand and archaeological and scientific evidence for those relations on the other. This work will require more communication and collaboration between philologists, historians, archaeologists and environmental scientists, but it will undoubtedly yield invaluable insight into the everyday practices of sustainability in the distant Greek past and the lessons we might learn from them in shaping a more sustainable future.
III. Eco-theology
In ‘The ancient roots of our ecological crisis’, White argued that the single most profound factor conditioning premodern cultural ecology was religion.Footnote 55 Ritual activity shaped the environment; the environment was explained by cosmological thought; and the translation of that thought into mythology in turn shaped and justified ritual activity.Footnote 56 This triangular connection between humans, the environment and the divine has been called ‘eco-theology’,Footnote 57 and philologists, historians and archaeologists alike have been particularly active in studying the eco-theology of the ancient Greek world. Their work can roughly be grouped into publications that examine ritual activity and those that study the realm of the imaginary;Footnote 58 whilst the majority of scholarship has focused on the latter, with a strong emphasis on philosophical texts,Footnote 59 multidisciplinary conferences and projects are beginning to integrate the analysis of ancient Greek eco-theological thought and activity with promising results. (Note that the role of non-human organisms in Greek religion has proved a particularly fruitful topic, but it has been covered in another recent review article, and so will not be discussed here.)Footnote 60
Among the most prominent focuses of this research has been animism.Footnote 61 White assumed that the attribution of divine agency to and respect for elements of the environment was ubiquitous in the Greek world,Footnote 62 and authors such as Hughes have echoed this sentiment.Footnote 63 The personification of natural features or entities, such as rivers, winds or animals, continues to stimulate interest; as numerous contributions in Marlow and Hunt (Reference Hunt, Hunt and Marlow2019) and Scheer (2019) show, however, this phenomenon was highly heterogeneous across the ancient world, and scholars now tend to treat it with greater sensitivity to broader social, economic and political contexts.Footnote 64 Indeed, such nuanced re-evaluations of animistic beliefs and their relation to action, both ritual and otherwise, have even led Hunt to call into question the foundational assumption that they translated into greater reverence for the natural world.Footnote 65
A closely related topic in the study of Greek eco-theology is discourses relating environmental features or processes to divine will. Whilst all Greek deities were thought to have had the power to influence the natural world, some, such as Zeus and Poseidon, were particularly closely associated with environmental events, especially hazards,Footnote 66 and recent studies have sought greater clarity on how the relationship between divine agency and such phenomena was understood. Herodotus, for instance, recognized ‘natural’ boundaries whose transgression by humans might provoke the wrath of the gods, but he in fact represents these as more flexible than has previously been recognized.Footnote 67 Similarly, Aeschylus depicted the Erinyes in the Oresteia as the punishers of those who thoughtlessly wasted natural resources, thus ensuring the balance between the needs of humans and the bounty of the environment.Footnote 68
A particularly promising new approach to the study of Greek eco-theology is the application of cognitive science to ancient religious written and material evidence. In a stimulating contribution, Larson (Reference Larson, Hunt and Marlow2019) examines some insights the cognitive science of religion has offered on the relationship between ‘intuitive’ and ‘reflective’ religious thought.Footnote 69 These findings indicate that rather than believing either that anthropomorphic deities inhabited natural entities or that they literally were those entities, ancient Greeks could have held both these ideas simultaneously and, indeed, that even modern theists to a certain extent concurrently hold intuitive animistic beliefs and more reflective theological views.Footnote 70 In this way, cognitive science is contributing to the creation of an intellectual framework in which the intuitive experiences of religion manifested in ritual practice can be integrated with the reflective discourses about divinities found in myth.Footnote 71
