Other Natures: Environmental Encounters with Ancient Greek Ethnography 9780520974814

Citation preview

Other Natures

Other Natures Environmental Encounters with Ancient Greek Ethnography Clara Bosak-Schroeder

university of california press

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2020 by Clara Bosak-Schroeder Epigraph: © Brooke Holmes, 2012, Gender: Antiquity and Its Legacy, I.B. Tauris, used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bosak-Schroeder, Clara, author. Title: Other natures : environmental encounters with ancient Greek ethnography / Clara Bosak-Schroeder. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2019047682 (print) | lccn 2019047683 (ebook) | isbn 9780520343481 (cloth) | isbn 9780520974814 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Ethnologists—Greece—History. | Ethnology—Mediterranean Region—History. | Human ecology—Mediterranean Region. | Greece— History—To 146 B.C.—Historiography. Classification: lcc gn20 .b67 2020 (print) | lcc gn20 (ebook) | ddc 305.80092—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047682 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047683 Manufactured in the United States of America 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For the teachers and other creatures of Point Reyes National Seashore, my heart’s first home

To follow our Greek and Roman sources doesn’t mean we have to end up in the same places they do. We may find instead the spurs of alternate paths. Brooke Holmes, Gender: Antiquity and Its Legacy

contents

Acknowledgments ix A Note on the Greek xiii Introduction 1

part i. ancient perspectives 1. Sources and Methods 15 2. Rulers and Rivers 32 3. Female Feck 57 4. Dietary Entanglements 84 5. Resisting Luxury 106

part ii. present concerns 6. After the Encounter 133 7. Transformation in the Natural History Museum 151 Notes 187 References 223 Index Locorum 259 Index 265

acknowledgments

My mother, Bethany Schroeder, read every paper I wrote until I reached college, when she told me I was on my own. Those years of free instruction made me the writer I am today. Although she died before I began work on my dissertation, let alone this book, I thought of her constantly during the writing of it. After completing an MFA at Cornell, she was offered the opportunity to do a PhD in creative writing but returned to nursing instead. Her rejection of academia and scholarly writing is something I think of every day in my own academic life. Although this book makes certain assumptions about its audience, it was written in the hope that a more expansive readership might find it accessible, even inviting. If I have succeeded at all in this goal, it is thanks to her. My great thanks also goes to the people who read this manuscript in its entirety, some of them multiple times: my father, Jon Bosak; my husband, Joe Dunker; my best friend, Harriet Fertik; my research assistant, Adam Kozak; my copy editor, Sharon Langworthy; the anonymous readers who volunteered their labor to UC Press; the team I assembled for a manuscript workshop in the fall of 2017—Dan Leon, Bob Morrissey, Mark Payne, Carol Symes, and Nora Stoppino; and my dissertation committee— Francesca Schironi, Paolo Asso, Ian Moyer, and Ruth Scodel—who read it in an earlier form. Francesca Schironi’s skepticism of ancient ecological ix

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criticism kept me grounded in philology, while Paolo Asso’s questions about “nature” launched me into areas of critical theory that have proved fruitful ever since. Because of Ian Moyer, I began to look for non-Greek influences in Greek texts. When Ruth Scodel said my project was interesting, I began to think it might have a future. A number of other people read chapters along the way, including Emily Baragwanath, Barbara Becker, Claudia Brosseder, Page duBois, Sam Frost, Lisa Hau, Rana Hogarth, Jamie Jones, Ellen Lee, Sarah Linwick, Debra Moskovitz, Walter Penrose, Erin Peters, Amy Pistone, Stephanie Rutherford, Eric Schmidt, Ariana Traill, and Rod Wilson; Antoinette Burton and the 2017–2018 workshop at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities; Rafe Neis and other attendees of the 2017 Non/human Materials Before Modernity conference; and my grad school community at the University of Michigan. Rebecca Futo Kennedy and Molly Jones-Lewis nurtured an earlier version of chapter 4, “Dietary Entanglements,” first as a paper delivered at the 2013 meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South and then as a contribution to their edited volume, The Routledge Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds (2016). This early opportunity to publish helped me both to develop a chapter of what would become this book and to get the academic job that has supported its completion. A number of scholars helped me understand ancient Egypt, India, the Middle East, and Scythia, including Balbina Bäbler, Ted Kelting, Anatoly Khazanov, Francesca Rochberg, Tom Trautmann, and Terry Wilfong. Many of them responded to a plea for help without ever having met me. An even greater number of strangers responded to my questions on Twitter about diction, bibliography, and accessibility. The introduction and final chapter, which deal with museums of natural history, would not have been possible without the generosity of museum staff at the California Academy of Sciences, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the Chicago Field Museum, and the Whale Museum: Patience Baach, Barbara Becker, Joseph Dresch, Erin Peters,

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Becca Shreckengast, and Seth Cotterell, as well as other museum professionals, including Courtney Cottrell, Amy Powell, and Stephanie Rutherford. I am particularly grateful to Debra Moskovitz, who helped me understand not only the history of exhibits at the Field Museum but also the constraints under which curators operate. The scope, structure, and intellectual stakes of the project were worked out in two workshops through the Office for the Vice Chancellor for Research at UIUC, the First Book Writing Group and an NEH application writing group. My thanks both to the university for supporting faculty writing and to the comments of Amanda Ciafone, Maria Gillombardo, Verena Höfig, Craig Koslofsky, Carol Symes, and Shelley Weinberg. Without having time off from teaching and funding to travel to museums, this book would have been much more difficult to write. My thanks to the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, and the LEAP program at UIUC, as well as to Antony Augoustakis and Ariana Traill, my heads of department, for authorizing these leaves, and to Serena Witzke and Krishni Burns, the contingent faculty who taught so I could write. I started thinking about ethnography with Trevor Murphy as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, in an independent study on Pliny the Elder. Cal is also where I studied Greek with Leslie Kurke and Ron Stroud and critical theory with Glynda Hull. It was Karla Herndon and Sarah Morrison at Berkeley High School whose Latin instruction set me on this path. Eric Schmidt is the best editor I could have asked for. His compassion, transparency, and encouragement meant so much at every stage. Rafe Neis’s painting Garrulous Quails, photographed by the ever-patient Chris Brown, renewed my faith in the project at a crucial moment. I am honored to share its company. Finally, I am grateful to my fellow scholars and teachers with chronic illness, mental illness, and other disabilities. Some of you spoke openly about your experiences, while others whispered them in closed offices and private chat groups. But you all sustained me.

a note on the greek

The Greek texts quoted in this book derive from N. G. Wilson’s edition of Herodotus (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Fisher and Vogel’s edition of Diodorus Siculus (Teubner, 1964). All translations, unless noted, are my own. I have transliterated much of the Greek in the main text to make it more accessible to blind and low-vision people using screen readers. If you would like to see the passages of Herodotus or Diodorus in greater context, free English translations for most books are available at www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/ (search for Herodotus) and http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E /Roman/Texts/ (search for Diodorus).

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Introduction

When I was little, my parents took me to the California Academy of Sciences to learn about the world. My favorite exhibit was a series of elaborate dioramas, each featuring life-sized mannequins of people from other places. One in particular grabbed and held my attention: an African woman crouched in a scrubby landscape, partly nude and holding a grub to her open mouth. In my memory the grub is enormous, pink and fat and glistening. The woman’s exposed breasts and the barrenness of her surroundings heighten my sense of the difference between us: a young white California girl and this brown woman half a world away. I sense my father behind me; he is looking down at my shocked face and laughing. Then for a moment distance and difference collapse. I imagine eating grubs myself, I imagine living naked in this landscape, and I am troubled. This encounter marked a significant development in my commitment to environmental justice, and it was effective precisely because I saw an “other,” a person framed (in this case by the museum) as very different from myself. The surprise of this encounter produced a different kind of vision. I could suddenly see that my life, like the one depicted before me, was built on resources I had taken for granted. The food I ate and the clothes I wore, even my presence in the museum, depended on 1

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a particular consuming of the rest of the world. If other people ate insects, should I too? If other people could live exposed to the elements, did I really need all my possessions? The shock I experienced told me a lot about who I thought I was, even about what I thought it meant to live as a human being. Later I would learn that the catalyst for this encounter was ethnographic presentism, the tendency of earlier anthropology and some current museum displays to “arrest” the ethnographic subject (the foreign human being) in a timeless now that often corresponds to the “primitive” past of the observer.1 The woman I saw was supposed to stand in for an African way of life that transcended time and space. For a white viewer, this simplified vision was very helpful; in one glance I was able (or thought I was able) to take in the whole of her “Africanness.” Recognizing the racism of this way of describing and displaying others, anthropologists now emphasize how individual practices vary within communities and how communities change over time. Many museums are overhauling their displays of peoples to reflect cocuration, the collaboration among anthropologists, museum curators, and their ethnographic subjects.2 In the Field Museum, for example, The Ancient Americas (2007) uses multimedia to tell a story of living Indigenous communities and their frequent cultural change, in contrast to the Native North American Hall, which is full of artifacts collected by white Americans in the nineteenth century and arranged in the 1950s.3 Museums have also made explicit how colonialism gave them other people’s artifacts, how those artifacts have been displayed, and the racist ideologies they helped motivate.4 The dioramas I saw at the California Academy of Sciences are long gone.5 Years after this encounter but still entranced by it, I would also learn that Greek and Roman authors described peoples in a similar mode, in “ethnographies,” the texts they wrote about distant places and their inhabitants.6 Herodotus’s fifth-century BCE Histories, for example, states that the Babylonians “bury their dead in honey, and mourn like those in Egypt” (1.198), while Diodorus Siculus’s first-century BCE

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Library claims that the “majority of Hyperboreans play the cithara” to honor Apollo (2.47.3). This use of the present tense is not mandatory to the genre, but it is the default in Herodotus, Diodorus, and other ethnographers, who describe many non-Greek customs as eternal, fixed at the time when the ethnographer (or an informant) observed them.7 In many ways, these ancient descriptions are the textual equivalent of the diorama I remember seeing as a child.8 Ancient Greeks and Romans were not the only peoples to develop a system for describing and cataloging others, but there is an especially close relationship between their ethnographies and modern anthropological displays.9 Natural history museums in Europe and its colonial holdings, including the United States, grew out of Renaissance “curiosity cabinets,” themselves the legacy of ancient natural history collections held by emperors and other elites, and of textual archives, such as Herodotus’s Histories and Diodorus Siculus’s Library.10 Professional and royal collectors vied with Greek and Roman authors to amass unusual objects and explain their origins, while Jesuit missionaries described the peoples they encountered in the “New World” by comparing them to ancient “barbarians.”11 Despite their formative influence on later colonialists, Greek and Roman ethnographies had a more complicated relationship to ancient colonialism. As Ian Moyer has argued, there is little evidence to suggest that Greek and Roman imperialists, unlike their later counterparts, used ethnographies as handbooks for conquest.12 Nevertheless, Greek and Roman ethnographic writing often depended on imperialist projects. Inasmuch as ethnographies derive from on-the-ground encounters between different peoples (rather than authors’ imaginations), conquest— like trade—caused contact and encouraged the exchange of information; conquerors in particular needed to gather information about the people they wished to rule.13 Herodotus’s main subject, the fifth-century BCE wars between Greek city-states and the Persian Empire, describes other peoples in the order the Persians conquered (or tried to conquer) them and in the

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context of his account of Persian expansion, so that Persian imperialism gives rise to and structures the ethnographies of the Histories.14 Given the wealth of Persian sources Herodotus mentions, we can assume that Persian expansion provided the Persian court, and subsequently Herodotus, with some of the ethnographic information he reports.15 In other words, the Persian conquests that preceded the Greco-Persian wars “opened” the world for Greek scholars as much as for Persian kings.16 As an author who seems to have relied largely on textual sources, Diodorus is further removed from the conquests that generated his information.17 On the other hand, several of his sources, including Megasthenes and Agatharchides, seem to have seen conquest or its aftermath up close.18 Like early modern anthropologists, Greek and Roman ethnographers also deployed the ethnographic present to enhance their own authority. The ethnographic present constructs a moment of direct contact between ethnographer and ethnographic subject and places the reader there; this allows the reader the pleasurable illusion of travel and increases the credibility of the ethnographer, whose account, because timeless, never loses its authority. The ethnographic present also constructs the other person as other by forcing them to stand still and be compared to the observer. To return to the preceding examples, the present tense used to describe Babylonian funeral customs allows Herodotus’s readers to compare these customs to those they themselves practice and assume that they understand the difference between themselves and the other. The cultural customs (nomoi) Greek ethnographies describe range from mourning and religion to dress and education. In line with my encounter with the nameless woman in the California Academy of Sciences, Other Natures focuses on what I call environmental cultures, human practices in which we can see the interactions among humans, other species, and larger ecosystems. This book is my inquiry into the environmental cultures of Greek ethnography and a chronicle of my own encounter with this ancient mode of writing. It tells the story of

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how two Greek authors, Herodotus of Halicarnassus and Diodorus Siculus, reflected on the environmental questions of their own time by analyzing how non-Greeks interacted with other beings and explores how we can read Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s texts to understand Greek environmental discourse. It further argues that people in the present day can use Greek ethnographies to confront environmental degradation and transform their own relationships to other species. In this book, the term discourse denotes a system of meaning that structures the way people talk, write, and otherwise communicate with one another. By looking at written documents, such as ethnographies, as well as dioramas, photographs, and other objects one might find in a museum of natural history, we can begin to understand the concepts, assumptions, beliefs, fears, hopes, and other thoughts of the people who created them. Discourse is the pattern that underlies or governs these thoughts, even if people are not aware of the pattern’s existence. Discourse is a set of rules to a game you may not even know you are playing.19 Greek ethnography embodies many discourses. There is its discourse of power, both the imperial power that often generates information about other peoples and the hierarchies that Greek authors assume govern other societies. There is its discourse of sex, gender, and sexuality, which structures the customs Greek authors track and the way they represent (or fail to represent) women and nonbinary people. These discourses and others appear in the following chapters, while many others do not, but my main focus is the environmental discourse in Greek ethnographies and, later on, in museums of natural history. Environmental discourse governs how Greek authors describe human beings in relation to other species and larger ecosystems. It determines the way Greek authors divide the world into natural categories, including species and sex, and how they evaluate the relationships between creatures in different categories—who should eat whom, for example. I begin with a passage that exemplifies the kind of discourse I am describing. In his fifth-century BCE Histories, Herodotus reports that

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there are a number of peoples living in what he calls Libya (present-day Libya and Algeria).20 Among them are the Nassamones. Herodotus begins: οἳ τὸ θέρος καταλιπόντες ἐπὶ τῇ θαλάσσῃ τὰ πρόβατα ἀναβαίνουσι ἐς Αὔγιλα χῶρον ὀπωριεῦντες τοὺς φοίνικας· οἱ δὲ πολλοὶ καὶ ἀμφιλαφέες πεφύκασι, πάντες ἐόντες καρποφόροι. τοὺς δὲ ἀττελέβους ἐπεὰν θηρεύσωσι, αὐήναντες πρὸς τὸν ἥλιον καταλέουσι καὶ ἔπειτα ἐπὶ γάλα ἐπιπάσσοντες πίνουσι. In the summer, they leave their herds by the sea and travel up to a place called Augila to gather dates. Plenty of tall, wide-spreading trees grow there, and they all bear fruit. And when they hunt locusts, they dry them in the sun and grind them up, then drink them sprinkled over milk. (Hdt. 4.172)

From this passage, we learn that the Nassamones herd animals, gather dates, and eat locusts. We learn that they depend on these species, and that these species are in turn indigenous to (or at least well-established in) the region. This description of Nassamonian customs is called an “ethnography” by classical scholars, but it is quite different from the socialscientific genre of the same name.21 Unlike modern anthropologists, Greek authors mix their descriptions of human beings with information now separated from anthropology, including geography, botany, zoology, and medicine.22 Later in book 4, for example, Herodotus catalogs the animals of Libya (4. 192). Greek ethnographers are interested not only in culture—how different societies practice religion and marriage, what languages they speak, and how they educate their children—but also in what political philosopher Samantha Frost calls “culturing.” In English, to culture is “to cultivate, to provide some kind of medium within which a thing or things can grow.” She goes on to explain: I prefer to think of culture in terms of the verb because it nudges us to take into consideration not just dimensions of our living habitats that shape and give meaning to living bodies and deeply complex forms of

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social and political subjectivity, but also those dimensions that materially compose living bodies . . . . All of the materials in which creatures are cultured are important to take into account.23

For ancient Greek (and Roman) ethnographers, human culture cannot be studied apart from the other species and forces with which humans live. They would agree with Frost that “all of the materials in which creatures are cultured are important to take into account.” Yet this does not mean that Herodotus answers all of our questions. He tells us that the dates the Nassamones eat are abundant and how they prepare them, but we do not know how the Nassamones feed their herds, or if they eat meat or anything other than dates and locust smoothies. Nevertheless, this commitment to describing humans alongside other beings puts Greek ethnographies at odds with the dominant strain of white Western environmental discourse, which has strictly partitioned nonhuman “nature” from human “culture” since at least the nineteenth century.24 This partition has shaped and severely limited environmental practice at both the individual and institutional levels. White Western environmental discourse is not necessarily environmentalist, that is, convinced that large-scale human violence against other species is immoral (or at least unsustainable). Both environmentalists and their opponents assume this division between humans and “nature.” But the effects of the human/nature partition have been particularly tragic for environmentalists. As US environmental historian William Cronon once said: “If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall. The place where we are is the place where nature is not. . . . We thereby leave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like.”25 Classical studies, the academic study of ancient Greece and Rome, has been implicated in the human/nature partition through Platonic dualism, which sets human reason above and beyond the material world, and its reception in the European Enlightenment.26 While some

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classical scholars have argued that aspects of Platonic thought can be made compatible with environmentalist projects, this book demonstrates that ethnographies embody a different strand of environmental discourse in Greek literature.27 My interest in the environmental discourse of Greek ethnography has two foci. The first focus delimits categorical boundaries, whether between nations and continents (chapter 2) or between bodies: male, female, human, and animal (chapter 3).28 The second focus explores environmental cultures by investigating how particular people feed themselves (chapter 4) and manage wealth (chapter 5). Through their depiction of relationships between humans and other beings, ancient Greek ethnographies suggest that people are coconstituted both culturally and materially with what is around them, that human beings will thrive if they organize society to promote economic self-sufficiency, and that independence from other human communities entails and encourages collaboration with nonhuman communities. Since Greek ethnography was a genre controlled by elite men, its environmental discourse cannot be called “Greek” in a universal sense.29 At the same time, the principles and possibilities that emerge from Greek ethnography are also a product of non-Greeks; the people Herodotus and Diodorus call Egyptians, Indians, Babylonians, and Scythians have left their imprint.30 To whatever degree readers of this book find Greek ethnographies helpful to think with, they must credit the non-Greeks without whom these texts would not exist. And why is Greek ethnography helpful to think with? The ancient world seems rather remote from the long environmental crisis in which we find ourselves, essentially unrelated to the rising and accelerating toll of extinctions and the environmental oppression of people without political power. What I offer here is primarily a cultural history of ancient Greece, a conservation of ancient Greek meanings, but this conservation is also, in Joy Connolly’s word, “purposive,” since it is animated by the needs of the present.31 In particular, I am driven by an urgent dread of the environmental destruction in which I participate as a consumer in one of

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the world’s richest countries. As I struggle with how to live in the Anthropocene, this new age of unprecedented human shaping of the world, I am hoping to receive an epiphany from my encounter with ancient cultures.32 I know from studying my sources that this encounter is itself implicated in both the history of empires that brought information to Greek ethnographers and the canonization of Greek and Roman “classics” by European powers that has made these texts especially precious to me.33 Nevertheless, I have found a great deal of worth in ancient Greek ethnographies, not because the environmental cultures they describe are easily applicable to the present day, but because the human and nonhuman entanglements they explore challenge my most deeply held assumptions about who I am and how I should live.34 Readers of this book may now follow (at least) two paths, reading through parts I and II continuously or skipping to part II for a return to present concerns, including museum displays like those I have described. After spending the majority of the book on ancient Greek ethnography, this return to natural history museums allows me to explore the resonance of Greek and Roman ethnography in living institutions and suggest places this resonance can be leveraged for environmental pedagogy. In these concluding chapters, natural history museums become the ground on which I stake my hope for the transformation of environmental culture. Chapter 1, “Sources and Methods,” introduces Herodotus’s Histories and Diodorus’s Library, including their relationship to Hellenistic historiography; significant concepts that recur in the chapters, including physis (nature) and bios (way of life); and the discourse of ancient cultural history and its relationship to ethnography. The chapter also outlines the history of ecocriticism both in and outside of classical studies and describes theoretical methods that animate the book, especially Indigenous cosmovisions and new materialisms, including the philosophy of Karen Barad. Chapter 2, “Rulers and Rivers,” argues that the boundaries between peoples and continents in Herodotus and Diodorus are not immutable,

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but emerge from the interactions of rulers, rivers, historians, and their surroundings. It begins with a reexamination of the Persian king Xerxes’s “transgressing” the border between Europe and Asia, when he whips, brands, and bridges the Hellespont. Rather than setting up Xerxes’s actions as unnatural or his bridge as artificial, Herodotus’s text indicates that the great works (erga) of rulers should be judged by their effects. Yet this does not free humans to act as they will in the world. The stories in Herodotus’s Histories and Diodorus’s Library suggest that humans and other forces (especially rivers like the Nile) should intervene in land- and waterscapes to help the human community. Chapter 3, “Female Feck,” argues that women in Greek ethnography possess feck, the ability to make a difference in the world, and use their outsider status and “situated knowledge” to rewrite bloodlines, expand empires, and destabilize sex/gender and species categories. One prominent example is Semiramis in Diodorus’s Library, who invents a gender-concealing garment to scale the walls of Bactra and giant elephant devices to fool her enemies in India. But women’s bodies also surpass their and others’ control. In the Histories, for example, the Persian queen Atossa has a breast tumor that puts her in the power of her doctor. Under his influence, she convinces her husband Darius to invade Greece, kickstarting the Greco-Persian wars. Chapter 4, “Dietary Entanglements,” turns from borders and bodies to bodily practices, particularly diet and its effects on health. Herodotus and Diodorus understand food not as an inert substance but an active force that, to use Sam Frost’s term, “cultures” human beings. For example, although long-lived Ethiopians in the Histories benefit from a diet of animal meat and milk, the Persians who pursue them end up eating one another. While Herodotus assumes that humans cannot escape the effects of these dietary entanglements, Diodorus shows that people can mitigate the negative consequences of certain diets by seeking even more interdependence with other species. His Egyptians are prime examples: although they have access to a variety of unhealthy refined foods, they protect themselves by feeding most of these to sacred animals.

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Chapter 5, “Resisting Luxury,” continues the theme of consumption, focusing on wealth. It argues that Solon and Croesus’s dialogue on wealth and happiness in the first book of Herodotus lays out principles that govern not only individual lives but also countries and their populations. Through the Histories we learn that human communities are easily destroyed by wealth: the envy of others often leads to being conquered, and the desire for more impels wealthy nations to conquer their neighbors. On the contrary, the happiest peoples are those who cultivate self-sufficiency, contentment with what they have in their native land. The chapter then analyzes two peoples in Diodorus’s Library who escape the problems of wealth by creating alliances with other species: Impassive Fisheaters who pair with trees, fish, and seals to improve their impoverished surroundings; and Indians, who protect their borders with war elephants. Human life flourishes in these interspecies collaborations. Chapter 6, “After the Encounter,” tries to move beyond the paradox of cultural comparison introduced in chapter 5, that is, that learning about other ways of life may reinforce attachment to one’s own customs rather than provoking change. Using Diodorus’s didactic proem to motivate a reading of the Library for the twenty-first century, I encourage readers to “become Amazons” by taking responsibility for how they make the world, extend society to include other beings, and engage with leaders to centralize environmental change. This approach is contrasted with Diodorus’s portrait of Alexander the Great, who applied his values inconsistently, with disastrous results for human life. In chapter 7, “Transformation in the Natural History Museum,” I express my hope that museums of natural history can bridge the written page and the world of lived experience. By analyzing exhibits in the Chicago Field Museum, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and the Whale Museum, the chapter explores how museums educate visitors about their relationship with other species. A number of these exhibits unintentionally exclude visitors from “nature” and encourage them to respond to environmental crises in very limited ways. Yet visitors to

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these museums also encounter ways of life that challenge their own, often in exhibits that do not emphasize environmental conservation. By drawing on the principles of Greek environmental discourse described earlier in this book, curators can leverage their collections for transformative environmental pedagogy.

part i

Ancient Perspectives

c h a p t e r on e

Sources and Methods

As described in the introduction, Other Natures falls into two parts. The first reads Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus for evidence of relationships between humans and other beings, while the second brings their texts into conversation with present concerns. This chapter provides background for Herodotus and Diodorus; gives an overview of Greek environmental terms and their development; and describes my methods, especially my debt to Indigenous cosmovisions and new materialisms.

herodotus and diodorus siculus This book focuses on two ancient Greek texts: Herodotus of Halicarnassus’s fifth-century BCE Histories and Diodorus Siculus’s first-century BCE Library. Herodotus’s Histories chronicles the events of the GrecoPersian wars and their backstories and investigates the non-Greeks who were either involved in the conflict, conquered in the course of Persian expansion, or brought to Herodotus’s attention in the course of his inquiries. These include a vast array of peoples, but I focus on those called Persians, Babylonians, Scythians, and Ethiopians in what is now Iran, Iraq, Russia, and east Africa, respectively. The passages I consider 15

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dominate books 1 through 4 and the beginning of 5, although details about other places and peoples appear throughout, and I consider the resonance of these passages when I discuss later books of the Histories.1 Diodorus’s Library has a much wider scope, aiming to encompass the history of the known world from its beginnings until Diodorus’s own time, ending around 60 BCE. Although only fifteen of forty books have survived intact, Diodorus’s work is still the longest extant from Greek and Roman antiquity. I focus on the first three books of nonGreek history, especially Diodorus’s descriptions of people living in what is now Egypt, India, and Sudan, but passages from book 5, which describes the Greek islands and parts of northern Europe, also make an appearance, and I consider book 12, Diodorus’s life of Alexander the Great, in chapter 6.2 Throughout the book I treat static descriptions of people’s customs alongside narratives of their actions in time, especially in the course of Persian conquest (Herodotus) and Egyptian and Babylonian conquest (Diodorus). I have subtitled this book “Environmental Encounters with Ancient Greek Ethnography” because this term is more evocative than “historiography,” which encompasses the many modes Herodotus and Diodorus write in. When I talk about ethnography in this book, I am referring to Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s portrayals of non-Greeks, and when I call them ethnographers I do so to emphasize this focus of their writings.3 I have chosen to anchor this study in Herodotus and Diodorus because their works loom so large in the history of Greek writing on other peoples and because, as bookends of the Greek world before Rome, they allow me to trace significant similarities and differences across four centuries.4 Since Diodorus is an heir to the tradition Herodotus founded, their juxtaposition also provides opportunities to see Herodotean calls and Diodoran responses. Diodorus’s reception of Herodotus, often mediated through lost Hellenistic authors, comments on the Histories, often critically. Although Herodotus may himself have been indebted to earlier writers, especially Hecataeus of Miletus and Skylax, his success so thoroughly

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eclipsed his predecessors’ that he often appears entirely original.5 We know that Herodotus’s mode of writing about other peoples was very popular in later periods. As Oswyn Murray has demonstrated, the Histories had a sustained impact on the Hellenistic geographers, ethnographers, and historians who succeeded him, whether or not they acknowledged that impact or had a favorable view of their predecessor.6 Yet the majority of these successors’ works do not survive, except as they are embodied in later writers such as Diodorus. Some of the work on Herodotus’s ethnographies has considered the relationship of other peoples to their environments, often focusing on the stereotype of the “noble savage.” Stewart Flory has said that “the story of the struggle between the Greeks and the Persians is also the story of the conflict between nature and culture . . . in which a man of culture, whom I call the ‘prosperous aggressor,’ attacks a man of nature, the ‘noble savage.’ ”7 Flory uses these terms as shorthand for a complicated, shifting dynamic between peoples in Herodotus, but the shorthand itself has come to dominate scholars’ sense of environmental patterns in the Histories. Flory’s dichotomy between “noble savage” and “prosperous aggressor,” along with James Redfield’s distinction between “soft peoples” and “hard peoples,” has encouraged scholars of Greece and Rome to see Herodotus through the lens of early modern anthropology and political theory, from which these terms derive.8 It is better to understand the “noble savage” as a reception of Greek and Roman ethnography than an idea that would be familiar to Herodotus’s first readers. The reception has been so powerful because it reveals something true and distinct in Greek and Roman ethnographies, namely their persistent interest in environmental cultures. But as compelling as these terms are, noble savage, prosperous aggressor, soft peoples, and hard peoples are reductive and limiting.9 Unlike Herodotus, Diodorus has been largely ignored as a writer. While his Library is regularly mined for its adaptation of now-lost Hellenistic histories, Diodorus’s text has received only a handful of booklength treatments.10 His use of lost texts is both immense and difficult

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to evaluate. Other scholars have painstakingly compared the “fragments” of these authors across their transmitters or “cover texts,” including Diodorus. Nevertheless, scholars have also shown that Diodorus exercised considerable authorship in the selection and adaptation of his sources, as did Herodotus before him. In placing Diodorus’s text alongside Herodotus’s, I hope to contribute to scholars’ growing appreciation for the Library as a historical work in its own right.11 For this reason, I do not wade into ongoing debates about where Diodorus has modified his sources and where he has transmitted them more or less intact. I leave to others the important work of distinguishing the environmental discourse of lost Hellenistic historians from the larger background I detail in this book. Although “Herodotus” has been championed as a great artist, the author of the entire Histories, while “Diodorus” is often credited only with certain passages of the Library, ancient readers probably did not make this distinction, and so I use the names “Herodotus” and “Diodorus” in parallel. At the same time, I note instances when Herodotus and Diodorus break out of the stream of narration to speak to the reader in their authorial personas. Otherwise, following a reader-centric rather than author-centric approach, I use the names “Herodotus” and “Diodorus” more or less interchangeably with their texts, the Histories and Library. I have presented Herodotus, his Histories, Diodorus, and his Library as showing, arguing, and implying things to readers.12 Focusing on the Library rather than its Hellenistic sources has several benefits. First, it allows me to describe the experience of Diodorus’s readers, who had access to his continuous narrative, rather than confining my arguments to individual passages extracted from the Library and confirmed as Diodorus’s original work. Second, preserving the layers of Diodorus’s words and those of his sources will remind us that Herodotus’s text is layered as well. Although many ethnographic writers claim to have seen some of what they record, most depended either in part or in full on the observations of others.13 When modern editors publish the “fragments” of these lost authors out of the context

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in which we find them—that is, embedded as quotations or adaptations in later authors—readers lose sight of the fact that ethnography was a tradition that covered its tracks.14 Direct observation, although one original source for ethnographic writing, became less important over time as other kinds of sources, especially the tradition of ethnographic writing itself, came into circulation. Over the centuries ethnography became an accretive, scholarly genre; these later ethnographers were not opposed to new evidence or eyewitness accounts but increasingly concerned with reading previous ethnographers and integrating their research. The heterogeneous tradition of ethnographic writing gives the environmental discourse I describe its unique texture. Ethnographic texts are polyvocal and sometimes fantastic, not committed to achieving a smooth, realistic synthesis or single forensic argument but rather composed of interpenetrating layers that give rise to multiple meanings. Ethnographers are interested not only in what they have seen or heard from eyewitnesses or even what they have read in previous histories, but also in what they can theorize themselves. These writers believe, as T. P. Wiseman once said, that “some credible things are not worth relating, and some incredible ones are.”15 Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s observations, adaptations of previous writers, oral histories, and creative extrapolations are the discursive material from which the environmental cultures I describe emerge. As I demonstrate, this discursive environment creates a fertile field for readers, who are encouraged to experiment with different ways of thinking about their own culture but rarely told what to conclude.

nature and environment Though in everyday English people talk about the nature of a thing—“it is in my nature to do X” or “it is natural to do X”—they also talk about nature as a place, as in the phrase “the natural world.”16 Nature in this second sense is a place one has to go to, a place where few (if any)

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humans reside, and a spiritual refuge.17 Greek has a word for nature, physis, 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 physisnomos 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:

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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

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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

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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 by lamenting the inaccessibility of early human history. Thucydides’s comments (1.1.3, 1.21.1) are the best known, but epistemological longing precedes Thucydides and recurs throughout the historical writing that follows him.34 Both before and especially after Herodotus, Greek writers imagined the deep past as a series of stages characterized by the gradual acquisition of technology, cultural practices, and refined products. Sometimes this is described as progress, for example, in Diodorus Siculus’s own narrative of early human history (1.8), and other times as decline, as in Hesiod’s famous series of Golden, Silver, and

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other generations (WD, 109–201). Hesiod does not characterize these types of human beings only by their “way of life” (bios), but bios plays an important role in demarcating especially the deep past inhabited by the Golden generation and the Iron generation, to which Hesiod belongs. The importance of bios is confirmed by the opening of the poem, in which Hesiod describes what life was like before and after Prometheus’s crime as the difference between humans having a secure bios and then losing it (42–93). Hesiod’s narrative did not belong to a defined genre in antiquity but has been called “historical anthropology” or “cultural history” by modern scholars.35 Cultural history begins with Homer, Hesiod, and the preSocratics and culminates in the now lost treatises by Democritus and Dicaearchus.36 Ancient Greek cultural histories do not derive from systematic study, although they may contain genuine, culturally transmitted memories of previous centuries; rather, this mode of historical writing is a hybrid of history and philosophy, an imaginative extrapolation from what little can be securely known about humans’ deepest past. Other writers use bios to think about different economies that operated on the earth simultaneously. Aristotle’s Politics, for example, describes distinct bioi of pastoralism, hunting and fishing, and raiding (1256a–b).37 Just as there are carnivores and herbivores among the earth’s animals, Aristotle says, so too do human ethnic communities (ethnē) vary in their mode of subsistence. Although Aristotle does not present the bioi of others as developmental stages, his schema offers his student, Dicaearchus of Messana, a base for articulating three stages of human development in his lost third-century BCE Life of Greece. Through quotations in later authors, we know that Dicaearchus read Hesiod’s Works and Days and blended Hesiod’s generations with Aristotle’s economies, describing human change as a progression from a golden age of gathering, to an intermediate stage of pastoralism, to a final stage of agriculturalism.38 As the influence of Aristotle’s ethnic bioi on Dicaearchus’s temporal bioi makes clear, cultural history and ethnography were related and mutually influential ways of understanding environmental culture. But

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Greek writers were combining ethnic and temporal thinking even before Dicaearchus. The “comparative method,” as it is known in anthropology, allowed Greek writers to compare living peoples to the Greeks’ own early history.39 Thucydides, for example, says that “there are many . . . respects in which a striking resemblance might appear between the old Greek way of life and present barbarian practice.”40 Plato notes that earlier forms of government are preserved in other parts of the world (Leg. 680b), and Arrian (writing after Dicaearchus) compares early Indians to living Scythians through their shared way of life: πάλαι μὲν δὴ νομάδας εἶναι ᾽Ινδοὺς καθάπερ Σκυθέων τοὺς οὐκ ἀροτῆρας, οἳ ἐπὶ τῆισιν ἁμάξηισι πλανώμενοι ἄλλοτε ἄλλην τῆς Σκυθίης ἀμείβουσιν, οὐτε πόληας οἰκέοντες οὐτε ἱερὰ θεῶν σέβοντες·. Long ago the Indians were nomadic, just like the nonfarming Scythians, who wander in their wagons and exchange one part of Scythia for another, neither dwelling in cities nor revering the temples of the gods. (Arr., Ind. 7.2–4)

Other texts compare older Greek to current non-Greek customs, including attitudes toward nakedness (Pl., Rep. 452c), religion (Pl., Crat. 397d), linguistics (Crat. 421d), and military practice (Ar. fr. 160).41 Plato, for example, says that “not too long ago it seemed embarrassing and ridiculous, as it seems to many barbarians now, for men to be seen naked.”42 Herodotus does not state the comparative method explicitly, but Tim Rood has argued that the Histories contain close parallels to the passage of Thucydides I have quoted here (1.6.6).43 Herodotus relates past Greek and current non-Greek writing habits, for example: Καὶ τὰς βύβλους διφθέρας καλέουσι ἀπὸ τοῦ παλαιοῦ οἱ Ἴωνες, ὅτι κοτὲ ἐν σπάνι βύβλων ἐχρέωντο διφθέρῃσι αἰγέῃσί τε καὶ οἰέῃσι· ἔτι δὲ καὶ τὸ κατ’ ἐμὲ πολλοὶ τῶν βαρβάρων ἐς τοιαύτας διφθέρας γράφουσι. The Ionians call papyrus sheets skins, as they have done from antiquity, because at that time they used to use goat and sheep skins for want of papyrus. And many barbarians write on such skins even today. (Hdt. 5.58.3)

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Whether or not one agrees with Rood that this passage fully employs the comparative method, it shows how Greek writers associate distant times and distant places, an association that goes back at least as far as Hesiod, who places the remnant of an older version of humanity at the edges of the earth (WD, 168).44 Herodotus, scholars have noted, imagines distant peoples occupying a blessed, golden-age existence very similar to that enjoyed by Hesiod’s Golden generation. The Ethiopians, for example, who occupy “the ends of the earth” (ta eschata gēs, 3.25.5) and eat milk and meat rather than bread, are tall and beautiful, scrupulous, and long-lived, and they despise luxury (3.20–23).45 Herodotus’s engagement with the emerging discipline of cultural history is more significant than has been recognized.46 Like ancient cultural historians who describe the stages of Greek prehistory in terms of a series of bioi, Herodotus often characterizes ethnic others by their “method of subsistence,” their diaita. Of the Persians who did not join Cyrus he says “all [are] tillers of the soil [arotēres],” except “the Dai, the Mardi, the Dropici, the Sagartii, all wandering herdsmen [nomades]” (1.125).47 This attention to diaita (a synonym of bios) places Herodotus in a larger conversation about the relationship between subsistence, ethnicity, and development over time, a conversation that produced full articulations of the comparative method in the authors who immediately followed Herodotus, including Thucydides and Plato, and cultural histories in the generation after him. Although Herodotus has been seen as just another writer, like Hesiod, who associated Greek past and non-Greek present, the Histories were instead a bridge between archaic correlations of time and place and late classical applications of this correlation to the study of the distant past.48 Herodotus may or may not have aimed to theorize the Greek past through the non-Greek present, but his text was available for Greek readers to interpret this way and for cultural historians after him to draw upon. Irvin Schick uses the phrase “technology of place” to “describe the discursive instruments and strategies by means of which space is constituted as place, that is place as socially constructed and reconstructed.”49

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Bios is a technology of both place and time, a way of constructing time and place that relates them to one another. By mapping bioi, Greek ethnographers explored the past through the world and the world through their understanding of the past. Bioi are also a technology of spatiotemporal difference, a way of creating and marking the difference between past and present, Greek and non-Greek, and within non-Greek communities. Although it is difficult to track lines of influence between cultural history and ethnography, I suspect that it would be most accurate to say that Greek ethnography and cultural history, Greek thinking about distant places and distant times, formed one another in the classical period, eventually merging in the universal history of the late Hellenistic and early Roman periods.50 One of these universal histories was Diodorus Siculus’s Library, which begins with a cultural history (Sic. 1.8) believed to have been broadly influenced by Dicaearchus’s lost Life of Greece, perhaps via Agatharchides, who wrote in Alexandria in the second century BCE.51 According to Diodorus, the first human beings: τοὺς οὖν πρώτους τῶν ἀνθρώπων μηδενὸς τῶν πρὸς βίον χρησίμων εὑρημένου ἐπιπόνως διάγειν, γυμνοὺς μὲν ἐσθῆτος ὄντας, οἰκήσεως δὲ καὶ πυρὸς ἀήθεις, τροφῆς δ’ ἡμέρου παντελῶς ἀνεννοήτους. endured a miserable existence because nothing useful for life (pros bion) had been discovered; they had no clothing, were unused to dwellings or fire, and [were] completely ignorant of cultivated (hēmerou) food. (Diod. Sic. 1.8.5)

