Despite the topicality of environmental history over the past three decades or more, ecological research on ancient times is still in its nascent stage. The full-scale results of geological and botanical investigations are still pending; moreover, the periodisation of environmental history needs to be further refined, and differentiated spatially and chronologically. The reconstruction of natural zones, material cycles and ecosystems is limited as a result of the paucity of sources. Historians investigating antiquity from an ecological scientific perspective have very restricted data and other means at their disposal. The material remains allow only limited conclusions to be drawn, and the documentary sources often support only indirect conclusions about conditions in ancient times. To date, few coherent discussions of humankind and the environment in antiquity exist.
Russell Meiggs set an initial milestone with his work Trees and Timber in the Ancient Mediterranean World (1982). Robin Osborne then provided an updated form of regional studies: Classical Landscape with Figures: The Ancient Greek City and Its Countryside (1987), which was followed by Robert Sallares’ extensive work The Ecology of the Ancient Greek World (1991), which sought explanations for cultural development in climatic and biological developments, including domestication. With Smog überAttika (1990), Karl-Wilhelm Weeber provided a popular scientific summary of ancient environmental problems. Paolo Fedeli presented a comprehensive depiction of the Roman situation, La natura violata: ecologia e mondo romano, also in 1990. A useful source book on the environment of the Graeco-Roman world is Giangiacomo Panessa's Fonti greche e latine per la storia dell’ambiente e del clima nel mondo greco (‘Greek and Latin sources on the history of the environment and the climate in the Greek world’, 1991).
Weeber's introductory work was complemented by J. Donald Hughes's comprehensive Pan's Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans (1994), by Günther E. Thüry's Die Wurzeln unserer Umweltkrise und die griechisch-römische Antike (‘The roots of our environmental crisis and Graeco-Roman antiquity’, 1995), and by Gudrun Vögler's Öko-Griechen und grüne Römer? (‘Eco-Greeks and green Romans?’, 1997). In 1999 Holger Sonnabend published both a description of ‘natural disasters of antiquity’ (Naturkatastrophen in der Antike) and a dictionary of ‘people and landscapes in antiquity’ (Mensch und Landschaft in der Antike), many of the entries in which provide useful introductions and references to secondary sources.
Like the modern concept of ecology generally, these recent representations are based on initial examinations from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The conditions of life and customs of the Greeks and Romans, as well as their relationship to nature, were already addressed in the great treatises on the ‘private/home life’ of the ancients (German Sittengeschichte, ‘moral history’), albeit with no basis in natural-scientific examination.22 At that time, such topics familiar in our own time as food, bathing and personal hygiene, lumber supply and horticulture were already addressed comprehensively. On the other hand, ancient geography also enjoyed great popularity. Heinrich Nissen's Italische Landeskunde (‘Italic geographic studies’, 1883–1902) was a notable work on Roman geography, while Alfred Philippson and Ernst Kirsten wrote a similar book on Greece, Die griechischen Landschaften (‘The Greek landscapes’, 4 vols., 1950–9), which is still useful to this day, and has never really been surpassed.
A pioneering work on the ancient environment was The Geography of the Mediterranean Region: Its Relation to Ancient History by Ellen C. Semple (1931). More recently, Hansjörg Küster's Geschichte der Landschaft in Mitteleuropa (‘History of the landscape in central Europe’, 1995) is a chronological and geographical overview which also takes the ancient period into account. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell emphasise in The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (2000) that the pre-modern Mediterranean is typified by an exceptional ‘fragmentation’ of ‘microregions’ and inconstant ‘microecologies’, where risk is managed by traditionally high ‘connectivity’. Their work has been followed by the overviews of Alfred T. Grove and Oliver Rackham,The Nature of Mediterranean Europe: An Ecological History (2001), and J. Donald Hughes, The Mediterranean: An Environmental History (2005).
