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CHAPTER ONE

Sources and Methods

As described in the introduction, Other Natures falls into two parts. The first reads Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus for evidence of relationships between humans and other beings, while the second brings their texts into conversation with present concerns. This chapter provides background for Herodotus and Diodorus; gives an overview of Greek environmental terms and their development; and describes my methods, especially my debt to Indigenous cosmovisions and new materialisms.

HERODOTUS AND DIODORUS SICULUS

This book focuses on two ancient Greek texts: Herodotus of Halicarnassus’s fifth-century BCE Histories and Diodorus Siculus’s first-century BCE Library. Herodotus’s Histories chronicles the events of the Greco-Persian wars and their backstories and investigates the non-Greeks who were either involved in the conflict, conquered in the course of Persian expansion, or brought to Herodotus’s attention in the course of his inquiries. These include a vast array of peoples, but I focus on those called Persians, Babylonians, Scythians, and Ethiopians in what is now Iran, Iraq, Russia, and east Africa, respectively. The passages I consider dominate books 1 through 4 and the beginning of 5, although details about other places and peoples appear throughout, and I consider the resonance of these passages when I discuss later books of the Histories.¹

Diodorus’s Library has a much wider scope, aiming to encompass the history of the known world from its beginnings until Diodorus’s own time, ending around 60 BCE. Although only fifteen of forty books have survived intact, Diodorus’s work is still the longest extant from Greek and Roman antiquity. I focus on the first three books of non-Greek history, especially Diodorus’s descriptions of people living in what is now Egypt, India, and Sudan, but passages from book 5, which describes the Greek islands and parts of northern Europe, also make an appearance, and I consider book 12, Diodorus’s life of Alexander the Great, in chapter 6.²

Throughout the book I treat static descriptions of people’s customs alongside narratives of their actions in time, especially in the course of Persian conquest (Herodotus) and Egyptian and Babylonian conquest (Diodorus). I have subtitled this book “Environmental Encounters with Ancient Greek Ethnography” because this term is more evocative than “historiography,” which encompasses the many modes Herodotus and Diodorus write in. When I talk about ethnography in this book, I am referring to Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s portrayals of non-Greeks, and when I call them ethnographers I do so to emphasize this focus of their writings.³

I have chosen to anchor this study in Herodotus and Diodorus because their works loom so large in the history of Greek writing on other peoples and because, as bookends of the Greek world before Rome, they allow me to trace significant similarities and differences across four centuries.⁴ Since Diodorus is an heir to the tradition Herodotus founded, their juxtaposition also provides opportunities to see Herodotean calls and Diodoran responses. Diodorus’s reception of Herodotus, often mediated through lost Hellenistic authors, comments on the Histories, often critically.

Although Herodotus may himself have been indebted to earlier writers, especially Hecataeus of Miletus and Skylax, his success so thoroughly eclipsed his predecessors’ that he often appears entirely original.⁵ We know that Herodotus’s mode of writing about other peoples was very popular in later periods. As Oswyn Murray has demonstrated, the Histories had a sustained impact on the Hellenistic geographers, ethnographers, and historians who succeeded him, whether or not they acknowledged that impact or had a favorable view of their predecessor.⁶ Yet the majority of these successors’ works do not survive, except as they are embodied in later writers such as Diodorus.

Some of the work on Herodotus’s ethnographies has considered the relationship of other peoples to their environments, often focusing on the stereotype of the “noble savage.” Stewart Flory has said that “the story of the struggle between the Greeks and the Persians is also the story of the conflict between nature and culture . . . in which a man of culture, whom I call the ‘prosperous aggressor,’ attacks a man of nature, the ‘noble savage.’ ”⁷ Flory uses these terms as shorthand for a complicated, shifting dynamic between peoples in Herodotus, but the shorthand itself has come to dominate scholars’ sense of environmental patterns in the Histories. Flory’s dichotomy between “noble savage” and “prosperous aggressor,” along with James Redfield’s distinction between “soft peoples” and “hard peoples,” has encouraged scholars of Greece and Rome to see Herodotus through the lens of early modern anthropology and political theory, from which these terms derive.⁸ It is better to understand the “noble savage” as a reception of Greek and Roman ethnography than an idea that would be familiar to Herodotus’s first readers. The reception has been so powerful because it reveals something true and distinct in Greek and Roman ethnographies, namely their persistent interest in environmental cultures. But as compelling as these terms are, noble savage, prosperous aggressor, soft peoples, and hard peoples are reductive and limiting.⁹

