Reflections on Environmental Humanities in Classics and Comparative Literature

To open an ancient text is to step into an alien climate. The dust of the Athenian agora, the chill mist of Germania’s forests in Tacitus, the inundating pulse of the Nile in Herodotus—these are not mere backdrops. They are active agencies, shaping destinies, framing cosmologies, and whispering constraints and possibilities to every human endeavor within their pages. The emerging field of the Environmental Humanities, an interdisciplinary field concerned with re-narrating the human story within the mesh of ecological relationships, finds both a deep wellspring and a profound challenge in the ancient worlds preserved by Classics and the connective dialogues fostered by Comparative Literature. To reflect on this confluence is to engage in a form of temporal and cultural ecology itself, tracing the roots of our current planetary condition while simultaneously cultivating a more expansive, less anthropocentric imagination.