Greeks had no word for the interrelatedness of organisms, this interconnection is assumed. Their world is one in which human beings and other creatures are governed by physis rather than one in which humans occupy a civilized space entirely separate from natural space. Instead, animate and inanimate beings of the natural world push back against the humans who tell their tale. When these beings are divine they may be dismissed by secular scholars as fantasies, irrelevant to present concerns, but just as often they are natural rather than supernatural, ancestors of the plants, animals, land, and water that surround us today. By investigating encounters between humans and these other beings, Greek ethnography offers the environmental humanities a resource and a comparative databank with which to test out different ontologies, epistemologies, and ethics of the human and more-than-human world.64
Greek ethnographies also assume that knowledge is situated, that is, partial, communal, embodied, and emplaced. Donna Haraway coined the phrase “situated knowledge” to critique both traditional white Western notions of objectivity, especially in science, and radical feminist constructivism, the perspective that truth is reducible to rhetoric. Instead, Haraway maps a third way that describes knowledge production not as a language game but as a “view from somewhere,” limited but rational and objective on its own terms.65 Indigenous peoples have long claimed access to other ways of knowing, ways now being promoted by scholars (many of them Indigenous).66 Like other white writers who have turned to Indigenous peoples for new ways of being in the Anthropocene, I am a student of Greek environmental knowledge, of Greek world building.
To understand how Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s texts build worlds, I have relied a great deal on the work of Karen Barad. Barad’s agential realism is an immense intellectual achievement, a systematic philosophy that draws on the physics of Neils Bohr and the gender theory of Judith Butler and interacts (or as Barad would say, “intra-acts”) with many of the strains of new materialism and feminist science studies I have mentioned in this chapter. Her work is also laden with unique terminology and written in a style that many readers will find irritating, which is why I quote it very little. Barad’s project, she says, “is an ethico-onto-epistemological matter. We are not merely differently situated in the world . . . each of us is part of the intra-active ongoing articulation of the world in its differential mattering.”67 Mattering for Barad describes the interdependence of matter and discourse, substance and significance. According to Barad, the way we know the world (epistemology) and how we decide to act in the world (ethics) are inextricable from what the world is (ontology) and what we are as well. This is true of both current scholarship, like this book, and the ancient sources under study. The way that Herodotus and Diodorus divide the world and construct its categories creates relationships between humans and other beings. The way that I have organized this book creates relationships as well, between readers, Greek authors, and the worlds they inhabit. By articulating the Greek past through Barad’s agential realism, I am materializing the past in the present. I hope that this materialization helps the humans who read this book and the others with whom they interdepend to create the practices of body and mind that allow human and more-than-human life to flourish.
CHAPTER TWO
Rulers and Rivers
As explained in chapter 1, my analysis of Greek ethnography’s environmental discourse attends to the boundaries between land and water (chapter 2) and differences between (and among) human and animal bodies (chapter 3), as well as the cultural practices described in chapters 4 and 5. This chapter shows how humans and other beings in Herodotus’s Histories and Diodorus’s Library build and rebuild the known world by constructing marvelous works such as pyramids, dams, and canals. These works (erga) are energy and material intensive, requiring tons of raw wood, stone, metal, and animal products, as well as the forced labor of humans and other animals. Erga also reroute rivers, sever bodies of land, and alter topography, sometimes forever. The massive effects of these engineering projects lead Herodotus and Diodorus to grapple with questions of environmental ethics: Under what circumstances should humans (and others) intervene in the world around them? Are there “natural” boundaries they should respect?
Both Herodotus and Diodorus distinguish between human-made and what are usually called natural features of the world. Herodotus says that some of the mouths of the Nile have been “dug” (orukta) by humans, while others are “original” (ithagenea, 2.17.6), picturing humans as secondary actors in Egypt. Diodorus uses different language, saying that the Egyptian king Sesoösis “erected many great mounds of land . . . in areas not naturally (physikōs) elevated” (1.57.1).1 For both authors, “nature” (physis) has temporal priority over human action, operating before and within people and other beings. Yet contrary to modern assumptions, the distinction between the “original” operation of nature in the world and later human or nonhuman changes to land- and waterscapes has no inherent moral value. Readers of Herodotus and Diodorus learn that these human interventions are not good or bad per se, but rather are judged by their consequences for the human community.2
The most infamous engineering project Herodotus records appears in the second half of the Histories. In book 7, the Persian king Xerxes prepares to invade Greece by bridging the Hellespont, the strait separating Asia and Europe. Just as the bridge is complete, storms arise and destroy it. Enraged, Xerxes orders his men to abuse the water with whips, shackles, and brands, while he himself casts these insults:
Ὦ πικρὸν ὕδωρ, δεσπότης τοι δίκην ἐπιτιθεῖ τήνδε, ὅτι μιν ἠδίκησας οὐδὲν πρὸς ἐκείνου ἄδικον παθόν. Καὶ βασιλεὺς μὲν Ξέρξης διαβήσεταί σε, ἤν τε σύ γε βούλῃ ἤν τε μή. Σοὶ δὲ κατὰ δίκην ἄρα οὐδεὶς ἀνθρώπων θύει, ὡς ἐόντι καὶ θολερῷ καὶ ἁλμυρῷ ποταμῷ.
Bitter water, this is the punishment you pay our master for wronging him although you suffered no injustice from him. King Xerxes will cross you whether you are willing or not. How right it is that no one sacrifices to you, muddy and salty a river as you are. (Hdt. 7.35)
Herodotus strongly marks Xerxes as in the wrong, calling his men’s speech “barbaric and recklessly presumptuous” (7.35.1: barbara te kai atasthala) and the act itself “an honor without honor” (7.36.1: hautē hē acharis timē). Narrative clues reinforce Herodotus’s disapproval: Xerxes ignores omens (7.37) and even his own feelings of despair (7.45) but does not turn back. Like Agamemnon’s trampling of the carpet in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon (to which this scene is often compared), the whipping of the Hellespont sums up and overdetermines Xerxes’s fall in the remaining books of the Histories.3
The scene is also crucial for scholars’ understanding of the relationship between humans and their world. Classicists have usually framed Xerxes’s act as “unnatural,” a transgression of predetermined natural boundaries. James Flory claims that Xerxes “profanes nature” with his act, while Henry Immerwahr argues that “the crossing of rivers . . . is always used to prove the hybris [violent arrogance] of the aggressor.”4 Since rivers had divine status in Greek religion, Thomas Harrison translates Xerxes’s “presumptuous” (atasthala) words as “impious” and says that the scene exemplifies “the moral that man should let his environment be.”5 Rosaria Munson agrees, tying Xerxes’s action to other “expansionist violations of rivers.”6 In this dominant view, there are natural boundaries in the Histories that humans “transgress,” “profane,” or “violate” by building bridges, redirecting rivers, and digging canals.