Unlike Herodotus, Diodorus has been largely ignored as a writer. While his Library is regularly mined for its adaptation of now-lost Hellenistic histories, Diodorus’s text has received only a handful of book-length treatments.¹⁰ His use of lost texts is both immense and difficult to evaluate. Other scholars have painstakingly compared the “fragments” of these authors across their transmitters or “cover texts,” including Diodorus. Nevertheless, scholars have also shown that Diodorus exercised considerable authorship in the selection and adaptation of his sources, as did Herodotus before him. In placing Diodorus’s text alongside Herodotus’s, I hope to contribute to scholars’ growing appreciation for the Library as a historical work in its own right.¹¹ For this reason, I do not wade into ongoing debates about where Diodorus has modified his sources and where he has transmitted them more or less intact. I leave to others the important work of distinguishing the environmental discourse of lost Hellenistic historians from the larger background I detail in this book.

Although “Herodotus” has been championed as a great artist, the author of the entire Histories, while “Diodorus” is often credited only with certain passages of the Library, ancient readers probably did not make this distinction, and so I use the names “Herodotus” and “Diodorus” in parallel. At the same time, I note instances when Herodotus and Diodorus break out of the stream of narration to speak to the reader in their authorial personas. Otherwise, following a reader-centric rather than author-centric approach, I use the names “Herodotus” and “Diodorus” more or less interchangeably with their texts, the Histories and Library. I have presented Herodotus, his Histories, Diodorus, and his Library as showing, arguing, and implying things to readers.¹²

Focusing on the Library rather than its Hellenistic sources has several benefits. First, it allows me to describe the experience of Diodorus’s readers, who had access to his continuous narrative, rather than confining my arguments to individual passages extracted from the Library and confirmed as Diodorus’s original work. Second, preserving the layers of Diodorus’s words and those of his sources will remind us that Herodotus’s text is layered as well. Although many ethnographic writers claim to have seen some of what they record, most depended either in part or in full on the observations of others.¹³ When modern editors publish the “fragments” of these lost authors out of the context in which we find them—that is, embedded as quotations or adaptations in later authors—readers lose sight of the fact that ethnography was a tradition that covered its tracks.¹⁴ Direct observation, although one original source for ethnographic writing, became less important over time as other kinds of sources, especially the tradition of ethnographic writing itself, came into circulation. Over the centuries ethnography became an accretive, scholarly genre; these later ethnographers were not opposed to new evidence or eyewitness accounts but increasingly concerned with reading previous ethnographers and integrating their research.

The heterogeneous tradition of ethnographic writing gives the environmental discourse I describe its unique texture. Ethnographic texts are polyvocal and sometimes fantastic, not committed to achieving a smooth, realistic synthesis or single forensic argument but rather composed of interpenetrating layers that give rise to multiple meanings. Ethnographers are interested not only in what they have seen or heard from eyewitnesses or even what they have read in previous histories, but also in what they can theorize themselves. These writers believe, as T. P. Wiseman once said, that “some credible things are not worth relating, and some incredible ones are.”¹⁵ Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s observations, adaptations of previous writers, oral histories, and creative extrapolations are the discursive material from which the environmental cultures I describe emerge. As I demonstrate, this discursive environment creates a fertile field for readers, who are encouraged to experiment with different ways of thinking about their own culture but rarely told what to conclude.

NATURE AND ENVIRONMENT

Though in everyday English people talk about the nature of a thing—“it is in my nature to do X” or “it is natural to do X”—they also talk about nature as a place, as in the phrase “the natural world.”¹⁶ Nature in this second sense is a place one has to go to, a place where few (if any) humans reside, and a spiritual refuge.¹⁷ Greek has a word for nature, physis, that corresponds only to the first of these meanings.¹⁸ Physis is not the space of “the natural world,” but the nature of a thing: an individual and generative force that causes it phyein, to grow.¹⁹ Physis is the growing-ness of things.

Greek authors often oppose physis to nomos, “law” or “custom.” Yet this is not an opposition between nonhuman “nature” and a space of human “culture.” When Greek intellectuals debate the importance of physis and nomos in human life, they focus on trying to understand human behavior.²⁰ In these debates, physis designates the internal nature or inclination of individual people, whereas nomos is what has been prescribed, either by physis or by humans themselves. The physis-nomos debate centers on writers’ uncertainty about why people behave as they do; is nomos necessary or effective for producing virtuous human beings and institutions, these writers wonder, or does justice derive from physis? In these debates, physis and nomos are forces that shape human society rather than different spaces in which humans operate.

