what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like.”25 Classical studies, the academic study of ancient Greece and Rome, has been implicated in the human/nature partition through Platonic dualism, which sets human reason above and beyond the material world, and its reception in the European Enlightenment.26 While some classical scholars have argued that aspects of Platonic thought can be made compatible with environmentalist projects, this book demonstrates that ethnographies embody a different strand of environmental discourse in Greek literature.27
My interest in the environmental discourse of Greek ethnography has two foci. The first focus delimits categorical boundaries, whether between nations and continents (chapter 2) or between bodies: male, female, human, and animal (chapter 3).28 The second focus explores environmental cultures by investigating how particular people feed themselves (chapter 4) and manage wealth (chapter 5). Through their depiction of relationships between humans and other beings, ancient Greek ethnographies suggest that people are coconstituted both culturally and materially with what is around them, that human beings will thrive if they organize society to promote economic self-sufficiency, and that independence from other human communities entails and encourages collaboration with nonhuman communities.
Since Greek ethnography was a genre controlled by elite men, its environmental discourse cannot be called “Greek” in a universal sense.29 At the same time, the principles and possibilities that emerge from Greek ethnography are also a product of non-Greeks; the people Herodotus and Diodorus call Egyptians, Indians, Babylonians, and Scythians have left their imprint.30 To whatever degree readers of this book find Greek ethnographies helpful to think with, they must credit the non-Greeks without whom these texts would not exist.
And why is Greek ethnography helpful to think with? The ancient world seems rather remote from the long environmental crisis in which we find ourselves, essentially unrelated to the rising and accelerating toll of extinctions and the environmental oppression of people without political power. What I offer here is primarily a cultural history of ancient Greece, a conservation of ancient Greek meanings, but this conservation is also, in Joy Connolly’s word, “purposive,” since it is animated by the needs of the present.31 In particular, I am driven by an urgent dread of the environmental destruction in which I participate as a consumer in one of the world’s richest countries. As I struggle with how to live in the Anthropocene, this new age of unprecedented human shaping of the world, I am hoping to receive an epiphany from my encounter with ancient cultures.32 I know from studying my sources that this encounter is itself implicated in both the history of empires that brought information to Greek ethnographers and the canonization of Greek and Roman “classics” by European powers that has made these texts especially precious to me.33 Nevertheless, I have found a great deal of worth in ancient Greek ethnographies, not because the environmental cultures they describe are easily applicable to the present day, but because the human and nonhuman entanglements they explore challenge my most deeply held assumptions about who I am and how I should live.34
Readers of this book may now follow (at least) two paths, reading through parts I and II continuously or skipping to part II for a return to present concerns, including museum displays like those I have described. After spending the majority of the book on ancient Greek ethnography, this return to natural history museums allows me to explore the resonance of Greek and Roman ethnography in living institutions and suggest places this resonance can be leveraged for environmental pedagogy. In these concluding chapters, natural history museums become the ground on which I stake my hope for the transformation of environmental culture.
Chapter 1, “Sources and Methods,” introduces Herodotus’s Histories and Diodorus’s Library, including their relationship to Hellenistic historiography; significant concepts that recur in the chapters, including physis (nature) and bios (way of life); and the discourse of ancient cultural history and its relationship to ethnography. The chapter also outlines the history of ecocriticism both in and outside of classical studies and describes theoretical methods that animate the book, especially Indigenous cosmovisions and new materialisms, including the philosophy of Karen Barad.
Chapter 2, “Rulers and Rivers,” argues that the boundaries between peoples and continents in Herodotus and Diodorus are not immutable, but emerge from the interactions of rulers, rivers, historians, and their surroundings. It begins with a reexamination of the Persian king Xerxes’s “transgressing” the border between Europe and Asia, when he whips, brands, and bridges the Hellespont. Rather than setting up Xerxes’s actions as unnatural or his bridge as artificial, Herodotus’s text indicates that the great works (erga) of rulers should be judged by their effects. Yet this does not free humans to act as they will in the world. The stories in Herodotus’s Histories and Diodorus’s Library suggest that humans and other forces (especially rivers like the Nile) should intervene in land- and waterscapes to help the human community.
Chapter 3, “Female Feck,” argues that women in Greek ethnography possess feck, the ability to make a difference in the world, and use their outsider status and “situated knowledge” to rewrite bloodlines, expand empires, and destabilize sex/gender and species categories. One prominent example is Semiramis in Diodorus’s Library, who invents a gender-concealing garment to scale the walls of Bactra and giant elephant devices to fool her enemies in India. But women’s bodies also surpass their and others’ control. In the Histories, for example, the Persian queen Atossa has a breast tumor that puts her in the power of her doctor. Under his influence, she convinces her husband Darius to invade Greece, kickstarting the Greco-Persian wars.
Chapter 4, “Dietary Entanglements,” turns from borders and bodies to bodily practices, particularly diet and its effects on health. Herodotus and Diodorus understand food not as an inert substance but an active force that, to use Sam Frost’s term, “cultures” human beings. For example, although long-lived Ethiopians in the Histories benefit from a diet of animal meat and milk, the Persians who pursue them end up eating one another. While Herodotus assumes that humans cannot escape the effects of these dietary entanglements, Diodorus shows that people can mitigate the negative consequences of certain diets by seeking even more interdependence with other species. His Egyptians are prime examples: although they have access to a variety of unhealthy refined foods, they protect themselves by feeding most of these to sacred animals.
Chapter 5, “Resisting Luxury,” continues the theme of consumption, focusing on wealth. It argues that Solon and Croesus’s dialogue on wealth and happiness in the first book of Herodotus lays out principles that govern not only individual lives but also countries and their populations. Through the Histories we learn that human communities are easily destroyed by wealth: the envy of others often leads to being conquered, and the desire for more impels wealthy nations to conquer their neighbors. On the contrary, the happiest peoples are those who cultivate self-sufficiency, contentment with what they have in their native land. The chapter then analyzes two peoples in Diodorus’s Library who escape the problems of wealth by creating alliances with other species: Impassive Fisheaters who pair with trees, fish, and seals to improve their impoverished surroundings; and Indians, who protect their borders with war elephants. Human life flourishes in these interspecies collaborations.
Chapter 6, “After the Encounter,” tries to move beyond the paradox of cultural comparison introduced in chapter 5, that is, that learning about other ways of life may reinforce attachment to one’s own customs rather than provoking change. Using Diodorus’s didactic proem to motivate a reading of the Library for the twenty-first century, I encourage readers