Through the gradual acquisition of arts, often bestowed by a culture hero like Isis or Heracles, human beings improved their lives.52 As this progression makes clear, Diodorus has a strong preference for “cultivated” or “civilized” life (e.g., 3.50.2: hēmeros bios) over the other forms of life humans experienced either earlier in time or in his day, in places unknown to culture heroes. Nevertheless, readers of Diodorus are not bound by the history he stages at the beginning of the Library and its valuation of more “developed” bioi over others. As discussed later, Diodorus’s persistent focus on different bioi and examination of their advantages

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and drawbacks allows his readers to explore other ways of life as alternatives to their own.

indigenous cosmovisions and new materialisms The environmental discourse of Greek ethnographies, with its “culturing” of human beings in larger ecosystems (see the introduction), both complements and critiques ideas in the emerging field of “environmental humanities.” This field is a big tent, a motley crew of broadly compatible approaches to describing what it has meant to be human and imagining what we might yet become. Environmental humanities developed out of and has grown to encompass environmental criticism, or ecocriticism, a branch of literary studies developed in the 1980s that investigates the cultural construction of nature. In this sense, ecocriticism is a shorthand term for intellectual environmental history, how human beings value and conceive of nature over time. But ecocritics also see their field as the environmentalist equivalent of feminism, critical race studies, and queer theory, and like many theorists from those schools, they often voice their hopes, fears, and opinions about current events in their analysis of “the relationship between literature and the physical environment.”53 Ecocriticism is itself an outgrowth (and in some cases appropriation) of Indigenous cosmovisions, ways of knowing and making the human and more-than-human world.54 It is these Indigenous cosmovisions and their allied white Western “new materialisms” that have the greatest relevance to this book.55 In their introduction to Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies, Salma Monani and Joni Adamson assert that “Indigenous understandings . . . suggest a cosmos of relations that speak to complex entanglements of the human with the more-than-human that must be creatively and thoughtfully negotiated.”56 These negotiations take many forms, from healing walks that mourn and reclaim devastated land to poetry that honors maize and human sexuality, but all recognize the responsibility

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humans and other beings owe one another by virtue of their interdependence and use story and movement to teach humans their share of this responsibility.57 Taking up this theme of interdependence, academics from physics, philosophy, political science, and science studies have developed a set of new ideas that try to account for the ontological, epistemological, and ethical relationship between humans and other beings—that is, how they relate in terms of being, knowledge, and responsibility. These thinkers, grouped under various headings—object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and new materialism—are all invested in dismantling the partition between humans and nature that, as discussed in the introduction, has governed so much white Western environmental discourse.58 Instead, they emphasize the agency, vibrancy, animacy, or ethical status of animals, plants, and other beings. To do this, they have developed several philosophies, including Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy, and as described later in this chapter, Karen Barad’s agential realism.59 Other thinkers have generated select vocabulary rather than systematic philosophies of the human and more-than-human world. Donna Haraway, who along with Bruno Latour turned the sociological study of science (science studies) toward metaphysics in the 1980s, popularized the term naturecultures to capture the interdependence of humans, other beings, and society, while Stacy Alaimo coined trans-corporeality to describe the porous interface of human and other bodies and their exchange of material. Deleuze and Guattari’s image of the rhizome is an early precursor of these ideas.60 To maintain accessibility, I have chosen not to use any of these terms, instead speaking more generically of entanglements and relationships between humans and other beings. But I believe this book could easily be translated to suit readers in these subdisciplines of the environmental humanities, and I hope they will adapt the stories I tell for their own projects.61 Ancient Greek writers were not proponents of Indigenous cosmovisions, new materialisms, or any of these other schools of thought. For

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one thing, Greek ethnographies are almost always anthropocentric, privileging humans and their success. The misogyny of Greek ethnography is another instructive difference. While many environmentalists and environmentally oriented scholars root themselves in feminism, Greek writers base their vision of human and nonhuman relations on a strict hierarchy that places human men above women, and so on down the line.62 Yet their subjugation does not prevent women from exercising what I call feck, the power to make significant differences in the world. When Greek ethnographies decenter the human, they also create room for the destabilizing of sex/gender norms. Despite these differences, there is an affinity between Greek ideas and the ideas of those who criticize the opposition between humans and the rest of nature.63 Although Greeks had no word for the interrelatedness of organisms, this interconnection is assumed. Their world is one in which human beings and other creatures are governed by physis rather than one in which humans occupy a civilized space entirely separate from natural space. Instead, animate and inanimate beings of the natural world push back against the humans who tell their tale. When these beings are divine they may be dismissed by secular scholars as fantasies, irrelevant to present concerns, but just as often they are natural rather than supernatural, ancestors of the plants, animals, land, and water that surround us today. By investigating encounters between humans and these other beings, Greek ethnography offers the environmental humanities a resource and a comparative databank with which to test out different ontologies, epistemologies, and ethics of the human and more-than-human world.64 Greek ethnographies also assume that knowledge is situated, that is, partial, communal, embodied, and emplaced. Donna Haraway coined the phrase “situated knowledge” to critique both traditional white Western notions of objectivity, especially in science, and radical feminist constructivism, the perspective that truth is reducible to rhetoric. Instead, Haraway maps a third way that describes knowledge production not as a language game but as a “view from somewhere,” limited

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but rational and objective on its own terms.65 Indigenous peoples have long claimed access to other ways of knowing, ways now being promoted by scholars (many of them Indigenous).66 Like other white writers who have turned to Indigenous peoples for new ways of being in the Anthropocene, I am a student of Greek environmental knowledge, of Greek world building. To understand how Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s texts build worlds, I have relied a great deal on the work of Karen Barad. Barad’s agential realism is an immense intellectual achievement, a systematic philosophy that draws on the physics of Neils Bohr and the gender theory of Judith Butler and interacts (or as Barad would say, “intra-acts”) with many of the strains of new materialism and feminist science studies I have mentioned in this chapter. Her work is also laden with unique terminology and written in a style that many readers will find irritating, which is why I quote it very little. Barad’s project, she says, “is an ethico-onto-epistemological matter. We are not merely differently situated in the world . . . each of us is part of the intra-active ongoing articulation of the world in its differential mattering.”67 Mattering for Barad describes the interdependence of matter and discourse, substance and significance. According to Barad, the way we know the world (epistemology) and how we decide to act in the world (ethics) are inextricable from what the world is (ontology) and what we are as well. This is true of both current scholarship, like this book, and the ancient sources under study. The way that Herodotus and Diodorus divide the world and construct its categories creates relationships between humans and other beings. The way that I have organized this book creates relationships as well, between readers, Greek authors, and the worlds they inhabit. By articulating the Greek past through Barad’s agential realism, I am materializing the past in the present. I hope that this materialization helps the humans who read this book and the others with whom they interdepend to create the practices of body and mind that allow human and more-than-human life to flourish.

c h a p t e r t wo

Rulers and Rivers

As explained in chapter 1, my analysis of Greek ethnography’s environmental discourse attends to the boundaries between land and water (chapter 2) and differences between (and among) human and animal bodies (chapter 3), as well as the cultural practices described in chapters 4 and 5. This chapter shows how humans and other beings in Herodotus’s Histories and Diodorus’s Library build and rebuild the known world by constructing marvelous works such as pyramids, dams, and canals. These works (erga) are energy and material intensive, requiring tons of raw wood, stone, metal, and animal products, as well as the forced labor of humans and other animals. Erga also reroute rivers, sever bodies of land, and alter topography, sometimes forever. The massive effects of these engineering projects lead Herodotus and Diodorus to grapple with questions of environmental ethics: Under what circumstances should humans (and others) intervene in the world around them? Are there “natural” boundaries they should respect? Both Herodotus and Diodorus distinguish between human-made and what are usually called natural features of the world. Herodotus says that some of the mouths of the Nile have been “dug” (orukta) by humans, while others are “original” (ithagenea, 2.17.6), picturing humans as secondary actors in Egypt. Diodorus uses different language, saying that 32

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the Egyptian king Sesoösis “erected many great mounds of land . . . in areas not naturally (physikōs) elevated” (1.57.1).1 For both authors, “nature” (physis) has temporal priority over human action, operating before and within people and other beings. Yet contrary to modern assumptions, the distinction between the “original” operation of nature in the world and later human or nonhuman changes to land- and waterscapes has no inherent moral value. Readers of Herodotus and Diodorus learn that these human interventions are not good or bad per se, but rather are judged by their consequences for the human community.2 The most infamous engineering project Herodotus records appears in the second half of the Histories. In book 7, the Persian king Xerxes prepares to invade Greece by bridging the Hellespont, the strait separating Asia and Europe. Just as the bridge is complete, storms arise and destroy it. Enraged, Xerxes orders his men to abuse the water with whips, shackles, and brands, while he himself casts these insults: Ὦ πικρὸν ὕδωρ, δεσπότης τοι δίκην ἐπιτιθεῖ τήνδε, ὅτι μιν ἠδίκησας οὐδὲν πρὸς ἐκείνου ἄδικον παθόν. Καὶ βασιλεὺς μὲν Ξέρξης διαβήσεταί σε, ἤν τε σύ γε βούλῃ ἤν τε μή. Σοὶ δὲ κατὰ δίκην ἄρα οὐδεὶς ἀνθρώπων θύει, ὡς ἐόντι καὶ θολερῷ καὶ ἁλμυρῷ ποταμῷ. Bitter water, this is the punishment you pay our master for wronging him although you suffered no injustice from him. King Xerxes will cross you whether you are willing or not. How right it is that no one sacrifices to you, muddy and salty a river as you are. (Hdt. 7.35)

Herodotus strongly marks Xerxes as in the wrong, calling his men’s speech “barbaric and recklessly presumptuous” (7.35.1: barbara te kai atasthala) and the act itself “an honor without honor” (7.36.1: hautē hē acharis timē). Narrative clues reinforce Herodotus’s disapproval: Xerxes ignores omens (7.37) and even his own feelings of despair (7.45) but does not turn back. Like Agamemnon’s trampling of the carpet in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon (to which this scene is often compared), the whipping of the Hellespont sums up and overdetermines Xerxes’s fall in the remaining books of the Histories.3

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The scene is also crucial for scholars’ understanding of the relationship between humans and their world. Classicists have usually framed Xerxes’s act as “unnatural,” a transgression of predetermined natural boundaries. James Flory claims that Xerxes “profanes nature” with his act, while Henry Immerwahr argues that “the crossing of rivers . . . is always used to prove the hybris [violent arrogance] of the aggressor.”4 Since rivers had divine status in Greek religion, Thomas Harrison translates Xerxes’s “presumptuous” (atasthala) words as “impious” and says that the scene exemplifies “the moral that man should let his environment be.”5 Rosaria Munson agrees, tying Xerxes’s action to other “expansionist violations of rivers.”6 In this dominant view, there are natural boundaries in the Histories that humans “transgress,” “profane,” or “violate” by building bridges, redirecting rivers, and digging canals. Other scholars have questioned this orthodoxy, pointing out Herodotus’s frequent admiration for bridges, canals, and other works of engineering, and arguing that Xerxes is punished for his insolence to the Hellespont, not for constructing the bridge itself.7 Although, as James Romm says, Herodotus draws on “tragic” language associating Xerxes’s punishment of the Hellespont with retributive justice (especially through allusions to a parallel scene in Aeschylus’s Persians), he employs a “more sophisticated, sophiē-reverencing impulse” that values human ingenuity (sophiē) when he describes Xerxes’s bridge.8 Most recently, Katherine Clarke has thoroughly examined Herodotus’s representation of land- and waterscapes, concluding that “geographical space . . . is an active player in the narrative” of the Histories and that it serves to characterize different players in the Greco-Persian wars.9 She demonstrates that the particular judgments of Herodotus’s text are context specific and complicated by focalization, the point of view from which human interventions are evaluated. Sometimes, as in the case of Xerxes, Herodotus himself condemns a work of human engineering; in others, this judgment is reported by Herodotus but attributed to his informants. For example, it is the Egyptians who disapprove of King Cheops’s pyramid, rather than Herodotus himself.10

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Since Clarke has so persuasively laid out an alternative to the standard, totalizing view of “natural” boundaries in Herodotus’s text, this chapter focuses instead on the environmental lessons that readers can learn from his inquiry into how humans and other beings have changed the world over time. Xerxes’s violation of the Hellespont has the power to characterize him because Greeks do in fact worry about whether or not humans should intervene in land- and waterscapes, but this worry cannot be reduced to a blanket prescription against crossing rivers, building bridges, or undertaking related projects. The negative attention Herodotus draws to Xerxes’s interactions with the Hellespont throws into contrast the engineering works that he admires and invites readers to meditate on the difference (if any) between them.11 Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s record of geographical change reveals that both humans and other beings, especially rivers, are responsible for remaking land- and waterscapes, and that they are judged on equal terms for how they change the world. In what follows, I argue four points. First, Herodotus and Diodorus are predisposed to positively value marvelous works (erga), not only because erga impress them and could be expected to delight readers, but also because they depend on these works for information about earlier centuries. Second, reading Xerxes’s bridge alongside other erga reveals that Herodotus does in fact place limits on human ingenuity, limits made more explicit by Diodorus. Both authors value engineering projects that benefit the ruled while immortalizing the ruler. Third, what we see in Herodotus and Diodorus is not the crossing of predetermined “natural” boundaries, but a demonstration of how those boundaries are made and can be remade by both humans and other beings. Fourth, the historian is not a passive observer of these boundaries-in-the-making, but a cocreator of them.

the historian complicit Herodotus and other historians are predisposed to admire works of engineering because they depend on them for information about the

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past. As Herodotus tells us in the opening lines of the Histories, he has recorded the display (apodeixis) of his inquiry “in order that the things done by people are not lost in time, and that great and amazing works (erga megala te kai thōmasta), some displayed (apodechthenta) by Greeks and some non-Greeks not be forgotten, in particular the cause of their conflict with one another” (1.1).12 While Herodotus emphasizes his role in preserving erga, the common language of display also underscores the similarities between his endeavor and those who left erga behind. His accomplishment depends on those it records. It is a great work composed of other great works.13 Like the semantics of the English word work, erga can denote intangible achievements as well as tangible objects, “the finished product of an activity.”14 For example, the Greek victory over the Persians is an intangible ergon, but the Histories also describes many concrete works. These erga may have been lost in original physical form, but Herodotus’s record ensures their survival in text, and these tangible erga in turn motivate large sections of Herodotus’s narrative. In book 3, for example, Herodotus explains that he “has gone on so long about the Samians because they accomplished the three greatest works of all the Greeks,” a tunnel for piping water into town, a harbor mole, and the largest temple he has ever seen.15 These objects prove the stories Herodotus relates and provide moments of pause for lush, ekphrastic description.16 Lands that lack human beings lack information, but monuments can testify even in the absence of human informants.17 Objects “worthy of mention” can be as small as a dedication, if it is expensive enough (e.g., the six golden bowls of Gyges; 1.14), but are often very large and qualify as “monuments” (mnēmosuna). These monumental works include tombs, pillars and statues, fortresses, and even whole cities.18 The Greek word for monument, mnēmosunon, is closely related to the word for memory (mnēmosunē), like the English memorial. Monuments commemorate the past and are for historians the material basis of their own creation. Commensurate with their size and expense, mnēmosuna consume vast quantities of natural resources,

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especially stone and precious metals, but Herodotus (unlike Diodorus, as discussed later in this chapter) does not dwell on this fact.19 Herodotus ties one of these monuments directly to his own authorial achievement. The Egyptian king Moeris is known to the Egyptian priests for building pyramids, the forecourt of a temple, and an artificial lake (2.101). Herodotus calls these works the ergōn apodeixis, the “display of works” promised to readers in the proem as both the form and content of his inquiry. Later on, he says that Moeris’s lake is a thōma, “marvel” (2.149), even more closely identifying it with the “great and marvelous works” (1.1: erga megala te kai thōmasta) he set out to record. Herodotus’s experience of Moeris’s labyrinth, which he wanders through in amazement and claims (ironically) is beyond his power of description (2.148: ton egō ēdē eidon logou mezō), epitomizes his attitude to great works. The labyrinth implicates him both literally and figuratively, enfolding his body and challenging him to surpass its achievement.20 Following Herodotus’s lead, Diodorus uses an architectural metaphor to draw out the competitive relationship between the erga of past rulers and his own work: τὰ μὲν γὰρ ἄλλα μνημεῖα διαμένει χρόνον ὀλίγον, ὑπὸ πολλῶν ἀναιρούμενα περιστάσεων, ἡ δὲ τῆς ἱστορίας δύναμις ἐπὶ πᾶσαν τὴν οἰκουμένην διήκουσα τὸν πάντα τἄλλα λυμαινόμενον χρόνον ἔχει φύλακα τῆς αἰωνίου παραδόσεως τοῖς ἐπιγινομένοις. For these other monuments (mnēmeia) remain but a little while, being uprooted by many circumstances, but the power of history (historia), extending over the whole world, possesses in time—which destroys everything else—a guardian for ensuring perpetual transmission to posterity. (Diod. Sic. 1.2.5)21

Diodorus disparages people’s desire to leave behind physical memorials rather than memorials of virtue, but he too preserves these “monuments of stone” (10.12.2). Like Herodotus’s mnēmosuna, Diodorus’s semantically equivalent mnēmeia often radically transform land- and waterscapes. Semiramis, the queen of Assyria, cuts through a mountain to make an “immortal

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memorial” for herself (2.13.5: athanaton mnēmeion), and the Roman censor Appius Claudius levels heights and fills valleys for the same purpose (20.36.2). When these monuments endure, they are also useful to the historian. As Diodorus comments, Semiramis’s memory benefits from the many memorials she left in her wake (2.14.1). Diodorus’s monument of these monuments, the Library, claims to be the ultimate memorial. But his achievement relies on the ambitious building projects of great rulers and heroes. As Clarke argues, the “consistent alignment of the historian” with rulers’ erga “seems to reinforce admiration rather than dismay.”22 I would go further and assert that historians’ interest in amazing works and reliance on them for information mute historiography’s ability as a genre to criticize human activity. The Hellespont scene in Aeschylus’s Persians provides a helpful contrast. Whereas Herodotus’s disapproval focuses on Xerxes’s punishment of the Hellespont, Aeschylus has Darius lament Xerxes’s decision to offend the gods by enslaving the Hellespont with fetters and “changing its form into a road” (Hdt. l.747: porou meterruthmize). In this tragic setting, the bridge is as much of a sacrilege as the shackles are.23 For Herodotus, on the other hand, the bridge is an artifact of history; the historian has a vested interest in making a distinction between the bridge Xerxes constructs, his bad reasons for constructing it, and the tantrum he throws when the bridge is destroyed. Historians’ reliance on great works, including those that testify to their actor’s memory by altering geography, limits the degree to which they can criticize the undertaking of these works. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern critique, moments when Herodotus and Diodorus evaluate the merits of these projects and the terms by which they judge them worthwhile.

monumental risks and rewards Earthworks, including tunnels, walls, roads, and buildings, run through Herodotus’s Histories. Occasionally they are demanded by the gods, as

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when Pisistratus (1.64) and, later, the Spartans (1.67) rebury bodies to fulfill oracular demands. But most are initiated by human beings. Amasis, a Persian king engaged in a protracted war with the Barceans, swears an oath to last “as long as the earth stays the same” (4.201: est’ an hē gē hautē houtō echē) but makes sure to limit this promise by standing over a lightly covered trench. The city of Barcē is taken and its citizens captured or killed, the men’s bodies impaled and displayed along with the women’s cut-off breasts (4.202). Although Amasis has tricked the Persians with this earthwork, he suffers neither divine retribution nor the author’s disapproval.24 On the contrary, Amasis’s “trick” (dolon) is the last in a series of moves and countermoves, as the Persians try to tunnel beneath the city and the Barceans counter-tunnel (antorussontes) in return (4.200). Elsewhere, Herodotus reports without additional comment the frequent earthworks provoked by the demands of war, both offensive (1.162) and defensive (1.163, 4.3). The Histories take for granted that people will manipulate the landscape to make war and protect themselves. Herodotus takes a similar view of waterworks, including bridges (like Xerxes’s), harbor moles, dams, dykes, canals, and a marvelous oxhide irrigation pipe (3.9). When the Lydian king Croesus crosses the River Halys, Herodotus wonders whether he used existing bridges or employed Thales of Miletus to divert the river around his army but does not judge the work itself (1.75). When describing a massive Samian irrigation tunnel and harbor mole, he expresses admiration and classes these achievements with the colossal temple the Samians also constructed, calling the three of them the greatest works of all the Greeks (3.60). Nevertheless, Herodotus recognizes moments when humans are forbidden to undertake these projects. The Cnidians begin a canal to fortify themselves from Persian invasion but notice that their workers suffer an unusually high number of injuries. They consult an oracle, who scolds:

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Ἰσθμὸν δὲ μὴ πυργοῦτε μηδ’ ὀρύσσετε Ζεὺς γάρ κ’ ἔθηκε νῆσον, εἴ γ’ ἐβούλετο. Do not fortify or dig up the Isthmus. Zeus would have made an island if he had wanted to. (Hdt. 1.174)

Like Xerxes, the Cnidians are wrong to undertake this alteration of their world; unlike him, they heed warnings and stop before catastrophe strikes.25 In a similar situation in book 2, the Egyptian king Necos starts digging a canal, which the Persian king Darius will later finish when he has conquered the region. An oracle stops Necos, saying that he is helping his Persian enemy (2.158).26 In Herodotus’s world, the gods are not usually in the business of approving or forbidding earth- and waterworks, but their occasional intervention proves both the risk and reward of undertaking them. Erga can offend the gods and bring ruin upon the rulers who order them (not to mention the workers who get in the way), or they can ensure those same rulers’ fame and memorialization in historiography.27 When negotiating these risks, the best rulers alter land- and waterscapes to benefit their people rather than merely themselves. This principle emerges from a series of stories in book 1 that report the great works of various rulers, both Babylonian (Semiramis, Nitocris) and Persian (Darius, Cyrus). Semiramis, Herodotus reports, constructs dykes “worthy of mention” (axiotheētēs) that prevent a river from flooding the plane of Babylon (1.184). Nitocris, a later successor, leaves behind “monuments” (mnēmosuna, 1.185.1) that Herodotus considers worth describing but also has the foresight to defend against Median encroachment by diverting the Euphrates, fortifying it with embankments, and constructing an artificial lake to slow the river and make it less useful to attackers (1.185.2–6). These interventions are “worthy of wonder” (1.185.3: axion thōmatos) and thus enhance Nitocris’s later reputation, but Herodotus also emphasizes how she has transformed the river into a defense system for her people (1.186.1).28 Another, more modest undertaking benefits the populace in peacetime. Nitocris constructs a bridge

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that is lowered by day and retracted at night. During the day, the bridge eases the “nuisance” (1.186.1: ochlēron) of conducting business, but at night its absence prevents the Babylonians from robbing one another. Nitocris’s bridge and defense system are the ingenious projects of a responsible ruler.29 Herodotus uses another story about Nitocris to demonstrate the importance of rulers’ intentions in undertaking their erga.30 After describing Nitocris’s bridge, Herodotus reports that she built a tomb for herself above the city gates, inscribed with a message to future rulers: Τῶν τις ἐμεῦ ὕστερον γινομένων Βαβυλῶνος βασιλέων ἢν σπανίσῃ χρημάτων, ἀνοίξας τὸν τάφον λαβέτω ὁκόσα βούλεται χρήματα· μὴ μέντοι γε μὴ σπανίσας γε ἄλλως ἀνοίξῃ οὐ γὰρ ἄμενον. Any Babylonian king who comes after me and needs money may open the tomb and take as much as he requires, but if he opens it for any other reason, it will not go well for him. (Hdt. 1.187.2)

Darius, a later, Persian ruler of Babylon, breaks into this tomb both because he wants the promised money and because he dislikes walking under Nitocris’s corpse when he enters the city. Once inside, he is greeted with these words: “Only a terribly greedy person would open the tombs of the dead.”31 Herodotus calls Nitocris’s tomb a “trick” or “deceit” (apatē), but the story also celebrates her ingenuity and portrays Darius as a hypocrite. Darius, who would not be seen in public passing through the gates under Nitocris’s tomb, is willing to violate it by night. Nitocris, on the other hand, subverts her greedy successor from the grave.32 The contrast between Nitocris’s and Darius’s intentions in carrying out their erga provides the background for the next story in the series. This one concerns Cyrus, Darius’s predecessor and the famous founder of the Persian empire. Herodotus reports that Cyrus, like Xerxes, punishes (1.190.1: etisato) the River Gyndus for obstructing him and killing one of his sacred horses, dividing the river into 360 channels (1.189).33 Although Nitocris also diverts rivers, her goal is to defend her people.

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Cyrus, on the other hand, aims only to satisfy his injured pride. Like Darius, who opened Nitocris’s tomb for the wrong reasons, Cyrus’s arrogance provokes him to alter the Gyndus. Although Cyrus and Nitocris both change the course of rivers, the difference in their motivations is crucial.34 The account in book 2 of Cheops, an Egyptian king, also focuses on rulers’ intentions. Obsessed with building a pyramid for himself, Cheops stops all other work in Egypt to enslave the Egyptian population and complete the project. Herodotus says that the wicked (kakotētos) Cheops drove the Egyptians into “total misery” (pasan kakotēta) by “wearing them out” (tribomenō) over ten years (2.124.1–3). Cheops has erected a monument Herodotus would normally be inclined to admire, but at a terrible price. He even forces his daughter into sex work to raise funds for the project. She does as ordered (tēn . . . tachthenta prēssesthai), but asks each of the men for a tip. With the blocks they give her she builds her own pyramid, making sure that no one forgets her role in Cheops’s marvel (2.126). Katherine Clarke notes that Cheops’s story is told from the perspective of Herodotus’s Egyptian informants, and that Herodotus does not himself judge Cheops for enslaving them.35 This may reflect his admiration for Cheops’s erga and his dependence on them for information about the world, but it also foregrounds the personal toll the pyramids have taken on the Egyptian people. In particular, this episode may reflect ideas passed among Herodotus’s lower-class informants.36 Like the stories Sara Forsdyke documents in her study of ancient Greek popular ideology, the tale of Cheops’s daughter celebrates an enslaved person’s wit at the expense of her enslaver. Her cunning does not put Cheops’s daughter in her father’s place but does allow her to enjoy some of the distinction he has accrued to himself by enslaving her. In building her own pyramid with materials siphoned from her father’s project, she criticizes the inequity between enslavers and enslaved without overturning the social order.37 The story of Cheops’s daughter also embodies the kind of world making most dear to Herodotus. While Cheops’s

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pyramids have come at a great cost to his people, his daughter’s pyramid memorializes her without adding to others’ suffering, since she uses blocks that have already been quarried and transported.38 She capitalizes on a bad situation to memorialize her experience and simultaneously provides Herodotus with evidence of the past. Herodotus uses the earth- and waterworks of the world’s rulers to reflect on several dynamics: risking divine wrath versus winning immortal reward, the motivations that lead people to intervene effectively in land- and waterscapes and those that lead them to ruin, and the costs and benefits of these interventions for the ruled. Diodorus develops the last of these dynamics into a consistent principle: the best rulers undertake erga that simultaneously enhance themselves and benefit others.

benefactions Unlike Herodotus, Diodorus regularly evaluates the costs and benefits of marvelous works. The hanging gardens of Babylon were requested of an Assyrian king by a woman who missed the landscape of her Persian home and wanted the king to re-create it “with the ingenuity of a garden” (2.10.1: dia tēs tou phutourgeiou philotechnias). Diodorus comments that the gardens were very expensive (2.10.4: polutelōs), but also “entranced those beholding” them (2.10.6: tous theōmenous psychagōgēsai). The pleasure gardens (paradeisa) that the Assyrian queen Semiramis constructs, on the other hand, are located on a high plateau, which she views (apetheōrei) from an even higher vantage point, ensconced in buildings “expensive and made to satisfy her desire for luxury” (2.13.3: polutelē pros truphēn epoiēsen). Unlike the hanging gardens of Babylon, which were available to many onlookers, Semiramis designs these gardens for her sole enjoyment. Diodorus goes on to observe that she ensures her dominance in the regime, as in this place, by refusing to remarry after her husband’s death, instead having sex with a series of men who are made to disappear (2.13.4: ēphanize). This extreme

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self-interest and self-absorption mirrors Cheops’s obsession with building a pyramid and the people he sacrifices to indulge it, as described in the Histories. Diodorus’s descriptions of mining, on the other hand, showcase mutual benefactions. While the bitumen quarried in Babylonia is available “for the people to extract freely” (2.12.1: ton laon epi ton topon apheidōs aruesthai), the Nubian gold mines are worked by convicted criminals, the falsely accused, and prisoners of war.39 According to Diodorus, “much gold is acquired with much suffering and expense” (3.12.1: sunagomenou pollou pollēi kakopatheiai te kai dapanē), pollou pollēi directly contrasting the quantity of gold with the suffering it causes. Although elsewhere Diodorus uses the phrase “with much suffering and expense” and others like it to index, with some admiration, the trouble incurred to achieve greatness, it has a more poignant meaning in his detailed description of the Nubian miners’ suffering.40 Diodorus notes that the Egyptians enslave not only prisoners of war and criminals, but also those accused unjustly (adikois diabolais), and punish their families as well. Diodorus pays particular attention to these miners, describing them in unusual detail over the course of several sections. He notes the work that each age group performs as well as the gendered division of labor. This interest is technical but also illustrates his larger point that the demands of mining cause the Nubians immense pain: προσούσης δ’ ἅπασιν ἀθεραπευσίας σώματος καὶ τῆς τὴν αἰδῶ περιστελλούσης ἐσθῆτος μὴ προσούσης, οὐκ ἔστιν ὃς ἰδὼν οὐκ ἂν ἐλεήσειε τοὺς ἀκληροῦντας διὰ τὴν ὑπερβολὴν τῆς ταλαιπωρίας. Because they have no way to care for their bodies or clothing to cover their shame, there is not anyone who would see them and not pity the poor things because of their overwhelming hardship. (Diod. Sic. 3.13.2–3)

Diodorus’s ethnography of the Nubian miners becomes oddly personal, forcing readers to imagine themselves in the position of the compassionate onlooker. Readers who take this role seriously will not only pity

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the Nubians but disapprove of the Egyptians, who extract gold at such a high price to the miners. Elsewhere Diodorus seems ambivalent about the trade-off between suffering and reward. Spanish silver mines depend on forced labor (5.38) and also involve the diversion of rivers (5.37.3), but Diodorus marvels at the screws (modeled after Archimedes’s) that allow miners in Spain to remove huge amounts of water, admiring “with what little work” (5.37.4: dia tēs tuchousēs ergasias) the screws operate. The screws, which save human labor, elevate the Spanish operation above the Nubian one.41 Readers of these stories are invited to apply a cost-benefit analysis to the erga they describe, with human suffering on one side of the balance and gain on the other. Diodorus does not go so far as to argue that workers should own the means of production, but he is alert to vast inequities between owners and workers. He favors erga that benefit both ruler and ruled. Like the Spanish miners, Diodorus’s Assyrian queen Semiramis also rides the edge of the cost-benefit equation, often by redeeming projects for her sole benefit with those that benefit others: παραγενηθεῖσα δ’ εἰς Ἐκβάτανα, πόλιν ἐν πεδίῳ κειμένην, κατεσκεύασεν ἐν αὐτῇ πολυτελῆ βασίλεια καὶ τὴν ἄλλην ἐπιμέλειαν ἐποιήσατο τοῦ τόπου περιττοτέραν. ἀνύδρου γὰρ οὔσης τῆς πόλεως καὶ μηδαμοῦ σύνεγγυς ὑπαρχούσης πηγῆς, ἐποίησεν αὐτὴν πᾶσαν κατάρρυτον, ἐπαγαγοῦσα πλεῖστον καὶ κάλλιστον ὕδωρ μετὰ πολλῆς κακοπαθείας τε καὶ δαπάνης. Having arrived at Ecbatana, a city that lies in the plain, she built there an expensive (polutelē) palace and in every other way paid rather a lot of attention (epimeleian) to the region. For since the city was without water and no spring existed nearby, she made it all well-watered by providing, with great suffering and expense, the purest water in abundance. (Diod. Sic. 2.13.5)

This project causes great pain and expense but also brings much-needed resources to the region and probably cements Semiramis’s hold on it. Most important, the attention (epimeleia) she pays her own pleasure and status is matched by her strategic attention to others.

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Diodorus saves his greatest admiration for works without a downside, like the lake that King Moeris of Egypt builds, which protects Memphis from flooding and serves farmers as a reservoir (1.51.5–7). This lake, Diodorus says, is “amazing” (thaumastē) for its “usefulness” (chreia), “helpfulness to all” (koinōphelia), and “inventiveness” (epinoia). A much earlier monument, the pillars of Heracles, achieve a similar result; they are an “everlasting work” (aeimnēston ergon) that also protects people from sea monsters (4.18.5). Here too Semiramis excels. Like her late husband Ninus, Semiramis is motivated by “a desire for great deeds and an ambition to surpass the fame of her predecessor.”42 Her palace in Babylon has “an advantage” (proeiche) over the old palace, cementing her legacy, but also uses amazing figural ornamentation that “offer variegated pleasures to those who gaze on them” (2.8.7: poikilēn psychagōgian parechomena tois theōmenois). Herodotus’s descriptions of engineering projects may have brought his readers pleasure, but Diodorus makes the pleasure of gazing on marvelous works concrete and explicit by imagining an audience within the text to consume them. Whereas Herodotus provides only glimpses of the Persian point of view, Diodorus makes the Assyrian public central to his evaluation of these works.43 Diodorus also pushes readers familiar with Herodotus to reevaluate the engineering projects of the Histories, especially Xerxes’s rebuilt bridge across the Hellespont. Like Xerxes, Semiramis seems headed toward disaster when she constructs a bridge to invade India: ὁ μὲν τῶν Ἰνδῶν βασιλεὺς ἀπήγαγε τὴν δύναμιν ἀπὸ τοῦ ποταμοῦ, προσποιούμενος μὲν ἀναχωρεῖν διὰ φόβον, τῇ δ’ ἀληθείᾳ βουλόμενος τοὺς πολεμίους προτρέψασθαι διαβῆναι τὸν ποταμόν. ἡ δὲ Σεμίραμις, κατὰ νοῦν αὐτῇ τῶν πραγμάτων προχωρούντων, ἔζευξε τὸν ποταμὸν κατασκευάσασα πολυτελῆ καὶ μεγάλην γέφυραν, δι’ ἧς ἅπασαν διακομίσασα τὴν δύναμιν. The king of the Indians withdrew his force from the river, pretending to retreat out of fear, but in reality wanting to urge the enemy to cross the river. Since things were going according to her plan, Semiramis yoked the

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river by constructing a large, expensive bridge by which she got across her entire force. (Diod. Sic. 2.18.5–6)

Several elements of this story point to catastrophe: the Indians want Semiramis to cross, the bridge is “expensive,” and Semiramis is at the height of her power. Yet the bridge turns into an unexpected advantage when Semiramis decides to destroy it in the wake of her retreat. Although some of her men die in the stampede, the bridge kills an even greater number of Indians and provides Semiramis “great security” (2.19.9: pollēn asphaleian).44 This scene rewrites the drama of Herodotus book 8, in which Xerxes agonizes about whether and how to flee Greece (Hdt. 8.97) and the Greeks deliberate about whether to destroy his bridge and prevent his escape (8.109–10). Although Xerxes makes it across the bridge without Greek interference, his army has been ravaged by famine and disease (8.115) and crosses just in time; the bridge has already been damaged by another storm (8.117) and is gone by the time the Greeks arrive to destroy it (9.114). The bridge may save Xerxes’s life, but it does not prevent the Greeks’ pursuit. Instead, Xerxes’s desperate march to reach the bridge and what his men suffer along the way echo and confirm the mistake he has made in building it. While Xerxes’s bridge turns against him, Semiramis transforms her own bridge into a weapon. Diodorus celebrates Semiramis and her risk taking because he sees doing little as a greater failing than attempting too much.45 Like Herodotus, Diodorus relies on building projects for information, but he goes beyond Herodotus by imagining what it would be like for a ruler to “play it safe.” One of these less ambitious rulers is Semiramis’s son Ninyas, whose reign Diodorus calls “peaceful” (eirēnikōs, 2.21.1). This is not a compliment. While Ninyas does not undertake any wars, neither does he accomplish anything for his people. He does not even allow them to see him, too busy with “luxury and sloth and never feeling pain or anxiety.”46 Semiramis loves luxury, but she also desires glory, and this propels her to change the world in ways that leave monuments for posterity and improve the lives of her people.