Yet Greek writers do recognize and oppose different kinds of spaces, including the country and the city and cultivated and “untamed” land, and categorize them as more or less affected by human activity.²¹ Greek writers, almost all of them men, do not seek a solitary, untamed wild for spiritual refuge or renewal.²² Instead, they value the countryside as its own kind of civilized space, attuned to men’s desires for leisure, simple foods, and sex. In golden age descriptions that celebrate a time before the establishment of agriculture and other applied arts, the absence of labor rather than the absence of human beings is valued. Greek writers attend to the degree and manner in which a space has been altered by human hands but generally assume that humans improve their surroundings, and should do so.²³

Although Greek writers usually portray human beings as nature’s best creation, they also document human errors. In a famous passage of the Critias, Plato describes soil erosion in Attica:

πολλῶν οὖν γεγονότων καὶ μεγάλων κατακλυσμῶν . . . τὸ τῆς γῆς ἐν τούτοις τοῖς χρόνοις καὶ πάθεσιν ἐκ τῶν ὑψηλῶν ἀπορρέον οὔτε χῶμα, ὡς ἐν ἄλλοις τόποις, προχοῖ λόγου ἄξιον ἀεί τε κύκλῳ περιρρέον εἰς βάθος ἀφανίζεται·λέλειπται δή, καθάπερ ἐν ταῖς σμικραῖς νήσοις, πρὸς τὰ τότε τὰ νῦν οἷον νοσήσαντος σώματος ὀστᾶ, περιερρυηκυίας τῆς γῆς ὅση πίειρα καὶ μαλακή, τοῦ λεπτοῦ σώματος τῆς χώρας μόνου λειφθέντος.

Since there were many floods . . . the earth that broke off from the heights at these times and in these disasters does not form a mass worthy of mention, as in other places, but sliding away, perpetually disappears into the deep. And just as on small islands, what now remains is like the skeleton of a sick body after all the fat and softness of the earth has wasted away and only the husk of the body remains. (111a–b)

For modern scholars, passages like these that describe soil erosion have “resonance” when correlated with later Mediterranean soil erosion and the clear-cutting that caused it.²⁴ But we must qualify Plato’s awareness of how humans can damage their environments. First, Plato says that floods, kataklysmoi, are responsible for causing erosion.²⁵ We may be meant to infer that the floods have carried away soil loosened by overforesting, but humanity’s role (if it has one) has been muted. Second, despite Attica’s degeneration, Plato claims that his country is still more productive than other lands:

τὸ γὰρ νῦν αὐτῆς λείψανον ἐνάμιλλόν ἐστι πρὸς ἡντινοῦν τῷ πάμφορον εὔκαρπόν τε εἶναι καὶ τοῖς ζῴοις πᾶσιν εὔβοτον.

What now remains of [the soil] is a match for any other; it is productive of all things and full of crops and well-pastured for all kinds of animals. (Pl., Criti., 110e–111a)²⁶

Rather than reflecting badly on human beings, the floods and soil erosion allow Plato to brag about both his land’s present superiority and the Attica that used to be. Environmental historians are working to document the ways that Greeks and especially Romans sometimes damaged their ecosystems, but it is important to recognize that anthropogenic damage was both limited by available technology and perceived as even more limited.²⁷

Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s texts generally confirm this picture. Both authors use physis to designate the inner nature of humans, animals, and geographical features.²⁸ Diodorus, perhaps following developments in Peripatetic and Stoic philosophy, also represents physis as a transcendent force that teaches humans and other animals and bestows gifts and hardships on creatures, including humans.²⁹ In both authors, human customs and arts can work together with physis and increase its effects, although sometimes the relationship between humans and physis is antagonistic.³⁰

As one would expect, both Herodotus and Diodorus are more interested in how humans benefit from rather than damage their surroundings. Destruction in general is rare. Herodotus reports that the Lydian king Alyattes burned the crops of his enemies (1.17), that the Mysian boar once ravaged Lydia’s fields (1.36), and that armies have drunk whole rivers dry (1.75, 1.108), while in Diodorus the quicksand of Barathra attacks people “as if with some sort of evil cunning” (1.30.7: hōsper pronoiai tini ponērai). Yet this destruction is usually mentioned only in passing. Instead, Herodotus and Diodorus attend to how animals, plants, and land- and waterscapes improve and are improved by the lives of the humans around them. When Heracles clears the countryside of wild beasts and insects (Diod. Sic. 1.24.5, 4.22.5), this is destructive from the animals’ perspective but an act of “cultivation” (hēmerōsis) in Diodorus’s eyes. Despite noting the suffering mining causes, Diodorus marvels at how a runaway fire causes the land to “run with much silver” (5.35.3: argurōi ruēnai pollōi). These “rivers” replace and even surpass the land that existed before.

