of a series of bioi, Herodotus often characterizes ethnic others by their “method of subsistence,” their diaita. Of the Persians who did not join Cyrus he says “all [are] tillers of the soil [arotēres],” except “the Dai, the Mardi, the Dropici, the Sagartii, all wandering herdsmen [nomades]” (1.125).47 This attention to diaita (a synonym of bios) places Herodotus in a larger conversation about the relationship between subsistence, ethnicity, and development over time, a conversation that produced full articulations of the comparative method in the authors who immediately followed Herodotus, including Thucydides and Plato, and cultural histories in the generation after him. Although Herodotus has been seen as just another writer, like Hesiod, who associated Greek past and non-Greek present, the Histories were instead a bridge between archaic correlations of time and place and late classical applications of this correlation to the study of the distant past.48 Herodotus may or may not have aimed to theorize the Greek past through the non-Greek present, but his text was available for Greek readers to interpret this way and for cultural historians after him to draw upon.
Irvin Schick uses the phrase “technology of place” to “describe the discursive instruments and strategies by means of which space is constituted as place, that is place as socially constructed and reconstructed.”49 Bios is a technology of both place and time, a way of constructing time and place that relates them to one another. By mapping bioi, Greek ethnographers explored the past through the world and the world through their understanding of the past. Bioi are also a technology of spatiotemporal difference, a way of creating and marking the difference between past and present, Greek and non-Greek, and within non-Greek communities. Although it is difficult to track lines of influence between cultural history and ethnography, I suspect that it would be most accurate to say that Greek ethnography and cultural history, Greek thinking about distant places and distant times, formed one another in the classical period, eventually merging in the universal history of the late Hellenistic and early Roman periods.50
One of these universal histories was Diodorus Siculus’s Library, which begins with a cultural history (Sic. 1.8) believed to have been broadly influenced by Dicaearchus’s lost Life of Greece, perhaps via Agatharchides, who wrote in Alexandria in the second century BCE.51 According to Diodorus, the first human beings:
τοὺς οὖν πρώτους τῶν ἀνθρώπων μηδενὸς τῶν πρὸς βίον χρησίμων εὑρημένου ἐπιπόνως διάγειν, γυμνοὺς μὲν ἐσθῆτος ὄντας, οἰκήσεως δὲ καὶ πυρὸς ἀήθεις, τροφῆς δ’ ἡμέρου παντελῶς ἀνεννοήτους.
endured a miserable existence because nothing useful for life (pros bion) had been discovered; they had no clothing, were unused to dwellings or fire, and [were] completely ignorant of cultivated (hēmerou) food. (Diod. Sic. 1.8.5)
Through the gradual acquisition of arts, often bestowed by a culture hero like Isis or Heracles, human beings improved their lives.52 As this progression makes clear, Diodorus has a strong preference for “cultivated” or “civilized” life (e.g., 3.50.2: hēmeros bios) over the other forms of life humans experienced either earlier in time or in his day, in places unknown to culture heroes. Nevertheless, readers of Diodorus are not bound by the history he stages at the beginning of the Library and its valuation of more “developed” bioi over others. As discussed later, Diodorus’s persistent focus on different bioi and examination of their advantages and drawbacks allows his readers to explore other ways of life as alternatives to their own.
INDIGENOUS COSMOVISIONS AND NEW MATERIALISMS
The environmental discourse of Greek ethnographies, with its “culturing” of human beings in larger ecosystems (see the introduction), both complements and critiques ideas in the emerging field of “environmental humanities.” This field is a big tent, a motley crew of broadly compatible approaches to describing what it has meant to be human and imagining what we might yet become. Environmental humanities developed out of and has grown to encompass environmental criticism, or ecocriticism, a branch of literary studies developed in the 1980s that investigates the cultural construction of nature. In this sense, ecocriticism is a shorthand term for intellectual environmental history, how human beings value and conceive of nature over time. But ecocritics also see their field as the environmentalist equivalent of feminism, critical race studies, and queer theory, and like many theorists from those schools, they often voice their hopes, fears, and opinions about current events in their analysis of “the relationship between literature and the physical environment.”53 Ecocriticism is itself an outgrowth (and in some cases appropriation) of Indigenous cosmovisions, ways of knowing and making the human and more-than-human world.54 It is these Indigenous cosmovisions and their allied white Western “new materialisms” that have the greatest relevance to this book.55
In their introduction to Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies, Salma Monani and Joni Adamson assert that “Indigenous understandings . . . suggest a cosmos of relations that speak to complex entanglements of the human with the more-than-human that must be creatively and thoughtfully negotiated.”56 These negotiations take many forms, from healing walks that mourn and reclaim devastated land to poetry that honors maize and human sexuality, but all recognize the responsibility humans and other beings owe one another by virtue of their interdependence and use story and movement to teach humans their share of this responsibility.57
Taking up this theme of interdependence, academics from physics, philosophy, political science, and science studies have developed a set of new ideas that try to account for the ontological, epistemological, and ethical relationship between humans and other beings—that is, how they relate in terms of being, knowledge, and responsibility. These thinkers, grouped under various headings—object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and new materialism—are all invested in dismantling the partition between humans and nature that, as discussed in the introduction, has governed so much white Western environmental discourse.58 Instead, they emphasize the agency, vibrancy, animacy, or ethical status of animals, plants, and other beings. To do this, they have developed several philosophies, including Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy, and as described later in this chapter, Karen Barad’s agential realism.59
Other thinkers have generated select vocabulary rather than systematic philosophies of the human and more-than-human world. Donna Haraway, who along with Bruno Latour turned the sociological study of science (science studies) toward metaphysics in the 1980s, popularized the term naturecultures to capture the interdependence of humans, other beings, and society, while Stacy Alaimo coined trans-corporeality to describe the porous interface of human and other bodies and their exchange of material. Deleuze and Guattari’s image of the rhizome is an early precursor of these ideas.60 To maintain accessibility, I have chosen not to use any of these terms, instead speaking more generically of entanglements and relationships between humans and other beings. But I believe this book could easily be translated to suit readers in these subdisciplines of the environmental humanities, and I hope they will adapt the stories I tell for their own projects.61
Ancient Greek writers were not proponents of Indigenous cosmovisions, new materialisms, or any of these other schools of thought. For one thing, Greek ethnographies are almost always anthropocentric, privileging humans and their success. The misogyny of Greek ethnography is another instructive difference. While many environmentalists and environmentally oriented scholars root themselves in feminism, Greek writers base their vision of human and nonhuman relations on a strict hierarchy that places human men above women, and so on down the line.62 Yet their subjugation does not prevent women from exercising what I call feck, the power to make significant differences in the world.
