Conversing with Chaos in Graeco-Roman Antiquity: Writing and Reading Environmental Disorder in Ancient Texts

(Hardback)

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This volume starts from a reconsideration of the idea that ancient perceptions of the non-human world rested on the profound belief in universal order and therefore paid little attention to variety, irregularity, and change. Focusing on the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, this book seeks to present long-term dynamics in environmental interactions. It traces another sense of environmental awareness, one that paid equal attention to chance and chaos, and even reflected on the, at times, fatal consequences of human intervention in nature. Contributors from across the globe examine the transformation and co-construction of ancient landscapes through natural and human processes. Their essays consider a range of evidence, from myths and philosophical treatises to epigraphic evidence and archaeological remains, but they all reveal the ways in which humankind constructs stories about its environment and how these stories facilitate the construction of ancient environments as living entities, respondent (maybe even vulnerable) to human actions and decision-making.

Reviews

A rich and remarkable union of the latest in environmental theory with texts and cultures from the ancient world, which promises to advance both classics and the environmental humanities. * Will Brockliss, Bradshaw Knight Professor of the Environmental Humanities, University of WisconsinMadison, USA *

Author Bio

Esther Eidinow is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a series editor for the Bloomsbury series Ancient Environments, and, among many other publications, is author of Luck, Fate, and Fortune: Antiquity and its Legacy (Bloomsbury 2011) and co-editor of Ancient Divination and Experience (2019). Christopher Schliephake is Assistant Professor of Ancient History at Augsburg University, Germany. His books include The Environmental Humanities and the Ancient World (2020) and as editor Ecocritisim, Ecology and Cultures in Antiquity (2017).