Despite their shared anthropocentrism, Diodorus moves beyond Herodotus to invent the idea of an interdependent “natural environment” (peristasis). This idea arises in his description of the Fisheaters of the Red Sea, reported to have built “houses modified to suit the peculiarity of their peristasis” (3.19.1). Although Diodorus elsewhere uses peristasis to designate “circumstances of the moment,” whether produced by natural phenomena such as weather (e.g., 2.30.5) or human actions such as war (e.g., 11.10.2), in this passage he designates the dynamic material circumstances that condition human life over time.³¹ This environment is governed by physis, which operates differently in every creature and element of the landscape, but it is not an empty space merely populated by humans and other beings. Rather, Diodorus uses peristasis to indicate the complex set of relationships in which humans and other creatures are cultured. For Diodorus, any given peristasis presents both challenges and opportunities for the human beings who live there. But people like the Fisheaters are integral to their environment, tending the trees they dwell in, feeding their corpses to the fish they will later eat, and sharing childcare with neighboring seals (3.18–19).³²

WAY OF LIFE

Instead of excluding humanity from nature, environmental discourse in Greek ethnography explores how relationships between humans and other beings make the world and make different forms of culture possible. The bases for these relationships are different bioi, “ways of life” or “methods of subsistence,” a word that directly relates the human to the nonhuman and human life to the march of time.³³

Greek historical writers (including ethnographers) often begin their works by lamenting the inaccessibility of early human history. Thucydides’s comments (1.1.3, 1.21.1) are the best known, but epistemological longing precedes Thucydides and recurs throughout the historical writing that follows him.³⁴ Both before and especially after Herodotus, Greek writers imagined the deep past as a series of stages characterized by the gradual acquisition of technology, cultural practices, and refined products. Sometimes this is described as progress, for example, in Diodorus Siculus’s own narrative of early human history (1.8), and other times as decline, as in Hesiod’s famous series of Golden, Silver, and other generations (WD, 109–201). Hesiod does not characterize these types of human beings only by their “way of life” (bios), but bios plays an important role in demarcating especially the deep past inhabited by the Golden generation and the Iron generation, to which Hesiod belongs. The importance of bios is confirmed by the opening of the poem, in which Hesiod describes what life was like before and after Prometheus’s crime as the difference between humans having a secure bios and then losing it (42–93).

Hesiod’s narrative did not belong to a defined genre in antiquity but has been called “historical anthropology” or “cultural history” by modern scholars.³⁵ Cultural history begins with Homer, Hesiod, and the pre-Socratics and culminates in the now lost treatises by Democritus and Dicaearchus.³⁶ Ancient Greek cultural histories do not derive from systematic study, although they may contain genuine, culturally transmitted memories of previous centuries; rather, this mode of historical writing is a hybrid of history and philosophy, an imaginative extrapolation from what little can be securely known about humans’ deepest past.

Other writers use bios to think about different economies that operated on the earth simultaneously. Aristotle’s Politics, for example, describes distinct bioi of pastoralism, hunting and fishing, and raiding (1256a–b).³⁷ Just as there are carnivores and herbivores among the earth’s animals, Aristotle says, so too do human ethnic communities (ethnē) vary in their mode of subsistence. Although Aristotle does not present the bioi of others as developmental stages, his schema offers his student, Dicaearchus of Messana, a base for articulating three stages of human development in his lost third-century BCE Life of Greece. Through quotations in later authors, we know that Dicaearchus read Hesiod’s Works and Days and blended Hesiod’s generations with Aristotle’s economies, describing human change as a progression from a golden age of gathering, to an intermediate stage of pastoralism, to a final stage of agriculturalism.³⁸

