Читать книгу Environmental Thought - Robin Attfield - Страница 8

This section concerns the ancient worlds of the Greeks and the Romans – the period from 700 BCE to the Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century CE. (The Homeric poems, which may have attained their current form around 700 BCE, bear many traces of earlier thought and practice, but are not considered here.) The thousand years under consideration nourished beliefs, attitudes and practices of immense diversity, and embodied a large variety of attitudes to nature, the land and the natural environment. No claim is made to anything like comprehensive coverage here. Instead, I have selected certain prominent, significant and contrasting claims and statements, whether in prose or verse, in song, drama or philosophy. (As we shall see, some of these were overlapping categories, with much drama and much philosophy expressed in poetic form.) Some have been selected because of their later influence, whether ultimately misleading, like Empedocles’ belief in four basic elements, or far-sighted, like his belief in a kind of natural selection (albeit without any recognizable belief in adaptation). Predominantly, however, ancient writers must be allowed to speak for themselves, and ancient practices, however questionable, to receive attention, if only because they supply the context of related thinking and protests, both contemporary and subsequent.