Since the mid-20th century, most analyses of the relationship between cultic activity and the environment in the ancient Greek world have been shaped by the theoretical framework of polis religion, which has tended to view the natural world as a component of the chōra, distinct from and peripheral to the urban core of the astu.Footnote 72 Thus, whilst much attention has been devoted to sacred landscapes and ‘numinous wilderness’ in recent decades, this has largely been refracted through the lens of the formation and modification of polis structures.Footnote 73 This is also true, for instance, of the study of how organic and human-made elements were integrated in Greek sanctuaries, especially with respect to ‘natural’ sites of worship (caves, springs, groves, etc.) and monumental architecture.Footnote 74 Some scholars have sought to nuance the polis religion model by devoting greater attention to supra-polis religious dynamics, and one theme offering great promise in this regard is localism. The exploration in Beck (Reference Beck2020) of the variation and local significance of myths and ritual practices in ancient Greece has demonstrated the many ways in which myth and ritual were constantly shaped and reshaped in the dynamic relationship between the local and the translocal.Footnote 75
An example of the promise offered by such supra-polis studies for our understanding of eco-theology comes from recent work on Arkadia. Viewed already in the Classical period as ecologically and religiously distinct from the rest of Greece, this region came to be a source of fascination for outsiders. Whilst individual Arkadian poleis had their own distinct cults and myths, their inhabitants, who were traditionally believed to have been among the oldest peoples in Greece, were seen as being united by primordial and inscrutable habits and cults, such as the eating of acorns and the worship of unusually theriomorphic divinities.Footnote 76 Because of this perceived ancient connection to ‘nature’, Arkadian landscapes were exceptionally dense palimpsests of religious meaning, with distinctive environmental elements, such as the sinkholes, seasonal lakes and caves typical of this region, foci of rich ritual and mythological associations.Footnote 77 This profound layering of eco-theological meaning came to produce a fascinating conjuncture of the imaginary and the quotidian in the Roman period. Pausanias depicted second-century AD Arkadia as a region whose once-flourishing human communities were on the wane, whilst its rural cults and the myths associated with them continued to thrive;Footnote 78 epigraphical sources suggest that this portrayal was influenced by the active preservation and promotion of cults that represented unusual connection to the natural world by local elites and Roman authorities alike.Footnote 79 Such research highlights the potential to enrich our understanding of Greek eco-theology beyond the polis model through the careful integration of literary, epigraphical and archaeological evidence for ritual and myth.
IV. Resilience
The scope of the contemporary ecological challenges confronting humanity, in particular the climate crisis, has triggered a sweeping reconceptualization of history in the 21st century. This has entailed a re-evaluation of the relationship between societal and environmental factors over the longue durée, as well as the boundaries between history and the earth sciences.Footnote 80 One of the most important themes to have emerged from this shift in the ancient environmental humanities is ecological resilience, or the capacity of societies to adapt to deleterious environmental change without breaking down. The agenda of premodern resilience research has largely been set by scholars in fields to which Hellenists often have little exposure, such as geography, prehistoric archaeology and the environmental sciences.Footnote 81 Nonetheless, as scientific evidence for environmental change in the ancient Greek world has accumulated, historians and archaeologists have begun to play a more active role in contextualizing how physical and biological processes affected its societies.
Studies on the ecological resilience and vulnerability of premodern Greek societies can broadly be divided into those studying slow change, such as climate change and landscape degradation, and those studying rapid shocks, such as seismic, volcanic and epidemiological events.Footnote 82 Much of the liveliest discussion has focused on periods of societal breakdown, which in the ancient eastern Mediterranean has primarily been the Late Bronze Age and Late Antiquity,Footnote 83 two periods that bookend the floruit of the polis between the Archaic period and the Imperial period. This has obscured the notable fact that, despite many poleis experiencing considerable environmental stress over the centuries, few are known to have disappeared as a direct result of ecological pressure; this seems to have been the case because poleis generally drew on intercommunity links to maintain their sociopolitical integrity and buffer against risk.Footnote 84 This may be contrasted with the history of the Mayan city states, for instance, whose relatively rapid disappearance after close to a millennium of development is now widely accepted to have been at least in part the result of climate change.Footnote 85 The sociopolitical flexibility of Greek communities in the first millennium BC makes them an ideal subject for comparative analyses of practices and institutions that engendered resilience in the premodern world. This is one area in which ancient evidence for sustainable thought and practice is of obvious relevance.