As the influence of Aristotle’s ethnic bioi on Dicaearchus’s temporal bioi makes clear, cultural history and ethnography were related and mutually influential ways of understanding environmental culture. But Greek writers were combining ethnic and temporal thinking even before Dicaearchus. The “comparative method,” as it is known in anthropology, allowed Greek writers to compare living peoples to the Greeks’ own early history.³⁹ Thucydides, for example, says that “there are many . . . respects in which a striking resemblance might appear between the old Greek way of life and present barbarian practice.”⁴⁰ Plato notes that earlier forms of government are preserved in other parts of the world (Leg. 680b), and Arrian (writing after Dicaearchus) compares early Indians to living Scythians through their shared way of life:

πάλαι μὲν δὴ νομάδας εἶναι ᾽Ινδοὺς καθάπερ Σκυθέων τοὺς οὐκ ἀροτῆρας, οἳ ἐπὶ τῆισιν ἁμάξηισι πλανώμενοι ἄλλοτε ἄλλην τῆς Σκυθίης ἀμείβουσιν, οὐτε πόληας οἰκέοντες οὐτε ἱερὰ θεῶν σέβοντες·.

Long ago the Indians were nomadic, just like the nonfarming Scythians, who wander in their wagons and exchange one part of Scythia for another, neither dwelling in cities nor revering the temples of the gods. (Arr., Ind. 7.2–4)

Other texts compare older Greek to current non-Greek customs, including attitudes toward nakedness (Pl., Rep. 452c), religion (Pl., Crat. 397d), linguistics (Crat. 421d), and military practice (Ar. fr. 160).⁴¹ Plato, for example, says that “not too long ago it seemed embarrassing and ridiculous, as it seems to many barbarians now, for men to be seen naked.”⁴²

Herodotus does not state the comparative method explicitly, but Tim Rood has argued that the Histories contain close parallels to the passage of Thucydides I have quoted here (1.6.6).⁴³ Herodotus relates past Greek and current non-Greek writing habits, for example:

Καὶ τὰς βύβλους διφθέρας καλέουσι ἀπὸ τοῦ παλαιοῦ οἱ Ἴωνες, ὅτι κοτὲ ἐν σπάνι βύβλων ἐχρέωντο διφθέρῃσι αἰγέῃσί τε καὶ οἰέῃσι· ἔτι δὲ καὶ τὸ κατ’ ἐμὲ πολλοὶ τῶν βαρβάρων ἐς τοιαύτας διφθέρας γράφουσι.

The Ionians call papyrus sheets skins, as they have done from antiquity, because at that time they used to use goat and sheep skins for want of papyrus. And many barbarians write on such skins even today. (Hdt. 5.58.3)

Whether or not one agrees with Rood that this passage fully employs the comparative method, it shows how Greek writers associate distant times and distant places, an association that goes back at least as far as Hesiod, who places the remnant of an older version of humanity at the edges of the earth (WD, 168).⁴⁴ Herodotus, scholars have noted, imagines distant peoples occupying a blessed, golden-age existence very similar to that enjoyed by Hesiod’s Golden generation. The Ethiopians, for example, who occupy “the ends of the earth” (ta eschata gēs, 3.25.5) and eat milk and meat rather than bread, are tall and beautiful, scrupulous, and long-lived, and they despise luxury (3.20–23).⁴⁵

Herodotus’s engagement with the emerging discipline of cultural history is more significant than has been recognized.⁴⁶ Like ancient cultural historians who describe the stages of Greek prehistory in terms of a series of bioi, Herodotus often characterizes ethnic others by their “method of subsistence,” their diaita. Of the Persians who did not join Cyrus he says “all [are] tillers of the soil [arotēres],” except “the Dai, the Mardi, the Dropici, the Sagartii, all wandering herdsmen [nomades]” (1.125).⁴⁷ This attention to diaita (a synonym of bios) places Herodotus in a larger conversation about the relationship between subsistence, ethnicity, and development over time, a conversation that produced full articulations of the comparative method in the authors who immediately followed Herodotus, including Thucydides and Plato, and cultural histories in the generation after him. Although Herodotus has been seen as just another writer, like Hesiod, who associated Greek past and non-Greek present, the Histories were instead a bridge between archaic correlations of time and place and late classical applications of this correlation to the study of the distant past.⁴⁸ Herodotus may or may not have aimed to theorize the Greek past through the non-Greek present, but his text was available for Greek readers to interpret this way and for cultural historians after him to draw upon.