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the works of the nile As I argue at the beginning of this chapter, Herodotus and Diodorus are disinclined to criticize works of engineering per se because they rely on them to craft their histories of the world. Instead, we have seen that these authors judge human intervention into land- and waterscapes individually by their motivations and effects. As I show next, both authors also represent rivers as changing the world around them and judge them by the same criteria that apply to human beings. While both authors are sensitive to whether and how rivers benefit the human community, Diodorus is again more explicit than Herodotus, noting rivers’ “benefaction” (euergesia) to human beings (Diod. Sic. 1.36.2). The most prominent nonhuman actor in both Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s histories is the Nile, a river with a long hold on the Greek and Roman imagination.47 As Herodotus says at the beginning of book 2: Δῆλα γὰρ δὴ καὶ μὴ προακούσαντι, ἰδόντι δέ, ὅστις γε σύνεσιν ἔχει, ὅτι Αἴγυπτος ἐς τὴν Ἕλληνες ναυτίλλονται ἐστὶ Αἰγυπτίοισι ἐπίκτητός τε γῆ καὶ δῶρον τοῦ ποταμοῦ. It is clear even to one who has not heard [the Egyptian account] before, but sees for themselves (if they have any sense) that the “Egypt” to which the Greeks sail is land acquired (epiktētos) for the Egyptians and a gift (dōron) of the river. (Hdt. 2.5)48 αύτης ὦν τῆς χώρης τῆς εἰρημένης ἡ πολλή, κατά περ οἱ ἱρέες ἔλεγον, ἐδόκεε καὶ αὐτῷ μοι εἶναι ἐπίκτητος Αἰγυπτίοισι. The majority of the land I have spoken about seems to me to be an additional acquisition (epiktētos) for the Egyptians, just as the priests say. (Hdt. 2.10.1)

This language of gift giving characterizes the Nile as a benefactor who has made Egypt for the Egyptians. “What was given from the river to the land and the land to the people” is correlated with the Egyptians’ periods of greatest fortune.49 In these passages, Herodotus points out

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that the land the Greeks take for granted as “Egypt” has a history. Although the Egyptians are elsewhere known as one of the oldest societies on Earth (2.2), and Herodotus is often criticized for representing them as static, his portrait of Egypt is a land that has changed under the Nile’s direction.50 The Nile’s actions in Egypt also illustrate the temporal dimension of physis and what Greek writers consider “natural.” Human action often succeeds the actions of other beings, like rivers; for example, as we saw earlier, Herodotus says that some of the Nile’s mouths have been “dug” (orukta) by humans, while others are “original” (ithagenea, 2.17.6), that is, dug by nonhuman forces. But the Nile has given land to Egypt that is epiktētos, “acquired in addition,” which posits an “Egypt” that predates the Nile’s actions. There is an “original” pre-Nilotic Egypt, just as the Nile had “original” prehuman mouths.51 A parallel passage in the Histories reveals additional connotations of epiktētos. In book 7, the Spartan king Demaratus explains that in Sparta, poverty is “native” (suntrophos), while valor is “acquired” (epaktos) through wisdom and law (7.102.1). Rosalind Thomas argues that Demaratus uses suntrophos and epaktos to contrast the effects of the Spartans’ physical environment with their cultural response.52 But set against the actions of the Nile, we should not understand this difference between physical environment and culture as a static division between preset, nonhuman nature and reactive, human society. Rivers are also capable of reacting to the world and remaking it as they see fit. Since Herodotus says that the flow of the Nile is “different in nature” (2.35.2: physin alloiēn)—presumably different from other rivers—and “contrary in nature” (2.19.3: empalin pephukenai), we might assume that its actions are unique. But Herodotus elsewhere clarifies that other rivers give gifts as well: τῶν γὰρ ταῦτα τὰ χωρία προσχωσάντων ποταμῶν ἑνὶ τῶν στομάτων τοῦ Νείλου, ἑόντος πενταστόμου, οὐδεὶς αὐτῶν πλήθεος πέρι ἄξιος συμβληθῆναί ἐστι. Εἰσὶ δὲ καὶ ἄλλοι ποταμοί, οὐ κατὰ τὸν Νεῖλον ἐόντες

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μεγάθεα, οἵτινες ἔργα ἀποδεξάμενοι μεγάλα εἰσί· τῶν ἐγὼ φράσαι ἔχω οὐνόματα καὶ ἄλλων καὶ οὐκ ἥκιστα Ἀχελῴου, ὃς ῥέων δι’ Ἀκαρνανίης καὶ ἐξιεὶς ἐς θάλασσαν τῶν Ἐχινάδων νήσων τὰς ἡμισέας ἤδη ἤπειρον πεποίκε. Of the rivers that have deposited these lands, none is worthy of being compared for greatness with even one of the mouths of the Nile, which has five. But there are other rivers, none as enormous as the Nile, which have displayed great works (erga apodexamenoi megala). I could recite the names of others, but not least of these is the Achelōos, which flowing through Akarnania and terminating in the sea has already made half of the Echinades islands into mainland. (Hdt. 2.10.2–3)

While the Nile is preeminent in its benefaction, rivers characteristically act on and create the lands that Greeks are used to taking for granted. This process is ongoing and, Herodotus argues, historically significant. By calling the actions of even these minor rivers erga megala, Herodotus ties them explicitly to the erga megala he sets out to record in the proem and correlates the “displays” (1.1: apodechthenta; 2.10: apodexamenoi) of both humans and rivers. Rivers are agents who can “will” (2.11: ethelēsei) and “work hard” (2.11: ergatikou), and whose erga are worthy of the historian’s attention.53 In Diodorus, the Nile has even greater powers. Diodorus’s Egyptian informants say: κατὰ τὴν ἐξ ἀρχῆς τῶν ὅλων γένεσιν πρώτους ἀνθρώπους γενέσθαι κατὰ τὴν Αἴγυπτον διά τε τὴν εὐκρασίαν τῆς χώρας καὶ διὰ τὴν φύσιν τοῦ Νείλου. τοῦτον γὰρ πολύγονον ὄντα καὶ τὰς τροφὰς αὐτοφυεῖς παρεχόμενον ῥᾳδίως ἐκτρέφειν τὰ ζωογονηθέντα· τήν τε γὰρ τοῦ καλάμου ῥίζαν καὶ τὸν λωτόν, ἔτι δὲ τὸν Αἰγύπτιον κύαμον καὶ τὸ καλούμενον κορσαῖον καὶ πολλὰ τοιαῦθ’ ἕτερα τροφὴν ἑτοίμην παρέχεσθαι τῷ γένει. In the beginning, during the creation of the universe, human beings first came into existence in Egypt because of the mildness and nature (physis) of the Nile. For being very productive and providing nourishment on its own, it easily supported the creatures that had come to be. For the root of the reed and the lotus, and the Egyptian bean and the korsaion, as it is

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called, and many other plants such as these provide nourishment to the race of human beings. (Diod. Sic. 1.10.1)

This passage ties human beings to other animals and elevates the importance of the Nile to human life. Building on the Egyptians’ cosmology, Diodorus puts the Nile in parallel with human heroes, like Isis, Osiris, and Heracles, later immortalized for their great gifts to humankind. The Nile, Diodorus says, “in general surpasses all other rivers in the world in providing benefits to human beings.”54 Like human rulers in the Library, Diodorus’s rivers compete with one another in benefaction and surpass those that, as we have seen, extract human labor without providing sufficient reward.55 As one of the best benefactors, the Nile provides both “ease in toil” (tois men ergois eukopian) and “profit” (1.36.4: lusiteleian). Yet like a human being, the Nile can also make mistakes. Although the land the Nile provides and irrigates is a great gift, Herodotus observes that this very beneficence may one day be the Egyptians’ undoing: Εἴ σφι θέλοι, ὡς καὶ πρότερον εἶπον, ἡ χώρη ἡ ἔνερθε Μέμφιος (αὕτη γάρ ἐστι ἡ αὐξανομένη) κατὰ λόγον τοῦ παροιχομένου χρόνου ἐς ὕψος αὐξάνεσθαι, ἄλλο τι ἢ οἱ ταύτῃ οἰκέοντες Αἰγυπτίων πεινήσουσι, εἰ μήτε γε ὕσεταί σφι ἡ χώρη μήτε ὁ ποταμὸς οἷός τε ἔσται ἐς τὰς ἀρούρας ὑπερβαίνειν. If, as I have said before, the land below Memphis (which is now increasing) should rise at the same rate as in the past, how could those living in Egypt not starve, provided that the land is not watered by rain nor the river able to irrigate the fields? (Hdt. 2.14)

The Nile’s best feature, its ability to provide land and irrigate it, will one day (Herodotus surmises) lead the Nile to create more land than it can water, causing drought and famine. Unlike animals in the Histories, rivers are not automatically regulated by the gods (7.10, 3.108).56 Instead, they are judged by their effects on the human community; human well-being determines whether the Nile has crossed natural boundaries.

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When rivers transgress, human beings are responsible for taming their excesses. Min, Egypt’s first king, dams and diverts the Nile to protect Memphis from being overwatered (Hdt. 2.99). When the river “steals” (Hdt. 2.109.2: pareloito; cf. Diod. Sic. 1.81.2) someone’s allotted land, the Egyptians respond by inventing the art of land surveying (Hdt. 2.109.3: geōmetriē). Should the Nile create more land than it can irrigate, as Herodotus fears, perhaps a ruler will build erga to keep the Nile within bounds. Diodorus reports this very eventuality: Uchoreus, Egyptian king and founder of Memphis, builds lakes and mounds to protect the people and their livestock from the Nile’s floods (1.50.5) and digs canals to increase the Nile’s “usefulness” (1.63.1: euchrēstian). There is no neutral “background” in which only human beings “artificially” intervene. Instead, the tug of war between humans and the Nile is ongoing, producing works upon works for the historian and the human community. Both Herodotus and Diodorus highlight rivers, especially the Nile, in their accounts of the making of the world. In one sense, this is not surprising. The Greeks considered rivers divine, although evidence for cult activity is scarce.57 As Brooke Holmes has shown, the river Scamander in Homer’s Iliad is a powerful force, a model to which Herodotus and Diodorus may have looked in their representations of the Nile. Egyptian informants also may have shaped Greek writers’ understanding of rivers.58 Until Roman conquest, the Egyptians did not worship the river itself but rather its inundation, Hapi.59 In Egyptian theology, human kings joined Hapi in the regular re-creation of the world by building temples, which represented earth.60 Although primordial waters are common images in world cultures, kings’ and the Nile’s ongoing participation in creation offered Herodotus and Diodorus a model for describing how humans and rivers interact.61 Egyptian texts like the Hymn to the Nile, in circulation at least by the New Kingdom period (1550–1069 BCE), credit the river with both Egypt’s natural abundance and cultural achievements.62 Without Hapi, the god of the Nile flood, there are

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No raw goods for finishing handwork, no cloth for fashioning clothes, No decking out offspring of rich men, no shadowing beautiful eyes, For lack of him, the trees all in ruins —no perfumes to linger on anyone. (9.7–12)63

Egyptian texts emphasize that the Nile could be both creative and destructive, and that it was the job of the king, as the enforcer of Ma’at, the principle of order, to regulate the Nile on behalf of the Egyptian people.64 Kings commonly commemorated their role in opening canals and their nilometers, devices for measuring the Nile floods, were famous in Greece and Rome.65 Kings were responsible for rebuilding if the Nile floods damaged Egyptian settlements, and they claimed to turn the destructive power of the Nile against Egypt’s enemies.66 Sometimes the destruction could not be overcome; when the Nile’s Pelusiac branch filled with silt, the capital city of the nineteenth dynasty (1292– 1189 BCE), Pi-Ramesse, had to be permanently abandoned.67 The Egyptian sources that Herodotus and Diodorus drew upon lived with the Nile’s annual gift as well as its potential for violence. Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s texts reflect a portrait of royal and Nilotic action consistent with what we find in Egyptian literature. Like Egyptian texts, the Histories and Library document the ongoing process of creation as it is carried out by rulers and rivers; indeed, in both Greek and Egyptian texts it is often the ruler’s job to keep rivers in line. The process of creation is neither pregiven nor a pure cultural construct. Instead, both Nile and king make the world and are judged by how their actions benefit the Egyptian people.

how boundaries come to matter Although Herodotus and Diodorus do not present humans intervening artificially in an otherwise fixed landscape, neither are their worlds constantly in flux. Rulers and rivers take concrete actions that remake

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the world, which persists until it is remade again. When Greek historians document erga, they reveal and document the flexibility of the world’s land- and waterscapes and simultaneously create a stable world, fixed at the time of writing or performance, for their readers to apprehend.68 In particular, by freighting certain boundaries with narrative meaning, they materialize these boundaries as fixed and “natural,” and their transgression, for example, Xerxes’s bridge across the Hellespont, as unnatural. And because different historians see the world differently and draw on different erga, their histories result in different demarcations of the “natural.” We can see how different boundaries materialize in Herodotus’s account of his predecessors and how they divide the world.69 In Herodotus’s text, the borders between continents are a matter of debate, and he takes time to critique the Ionian Greek division of the world into Europe, Asia, and Libya, with the Nile dividing Libya from Asia (2.16). This schema is absurd, Herodotus argues, because it leaves Egypt split between continents. Instead, he claims that Libya and Asia are divided by “the boundaries of the Egyptians” (2.17.1: tous Aiguptiōn orous), and that Egypt is all the land “inhabited by the Egyptians” (2.17.1: hupo tōn Aiguptiōn). Herodotus returns to this critique in book 4, disparaging the Ionians threefold division of continents and asserting instead that the earth is “one” (4.45.2: miēi), but concluding that he will abide by their “conventions” (4.45.5: toisi . . . nomizomenoisi). This critique, especially in book 4, has led scholars to conclude that Herodotus considers continental divisions “mere” conventions that bind him against his will.70 While Herodotus is certainly troubled by the process that has led to the threefold division, and especially the naming of continents, he nevertheless asserts his own definition of continental borders. In book 2, he says that the “borders of the Egyptians” divide Egypt from the other continents, defining nations by the people who inhabit them. Yet we also know, from his description of the Nile’s activity, that the human population of Egypt depends on the Nile’s extent and the gift of the earth that it provides and irrigates (2.11).

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The borders of the Egyptians define Egypt, but the Nile has shaped how far the Egyptians extend. Neither human convention nor riverine agency has made Egypt on its own.71 Instead, Herodotus’s inquiry (historia) materializes Egypt as a flexible cocreation of the Nile and the Egyptian people. The relationship between historia and erga accords with Karen Barad’s philosophy, which explains how different accounts of the world demarcate boundaries between objects. One of Barad’s most famous examples is a fetus as it is being imaged by ultrasound. Whereas we are used to speaking of the fetus as an object separate from the pregnant body and the ultrasound that sees it, Barad argues that fetus and ultrasound are an inextricable phenomenon. By seeing the fetus through the apparatus of the ultrasound, the fetus emerges as an object with boundaries that can be demarcated from the rest of the pregnant body. As Barad says, “The transducer does not allow us to peer innocently at the fetus, nor does it simply offer constraints on what we can see; rather, it helps produce and is ‘part of’ the body it images.”72 For Herodotus and Barad, agencies of observation, including the practice of history, are inextricable from the world they would seem to “peer innocently” at. If there is no longer a world that we see and know from a distance, but rather one whose borders come into being through our interaction with and observation of them, then, as Barad argues, humans are much more accountable to the rest of the universe than we have usually realized. Because we make the world we seek to know, every act of knowledge making is also an ethical act. When the transducer “sees” the fetus, it separates the fetus from surrounding tissue and renders that tissue mere background. This can lead to the humanization of fetuses and the dehumanization of pregnant people, two morally weighty outcomes. When Herodotus documents Xerxes’s bridge across the Hellespont and gives it a “negative moral charge,” he naturalizes the boundary between Europe and Asia and casts the manner in which Xerxes yokes the continents as a transgression.73 On the other hand, when we learn from Diodorus that Semiramis’s huge and expensive bridge, so

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similar to Xerxes’s, ensures her salvation, the border between India and Assyria “matters” less, in both senses of the word: it is less significant and less real.74 Both Herodotus and Diodorus are fundamentally interested not in a given geographical morality but in the emerging accountability of rulers, rivers, and other beings to the worlds they make.75 If the world can be made and remade, then human interventions must be measured by some other standard than a fixed sense of the natural. As we have seen, Herodotus and especially Diodorus do not conclude that humans (and others) can therefore intervene in the world however they wish; rather, they evaluate erga by their benefit to human beings. This is how they hold the agencies of the world accountable to the worlds they make. But Barad would say, and I agree, that Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s standard is insufficient. The more humans see ourselves as cocreators with other beings, the more we realize our interdependence with those beings, the more we should understand that their benefit and ours cannot be easily separated. If the Nile has given human beings gifts, humans should provide for the other creatures of the Nile. Hints of such reciprocal relationships are explored in chapters 4 and 5. This chapter has considered the role of historia and erga in the production of continents, countries, monuments, and transgressions, especially in Herodotus’s Histories. Chapter 3 turns to the boundaries of another set of categories: men versus women and humans versus animals. And now it is Diodorus’s turn to shine, for while Herodotus takes these divisions more or less for granted, Diodorus demonstrates their contingency and the role of women in remaking them.

chapter three

Female Feck

Unlike the boundaries of continents and landscapes, the borders of sex and species may seem much more solid, at least in ancient Greek thought. Greek writers, including Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, employ a consistent vocabulary to differentiate “women” (gunaikes) from “men” (andres) and “humans” (anthrōpoi) from other animals (ktēnea, thēria). But Greek concepts of sex, gender, and species are surprisingly complex.1 As demonstrated in this chapter, Herodotus and Diodorus are more invested in the boundaries between types of bodies than they are in the distinction between geographical boundaries. But where these bodily boundaries come into question—at the edges of the Greek world—new relationships between men and women and between humans and other animals become possible. It is no coincidence that foreign women are the catalyst for questioning the distinctions between these potent categories. Intersectional analyses, which consider how the many aspects of one’s identity and culture affect experience, including the experience of oppression, have also shed light on how people with multiply marginal identities (women of color, for example) uniquely prompt and effect social change, including environmental change.2 From their experience at the nexus of social

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and natural categories, foreign women in Greek ethnography develop new knowledge that can overturn seemingly natural categories. The foreign women who rewrite categories in the Histories and Library allow us to see how sex and gender equality is connected to environmental justice, since the logic that subordinates women to men also underwrites the idea of humans as superior to other animals. For example, the philosopher Thales is supposed to have given thanks every day that he had been born human, male, and Greek, rather than a beast, female, or a “barbarian.”3 More casually, Greek writers also refer to women in animal terms, including Homer’s bitchy Helen (Il. 6.344); Hesiod’s Pandora with her doggish mind (WD 67); and Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra, standing over her victims like a crow (Ag. 1473). These characterizations imply that women are less human than men and that humanity is a higher order than other animals, naturalizing the exploitation of women and nonhuman animals simultaneously. This chapter has three movements. In the first, I explore sex/gender and species variance in Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, positioning them against the background just described. As discussed in chapter 2, the boundary between normative and transgressive is enacted rather than essential; it is historians whose investigation of female characters materializes sex/gender and species categories. In the second movement, I argue that Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s female characters, like the rulers and rivers of chapter 2, are historical agents, altering families, bloodlines, and even the boundaries of empire. Women also remake their worlds by acting as a natural resource passed among men in societies that practice “sex in common” (mixis epikoinos). Finally, the chapter ends with Semiramis, the Babylonian queen encountered briefly in chapter 2. Contrary to Herodotus, who represents sex/gender variance as a sign of divine displeasure, Diodorus celebrates Semiramis for rewriting gender norms and producing giant elephant devices that couple human, animal, and plant materials. Semiramis is able to remake her world by virtue of the knowledge she possesses as an outsider to elite male society.

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sex/gender variance As Lesley Dean-Jones, Brooke Holmes, and Helen King have shown, Greek writers documented sudden changes to the sexed body that could in turn shift a person’s gender role.4 The story of Phaethousa and Nanno, whose bodies “masculinized and became hairy all over” (Hippocrates Ep. 6.8.32: sōma ētndrōthē kai edasunthē panta), is illustrative. From the Hippocratic perspective, Phaethousa and Nanno did not become men but lost their grip on the female sex.5 In Greek models of sex/gender, women are sometimes described as a separate species (genos, in Hesiod); sometimes as underdeveloped men (Aristotle); and sometimes, as in the Hippocratic corpus, as part of a spectrum of sex/ gender differences.6 Greek writers agree on the superiority of male bodies and manly practices while debating what material-discursive forces produce differently sexed and gendered beings. Like writers in other genres, Herodotus investigates women’s bodies to understand and reaffirm the distinction between men and women. Although famous for his prominent female characters, many of whom possess typically masculine attributes and roles, his text is also invested in a sex/gender binary (male vs. female) endorsed by the gods.7 For example, Aphrodite afflicts Scythian men and their descendants with the “female disease” (1.105.4: thēlean nouson), which they pass on to their descendants.8 Although Herodotus does not explain what this disease entails, its very name pathologizes sex/gender instability.9 Athena too communicates with humans by altering how their bodies can be classified. “Whenever something terrible (anapitēdeion) was about to happen to them or their neighbors the priestess of Athena grew a big beard” (1.175).10 This bearded woman is a disaster analogous to the disaster she announces. Although human behaviors in the Histories travel along a continuum of masculinity and femininity, bodies are clearly sexed and gendered, and the gods express their displeasure or signify impending doom by speaking to human beings in the language of a bodily male-female binary.

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Like the gods, Herodotus’s men are invested in proper sex/gender performance, especially their wives’ fidelity. Men guarantee this fidelity by looking for signs of sexual impurity or disloyalty in the world around them. The virgins (parthenoi) of the Auseans, for example, fight one another every year in honor of Athena. Only the pseudo-virgins (pseudoparthenoi) die (4.180). Among the Auseans, sexual purity is manifested in the body’s martial strength. A similar story locates a woman’s sexual fidelity in the interaction between her body and her husband’s. To regain his sight after insulting a river, the Egyptian king Sesostris is told that he must wash his eyes with the urine of a woman “who has had sex only with her own husband, not knowing (apeiros) any other man.”11 Finding his own wife wanting, Sesostris burns her alive along with others who fail his test (peirasthai), until he finally finds and marries a woman whose urine proves effective (2.111.4). Although Herodotus does not comment on Sesostris’s action, the fact that women’s power resides in their sexual purity seems to endorse it. Women are not allowed to “test out” (apeiros) other men, even though Sesostris is rewarded for “testing” (peirasthai) them. The future wife left standing is defined by her pure body and its effect on her husband. Like Sesostris, Amasis, another Egyptian king, thinks he knows his wife’s allegiance by his own body’s response. Whenever Amasis lay down with Ladice, his new wife from Cyrene, “he was unable to have sex, although he could with every other one of his wives.”12 Amasis accuses Ladice of sorcery (epharmaxas) and threatens her with death, but she is saved by a quick prayer to Aphrodite and promises to make a future dedication. Amasis, like Sesostris, blames his wife for his ailment. As Greek readers would expect, obedience is key to how Sesostris and Amasis define their wives. More interestingly, it is the husbands’ bodies that seem to men to manifest their wives’ allegiance (or lack thereof). Sesostris’s and Amasis’s actions argue that a man knows a wife best not by observing her actions, which can be hidden, or even by

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observing her body, as the Auseans observe their fighting parthenoi, but by waiting for her to affect his own body. In other words, wifehood—to which womanhood is often reduced—comes into being at the juncture of a woman’s actions and her husband’s body. Sesostris and Amasis interact with their wives’ hidden actions (and in Sesostris’s case, his wife’s urine as well) to measure their wives’ obedience to them.13 Though the Histories divide humans and other animals into males and females, these marvelous stories of sexual transgression reveal the inner workings of the divide and probe its borders. In Diodorus’s Library, manliness is used in a similar way to test out the borders of maleness and femaleness.14 Diodorus celebrates masculine women but denigrates feminine men, allowing them much less scope for gender performance.15 Unlike Herodotus, Diodorus reports cases of intersexed people, those with a “mixed” nature, although he is not sure he believes them (4.6.5; cf. 3.28.1). Yet Diodorus saves his greatest admiration in the first part of the Library for a woman, Semiramis, who troubles the sex/gender binary as well as distinctions between species.16 As discussed in chapter 2, boundaries and borders between continents were not taken as natural but marked by their benefits or disadvantages to human beings, and Diodorus similarly evaluates sex/gender variance by its effects on the larger community. The most famous feminine man Diodorus describes is the Assyrian king Sardanapallus, despised by an onlooker for his “luxury and longing for womanly pursuits,” which include wearing women’s clothes and makeup and employing a womanly voice (phōnēn gynaikōdē), as well as spinning wool and spending time with women (2.23.1).17 Sardanapallus not only weaves as a Greek woman would be expected to but chooses to work the most feminine cloth possible, dyed with expensive purple and made of the “softest” (malakōtata) wool (2.23.1). Diodorus comments that Sardanapallus is so devoted to cosmetics that he tricks out his face “more delicately than any luxurious woman” (2.23.1: hapalōteron pasēs gynaikos trupheras). Diodorus is especially offended

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by Sardanapallus’s sexual appetite, which he indulges with both men and women “without restraint” (2.23.2: anedēn). His way of life is notable for its “luxury and idleness” (2.23.1: tryphē kai rathumia), which Diodorus associates with inaccessibility; he says that the king was never “seen by anyone outside” the palace (2.23.1: tou mēd’ hyph’ henos tōn exōthen horasthai). On the surface, Sardanapallus looks like a stereotypically “effeminate” Eastern ruler, although feminine luxury, as Robert Gorman and Vanessa Gorman have noted, is not the direct cause of his downfall. Medes and Persians who witness his behavior are encouraged to pursue their conspiracy against him, but their motivations and ultimate success are unrelated to Sardanapallus’s private pursuits.18 Nevertheless, Diodorus links two other qualities to his ultimate defeat—idleness and inaccessibility—and in the context of Sardanapallus’s broader story we should understand these as feminine failings. Since elite Greek women were usually confined to the home and prohibited from performing most kinds of work, idleness and seclusion, like luxury, were qualities often associated with women. Sardanapallus, who is marked so strongly as feminine, performs luxury, idleness, and inaccessibility in a feminine way.19 Sardanapallus’s war with the rebels is long and complicated, but an important turning point occurs when he decides to retreat to the palace and “remain hopeful, thinking he would endure the siege and await the troops sent by his subjects.”20 We are not told whether these troops materialize, but Sardanapallus seems foolish to expect that they will, given how he has cut himself off from his people. The rebels, on the other hand, are able to challenge and ultimately defeat the great Assyrian empire by forging alliances. Arbaces and Belesys, the ringleaders, “united with the leaders of the other nations and zealously invited them all to banquets and common gatherings, building friendship with each of them.”21 Sardanapallus, whether devoted to his desires or holed up against a siege waiting for help from subordinates, is the polar opposite of Arbaces and Belesys, who rely on face-to-face contact between equals

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to form personal relationships. In Diodorus’s account of Sardanapallus, femininity is linked to defeat, but not through luxury. Rather, Diodorus demonstrates that feminine pursuits are disastrous for rulers because they generate or reinforce the desire for idleness and seclusion, both of which are inimical to strong relationships with potential allies and one’s people. Diodorus devotes another section of book 2 to masculine women, Amazons, Scythians, and human Gorgons.22 Through these communities of women, Diodorus explores the limits of sex/gender variance, admiring masculine women as long as they do not feminize men. Before Diodorus, Herodotus had presented communities of warrior women in neutral terms. His story of the Amazons, who ultimately incorporate Scythian men into their community, inverts some typical features of Greek sex/gender norms (4.114; cf. 2.35), but Herodotus does not express admiration (as Diodorus does) for their strength or way of life.23 The first warrior women Diodorus describes are the Scythians, whose rulers are “notable for their might” (alkēn diapherousai). This quality is not inborn, Diodorus notes, but cultivated through egalitarian training in war, as a result of which they “do not at all fall short of the men in their acts of courage” (tais andreiais ouden leipontai tōn andrōn) and are themselves doers of “great deeds” (2.44.1: megalai praxeis).24 While Walter Penrose has convincingly argued that andreia, “courage,” is attributed to both men and women in the Hellenistic period, Diodorus retains this word’s masculine overtones by pairing it with a cognate in the phrase tōn andrōn.25 Andreia is also what distinguishes the Amazons, the next community of women Diodorus describes (2.44.2). Diodorus’s representation of the Amazons is mixed. Whereas his Scythians employ an egalitarian system of training, the first Amazonian queen enforces matriarchy (2.45.1: gynaikokratoumenou) by disabling men and confining them inside the home (2.45.2–3).26 Diodorus does not value “women’s work,” whoever accomplishes it, going so far as to say that the Amazonian men

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have been afflicted with “humiliation and enslavement” (tapenōsin kai douleian).27 Diodorus’s Amazons have enforced this “reversal” by modifying their bodies: they disable the men to keep them indoors and remove one of the women’s breasts to (presumably) make shooting easier (2.45.3; cf. 3.53). Diodorus does not evaluate this body modification, but his pragmatism elsewhere (in judging works of engineering, for example) encourages readers to evaluate this custom by its effects. Disabling the men makes them “useless” (achrēstous, 2.45.3) for war; the women’s breast surgery, on the other hand, seems to enhance their might.28 Diodorus also traces the Amazons’ weakening over time (2.46.6: asthenēsai), a theme to which he returns in his discussion of the Gorgons, the Amazons’ foes. These human Gorgons, “rationalized” versions of mythic female monsters, are weakened by Perseus and then exterminated, along with the Amazons, by Heracles, “thinking it would be an awful thing if he suffered any people (ethnos) to be ruled by women, given that he had decided to be the equal benefactor of the whole race (genos) of human beings.”29 Yet elsewhere Diodorus admires these communities of women, commenting that they were “a cause of great wonder because of their courage” (tethaumasmena megalōs ep’ andreiai) and that the Gorgons, like the Amazons in book 2, were “remarkable for their strength” (alkē diaferon): τὸ γὰρ τὸν Διὸς μὲν υἱόν, τῶν δὲ καθ᾽ ἑαυτὸν ῾Ελλήνων ἄριστον, τελέσαι μέγιστον ἆθλον τὴν ἐπὶ ταύτας στρατείαν τεκμήριον ἄν τις λάβοι τῆς περὶ τὰς προειρημένας γυναῖκας ὑπεροχῆς τε καὶ δυνάμεως· ἥ τε τῶν νῦν μελλουσῶν ἱστορεῖσθαι ἀνδρεία παράδοξον ἔχει τὴν ὑπεροχὴν πρὸς τὰς καθ᾽ ἡμᾶς φύσεις τῶν γυναικῶν συγκρινομένη. For the fact that the son of Zeus, the best of the Greeks of his day, completed the war against these women [the Gorgons] as his greatest labor, anyone would consider proof of their superiority and power. And indeed the courage (andreai) of the women we are about to inquire into [the Amazons] conveys their amazing superiority, judged against the nature of women in our own day. (Diod. Sic. 3.52.4)

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Particularly striking is his comparison between the Amazons and the inferior women “of our own day.” As Michèle Rosellini and Suzanne Saïd have noted, Diodorus’s ethnographies evoke fears of gynecocracy, the rule of women, but this fear is limited to customs that feminize men.30 Diodorus admires female rulers who go to war, extend empire, and train other women for war but do not threaten men’s participation in these same activities. In particular, he celebrates Semiramis, the Assyrian wife and successor of king Ninus, whose exploits are discussed at the end of this chapter.

ethnicity and animality As with sex/gender distinctions, Herodotus and Diodorus both assume a divide between humans and other animals and track its dissolution, often through the interaction of animals with non-Greeks. After Darius and his comrades kill a usurper of the Persian throne and reaffirm monarchy as the Persian form of government, they decide that the man whose horse first neighs at sunrise will be king (Hdt. 3.84.3).31 But Darius’s wise (sophos) groom, Oebares, ensures that Darius’s horse wins what is supposed to be a divinely guided lottery. In one version of the story, Oebares brings a mare to Darius’s horse and allows him to mount (ocheusi) her (3.85.3). In another version, Oebares rubs his hand on the mare’s vulva and then puts his hand under the nose of Darius’s horse (3.85.4). As Deborah Boedeker observes, the role the mare plays in this story reveals that “erotic attraction compels males” even when the foreign female involved is nonhuman.32 This story uses animal bodies in another land to affirm the universal truth of female “seductiveness.” Many Greek writers including Herodotus strongly characterize nonGreeks as animals.33 Herodotus describes werewolf Neurians (4.105) and Ethiopians who “squeak like bats” (4.183.4: tetrigasi kata per hai nukterides). Non-Greeks in the Histories also perform animality by mistreating human beings; several Scythians and Medes repeat a tragic

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trope by serving people up as cooked animals to their enemies (1.73, 1.119), and other non-Greeks contravene the Greek taboo against corpse abuse.34 Scholars have interpreted these characterizations as dehumanizing.35 In these moments, Herodotus also probes the connections between humans and other animals. This connection is often explored through stories about sexuality and generation. When the oracle at Delphi describes Cyrus as a mule (1.55) because his mother is Median and his father is Persian (1.91), she analogizes ethnic and animal hybridity.36 After explaining that the Egyptians do not sacrifice goats, Herodotus reports that in his own time “a human woman had sex with a goat in the open” (2.46: gynaiki tragos emisgeto anaphandon), linking the reverence for goats in ritual with this sexual mixing of the species. It is foreign women to whom Herodotus attributes the richest stories of animality. Cyrus’s mother, “Bitch” (Cyno), is transformed into a dog in later stories (1.122); the women of Dodona are interpreted as doves because their speech sounds like the singing of doves (2.57); and the Scythians say that their progenitors were Heracles and a “doubleformed half-woman snake” (4.9: mixoparthenon tina echidnan diphyea). Mycerinus, the king of Egypt, buries his daughter in a gilded, cow-shaped tomb, wanting to inter her in a “fabulous” fashion (2.130: perissoteron). Others—although Herodotus does not believe them— claim that she died by suicide after Mycerinus raped her (2.131); in this version, an animal tomb may particularly befit a woman whose body mixed “unnaturally” with her father’s. Herodotus does not credit these stories, emphasizing again and again the ritual and procreational differences between humans and animals (2.45; 2.64). He disapproves when humans do not respect the differences between themselves and other animals, and when people claim that they have animal or hybrid ancestors, he dismisses these ideas. The mixing of species in the Histories, like the mixing of sex/gender, is usually a bad omen. The Lydian king Croesus tests the Delphic oracle

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before committing himself to its advice, asking the Pythia to predict when he cooks lamb and tortoise together, something “impossible to discover or even to imagine” (1.48: amēchanon exeurein te kai epiphrasasthai). Only the oracle can discover or imagine such a bizarre combination of species, just as only divine forces can manifest or inflict the mixing of sex/gender categories (1.105.4, 1.175). Similarly, Xerxes’s doomed invasion of Greece is accompanied by two portents: a horse who gives birth to a hare and a donkey born with both male and female genitalia (7.57). Although Herodotus reads the first portent allegorically and does not comment on the second, these mixed species and mixed sexes foreshadow Xerxes’s doom.37 Diodorus Siculus presents more significant transgressions of the human-animal divide. Although he explains the “double-formed” (diphous) Athenian king Cecrops as a man with “dual citizenship” (1.28.7: duoin politeiōn) rather than human and animal body parts, he seems less suspicious of the half-snake ancestor of the Scythians (2.43.3). Diodorus also describes and admires several “double-formed animals” (2.50.3: zōia diphyē,), including camel-birds, camel-leopards, and goatdeer (2.50–51), “animal species of double-shape which have a nature combined from very different sources.”38 Libya, in which camel-birds and other hybrids reside, produces “beautiful animals of varied color” and “every kind” (2.51.3–4: poikilōn eti de kalōn zōiōn . . . pantodapōn; cf. 5.43.2).39 The aesthetic pleasure Diodorus takes in variety—the variety of animals, the variety of their coloring—helps to explain his belief in and appreciation for animal and human-animal hybrids.40 As demonstrated in the first part of this chapter, both Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus show “natural” categories in the making: the distinction between men and women and between humans and other animals. In these stories, women’s bodies are often sites for sex/gender and species variance. Next I consider women as historical agents, showing how they make and remake the world around them by materializing social institutions, especially the family and the empire.

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the question of agency Scholars have shown intense interest in Herodotus’s female characters, noting that his women have an “often paramount role in determining what happens.” 41 In the opening book of the Histories, for example, the Lydian king Candaules displays his wife’s naked body to his servant, Gyges, against his wife’s will. When she finds out, she gives Gyges a choice: he can die, or he can join her in overthrowing Candaules. He chooses the latter (1.8–12). At the same time, there is great debate about what actions such as these signify. Are Herodotus’s women “vengeful queens symbolic of passion” and social upset? 42 Or do they mostly act to reinforce social norms? 43 John Gould is right that women’s actions in Herodotus cannot be reduced to a “single formula”—this, even more than their prominence in the Histories, marks Herodotus’s achievement.44 But there are more fundamental barriers to understanding his female characters. Scholars of Herodotus have tended to assume a set of pregiven cultural norms, like family loyalty, which women either reinforce or transgress. In what follows, I explore how women constantly make customs that other characters either uphold as normative or reject as transgressive. As illustrated in chapter 2, the boundary between normative and transgressive is enacted rather than essential; it is historians whose investigation of female characters materializes their actions, like the sex/gender and species categories previously mentioned, and naturalizes them. Scholars have also tended to characterize female characters as either “active” or “passive.” 45 We want to know what women intend and whether their intentions are successful; we want to know whether women have agency so that we can decide whether they have power. Like past scholars, I am interested in female characters’ power, but I try to get beyond the question of whether female characters are “active” or “passive” by focusing on the effects they have in the world. Is an agency dependent on effects rather than intentions equivalent to existence, as Timothy Ingold has suggested? 46 Perhaps so. But existence

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here is, in Bruno Latour’s formulation, a matter of “making some difference to a state of affairs.” 47 So as to reserve agency for differences intentionally made, I have decided to call this quality feck, a kind of effectiveness that fucks with the world. In what follows, I trace female feck, female characters’ spheres of action and the differences they make. My approach in this chapter builds on Alexandre Tourraix’s claim that women in Herodotus have “the role of mediatrix of power” (le rôle de médiatrice du pouvoir) and Deborah Boedeker’s study of sex and gender relations as a driving force in the Histories.48 Like Boedeker, I see women in the Histories (and the Library) as actors who transcend the passivity others expect of them, but I extend their power beyond their minds and wills to the material of their bodies. This material is not the inert ground upon which women exercise will or against which men define them, nor is it the passive medium of other people’s power. Women’s bodies are often manipulated by women’s wills and deployed by men for their own advantage, but women cannot be reduced to this deployment; they have a capacity to influence the world that transcends their or others’ intentions.

sexual power Women often make differences in the world by attracting men and birthing new dynasties. Although Greek writers knew that men are also involved in sexual reproduction, it is women’s bodies that drive these changes in Herodotus’s narrative.49 While the Persians claim that Io’s abduction prompted the hostilities between Persia and Greece, the Phoenicians say that Io left Argos of her own accord when she found she was pregnant by the Phoenician ship’s captain (1.5), not only instigating Greek-Asian hostilities but founding a hybrid GreekPhoenician line. A Lydian queen, Candaules’s wife, accomplishes a similar feat. After her husband exhibits her naked to their servant Gyges, Candaules’s wife enlists Gyges to overthrow her husband, promising him “herself

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as well as her kingdom” (1.11.2: eme te kai tēn basilēiēn). Whereas Candaules had deployed his wife’s body to cement his bond with Gyges, the queen uses that same body to write Candaules out of the royal line and remake the kingdom in her own image. Like Candaules’s wife, Scythian women make a similar alliance with those they have enslaved, having sex with them in their husbands’ prolonged absence (4.1). While Herodotus emphasizes the Scythian women’s desperation, he also demonstrates how they take control of their people’s future. Although women’s reproductive power is often used by men to create alliances and solidify power, Herodotus shows that it also exceeds male control. The Assyrian king Astyages marries his daughter, Mandane, to a Persian because he fears being overthrown by her son; a dream in which Mandane’s urine floods Asia prompts this decision.50 Next, Astyages dreams that a vine grows from Mandane’s genitals and chokes all of Asia (1.108), which convinces him to order Cyrus, Mandane’s son, to be killed. Mandane’s body not only bears the child who will overthrow Astyages but communicates a prophecy and directs Cyrus into exile. It is to Mandane’s body that the dream allots power, not her Persian husband or Cyrus himself. Other stories demonstrate how women themselves can be surprised and subverted by their bodies’ effects. In a story Herodotus reports (but does not believe), a Persian woman visits the wives of Cyrus the Great. Awestruck by the sight of Cassandane “standing beside her tall, gorgeous children” (parestōta tekna eueidea te kai megala), she praises the queen and is met with a bitter reply: “Although I am the mother of such children,” Cassandane says, “Cyrus dishonors me and honors his new acquisition from Egypt.”51 Herodotus explains that this “new acquisition” is Nitetis, Cyrus’s Egyptian wife. Cassandane says that Nitetis has been “acquired in addition” (epiktētos), just like the majority of Egyptian territory, which the Nile gives the Egyptians as an “additional acquisition” (epiktētos, 2.5 and 2.10.1).52 By calling Nitetis epiktētos, Cassandane asserts her own precedence in the household and in the natural hierarchy and casts Nitetis as an excrescence. Cambyses responds to his moth-

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er’s humiliation by promising to overturn Egypt when he is grown (3.3; cf. Diod. Sic. 1.53.8). In this story, Cassandane’s body acts on others contrary to her own intentions. Cassandane’s body, displayed next to the bodies of her children, invites readers to value the power of the one in producing the others, just as the Persian visitor has. But Cassandane is unable to have the same effect on Cyrus, the person whose good opinion really matters. Cambyses, on the other hand, is so moved by her words that he decides to overthrow Egypt. Ironically, this response is not in accord with Cassandane’s complaint; she has argued that her native body and native sons are the genuine heirs of Cyrus, while Nitetis is literally an add-on that (Cassandane implies) should be chopped off. Cambyses promises to conquer Egypt—a stand-in for Nitetis, an Egyptian woman—but doing so will bring Egypt/Nitetis more fully into Persia, further eroding the distinctiveness Cassandane claims she and her children possess. Cassandane has not revenged herself on Nitetis, at least not in the way she had imagined. The body of Atossa, the Persian king Darius’s wife, also indirectly incites a male relative to expand his empire. In bed one night, Atossa convinces Darius to begin his campaign against Greece so that (she claims) she can enslave Greek women as her servants (3.134.5). She takes this action at the prompting of Democedes, an enslaved Greek doctor who wants to use Darius’s invasion to return home.53 Atossa helps Democedes because he is the only person she trusts to treat her breast disease: ὅσον μὲν δὴ χρόνον ἦν ἔλασσον, ἡ δὲ κρύπτουσα καὶ αἰσχυνομένη ἔφραζε οὐδενί, ἐπείτε δὲ ἐν κακῷ ἦν, μετεπέμψατο τὸν Δημοκήδεα καί οἱ ἐπέδεξε. ὁ δὲ φὰς ὑγιέα ποιήσειν ἐξορκοῖ μιν ἦ μέν οἱ ἀντυποργήσειν ἐκείνην τοῦτο τὸ ἂν αὐτῆς δεηθῇ, δεήσεσθαι δὲ οὐδενὸς τῶν ὅσα ἐς αἰσχύνην ἐστὶ φέροντα. As long as the tumor was small, she hid it out of shame (aischunomenē) and told no one, but when it got worse she summoned Democedes and showed it to him. He said he would heal her if she repaid him by doing

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whatever he asked; he would ask for nothing that would bring her shame (aischunēn). (Hdt. 3.133)

Herodotus tells this story from Democedes’s perspective. Democedes, a doctor who has even greater access to Atossa than her husband does, uses Atossa’s illness to put his plan in motion.54 But we can also understand these events from the perspective of Atossa’s body, whose sexual power over Darius and medical dependence on Democedes contribute to initiating the Greco-Persian wars and temporarily expand the borders of Persia. This dependence is itself the result of forces both human and more than human; Atossa has a naturally occurring tumor that demands care, but cultural expectations of modesty keep her from revealing it to other, perhaps less manipulative doctors.55 She has overcome some sense of shame to show Democedes her tumor, but he plays on her lingering embarrassment about the tumor (as well as her general modesty) to compel her help. This combination of forces acts on Atossa to “press her case” to Darius, as Boedeker notes, by inventing a desire for a full collection of international servants.56 Atossa, compelled by her body’s need and sense of shame, encourages Darius to bring even more foreigners into their household, foreigners with whom she, like Cassandane, may find herself in competition. In these stories of women crossing continents, taking new lovers, and expanding territory, the Histories explore how female sexuality and women’s role in sexual reproduction make the stage of history: the dynasties and empires that play out the drama of the Greco-Persian wars. Herodotus documents the emergence of history through female feck, women’s disruptive effectiveness in the world. Like the rulers and rivers of chapter 2, women’s bodies shape the material of other humans and thus play a role in the demarcation of populations and empires. But unlike the kings in chapter 2, who decide to intervene in land- and waterscapes, Herodotus’s female characters, many of them queens, have a power that exceeds their own intentions or control. Their bodies are a world-making force.

