Ecology, History, and the Other in Ancient Greece

Abstract

Ecology, History, and the Other in Ancient Greece reads for the environment in three Greek descriptions of other places and their inhabitants: Herodotus’s fifth century BCE Histories, Megasthenes’ c. 300 BCE Indika, and Agatharchides’ c. 150 BCE On the Red Sea.

Chapter 1 begins by investigating the meaning of physis and natura in Greek and Roman philosophical texts, arguing that ancient authors include humans within their concept of nature and generally celebrate human activity in the world. I conclude this chapter by proposing ancient ethnography as a source of Greek ecological thinking. In chapter 2 I introduce the three ethnographers under consideration. While ancient ethnographies have often been dismissed as ill-suited to the histories in which they are usually embedded, I argue that Greek ethnographers engage in historical inquiry by presenting geographically distant Others as remnants of their own distant past, and use the bios, “way of life,” of Others to imagine earlier stages of Greek development.

Chapters 3 and 4 present specific ecological readings of Herodotus, Megasthenes, and Agatharchides, the first focusing on health and the second on warfare. Ethnic Others who practice pastoralism or hunter-gathering rather than agriculture often enjoy superior health and material contentment, a fact that criticizes the tendency of settled agriculturalism to promote illness, warfare, and greed. I conclude these chapters by arguing that the Indika and On the Red Sea respond to environmental problems posed in Herodotus’s Histories, and that these Hellenistic texts criticize the elephant-hunting expeditions of Megasthenes’ and Agatharchides’ royal patrons.

In conclusion, chapters 5 and 6 consider the meanings that arise from Greek ethnographers’ focus on the bios of Others. Arresting geographically distant Others at an earlier stage of development allows readers to consider alternate ecologies and engage in self-critique, but this arrest also instrumentalizes Others and denies them the complexity of representation that Greeks and less-distant non-Greeks enjoy. The most potent scenes for generating ecological self-critique, those in which an Other rejects the pleasures of Greek civilization, are easy for readers to dismiss as extreme. The conditions that produce ecological reflection are also those that frustrate its application.