In the study of adaptation to slow environmental change in the Greek world, some of the most stimulating contributions have come from the ‘Domesticated Landscapes of the Peloponnese’ project. The team behind this project has focused on reconstructing the relationship between climate change, landscape dynamics and sociopolitical systems in the Peloponnese between the Bronze Age and Late Antiquity, publishing several new palaeoclimatic records as well as methodologically robust analyses of the rich array of written, archaeological and environmental data already available from this region.Footnote 86 Whilst much of the team’s attention has been devoted to the connection between climate change and the disappearance of Mycenaean states in the Late Bronze Age,Footnote 87 its members have also examined later periods, arguing, for instance, that a reduction in the occupation of marginal land in the northeastern Peloponnese in the late Hellenistic and Roman periods was in part the result of a long stretch of drier climatic conditions.Footnote 88 Three chapters in Erdkamp et al. (2021) build on this project’s work, addressing the resilience of societies in the Peloponnese to climate change, but whilst two examine Mycenaean communities of the Late Bronze Age,Footnote 89 only a single chapter covers the poleis of this peninsula across the entire first millennium BC.Footnote 90 Future studies will need to provide a more even analysis of vulnerability and resilience among Greek populations over the longue durée of antiquity.
The availability of more written and archaeological evidence testifying to the impact of rapid ecological shocks, in particular earthquakes and epidemics, in the Greek world has contributed to the greater abundance of studies of the resilience of poleis to such hazardous episodes. This research has been bolstered in recent years by the incipient subdiscipline of disaster studies.Footnote 91 Key foci of its research agenda include the importance of cultural memory in natural disaster preparedness and the role that religious beliefs and institutions played in shaping or justifying communal activity in response to such events.Footnote 92
Given the seismicity of most areas of the Mediterranean settled by Greeks in antiquity, earthquakes have emerged as an important theme in the study of the resilience of Greek communities. Some of this research is of practical interest for disaster preparedness; for example, a palaeoseismological study demonstrated that the last significant seismic event to occur along the Sparta fault was the famous earthquake of ca. 464 BC, which caused huge loss of life in Sparta and precipitated a widespread helot revolt,Footnote 93 and that the periodicity of prior such events indicates that it is overdue for another.Footnote 94 For Hellenists, however, the primary value of this research lies in examining the social, economic, cultural and political dynamics laid bare by these exogenous shocks.Footnote 95
The most fascinating case study of resilience, or lack thereof, in the face of a seismic event in the Greek world is that of the Achaian polis of Helike, which has been studied intensively by the Helike Project since the 1990s.Footnote 96 On a winter night in 373 BC, western Achaia was shaken by an earthquake and subsequently submerged by an inundation;Footnote 97 many poleis belonging to the Achaian League were damaged in this event, but only Helike, home to the most prominent sanctuary in Achaia, disappeared as a result.Footnote 98 The apparent extent of the destruction and the supposed visibility of portions of the submerged town for centuries afterwards contributed to the preservation of the memory of this disaster, which became a point of fascination for both Greeks and Romans.Footnote 99 This persistent ancient curiosity in turn piqued the interest of modern scholars, who attributed the disappearance of Helike to the devastating effect of an exceptionally powerful earthquake followed by a huge tsunami.Footnote 100
Recent scientific, archaeological and literary reassessments under the auspices of the Helike Project have, however, presented a rather different narrative. A geomorphological study has indicated that the earthquake of 373 BC was probably not very powerful, and that it most likely caused extraordinary damage because it triggered landslides that formed natural dams in rivers to the southwest of the city; when aftershocks hit the region hours after the initial tremors, these dams were dislodged, causing an enormous flood that submerged the plain below.Footnote 101 Archaeological evidence also now indicates that Helike’s territory was at least partly reoccupied by the mid-fourth century BC,Footnote 102 and there is slight evidence suggesting that an attenuated polis may even have survived for a short time after 373 BC.Footnote 103 Why then did the polis of Helike not survive, as its comparably damaged neighbour, Boura, apparently did?Footnote 104 The widespread impact of this earthquake on other members of the Achaian League may have hindered relief effortsFootnote 105 but, as Walter (Reference Walter and Schliephake2016) has argued, references to neighbouring poleis dividing up its territory suggest that Helike fell victim to the opportunistic predation of its neighbours, who resented its control over the premier federal sanctuary of Poseidon. This action was then retrospectively justified by the propagation of narratives that the Helikaians’ impious actions had provoked the wrath of that god.Footnote 106 Thus, whilst environmental hazards caused widespread damage to the community of Helike, its disappearance as a political entity was ultimately a result of social processes.
