Other Natures. Clara Bosak-Schroeder
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