Conversing with Chaos in Graeco-Roman Antiquity

This volume starts from a reconsideration of the idea that ancient perceptions of the non-human world rested on the profound belief in universal order and therefore paid little attention to variety, irregularity, and change. Focusing on the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, this book seeks to present long-term dynamics in environmental interactions. It traces another sense of environmental awareness, one that paid equal attention to chance and chaos, and even reflected on the, at times, fatal consequences of human intervention in nature. Contributor s from across the globe examine the transformation and co-construction of ancient landscapes through natural and human processes. Their essays consider a range of evidence, from myths and philosophical treatises to epigraphic evidence and archaeological remains, but they all reveal the ways in which humankind constructs stories about its environment - and how these stories facilitate the construction of ancient environments as living entities, respondent (maybe even vulnerable) to human actions and decision-making.>

Préface
An examination of how ancient environments were socio-culturally constructed as responsive living entities that could undermine or even challenge humankind's sense of control.

Auteur
Esther Eidinow is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a series editor for the Bloomsbury series Ancient Environments, co-editor of Cognitive Approaches to Ancient Religious Experience (2022) and author of Envy, Poison and Death: Women on Trial in Classical Athens (2016). Christopher Schliephake is Assistant Professor of Ancient History at Augsburg University, Germany. He is author of The Environmental Humanities and the Ancient World (2020) and editor of Ecocritisim, Ecology and Cultures in Antiquity (2017).

Texte du rabat

"Contributors from across the globe examine the transformation and co-construction of ancient landscapes through natural and human processes. Their essays consider a range of evidence, from myths and philosophical treatises to epigraphic evidence and archaeological remains, but they all reveal the ways in which humankind constructs stories about its environment - and how these stories facilitate the construction of ancient environments as living entities, respondent (maybe even vulnerable) to human actions and decision-making"--

Résumé
How did ancient Greeks and Romans perceive their environments: did they see order or chaos, chance or control? And how do their views compare to modern perceptions? Conversing with Chaos in Graeco-Roman Antiquity challenges prevailing ideas that ancient perceptions of the non-human world rested on a profound belief in universal order, and that the cosmos was harmonious and under human control. Engaging with the concept of chaos in both its ancient and modern meanings, and focusing on the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, this book reveals another sense of environmental awareness, one that paid equal attention to chance and chaos, and the sometimes-fatal consequences of human interventions in nature. Bringing together a team of international scholars, the volume investigates the experience of the interaction of humans with the environment, as reflected in ancient evidence from myths and philosophical treatises, to epigraphic evidence and archaeological remains. The contributors consider the role of the human in the formation of perspectives about the natural world and explore themes of agency, affordances, ecophobia, gender and temporality. Overall, the volume reveals how, in ancient imaginations, environments were perceived as living entities with their own agency, and respondent (or even vulnerable) to human actions and decision-making. It highlights how modern insights can enrich our understanding of the past, and demonstrates the increasing relevance of ancient historical research for reflecting on current relations to the natural world.

Contenu
List of Contributors Preface List of Abbreviations Introduction, Esther Eidinow and Christopher Schliephake I. Control 1. Perilous Environs: The Rustic World in Aratus and Nicander, Leonardo Cazzadori 2. Shared Suffering and Cyclical Destruction: Failures of Environmental Control in the Aeneid, Aaron M. Seider 3. Chaos and Kosmos: An Ecocritical Reading of Seneca's Thyestes, Simona Martorana II. Connection 4. The Interspecies and Trans-Corporeal Mesh in Euripides' Bacchae, Maria Combatti 5. The Relationality of Darkness in Thucydides, Esther Eidinow 6. The Only Constant Is Change The Environmental Dimension of Plutarch's De defectu oraculorum, Christopher Schliephake III. Contact 7. Poseidon's Mode of Action: Divine Agency and the Helike Disaster, Michiel van Veldhuizen 8. River, Agency, and Gender: An Ecocritical Reading of the Myths of the Tiber, Kresimir Vukovic 9. Ecological Grief and the Safaitic Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia, Eris Williams Reed IV. Change 10. Ecological Grief in Aelius Aristides and Philostratus, Jason König 11. An Allegory of the 'Anthropocene': Environmental and textual disorder in Claudian's De Raptu Proserpinae, Marco Formisano 12. The Environmental Ethics of Delphi: Back-filling Latour's Facing Gaia, Mark D. Usher