The Environmental Humanities and the Ancient World: Questions and Perspectives

Christoper Schliephake. (2020). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schliephake’s main concern is how the study of ancient Greek and Roman societies can connect with and further aid how our contemporary environmental crisis is understood. It is argued that ancient texts continue to be read and resound with modern readers because they bring forward alternative ways of thinking. They highlight that the environmental humanities and potential solutions to the climate crisis require input from transcultural narratives and thought processes. Chapter 2 focusses on methodological approaches, comparing Big and Deep History as well as Historical and Storied Ecology. Chapter 3 examines how Ancient Greek religion impacted the environment, applying a Storied Ecological reading to the example of Athena’s gift of the olive tree to Athens and the wealth Athens gained from cultivating the olive. Chapter 4 then links ancient and contemporary thoughts on the environment, namely how mythology can capture imaginations and create imagined spaces through which ideas can be thought through, using the myth of Gaia as an example.

Example Quotation

More recent ecocriticism is often pioneering a reorientation of the sense of time and periodisation as fundamental modes of human categorisation and conception: what does it mean, for example, to find Housman’s ‘Loveliest of trees’, Shakespeare’s plays, Homer’s Odyssey or the Mahabharata as texts that now read, newly estranged, as products of the late Holocene, the geological epoch arguably now ended or eroded, with its fading assumptions of the regular periodicity of familiar seasons as providing a sense of background order and unregarded reliability for human affairs?

(p.42)