Speaker: Jason König, Professor of Classics, University of St. Andrews
How did ancient Greeks and Romans envisage the earth and their own relationship with the earth? What range of possibilities was available in ancient texts for imagining the earth’s resilience or vulnerability?
I sketch out some answers to that question, first via a reading of the famous Cypria fragment, which represents the Trojan War as a divinely engineered plan to relieve the earth from the burden of human over-population, and then via discussion of a series of later works, from the Roman empire.
In the process I aim to bring those ancient texts into dialogue with modern ecocritical approaches that explore present-day understandings of the earth and our relationship with it. Are there ways in which our own damaged relationship with the planet we inhabit is still shaped by classical precedents? Are there ways in which ancient images of human interaction with the earth can act as a positive resource for our responses to environmental crisis in the present?