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women as a natural resource Female feck also operates on the smaller scale of social relationships, especially the family.57 Of particular interest to Herodotus, Diodorus, and other Greek and Roman ethnographers are societies that practice mixis epikoinos, “sex in common,” usually the sharing of women among the male population. This discourse is complicated, associated with both subhuman animality on the one hand and utopia on the other.58 However writers evaluate this custom, sex in common is an environmental practice: it treats women as a natural resource that, like other resources, can be shared among men to promote their goals. As natural resources, women continue to act as world makers, changing the way societies and relationships function. In describing societies that practice sex in common, Herodotus emphasizes that women are shared by men and for men’s benefit. The Auseans practice mixis epikoinos without any form of marriage or longterm partnership, but when a child grows up it is claimed by the man it most resembles (4.180). The Massagetan men marry women but use them in common (epikoina), having sex whenever they desire (1.216: apithumesei). The Nasamonean men marry multiple women and share wives (4.172: epikoinon mixin). Like Babylonian custom, which compels (dei) Babylonian women to await a man’s sexual favor before they can leave the temple of Aphrodite and resume their lives (1.199), custom dictates that Nasamonean women have sex with every man in the community on their wedding night (cf. Diod. Sic. 5.18.1). Herodotus, who considers this Babylonian custom their worst (aischunos), may be implying that the Nasamonean practice of sex in common is also bad for society. Only in one case does Herodotus say that this practice is well motivated. Agathyrsian and Thracian men practice sex in common “so that they may be each other’s brothers and, all being related, harbor neither fear nor hatred toward one another.”59 It is not clear whether this means that they will become brothers-in-law or that their offspring will all be

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related; perhaps both. The Agathyrsian and Thracian men are a bit like the Massagetan men, who avoid the fear (adeos, 1.216) of retribution by decriminalizing adultery, but they have gone further than the Massagetans, building on the fearlessness that results from mixis epikoinos to restructure society. Women’s bodies can create fear and violence among peoples who practice monogamy and criminalize adultery, or they can create fearless, harmonious societies of brothers. In both cases, it is the woman’s body that demarcates the family. When women circulate at men’s will, they create a family that includes the entire people. Diodorus focuses on this last model of mixis epikoinos, expanding the idea of sex in common to also encompass communal child-rearing.60 For example, men on the Island of the Sun γυναῖκας δὲ μὴ γαμεῖν, ἀλλὰ κοινὰς ἔχειν, καὶ τοὺς γεννηθέντας παῖδας ὡς κοινοὺς τρέφοντας ἐπ’ ἴσης ἀγαπᾶν· νηπίων δ’ ὄντων αὐτῶν πολλάκις τὰς τρεφούσας διαλλάττειν τὰ βρέφη, ὅπως μηδ’ αἱ μητέρες ἐπιγινώσκωσι τοὺς ἰδίους. διόπερ μηδεμιᾶς παρ’ αὐτοῖς γινομένης φιλοτιμίας ἀστασιάστους καὶ τὴν ὁμόνοιαν περὶ πλείστου ποιουμένους διατελεῖν. do not marry, but hold wives in common (koinas), and since they raise their children as if they belonged to all (hōs koinous), they love them equally. And when the children are infants, the nurses often change them around, so that not even the mothers know their own offspring. For this reason, they are not obsessed with honor (philotimias) and without strife persevere in putting the highest premium on harmony. (Diod. Sic. 2.58.1)61

In this system, nursemaids prevent mothers from claiming a special relationship with their biological children. The nursemaids exchange infants as the men exchange wives, a practice that reinforces the underlying practice of wife sharing while also making women (the nursemaids) themselves collaborators in the system. Nevertheless, the adverb “as if” (hōs) differentiates the sharing of children from the sharing of wives. Men on the Island of the Sun hold their women in common but merely treat children “as if” (hōs) they were shared. Raising children in common on the Island of the Sun creates a harmonious society because

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men and women are tricked into believing that any child could be theirs. With the Island of the Sun, Diodorus demonstrates his interest in the social consequences of sex and child-rearing. This complicated and contentious system is worthwhile because it allows men to escape the “love of honor” (philotimia) that, Diodorus implies, may overtake his readers. Diodorus uses other examples of sex in common to probe the connection between women and other natural resources. From these examples, readers learn that sex communalism is not sufficient to ensure peace in society; people have to have an abundance of food as well. For example, the Barkeaters (Hylophagoi) and Cave-dwellers (Trōgodytes) hold wives and children in common but still fight over scarce foraging spaces.62 Diodorus clarifies that the Cave-dwellers fight because their pasture has been diminished by “excessive heat” (tēn kaumatōn hyperbolēn), not as Greeks do, “over land or to avenge some complaint” (3.33.3: hyper gēs ē tinōn allōn egklēmatōn). Although the Cave-dwellers and Barkeaters share the resources of women’s bodies, scarcity of food has prevented them from achieving the harmony (homonoia) of the Island of the Sun. Certain Fisheaters (Icthyophagoi), on the other hand, “have sex with any women they happen to meet for the sake of bearing children, being freed from every occupation (ascholia) because they have easy access to food ready to hand.”63 The Fisheaters have the leisure to pursue multiple women because they do not have to spend time on food gathering. In the logic of these stories, men need an abundance of food before they can stop competing over women. Once they share food, women, and children in common, strife disappears altogether.64 The women encountered so far have exercised their feck on a number of scales, from the family to the dynasty, from continents to the boundaries of empire. In the final part of this chapter I tell the story of one of these women, Diodorus Siculus’s Assyrian queen Semiramis, to refocus on natural categories. Here we see what happens when a woman is empowered to remake her world.

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semiramis and her elephants The historical Semiramis, usually associated with Semmu-ramat, ruled Assyria after the death of her husband, King Ninus (founder of Nineveh) in the eighth century BCE.65 In Diodorus’s account of her life, our longest from Greek and Roman sources, her reign is marked by numerous achievements: she founds Babylon, constructs the Ziggurat of Ur, and then continues King Ninus’s conquest of Asia.66 As Diodorus comments, she is “the most remarkable” (epiphanestatēn) of all the women he knows of (2.4.1). Diodorus’s portrait of Semiramis elaborates extensively on Herodotus’s brief reference to her as a builder (Hdt. 1.185) but also attends to how Semiramis herself is built. Like the Scythians, Gorgons, and Amazons previously discussed, Semiramis is a woman who in many respects behaves like a man, hunting, constructing, conquering, and conversing with men as their equal and taking multiple sexual partners instead of a husband after Ninus dies (Diod. Sic. 2.13.4).67 But Semiramis moves beyond Diodorus’s warrior women to reformulate the boundaries of sex/gender itself. Semiramis challenges the sex/gender binary from her position as an outsider to her husband’s court.68 Although a ruler for most of her story, we should understand Semiramis as having a “subjugated standpoint” from which she is able not only to critique those in power but also achieve power for herself in ways those around her cannot imagine.69 In the process, she demonstrates that knowledge is situated differently in different bodies—in outsiders like herself and in the outsider elephants she creates. Semiramis is discovered by Onnes, an Assyrian courtier who sees her herding sheep and falls in love with her beauty (Diod. Sic. 2.5.1). Many heroes are elevated from peasant or pastoral circumstances, but this scene also emphasizes the contrast between Semiramis’s origins as a simple shepherdess and her ultimate success as an empire builder. As Diodorus himself notes, “It is necessary first to explain how she was carried from such miserable fortune to such fame.”70

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Onnes’s love for Semiramis would have troubled Greek readers familiar with Herodotus. In one of the most famous stories of the Histories, the Lydian king Candaules becomes “terribly enamored” (1.8.1: erastheis; cf. 2.131.1) with his wife and decides to exhibit her naked body to his bodyguard Gyges. This is an error that, as we have seen, ultimately leads to his death.71 Like his model, Onnes falls in love (Diod. Sic. 2.6.5: erōtikōs echōn) with his future wife and comes to a bad end; when Ninus asks to take Semiramis away from him, Onnes refuses and commits suicide (2.6.10). But Onnes’s love for Semiramis initially brings him good fortune: “It happened that her husband became completely enslaved to her and, doing nothing without her input, was very successful in everything.”72 This statement reverses Greek conceptions of male dominance in erotic relationships between men and women.73 The “input” (gnomē) Semiramis offers Onnes can be translated as “intelligence, judgment,” literally the way she knows or perceives things (gignōskō). This capacity also helps King Ninus, the man who will become her second husband. Before Semiramis’s remarriage, Onnes joins Ninus’s campaign against Bactria. After several pitched battles, Ninus pushes the Bactrians back into their cities and conquers them one by one, until only the capital, Bactra, remains. Though the Assyrians are winning this war, the siege of Bactra has stalled. Onnes senses that Semiramis might be able to help: Πολυχρονίου δὲ τῆς πολιορκίας γινομένης, ὁ τῆς Σεμιράμιδος ἀνήρ, ἐρωτικῶς ἔχων πρὸς τὴν γυναῖκα καὶ συστρατευόμενος τῷ βασιλεῖ, μετεπέμψατο τὴν ἄνθρωπον. ἡ δὲ συνέσει καὶ τόλμῃ καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις τοῖς πρὸς ἐπιφάνειαν συντείνουσι κεχορηγημένη καιρὸν ἔλαβεν ἐπιδείξασθαι τὴν ἰδίαν ἀρετήν. When the siege had been going on a long time, Semiramis’s husband, since he was in love with his wife (gynaika) and was campaigning with the king, summoned this human being (anthrōpon). She, supplied abundantly with wit, daring, and every other quality leading to distinction, leapt at the chance to display her innate excellence (idian aretēn). (Diod. Sic. 2.6.5)

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Onnes loves Semiramis as a wife, a gynē, but summons her to contribute to the war as an anthrōpos, a human being. Although this story casts most wives as inferior to Semiramis, it also asserts the humanity that underlies both men’s and women’s aretē (excellence). The pivot from andreia, which characterized the Gorgons, Scythians, and Amazons, to aretē is pointed. Unlike andreia, which is sometimes coded as masculine, aretē was more often applied to both men and women.74 Through Semiramis, Diodorus affirms that aretē is a quality available to all. Yet the form Semiramis’s aretē takes in this moment evokes sex/gender in an unexpected way. In response to Onnes’s call for help, Semiramis invents a garment that prevents anybody from “discerning whether the one wearing it is a man or woman.”75 Semiramis’s gnomē, so useful to Onnes, now allows her to manipulate the perception (diagnōskein) of others. The garment Semiramis invents is “suited to her” (euchrēstos autē) in other ways as well, protecting her skin from the sun and allowing her to “do whatever business she wanted to do” (pros tas en tō prattein ho bouloito chreias). So popular is this garment that it becomes standard dress for the Medes and Persians who occupy the territory after the Assyrian empire has fallen (Diod. Sic. 2.6.6). Cloaked in her invention, Semiramis scales the Bactrian walls in comfort and leads the Assyrians to victory (2.6.6). Although the origin story of Median and Persian dress retrospectively normalizes Semiramis’s outfit, in the moment its invention allows Semiramis to leave behind the disadvantages of her sex/gender. No longer hampered by womanly dress or, we may imagine, dismissed by the men around her, Semiramis’s cross-dressing transgresses her role as gynē, a word that means both woman and wife, and comments on the gender expectations that would otherwise prevent her from exercising her excellence.76 The garment is also a tool for Semiramis to apply her outsider standpoint to a problem that has stymied the men around her; unlike them, she literally sees a new line of attack. Semiramis’s achievement is underlined by this episode’s reception of a famous story in Herodotus. In book 3 of the Histories, Darius besieges

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Babylon, the city Semiramis is supposed to have founded.77 Although struggling, Darius has been told that he will ultimately succeed, and Zopyrus, one of Darius’s men, decides to hasten the victory in order to elevate his own standing (Hdt. 3.154). Zopyrus, like Semiramis, wins the siege through a disguise, infiltrating the city by mutilating his face and claiming to be a deserter. In one sense, Semiramis labors under a misogynistic cloud: it would not be appropriate for her, as a woman, to sacrifice her beauty as Zopyrus does. But operating within this constraint, Semiramis demonstrates her intelligence. In Herodotus’s story, women are expendable; all the Babylonian women have been killed to maintain the siege (3.150). In Diodorus, a woman accomplishes what even Zopyrus failed to do when he tried to take her city, preserving her beauty and providing the benefits of her novel garment to later generations. The story of Semiramis in Diodorus’s Library has been attributed to Ctesias, Greek physician to the court of Artaxerxes II, and his now-lost Persica, but we should also consider the effects of Ctesias’s MiddleEastern sources.78 In particular, scholars have noted connections between Semiramis and Ishtar, the Sumerian goddess.79 Not only is Semiramis, like Ishtar, a femme fatale of sorts; she is associated with doves, sacred to Ishtar.80 Semiramis’s unmaking and remaking of sex/gender distinctions may also originate with Ishtar, whose worshippers upended sex/ gender norms.81 Or perhaps Ctesias and Diodorus were inspired by Derceto, Semiramis’s mother, an incarnation of the Syrian goddess Atargatis. Atargatis, like Ishtar, was often depicted with doves, and her priests were known to self-castrate.82 The climax of Semiramis’s story in the Library is her invasion of India. Diodorus’s readers would know that it was impossible for her to succeed—not even Alexander the Great conquered India—but Diodorus works within these narrative constraints to glorify her strategy, one that rewrites sex/gender and species divides. India is protected by war elephants, which Semiramis does not have. Instead she decides to construct her own. These elephant eidōla—“images,”

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“puppets,” or “elephantasms”—are composed of oxhides stuffed with straw and driven from the inside by men with camels.83 The eidōla “offered the appearance of a real animal to those viewing it from a distance.”84 On the eve of her invasion, the Indian king Stabrobates sends Semiramis a letter, in which πολλὰ δὲ καὶ ἄρρητα κατ’ αὐτῆς ὡς ἑταίρας βλασφημήσας διὰ τῶν γραμμάτων καὶ θεοὺς ἐπιμαρτυράμενος, ἠπείλει καταπολεμήσας αὐτὴν σταυρῷ προσηλώσειν. ἡ δὲ Σεμίραμις ἀναγνοῦσα τὴν ἐπιστολὴν καὶ καταγελάσασα τῶν γεγραμμένων, διὰ τῶν ἔργων ἔφησε τὸν Ἰνδὸν πειράσεσθαι τῆς περὶ αὐτὴν ἀρετῆς. he said many unspeakably slanderous things against her, calling her a whore (hetairas), and, swearing by the gods, he threatened to crucify her once she had been defeated. But Semiramis read the letter, laughed, and dismissed it, saying that it was through deeds (tōn ergōn) that the Indian would make a trial of her valor (aretēs). (Diod. Sic. 2.18.1–2)

Semiramis’s retort is remarkable. Instead of protesting the king’s insults and claiming to be a virtuous woman, Semiramis redefines aretē as something they can both possess. In the larger context of book 2, this retort prepares the reader to understand the elephant eidōla Semiramis has constructed and will subsequently deploy. Diodorus had previously described Semiramis’s building projects as erga (2.13.1), and he puts the elephant eidōla in parallel with these other accomplishments. I read the erga in Semiramis’s retort to Stabrobates as a sly, forward-looking reference to the elephant eidōla she is about to unleash. Semiramis herself has animal attributes that more deeply connect her to the eidōla. Although Diodorus calls her an anthrōpos, a human being, Semiramis has an animal history: she is raised by doves and named for doves (2.4.4–6) and transforms into a dove at the end of her rule (2.20.2). Semiramis’s mother, the goddess Derceto, experiences a similar transformation, becoming a mermaid later in her life (2.4.2). Although Derceto’s transformation occurs after Semiramis’s birth, this narrative detail reinforces our sense that Semiramis’s humanity is unstable.85

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Semiramis’s animal attributes, like her masculine attributes, place her at the intersection of two Greek binaries.86 These binaries are further destabilized in Semiramis’s battle against Stabrobates, which also demonstrates that knowledge is situated differently in different bodies. Although Semiramis’s trick elephants are ingenious, they are not going to fool her enemies; we know already that some of Semiramis’s soldiers have deserted to the Indians and told them the truth about the elephants (2.18.8). Nevertheless, the eidōla offer Semiramis an unexpected advantage that allows her to win the battle. Although the Indian humans do not fear meeting her elephants, the Indian horses shy away when they encounter them: τὰ γὰρ εἴδωλα πόρρωθεν μὲν ὁμοίαν εἶχε τὴν πρόσοψιν τοῖς ἀληθινοῖς θηρίοις, οἷς συνήθεις ὄντες οἱ τῶν Ἰνδῶν ἵπποι τεθαρρηκότως προσίππευον· τοῖς δ’ ἐγγίσασιν ἥ τε ὀσμὴ προσέβαλλεν ἀσυνήθης καὶ τἄλλα διαφορὰν ἔχοντα πάντα παμμεγέθη τοὺς ἵππους ὁλοσχερῶς συνετάραττε. For far off the eidōla had the same appearance as those genuine animals with which the horses were familiar and charged at boldly, but the smell that struck the horses was unfamiliar, and then the other differences, being very great when taken altogether, threw them into total confusion. (Diod. Sic. 2.19.3)

The horses’ superior sense of smell would not have surprised Diodorus’s readers, who had probably encountered this idea in other writers.87 Readers familiar with Herodotus would know that horses particularly hate the smell of camels (1.80.4; cf. Xen. Cyr. 7.1.27) and would conclude that the Indian horses fear the eidōla because they can smell the camels within them. An earlier passage of Diodorus, in which Semiramis accustoms her horses to the eidōla, supports this possibility. In addition to employing camels in her cavalry, Diodorus reminds readers that she also used them inside the eidōla: πρὸς δ’ αὐτὰς τοὺς ἵππους οἱ στρατιῶται συνάγοντες συνήθεις ἐποίουν τοῦ μὴ φοβεῖσθαι τὴν ἀγριότητα τῶν θηρίων.88

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And by leading their horses up to the camels, [the Assyrians] made them familiar with them, so that they would not fear the fierceness of the beasts. (Diod. Sic. 2.17.2–3)

Semiramis, perhaps because of her animal attributes, knows that her horses will be disturbed by the smell of the camels in her army. By accustoming them to the camels, she ensures that the mix of species under her command will work together. Diodorus has drawn on traditional scientific assumptions about animals’ keen sense of smell and Herodotus’s report that horses hate the smell of camels, but his text further claims that the horses’ senses work together to create knowledge. The Indian horses dislike the unfamiliar smell of the camels, but it is the disjuncture between the familiar sight of the elephants and their unfamiliar smell that throws them into confusion.89 Although the Indians have been told that the elephants are fake, we are led to believe that they would not have recognized them by sight alone. The Indian horses, on the other hand, have superior smell and thus access to a different form of knowledge, one that, ironically, becomes a liability for their human riders. Like Semiramis, the horses are outsiders who can sense things that other creatures cannot, but their failure in the battle reveals that situated knowledge is not always an asset. Indian humans and Indian horses categorize the elephant eidōla differently. Semiramis too defies easy categorization. While Diodorus calls her a woman, the gender-neutral garment she invents may indicate that she imagines herself as something else. Yet Diodorus does not delve into how the Indian horses or Semiramis herself construct categories. Instead, he deconstructs these categories to redefine how readers should judge great figures of history. By underscoring Semiramis’s excellence and highlighting her elephants’ effectiveness (or feck), Diodorus’s text argues that it is not what creatures are but what they accomplish that matters. Though Semiramis remakes sex/gender distinctions and rearranges human and animal bodies, even combining their aspects in her own

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person, she creates a new hierarchy with herself at the top. Rather than forming reciprocal bonds with other women, nonelites, or animals, she deploys them in her elephant army to increase the glory of her empire. Yet in Semiramis Diodorus gives us a powerful image of hybridity, one that can inspire readers to see hybridization around them. Though Semiramis has a human son, Ninyas, he proves a disappointment, plotting to overthrow his mother and then isolating himself from the Assyrian people (2.20–21; see “Benefactions” in chapter 2). Rather than this heterosexually produced human son, it is Semiramis’s elephants, a multispecies collaboration, that have reproduced her ingenuity. Though Semiramis has disrupted categories to remake her world, she is still expected to lead her people well. As shown in chapter 2, the breakdown of the “natural” does not lead to amorality but rather to a morality based on a different rubric, the benefit to the human community. Chapter 4 focuses on a different aspect of Greek ethnography’s environmental discourse: how human lifeways, starting with diet, are entangled with other species. It shows how hybridization can become a kind of contamination, leaving human beings open to cultural change they might not desire.90

c h a p t e r fou r

Dietary Entanglements

As described in chapters 2 and 3, rulers, non-Greek women, rivers, and historians delimit continents, families, and categories to make the world. In this chapter and chapter 5, I examine smaller scale interactions between humans and other beings to understand how environmental cultures come to be and can be changed. As we will see, natural resources act on human beings to produce different kinds of society. For example, the king of the Ethiopians in Herodotus’s Histories is approached by Cambyses, a Persian king intent on conquering Ethiopia and the rest of the known world, and given a number of gifts refined from plants, animals, and precious metals, including expensive cloth, golden jewelry, perfume, wine, and instructions on how to grow wheat. The Ethiopian king denigrates all of these (except for the wine, as I discuss later in the chapter), calling the cloth and perfume deceitful, the jewelry shackles, and bread “shit” (kopros). He urges Cambyses to repent of his desire for conquest and, in his rejection of Cambyses’s gifts, implies that deceit, sickness, and imperialism are all connected (3.20–22). Objects such as gold and perfume, even bread, may seem inert, but they have tremendous effects on those who consume them. To paraphrase Samantha Frost, quoted in the introduction, natural resources “culture” human beings.1 84

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This chapter focuses on Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s descriptions of other people’s diets, starting with diet as an indicator of health. Herodotus and Diodorus represent diet as an encompassing “way of life” (bios), a complex set of relationships between humans and their environments.2 By exploring the dietary cultures of non-Greeks, Greek readers can imagine alternative ways to relate to plants and animals. But in so doing they learn that food choice is inextricable from other cultural practices; once they change diet, other aspects of society shift as well, not always for the better.

health and diet Like many Greek writers, ethnographers were fascinated by illness and eager to understand it. In fact, writers across genres used the health of other peoples as a touchstone for describing larger scale geographic and temporal differences. Hesiod’s seventh-century BCE poem Works and Days claims that the mythic Golden generation lived free from the pains of old age and infirmity (WD, 113–15), while the fifth-century BCE Hippocratic Airs, Waters, Places catalogs the relative health and illness of contemporary non-Greeks.3 In these writings, ethnic others may be healthy for a number of reasons—Herodotus’s Libyans, for example, cauterize the veins of their children’s heads (4.187)—but writers often credit diet with promoting or inhibiting health. In Greek, a people’s diet is called a “way of life” or “method of subsistence,” bios or its synonym in ethnographic contexts, diaita.4 When describing the peoples of the world, Herodotus and Diodorus make a primary distinction among three kinds of bioi: those of farmers, nomadic pastoralists, and hunter-gatherers. Many of the last rely on a single food reflected in their name, for example, “Fisheaters” (Icthyophagoi). Since this subset of hunter-gathering is so prominent in both Herodotus and Diodorus, I have called it “monoforaging” and its practitioners “monoforagers,” peoples who hunt or gather primarily one food, on the pattern of monoculture, the growing of only one crop in a given

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area. However, it is important to remember that neither author has a term for monoforagers or hunter-gatherers, although they both distinguish these peoples from farmers (arotēres) and pastoralists (nomades). Because ethnographers are trying to describe the real world, their divisions between these groups are not always clean and clear. Herodotus describes marsh-dwelling Indians who subsist on raw fish; nomadic ones who eat raw flesh, including human flesh; and vegetarians.5 As this vocabulary indicates, Herodotus and Diodorus identify others with their diets and represent foodstuffs as entangled with an encompassing “way of life.” The entailments of each bios are complex. Farmers may pasture animals as well as hunt and gather but are assumed to cultivate wheat and other crops (Hdt. 1.193), to be “eaters of bread,” in Odysseus’s phrase (Od. 9.191).6 Bread eating and viticulture are not diets that stand in isolation; they entail other practices and attitudes, including city building and imperialism. It is the agricultural peoples of the Mediterranean and Middle East (Greeks, Persians, Assyrians, Lydians, Egyptians, Carthaginians) who instigate or perpetuate the great conflicts of Greek historiography. But they are also the ones, in Greek writers’ thought, who practice “high culture.” In ethnographies, it is only in the context of agricultural settlements that human beings produce literature, temple-based religion, and most crafts (technai). Pastoralism is defined by the consumption of meat and milk and a nomadic existence (reflected in the Greek word for pastoralist, nomeus) that precludes city building and its cultural “developments.” Both Herodotus and Diodorus characterize pastoralists as the opposite of farmers, distinguished by the cities, fields, and political commitments they do not have. The opposition between agriculturalists and pastoralists surfaces again and again in both writers. To reprise an example from chapter 1, Herodotus says that of the Persians who did not join king Cyrus, “all [are] tillers of the soil [arotēres],” except “the Dai, the Mardi, the Dropici, the Sagartii, all wandering herdsmen [nomades].”7 The lives of hunter-gatherers, including monoforagers, are more variable. These peoples hunt a variety of game and fish or eat roots, berries, and grass.

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Diodorus, for example, describes Fisheaters, Locusteaters, Birdeaters, Rooteaters, and Grasseaters, among others (3.15–3.29). Monoforagers live in communities but construct temporary dwellings and roam to eat. Like pastoralists, they do not settle in cities or engage in wars of conquest. They may not even employ language, like the Cave-dwellers (Trōglodytai) Herodotus describes (Hdt. 4.183.4). As this brief survey suggests, Greek bios is much more than diet. Peoples are known for what they eat, but what they eat is connected to how they organize society. On the other hand, the cultural significance of diet does not mean that humans will their way of life into being. Rather, Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s bioi are composed of entangled humans and other beings who act upon one another. Farmers often become imperialists, and herdsmen are often cannibals. Human farmers, pastoralists, and hunter-gatherers do not precede their relations to fields, herds, or prey; rather, it is their interaction that produces the “farming,” “pastoralist,” or “hunter-gathering” way of life.8 Health is an emergent property of different bioi, some aspects of which are under human control and others of which are not.9 In what follows, I show how Herodotus and Diodorus locate health within different bioi, especially nonagricultural bioi, and attempt to make the advantages of other diets available to their agriculturalist readers.10 Herodotus is pessimistic that Greeks can attain the good health of pastoralists and hunter-gatherers without also adopting cultural practices inimical to Greek values. Diodorus, on the other hand, shows his readers how to leverage relationships with animals to achieve wellness within an agricultural way of life.

the ethiopian king In the third book of Herodotus’s Histories, the Persian king Cambyses takes Egypt and begins to contemplate conquests farther south. Cambyses has heard that the mythic, long-lived Ethiopians have a Table of the Sun that produces meat spontaneously for the Ethiopians year-round, so

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he sends a delegation of Fisheaters (Icthyophagoi) to extend the hand of Persian friendship and discover whether the Table of the Sun really exists. The irony of a monoforaging people, the Fisheaters, trying to teach agriculture to the pastoral Ethiopians cues readers to the complex analysis of diet and culture that follows.11 When the envoy arrives, the king of the Ethiopians systematically rejects most of the gifts Cambyses has sent (Hdt. 3.22), thereby commenting on Persian (and also Greek) bios in what James Romm has dubbed an “ethnologic satire.”12 This scene also parodies tropes of culture heroism. Because Greeks generally celebrated agricultural bios, they attributed the gifts of agriculture to gods and demigods such as Heracles and Dionysus. Like these heroes, the Persian delegation brings agricultural products to the Ethiopians, but their gifts are mostly rejected. Elites like the Ethiopian king have no interest in amassing wealth or displaying luxuries to the oppressed masses; on the contrary, they provide everything their people need in an aspirational golden age. The Ethiopian king’s comments also reflect concerns (as well as the humorous, obscene tone) of popular Greek ideology and may derive from nonelite Greek traditions.13 Ethiopia is a “world turned upside down” not in its social hierarchies, but in its economic values. The only gift that interests the Ethiopian king is Persian wine, and his pleasure in the wine inspires him to hold forth on the subject of diet: Ὡς δὲ ἐς τὸν οἶνον ἀπίκετο καὶ ἐπύθετο αὐτοῦ τὴν ποίησιν, ὑπερησθεὶς τῷ πόματι ἐπείρετο ὅ τι τε σιτέεται ὁ βασιλεὺς καὶ χρόνον ὁκόσον μακρότατον ἀνὴρ Πέρσης ζώει. Οἱ δὲ σιτέεσθαι μὲν ὁκόσον μακρότατον ἀνὴρ Πέρσης ζώει. Οἱ δὲ σιτέεσθαι μὲν τὸν ἄρτον εἶπον, ἐξηγησάμενοι τῶν πυρῶν τὴν φύσιν, ὀγδώκοντα δὲ ἔτεα ζόης πλήρωμα ἀνδρὶ μακρότατον προκεῖσθαι. Πρὸς ταῦτα ὁ Αἰθίοψ ἔφη οὐδὲν θωμάζειν εἰ σιτεόμενοι κόπρον ἔτεα ὀλίγα ζώουσι· οὐδὲ γὰρ ἂν τοσαῦτα δύνασθαι ζώειν σφέας, εἰ μὴ τῷ πόματι ἀνέφερον, φράζων τοῖσι Ἰχθυοφάγοισι τὸν οἶνον· τοῦτο γὰρ ἑωυτοὺς ὑπὸ Περσέων ἑσσοῦσθαι. Ἀντειρομένων δὲ τὸν βασιλέα τῶν Ἰχθυοφάγων τῆς ζόης καὶ τῆς διαίτης πέρι, ἔτεα μὲν ἐς εἴκοσί τε καὶ ἑκατὸν τοὺς πολλοὺς αὐτῶν ἀπικνέεσθαι, ὑπερβάλλειν δέ τινας καὶ ταῦτα, σίτησιν δὲ εἶναι κρέα ἑφθὰ καὶ πόμα γάλα.

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When he came to the wine and learned how it was made, he took exceeding great pleasure in it, and asked what the Persian king ate and what was the highest age a Persian man could attain. And they said that he ate bread, explaining the nature of [the growing of] wheat, and that 80 years of life was the greatest measure allotted to a man. To these things the Ethiopian said that if they ate shit (kopros), it was no wonder they lived so few years, for they would not be able to live even that long if they did not sustain themselves with this drink (indicating to the Fisheaters the wine), for in this they had been beaten by the Persians. To the Fisheaters asking in turn about their way of life and life span, the king said that most of them reached 120 years, and some lived even longer, and that their food was boiled meat and their drink milk. (Hdt. 3.22.11–3.23.5)

Kopros is a particularly apt insult in this context, since it can refer to the manuring involved in the cultivation of wheat.14 When the Ethiopian king calls bread kopros, he implies that to grow food with shit is to eat shit. Rather than validating Greek agricultural bios by gratefully accepting Cambyses’s gifts, the Ethiopian king calls into question whether Persians (or Greeks) should have adopted agriculture in the first place or should continue to practice it. The Ethiopian king’s appreciation for Persian wine, however, complicates his criticism of agriculture. While non-Greeks are often said to like alcohol, James Romm points out that the Ethiopian king specifically evokes the Cyclops Polyphemus in Homer’s Odyssey.15 Like the Ethiopians, the Cyclopes are pastoralists and have a fondness for wine; Odysseus escapes Polyphemus’s cave by getting the Cyclops drunk. But the reference to the Odyssey is more complicated than it may at first appear. Readers who have the episode in mind will remember the juxtaposition of pastoralism and cannibalism in Homer’s text—Polyphemus washing down Odysseus’s men with milk (Od. 9.296–7)—before the Cyclops is “beaten” by Odysseus’s gift of wine (Od. 9.347ff.).16 Whether or not the Homeric passage has provided Herodotus with an explicit model in the Ethiopian episode, readers who know Homer may begin to question the Ethiopian king’s advice, or at least how to apply it. The scene opposes pastoral and agricultural diets through the

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comparison of bread and meat (and milk), then complicates this opposition with the Ethiopians’ and Persians’ shared appreciation for wine. The Ethiopian king’s concession that wine is a true pleasure, even a healthful one, underlines his denigration of bread, but it means that neither agriculturalism nor pastoralism emerges triumphant. Instead, the Ethiopian king’s comments highlight the entanglement of agriculture and alcohol production; (palm) wine is part of the agricultural bios the Ethiopian king would like to reject. The pastoral diet is itself entangled with problematic cultural practices. The majority of Ethiopians may believe that the Table of the Sun produces food spontaneously, but Herodotus tells us that this is a trick of the Ethiopian leadership. There is, he says, “a meadow in the area surrounding the city quite full of boiled meats of every sort of quadruped.”17 This conforms to the reports Cambyses has heard as well. But Herodotus has discovered that “at night, it is each time the duty of those in office to place the meats on the table” in secret.18 The Ethiopians eat pastoral products that seem to them to spring spontaneously from the earth but are in fact supplied secretly by the Ethiopian leadership. This lie does not contradict the Ethiopian king’s claims about diet, but it does make him a hypocrite; the Ethiopian king had earlier criticized the Persians for “lying” with their purple cloths and perfumes (Hdt. 3.22). This discrepancy between what the Table seems to be and what it actually is may have proven fatal for Cambyses and his army. After Cambyses’s spies return to him and report what they have seen and heard, he becomes enraged and sends his troops against Ethiopia. This march is a complete disaster. Cambyses, who had before been so keenly interested in the Table of the Sun, ironically fails to provision his army appropriately.19 As a result, the Persian soldiers turn to eating their pack animals, grass, and ultimately, one another (3.25.13–23). Cambyses is guilty of the grossest negligence, but Herodotus’s text also suggests that he has been misled about the nature of Ethiopia and encouraged to send his troops unprepared.20 We are told that Cambyses

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sent the Fisheaters to find out about the Table of the Sun and that the Fisheaters in fact see the Table and report what they have seen to Cambyses.21 We know that Herodotus has discovered the ruse of the Table (3.18), but there is no indication that the Fisheaters or Cambyses know the truth, and we should assume that the Fisheaters have reported to Cambyses both the Ethiopian king’s insulting diatribe and what they think they have observed about the Ethiopian way of life. When Cambyses invades Ethiopia, he is motivated both by anger and by his earlier stated desire to acquire the Table of the Sun. Crucially, he may assume that the abundance of Ethiopia will be available to his army, and this makes him even more reckless in preparing provisions. As other scholars have noted, Herodotus’s description of the army’s demise depicts a nightmarish descent into nonagricultural foods: first grass, then pack animals, and finally human flesh.22 Though the army is in an extreme situation, this descent echoes and undermines the Ethiopian king’s earlier comments. He made an argument to the Persian envoy for a meat-based diet over a bread-based one, but when Cambyses’s soldiers enter Ethiopia and symbolically “adopt” a nonagricultural diet, they end up eating one another. Readers who have been swayed by the Ethiopian king’s argument for pastoralism may reconsider after this episode. As the fate of Cambyses’s army shows, the consumption of animals and animal products can act as a gateway to anthropophagy (as in the Odyssey), the confusion of appropriate and inappropriate “meats.”23 If Herodotus’s presentation of the army’s fate undercuts the Ethiopians as a model for his Greek reader or at least encourages doubt about attaining the health benefits of pastoralism, his comments about custom trouble matters further. The Ethiopian episode is followed shortly by Herodotus’s famous statement that all peoples prefer their own customs (nomoi), a conclusion he reaches after relating his most famous story about diet. The Persian king Darius, Herodotus reports, once inquired into people’s attachment to their customs. He found that there was no sum of money Greeks would accept for eating their

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parents (the habit of the Calliatai, an Indian community), and none the Calliatai would accept for cremating theirs (the custom of the Greeks). The poet Pindar was right, Herodotus says, to call nomos king of all (3.38).24 Given this scene’s proximity to the Ethiopian king’s discourse on bread, readers may reinterpret the Ethiopian episode not as a criticism of Persian diet but as an example of everyone’s preference for what they know (cf. Hdt. 4.80, 4.114), concluding that Ethiopian diet is fixed in Ethiopian bios, despite what the Ethiopian king has said, and appropriate only for the Ethiopians. Read in this way, Darius’s investigation into nomos acts as a counter-satire to the Ethiopians’ ethnological satire of Greece and Persia, deconstructing the entire enterprise of ethnological comparison.25 The Ethiopian king seems to offer a specific and helpful criticism of Greek diet and how it affects health, but if custom is king, there may be no point in taking this criticism to heart. By staging such a stark contrast between nomoi, Herodotus opens up a space for people to evaluate their own customs. But the very starkness of the contrast may work ultimately to reconfirm readers’ initial devotion to their own way of life. Herodotus’s Ethiopian king is a persuasive proponent of pastoralism, but Cambyses’s army’s fate and Herodotus’s nomological commentary reveal the dangers of trying to separate diet from a people’s entangled way of life. Diodorus Siculus is also fascinated by nonagricultural diets, and his text, like the Histories, is uncertain about how to capture their advantages. He goes a step further, however, and develops the principle of haplotēs, “simplicity,” as a way of characterizing the nonagricultural diets of others.

