In view of the environmental problems of our own time, we are increasingly addressing the question of the historical roots and conditions of ecological crises. This leads us back far beyond the environmental history of the past fifty years, and addresses long-term developments of human history since the earliest times. It also includes a large number of scientific disciplines: prehistory, history, geography, geology, anthropology, medicine, biology, ethnology and others. Clearly, environmental historical work relying on a single discipline would be inadequate or too one-sided; it would need to be completed by results from other fields of study, and, ideally, meshed with them.
Ancient history as a discipline draws primarily on the literary sources, from Greece of the archaic era through to late antiquity. It thus addresses primarily ancient perceptions, descriptions and interpretations, which risks a one-dimensional perspective. For a more adequate reconstruction of ancient environmental conditions, this volume will attempt to at least begin to include research from other disciplines, even if no comprehensive interdisciplinary approach can as yet be realised.
The primary goal of the study of antiquity must be the examination of the peculiarities of human behaviour under the specific conditions prevailing at the time in question. The assessment of ancient conceptions of the environment or ancient environmental behaviour in terms of modern standards is problematical from the outset. Broad-brush prejudices, which either paint a picture of an idyllic ancient world where humankind and nature were one, or else go to the other extreme to emphasise the scant respect for nature exhibited by the Greeks and Romans, are in fact not particularly helpful in this regard. The number and scope of impacts are generally of entirely different dimensions than is the case today, and are based on very different technological and societal foundations. A reconstruction of ancient conditions can therefore contribute only indirectly to enlarging our field of vision for an analysis of our own time.
The most conspicuous interventions of the Greeks in nature were first of all forest clearing and mining, as well as the common wartime tactic of devastating the enemy's farmland to rob him of his sustenance, at least temporarily. The realisation that forest clearing led to soil erosion, and hence to the loss of farm and pastureland, quickly gained acceptance, but this was apparently not accompanied by any fundamental critique of clear-cutting. Clearing the forest was seen first and foremost as part of the progress of civilisation – as it would be later, too, among the Romans. On the other hand, the damage to farmland was probably of limited scale, neither leading to immediate shortages nor providing any comprehensive picture of the finiteness of resources. The Greeks and Romans of course still lacked the technological wherewithal to inflict global damage upon the environment. They thus never faced the necessity of fundamentally reconsidering their behaviour towards nature.
The numerous foundations of cities in countries all around the Mediterranean, which began during the first millennium BC, constituted a fundamental intervention in the landscape. Even in archaic times (between the eighth century BC and 500 BC) considerable quantities of stone, wood and metal were needed for public and private buildings. The temples, theatres, columned halls and gymnasia – schools for both athletic and artistic education – of the classical era (500–336 BC) demanded still more materials, and were the cause of even greater degrees of overexploitation, yet they also led to various forms of reuse and recycling. Certainly, the splendour and pomposity of the Hellenistic royal courts demonstrates that the ancient Greeks did not always husband natural resources in a thrifty manner, nor did their impacts upon nature exclusively result from the purposes of satisfying basic needs. This does, however, appear to some extent as a contradiction to their fundamental religious beliefs, according to which they venerated ‘Mother Earth’ in the form of the goddess Demeter, and always appreciated the beauty of pleasant groves, bays and river landscapes.
The Romans were able to expand still further the range of impacts on nature, both in the countryside and in the towns, and even to extend it north of the Alps, to large areas of Europe. Even in pre-imperial times, Rome was already confronted with urban problems not unfamiliar to us today. Congested streets, traffic noise, the stench of waste, and plumes of smoke from charcoal heating and baths led to a deterioration in living conditions, particularly of the lower classes of society. Huge numbers of exotic wild animals died in bloodthirsty public spectacles in the arenas, on a scale which threatened a number of species, such as the hippopotamus in Lower Egypt, with extinction in some areas. While there was sporadic criticism of damage to nature caused by rapacious mining or the popular practice of lining rivers and lake shores with villas, this criticism was aimed less at the destruction of the environment than at the material greed and addiction to splendour for which the upper classes were thus berated.
The carelessness of the ancients in their stewardship of nature and its raw materials has certainly had its effects. The impacts of the utilisation of nature and the landscape in ancient times were considerable in many areas. Both southern and northern Europe, which was then newly incorporated into the ancient civilisational realm, were transformed. Nevertheless, popular opinion, according to which the widespread karst formation in various areas of the Mediterranean is due to clear-cutting of forests in ancient times, turns out to be wrong. Caution is called for when interpreting ancient intervention in nature, for in many areas later natural or anthropogenic changes, such as the building of the Venetian fleet or clear-cutting during the nineteenth century, have contributed to today's appearance of the landscape.
The discussion of humankind and the environment in antiquity necessarily makes use of modern terms for environmental phenomena, which are, however, associated with particular periods of history and hence require clarification as to their origins and meanings. This moreover includes the term ‘environmental history’ itself, the contents and approaches of which have to be placed in a history-of-science perspective; moreover, its relevance or applicability to antiquity must first be examined. In this context, reference must be made to the research both of modern and of ancient environmental history, so as to delimit the scope of the study.