Valuing Landscape in Classical Antiquity
Subtitle: Natural Environment and Cultural Imagination
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 495
ISBN-13: 9789004319707
Subjects: Landscapes; Greece, social conditions; Rome, social conditions
Description: ‘Where am I?’. Our physical orientation in place is one of the defining characteristics of our embodied existence. However, while there is no human life, culture, or action without a specific location functioning as its setting, people go much further than this bare fact in attributing meaning and value to their physical environment. 'Landscape’ denotes this symbolic conception and use of terrain. It is a creation of human culture. In Valuing Landscape we explore different ways in which physical environments impacted on the cultural imagination of Greco-Roman Antiquity. In seventeen chapters with different disciplinary perspectives, we demonstrate the values attached to mountains, the underworld, sacred landscapes, and battlefields, and the evaluations of locale connected with migration, exile, and travel.