fisheaters and locusteaters Like Herodotus, Diodorus features diet in his ethnographic descriptions. He is especially fascinated by monoforagers, and he devotes considerable space to communities of Fisheaters in Africa.26 For those Fisheaters who live along the coast of the Red Sea, Diodorus says, the

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ocean brings to shore every day and even twice a day an apiston plēthos pantoiōn ichthuōn, “an unbelievable abundance of every sort of fish” (3.15.4). “Because of the simplicity (haplotēs) of their diet, they rarely fall ill,” he says, “but they are much shorter-lived than we are.”27 Diodorus attributes the good health of the Fisheaters to the haplotēs of their diet, its “simplicity,” or “singleness.” They eat a simple, unrefined food, and only one kind of it. Diodorus’s Fisheaters are, however, not quite exempla of well-being. Their simplicity of diet wards off illness, but they are not as long-lived as “we” Greeks are. With this reference to longevity, Diodorus evokes and reverses Herodotus’s Ethiopians. Like the Ethiopians’ meadow “quite full of boiled meats of every sort of quadruped” (Hdt. 3.18), the Red Sea provides an “unbelievable abundance of every sort of fish” to Diodorus’s Fisheaters, and like the Ethiopians the Fisheaters enjoy excellent health. But unlike the Ethiopians, the Fisheaters do not meet—let alone exceed—a Greek life span. This disjunction between the Fisheaters’ good health and short lives, between what the simplicity of their diet achieves and what it fails to achieve for them, makes it clear that “simplicity” cannot guarantee well-being. The Locusteaters, another monoforaging people in the Library, allow Diodorus to further qualify what “simple” diets can achieve. Like the Fisheaters, who enjoy an “unbelievable abundance of every sort of fish,” the Locusteaters feast on an “unspeakable multitude of locusts” (3.29.2: plēthos akridōn amuthēton). But the Locusteaters, “having light bodies and quick feet, are altogether short-lived” and die from a most terrible disease, eaten from the inside out by pterotoi phtheires, “winged worms” or “lice”:28 οὗτοι μὲν οὖν εἰς τοιαύτην διάλυσιν τοῦ σώματος καταστρέφουσι τὸν βίον δυστυχῶς, εἴτε διὰ τὴν ἰδιότητα τῆς τροφῆς εἴτε διὰ τὸν ἀέρα τοιαύτης τυγχάνοντες περιπετείας. With such a dissolution of their bodies these people bring their lives to an unhappy end, happening upon such a reversal either because of the peculiarity of their food or the air. (Diod. Sic. 3.29.7)29

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With the Locusteaters, Diodorus exhibits a simple diet that no longer promotes health but may be associated with its opposite.30 Either “bad air” acts upon the Locusteaters, in which case diet is irrelevant to their health, or the locusts act in sympathy with the winged worms that sicken the Locusteaters. A food can be very simple, singular, and nonagricultural, like the locust, but still entangled in a broader system that limits the human life span. Like Diodorus, Herodotus offers multiple explanations for different people’s life spans.31 Herodotus’s Ethiopians first tell the Persian envoys that meat and milk protect them from disease but then show them a spring that Herodotus claims is the real reason for Ethiopian longevity: “If this water is as it is said to be, making such use of it would be the reason why [the Ethiopians] are long-lived.”32 In ethnographies, health emerges from systems seemingly too complicated to replicate. Human practices, including food choice, make a difference, but fish, locusts, springs, and air have effects beyond human control. Despite the complexity of dietary phenomena, both Herodotus and Diodorus remain committed to the idea of emulating others and achieving their dietary advantages. They do this by abstracting the desirable characteristics of other bioi rather than trying to replicate the way of life directly: the Ethiopian king enjoys Persian wine while rejecting other gifts, and Diodorus develops the principle of simplicity to characterize a variety of bioi. But their texts also reveal that these abstractions cannot be added to an agricultural way of life without altering the system. As I describe later in this chapter, Athenians who emulate Scythian strategy in Herodotus unwittingly take on Scythian disrespect for the dead. In Diodorus, Egyptians who adopt a “simple” diet like that of the Fisheaters divert agricultural resources to their sacred animals and reconfigure Egyptian kingship.

scythian ways As the non-Greeks that Herodotus describes at greatest length and the subject of François Hartog’s influential Mirror of Herodotus, the

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Scythians are the most famous of Herodotus’s pastoralists.33 Herodotus’s description of their customs, diet, and conflict with the Persian king Darius dominate book 4 of the Histories (4.1–142). They also signify an extreme form of pastoralism, embodying, as Brent Shaw has argued, “the negative ideology of the savage nomad.”34 In particular, the Scythians contravene deeply held Greek taboos against using enemy corpses rather than burning or burying them.35 Herodotus’s Scythians drink the blood of their enemies, adorn themselves with their skins, and turn their enemies’ heads into drinking vessels (4.64–5). In rejecting settled agriculturalism, the Scythians have also lost what Greeks consider proper reverence for the dead; like the Homeric Polyphemus or Cambyses’s army, pastoralism has made the Scythians consumers of human bodies as well as corpse abusers. Despite the Scythians’ negative qualities, Herodotus uses their escape from the Persian king Darius to teach Athens how to defeat Darius’s successor, Xerxes. Through the Scythian/Athenian parallel, Herodotus offers Greeks a way to capture the advantages of the Scythian way of life. He does this by focusing on “waylessness” (aporia), a principle that can be adapted to different circumstances. As other scholars have observed, numerous narrative elements of the Scythian story are picked up later in the Histories, with the Scythians consistently prefiguring the Athenians. In Hartog’s words, Herodotus has turned the Scythians into “Athenians of a kind.”36 Yet in emulating Scythian strategies, it is more accurate to say that the Athenians have become “Scythians of a kind.”37 These strategies are directly linked with Scythian pastoralism: Τῷ δὲ Σκυθικῷ γένεϊ ἓν μὲν τὸ μέγιστον τῶν ἀνθρωπηίων πρηγμάτων σοφώτατα πάντων ἐξεύρηται τῶν ἡμεῖς ἴδμεν, τὰ μέντοι ἄλλα οὐκ ἄγαμαι. Τὸ δὲ μέγιστον οὕτω σφι ἀνεύρηται ὥστε ἀποφυγεῖν τε μηδένα ἐπελθόντα ἐπὶ σφέας, μὴ βουλομένους τε ἐξευρεθῆναι καταλαβεῖν μὴ οἷόν τε εἶναι. Τοῖσι γὰρ μήτε ἄστεα μήτε τείχεα ᾖ ἐκτισμένα, ἀλλὰ φερέοικοι ἐόντες πάντες ἔωσι ἱπποτοξόται, ζώοντες μὴ ἀπ’ ἀρότου ἀλλ’ ἀπὸ κτηνέων, οἰκήματά τέ σφι ᾖ ἐπὶ ζευγέων, κῶς οὐκ ἂν εἴησαν οὗτοι ἄμαχοί τε καὶ ἄποροι προσμίσγειν.

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The Scythian race has made the cleverest discovery (as far as we know) regarding the single greatest matter of human life, although I do not admire them in other respects. This essential thing they have discovered is how to prevent an attacker from escaping them and how to avoid capture unless they want to be found. For since they have established neither cities nor walls, and instead are house carriers and mounted archers, making their living not from cultivated land but from flocks, moving their possessions in wagons, how could they not be unfightable (amachoi) and difficult (aporoi) to meet in battle? (Hdt. 4.46)38

Despite Scythian customs of corpse abuse and drinking human blood, Herodotus is adamant that pastoralism has given the Scythians an advantage in “the greatest matter of human life.” Because of their mobility, expertise at shooting, and dependence on herds rather than crops, they thwart every invader. They are amachoi “unfightable” and aporoi, both “unmanageable” and “poor, without resources.” The double meaning of aporia encapsulates their paradoxical advantage. For the Scythians, the lack of agricultural resources, especially fields and cities, is wealth. In his analysis of Scythian success, Herodotus enumerates a number of subsidiary relationships that constitute the Scythian bios. The Scythians are “house carriers” (phereoikoi) and “mounted archers” (hippotoxotai). These compound nouns hybridize the Scythians, describing them in relation to their portable homes and horses.39 Herodotus also emphasizes what they do not have: cultivated fields, towns, and walls. But he does not characterize this lack as a disadvantage. On the contrary, because the Scythians do not depend on cultivated land, they enjoy great freedom. As Idanthyrus, the king of the Scythians, says to Darius, they have nothing they fear will be taken away from them (4.127). The Scythians’ freedom from agriculturalism allows them freedom to evade the enemy: this is their aporia, an advantageous lack produced by the pastoral way of life.40 Yet the Scythian bios is not mere lack; Herodotus is as interested in what the Scythians have as in what they have given up. They employ

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their way of life “in a land suited to them” (tēs te gēs eousēs epitēdeēs) and “with the rivers of Scythia as allies” (tōn potamōn eontōn sphi summachōn, 4.47). The Scythians are also supported in their aporia by the euporia of the land, its “abundance of resources” (4.59). This word puns on the Scythian’s aporia to underline an important point. The Scythians do not have the kind of poroi, “paths” or “means,” that a settled agricultural people would, but their other resources—verdant meadows, abundant fish, and potable water—are more than sufficient (4.53). Just as aporia is a paradoxically advantageous lack, euporia is the positive side of this lack, the sum of everything the Scythians have instead of settled agriculturalism. It would be easy, as Herodotus does elsewhere, to describe the Scythians as the mere inverse or opposite of agriculturalists, but here he focuses on the positive side of the equation.41 Scythia’s abundance, Herodotus implies, allows them to find what they need wherever they go. Herodotus’s admiration for Scythian aporia may derive from historical Scythians. Although Herodotus’s Scythians have often been dismissed as a Greek fiction, parts of his description have recently been confirmed by archaeology.42 Comparative historical evidence of other nomadic peoples can shed additional light on the emerging picture of the Histories’ Scythian sources. Despite Herodotus’s gesture to “farming Scythians” (4.53), he portrays the nomadic Scythians as independent from their neighbors and self-sufficient in their own country, whose rivers provide them with “the most crucial things” (4.59: ta . . . megista). However, on-the-ground (rather than textual) nomadic pastoralists depend on sedentary agriculturalists for survival despite their claims to autonomy.43 Herodotus’s elite Scythian sources may have promoted a vision of themselves as independent, invincible, and abundantly resourced to enhance their reputation in the eyes of Greeks.44 Inasmuch as Scythian aporia depends on abundance, euporia, peculiar to Scythia, their military advantage would seem to be foreclosed to other peoples. Yet later on in the Histories, Herodotus imagines a way

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for agriculturalists, the Athenians, to attain Scythian aporia. When the Athenians consult the Delphic Oracle in near despair at Xerxes’s approach, she advises them to abandon their cities and fields in favor of “walls of wood” (7.140). Themistocles ultimately convinces the Athenians that this means retreating to the island of Salamis and putting their hope in ships. As Hartog notes, the Delphic Oracle advocates (and Themistocles initiates) a strikingly “Scythian” strategy of abandoning settlements and avoiding pitched battles.45 The Athenians draw Xerxes into the straits of Salamis, where their smaller force can maneuver (8.60), much as the Scythians had earlier lured Darius, Xerxes’s father, into the pathless interior of Scythia that only they could navigate (e.g., 4.122). In abandoning Athens for a nomadic, nautical way of life, the Athenians temporarily become Scythian, enjoying the military advantages of Scythian pastoralism without giving up their agricultural diet or settled existence in the long term. But the Athenians’ practice of aporia changes them. Although they retreat to Salamis only for a time, the Athenians later mimic Scythian treatment of the dead. In the final movement of the Histories, Xanthippus, an Athenian general, and the people of Elaus, a city in northern Greece, “fasten to a plank and hang up” (sanidi prospassaleusantes anekremasan, 9.120; cf. 7.33) Artayctes, a corrupt and blasphemous Persian, even after he begs for his life and promises to make reparations. As Michael Flower and John Marincola note, Herodotus associates such mistreatment of the body only with non-Greeks.46 But which ones? Readers of this scene might remember the Persian king Darius, the only other person to crucify someone in the Histories, but even he changes his mind (7.194; cf. 7.238). The Scythians, on the other hand, routinely skin human corpses and carry the skins “stretched upon beams” (4.64: diateinantes epi xulōn), mimicking a crucifixion like the one Artayctes suffers. Although the Athenians have not adopted a pastoral diet, they are now implicated in the pastoral bios and have started to treat human corpses the way Scythians do. Herodotus’s ethnography of Scythia argues that even a concept like aporia cannot be fully disembedded

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from the way of life in which it originates. The Athenians cannot control how Scythian they will become.47

egypt and the island of the sun Diodorus’s attitude to bios and cultural change is very different from what we have seen so far. Whereas Herodotus’s Histories traces the negative consequences of emulating others’ way of life, Diodorus’s Library asserts that the beneficial aspects of one way of life can be safely applied in another. Diodorus achieves this effect by describing certain diets as haplos, or litos, “simple.” The prototypically simple diet is nonagricultural, as we saw with the Fisheaters and Locusteaters, but Diodorus shows how the Egyptians and the inhabitants of the Island of the Sun have attained the health of simple, nonagricultural diets by reinventing haplotēs for themselves. Nevertheless, Diodorus agrees with Herodotus that translating aspects of a way of life across cultures can have unintended consequences. To attain haplotēs the agriculturalist Egyptians enroll animals in their way of life and as a result change the relationships between rulers, ruled, and the divine. Diodorus’s Library begins with an extended description of Egypt and the Egyptians, whose customs Diodorus says are “the best” (1.69.6: kratistoi). They also deserve credit, he says, for the governance structure and early rulers of Athens (1.28–29), and he reports that many Greek philosophers and artists studied there, including Homer, Solon, and Plato (1.196). Although these Egyptians are significantly different from Diodorus’s non-Egyptian, Greek-speaking readers, they are a “near other,” both geographically, culturally, and environmentally similar to Greeks and Romans and much easier to emulate than the remote Fisheaters and Locusteaters. When Diodorus shows the Egyptians learning from other peoples, he implies that his own readers can learn from them in turn.48 Diodorus describes two diets followed in Egypt: one for the king and one for everybody else. The king’s diet, like the rest of his life, is strictly

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regulated. Unlike other autocrats, Diodorus says, Egyptian kings are legally bound not only in the civic realm but also in “daily activities and diet” (1.70.1–2: ta peri tēn kath’ hēmeran diagōgēn kai diaitian). It is their custom ἁπ(α)λαῖς χρῆσθαι, κρέα μὲν μόσχων καὶ χηνῶν μόνων προσφερομένους, οἴνου δὲ τακτόν τι μέτρον πίνοντας μὴ δυνάμενον πλησμονὴν ἄκαιρον ἢ μέθην περιποιῆσαι. καθόλου δὲ τὰ περὶ τὴν δίαιταν οὕτως ὑπῆρχε συμμέτρως διατεταγμένα ὥστε δοκεῖν μὴ νομοθέτην, ἀλλὰ τὸν ἄριστον τῶν ἰατρῶν συντεταχέναι τῆς ὑγιείας στοχαζόμενον. to eat delicate/simple foods, consuming the flesh of calves and geese only, and to drink a prescribed amount of wine, not enough to produce either immoderate satiety or drunkenness. On the whole, their diet was so moderate that it seemed to have been drawn up not by a lawgiver but by the best of their doctors, for the sole purpose of producing health. (Diod. Sic. 1.70.11–1.71.1)49

Diodorus calls the king’s foods either “delicate” (hapalai) or “simple” (haplai), depending on the manuscript reading one prefers.50 On first glance, veal and goose seem like “delicate” foods, and the Hippocratic On Regimen 2.46 calls veal just such a hapalos type of flesh. Yet Diodorus himself never elsewhere mentions delicacy in the context of health; instead, simplicity (haplotēs) appears in his discussion of Fisheater well-being (3.17.5). While I argue that we should prefer the reading of hap(a)los as “simple,” the scribal variant draws attention to what a healthy diet means for the Egyptian king. He eats only two animals, and in this sense his diet is “simple,” but since he is the king, these animals are also “delicate,” that is, expensive and refined. While the Egyptian king eats veal and goose and consumes wine (although only in moderation), the Egyptian people eat much more humbly: τρέφουσι δὲ τὰ παιδία μετά τινος εὐχερείας ἀδαπάνου καὶ παντελῶς ἀπίστου· ἑψήματα γὰρ αὐτοῖς χορηγοῦσιν ἔκ τινος εὐτελείας ἑτοίμης γινόμενα, καὶ τῶν ἐκ τῆς βύβλου πυθμένων τοὺς δυναμένους εἰς τὸ πῦρ ἐγκρύβεσθαι, καὶ τῶν ῥιζῶν καὶ τῶν καυλῶν τῶν ἑλείων τὰ μὲν ὠμά, τὰ δ’ ἕψοντες, τὰ δ’ ὀπτῶντες, διδόασιν.

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They feed their children in an indifferent (euchereias) fashion, so inexpensive as to beg belief. For they supply them with a mash from whatever is cheap (euteleias) and handy (hetoimēs) and give them stalks of the papyrus plant that can be cooked among the coals, and roots and stems of marsh plants, either raw, boiled, or roasted. (Diod. Sic. 1.80.3)51

Although this food is abundant and as varied as foraged diets get (1.34.4, 1.36.1), Diodorus emphasizes the mental state of the Egyptians, who exercise “indifference” (euchereia), looking only for what is “handy” (hetoimē). Although Diodorus does not call the common Egyptian diet haplos, Greek writers consistently mix the language of economy, especially euteleia, “cheapness,” with the language of simplicity, and we should align this passage with Diodorus’s earlier comments about haplotēs.52 The foodstuffs common Egyptians eat, papyrus and other marsh plants, mirror the foraged diet of their ancestors, who “ate grass and the stalks and roots of marsh plants.”53 Although the Egyptians have access to cultivated foods, they choose to eat primarily foraged foods, replicating both their earlier, nonagricultural diet and the diets of healthy, huntergathering others (cf. Hdt. 2.36).54 The Egyptians support this diet with other forms of health care, subsidizing doctors and employing “purging baths, fasts, and emetics” (klusmoi, nēsteiai, emetoi), for they claim that “the majority of food ingested into the body is excessive (peritton), and this is what causes disease.”55 In his description of the Egyptians, Diodorus demonstrates that “simplicity” can be understood as the avoidance of “excess” when more than one food is available. The king avoids excess by national decree, and the common people follow suit. Laws that govern the king’s diet and a culture of health care reinforce the Egyptian commitment to moderation. How did this system come to be? Diodorus tells us that the first king of Egypt introduced “luxury” (truphē) to the Egyptians, with many ill effects. Much later, a descendant of this king ran out of supplies on campaign in Arabia and sheltered with a family who offered him “inexpensive” (euteleia) food. This prompted him to “renounce luxury” (1.45.2:

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katagnōnai truphēs).56 The Egyptian king’s experience in Arabia both explains the Egyptians’ current dietary system and models how Diodorus’s readers are supposed to see ethnic others. Like the Egyptian king who travels to Arabia, we are invited to sojourn among the peoples at the edges of the known world and learn from them about the best way to live. This scene also programmatically distinguishes Diodorus’s ethnography from Herodotus’s. Unlike Herodotus’s Cambyses, whose troops resort to cannibalism when they travel into Ethiopia, Diodorus’s Egyptian king listens to and learns from the others he meets. But the Egyptian king’s openness has limits, as the episode also demonstrates. The Egyptian king does not eat what the Arabian people do after returning to Egypt. His food is still expensive—veal and goose—as befits his station. Diodorus expects his readers, like the Egyptian king, to adapt others’ diets, not adopt them outright. Where, then, does the Egyptians’ variety of complicated, expensive, and excessive foods go? Instead of consuming these foods themselves, the Egyptians feed their most famous sacred animals, like the crocodile of Lake Moeris, “the most expensive (polutelestatas) food,” including the highest-grade flour, pastries in honey, and goose (1.84.5). The “most expensive food” the animals eat is the direct opposite of the “inexpensive” (eutelēs) food that common Egyptians eat. These animals dine better than the majority of sacred animals (e.g., hawks and cats), who, like monoforaging humans, eat the one food “appropriate” (1.83.4: harmozousan) to them. They also eat better than the king does, enjoying a huge range of foods, including cultivated grains, which they are allowed to consume in abundance (polla).57 “Simple” diets can be socially enforced, but the products of agriculture and agricultural civilization have to go somewhere. By displacing their rich food onto sacred animals, the Egyptians protect themselves from the food’s pernicious effects while still enjoying the benefits of urbanism, conquest, and other elements of the agricultural way of life. Diodorus’s description of Egypt allows him to explore the ways that a simple diet can be adapted to an agricultural way of life. Very important

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to this economy are animal cults, which Diodorus does not denigrate as some of his peers do.58 This may indicate that he or his sources relied on priestly informants who wanted to promote the cult. We know little about the care and feeding of sacred animals in general, except that land was set aside for the growing of their food, which included clover and freshwater snails.59 What we do know concerns particular cults in particular places. The Archive of Hor, a rich set of Greek and demotic texts from the second century BCE, describes the ibis cult in Saqqara, Egypt. Hor tells us that the “food of the Pharaoh” was offered to the ibises or their cult image. The ancient editor of the Archive surmises that this food was consumed by the ibises or by their keepers.60 This practice may have inspired Diodorus’s description, which generalizes the particular sacrifice of royal food in an economy that diverts “excessive” agricultural produce to the sacred animals. Or it may be the case that Diodorus’s description masks malnourishment of sacred animals Egyptian priests wanted to hide, just as the Archive of Hor tells us that they attempted to defraud people by pocketing the money meant for ibis burials.61 A. G. Nerlich et al. note bone pathologies in sacred baboons at Tuna-el-Gebel that they attribute to malnourishment, and failing to feed the sacred animals might have been another common method of keeping temple costs down (or profits up).62 There is too little archaeological data to draw broad conclusions about the treatment of sacred animals in Egypt, but Hor’s account of fraudulent ibis burials and the evidence of malnourishment among baboons in Tuna-el-Gebel should make us suspicious of Diodorus’s priestly sources, who would have every reason to hide any “irregularities” and perhaps even exaggerate the amount and cost of food the animals did receive. Another people who adapt nonagricultural haplotēs for their way of life are the inhabitants of the Island of the Sun. Although they enjoy an abundance of every sort of food (1.57), the Islanders dedicate themselves to “simplicity” (litotēs), eating only what is “sufficient” (arkousan), and eschew “pleasures without restraint” (ouk anedēn chrōntai tais apolausesin) by

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consuming foods in rotation, one kind per day, including fish and poultry, and “the most simple” (litotatos) accompaniments (2.59). The repetition of lito- words semantically relates this passage to the haplos diet of the Fisheaters, who also only ate one food at a time—the same food for all time.63 The Islanders have become artificial monoforagers by enjoying single foods in succession.64 Although the Islanders are in some ways fantastic—they have forked tongues, for example (2.56)—their dietary system is fully applicable in the agricultural context of Diodorus’s readers. But as in Egypt, it does require a great deal of social control to enforce. On the Island of the Sun, Diodorus says, this artificially simple diet “has been appointed” (diatetachthai) and follows “a defined order” (2.59.5: hōrismena taxis), just like the rest of life. The Islanders, including their king, die by suicide after a prescribed number of years (2.57.5, 2.58.6). Egyptian law uses the same vocabulary; the king does everything “at the appointed time” (1.70.10: kairos hōrismenos). Diodorus does not explain how these systems of law are maintained and enforced, but both societies are autocratic. In Egypt, a king who rejected luxury set the custom for future generations (1.45). More fundamentally, perhaps, the king’s body in both societies is an example for the common people to follow. The king embodies the law, reinscribing its authority by his own submission to it.65 If Herodotus’s kings are often despots, including those, like Cambyses, whose desire knows no bounds, Diodorus imagines kings who have controlled their appetites and can inspire their subjects to do the same. Carolyn Dewald once concluded that in Herodotus, “rulers of empire must refuse to enjoy the fruits of their labors, in order to survive as rulers.”66 Diodorus puts this sentiment into action by imagining autocracy with restraint.67 But Diodorus’s solution to the conundrum of achieving nonagricultural health in an agricultural way of life also entails new and perhaps unexpected effects. Just as Herodotus’s Athenians found themselves ensnared in other aspects of pastoralism when they attained

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Scythian aporia, so too do Diodorus’s Egyptians alter their way of life when they outsource their “expensive” foods to sacred animals. In this new version of agricultural bios, sacred animals are key actors, eating the food that would make humans sick and entwining human and animal flourishing with the political and religious systems in which they act. If, as Victoria Wohl has argued, Greek writers imagine the autocrat as an insatiable consumer of luxuries and fantasize that he will one day distribute his power and pleasures to the people, Diodorus imagines an ascetic ruler who has shared his wealth not with the people, but with other animals.68 In adopting a moderate but still kingly diet, the Egyptian king reasserts his fitness to rule and his position as mediator between the animal-gods above him and common humans below. In Egypt, haplotēs has triangulated relations between ruler and ruled to include a third order of animals. I began by noting the tendency of Greek authors to label other peoples “healthy.” We have seen, however, that health is not an essential characteristic of human beings, but an emergent property of humans’ relationships with other beings, which ethnographers organize into bioi. When Greeks try to attain the health of others but maintain their own agricultural way of life, they face unexpected and sometimes unwelcome consequences. This chapter demonstrates that human beings and their cultural practices are embedded in complex systems of action and counteraction by other species. Human society is an emergent property of natural environments but cannot be disentangled from them. Diodorus’s Egyptian agriculturalism, in which humans and animals partner for shared well-being, foreshadows the topic of chapter 5. Here I have focused on Greek anxieties about diet and health, especially the ill effects of an agricultural diet and how they can be mitigated. Chapter 5 considers Greek concern about “excess” or “luxury” more generally and how alliances between humans and other species can prevent social decline.

chapter five

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In chapter 4, I argue that diet, the food people consume, involves them in larger ways of life (bioi) and can affect their cultural habits in ways they do not anticipate. Some peoples, like Diodorus’s Egyptians, benefit from these effects, while others, like Herodotus’s Athenians and Locusteaters, are both advantaged and disadvantaged by their bios. As discussed, Herodotus and Diodorus are ambivalent about different diets and their consequences for human well-being. In contrast, Greek writers are more consistently concerned about how wealth affects those who possess it, and it has been typical to discuss this as the “problem of luxury” in Greek literature. When we think of luxury, we often picture consumption: humans using (and using up) inert materials like precious jewels, expensive clothing, and finely prepared food, and often living to regret the consequences. Indeed, ancient Greek writers were keenly aware of wealth’s materiality and its connection to natural resources.1 Yet wealth, like food in chapter 4, often exceeds human control; luxury “corrupts” because it acts on people, often contrary to their desires. These effects and countereffects map out different ecologies of consumption that Herodotus and Diodorus evaluate against one another.

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Herodotus has played a large role in the history of Greek anxieties about wealth, and the discourse of luxury in Herodotus has been considered significant to the text’s overall interpretation. Many of Herodotus’s characters are notably wealthy, especially Persians and other peoples from the ancient Middle East, and their wealth seems to precipitate their demise.2 But the mechanics of this dynamic in Herodotus’s text (and Greek thought generally) continue to be debated. While Herodotean scholars have often credited wealth with historical force, Robert Gorman and Vanessa Gorman have recently argued that wealth is incidental to the fall of Herodotus’s rulers and states.3 As I show in the first half of this chapter, Herodotus’s luxury discourse must be understood as affecting private individuals one way and rulers and their communities another. For Herodotus and fifth-century writers generally, wealth is a good thing, and luxury items are admirable. But with wealth comes risk: the risk that wealth will act on people to produce pleonexia, insatiable greed, and attract phthonos, the envy of others.4 Whereas private individuals can combat greed with virtue, and envy with humility and discretion, wealthy rulers and communities enjoy wealth on such a scale that it exceeds the control of the people who possess it. The virtue of private individuals in the community cannot keep communal greed at bay, and the more communities trade or go to war to quell their desire, the more they increase the risk that they will attract conquerors. Luxury has causal force in the Histories not because it necessarily corrupts (as the Persian Otanes claims; Hdt. 3.80), but because on a large scale its risks cannot be contained. While luxury, possessions that exceed base subsistence, may seem like an essential or cross-cultural concept, it is in fact relative.5 Luxury objects are rare, difficult to access, and often foreign, that is, defined against resources that are plentiful, easy to access, and usually native. Because the Ethiopians possess gold in abundance, for example, they do not value it, whereas bronze is greatly prized (Hdt. 3.23.4). The relative value of different resources is connected to the relative differences

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between places, and the fact that people in different places tend to want what others have shapes foreign relations. For example, Herodotus notices that the edges of the earth contain “the best things” (3.106, 1.32.8: ta kallista; cf. 3.116), things that the characters of the Histories often greatly desire. In the final scene of the Histories (to which I return later in the chapter), the Persians approach Cyrus about abandoning their own “small and rugged land” (oligēn kai tautēn trēchean) and going somewhere better (9.122: ameinō). Though Cyrus dissuades them in this moment, the desire for more eventually infects him and his heirs. In Herodotus, the unequal distribution of natural resources acts on people’s desires and affects the outcome of world events. Although Herodotus rarely mentions luxury itself using words such as tryphē or habrosynē, he refers to it through the desire that peoples and individuals express for things they do not have.6 Herodotus is also interested in the opposite of luxury consumption: self-sufficiency (autarkeia). People in the Histories are autarkic if they remain economically and politically independent from neighboring countries.7 But the events of the Histories demonstrate that autarkeia is very difficult to maintain; interacting with other countries brings people into contact with novelties and advertises their own resources to others. Herodotus’s pessimism prevents him from outlining any clear solutions to the problems luxury poses. Although he notes the growth of great cities as well as their decline (1.5), the events of the Histories emphasize that great leaders and great empires, luxurious communities and wealthy individuals, will tend toward diminishment and degeneration.8 But Diodorus is more optimistic than his predecessor, and in the second part of this chapter I reveal the strategies his Indians and Impassive Fisheaters generate for combating luxury’s negative effects. In Diodorus, the humans who resist luxury most successfully are those who collaborate with animals and plants in their environment to promote self-sufficiency. Partnering with other species allows humans to improve their lives while remaining independent from the vicissitudes of interstate trade, war, and politics.

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the happiness of lands Although the Histories is largely organized around remarkable individuals, Herodotus states early on that he is interested in the full scale of human experience, from the “people” (1.1: ethnos) to the “city” (1.5: polis). The larger scale of inquiry becomes explicit especially in the concluding episode of the text, when Cyrus warns against the dangers of “soft lands” (discussed later in this chapter) but is also reflected in Herodotus’s descriptions of other lands and their products. These different scales of inquiry, into the individual and the community, constitute different discourses in the Histories but not entirely separable ones; what Herodotus or his characters say about the smaller units of human experience resonates with what they say about the larger ones, and sometimes levels of experience intersect directly.9 This interplay is on view in the very first book of the Histories, in an episode that introduces many of Herodotus’s themes.10 In this first book, the legendary Athenian lawmaker Solon makes an anachronistic journey to Lydia (in what is Turkey today), where he meets king Croesus, the wealthiest man alive (1.29). When Solon refuses to agree that Croesus’s possessions guarantee his happiness, the two debate what wealth and happiness really are, grounding this topic as a major theme of the Histories (1.30-32). Key to understanding Solon and Croesus’s debate is the semantic ambiguity of the Greek word for wealth, olbos, which can mean both “riches” and “happiness.”11 This ambiguity allows Solon to question Croesus’s happiness, even though his riches are beyond doubt. Croesus begins by asking Solon a question he believes has an obvious answer: Who is the olbiotatos, the “happiest” or “wealthiest” human being? Much to Croesus’s dismay, he does not rank anywhere on Solon’s list of relatively humble, happy men. To defend his choice, Solon draws a distinction between mere ploutos, “wealth,” and true olbos, “happiness,” which he says involves both wealth and eutuchia, “divine favor” (1.32.8), and can only be calculated after someone has died.12 In debating these

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concepts, Solon and Croesus refer to individuals: Tellus, the “happiest” (olbiotatos) man Solon knows, was well-off, had many descendants, and died gloriously, without experiencing misfortune; Cleobis and Biton, the runners-up, were moderately well-off, very strong, and also died honorably, too young to have experienced misfortune; and Croesus himself, whose olbos Solon says he cannot rate until Croesus’s death. Yet the debate also includes a curious moment in which Solon moves beyond the individual to speak about the happiness of lands (chōrai). In explaining why happiness is so hard for individuals to attain, Solon connects happiness to self-sufficiency (autarkeia):13 Τὰ πάντα μέν νυν ταῦτα συλλαβεῖν ἄνθρωπον ἐόντα ἀδύνατόν ἐστι, ὥσπερ χώρη οὐδεμία καταρκέει πάντα ἑωυτῇ παρέχουσα, ἀλλὰ ἄλλο μὲν ἔχει, ἑτέρου δὲ ἐπιδέεται· ἣ δὲ ἂν τὰ πλεῖστα ἔχῃ, αὕτη ἀρίστη. Ὣς δὲ καὶ ἀνθρώπου σῶμα ἓν οὐδὲν αὔταρκές ἐστι· τὸ μὲν γὰρ ἔχει, ἄλλου δὲ ἐνδεές ἐστι.· It is impossible for a mere mortal to get all these things [wealth, health, luck, beauty, children], just as no land is self-sufficient (katarkeei) in every way, but one has one thing and lacks another, and the one that has the most is the best. Just so, no one person is self-sufficient (autarkes), for they have one thing, but lack another. (Hdt. 1.32.8)

In this comparison, the possessions or products of a land upon which its human inhabitants survive are analogous to the “possessions” of an individual human being; autarkeia is the high but unattainable ideal of both lands and individuals.14 In Solon’s debate with Croesus, this comparison strengthens his argument that luck is a possession comparable to material wealth and as important to happiness—even more important, as he claimed earlier (Hdt. 1.32.5–6). The happiest individual is well-off and lucky (Tellus), while the next happiest are lucky but less wealthy (Cleobis and Biton). If Croesus, as the richest man in the world, is also lucky to the end of his life, he will presumably surpass even Tellus. And if a very poor person were also very unlucky, he would end up at the other end of Solon’s spectrum. Other characters in the Histories also fit into the schema, espe-

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cially the rich and unlucky Cyrus, Amasis, Polycrates, and Pythius.15 This is not news; scholars have long used Solon’s words to categorize later characters in the Histories. But the comparison Solon draws between lands and individuals also signals that Herodotus will track the happiness of lands and the factors that produce it. This larger frame allows us to see how the consumption patterns of individuals create systems of exchange that lead to war and conquest.

greed, envy, and self-sufficiency Unlike the happiness of individuals, the happiness of lands is not easily schematized. While individual human lives have defined beginnings, middles, and ends (tela), the fate of lands is open-ended.16 As shown in chapter 2, the borders of a country can change, and so can the customs of those who live within them. The edges of the earth contain “the best things” (3.106, 1.32.8: ta kallista; cf. 3.116), but this does not always render their inhabitants happy or fortunate. Nevertheless, if we read the Histories from the perspective of larger human communities, Solon’s remarks are borne out: the best country is the one that natively possesses the most of “the best things.” Countries fare better when they eschew trade and conquest and instead cultivate satisfaction with what they have, however little that is.17 Economically independent lands include the territory of the longlived Ethiopians, Scythia, most of India, the territory of the Massagetans, Sparta, Libya, and Arabia.18 Sometimes the rulers of these lands express a policy of isolationism, like the Ethiopian king, but more often their independence can be inferred from Herodotus’s silence about trade connections, consumption of luxury products, or military campaigns. Because they remain aloof from other lands, the human inhabitants of these countries are sometimes quite poor in “the best things.” On the other hand, economically interdependent lands, which have greater access to wealth and luxury items, are at much greater risk for becoming conquered subjects. These include Babylonia, Egypt, and

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Lydia, all of which trade with cities in Greece and Persia and with one another.19 Some lands suffer conquest despite their economic independence, including the territory of the Ethiopians near Egypt, the territory of the Callantiai (a community of Indians), and Colchis (3.97). Significantly, the only lands that enjoy economic interdependence without suffering political subordination are Athens and Persia, but the entire drama of the Histories demonstrates how close Athens and the rest of Greece come to being conquered and implies that Persia may next become Greek.20 Instead of describing economically interdependent but politically independent lands, Herodotus’s text explains why economically interdependent lands often fail: trade and empire make more luxuries available to people, and on a large scale the risks that attend luxury, “greed” (pleonexia) and “envy” (phthonos), cannot be contained. An individual like Tellus can learn to be satisfied with what he has and lead a humble life that diverts the envy of neighbors and the gods, but communities often cannot. People reinforce one another’s taste for luxury and over the long term develop cultures that lead them into wars of conquest; this is the risk of pleonexia. Even if peoples resist becoming imperialists, other imperialists often see them as a prize to be won; this is the risk of phthonos. The conflict between Sparta and Tegea illustrates how wealth produces greed and envy in communities. Since the Spartans are notoriously “tough” and “warlike,” their vulnerability to wealth is especially revealing.21 After Lycurgus establishes the Spartan constitution, Sparta prospers: Οἷα δὲ ἔν τε χώρῃ ἀγαθῇ καὶ πλήθεϊ οὐκ ὀλίγῳ ἀνδρῶν, ἀνά τε ἔδραμον αὐτίκα καὶ εὐθενήθησαν. Καὶ δή σφι οὐκέτι ἀπέχρα ἡσυχίην ἄγειν, ἀλλὰ καταφρονήσαντες Ἀρκάδων κρέσσονες εἶναι ἐχρηστηριάζοντο ἐν Δελφοῖσι ἐπὶ πάσῃ τῇ Ἀρκάδων χώρῃ. Since they had a good land and a not insignificant number of men, they soon thrived and prospered. But it was not enough for them to live in peace (hēsuchian agein), and thinking that they were better than the

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Arcadians, they consulted the oracle in Delphi about the whole of Arcadia. (Hdt. 1.66)

The oracle responds that the acorn-eating Arcadians will not give way to them, but seems to say that they can acquire Tegea instead. The Spartans misinterpret the oracle’s words, fail to conquer Tegea, and become enslaved to the Arcadians rather than Arcadia’s new rulers. In this story, it is the prosperity of the Spartans that ruins their contentment with peace and leads them into arrogance, war, and enslavement.22 In his narrative of Persian expansion, Herodotus describes several communities that are protected from the envy of others by geographical boundaries. The Massagetans are bordered by the river Araxes, the long-lived Ethiopians by a desert, the Scythians by the Ister, and the inland Libyans by mountains and wild animals.23 Conquerors try to reach these peoples, but they do not succeed. On the other hand, remoteness does not guarantee safety. The Indians live at the easternmost edge of the known world, protected by a desert on their western side (3.98), but still pay tribute to the Persian king (3.94). To maximize the advantage of external boundaries, the Massagetans, Spartans, long-lived Ethiopians, and others cultivate self-sufficiency as an internal boundary against greed.24 Since it is the rulers of these peoples who often articulate an autarkic philosophy, they may be responsible for enforcing this philosophy among their people. Tomyris, queen of the Massagetans, urges the Persian king Cyrus to rule his own land and leave her to hers (1.206); Cleomenes, the Spartan king, rejects the gifts of the exiled Samian tyrant Maeandrius, “lest he persuade Cleomenes or some other Spartan to become bad.”25 As shown in chapter 4, the king of the long-lived Ethiopians rejects Persian luxuries in an elaborate celebration of native Ethiopian resources (3.21). Rulers initiate selfsufficient culture and use their power to sustain it. With the Amazons (4.111–116), Herodotus most fully imagines the communal rejection of luxury.26 Herodotus’s Amazons, as one would expect, are a nomadic community of warrior women. Like Diodorus’s Amazons, described in chapter 3, they take husbands and have children,

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but in Herodotus’s telling their husbands are Scythian, members of a different ethnic group. After the Scythians woo the Amazons and the two groups decide to wed, the Scythians argue that they and their brides should return to the “parents and possessions” (tokees . . . de ktēsies) they have at home. The Amazons refuse, citing their cultural differences from the Scythians and saying that they could never live with the larger Scythian community in peace (4.114). This devotion to their own culture is not a commitment to self-sufficiency per se but does prohibit the Amazons from enjoying the wealth of another community. Ultimately, the Amazons agree to receive the Scythian men with their inheritance but then suggest that they move far away (4.115), cutting themselves off from the source of future possessions. The Amazons are the only people in Herodotus to sustain their independence without the guidance of a ruler, a fact that either reflects Herodotus’s pessimism or limits his purported support for democratic ideology.27 In the Histories, people must overwhelmingly identify with their own culture, as the Amazons do, to resist the temptations of luxury without autocracy. At the same time, stories of greedy leaders such as Croesus, Cyrus, Polycrates, and later, Themistocles (8.111), demonstrate how difficult it is for lands to remain independent. They need not only strong leaders but ones with autarkic values.

soft lands and athenian greed In tracing the large-scale effects of wealth in the Histories, there is one last piece of evidence to consider: the Persian king Cyrus’s infamous words at the end of book 9. This episode transports us to Cyrus’s youth, well before the Greco-Persian wars and even before his great imperial expansion. The Persians come to Cyrus, saying that they want to invade other lands because they live in a “little” (oligē), “rough” (tracheia) place. This younger Cyrus warns the people to rule the country they inhabit rather than seek more fertile lands and become enslaved to others. He tells them that “soft (malakōn) people derive from soft lands.