Irvin Schick uses the phrase “technology of place” to “describe the discursive instruments and strategies by means of which space is constituted as place, that is place as socially constructed and reconstructed.”⁴⁹ Bios is a technology of both place and time, a way of constructing time and place that relates them to one another. By mapping bioi, Greek ethnographers explored the past through the world and the world through their understanding of the past. Bioi are also a technology of spatiotemporal difference, a way of creating and marking the difference between past and present, Greek and non-Greek, and within non-Greek communities. Although it is difficult to track lines of influence between cultural history and ethnography, I suspect that it would be most accurate to say that Greek ethnography and cultural history, Greek thinking about distant places and distant times, formed one another in the classical period, eventually merging in the universal history of the late Hellenistic and early Roman periods.⁵⁰

One of these universal histories was Diodorus Siculus’s Library, which begins with a cultural history (Sic. 1.8) believed to have been broadly influenced by Dicaearchus’s lost Life of Greece, perhaps via Agatharchides, who wrote in Alexandria in the second century BCE.⁵¹ According to Diodorus, the first human beings:

τοὺς οὖν πρώτους τῶν ἀνθρώπων μηδενὸς τῶν πρὸς βίον χρησίμων εὑρημένου ἐπιπόνως διάγειν, γυμνοὺς μὲν ἐσθῆτος ὄντας, οἰκήσεως δὲ καὶ πυρὸς ἀήθεις, τροφῆς δ’ ἡμέρου παντελῶς ἀνεννοήτους.

endured a miserable existence because nothing useful for life (pros bion) had been discovered; they had no clothing, were unused to dwellings or fire, and [were] completely ignorant of cultivated (hēmerou) food. (Diod. Sic. 1.8.5)

Through the gradual acquisition of arts, often bestowed by a culture hero like Isis or Heracles, human beings improved their lives.⁵² As this progression makes clear, Diodorus has a strong preference for “cultivated” or “civilized” life (e.g., 3.50.2: hēmeros bios) over the other forms of life humans experienced either earlier in time or in his day, in places unknown to culture heroes. Nevertheless, readers of Diodorus are not bound by the history he stages at the beginning of the Library and its valuation of more “developed” bioi over others. As discussed later, Diodorus’s persistent focus on different bioi and examination of their advantages and drawbacks allows his readers to explore other ways of life as alternatives to their own.

INDIGENOUS COSMOVISIONS AND NEW MATERIALISMS

The environmental discourse of Greek ethnographies, with its “culturing” of human beings in larger ecosystems (see the introduction), both complements and critiques ideas in the emerging field of “environmental humanities.” This field is a big tent, a motley crew of broadly compatible approaches to describing what it has meant to be human and imagining what we might yet become. Environmental humanities developed out of and has grown to encompass environmental criticism, or ecocriticism, a branch of literary studies developed in the 1980s that investigates the cultural construction of nature. In this sense, ecocriticism is a shorthand term for intellectual environmental history, how human beings value and conceive of nature over time. But ecocritics also see their field as the environmentalist equivalent of feminism, critical race studies, and queer theory, and like many theorists from those schools, they often voice their hopes, fears, and opinions about current events in their analysis of “the relationship between literature and the physical environment.”⁵³ Ecocriticism is itself an outgrowth (and in some cases appropriation) of Indigenous cosmovisions, ways of knowing and making the human and more-than-human world.⁵⁴ It is these Indigenous cosmovisions and their allied white Western “new materialisms” that have the greatest relevance to this book.⁵⁵

In their introduction to Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies, Salma Monani and Joni Adamson assert that “Indigenous understandings . . . suggest a cosmos of relations that speak to complex entanglements of the human with the more-than-human that must be creatively and thoughtfully negotiated.”⁵⁶ These negotiations take many forms, from healing walks that mourn and reclaim devastated land to poetry that honors maize and human sexuality, but all recognize the responsibility humans and other beings owe one another by virtue of their interdependence and use story and movement to teach humans their share of this responsibility.⁵⁷

Taking up this theme of interdependence, academics from physics, philosophy, political science, and science studies have developed a set of new ideas that try to account for the ontological, epistemological, and ethical relationship between humans and other beings—that is, how they relate in terms of being, knowledge, and responsibility. These thinkers, grouped under various headings—object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and new materialism—are all invested in dismantling the partition between humans and nature that, as discussed in the introduction, has governed so much white Western environmental discourse.⁵⁸ Instead, they emphasize the agency, vibrancy, animacy, or ethical status of animals, plants, and other beings. To do this, they have developed several philosophies, including Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy, and as described later in this chapter, Karen Barad’s agential realism.⁵⁹

