of others.13 When modern editors publish the “fragments” of these lost authors out of the context in which we find them—that is, embedded as quotations or adaptations in later authors—readers lose sight of the fact that ethnography was a tradition that covered its tracks.14 Direct observation, although one original source for ethnographic writing, became less important over time as other kinds of sources, especially the tradition of ethnographic writing itself, came into circulation. Over the centuries ethnography became an accretive, scholarly genre; these later ethnographers were not opposed to new evidence or eyewitness accounts but increasingly concerned with reading previous ethnographers and integrating their research.
The heterogeneous tradition of ethnographic writing gives the environmental discourse I describe its unique texture. Ethnographic texts are polyvocal and sometimes fantastic, not committed to achieving a smooth, realistic synthesis or single forensic argument but rather composed of interpenetrating layers that give rise to multiple meanings. Ethnographers are interested not only in what they have seen or heard from eyewitnesses or even what they have read in previous histories, but also in what they can theorize themselves. These writers believe, as T. P. Wiseman once said, that “some credible things are not worth relating, and some incredible ones are.”15 Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s observations, adaptations of previous writers, oral histories, and creative extrapolations are the discursive material from which the environmental cultures I describe emerge. As I demonstrate, this discursive environment creates a fertile field for readers, who are encouraged to experiment with different ways of thinking about their own culture but rarely told what to conclude.
NATURE AND ENVIRONMENT
Though in everyday English people talk about the nature of a thing—“it is in my nature to do X” or “it is natural to do X”—they also talk about nature as a place, as in the phrase “the natural world.”16 Nature in this second sense is a place one has to go to, a place where few (if any) humans reside, and a spiritual refuge.17 Greek has a word for nature, physis, that corresponds only to the first of these meanings.18 Physis is not the space of “the natural world,” but the nature of a thing: an individual and generative force that causes it phyein, to grow.19 Physis is the growing-ness of things.
Greek authors often oppose physis to nomos, “law” or “custom.” Yet this is not an opposition between nonhuman “nature” and a space of human “culture.” When Greek intellectuals debate the importance of physis and nomos in human life, they focus on trying to understand human behavior.20 In these debates, physis designates the internal nature or inclination of individual people, whereas nomos is what has been prescribed, either by physis or by humans themselves. The physis-nomos debate centers on writers’ uncertainty about why people behave as they do; is nomos necessary or effective for producing virtuous human beings and institutions, these writers wonder, or does justice derive from physis? In these debates, physis and nomos are forces that shape human society rather than different spaces in which humans operate.
Yet Greek writers do recognize and oppose different kinds of spaces, including the country and the city and cultivated and “untamed” land, and categorize them as more or less affected by human activity.21 Greek writers, almost all of them men, do not seek a solitary, untamed wild for spiritual refuge or renewal.22 Instead, they value the countryside as its own kind of civilized space, attuned to men’s desires for leisure, simple foods, and sex. In golden age descriptions that celebrate a time before the establishment of agriculture and other applied arts, the absence of labor rather than the absence of human beings is valued. Greek writers attend to the degree and manner in which a space has been altered by human hands but generally assume that humans improve their surroundings, and should do so.23
Although Greek writers usually portray human beings as nature’s best creation, they also document human errors. In a famous passage of the Critias, Plato describes soil erosion in Attica:
πολλῶν οὖν γεγονότων καὶ μεγάλων κατακλυσμῶν . . . τὸ τῆς γῆς ἐν τούτοις τοῖς χρόνοις καὶ πάθεσιν ἐκ τῶν ὑψηλῶν ἀπορρέον οὔτε χῶμα, ὡς ἐν ἄλλοις τόποις, προχοῖ λόγου ἄξιον ἀεί τε κύκλῳ περιρρέον εἰς βάθος ἀφανίζεται·λέλειπται δή, καθάπερ ἐν ταῖς σμικραῖς νήσοις, πρὸς τὰ τότε τὰ νῦν οἷον νοσήσαντος σώματος ὀστᾶ, περιερρυηκυίας τῆς γῆς ὅση πίειρα καὶ μαλακή, τοῦ λεπτοῦ σώματος τῆς χώρας μόνου λειφθέντος.
Since there were many floods . . . the earth that broke off from the heights at these times and in these disasters does not form a mass worthy of mention, as in other places, but sliding away, perpetually disappears into the deep. And just as on small islands, what now remains is like the skeleton of a sick body after all the fat and softness of the earth has wasted away and only the husk of the body remains. (111a–b)
For modern scholars, passages like these that describe soil erosion have “resonance” when correlated with later Mediterranean soil erosion and the clear-cutting that caused it.24 But we must qualify Plato’s awareness of how humans can damage their environments. First, Plato says that floods, kataklysmoi, are responsible for causing erosion.25 We may be meant to infer that the floods have carried away soil loosened by overforesting, but humanity’s role (if it has one) has been muted. Second, despite Attica’s degeneration, Plato claims that his country is still more productive than other lands:
τὸ γὰρ νῦν αὐτῆς λείψανον ἐνάμιλλόν ἐστι πρὸς ἡντινοῦν τῷ πάμφορον εὔκαρπόν τε εἶναι καὶ τοῖς ζῴοις πᾶσιν εὔβοτον.
What now remains of [the soil] is a match for any other; it is productive of all things and full of crops and well-pastured for all kinds of animals. (Pl., Criti., 110e–111a)26
Rather than reflecting badly on human beings, the floods and soil erosion allow Plato to brag about both his land’s present superiority and the Attica that used to be. Environmental historians are working to document the ways that Greeks and especially Romans sometimes damaged their ecosystems, but it is important to recognize that anthropogenic damage was both limited by available technology and perceived as even more limited.27
Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s texts generally confirm this picture. Both authors use physis to designate the inner nature of humans, animals, and geographical features.28 Diodorus, perhaps following developments in Peripatetic and Stoic philosophy, also represents physis as a transcendent force that teaches humans and other animals and bestows gifts and hardships on creatures, including humans.29 In both authors, human customs and arts can work together with physis and increase its effects, although sometimes the relationship between humans and physis is antagonistic.30
As one would expect, both Herodotus and Diodorus are more interested in how humans benefit from rather than damage their surroundings. Destruction in general is rare. Herodotus reports that the Lydian king Alyattes burned the crops of his enemies (1.17), that the Mysian boar once ravaged Lydia’s fields (1.36), and that armies have drunk whole rivers dry (1.75, 1.108), while in Diodorus the quicksand of Barathra attacks people “as if with some sort of evil cunning” (1.30.7: hōsper pronoiai tini