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For it is not the case that the same land produces wondrous crops and men good at war.”28 Herodotus concludes the Histories by saying that the Persians took Cyrus’s advice. This is true in one sense—the Persians do not migrate en masse from Persia—but false in another, since readers know from Herodotus’s narrative that Cyrus himself falls prey to the pleonexia expressed by his people in this episode and inaugurates Persian expansion. Young Cyrus’s pronouncement about soft lands and soft peoples has tremendous force in its context and in the Histories as a whole.29 Most scholars have taken Cyrus at his word and understand the Histories through the lens of soft lands and soft people, concluding that luxury and wealth more or less automatically corrupt human beings and lead to their defeat. Robert Gorman and Vanessa Gorman, having shown that much of the text contradicts Cyrus’s statement, conclude that Cyrus is wrong. But this makes Cyrus’s statement an odd note on which to end. His words ring true, an impression underwritten by his role as the Persians’ “wise adviser,” a frequent character in the stories Herodotus tells.30 To reconcile this competing evidence, I suggest that Cyrus is right for the wrong reasons, or right for reasons he does not yet understand and cannot understand until his own downfall. Young Cyrus is right that wars of conquest are dangerous, but unacquainted with his future self’s experience, he does not understand why. Although he seems to believe that luxury produces laziness and “men bad at war,” we know from reading the Histories that soft lands do not always enervate their inhabitants, just as military training does not by itself protect empires from collapse.31 There is, however, a deep truth behind Cyrus’s statement. Readers of the Histories know that “soft” lands, lands with “wondrous” crops, are dangerous to their inhabitants because they inspire envy. The softness of the land, its desirability to conquerors, produces people whose wealth has made them a target. They may be brave and warlike, contrary to young Cyrus’s words at 9.122, but they are vulnerable to invaders who want what they have.

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Cyrus’s wise-but-incorrect statement at the end of the Histories echoes the end of book 1, in which Cyrus attacks the Massagetans and dies on the battlefield. Although introduced much earlier in the narrative of the Histories, this event takes place after 9.122, the Histories’ final scene. Once Cyrus plans to attack the Massagetans, he must decide whether to engage them on their own land or invite them to his. Croesus reminds Cyrus that human fortune is on a “wheel” (kuklos) that constantly reverses advantage; since Croesus assumes that the Massagetans will press their advantage if they win, he argues that Cyrus should fight on Massagetan land to avoid a counterinvasion if he loses (1.207). Cyrus loses on Massagetan land, preventing us from learning whether Croesus is right. However, Queen Tomyris has said already that she is uninterested in Cyrus’s territory (1.206). If Cyrus had disregarded Croesus’s advice and engaged the Massagetans on his home turf, he might have survived; in any case, Croesus’s advice only makes sense because he assumes that everyone wants an empire.32 Yet Croesus’s advice at the end of book 1, like Cyrus’s at the end of book 9, conveys a deeper truth.33 Human fortune is cyclical; it is the tragedy of human life that this cycle can only be properly viewed in retrospect. Herodotus underscores this tragedy at the end of the Histories by tracing the beginning of Athenian imperialism, which would engulf the Greek world in the years after the wars with Persia and lead to a protracted conflict between Athens and Sparta. The torture of Artayctes, mentioned in chapter 4, is one sign of the danger Athens is in; another is pleonexia, the greed that has largely affected non-Greeks in the Histories but finally comes to infect the Greek general Themistocles. In a small moment in book 8, we are told that Themistocles, who had recently extracted protection money from the islands of Andros, “did not stop wanting more” (8.112.1: ou . . . epaueto pleonekteōn).34 Themistocles’s boundless greed would become characteristic of the Athenian empire to come. As the Histories end with Cyrus’s advice to the Persians, pleonexia and phthonos have become so endemic to the Mediterranean that imperialistic Persians and democratic Greeks appear to

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have switched places. The cautious optimism of Solon at the beginning of the Histories has been confounded. As Rosaria Munson has argued, Herodotus’s text is “moralistic,” that is, laden with values and principles from which readers are encouraged to learn. In particular, the counterfactual history of 9.122, in which the Persians heed Cyrus’s advice and remain self-sufficient, allows readers to imagine alternatives to the dangers of luxury, greed, and envy. Yet lessons of Herodotus’s text are not easy to apply and often lead to the reader’s “ultimate aporia [uncertainty].”35 It took a pragmatic reader of Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, to chart solutions to the problems of wealth the Histories describe.

land management and elephant allies Although Herodotus offers a generally pessimistic theory of wealth, resource acquisition, and war, the authors who inherited his ethnographic tradition continued to explore the possibility for human happiness on a large scale. In Diodorus’s description of India and the Red Sea region, he offers two different counterarguments to the decline narrative of the Histories and demonstrates the power that plants and animals have to counteract the dangers of luxury. By forming relationships with other beings, humans can protect themselves from their own greed and the envy of others. Like the land Cyrus describes in the concluding episode of the Histories, Diodorus’s India produces many wondrous fruits.36 India abounds in mountains, rivers, flora, fauna, cities, and people, and the earth itself is characterized by eudaimonia, “prosperity,” yielding a double harvest and continual produce throughout the year: ἡ δὲ γῆ πάμφορος οὖσα τοῖς ἡμέροις καρποῖς ἔχει καὶ φλέβας καταγείους πολλῶν καὶ παντοδαπῶν μετάλλων . . . χωρὶς δὲ τῶν δημητριακῶν καρπῶν φύεται κατὰ τὴν ᾽Ινδικὴν πολλὴ μὲν κέγχρος, ἀρδευομένη τῆι τῶν ποταμίων ναμάτων δαψιλείαι, πολὺ δ᾽ ὄσπριον καὶ διάφορον, ἔτι δ᾽ ὄρυζα καὶ ὁ προσαγορευόμενος βόσπορος, καὶ μετὰ ταῦτ᾽ ἄλλα

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πολλὰ τῶν πρὸς διατροφὴν χρησίμων· καὶ τούτων τὰ πολλὰ ὑπάρχει αὐτοφυῆ. The earth, bearing all kinds of crops, also has many underground veins of all different kinds of metals. . . . In addition to the fruit of Demeter, much millet grows throughout India, irrigated by a profusion of running streams, and there is a large quantity of legumes, and also rice and what is called “bosporos.”37 In addition, there are many other plants useful to nourishment, the majority native. (Diod. Sic. 2.36.2–5)38

“Sweet” wild foods “offer an abundance for people” in addition to what can be cultivated. “As a result, they say that India has never been oppressed by hunger or, in general, a scarcity of daily staples.”39 In addition to these gifts from the land, the Indians have been blessed by mortal versions of Dionysus and Herakles, two canonical culture heroes.40 Dionysus provides the Indians with the arts of medicine, music, and food preservation; establishes cities; and gives them law, religion, and wine (2.38.4–6). Herakles, Dionysus’s successor, founds additional cities, fortifies them, and clears the land of wild beasts (2.39). India, amazingly verdant and full of a variety of resources, is just the sort of “soft land” we would expect to produce “soft people”: people vulnerable to attack and prone to wanting even more. Yet Diodorus’s India prospers without exposing the Indians to external threat or causing internal degeneration. This is no accident, Diodorus’s text makes clear, but the result of a conscious partnership between the Indians and their surroundings.41 With Herodotus we learn that wealth presents two dangers to people: that they will look outward for more (pleonexia) or attract the notice of conquerors (phthonos). The Indians protect themselves from this first danger by organizing their society around land management. This investment in India keeps the Indians’ attention fixed on their own country and encourages them to be satisfied with what they already have. Like Herodotus’s Amazons, who cannot imagine living in Scythia, the Indians form bonds of interdependence with their native country instead of looking for resources abroad.

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Diodorus describes Indian society as divided into a series of seven classes (merē): philosophers, farmers, herders, soldiers, craftsmen and merchants, overseers, and advisers to the king.42 Many of these classes play a role in keeping the land safe and productive. The philosophers “provide a great service to the Indian public” by predicting storms, droughts, and plagues—what we would call natural disasters—at an annual meeting at which both king and people are present (2.40.2).43 The farmers and herdsmen farm the land and tend its livestock (2.40.5), while the herdsmen have the additional task of making the land “pure,” kathara, by keeping India’s prolific fauna within manageable bounds (2.40.6). The craftsmen forge weapons but also support the farmers by making tools specifically for them (2.42.1). Although the philosophers enjoy the greatest distinction and are released from most forms of public service, they must still protect the community by predicting natural disasters, a duty Diodorus puts on a par with their care for the dead (2.40.2). The fact that both king and commoners attend the meeting at which the philosophers make their predictions demonstrates their shared commitment to land management, and Diodorus stresses king and people’s common investment in what the sages say (2.40.3). Although India is blessed with natural abundance, it is not a golden-age land of perfect happiness. On the contrary, droughts, famines, and epidemics are possible and must be averted by people working together. The farmers are the biggest meros and appear to be the least honorable, yet they too enjoy exemptions from warfare and other duties in order to focus exclusively on their work (2.40.4; cf. 5.45.4). The Indians even take additional measures to safeguard farmers and their land from the threat of war: συμβάλλονται δὲ παρὰ τοῖς ᾽Ινδοῖς καὶ τὰ νόμιμα πρὸς τὸ μηδέποτε ἔνδειαν τροφῆς παρ᾽ αὐτοῖς εἶναι, παρὰ μὲν γὰρ τοῖς ἄλλοις ἀνθρώποις οἱ πολέμιοι καταφθείροντες τὴν χώραν ἀγεώργητον κατασκευάζουσι, παρὰ δὲ τούτοις τῶν γεωργῶν ἱερῶν καὶ ἀσύλων ἐωμένων . . . τοὺς

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δὲ περὶ τὴν γεωργίαν ὄντας ἐῶσιν ἀβλαβεῖς, ὡς κοινοὺς ὄντας ἁπάντων εὐεργέτας, τάς τε χώρας τῶν ἀντιπολεμούντων οὔτ’ ἐμπυρίζουσιν οὔτε δενδροτομοῦσιν. What is customary among the Indians also contributes to an absence of undernourishment among them. For although it is the case among some people that an enemy, laying waste to the land, renders the land uncultivatable, among them farmers are allowed to be sacred and left alone . . . for they consider the farmers the common benefactors (euergetes) of everyone; nor do they set fire to the land of their enemies or cut down their trees. (Diod. Sic. 2.36.6–7)44

Here, the farmers are figured as benefactors (euergetes) on a par with Dionysus, “introducer of many good things” (2.38.5: pollōn kai kalōn ergōn eisēgētēn) to India in ancient times.45 This role elevates the farmers and their work and asserts the status of the land itself as another protected member of the Indian community. Diodorus claims a causal connection between these protections and India’s fruitfulness: “For this reason the land remains uncorrupted and, laden with crops, brings advantages to fruition for people.”46 India is naturally abundant and fruitful, but not autonomously so. Human beings have the power to manage the land’s abundance, and it is a central feature of Indian society—and Indian success—that they do. Diodorus’s text is in dialogue with models of society found in Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics, which argue that labor should be divided among different classes of people. His India includes seven classes, clearly indebted to the six imagined by Aristotle—farmers, craftsmen, the military, the rich, priests, and judges—and which, like his, do not allow for class mobility.47 Diodorus says that farmers are not allowed to become soldiers and vice versa, an echo of Aristotle’s insistence that farmers and soldiers be kept separate and Plato’s argument for specialized professions.48 But both the investment of Indian society in land management and the explicit protection of farmers put Diodorus’s India at odds with the ideal state imagined by Plato and Aristotle. In Diodorus’s India, an elite warrior class does not rule over an enslaved

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producer class, as in Aristotle’s Politics (Pol. 1329a 25; cf. 1330a 25), nor is the task of land management confined to farmers, as in Plato. Rather, farmers, soldiers, and other classes characterized by their professions are equally subordinated to a king, and almost every class has a responsibility for keeping the land safe and productive. Whereas Aristotle privileges war over agriculture by elevating the status of soldiers over farmers, and Plato makes farming the purview of farmers alone, Diodorus does neither. In his India, agricultural labor and laborers are as valued as war and warriors, and land management is the responsibility of everyone. While the India of Herodotus’s text had been insulated from global politics, Alexander’s conquests opened India, at least in the Greek imagination, to external threat. In particular, Diodorus’s Indians depend on war elephants, well known from historical sources.49 These elephants are another exemplary Indian resource; as Diodorus says, Indian elephants are “the largest” of all and “far surpass Libyan elephants in strength.”50 The Indian state trains and maintains the elephants (2.41.2), and it is their deployment that frightens off all potential attackers, “since everyone fears the number and strength of the animals.”51 Despite their deployment in war, these elephants are represented not so much as the Indians’ weapons but as their allies. Diodorus’s description of the elephants interrupts the narrative of Indian society, intervening between descriptions of the seven classes and the magistrates appointed to foreigners (2.42). This narrative patterning treats the elephants as similar to human ethnographic subjects, reflecting the importance of the elephants to Indian society. Diodorus also makes a significant choice in how he represents the human-elephant relationship. Unlike Arrian and Strabo, other texts influenced by Megasthenes’s Indika, Diodorus does not describe the process of elephant hunting here, indicating that the Indian human-elephant relationship may be collaborative.52 This does not mean that the elephants are treated as persons or that they consent to their use in war, but Diodorus paints a

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picture of human-elephant relations that reflects Indian values. Like the other classes of India, the elephants have a role to play, one supported by the rest of India’s inhabitants. If the Indian state did not prioritize the elephants’ training and upkeep, the mere presence of elephants in India would not protect the Indians from invasion. I have described Diodorus’s Indian ethnography as a Greek production, but this section of the Library may rather reflect Indian selfpromotion.53 Diodorus’s Indians protect farmers and farmland, involve nearly all members of society in land management, and repel intruders with war elephants. These commitments are visible also in the Arthashastra, an Indian treatise on national economy and government. The date of the Arthashastra has been much debated, but scholars now tend to think it was composed between the first century BCE and the first century CE, placing it well beyond direct comparison with Diodorus’s source for India, Megasthenes, who traveled to India in the late fourth century BCE.54 Nevertheless, these same scholars also assume (following the Arthashastra’s opening words) that aspects of the text are much older, and they use it as evidence for the Mauryan empire Megasthenes described. If this assumption is correct, we should imagine that Megasthenes, who traveled to India with Alexander the Great or one of his Seleucid successors, met members of the Mauryan court and learned about Indian land management as it is presented in the Arthashastra. On this account, the Arthashastra’s vision for Indian land use reached Diodorus through Megasthenes’s lost Indika. The Mauryan empire was a watershed in India’s environmental history, a time when India’s rulers expanded agricultural land, centralized India’s production and distribution of natural resources, and subdued those who revolted against them. These trends were just beginning when Megasthenes traveled to India, but we can see them refracted through Diodorus’s use of Megasthenes’s Indika. For example, Romila Thapar reads Diodorus’s and other writers’ adaptations of Megasthenes against the Arthashastra and the Edicts of Asoka, another Mauryan text.55 She notes the protections for farmers and farmland in Mega-

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sthenes and connects this to the Mauryan policy of extending cultivation. Unfortunately, Thapar tends to take Greek and Roman writers’ citations of Megasthenes at face value, ignoring the context of different fragments and drawing direct correspondences between Mauryan texts, Greek texts, and Indian realities. Diodorus’s (and other writers’) versions of Megasthenes are valuable for understanding Mauryan India, but what they mainly show is the influence of Mauryan land policy. One way the Mauryas tried to unify and control India was to centralize the production and distribution of natural resources. Indians under Mauryan rule were told to maximize agricultural land and send a portion of their produce to the state.56 This policy was advocated strongly by the Arthashastra but limited in practice, as the Mauryas warred with those who resisted them.57 Nevertheless, Diodorus’s description of India promotes the Arthashastra’s goal of centralized, maximized production. According to Diodorus, India’s well-being depends on everyone’s involvement in land management, from farmers who till the land and hunters who clear it for cultivation to sages who predict the weather with the king in attendance (2.40). Diodorus’s celebration of India (2.35–37) accords with the ideal country described in the Arthashastra: Having strongholds in the center and on the frontiers; capable of supporting itself and others during times of adversity; easy to protect; providing an easy living; showing antipathy toward enemies; with pliant neighboring rulers; free of mud, stones, brackish soil, rugged land, criminals, gangs, vicious animals, wild animals, and forest tribes; charming; abounding in agricultural land, pit mines, produce forests, and elephant forests; good for cattle and for humans; with secure pasture land; abounding in farm animals; with land not dependent on rain; containing water and land routes; containing valuable, diverse, and ample commodities; capable of bearing fines and taxes; containing agricultural workers with a good work ethic and landlords who are prudent; populated mainly by the lower social classes; and with people who are loyal and honest—these are the exemplary qualities of the countryside. (AS, 6.1.8; tr. Olivelle)

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Both Diodorus’s India and the ideal land of the Arthashastra are selfsufficient, abounding in land, water, animals, and precious metals. Both descriptions place a premium on defense against and isolation from neighboring countries, and both texts exclude the forest peoples the Mauryas fought and marginalized.58 Diodorus’s text, which credits Dionysus with the end of hunter-gathering and the beginning of agriculture (2.38.3–5), may reflect Mauryan self-presentation filtered through Greek mythology. Like Dionysus, the Mauryas saw themselves as bringing agriculture and settlements to a scattered and unproductive population. Diodorus’s text, which ends with Dionysus’s elevation to godhood, reflects the Mauryan endgame: a unified, maximally productive India under one-man control. Mauryan environmental ideology can also be seen in Diodorus’s description of India as unconquerable (Diod. Sic. 2.37.3; cf. Arr. Ind. 9.12). The Arthashastra urges India’s rulers to heavily fortify settlements and preserve elephant forests as natural frontiers.59 Yet Diodorus presents the threats to India as external, hailing from the likes of Alexander the Great rather than other Indians (2.36.3). This ignorance of India’s civil strife may have been intended by the Mauryas, whose fortification program would have benefited from the specter of a foreign enemy. Diodorus’s Indian ethnography answers Herodotus’s concern with abundance and outlines strategies to cultivate self-sufficiency and ward off invasion, both of which involve associating more closely with elephants. But whereas Herodotus attends exclusively to the problems of having too much, Diodorus considers the opposite situation, people who have nearly nothing. His description of the Impassive Fisheaters explores strategies for maintaining contentment in extreme poverty; here too, animals play an important role.

the impassive fisheaters As I discuss in “Fisheaters and Locusteaters” (chapter 4), Diodorus describes the Fisheaters (Icthyophagoi) of Africa at length. I also note

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that his Fisheaters enjoy “an unbelievable abundance of every sort of fish” (3.15.4) and in this way mimic Herodotus’s Ethiopians, with their table “quite full of boiled meats of every sort of quadruped” (Hdt. 3.18). The Fisheaters do enjoy an abundance of fish, but since it is their only meaningful resource, they would have seemed poor to Diodorus’s first readers, especially in comparison to the Indians.60 In his extended ethnography of the Fisheaters, Diodorus focuses on one subgroup, the Apatheis Icthyophagoi or “Impassive Fisheaters,” whom he also calls “Ethiopians” (Aithiopōn, 3.18.4). The majority of the Fisheaters inhabit the west coast of the Red Sea, but the Impassive Fisheaters live “beyond the straits” (3.18.1), an area that corresponds roughly to modern Djibouti, just south of Eritrea in the horn of Africa. Like the other Icthyophagoi Diodorus describes, the Impassive Fisheaters subsist entirely on fish. But because they eat fish that are raw and still juicy, these Fisheaters do not require water. Their lack of thirst leads Diodorus to conclude that they are apatheis (cognate with apathetic), “unsuffering,” or “impassive,” since they do not experience thirst as other humans do. Of their way of life, he says that “they are content with the diet that has been allotted to them by fortune from the very beginning, considering happiness (eudaimonia) the banishment of the pain that comes from want.”61 Yet this freedom from thirst is only the most superficial aspect of the Fisheaters’ apatheia. They never express emotion, even when they are beaten or when their wives and children are slaughtered in front of their eyes (3.18.5–6).62 Although the Fisheaters’ apatheia protects them from the pain of poverty or the risk of greed, it also distances them from other humans. As Diodorus says: καθόλου δ’ ἀποφαίνεται μήτ’ εἰς σύλλογον ἔρχεσθαι πρὸς τοὺς ἀλλοεθνεῖς, μήτε τὸ ξένον τῆς ὄψεως τῶν προσπλεόντων κινεῖν τοὺς ἐγχωρίους, ἀλλ’ ἐμβλέποντας ἀτενῶς ἀπαθεῖς ἔχειν καὶ ἀκινήτους τὰς αἰσθήσεις, ὡς [ἂν] μηδενὸς παρόντος. On the whole . . . they do not enter into conversation with other peoples, nor does the foreign appearance of those who approach their lands

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disturb them, but looking at them steadfastly they remain dispassionate and keep their composure, as if no one were there. (Diod. Sic. 3.18.5)

Apatheia leads to lack of interest in human conversation, and this lack of interest means that the Impassive Fisheaters use manual gestures rather than spoken language.63 Instead, the Impassive Fisheaters forge social bonds with other members of their environment: καὶ τὸ πάντων θαυμασιώτατον, φῶκαι τοῖς γένεσι τούτοις συνδιατρίβουσαι θήραν ποιοῦνται τῶν ἰχθύων καθ’ αὑτὰς παραπλησίως ἀνθρώποις. ὁμοίως δὲ καὶ περὶ τὰς κοίτας καὶ τὴν τῶν γεννηθέντων ἀσφάλειαν μεγίστῃ πίστει τὰ γένη χρῆσθαι ταῦτα πρὸς ἄλληλα· χωρὶς γὰρ ἀδικήματος ἀλλοφύλοις ζῴοις ἡ συναναστροφὴ γίνεται μετ’ εἰρήνης καὶ πάσης εὐλαβείας. And what is most marvelous of all, seals live with them and catch fish for themselves alongside (paraplēsiōs) the human beings.64 Likewise, when it comes to their beds and the safety of their children, they have the greatest confidence in one another, for the society between species is perpetuated without injustice and with peace and all due respect. (Diod. Sic. 3.18.7)

While the Fisheaters north of the straits kill and eat seals along with other sea creatures (3.15.6), the Impassive Fisheaters, by contrast, socialize with the animals who would otherwise be their prey. The society that seals and Fisheaters form acts as an alternative to the normal relationship between humans and animals, which Greek writers usually represent as exploitative or at least adversarial. Although the Impassive Fisheaters eschew individual human bonds and have no interest in outsiders, they are able to form a society with the nonviolent seals who are their neighbors. This collaboration allows them to benefit from the help that society provides without compromising their apatheia.65 The Impassive Fisheaters partner with nonhumans in other ways as well, especially in their method of house building.66 Some Impassive Fisheaters live in ready-made caves, others weave huts out of found whale ribs or wild olive trees, and still others burrow into mountain-like mounds of seaweed.67 In each case, the Impassive Fisheaters succeed in

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making their material surroundings as pleasant for themselves as they can: ἐλαῖαι φύονται πάνυ πολλαὶ περὶ τοὺς τόπους τούτους, τὰ μὲν περὶ τὴν ῥίζαν ἔχουσαι προσκλυζόμενα τῇ θαλάττῃ, πυκναὶ δὲ τοῖς φυλλώμασι, τὸν δὲ καρπὸν ὅμοιον ἔχουσαι τῷ κασταναϊκῷ καρύῳ. ταύτας ἀλλήλαις συμπλέκοντες καὶ συνεχῆ σκιὰν ποιοῦντες ἰδιαζούσαις σκηναῖς ἐμβιοῦσιν· ἅμα γὰρ ἐν γῇ καὶ θαλάττῃ διατρίβοντες ἐπιτερπῶς διεξάγουσι, τὸν μὲν ἥλιον φεύγοντες τῇ διὰ τῶν ἀκρεμόνων σκιᾷ, τὸ δὲ φυσικὸν περὶ τοὺς τόπους καῦμα τῇ συνεχεῖ τοῦ κύματος προσκλύσει διορθούμενοι, ταῖς δὲ περιπνοαῖς τῶν εὐκαίρων ἀνέμων εἰς ῥᾳστώνην ἄγοντες τὰ σώματα. Olive trees grow about these lands in great abundance. Their roots are washed by the sea, but they have thick foliage and their fruit is like the chestnut. Weaving these trees together, they make a continuous shade and live in tents of this peculiar kind. For they lead pleasant lives by passing their time on land and in the sea simultaneously, since they escape the sun by means of the shade of the branches, and counterbalance (diorthoumenoi) the natural heat of the place by the waves that continually lap against them, and their bodies enjoy the blowing of gentle breezes. (Diod. Sic. 3.19.3–4)

The way that the Impassive Fisheaters diorthousthai, “set right for themselves,” or “counterbalance” the heat of their country, is key to their happiness and representative of their building philosophy at large.68 Since their environment is very hot, they use trees to shade their bodies and take advantage of the trees’ amphibiousness to become amphibious themselves. They do not harvest the trees but weave them where they stand, sharing space with the trees just as they share their beds with neighboring seals. Even in death the Impassive Fisheaters continue to integrate their bodies into the surrounding environment: τοὺς δὲ τελευτήσαντας θάπτουσι κατὰ μὲν τὸν τῆς ἀμπώτεως καιρὸν ἐῶντες ἐρριμμένους, ὅταν δ’ ἡ πλημυρὶς ἐπέλθῃ, ῥίπτουσιν εἰς τὴν θάλατταν τὰ σώματα. διὸ καὶ τὴν ἰδίαν ταφὴν τροφὴν τῶν ἰχθύων ποιούμενοι κυκλούμενον ἰδιοτρόπως τὸν βίον ἔχουσι παρ’ ὅλον τὸν αἰῶνα.

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They bury their dead by leaving them out at low tide, and when the tide comes in they cast the bodies into the sea. And because they make their peculiar form of burial into food for the fish, they follow a way of life that cycles (kykloumenon) in this unique fashion from age to age. (Diod. Sic. 3.19.6)69

The unusual burial rites of other peoples are a trope of ethnography; it is, after all, the practice of certain Indians to eat their dead that causes Herodotus to declare that custom is king (Hdt. 3.38).70 Here, however, the “peculiarity” (idiotēs) of the Impassive Fisheaters’ burial practice helps them to survive as they become the fish that they eat. The Impassive Fisheaters’ adaptive building method and unusually peaceful cohabitation with seals culminate in this fusion of their bodies with the fish on which they depend. The Impassive Fisheaters’ relationship with the fish, seals, and plants around them stands in contrast to their lack of interest in typical human relationships and may indicate that there is an economy between sensitivity to humans and other beings. If so, the Impassive Fisheaters’ apatheia, their lack of human emotion and interest in human society, frees them to engage with the other members of their environment. Their apatheia also encourages them to accept their environment for what it is. They modify their surroundings only as much as necessary for their basic needs and consider happiness what Diodorus’s readers would call base subsistence. As with the Indians, the Impassive Fisheaters’ way of life is to some degree determined by the chance conditions of their environment. Of their building technique Diodorus says that “the necessity imposed by nature leads them in a skill that they taught themselves” and proposes both habit and need as possible causes of their association with seals:71 Οὗτος μὲν οὖν ὁ βίος, καίπερ ὢν παράδοξος, ἐκ παλαιῶν χρόνων τετήρηται τοῖς γένεσι τούτοις, εἴτε ἐθισμῷ διὰ τὸν χρόνον εἴτε ἀναγκαίᾳ χρείᾳ διὰ τὸ κατεπεῖγον ἡρμοσμένος. This form of life [i.e., living with seals], although incredible, has been preserved by these people from long ago, whether it was fashioned as a result

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of habit over time or imposed by the pressing necessity of circumstances. (Diod. Sic. 3.18.7)72

Nevertheless, although Diodorus gives due weight to nature (physis) and the constraints of the Impassive Fisheaters’ harsh environment, he shows readers that they decide to respond to those constraints in certain ways. He seems to imply that the Impassive Fisheaters are impassive by nature rather than habit, but he also investigates how they work with their environment to make things as pleasant for themselves as they can. The Impassive Fisheaters’ existence is very difficult, but through them Diodorus demonstrates that contentment can be achieved through interspecies cooperation. Although Diodorus’s Indians have many more resources than the Fisheaters, they are also a product of their environment. India is hyperabundant by nature, just as the Indians are naturally many and strong (2.36.1). Nevertheless, Diodorus stresses communal action in the response to preset conditions. A soft land can be safe if people invest in their surroundings to resist greed and ward off invasion. Animals play an important and surprising role in Diodorus’s response to the problem of luxury. The Indians are successful inhabitants of a “soft” land in part because they resist conquest; elephants are key allies in their military strategy. The Impassive Fisheaters are also isolated from foreign humanity, but they build a community with seals instead. To my knowledge, Diodorus’s description of seal and human society is unique among Greek texts in depicting a stable and peaceful arrangement between a community of humans and animals.73 Readers do not know whether the seals have taken on aspects of human culture, inasmuch as the Impassive Fisheaters possess recognizably human culture, but the seals have not been domesticated to human use.74 Instead, humans and seals have achieved a true symbiosis, one that extends to fish and Fisheaters as well. Fish and Fisheaters are “companion species,” to use Donna Haraway’s term. Haraway originally developed this idea to describe the

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coevolutionary relationship between dogs and humans that has significantly shaped both species. “There cannot be just one companion species,” she says, “there have to be at least two to make one.”75 Like Haraway, Diodorus deconstructs the narratives that separate human and more-than-human society and corporeality. In Diodorus’s text, the Fisheaters are formed by and from the fish after whom they are named. This does not mean that fish would not exist without Fisheaters or vice versa, but that both humans and fish enact a cycle that is mutually beneficial and co-constituting. Yet Diodorus also complicates the Harawayan notion of companion species, since fish and Fisheaters achieve symbiosis through mutual eating. While the Fisheater-seal relationships most closely mimic the human-dog relationships Haraway describes, it is the fish with whom the Fisheaters are materially entangled.76 The Impassive Fisheaters’ contentment comes at a great cost to what Greek readers would have considered their humanity. Their perfect apatheia has undermined their affective bonds with one another and thus their development of spoken language and other forms of culture. Their closeness with the other species in their environment, especially their practice of burying at sea to continue “the endless cycle” of mutual nourishment, contravenes deeply held Greek values regarding the treatment of the dead. Diodorus, like many Greek ethnographers, does not adjudicate between Impassive Fisheater and typical Greek values, leaving their interpretation open. The fact that the Fisheaters achieve contentment in such a radically un-Greek way might well have provoked disgust in Diodorus’s readers and a rejection of Impassive Fisheater bios. On the other hand, Cynic philosophy, with its celebration of poverty, probably made the Fisheaters more intelligible.77 Either way, the Impassive Fisheaters, like other ethnographic subjects, “offer the ideal imaginative space within which to conduct . . . conceptual experimentation.”78 In the absence of those aspects of culture Greeks take for granted, new and vibrant ways of life can emerge.

part ii

Present Concerns

c h a p t e r si x

After the Encounter

The Persian king Darius once interviewed two different communities about their treatment of human corpses. The Greeks, he found, would never agree to eat their dead, while the Calliatai in India would never burn theirs. Herodotus tells this story and concludes that “custom (nomos) is king”: εἰ γάρ τις προθείη πᾶσι ἀνθρώποισι ἐκλέξασθαι κελεύων νόμους τοὺς καλλίστους ἐκ τῶν πάντων νόμων, διασκεψάμενοι ἂν ἑλοίατο ἕκαστοι τοὺς ἑωυτῶν· οὕτω νομίζουσι πολλόν τι καλλίστους τοὺς ἑωυτῶν νόμους ἕκαστοι εἶναι. If someone instructed all humankind to pick out the best customs from all the customs in the world, after examining them each group would choose their own; to such an extent does everyone think their customs are the best. (Hdt. 3.38.1)

Though this statement emphasizes people’s willed adherence to their customs, I argue in chapters 4 and 5 that the Histories and Library document the contingency and flexibility of environmental culture. People do not usually choose their nomoi; rather, nomoi come into being through interactions between humans and others. Even when people consciously take on other customs, these customs come embedded in larger ways of life. As shown in chapter 4, individual practices are 133

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difficult to disembed from larger patterns: Athenians who adopted a form of Scythian nomadism in Herodotus found themselves replicating Scythian treatment of the dead. Moreover, as I argue in chapter 2, humans are involved in the “ongoing articulation of the world in its differential mattering.”1 People materialize the world’s boundaries through practices such as historical inquiry, just as they are themselves continuously created through the actions of others. Rather than occupying and living estranged from a pregiven natural world, human beings in Greek descriptions of other places and peoples come into being with the land- and waterscapes, plants, and animals whom they shape in turn. This world making even extends to the destabilizing of sex/gender and species categories, as I argue in chapter 3. Most especially, the women of Herodotus’s Histories and Diodorus’s Library possess feck, the ability to make a difference in the world. Herodotus’s statement that nomos is king also creates a paradox. Readers learn about differences between people, and they learn that difference is itself interesting; some ways of life have advantages that others do not. But the Histories is more focused on collecting these differences than in synthesizing them into a portable philosophy. Herodotus’s openness, his aversion to coming to conclusions, is an artistic strength because it allows readers many points of access to his text and many experiences of the world he creates. Openness is a strength also of the diorama with which I open the introduction to this book. The way of life on display there provoked me to examine my own, and this led to deeper reflection, even consternation. But other viewers of the woman I saw in the diorama may have been merely repulsed. They may have gone away reaffirmed in the rightness or givenness of their own way of life, perhaps also in anti-Blackness and white supremacy.2 This paradox may be inherent in ethnography’s form. Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins, in their study of ethnographic photographs, conclude that “for diverse viewers, the images of a starving African family may implicate American overconsumption, greedy multinational corpora-

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tions, corrupt local governments, or the lack of industry of darkskinned peoples. . . . [The photograph] cannot provide the social analysis that would allow its viewers to act on their unease. The most we can ask of an image is that it leave us with questions, with an aroused interest in the subject, a desire to know more fully the conditions surrounding the representation.”3 “The most we can ask,” Lutz and Collins claim, “is that it leave us with questions.” Yet as scholars who study these texts and images, we must do more. We are not bound by ethnography’s form or the constraints on museum curators, who must balance their own philosophies against the constraints of collections. On the contrary; our freedom from these constraints and freedom of speech is also a responsibility to speak, to make the connections that ethnography cannot. The paradox of comparison need not paralyze us. In moving beyond paralysis, I rely on a method of interpretation rooted in the Indigenous cosmovisions introduced in chapter 1. Scholars of these cosmovisions are often non-Indigenous, but they collaborate with Indigenous artists, storytellers, and activists to challenge white Western colonization, industrialization, and the violence that these processes have visited on human and more-than-human life.4 In this process, the tools of academic literary analysis are brought to bear on Indigenous ecological practices, but not from a distance. Both scholars and those they study are passionately engaged in their shared project. Though unable to collaborate directly with ancient sources, I approach this chapter in a similar spirit. In the preceding chapters I analyze the environmental discourse of Greek ethnography, the discourse as it might have been experienced by Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s first readers. In this chapter I go beyond those meanings to articulate how their texts might speak in the twenty-first century.

diodorus’s invitation As described in chapter 1, many Greek scholars emulated Herodotus by creating their own collections of the world. Diodorus’s Library is a

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textual museum of these lost ethnographies, and like other curators, Diodorus interprets his sources for readers through his choice of material and arrangement. But Diodorus is more pragmatic than his predecessor. He opens his work by touting the benefits of universal history and reprises these sentiments at the beginning of book 5:5 ἀκίνδυνον γὰρ διδασκαλίαν τοῦ συμφέροντος εἰσηγησάμενοι καλλίστην ἐμπειρίαν διὰ τῆς πραγματείας ταύτης περιποιοῦσι τοῖς ἀναγινώσκουσιν. By providing an education in what is advantageous (tou sumpherontos) that entails no danger, [the writers of universal history] furnish their reader with the best experience by this system. (Diod. Sic. 1.1–2) Πάντων μὲν τῶν ἐν ταῖς ἀναγραφαῖς χρησίμων προνοητέον τοὺς ἱστορίαν συνταττομένους, μάλιστα δὲ τῆς κατὰ μέρος οἰκονομίας. Writers should pay attention, when they draw up their inquiries, to everything that might be useful (chrēsimōn), and most of all to how they organize the various parts. (Diod. Sic. 5.1)

Diodorus’s focus on “what is advantageous” (tou sumpherontos) and “useful” (chrēsimōn) tells readers to expect a certain kind of “education,” one they can actually apply to their lives.6 Chapter 4 traces some of these applications, including the artificial simplicity of the Egyptians; unlike Herodotus, Diodorus finds constructive ways for people to adapt each other’s ways of life. But Diodorus is also aware of how easily humans become habituated to what they know. There are people, Diodorus says, who live beyond the Scythians and the Cave-dwellers in extremes of weather that can hardly be believed. The first group are mutilated by frostbite, while the second must drink constantly to ward off dehydration. Nevertheless: ἀλλ’ ὅμως οἱ κατοικοῦντες ἀμφοτέρας τὰς εἰρημένας χώρας οὐχ οἷον φεύγειν βούλονται τὴν ὑπερβολὴν τῶν συμβαινόντων αὐτοῖς κακῶν, ἀλλὰ καὶ τοὐναντίον ἑκουσίως προΐενται τὸ ζῆν ἕνεκα τοῦ μὴ βιασθῆναι διαίτης ἑτέρας καὶ βίου πειραθῆναι. οὕτως αὐτοφυὲς ἔχει τι φίλτρον πᾶσα συνήθης χώρα, καὶ περιγίνεται τῆς ἐκ τῶν ἀέρων κακοπαθείας ὁ χρόνος ὁ τὴν ἐκ νηπίου παραλαβὼν ἡλικίαν.

