marvels at how a runaway fire causes the land to “run with much silver” (5.35.3: argurōi ruēnai pollōi). These “rivers” replace and even surpass the land that existed before.
Despite their shared anthropocentrism, Diodorus moves beyond Herodotus to invent the idea of an interdependent “natural environment” (peristasis). This idea arises in his description of the Fisheaters of the Red Sea, reported to have built “houses modified to suit the peculiarity of their peristasis” (3.19.1). Although Diodorus elsewhere uses peristasis to designate “circumstances of the moment,” whether produced by natural phenomena such as weather (e.g., 2.30.5) or human actions such as war (e.g., 11.10.2), in this passage he designates the dynamic material circumstances that condition human life over time.31 This environment is governed by physis, which operates differently in every creature and element of the landscape, but it is not an empty space merely populated by humans and other beings. Rather, Diodorus uses peristasis to indicate the complex set of relationships in which humans and other creatures are cultured. For Diodorus, any given peristasis presents both challenges and opportunities for the human beings who live there. But people like the Fisheaters are integral to their environment, tending the trees they dwell in, feeding their corpses to the fish they will later eat, and sharing childcare with neighboring seals (3.18–19).32
WAY OF LIFE
Instead of excluding humanity from nature, environmental discourse in Greek ethnography explores how relationships between humans and other beings make the world and make different forms of culture possible. The bases for these relationships are different bioi, “ways of life” or “methods of subsistence,” a word that directly relates the human to the nonhuman and human life to the march of time.33
Greek historical writers (including ethnographers) often begin their works by lamenting the inaccessibility of early human history. Thucydides’s comments (1.1.3, 1.21.1) are the best known, but epistemological longing precedes Thucydides and recurs throughout the historical writing that follows him.34 Both before and especially after Herodotus, Greek writers imagined the deep past as a series of stages characterized by the gradual acquisition of technology, cultural practices, and refined products. Sometimes this is described as progress, for example, in Diodorus Siculus’s own narrative of early human history (1.8), and other times as decline, as in Hesiod’s famous series of Golden, Silver, and other generations (WD, 109–201). Hesiod does not characterize these types of human beings only by their “way of life” (bios), but bios plays an important role in demarcating especially the deep past inhabited by the Golden generation and the Iron generation, to which Hesiod belongs. The importance of bios is confirmed by the opening of the poem, in which Hesiod describes what life was like before and after Prometheus’s crime as the difference between humans having a secure bios and then losing it (42–93).
Hesiod’s narrative did not belong to a defined genre in antiquity but has been called “historical anthropology” or “cultural history” by modern scholars.35 Cultural history begins with Homer, Hesiod, and the pre-Socratics and culminates in the now lost treatises by Democritus and Dicaearchus.36 Ancient Greek cultural histories do not derive from systematic study, although they may contain genuine, culturally transmitted memories of previous centuries; rather, this mode of historical writing is a hybrid of history and philosophy, an imaginative extrapolation from what little can be securely known about humans’ deepest past.
Other writers use bios to think about different economies that operated on the earth simultaneously. Aristotle’s Politics, for example, describes distinct bioi of pastoralism, hunting and fishing, and raiding (1256a–b).37 Just as there are carnivores and herbivores among the earth’s animals, Aristotle says, so too do human ethnic communities (ethnē) vary in their mode of subsistence. Although Aristotle does not present the bioi of others as developmental stages, his schema offers his student, Dicaearchus of Messana, a base for articulating three stages of human development in his lost third-century BCE Life of Greece. Through quotations in later authors, we know that Dicaearchus read Hesiod’s Works and Days and blended Hesiod’s generations with Aristotle’s economies, describing human change as a progression from a golden age of gathering, to an intermediate stage of pastoralism, to a final stage of agriculturalism.38
As the influence of Aristotle’s ethnic bioi on Dicaearchus’s temporal bioi makes clear, cultural history and ethnography were related and mutually influential ways of understanding environmental culture. But Greek writers were combining ethnic and temporal thinking even before Dicaearchus. The “comparative method,” as it is known in anthropology, allowed Greek writers to compare living peoples to the Greeks’ own early history.39 Thucydides, for example, says that “there are many . . . respects in which a striking resemblance might appear between the old Greek way of life and present barbarian practice.”40 Plato notes that earlier forms of government are preserved in other parts of the world (Leg. 680b), and Arrian (writing after Dicaearchus) compares early Indians to living Scythians through their shared way of life:
πάλαι μὲν δὴ νομάδας εἶναι ᾽Ινδοὺς καθάπερ Σκυθέων τοὺς οὐκ ἀροτῆρας, οἳ ἐπὶ τῆισιν ἁμάξηισι πλανώμενοι ἄλλοτε ἄλλην τῆς Σκυθίης ἀμείβουσιν, οὐτε πόληας οἰκέοντες οὐτε ἱερὰ θεῶν σέβοντες·.
Long ago the Indians were nomadic, just like the nonfarming Scythians, who wander in their wagons and exchange one part of Scythia for another, neither dwelling in cities nor revering the temples of the gods. (Arr., Ind. 7.2–4)
Other texts compare older Greek to current non-Greek customs, including attitudes toward nakedness (Pl., Rep. 452c), religion (Pl., Crat. 397d), linguistics (Crat. 421d), and military practice (Ar. fr. 160).41 Plato, for example, says that “not too long ago it seemed embarrassing and ridiculous, as it seems to many barbarians now, for men to be seen naked.”42
Herodotus does not state the comparative method explicitly, but Tim Rood has argued that the Histories contain close parallels to the passage of Thucydides I have quoted here (1.6.6).43 Herodotus relates past Greek and current non-Greek writing habits, for example:
Καὶ τὰς βύβλους διφθέρας καλέουσι ἀπὸ τοῦ παλαιοῦ οἱ Ἴωνες, ὅτι κοτὲ ἐν σπάνι βύβλων ἐχρέωντο διφθέρῃσι αἰγέῃσί τε καὶ οἰέῃσι· ἔτι δὲ καὶ τὸ κατ’ ἐμὲ πολλοὶ τῶν βαρβάρων ἐς τοιαύτας διφθέρας γράφουσι.
The Ionians call papyrus sheets skins, as they have done from antiquity, because at that time they used to use goat and sheep skins for want of papyrus. And many barbarians write on such skins even today. (Hdt. 5.58.3)
Whether or not one agrees with Rood that this passage fully employs the comparative method, it shows how Greek writers associate distant times and distant places, an association that goes back at least as far as Hesiod, who places the remnant of an older version of humanity at the edges of the earth (WD, 168).44 Herodotus, scholars have noted, imagines distant peoples occupying a blessed, golden-age existence very similar to that enjoyed by Hesiod’s Golden generation. The Ethiopians, for example, who occupy “the ends of the earth” (ta eschata gēs, 3.25.5) and eat milk and meat rather than bread, are tall and beautiful, scrupulous, and long-lived, and they despise luxury (3.20–23).45
Herodotus’s