In recent years, ancient historians’ analyses of similar events have been bolstered by the adoption of increasingly sophisticated frameworks for understanding societal responses to environmental shocks adapted from other disciplines, most notably anthropology, medieval history and early modern history. One such framework is the social burden of resilience, the idea that the benefits and costs of resilience are always unevenly distributed across a society.Footnote 107 A good example of the utility of examining ancient disasters through this lens comes from the famous earthquake that damaged Rhodes in 227 BC. As Polybius’ account indicates, this renowned commercial and maritime power of the Hellenistic world derived resilience from its extraordinary political and economic relationships with other powers in the eastern Mediterranean, drawing on those ties in the wake of this disaster to obtain generous donations in support of its rebuilding effort.Footnote 108 But whilst the redistribution of those donated resources and the extension of economic privileges to encourage the reconstruction of Rhodes greatly benefited traders based in that polis, many of whom were not Rhodian citizens, much less direct assistance seems to have been offered to the rest of the polis’ population, who must have borne the brunt of the earthquake’s impact.Footnote 109
Environmental evidence testifying to the frequency and magnitude of environmental shifts and shocks experienced by the inhabitants of the ancient Greek world is rapidly accumulating, with new palaeoclimatic evidence from the Aegean, for instance, being published on an almost annual basis;Footnote 110 the opportunities for collaboration between scholars within and without the traditional bounds of classical studies to explore Greek ecological resilience are growing accordingly. As the contributions in Erdkamp et al. (2021) show, however, scholars of the ancient Mediterranean have only just begun to grapple with the monumental methodological hurdles involved in integrating such evidence into traditional research strands. The development of more robust methodologies for integrating scientific, archaeological and historical evidence for environmental and societal change thus remains a pressing need. In this respect, there is promising work on climate change and natural disasters in more recent periods of history, for which richer, more fine-grained data sets are available that present greater opportunities to test theories of correlation and causation.Footnote 111
V. Conclusion
As contemporary environmental issues continue to shape research agendas across the humanities, the need for Hellenists to engage directly with ancient environmental studies will continue to grow. At a time when many scholars of classical studies are grappling with the contemporary relevance of their scholarship, facing atrophying institutional support and deconstructing the past complicity of their discipline in various ills afflicting our world, the ecological turn provides a welcome opportunity to reflect on the enduring value of studying antiquity. The ancient Greek world continues to fascinate people globally, and the intellectual influence that Classics has had on the environmentalist movement lends it a particular relevance in the environmental humanities.Footnote 112 Moreover, the ancient Greek world offers an abundance of different types of evidence testifying to cultural ecology in the distant past which can be paralleled by only a few other times and places in the premodern world. The relative familiarity of ancient Greek culture to many today lends this material an air of accessibility, but the strangeness to contemporary audiences of many of its ways of viewing the cosmos make it a valuable source of alternative ecologies.
This review has highlighted a few of the most prominent strands in the study of human–environment relations in the ancient Greek world, but many more remain underexplored. The topics of gender and health, for instance, intersect with numerous facets of ancient environmental studies.Footnote 113 Identifying such convergences and making meaningful progress in studying them will require specialists of all stripes working on the societies or environments of the ancient Mediterranean to familiarize themselves with the work of and collaborate with colleagues in other disciplines. As such, it will be increasingly important going forward for scholars of ancient environmental studies to collaborate in order to maximize disciplinary complementarity, minimize biases, eliminate blind spots and ensure the representation of all stakeholders. Such cooperation not only has the potential to infuse the study of the Greek past with greater vitality, but even, perhaps, to go some way towards creating a future in which both human and non-human can thrive.
Open access