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The inhabitants of both places I have mentioned do not wish to escape the extremity of the evils that have befallen them; on the contrary, they willingly let go of their lives so that they are not forced to try out a different diet and way of life.7 So it is the case that the land to which people are accustomed acts like some sort of spell (ti philtron), and the time they spend from infancy overcomes the misery of the climate. (Diod. Sic. 3.34.5–7)

Placed in Diodorus’s third book, like Herodotus’s comment that custom is king, this passage confirms and at the same time goes beyond Darius’s experiment with the Greeks and Calliatai. Like the two peoples Darius interviews, the people who live beyond the Scythians and Cave-dwellers are devoted to their own ways of life. While Herodotus probably provoked strong feelings of disgust in his readers by contrasting Greek burial with Calliataian consumption of the dead, Diodorus may have aimed to go a step further with his description of people who prefer painful deaths to another way of life. Diodorus also enriches his Herodotean model by theorizing the origin of people’s attachment to their customs. Unlike the Greeks and Calliatai, whose customs appear essential to them, the peoples Diodorus describes have been habituated to their way of life over time. Diodorus hints at a struggle between these people’s surroundings and the time they have spent there, which can “overcome their misery.” By calling their way of life miserable and comparing them to victims of a love potion (ti philtron), Diodorus casts doubt on whether custom should be king. If the ways of life he describes are a kind of spell, readers are encouraged to imagine what it would take to break it. In fact, Diodorus celebrates a person who changes not only his own way of life but the way of life of his people. As mentioned in chapter 4, the first human king of Egypt, Diodorus says, was Menas. Menas benefited his people by showing them how to worship the gods but also taught them “to be luxurious and lead a lavish way of life.”8 Much later, another Egyptian king, Tnephachthus, was on campaign in Arabia when he ran out of food and was forced to “rely on quite inexpensive provisions at the home of some private person he happened to meet.”9

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ἡσθέντα δὲ καθ’ ὑπερβολὴν καταγνῶναι τῆς τρυφῆς καὶ τῷ καταδείξαντι τὴν πολυτέλειαν ἐξ ἀρχῆς βασιλεῖ καταρᾶσθαι· οὕτω δ’ ἐγκάρδιον αὐτῷ τὴν μεταβολὴν γενέσθαι τὴν περὶ τὴν βρῶσιν καὶ πόσιν καὶ κοίτην ὥστε τὴν κατάραν ἀναγράψαι τοῖς ἱεροῖς γράμμασιν εἰς τὸν τοῦ Διὸς ναὸν ἐν Θήβαις· ὃ δὴ δοκεῖ μάλιστα αἴτιον γενέσθαι τοῦ μὴ διαμεῖναι τὴν δόξαν τοῦ Μηνᾶ καὶ τὰς τιμὰς εἰς τοὺς ὕστερον χρόνους. Delighted with the experience, he condemned excessive luxury (huperbolēn tēs truphēs) and called down curses on the one who had first disseminated extravagance (poluteleian), and so much to heart did he take the change that had occurred in the Egyptians’ habits of eating and drinking and bedding down, that he inscribed his curse in the temple of Zeus in Thebes; it seems that this is the chief reason the fame and honors of Menas did not endure into further ages. (Diod. Sic. 1.45.2–3).

As pointed out in chapter 4, Tnephachthus reverses Herodotus’s story of the Persian king Cambyses, whose army dies on a similar expedition, and instructs Diodorus’s readers in how to approach other peoples. Despite the greatness of his society, Tnephachthus recognizes a better way of life when he sees it; this seems to be the model of ethnological comparison that Diodorus most admires. At the same time, Diodorus is cagey about how to apply the lesson more broadly. Tnephachthus revises Egyptian diet and deployment of wealth, but the Egyptians do not “become” Arabians. Readers are left with only a vague sense that they can learn from other people’s good examples. As noted previously, it is not the task of ethnography to adjudicate between ways of life, let alone prescribe customs for readers. Nevertheless, Diodorus’s pragmatic philosophy of history writing invites readers to read his text more deeply, teasing out the environmental ethics that lie latent in his descriptions of other peoples and their ways of life. In what follows, I perform this reading of stories already encountered in the course of this book, as well as new passages on related themes, attending especially to how the “painless experience” the Library offers can be applied in the present day and made “beneficial” to twenty-firstcentury readers.

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making the world As discussed in chapter 2, Herodotus and Diodorus both present the world in a constant state of creation. Rivers, heroes, rulers, and the people they deploy make the geographic boundaries that come to be perceived as natural later in time. These boundaries are neither good nor bad in themselves but are evaluated for how they either benefit or harm human communities. As an environmental principle, this anthropocentrism is very limiting. Though global climate change and other environmental crises threaten human life, they are also already devastating more than human life, a fact that the best environmental ethics take into account. Yet by centering human well-being, Greek ethnographies also offer twenty-firstcentury people an opportunity. For environmental change to succeed, it must engage the majority of human beings, people who value their own species above others. Greek ethnography, by showing us a world in which people are both superior to other beings and inextricably interconnected with them, offers one way to do this. Even in an anthropocentric world, this interconnection places an obligation on us. If the world is not a fixed, predetermined place in which humans as well as other beings play out their minor roles, but rather a creative space of continual possibility, then people cannot pursue “social” lives isolated from a “natural” world. We are a part of the nature that we constantly create. Neither Herodotus nor Diodorus could foresee the degree to which industrialized humans would remake their surroundings, but their ethic can help us confront the scale of disaster we now face. As a reader of this book you (like me) are probably part of the demographic that consumes the majority of the planet’s resources. By our participation in the global economy, you and I have contributed to the sixth mass extinction of Earth’s history. We are warming the climate and changing ecosystems far from any human habitation as well as endangering people who live in precarious places or live precarious lives in more secure ones.10 This is the world we have made; we are responsible for deciding what kind of world we want to make next.

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Semiramis, one of Diodorus’s favorite characters, provides one model for navigating these responsibilities. As I argue in chapter 3, Herodotus and Diodorus use women to explore the creation of categories and deploy female characters (or women-led communities, like the Amazons) to map women’s effects on bloodlines, families, and society at large. In particular, Diodorus represents the Assyrian queen Semiramis at the intersection of several categories. Though called a woman, she takes many male prerogatives and is credited with inventing a gender-neutral garment. Though called a human being, she was born from a mermaid goddess and raised by doves. These gender-bending and more-than-human attributes allow Semiramis to see the world differently, to solve problems the men around her cannot. With this insight she births giant trick elephants that allow her to face off with the real elephants of the Indians and confuse their horses. Though Semiramis has feckless sons of her own, these elephant eidōla (“elephantasms”) are her real heirs. When Semiramis constructs her trick elephants, she makes a new creature, a hybrid of camel and human surrounded by oxhide. The eidōla, like Semiramis, share attributes of more than one species, even wearing a “costume” (the oxhide exterior) that, like hers, obscures their inner nature. This assemblage of humans and other animals disrupts the typical relationships between elephants and horses on the battlefield but also affirms the relationships Semiramis has forged with her people. Having discovered that the Indians possess real elephants, ἐπιλέξασα δὲ βοῶν μελάνων τριάκοντα μυριάδας τὰ μὲν κρέα τοῖς τεχνίταις καὶ τοῖς πρὸς τὴν τῶν κατασκευασμάτων ὑπηρεσίαν τεταγμένοις διένειμε. she picked out 300,000 black oxen and distributed the meat to her artisans and those assigned to the construction of the devices. (Diod. Sic. 2.16.9)

Semiramis does not hesitate to intervene in the “natural” order, but she does so with fairness, strengthening the compliance of subordinates by

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honoring their craft. Semiramis’s elephants have been created not only from oxhides and straw, camels, and drivers, but also from the labor of artisans and other workers, who must be nourished if they are to complete their work. The world is made of bodies that interdepend, and when we remake the world we remake those interdependencies. As an environmental exemplum, Semiramis argues that our interventions in the world should be evaluated based on their effects, not on whether they are traditional or innovative, seemingly natural or contrary to the world as it is. This principle can help us think through planetary interventions not yet possible, like climate engineering, as well as efforts currently under way, like rewilding, a form of large-scale conservation in which plant and animal species are reintroduced rather than merely protected where they happen to survive.11 Climate engineering and rewilding may or may not be the right way to address environmental crises, but their risks should be weighed against their potential rewards without reference to what seems “natural” or “artificial.”

extending society In Semiramis’s case, oxen mediate and strengthen her bonds with other humans. Animals in the Library are often instrumental to human relationships; this is the main criterion for animal worship in Egypt, for example.12 Many of the animals in Egypt that provide a benefit “for the common life and for the people” (1.87.1: tou koinou biou kai tōn anthrōpōn) are domestic or domesticated: cows and sheep give labor, milk, and wool, while dogs and cats hunt and guard the home. Other animals help humans from outside, often without recompense: birds drive out pests and are used in soothsaying, while ichneumons, a type of mongoose, break crocodile eggs “though they receive no benefit in return” (1.87.4: mēden ōpheloumenon; cf. 1.35.7). Crocodiles are a serious threat to human beings in Egypt, so Diodorus is floored that some are worshipped alongside the animals that hunt the Egyptians themselves. Some claim that Menas, an early king, instituted the cult after he had

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been saved by a crocodile, while others say that crocodiles are responsible for driving out malefactors who try to cross the Nile (1.89.2–3). But Diodorus stresses that the crocodiles “practice the most horrible way of life” (1.89.1: deinotata diatithentas); he has not been persuaded of this particular Egyptian custom. Despite his skepticism, Diodorus reports several other people who elevate subordinates—whether animals or other humans—to the role of benefactor. As shown in chapter 5, Indians treat even enemy farmers as “the common benefactors of all” (2.36.7: koinous ontas hapantōn euergetas), thus securing their food supply in peacetime. Impassive Fisheaters go so far as to live their lives in common with the seals that neighboring communities hunt for food, building a “society” (sunanastrophē) “without injustice and with peace and all due respect” (3.18.7: adikēmatos . . . met’ eirēnēs kai pasēs eulabeias). In each of these cases, humans and other animals that would normally be targets of violence have instead become part of a common concern. Yet violence is also compatible with these relationships, if the benefactions are mutual. The Fisheaters eat fish “in an endless cycle,” their own bodies feeding the fish in turn (3.19.6). Extending society this way has immediate benefits to those involved, both those in power and those they partner with, but the advantages of these relationships go further. People who include others in their community live richly self-sufficient lives. While impoverished “self-sufficiency” (autarkeia) is a virtue in much of Greek literature, Diodorus demonstrates that people can actually improve their quality of life by focusing on the creatures within their borders. Once enfolded within human society, these creatures help humans maximize what they have at home and insulate them from desire for the possession of others. If Semiramis had tried to hunt elephants in India while beginning an invasion, she probably would have come to ruin.13 Instead, she leveraged the human and nonhuman resources of Assyria to create elephants of her own. As noted previously, Greek ethnographies elevate humans over other creatures, subordinating their well-being to the service of the human

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community. But when people focus on the other beings around them, they also seem to value them more. Under the influence of self-sufficiency, anthropocentrism softens into an uneven but sustainable relationship. In our present moment, focusing on other beings could take many forms, from granting legal personhood to nonhumans, including animals and mountains, to mass veganism.14 But Diodorus’s text reveals how important it is for human beings to build relationships with nonhumans from which these policies and behaviors can flow. This means much more than “spending time in nature” by hiking or even volunteering in nature preserves.15 Rather, we in industrialized communities must redesign our way of life to make visible our interdependencies with other species. This might mean a large-scale return to local food production and processing, including hunting, home gardening, and preserving, as well as other crafts that would make people intimate with the materials—the plant and mineral and animal bodies—they need to clothe, shelter, educate, and entertain themselves.16

centralizing change Environmental cultures in Greek ethnography are maintained by systems and institutions, especially autocracy, rather than the will of individual, common people. As discussed in chapter 5, Herodotus gives several examples of rulers who persuade the ruled to remain selfsufficient, including Cleomenes of Sparta and the Massagetan queen Tomyris. In Diodorus too rulers play an outsize role in enforcing limits on consumption and wealth. The Egyptian king Tnephachthus imports Arabian customs, disseminating his changes by royal decree, while his successors, as shown in chapter 4, exemplify (in royal fashion) the “simple” diet common Egyptians are expected to follow. On the Island of the Sun, another “simple” diet “has been appointed” (Diod. Sic. 2.59.5: diatetachthai) and is followed along with customs like child-sharing (chapter 3) and suicide (chapter 5), which carefully manage the resource of human bodies. In India, as discussed in chapter 5, nearly every

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stratum of society participates in land management and the maximizing of local products, as decreed by the king. The Histories and Library present a world in which centralized power determines people’s consumption of natural resources, especially their decision to restrict consumption. Only Diodorus’s Impassive Fisheaters (chapter 5) are individually capable of resisting the temptations of “wanting more” (pleonexia), and their immunity to suffering appears to be a gift of physis (inner nature). White Western environmental discourse often tries to persuade individuals of their ethical obligation to recycle, use public transportation, forgo fast fashion, become vegetarians, and take on other “environmentalist” practices. Though communal environmental customs are composed of individual behaviors, Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s texts indicate how much more powerful institutions and leaders are than common individuals and their ethical commitments. If they are right, we should focus on empowering leaders to set large-scale environmental policies rather than trying to persuade people to make individual, principled choices. Does this leave individuals completely powerless? On the contrary; Diodorus shows that common people are responsible for holding their leaders and institutions accountable. His description of Egypt is particularly interested, as shown in chapter 2, in the benefits that rulers provide their people and the costs in labor that these benefactions extract. After the Egyptian king dies, he is eulogized by his priests. The people either affirm his praises or offer their complaints, as a result of which πολλοὶ τῶν βασιλέων διὰ τὴν τοῦ πλήθους ἐναντίωσιν ἀπεστερήθησαν τῆς ἐμφανοῦς καὶ νομίμου ταφῆς· διὸ καὶ συνέβαινε τοὺς τὴν βασιλείαν διαδεχομένους μὴ μόνον διὰ τὰς ἄρτι ῥηθείσας αἰτίας δικαιοπραγεῖν, ἀλλὰ καὶ διὰ τὸν φόβον τῆς μετὰ τὴν τελευτὴν ἐσομένης ὕβρεώς τε τοῦ σώματος καὶ βλασφημίας εἰς ἅπαντα τὸν αἰῶνα. many of the kings were deprived of a typical, public burial because of the opposition of the masses. And so it happened that their successors acted justly, not only because of the reasons just described, but also from fear of the abuse their bodies would suffer after death and of a bad reputation for all time. (Diod. Sic 1.72.6)17

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If rulers do not meet their responsibilities to make the world for the common good—including the good of other beings—then people have a concomitant responsibility to shame them and inspire better successors. This is a power the people must take however they can. Diodorus learns from Egyptian priests that Egypt’s early kings were chosen for their use to society rather than their pedigree, εἴτε προκαλουμένων τῶν ἀνθρώπων τοὺς ἐφ’ ἑαυτῶν βασιλεῖς ἐπὶ τὴν κοινὴν εὐεργεσίαν, εἴτε καὶ κατ’ ἀλήθειαν ἐν ταῖς ἱεραῖς ἀναγραφαῖς οὕτω παρειληφότων. whether [by saying this] people were challenging the kings to benefaction for all (tēn koinēn euergesian) or whether they actually received this account in their sacred writings. (Diod. Sic. 1.43.6)

Diodorus raises the possibility that his informants are lying when they say that their sacred writings have given them the power to hold their rulers to account; this may “actually” (kat’ alētheian) be the case or a pretext that allows them to advocate for the common good. Though ethnographies impress upon readers the power of community in shaping environmental behavior, individuals must coax rulers into making change happen. When it comes to facing the climate emergency of the twenty-first century, this lesson should move us, for example, beyond green consumerism to invest in local food and other resource systems and mobilize for collective action. Key to this action will be electing leaders and holding them accountable on environmental policy, but in the United States even the organs of democracy are imperiled. Without free and fair elections, especially in a country gerrymandered primarily by Republicans, environmental change is dead on arrival.18

becoming amazons I have emphasized the role of rulers in making social change because this is a theme of the first part of the Library, which has been my focus in this book. But another ruler Diodorus admires can help us see the

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negative side of one-person rule. Diodorus has many good things to say of Alexander the Great, to whom he devotes the entirety of book 17, though he also tempers this praise with what some have seen as criticism.19 I take this interpretation in a somewhat different direction and argue that Diodorus’s treatment of Alexander reveals the limitations of the Library he has created, which offers readers the world-making possibilities I have sketched out but ultimately rests its highest praise in a leader incapable of committing to his best ideas. As Alexander’s failure shows, the principles I have outlined mean nothing without follow-through. Diodorus says that “of all the many good things Alexander did, none was better or more worthy of record and memorialization in history” than the fact that after the battle of Issus he welcomed, reassured, and showed the greatest respect to the captive mother, wife, and children of his foe Darius.20 Yet in the sack of Thebes earlier in book 17, “children and women and the elderly who had fled into the temples were subjected to outrageous violence (hybris) beyond limit” by the Macedonian army.21 The victims in Thebes parallel those members of Darius’s family that Alexander treats so well, but Alexander seems able to pity only those directly in front of him. In fact, Diodorus tells us that Darius’s family members are not the only civilians taken into captivity after the battle of Issus. After the Persian army had scattered, the Macedonians “set out for plunder” (17.35.1: pros harpagēn hōrmēsan), acquiring not only vast amounts of silver, gold, and precious clothing, but also the elite women they found. Diodorus paints a vivid picture of the “extreme suffering” (17.35.4: pathos . . . deinotaton) of these women, telling us that they were dragged by the hair, stripped, and beaten by men guilty of hubris (17.35.7: hybrizontes). Darius’s family members are among those outraged in this way, but they are the only ones that excite the greatest pity among the “most prudent” or “moderate” (17.36.1: epieikestatoi) of the Macedonians, the same Macedonians who felt no pity for the Thebans. Through the juxtaposition of the Theban women, Persian women, and family of

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Darius, Diodorus’s text does not celebrate Alexander’s “prudence” or “moderation” (17.38.3: epieikeia) so much as reveal how severely it is limited. Alexander fails in the same way later in book 17. On the other side of the Araxes River, marching east, Alexander “encounter[s] a strange and horrible sight, inciting righteous hatred (misoponēria) against the perpetrators and compassion (sympatheia) for the wretched victims.”22 Eight hundred Greek veterans approach him. “Most were old, but all had been mutilated, some lacking hands, some feet, and some ears and noses.”23 Greatly moved by their entreaties, Alexander grants them gifts of money, clothing, livestock, grain, and exemption from taxes (17.69.8). Yet in attacking Persia, Alexander has created the conditions that will add to the numbers of the disabled. Diodorus treats us to a graphic description of the Persians’ scythed chariots in action, which “cut off the arms of many, shields and all, and not infrequently cut through the necks so that the head hit the ground with its eyes still open and the expression frozen in place.”24 Nor does Alexander feel compassion when his own men are wounded. On another campaign, Alexander “did not especially worry” (ouch houtōs . . . elupēthē) about his men, who were dying from the poisoned weapons of the Indians, except his “beloved” (17.103.6: agapōmenōi) heir Ptolemy. As in the aftermath of the battle of Issus, Alexander’s sense of connection with others is capricious, triggered by particularly moving encounters and old bonds rather than a consistent ethical commitment. Diodorus’s first readers probably would have found these inconsistencies unsurprising, since Greeks were expected to bring joy to their friends and grief to their enemies (Od. 6.184–85), only occasionally, like Glaucus and Diomedes in the Iliad (6.119–236), enfolding an enemy into the category of friend. But Diodorus’s centering of Alexander must give pause to any who look to the Library for ways to change environmental culture. The principles I have sketched here, even when internalized, may bear inconsistent fruit. Worse yet, the leaders on whom people depend to carry out the change they wish to see may be incurably

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myopic. Alexander is by many accounts a good leader, but he cannot see the larger picture in which he participates. To counter the environmental problems posed by Alexander’s example, I close by reprising Herodotus’s singular Amazons, discussed in chapter 4. As shown there, the Amazons remain self-sufficient even after marrying Scythian husbands. Their norms survive this cultural mixing without the injunctions of a charismatic ruler like Cleomenes, Tomyris, or the Ethiopian king (in Herodotus); Tnephachthus or his successors; or even Alexander (in Diodorus), and without the Impassive Fisheaters’ marvelous immunity to suffering. Unlike, say, the Ethiopian king, the Amazons do not reject others’ customs because they think they are bad, but because Scythian ways are incompatible with their own: Ἡμεῖς οὐκ ἂν δυναίμεθα οἰκέειν μετὰ τῶν ὑμετέρων γυναικῶν· οὐ γὰρ τὰ αὐτὰ νόμαια ἡμῖν τε κἀκείνῃσί ἐστι. ἡμεῖς μὲν τοξεύομέν τε καὶ ἀκοντίζομεν καὶ ἱππαζόμεθα, ἔργα δὲ γυναικήια οὐκ ἐμάθομεν· αἱ δὲ ὑμέτεραι γυναῖκες τούτων μὲν οὐδὲν τῶν ἡμεῖς κατελέξαμεν ποιεῦσι, ἔργα δὲ γυναικήια ἐργάζονται μένουσαι ἐν τῇσι ἁμάξῃσι, οὔτ’ ἐπὶ θήρην ἰοῦσαι οὔτε ἄλλῃ οὐδαμῇ. οὐκ ἂν ὦν δυναίμεθα ἐκείνῃσι συμφέρεσθαι. ἀλλ’ εἰ βούλεσθε γυναῖκας ἔχειν ἡμέας καὶ δοκέειν εἶναι δικαιότατοι, ἐλθόντες παρὰ τοὺς τοκέας ἀπολάχετε τῶν κτημάτων τὸ μέρος, καὶ ἔπειτα ἐλθόντες οἰκέωμεν ἐπ’ ἡμέων αὐτῶν. We could not live with your women, for we do not have the same customs that they do. For we shoot bows, throw spears, and ride horses, and have not learned women’s work, but your women do none of the things we have spoken of and remain in their wagons doing women’s work, nor do they hunt outside or anywhere else. So we would not be able to get along. But if you want to have us as your wives and be known as the fairest of men, go to your parents and take your share of the inheritance, and afterward let us go and live together on our own. (Hdt. 4.114.3-4)

Despite their devotion to their own way of life, the Amazons have learned their husbands’ language (Hdt. 4.114.1) and accept them as full members of their community, which is now known as Sauromatian:

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καὶ διαίτῃ ἀπὸ τούτου χρέωνται τῇ παλαιῇ τῶν Σαυροματέων αἱ γυναῖκες, καὶ ἐπὶ θήρην ἐπ’ ἵππων ἐκφοιτῶσαι ἅμα τοῖσι ἀνδράσι καὶ χωρὶς τῶν ἀνδρῶν, καὶ ἐς πόλεμον φοιτῶσαι καὶ στολὴν τὴν αὐτὴν τοῖσι ἀνδράσι φορέουσαι. From that time on, the Sauromatian women employed their ancient ways, going out to hunt with the men or without them, making war, and wearing the same clothing as the men do. (Hdt. 4.116.2)

Unlike Diodorus’s Amazons, who disable their husbands (Diod. Sic. 2.45.2–3), or the people beyond the Scythians and Cave-dwellers, who prefer frostbite and thirst to another way of life (3.34.5–7), Herodotus’s Amazons both identify with their way of life and know when to change. Their identity is embodied in a set of practices that are easily adapted to a new land, since we know that they have recently survived displacement (Hdt. 4.110), but the sex/gendered dimension of these practices requires a certain amount of isolation and autonomy. Alexander, on the other hand, only seems committed to principles of generosity, mercy, and cultural openness. In reality, all his interpersonal virtues are subordinated to his imperial project. In weighing the exempla of Greek ethnography, I urge us to become Amazons, committed to practices that insulate us from aspects of the wider world; in particular, wanting more (pleonexia) and using up Earth’s resources. Becoming Amazons means identifying with a way of life that is open to cultural mixing but resists the dominant environmental culture, which separates humans from other beings and takes human domination for granted. This way of life may not be organized around a commitment to certain gender roles, as Amazon society is, but it needs an anchor, or perhaps different anchors in different places. One of these might be religion, which can dictate diet, work, and other environmental behaviors even in industrialized, capitalist countries.25 Another anchor, and the one I propose in the final chapter, is the natural history museum. Like ethnographies, the natural history

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museum provides a context for reflection on one’s way of life through cultural comparison. But unlike the written page, the embodied space of the museum is communal and immersive, allowing people to break through the glass that separates self and other and imagine their shared future.

c h a p t e r sev e n

Transformation in the Natural History Museum

The paradox of cultural comparison described in chapter 6 is familiar to every environmentalist who lives in a high-consuming country like the United States. For example, in the wake of James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar, a problematic but also powerful environmental epic, fans moved by the destruction of human and more-than-human life and culture came together to create change. These included Indigenous viewers, who used the film to galvanize support for regional struggles with transnational corporations.1 But the general fandom that emerged, though deeply invested in the world of the film, did not build into an environmental movement. Avatar takes place in a near-future in which humans have achieved sophisticated, long-distance space travel. The protagonist, Jake Sully, is a paraplegic ex-marine, who in the wake of his injury and the sudden death of his identical twin brother has taken his brother’s place on a ship bound for the planet Pandora. The ship is staffed by scientists interested in the flora and fauna of Pandora but funded and controlled by the Resources Development Administration (RDA), which wants to mine “unobtanium,” a rich source of energy unique to the planet. In addition to boasting a variety of animal and plant life, Pandora is also inhabited by tall blue humanoids who call themselves Na’vi. When the 151

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film opens, the Na’vi have resisted the RDA’s overtures to buy or trade for Pandora’s unobtanium. Pandora does not have an atmosphere that will support human life, but the scientists on the mission have devised a way to grow avatars, “remotely controlled bodies . . . grown from human DNA mixed with the DNA of the natives” (00:8:28), with which the humans can psychically “link.” Jake is able to link with the avatar created for his brother and thus take his place on the mission. Although initially indifferent to Pandora, Jake falls in love with Neytiri, a Na’vi he encounters, and with her way of life. He is eventually initiated into Neytiri’s clan and comes to oppose the actions of the RDA. But by the time Jake fully acculturates, the RDA has learned enough from him to attack the Na’vi and take their unobtanium by force. At first rejected by the Na’vi as a traitor, Jake eventually wins their trust; defeats the RDA; and in the final scene of the film, fuses with his Na’vi avatar and abandons his human body forever. Jake’s story thus traces a conversion of both mind and body, philosophy and way of life, that elevates Indigenous knowledge systems and cultures over those of white Westerners, including many fans of the film. Inspired by this story and its exposition of Earth’s environmental crises, Avatar’s fans made communities to extend and debate the film’s mythology and discuss its application to environmental problems on Earth. But while some called for radical political action, “most discussions debate[d] practices that [could] be incorporated into the everyday life of fans.”2 These practices included meditation, the circulation of petitions, and vegetarianism, which, however worthy, have (so far) done little to dismantle the material and cultural structures that underpin global climate change and mass extinction.3 I suspect that fans’ access to the Na’vi and their way of life subverted their desire to alter their own. Though affected by the message of the film, the resource-intensive medium of this message reinforced their investment in maintaining the systems that brought the film to their attention.4 Greek readers of the ancient texts I have discussed were in a

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similar position, uniquely able to access an array of information about other peoples and, precisely because of this access, likely to dismiss criticisms of the systems, including imperialism, that made ethnography available to them. Chapter 6 offers a way to read ethnography, especially parts of Diodorus Siculus’s Library, that acknowledges some of these problems and tries to go beyond them. The Library builds up a vision of the world that could be, if we are willing to sacrifice the world as it is. But this vision still exists only on the page. It needs to be translated into action, into lived experience that transforms culture rather than accommodates the status quo. We must, as I suggest in chapter 6, “become Amazons,” consciously rejecting much of the consumption that makes life in the twenty-first century so sweet for those who can afford it. This is an enormous undertaking, and I do not have all the answers. Instead, in this final chapter of the book I offer museums of natural history as sites for both encounter and transformation. Like the Histories and Library, museums of natural history are implicated in imperialism, colonialism, and the devastation of human and more-than-human life that has accelerated over the last century. But unlike these Greek archives, let alone films like Avatar, natural history museums are public institutions, dynamic spaces of ongoing research, education, and activism that try to speak to visitors of every age, educational background, and income level. While most people will never read ancient Greek texts, many will pass through the doors of a museum, eager to learn about the world. And they will bring their children, children who may, as I did long ago, have an epiphany about their own way of life.

why museums As discussed in the introduction, early white Western collectors, trained in the “classics,” saw their projects in the tradition of Greek and Roman natural history, including the ethnographies analyzed in part I, and Greek and Roman presences remain in the institutions they founded. For

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example, at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York, one of the country’s oldest and largest institutions of its kind, visitors to the Hall of Asian Peoples can trace human “progress” from Paleolithic, Neolithic, and Bronze Age settlements as illustrated by the Koryak and Chukchee, Indigenous peoples living in Siberia: “The beginnings of modern man may go back almost 500,000 years. But only in the last 5,000 years has man achieved civilization, which is characterized by the dominant role of symbols. . . . Through mastery of technology civilized man can exploit the physical environment most intensively to provide the agricultural surplus and raw materials that make civilization possible.” The exhibit culminates in Man’s Rise to Civilization in the Near East, a series of displays that describe the “achievements” of the Persians, Babylonians, and Greeks. While the Babylonians possessed “the basic criteria for civilization” and the Persians “laid the ground for the accomplishments . . . of classical civilization,” it is the Greeks who are associated with “Western civilization” and the aim of the museum itself, “to investigate nature to the limits of human intellect.” Though the Greeks were only “one result of th[e] rise” this exhibit traces, its language subordinates “Asian knowledge” to “local [i.e., Greek] genius.” Greece is the culmination, the ever-living present of Western civilization, while living Indigenous peoples remain yoked to an uncivilized past.5 This exhibit and others like it have been subject to criticism, especially by Indigenous peoples and their allies. These include scholars who study ethnographic exhibits in museums, those who work as curators and cocurators to change exhibits, and others who rally against them as part of a broader political movement of decolonization.6 Surprisingly, even recent exhibits cocurated with Indigenous peoples rely on comparisons with Greek and Roman antiquity. At the Chicago Field Museum, for example, The Ancient Americas (2007) displays a picture of the Roman Colosseum and this text: American empires were just as grand and powerful . . . and sometimes just as violent.

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The Aztec and Inca empires were similar to the mighty empire of ancient Rome (50 BC–AD 300). All were sophisticated and vast, and created largely through conquering others. But violence and conflict were not the only ways these empires controlled territories. To keep people under their power, rulers created political allies, shared art styles, imposed common religious beliefs, developed extensive trade networks, and managed complex record keeping and communication systems.

This panel argues that empires in the ancient Americas were “just as grand and powerful” as the Roman empire, pushing back against exhibits like Man’s Rise at AMNH that subordinate Indigenous cultures to “classical” ones. But it is striking that Rome is still an important referent for curators of The Ancient Americas (and presumably their audience). It is not (yet) enough to simply assert the grandeur and violence of American empires.7 If the myth of Greece and Rome furthers toxic narratives of progress and primitivism, then other aspects of the ancient world can be leveraged for transformative environmental pedagogy, the formation of visitors into agents of environmental change. As I have argued in previous chapters, the environmental discourse of Greek ethnography assumes the interdependence of humans and other beings and explores mutually beneficial partnerships between them. Where museums of natural history express these values, they echo aspects of antiquity that are worth bodying forward. In this chapter I show how these values are already at work in museums of natural history, as well as how they can be reinforced and extended to further the environmental mission of museums. Chapter 1 uses several theoretical models to frame my exploration of Greek ethnography, including the “Indigenous cosmovisions” described by Joni Adamson and Salma Monani.8 These cosmovisions imagine a world in which human well-being is entangled with the rest of the world’s.9 Museums of natural history are themselves cosmovisions, constructed worlds that entangle human visitors with the other beings on display, both plant and animal specimens and the artifacts of collected

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cultures. This interpolation of human and nonhuman materials makes museums of natural history powerful, potentially transformative environmental educators. While zoos, aquariums, botanical gardens, and science museums teach people about other species and their ecosystems, natural history museums are one of the few places where the US public sees human artifacts and nonhuman specimens together and one of the few educational institutions in which visitors are invited to envision humans in a “natural world.”10 Of course, many natural history museums have taken on a conservation mission that explicitly instructs visitors in environmental history and current environmental crises.11 But the juxtaposition of animal and plant specimens with minerals and human artifacts educates visitors beyond the explicitly didactic specimen labels, wall texts, and audiovisual commentaries they encounter. As visitors experience the museum, they are initiated into its cosmovision. Because of the colonial origins and control of collections, the humans in natural history museums have usually been colonized nonEuropeans, leading in recent decades to strong (and often successful) arguments for the overhaul of anthropological displays and their cocuration with Indigenous people.12 Less controversial are exhibits that teach visitors about what nature is and where and whether humans belong in it. As Stephanie Rutherford has shown in her study of the AMNH, natural history museums participate in a particular “governance” of nature that often focuses on scientists, rather than visitors, as environmental actors.13 This chapter uses the principles that have emerged in the previous chapters to read museums of natural history and compares their effects on visitors (or one visitor) with the effects of Greek ethnography. This comparison responds to Brooke Holmes’s recent call for comparativist work in the study of Greek and Roman antiquity, work whose worlds “bring sometimes unusual constellations of ancient texts together with live elements in the present in creative symbiosis.”14 What it does not do is mimic the evaluations museums themselves conduct to understand how visitors at large interpret their exhibits. I am a data set of one and

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have taken an atypical approach to reading these museums. While the average visitor spent ten minutes in Restoring Earth and We Are Nature, two of the exhibits described in this chapter, I have read these exhibits slowly, over multiple visits. In what follows, I interpret museum displays using my own observations and interviews with the staff who developed them.15 Studying exhibits over time, as I have studied Herodotus and Diodorus, reveals a range of possibilities available to visitors.16 In what follows, I look in depth at the Field Museum in Chicago as a world-building institution, a place that not only displays the world to visitors but allows them to imagine and even experience new worlds. Then I contrast the Field’s exhibits with two others from smaller museums: We Are Nature: Living in the Anthropocene, an exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH) in Pittsburgh that ran from October 2017 to September 2018, and a permanent display of whale genealogies and naming practices at the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor, Washington. Along with the AMNH, the Chicago Field Museum is one of the largest and most important natural history museums in North America, its permanent exhibits ranging from the very new (Restoring Earth, 2011) to some very old mounts from the 1800s (Hall of African Mammals). While the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, for example, has streamlined its entire exhibition collection to reflect a unified rhetorical program, the Field’s permanent exhibits allow visitors to see the layers of the museum’s history.17 This layering serves as an archive of curators’ changing environmental philosophies and also complicates the interpretive possibilities for museumgoers. Like ancient Greek ethnography, whose sources have been compiled and adapted, sometimes exposed for view and at other times written over, the Field Museum’s exhibit collection is dynamic and polyvocal. This is especially evident in the four exhibits that highlight environmental crisis and conservation— Nature Walk, Messages from the Wilderness, Hall of Birds, and Restoring Earth—which span over a century of materials and interpretation. Through these exhibits, the Field speaks to visitors in four different

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idioms about the relationship between humans and the more-thanhuman world, positioning them as naturalists and volunteers but rarely as agents of environmental change. I chose to focus on the Field for its rich palimpsest of materials and because of the costs—in time, money, personal energy, and carbon— that it would have taken to go elsewhere. As an employee of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, I am just a few hours away from Chicago by car, bus, or train and was able to visit repeatedly over several years. As I started to look for museums to contrast with the Field, I discovered the CMNH and studied We Are Nature for several days before it closed. Although this exhibit is no longer available for readers to experience, its innovations impressed me and are included as an example of late 2010s environmental museology. We Are Nature also showcases what curators can do when they construct an exhibit from scratch rather than wrestling with permanently installed collections, though as we will see, the staff at CMNH were constrained in other ways. Finally, I discuss displays from the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor, Washington, a museum I discovered by chance. Unlike the Field or CMNH, which though on different scales both attempt to comprehensively present “natural history” to their metropolitan visitors, the Whale Museum occupies a small building in a small town on San Juan Island, accessible only by ferry or plane, and devotes itself to the study and conservation of whales, especially orcas. Yet this small museum also excels at an aim shared by its larger cousins: to make visitors feel not only connected to other beings but also motivated to share their lives and resources with them.

nature walk Nature Walk, on the main floor of the Field, is composed of some of the museum’s oldest dioramas (ca. 1912), rearranged in 1991 around a boardwalk and a woodland trail. This walk imagines a tour through “nature” that takes visitors past cases filled with taxidermied animals and artifi-

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cial flora placed against painted landscapes; each case represents animals in their surroundings, highlighting the relationships between plant and animal species.18 The intention of the exhibit is to draw visitors in and provide “an easy introduction to the outdoors” while recycling older mounts. Nature Walk provides an overture to ideas that subsequent halls explore in greater depth, with a focus on “sparking curiosity” that will continue once visitors leave the museum.19 Yet the material constraints of the exhibit unintentionally assert a divide between humans and the rest of nature. While curators attempted to construct a habitat outside the glass cases that would bridge the divide between visitors and specimens, maintenance costs made this prohibitive. For example, newer taxidermy mounts harvested from roadkill were placed outside the glass cases to provide a more “intimate” experience, but these were constantly eroded and have not been replaced in recent years.20 The end result is that visitors walk along a “woodland path” (a boardwalk made of rustic wooden boards) that demarcates people from, rather than incorporates them into, the natural habitats they see. The rhetoric of the exhibit reinforces this unintentional divide between human and nature, civilization and wilderness. An introductory panel directs visitors to “discover up close the wonders that await you in the wild.” In this panel and throughout the exhibit, visitors are positioned as naturalists who should “look and listen carefully” to animals that might be “hiding” because “there’s no telling where wildlife might surprise you.” Looking and listening are also important for building relationships that would cross the divide laid out in Nature Walk, but if visitors notice this invitation they must tease out its implications on their own. This is an exhibit for human pleasure: the pleasure of wonder, surprise, and finding what one seeks. This pleasure coexists with the constant threat of extinction, another theme of Nature Walk. The informational panels below each exhibit describe the ecosystems that support the animals on display, along with a map noting their distribution and a “nature note,” which usually describes threats to the animals’ survival. These “nature notes” provide

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important statistics on conservation efforts and their effects, as well as the root causes behind species endangerment. For example, the nature note below a display of white pelicans reads: “Hunting for sport nearly killed off white pelicans in the 1800s, but a committed effort to protect them helped populations recover. Today, if these majestic birds are to survive, we must commit ourselves to saving their wetland habitats [emphasis added].” The word “today” makes conservation efforts more urgent while simultaneously effacing the decades that separate the exhibits’ rearrangement in 1991 and the current realities of the species. Since the museum is limited in its ability to keep up with endangerment statistics, the timelessness of these descriptions unintentionally constructs a static state of endangerment and an enduring hope of survival, forever locked in combat outside the experience or agency of the visitor. More important, although the panel criticizes sport hunting and calls for a commitment to wetland conservation, it does not indict the actors that have made this conservation so difficult, namely legislators, developers, and agricultural corporations.21 While the nature notes complicate this “easy introduction to the outdoors,” readers are left without instruction in their own next steps, beyond visiting living habitats that have served as models for those they have seen. Although the introductory panel’s exhortation to “leave these creatures’ homes as you found them” may refer to keeping Nature Walk clear of debris, visitors are clearly separated from the “creatures” by glass. Rather, this exhortation trains visitors in a “leave only footprints, take only photographs” hiking ethic that they can apply to “real” nature walks. The second half of the direction, “leave these creatures’ homes as you found them, so that others can enjoy them too,” imagines other humans, not the “creatures” themselves, as the beneficiaries of care. Some panels draw attention to the complicity of visitors in habitat destruction—“Despite the immense value of wetlands, we continue to destroy this important habitat. Many of our wetlands are still drained for farmland; others have become dumping grounds for thousands of tons of tin cans, plastic bottles, old refrigerators, and even toxic waste

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[emphasis added]”—but others imply that their way of life is compatible with conservation. The nature note for the Fox Lake case reads: “Do you recognize this as Fox Lake? Today, you might see more motorboats than marsh birds in this haven for Chicago-area nature lovers. But if we support our local nature reserves, wildlife and modern leisure can exist side by side.” This is a strategic message, one that seeks to engage visitors in their local nature reserves without alienating them by questioning “modern leisure,” let alone developers, agricultural corporations, or the elected officials who pave their way. Other panels in Nature Walk highlight the plight of Illinois prairies, which, like wetlands, have been destroyed for human settlements and farms. The rhetoric here is stronger. “Will we restore prairies to Illinois?” the panel asks, then states: Illinois prairies attracted thousands of settlers who saw that the rich soil was ideal for crops. Acre after acre was farmed, until by the late 1970s, only 0.01 percent of our prairies remained intact. Prairies can recover if given a chance, but the process takes many, many years. Current restoration efforts include protecting land, burning off shrubs and replanting native grasses and wildflowers [emphasis in original].