The goal of this book
The present book on the one hand addresses the foundations which determined the relationship between humankind and nature in Graeco-Roman antiquity. It thus attempts to ascertain the interactive complexes of effects between people and their environment during the period starting with the early Greeks – the ninth to eighth centuries BC – up through late antiquity, or the fourth to fifth centuries AD. The first factors to be taken into account are the geographical space and the ancient understanding of nature. The latter includes both mythical interpretations and the proto-scientific view of the world: its four elements, water, earth, fire and air; the theory of climatic determinism, according to which the physical constitution and the political system were influenced by the climate; and the manner in which animals and plants were dealt with.
On the other hand, this book seeks to examine concrete aspects in the relationship between humans and the environment in greater detail. These aspects include various human interventions in nature, such as farming and food procurement, forest cover and timber construction, the destruction of nature in war, horticulture, hydraulic construction, mining and urban problems. Finally, it investigates changes in nature and seeks to determine their significance for ancient society: the shift of coastlines and the siltation of river mouths, and such extreme events as conflagrations, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and floods.
The book comprises two parts, ‘Greece’ and ‘Rome’, and is largely structured with parallel chapters, so as to show both the similarities and the differences between the two civilisations and their handling of nature. The ancient Mediterranean world is thus not treated as a geographically closed space in a historically uniform era, but rather subdivided into two cultures, with partly different chronologies. In addition, the chapter on Roman Britain, a regional study of a geographically more limited landscape, compiles the issues and problems addressed in an exemplary summary.
This book is based for the most part on the literary sources, which are inserted into the text in brackets; thus, ancient perceptions inevitably move into the foreground. Natural-scientific investigations of various types which are increasingly contributing results to problems of ancient history can be taken into account only to a limited degree, and these methods are not discussed in detail. The examined areas therefore do not cover the full range of environmental issues, but are rather to a large degree determined by the literary material. The multi-layered problem of diseases and epidemics – together with very uncertain population statistics – can be, for example, only marginally addressed.
Furthermore, owing to the uneven availability of sources, it is hardly ever possible to always examine the contents presented according to a uniform structure of questions. It is the task of the historian to arrange the environmental phenomena addressed in their intellectual and cultural context, and to investigate the different results. In that way, the dependence of ancient society on the environment is to be highlighted, and a contribution provided to an understanding of the culture of that era. In this respect, environmental history can be understood as a part of general history, and can serve the purpose of opening up a view of ancient civilisation so as to create a reference to the foundations which have permanently shaped the people and landscape of Europe, and which, with manifold breaks, have remained effective up to our own time.
Historians today are called upon to contribute to a critical dealing with nature and hence, too, to engage in environmental research. This book seeks to do so by conveying the basis for historical research in the field of the environment in antiquity, and to provide a point of departure for further investigation of this topic in the future. For this purpose, it also includes detailed secondary bibliographical references for each chapter, and a short bibliographical essay at the end of the book.
1 Fuchsloch 1996, 4.
2 Jacob von Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, Berlin, 1909.
3 Winiwarter 1994, 131, 154; cf. Merchant 1993, 1.
4 Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, Berlin, 1866, II.286, I.8.
5 Begon et al. 2006, xi.
6 Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. ‘sustainable’, http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=sustainable&searchmode=none.
7 Hanns Carl von Carlowitz, Sylvicultura Oeconomica (Anweisung zur wilden Baum-Zucht), Leipzig, 1713.
8 Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 1999, 28.
9 Popular definition in Wikipedia, s.v. ‘disaster’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disaster (16 January 2006).
10 Meißner 2008.
11 Hughes 2001, 4–5; Hughes 2006, 1; Winiwarter and Knoll 2007, 14–15.
12 Winiwarter 1994, 154.
13 Hughes 2006, 3.
14 Sieferle 1997, 13–14.
15 Winiwarter 1994, 155.
16 Winiwarter 1994, 154–5.
17 Sieferle 1988, 311ff.
18 Merchant 1993, 1.
19 Sieferle 1993.
20 Simmons 1993, 1ff.; Sieferle 1993, 1995, 1997.
21 Pfister 1995.
22 Marquardt 1886; Blümner 1911; Friedlaender 1921–3.