Human Landscapes In Classical Antiquity

Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity shows how today's environmental and ecological concerns can help illuminate our study of the ancient world. The contributors consider how the Greeks and Romans perceived their natural world, and how their perceptions affected society. The effects of human settlement and cultivation on the landscape are considered, as well as the representation of landscape in Attic drama. Various aspects of farming, such as the use of terraces and the significance of olive growing are examined. The uncultivated landscape was also important: hunting was a key social ritual for Greek and hellenistic elites, and 'wild' places were not wastelands but played an essential economic role. The Romans' attempts to control their environment are analyzed. This volume shows how Greeks and Romans worked hand in hand with their natural environment and not against it. It represents an outstanding collaboration between the disciplines of history and archaeology.

Valuing Landscape explores how physical environments affected the cultural imagination of Greco-Roman Antiquity. It demonstrates the values attached to mountains, the underworld, sacred landscapes, and battlefields, and the evaluations of locale connected with migration, exile, and travel.

Over the last two decades, research in cultural geography and landscape studies has influenced many humanities fields, including Classics, and has increasingly drawn our attention to the importance of spaces and their contexts, both geographical and social: how spaces are described by language, what spaces are used for by individuals and communities, and how language, use, and the passage of time invest spaces with meaning. In addition to this ‘spatial’ turn in scholarship, recent years have also seen an ‘emotive’ turn – an increased interest in the study of emotion in literature. Many works on landscape in classical antiquity focus on themes such as the sacred and the pastoral and the emotions such spaces evoke, such as (respectively) feelings of awe or tranquillity in settings both urban and rural. Far less scholarship has been generated by the locus terribilis, the space associated with negative emotions because of the bad things that happen there. In short, the recent ‘emotive’ turn in humanities studies has so far largely neglected several of the more negative emotions, including anxiety, fear, terror, and dread. The papers in this volume focus on those neglected negative emotions, especially dread – and they do so while treating many types of space, including domestic, suburban, rural and virtual, and while covering many genres and authors, including the epic poems of Homer, Greek tragedy, Roman poetry and historiography, medical writing, paradoxography and the short story.

Geoarchaeology uses the concepts, methods and knowledge base of the earth sciences in the direct solution of archaeological problems.

Featuring over 130 colour maps of ancient physical and human landscapes spanning Britain to India and deep into the Sahara, this atlas is a compact kaleidoscope of peoples, migrations, empires, strife, cultures, cities and travels from Greece’s Bronze Age to Rome’s fall in the West. This revised edition of the Atlas of Classical History equips readers with a clear visual grasp of the spatial dimension, a vital aspect for understanding history. Users gain insight into the formative roles of physical landscape – seas, rivers, mountains, deserts – in Mediterranean peoples’ development. The maps in all their variety of scope, scale and colour offer an absorbing means to track the growth of states on the ground, especially their relationships, conflicts, urbanization, communications and cultures. Each map is enriched by readily identifiable symbols and concise accompanying texts, as well as recommendations for further reading. With its vast geographical sweep in a compact format, this book is a comprehensive reference work primarily aimed at non-specialists. With updated text and thoroughly revised maps now presented in colour, the Atlas of Classical History remains an essential reference volume for all those interested in the civilizations of ancient Europe, North Africa and Western Asia, as well as for students and scholars of ancient Greek and Roman history.

This article seeks to define ‘water culture’ in Roman society by examining literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence, while understanding modern trends in scholarship related to the study of Roman water.

Prudentius and the Landscapes of Late Antiquity offers a thematic analysis of the poetry of the late Latin poet Prudentius, focusing in particular on his descriptions of the geographical and cultural landscapes of late antiquity. Cillian O'Hogan sets Prudentius in the context of other late antique authors, including Lactantius, Jerome, Augustine, and Endelechius, and argues that the poet makes use of allusion to Augustan and early imperial Latin authors to present the late Roman landscape as one markedly altered by the arrival of Christianity, though retaining the grandeur of the pagan past. This volume examines his conception of the world as a text, his use of intertextuality to describe literary journeys, his view of the civic function of Christian martyrdom, his conception of heaven, and his attitude towards art and architecture, combining philological and intertextual criticism with approaches drawn from the fields of book history, cultural geography, and theology to paint a fuller and richer picture of the greatest of the Christian Latin poets.

The seventeen contributions to this volume, written by leading experts, show that animals and humans in Graeco-Roman antiquity are interconnected on a variety of different levels and that their encounters and interactions often result from their belonging to the same structures, ‘networks’ and communities or at least from finding themselves together in a certain setting, context or environment – wittingly or unwittingly. Papers explore the concrete categories of interaction between animals and humans that can be identified, in what contexts they occur, and what types of evidence can be productively used to examine the concept of interactions. Articles in this volume take into account literary, visual, and other types of evidence. A comprehensive research bibliography is also provided.