Conversing with Chaos in Graeco-Roman Antiquity
Subtitle: Writing and Reading Environmental Disorder in Ancient Texts
By: edited by Esther Eidinow and Christopher Schliephake
Edition: 1st ed.
Series: Ancient Environments
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2024
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 232
ISBN-13: 9781350344228
Subjects: Chaos; Natural world; Philosophy, Ancient..; Ancient Greek religion & mythology; Ancient World; Environmental archaeology
Description: <b>How did ancient Greeks and Romans perceive their environments: did they see order or chaos, chance or control?</b> And how do their views compare to modern perceptions?<i> </i><i>Conversing with Chaos in Graeco-Roman Antiquity</i> 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.<b> </b>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.
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Table of contents: title: List of Contributors Preface List of Abbreviations   Introduction, Esther Eidinow and Christopher Schliephake   <b>I. Control</b> 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   <b>II. Connection</b> 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 <b> </b> <b>III. Contact</b> 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   <b>IV. Change</b> 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