Other thinkers have generated select vocabulary rather than systematic philosophies of the human and more-than-human world. Donna Haraway, who along with Bruno Latour turned the sociological study of science (science studies) toward metaphysics in the 1980s, popularized the term naturecultures to capture the interdependence of humans, other beings, and society, while Stacy Alaimo coined trans-corporeality to describe the porous interface of human and other bodies and their exchange of material. Deleuze and Guattari’s image of the rhizome is an early precursor of these ideas.⁶⁰ To maintain accessibility, I have chosen not to use any of these terms, instead speaking more generically of entanglements and relationships between humans and other beings. But I believe this book could easily be translated to suit readers in these subdisciplines of the environmental humanities, and I hope they will adapt the stories I tell for their own projects.⁶¹

Ancient Greek writers were not proponents of Indigenous cosmovisions, new materialisms, or any of these other schools of thought. For one thing, Greek ethnographies are almost always anthropocentric, privileging humans and their success. The misogyny of Greek ethno­graphy is another instructive difference. While many environmentalists and environmentally oriented scholars root themselves in feminism, Greek writers base their vision of human and nonhuman relations on a strict hierarchy that places human men above women, and so on down the line.⁶² Yet their subjugation does not prevent women from exercising what I call feck, the power to make significant differences in the world. When Greek ethnographies decenter the human, they also create room for the destabilizing of sex/gender norms.

Despite these differences, there is an affinity between Greek ideas and the ideas of those who criticize the opposition between humans and the rest of nature.⁶³ Although Greeks had no word for the interrelatedness of organisms, this interconnection is assumed. Their world is one in which human beings and other creatures are governed by physis rather than one in which humans occupy a civilized space entirely separate from natural space. Instead, animate and inanimate beings of the natural world push back against the humans who tell their tale. When these beings are divine they may be dismissed by secular scholars as fantasies, irrelevant to present concerns, but just as often they are natural rather than supernatural, ancestors of the plants, animals, land, and water that surround us today. By investigating encounters between humans and these other beings, Greek ethnography offers the environmental humanities a resource and a comparative databank with which to test out different ontologies, epistemologies, and ethics of the human and more-than-human world.⁶⁴

Greek ethnographies also assume that knowledge is situated, that is, partial, communal, embodied, and emplaced. Donna Haraway coined the phrase “situated knowledge” to critique both traditional white Western notions of objectivity, especially in science, and radical feminist constructivism, the perspective that truth is reducible to rhetoric. Instead, Haraway maps a third way that describes knowledge production not as a language game but as a “view from somewhere,” limited but rational and objective on its own terms.⁶⁵ Indigenous peoples have long claimed access to other ways of knowing, ways now being promoted by scholars (many of them Indigenous).⁶⁶ Like other white writers who have turned to Indigenous peoples for new ways of being in the Anthropocene, I am a student of Greek environmental knowledge, of Greek world building.

To understand how Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s texts build worlds, I have relied a great deal on the work of Karen Barad. Barad’s agential realism is an immense intellectual achievement, a systematic philosophy that draws on the physics of Neils Bohr and the gender theory of Judith Butler and interacts (or as Barad would say, “intra-acts”) with many of the strains of new materialism and feminist science studies I have mentioned in this chapter. Her work is also laden with unique terminology and written in a style that many readers will find irritating, which is why I quote it very little. Barad’s project, she says, “is an ethico-onto-epistemological matter. We are not merely differently situated in the world . . . each of us is part of the intra-active ongoing articulation of the world in its differential mattering.”⁶⁷ Mattering for Barad describes the interdependence of matter and discourse, substance and significance. According to Barad, the way we know the world (epistemology) and how we decide to act in the world (ethics) are inextricable from what the world is (ontology) and what we are as well. This is true of both current scholarship, like this book, and the ancient sources under study. The way that Herodotus and Diodorus divide the world and construct its categories creates relationships between humans and other beings. The way that I have organized this book creates relationships as well, between readers, Greek authors, and the worlds they inhabit. By articulating the Greek past through Barad’s agential realism, I am materializing the past in the present. I hope that this materialization helps the humans who read this book and the others with whom they interdepend to create the practices of body and mind that allow human and more-than-human life to flourish.