The title question—Will we restore prairies to Illinois?—raises the possibility that Illinoisans might choose to give over farmland to prairie species but does not follow through on what this might mean for visitors’ way of life. From talking to the curators of the exhibit, I doubt that this silence is part of a conscious strategy, but it inadvertently constructs visitors as passive observers (of nature, of conservation or its lack) rather than responsible cocreators of the world around them. In a display on oil spills, visitors learn how oil can kill animals and destroy habitats, but the economic and social structures that fuel these spills remain unexamined. Throughout Nature Walk, visitors are taught to focus their energy on a small scale: to enjoy the exhibit, which celebrates individual specimens; to prevent or clean up after oil spills as they occur; to

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resist the desire to shoot and kill animals we might fear; and to protect what little of Illinois’s prairies and wetlands remains. Visitors also learn, through their absence from these cases, that they are not a part of the nature they see. No humans appear in the painted backgrounds of the cases, and humans are positioned through the nature notes either as antagonists to conservation efforts or, occasionally, as heroes of conservation organizations, but visitors are not directly implicated in either group. They are assured that “wildlife and modern leisure can exist side by side,” but what this looks like is left to the imagination.

messages from the wilderness and hall of birds Messages from the Wilderness, also on the ground floor of the museum, was created shortly after Nature Walk, in 1992/1993, and was intended to offer a “deeper dive” into many of the same themes.22 The material constraints here were more severe, however; whereas the cases in Nature Walk could be positioned dynamically around a boardwalk, those repurposed for Messages had to remain in place, arranged in neat rows on either side of a mostly linear hall. Instead of imagining a walk through the wilds of Illinois, Messages positions museum patrons as visitors to national parks in North and South America. As in Nature Walk, most of the cases omit human life and habitation (a stork, flying over thatched roofs, is the one exception), but information about the animals is delivered in the voice of park rangers, who have authored the notes visitors read and speak to them directly in audio recordings attached to the cases. Whereas Nature Walk imagined visitors as amateur naturalists, here they become professionals, and the questions they must confront are more difficult. In particular, graphic images of hunting and habitat extinction accompany the cases, including a taxidermied cougar hanging by its feet. This cougar draws visitors into a display that describes the US government’s

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failed attempt in the early twentieth century to regulate deer populations on Arizona’s Kaibab Plateau, a management strategy that was just as disastrous as the self-serving interventions of hunters, ranchers, loggers, and road builders described elsewhere in the exhibit. The rhetoric here is stronger, too. Instead of assuring visitors that their lives can go on as normal, they are told again and again how the protection of species is not enough. For example, in a panel titled “Dead Ends,” visitors learn that “the road to extinction is paved with destroyed habitats”: By leveling large sections of forest, people caused the extinction of imperial woodpeckers and contributed to the extinction of Mexican grizzlies. Yet we still ravage the ranges these animals roamed, sentencing more species to death. Habitat destruction threatens thousands of species both in the United States and worldwide. Simply protecting a species won’t prevent its extinction. Unless we also preserve the homes animals live in, entire wildlife communities are doomed.

This panel uses the language of sin and damnation to underline the urgency of deforestation and frame societies’ response in moral terms. Humans have not only caused extinction but wantonly “ravage” the same land and “sentence to death” even more species. These species are “doomed” unless we get off the road to hell we have paved for us both.23 Messages also explicitly discusses the competition between plant and animal habitats, on the one hand, and human industries on the other. “Will we lose forests or jobs?” asks one panel, noting that clear-cutting destroys both habitats and long-term job security. Yet this panel also ends with a hopeful message: “Forests, animals, and jobs would survive [emphasis in original] if companies practice selective logging and “replant and cut previously logged areas more efficiently.” This panel complicates the opposition between what humans and other species need (or desire) but also asserts that humans can have it all, like the panel in Nature Walk that posits the coexistence of “wildlife and modern leisure.” There is evidence that selective logging on an industrial

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scale does not protect biodiversity in the long run, though the issue remains contentious in scientific circles.24 But what role does the consumer play in the struggle between forests and jobs? Logging is driven by the demand for forest products and agricultural land. If people vastly reduced their consumption of these products, many more types of forest management would become possible. Instead of being asked to challenge the assumptions of global economics, visitors are led to reflect on their fundamental attitude to the rest of nature. A triptych at one end of the display voices an expected question—Why should we care about wilderness?—and offers the same answer three times: “Because all life is interconnected.” Below this line are three texts, one on each side of the triptych. The first, “living things are closely linked to each other and their habitats in ways we don’t always understand,” is accompanied by a photograph of a bedewed spider web and a quotation from John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords . . . to everything in the universe.” Below the photograph is another quotation, this one from Chief Seattle: “Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself.” This panel draws together the “ecological Indian” Chief Seattle with the sainted naturalist John Muir (even as it puts the words of the former below the latter).25 Both men speak in a spiritual tone. We are connected by “invisible cords” in ways “we don’t always understand.” We are not the weavers of this web, but a weaver may exist somewhere. The spiritual humility this panel advocates for is repeated on the second side of the triptych, which begins with a quotation from Richard Cellarius, environmental studies professor and past Sierra Foundation trustee: “Let us celebrate our being hitched physically, ecologically, and most of all, spiritually to nature.” The rest of the panel argues that this spiritual devotion is as much self- as other-interested. “Dumping garbage and detergents into rivers and streams . . . contaminates our drinking water and kills other wildlife.” Meanwhile, “cutting down forests kills plants

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and animals” but also leads to erosion, and “crops wash away along with the soil.” Building on these arguments for our connection to other species and responsibility for preventing harm, the final panel of the triptych reiterates the central question, “Why should we care about wilderness?,” and answers conclusively: “Because we can make the difference. When we protect wilderness, we protect processes that support all life, even our own. Each of us can do simple things to help. Please share your thoughts with us.” Having read arguments based on spirituality and self-interest, visitors are now invited to post “simple things” on a corkboard that will “make the difference.” This is the place where the inner work of reflection might begin to emerge in the world in concrete action, but this interactive feature is now defunct. The corkboard stands, but pens, paper, and pins to post ideas were discontinued after staffing demands became too great. Because of this material constraint, visitors leave Messages with a sense of urgency about preserving wilderness but without knowing what concrete steps to take to create the difference it calls for. Hall of Birds, which visitors can enter after Messages from the Wilderness, Nature Walk, or World of Mammals, picks up many of the concerns in Messages—habitat loss, extinction, and the pleasures of observing other species—but with the granularity that comes from a focus on a particular kind of animal. This exhibit contains old mounts and some older interpretation, but many displays were updated in 2012. Like the “Nature Notes” in Nature Walk, interpretive panels chronicle endangered bird species, most of whom suffer primarily from habitat loss, and a few conservation successes, including cormorants, peregrine falcons, and cranes. Larger displays provoke visitors to reflect on both loss and conservation. In “Grasslands turn into farmland . . . with devastating consequences” we learn that “every acre of grassland that’s converted to crops” drives another species to extinction. The panel concludes: “The wildlife and habitats we’ve lost are wonders we’ll never see again. And the hundreds of birds, mammals, and plants now facing extinction are a warning that losses will continue if we don’t learn from

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our past.” “Learn[ing] from our past,” this panel implies, might mean halting the expansion of farmland, if not also rolling it back, though “wonders we’ll never see again” might argue against large-scale restoration projects. A success story, the rehabilitation of midwestern cranes, clarifies what a commitment to restoration looked like for two midwesterners: “Individuals can make a difference. Two concerned crane lovers, Ronald Sauey and George Archibald, founded the International Crane Foundation in Barbaroo, Wisconsin. Today the foundation breeds cranes on-site, and strives to protect wetlands around the world [emphasis in original].” Visitors may see this display and become involved with the International Crane Foundation, but the exhibit itself centers a different response to the plight of bird species: birding. The short documentary film A Passion for Birds (2011) occupies a central place in the exhibit, in front of its main seating area.26 Although a more recent production, this film is consistent with the earlier rhetoric of both Nature Walk and Messages. Through this video, visitors are directed to interact with birds by becoming birders. As Kimberley Kaufman says, “I think everyone is a birder somewhere deep down inside.” A Passion for Birds profiles professional and lay bird-watchers from the East Coast to the Midwest; a key goal of the video seems to be to disrupt the stereotypical image of birders as “little old ladies in tennis shoes,” in the words of John Fitzpatrick, one of the film’s subjects. The film emphasizes how birding can connect people not only to birds, but also to their families. A father and son team reflect on the precious time together birding affords them, while a married birding couple imagine their last minute on Earth: holding hands and looking at a bird. Birds “represent the intensity of life,” according to Ken Kaufman. “They are like us but more spiritual,” says Peggy Macnamara. This discourse connects back to the triptych of Messages, showing visitors what it means to be “hitched . . . spiritually to nature.” A Passion for Birds promises other benefits as well: the “life-skill” of learning to pay attention and the satisfaction of our common “hunger for beauty,” according to Wendy Paulson. Even if birding is not for everyone, visitors are exhorted by

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Shannon Hackett to discover “what jazzes you about your life as birds do me.” Birding thus becomes a metaphor for life fulfillment. Visitors also learn that bird conservation began with birding and that bird-watchers can become “citizen scientists” who contribute data to conservation efforts. But although birding allows people like Alison Világ to “feel part of nature and part of the world,” the environmental costs of birding go unacknowledged. Serious bird-watchers, we learn, will drive for hours or fly across the country to see a single species. The strengths of this video are many: it uses a lively tone and the real voices of diverse Chicagoans to entice visitors into a regular practice of going outdoors. But like Nature Walk and Messages, A Passion for Birds also encourages visitors to see nature as a place apart from themselves and their observations of other species as inherently helpful to those species. Once again, material constraints have limited the ability of curators to present a nuanced message. Next to the screen that shows A Passion for Birds hangs a window where visitors used to be able to observe birds and record their observations. But binoculars kept disappearing, and the Museum had to stop replacing them. In the words of curator Debra Moskovitz, “This interactive would have pushed against the video, but video is [the] only evidence we have.”

restoring earth The most recent conservation exhibit in the Field Museum, The Abbott Hall of Conservation: Restoring Earth, was created from scratch in 2011.27 Located on the upper floor of the museum, Restoring Earth uses interactive, multimedia displays, as well as traditional photographic and text ensembles, to showcase the Field’s conservation efforts and explain the process of conservation. With this exhibit, visitors move from more passive roles as naturalists and park goers, in Nature Walk and Messages from the Wilderness, to active collectors, drawing on the rhetoric of A Passion for Birds. For example, one of the most elaborate interactive exhibits in Restoring Earth invites visitors to curate a digital

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mini-collection of objects from the Field Museum and arrange them in a virtual display box. The initial rooms of Restoring Earth probe the relationship between collections and conservation; as a sign at the entrance proclaims, “The Field Museum’s conservation puts science into action.” Several sections of the exhibit describe the process of conservation “rapid inventories,” in which scientists quickly survey and assess species and their significance in an ecosystem. Rapid inventories in the Andes-Amazon forests have resulted in “21.9 million acres protected in 11 years,” an area of land, a sign notes, almost equal to the size of Illinois. For visitors who have also seen Nature Walk, this statistic may seem ironic; through the Field’s conservation efforts, the 90 percent of lost wetlands and 99.7 percent of lost prairie in Illinois have been regained abroad. But the Field’s successes in other countries also illuminate the cultural differences that impel and sustain large-scale conservation. Through the voices of the Field’s Indigenous collaborators, visitors learn how human beings in different places think about their surroundings, what values prompt them to commit to conservation, and the changes to their way of life this commitment requires. After conducting a rapid inventory, Field Museum scientists collaborate with Indigenous peoples in their host countries to develop plans for resource management. These include Shipibo, Maijuna, Secoya, Cofan, and Awajun, Indigenous Amazonians who live on the outskirts of what is now the Cordillera Azul National Park in Peru. Restoring Earth explains that the Maijuna, for example, are under cultural and economic pressure to sell their forests to loggers, who often push them into Peru’s shantytowns. Field Museum scientists work with the Maijuna to “sav[e] the rainforest—by using it,” that is, selling sustainably harvested aguaje fruit and crafts made from forest materials. To make this happen, the Maijuna not only sacrifice the upfront cash they would have received from logging companies, but also take on the risk of scaling one-hundred-foot aguaje trees to harvest materials by hand. An interpretive panel asks museum visitors, “Are you willing to climb 100 feet

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into the air? That’s what the Maijuna do to maintain aguaje palms on their land.” Quotations from Maijuna demonstrate how aware they are of their role in conservation. “This is our forest, the forest of our ancestors, the forest of the Maijuna who lived before us, and we want to conserve it in a rational way,” says Romero Ríos Ushiñahua. Lorenzo Barbarán Linæres confirms this sentiment, but from the perspective of future rather than past generations: “If we don’t protect [our natural resources], the children of our children won’t have the same quality of life that we have. We are the first line of defense.” These prominently displayed quotations from the Maijuna work together with leading questions in the interpretive panels (“Are you willing to climb 100 feet into the air?”) to show visitors what conservation looks like and feels like for ordinary people. A video that centers on the Shipibo woman Francisco “Panchita” Limas and the Field Museum anthropologist Alaka Wali brings women’s voices into this story. We watch Limas combing her hair in front of a mirror and see her standing among the buildings, trees, people, and chickens of her village. She explains that after the logging companies came, the animals of the area began to disappear, but that “now, once again you can find fish and animals.” This section of the video, labeled “Using natural resources sustainably gives a better quality of life,” is perhaps taken from the words of the next speaker, Lorenzo Barbarán, who explains that “having a good quality of life means living with an abundance of our natural resources.” The crafts that the women of the village are pictured making are a way of “practicing our culture,” even though, the video notes, “It doesn’t make a lot of money, but a little goes a long way.” The video continues: “These are difficult choices—how much money do you need to have a good quality of life?” Wali, the anthropologist, continues Barbarán’s thought: “So when you think about your life and you think about the decisions you have to make, then you put that in the context of what does it mean to live well for you? [emphasis in original].” Wali’s question, spoken with the authority

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of a Field Museum anthropologist directly to visitors viewing or listening to the video, is a deep one. If visitors take the Maijuna, Shipibo, and other Indigenous people in Restoring Earth as a model, they will decide that “a little goes a long way” and be inspired to radically reduce their consumption of natural resources. But Wali’s question is open-ended, and visitors may instead decide that “living well for [them]” means retaining a carbon footprint much larger than that of the Indigenous people of Peru. Because this video emphasizes the traditional knowledge that Limas and others of her community possess, visitors are encouraged to see them as teachers in deciding what a good life looks like and how conservation can be carried out. Field Museum postdoc Joshua Drew, for example, explains how he leveraged the value of tabu among the Fijians to protect fish populations. Tabu, which forbids fishing when a chief dies or during major celebrations, has been extended to cover more time and broader fishing areas. As Drew comments, “Local traditions and science can really work together to protect Fiji’s future.” This marriage between forms of knowledge is a major achievement of Restoring Earth. Indigenous peoples are neither denigrated nor idealized but taken seriously as partners in knowledge production and land management. This partnership extends even into the past. A video nearby asks, “What can the past teach us about living with nature?” and answers with information about the canals of the ancient Wari people, including an animated video that stages a dialogue between a Field archaeologist and a Wari man, who speaks to the archaeologist as an equal rather than an ethnographic subject. Like the Indigenous people in Ancient Americas on the ground floor, this Wari character emphasizes how environments and cultures change over time. Visitors next face specific questions about their environmental behaviors. Ostensibly posed by Field Museum researchers, these questions cannily provoke environmental reflection: “How does nature improve your life?” “How do you picture climate change?” “How do you use energy?” “What things make it difficult to help the environment?”

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“What do you already do that helps the environment?” In these panels and accompanying videos, “helping the environment” is pictured as planting gardens, keeping chickens, eating less beef, using clotheslines, using bicycle paths and public transportation, switching to compact fluorescents, conserving water, and landscaping with native plants rather than maintaining lawns. Several videos end with pictures of a brighter future, one in which Chicago is greener, some food production happens close to home, and wind turbines share space with the iconic skyline. These changes to Chicago would be significant, but they reveal a wide gap between what conservation means to the Maijuna, Shipibo, Fijians, and other people in the countries where the Field has conservation projects and what it means to the museum’s visitors. Restoring Earth makes a powerful and provocative case for the types of risks Indigenous people are taking and the sacrifices they are making in order to conserve their homeland. But comparable sacrifices and risks are not required of Chicagoland residents, who are pictured volunteering their time to conservation projects and making wiser choices at the supermarket. This green consumerism is consistent with a great deal of environmental messaging in the United States, but the Field can do more. Its access to other places and commitment to working with diverse peoples can be shared with visitors to highlight the systemic environmental injustice in which they are complicit and provoke them to change. If the stories of Indigenous people in the first half of Restoring Earth provide examples of conservation in action and provoke visitors to reflect on their own use of natural resources, then displays near the back of the exhibit encourage them to apply what they have learned to conservation in Illinois by showcasing Chicagoland conservation. Chicagoans experience conservation as “a celebration,” “a heritage,” “the food we eat,” “discovery,” “making a living,” and “passion” by locating their events at Lake County Forest Preserves; using the American Indian Center to grow sacred and medicinal herbs; growing food for Hull House’s soup kitchen; participating in educational programs at

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Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore; practicing sustainable building at Southpoint Academy; and learning about bird migration patterns alongside the Great Migration of African Africans in the twentieth century. Many of the people depicted in these photographs are African Americans and Native Americans, disrupting dominant white Western environmental discourse. The titles of each section also meaningfully connect to the language of Indigenous peoples in South America, who highlight their “heritage” as well as the role of the Amazon in their foodways and economic survival. Pride of place is given to the Chicago Wilderness Project, a collaboration between the museum and Chicagoarea nature organizations that began in the 1990s and has since extended to neighboring states. Three short videos play on a loop, each explaining prairie conservation in a different way and encouraging visitors to become involved in their work. In Bringing Back the Prairie, we learn about the Somme County Nature Preserve in Northbrook, Illinois. In the words of Laurel Ross, emerita of the Field’s Science and Education Department, “just about every imaginable kind of person comes out to volunteer,” and we see people of different racial and gender presentations and ages throughout the video. These visitors demonstrate what restoration entails, including pulling up invasive species, seed mixing, and hand pollinating rare plants like the eastern prairie fringed orchid. They also outline the benefits of volunteering, including exercise, a sense of personal satisfaction and accomplishment, and sharing the experience with family. If visitors have been inducted into the natural world and its endangerment through Nature Walk and Messages from the Wilderness and then developed a regular practice of observing other species as A Passion for Birds urges, then Bringing Back the Prairie celebrates Illinoisans who have graduated to the next level and now participate in the restoration of native habitats. A Green Network profiles Ryerson Woods in Riverwoods, Illinois, an interconnected set of habitats connected to other reserves by the Des Plaines River. The video calls viewers to take specific actions, especially removing invasive plants around their homes and towns and planting

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native species, and describes the attitude they should cultivate toward the rest of nature: “Find a natural area that just appeals to you, and visit it regularly” advises Nan Buckardt, director of education for Lake County Forest Preserves. Sophie Twichell, former executive director of Ryerson Woods, adds: “If you go regularly, and see how it changes, you become more committed to that place and you feel more in touch with nature.” Buckardt concludes: “And just grow to love that place, because that will become part of your life, and it will renew you.” This set of recommendations, to spend time outdoors and participate in prairie restoration at home and as a volunteer, reprises some of the advice in A Passion for Birds as well as some of my own advice in chapter 6. There, I noted that building lives and livelihoods with other beings might shift humans’ values and thus their environmental behaviors. But spending time with other species, whether as a birder or visitor to places like Ryerson Woods, is not enough; we must also reflect on the economic systems that are killing or displacing most nonhuman species and many marginalized human beings. Restoring Earth’s videos present opportunities to do this critical work. In Fire + Floods: Nature Rebuilds, viewers learn how controlled burns and flooding, rather than threatening restored habitats, allow them to thrive. But the most interesting moment of this film may be its opening lines, which explain that the Gensburg-Markham Prairie was saved from development by the 1929 stock market crash. This is the type of trade-off that the Field can help visitors confront: Do they want habitats for other species or more new construction? Would they be willing to live in tighter quarters to make room for plants and animals? How could these burdens be equitably shared by residents who have different incomes and other levels of privilege?

immersive experiences at the field I have argued that the Field educates visitors to become naturalists and green consumers who support a moderate environmental agenda of

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selective logging and prairie restoration. But the Field also forms visitors into environmental actors through immersive, rather than explicitly didactic, spaces. Perhaps the most powerful of these spaces is outside the exhibits, in the museum café, where visitors can buy (and then compost) locally sourced food and drink, and its gift shops. The main gift shop, on the ground floor, which crowns (and also sometimes opens) many visitors’ experience, reinforces the limitations of the exhibits I have described. While there are a few fair-trade items for sale, the majority of objects have been mass produced and imported. This reflects the realities of most museums and other nonprofit organizations: they need revenue, and in the absence of state funding or private largesse, rely on consumerism to make ends meet. Ironically, the consumerism that allows the Field to function also cuts against its conservation efforts. The objects visitors buy and later no longer want may well end up in Illinois’s remaining wetlands, as pictured in Nature Walk. Many of these objects are representations of animals in plastic or fabric, mimics of the taxidermy that dominate the museum. While visitors have experienced being naturalists in Nature Walk and Hall of Birds, park rangers in Messages from the Wilderness, and Field Museum scientists or volunteers in Restoring Earth, the gift shop positions them as consumers whose first act of new relationship to the natural world will be to collect its representatives. As Jennifer Price argues in her analysis of the now-defunct Nature Company, stores like the Field’s gift shop connect people to the rest of nature via the natural resources that have been used to make the objects for sale.28 This is hardly the sort of behavior encouraged by Nature Walk, Messages from the Wilderness, Hall of Birds, or Restoring Earth. Yet other exhibits at the Field offer types of immersion that counter mainstream US consumerism and environmental messaging. Surprisingly, these exhibits stand apart from those I have analyzed so far, which highlight environmental issues and make explicit arguments to visitors about conservation. The displays I showcase here, from What Is an Animal?, Africa, and the Native North American Hall, on the ground

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floor, to Underground Adventure, on the lower level, educate visitors in environmental issues indirectly, rather like the ancient Greek texts brought forth in part I. As we have seen, Greek ethnographies represent humans in complex interspecies relationships. Both What Is an Animal? and Underground Adventure embed visitors in nonhuman perspectives and counter their separation from the rest of nature. In What Is an Animal?, visitors wander past display cases filled with animal models, taxidermy, and other specimens: butterflies sitting next to giant turtles, ducks next to wolves. The question of the exhibit is answered first by this multiplicity of forms and next by a series of rooms that investigate what animals look like, where they live, how they “make a living,” how they are divided into scientific categories, and what their skeletons are like. The exhibit also explores how Chicagoans rely on animals for food, the materials of everyday life, and the very city they inhabit: a striking model shows the (then) Sears tower emerging from a prehistoric coral reef. What Is an Animal? delights in form and color, arranging animal bodies in beautiful patterns. Unlike the cases of Nature Walk, for example, which aim at verisimilitude, the hand of humans in this exhibit is abundantly clear. Some cases play with the trope of the standard taxidermy case, creating a realistic landscape but populating it with species never found together. Interpretation below the case lets visitors in on the secret: “Would you ever really find all these animals in the same place? No—this display includes land and freshwater animals from all over the world.” This display does not allow visitors to pretend that they are temporarily in nature; instead, it confuses visitors’ preconceived categories and prepares them to embrace their kinship with other animals. This kinship is expressed in the language of the exhibit, which speaks of animals as a “we.” But this “we” is not homogenous; instead, the exhibit probes the differences between animals and how they can be understood by the human animal. This understanding extends even to animals that seem most unlike humans. In one interactive, visitors are

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encouraged to experience barnacle animal life by “becom[ing] part of [a] barnacle colony,” extending their fingers to complete a large model. Immersive experiences like this one are continued in Underground Adventure, in which visitors are “shrunk” by funhouse mirrors to explore soil ecosystems; walls and ceiling are covered in brown, irregular molding filled with giant models of insects, roots, and rocks. As in Nature Walk and Restoring Earth, informational panels position visitors as tiny scientists tasked with examining their surroundings, naming the creatures they discover, and comparing species’ life cycles. But unlike much of the rest of the museum, which places objects behind glass or a screen, here visitors are literally surrounded by the nature they have come to examine. In one room, children are invited to “step inside” giant cicada husks “and try one on for size”; in another, visitors of all heights can pass their arms through spaces in the surrounding “soil” to experience air and water courses. Though informational panels on soil degradation conveniently elide the ecological devastation caused by agribusiness, including Monsanto, the exhibit’s largest financial backer, Underground Adventure invites visitors to live the lives of other species. There are a number of ways the Field could build on the strengths of What Is An Animal? and Underground Adventure in other parts of the museum. Without overhauling its displays, it would be helpful to implicate humans in the rest of nature as much as possible, highlighting the way that visitors use and abuse other species; asserting human membership in a broader natural world; and integrating the human, plant, animal, and geological exhibits of the museum.29 It is not practical to rearrange the exhibit specimens on different lines, but signage, touch screens, and other devices can be used to connect material seen in one part of the museum with what is seen elsewhere. Drawing on Tradition could provide a model. In this temporary installation, Kanza artist Chris Pappan drew over existing Field Museum cases on the ground floor to comment on the representation of Plains Indians and showcase his own work. What would it look like if

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human figures and practices were drawn over the glass cases of Nature Walk? Several other exhibits in the museum feature touch screens that allow visitors to learn even more about the objects on display. Touch screens could also be used to virtually populate the taxidermy cases with humans—those whose ways of life threaten the plants and animals on display and those who have found ways to coexist with them. Taking on this suggestion would mean committing more concretely to a vision for the future, one that perhaps criticizes consumption in the United States, including Chicagoland. Currently, this vision emerges only in Restoring Earth and its exploration of Indigenous ways of life in South America. Although the Field cannot actively collaborate with animals, plants, and other beings in their representation, it would be helpful to represent their perspectives more often. As in the anthropological exhibits of the past, the Field’s nonhuman specimens occupy a timeless now that lulls visitors into a false sense of what nature is and can be. In The Ancient Americas, visitors are repeatedly exhorted to imagine themselves in the shoes of Indigenous peoples. What if we experienced animal exhibits in the same way? A great strength of The Ancient Americas is that it emphasizes living traditions and change over time and relates the many political and economic strategies of past Americans to current processes. It would be helpful for all exhibits to meditate on the shared motivations, strategies, and practices of humans, plants, and animals, so that anthropogenic destruction is not naturalized as something we cannot control but contextualized across species. Drawing on chapter 2 of this book, curators could consider the nonhuman forces that have shaped the world and evaluate human action not by the scale of this change but by its effects on humans’ and others’ well-being. Like Diodorus, the creators of What Is an Animal? are already invested in describing and even problematizing distinctions between humans and other animals. Drawing on chapter 3, curators could follow Diodorus a step further and deconstruct sex/gender for their visitors. Though life on Earth exhibits multiple sex/genders and forms of sexuality, the

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Field’s exhibits (like most in natural history museums) are unrelentingly heteronormative and invested in a male/female binary.30 As shown in chapter 4, Greek writers argue that ways of life cannot be disentangled from humans’ relationships with animals, plants, and land- and waterscapes. Rather than merely asserting that humans are a part of nature, ethnographies (and anthropological exhibits) have the ability to make this relationship real. A good example of this in the Field itself is tucked away in Africa, an exhibit on the ground floor that opened in 1993. Divided into many rooms, Africa surveys human and nonhuman life in parts of Africa at particular times. Some rooms describe environmental practices like mining and metalworking from social, technological, and geological perspectives, although the rooms that address savannah animals and mountain gorillas were quarantined from most of the human stories through community input.31 Most impressive is the Tuareg room, which describes in detail the lifeways of the nomadic Tuareg people and displays their artifacts, including a complete tent. The centerpiece of the room is a life-sized model oasis, flanked by a date palm and a well. On one side visitors can experience the effort it would take to draw water from this well, while on another they can examine a model camel, whose body can be opened and operated to understand camel physiology and camel-Tuareg cooperation. By integrating human, animal, and plant materials, this section of Africa gives visitors a vivid and provocative idea of what it would be like to live interdependently with other species. Chapter 5 shows how Greek writers use non-Greeks to imagine different ways of life and solve the problems of wealth. The Pawnee Earth Lodge, one of the museum’s most popular exhibits, does just this. As in Underground Adventure, visitors to the lodge step into another world, the shared, circular home of an extended Pawnee family in the 1800s. They can sit on bison skin couches, play with cloth dolls, and touch earthenware vessels. A museum interpreter lifts floorboards to reveal storage space for bison meat and points out other preserved food hanging from the rafters. By inhabiting this space, visitors are encouraged to

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compare their own diet, clothing, and housing with the way of life of the Pawnee. While Restoring Earth showcases Indigenous ways of life, Pawnee Earth Lodge allows visitors to “try it on for size.” As these examples indicate, the Field is already educating visitors in new environmental cultures through the experience of other ways of life. But this education is not taking place in the conservation exhibits themselves; instead, it is others who position visitors as a part of nature and allow them to experience other ways of life. As conservation psychology has demonstrated, information alone does not usually change people’s environmental behaviors.32 Instead, their identities, especially communal identities, must change if visitors are to become people who use public transportation, garden, and eat less meat (as the Field seems to desire), let alone take on more significant reductions of their carbon footprint, as Indigenous peoples in the Amazon-Andes have done. The Field needs more exhibits that invite visitors to immerse themselves in other ways of life. To fully leverage immersive experiences like Africa and Pawnee Earth Lodge, the Field must give visitors both practice in the behaviors they are trying to instill and social support to maintain them.33 Some of these behaviors could be cultivated in the museum itself, in the new Rice Native Gardens, for example; others will probably happen after visitors leave, as the museum anticipates. But here too the Field has a vital role to play in bridging the gap between what visitors see in the museum and what they decide to do—or who they decide to become—when they leave. While it would be impractical to close the gift shop, it plays an oversize role at the museum’s main exit. Building off Restoring Earth, the museum could devote one section of the gift shop to connecting visitors with specific environmental efforts. As I describe in “Whale Naming and Adoption” later in this chapter, the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor, Washington, has done just this. But in order to attempt any of these suggestions or carry out what I am sure is a large backlog of their own ideas, the Field Museum needs more money to staff exhibits, fix interactives, and update interpretation.

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Its power to form visitors as environmental agents must be recognized and its mission supported by donors and state agencies. In the meantime, two much smaller museums highlight the possibilities of carrying out some of these ideas on a limited budget, though here too material constraints restrict what museums can do.

we are nature The CMNH, like the Field Museum, is an encyclopedic museum of natural history that presents permanent collections and rotating exhibits of rocks and fossils, animal and plant specimens, and human artifacts. The museum also conducts environmental research, especially at the Powdermill Nature Reserve in Rector, Pennsylvania. In 2017 CMNH hosted the annual conference of the International Council of Museums Committee for Museums and Collections of Natural History (ICOM NATHIST), with the theme “The Anthropocene: Natural History Museums in the Age of Humanity.” To accompany the conference, the museum mounted We Are Nature: Living in the Anthropocene, under the direction of Becca Shreckengast, its director of exhibition experience.34 Both to harmonize with the theme of the conference and because of time and budgetary constraints, Becca and her team adopted an “ethos of reuse,” repurposing displays from other exhibits and making much of the exhibit infrastructure in-house.35 Rather than showcasing the museum’s own conservation research and advocacy, the theme of the Field’s Restoring Earth, We Are Nature focused on “one big idea: In order to process the Anthropocene, we must first understand what it is [emphasis in original].”36 To this end, We Are Nature displayed objects in six themed groups: Extinction, Climate Change, PostNatural (in collaboration with the Pittsburgh Center for PostNatural History,) Pollution, Habitat Alteration, and Inequality. For example, in a display entitled “R.I.P. Great Barrier Reef,” visitors were presented with a portrait of the reef draped in black and encouraged to mourn its extinction by signing a condolences book in front of a portrait of the reef draped in black.

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Delivering this information about anthropogenic environmental damage was only a part of the exhibit’s aim. We Are Nature also tried to shift visitors’ sense of who they were and where they fit in the natural world. In a digital interactive exhibit, visitors were shown a map and instructed to “touch the parts of the Pittsburgh landscape that [they] would consider nature.” Highlighting only a few areas generated this response: “Actually, Nature is EVERYWHERE. We are not separate from Nature; We Are Nature. We assume nature is where humans are not; wild places like forests, parks, and rivers. But nature is everywhere, even where you live.” Though it may seem a bit heavy-handed, this interactive directly countered the assumption that humans and nature are separate and separable, a foundational error of both environmental movements and their opponents.37 These abstract concepts were also brought “home” to visitors as they went through the exhibit. In the “Anthropocene Living Room,” for example, visitors entered a bare, white room outfitted with a couch, television, kitchen, and objects representing the six themes of the exhibit. On the television in front of the couch played a video of quotations from people affected by environmental crisis. This display, though simply furnished, subverted the typical relationship between museum visitors and people in other places. By entering the living room, visitors became a part of an exhibit rather than mere observers of it and were encouraged to turn their attention not to other people’s bodies or customs as objects to be consumed, but to their stories of upheaval and displacement. We Are Nature took these encounters further by encouraging visitors to reflect on their feelings about the Anthropocene and name the actions they would take next. At the end of the exhibit, visitors encountered areas for making art, meditating, and reading, as well as pledging changes to their use of natural resources, sharing their experiences on social media, and brainstorming with other visitors. Although limited by time and budget, We Are Nature succeeded in complex environmental messaging, educating visitors not only in the idea of the Anthropocene but also in their responsibility to become

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intentional environmental agents. Much of this innovation depended on being able to create the exhibit from scratch; although CMNH staff recycled many of the exhibit’s component parts, they did not have to contend with immovable heritage displays, as in the Field. But as at the Field, the impact of We Are Nature was muted. Although its interactive exhibits worked well on their own, many visitors only spent ten minutes total in an exhibit that took me more than an hour to fully experience.38 CMNH needed more staff on hand to encourage the deep and difficult reflection We Are Nature made possible. At the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor, Washington, the messaging is much simpler, though the effects on visitors may be more lasting.

whale naming and adoption The first floor of the Whale Museum is devoted to the gift shop, meeting rooms, and rotating exhibits, while the second boasts the Gallery of Whales. This gallery is original to the museum, which was founded in 1979, and includes a wide range of whale specimens, including wet mounts and articulated skeletons, as well as human artifacts related to whale hunting and research. One of the most unusual of these research displays is a large chart, the “Genealogy of Southern Resident Community of Orcas,” which shows the names, pictures, and relationships of all known southern resident orcas, both living and dead. This endangered community of orcas is divided into three pods (J, K, L) and has multiple matrilines within each pod. Though the Whale Museum aims to educate visitors in all manner of whale species, the southern resident orcas are its greatest research focus and point of engagement with visitors, many of whom live in the community’s bioregion. The fact that the genealogy includes not only each whale’s scientific designation, “K-36,” for example but their common name, “Yoda,” and a photographic portrait allows visitors to connect to the whales as individuals whose distinguishing features can be learned and recognized in the wild.

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Visitors can also become involved in the naming of whales. As an interpretive panel written by Mary Jo Farrer describes, although researchers have sometimes given the whales nicknames, it has been common since 1984 for the public to submit names in a contest, and this practice continues today. “It was hoped that by naming the whales, people would make connections with these whales and their families and protect them from further capture.” The naming criteria encourage place-names and names that relate to “the marine environment of the Pacific Northwest,” “whales in general,” “the whale’s physical characteristics,” or “the matriline.” For example, Marina (L-47) has five descendants, all with “M” names: her children, Moonlight, Muncher, and Mystic, and grandchildren, Midnight and Magic. But there is an important exception to this public naming: “Any calves born to Samish (J-14) or her offspring are named by the Samish Indian Nation in a traditional potlatch ceremony. This naming tradition was started in 2001 with Hy’Shqa (J-37) and continued with Suttles (J-40) [in 2005], Se-Yi-Chn (J-45) [in 2009] and last year [2013] with T’ilem Inges (J-49).”39 While Hy’Shqa (blessing, thank you) and T’ilem Inges (singing grandchild) are Samish words, Suttles was named after anthropologist Dr. Wayne Suttles. Framed photographs, certificates, and ribbons commemorate the ceremony and describe Suttles’s namesake this way: “Dr. Suttles devoted his working life to the study of the Coast Salish people, their language and culture. He was highly respected by the Coast Salish and scholars of Coast Salish people.” This moving display commemorates a rare moment in the history of Indigenous and colonial contact in which Indigenous people, empowered to name and claim another Indigenous species, have chosen to honor the white man who studied them. While many scientists in white Western traditions name animals after themselves, Dr. Suttles’s connection to his namesake has been bestowed by people whose own naming practices are usually effaced. In tandem with facilitating these naming programs, the Whale Museum also runs an adoption program that allows visitors to connect

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more deeply with the Southern Resident Community. Both in the gift shop and on its website, the Whale Museum encourages visitors to sponsor a whale of their choosing for one year in a “symbolic adoption.” At the time of this writing, an individual (rather than family or classroom) adoption costs $35. The adoption packet includes a condensed genealogy of the entire community; an in-depth profile of the adopted whale, including its family history; significant behaviors and recent sightings; an information booklet about the community; and a certificate of adoption with a photograph of the adopted whale. For example, my certificate reads: The Whale Museum hereby declares that the killer whale (Orcinus orca) known as T’ilem Inges (J-49) has been adopted by Clara Bosak-Schroeder

While many other conservation organizations offer symbolic adoptions, the Whale Museum’s adoption program builds strongly on the genealogy and naming displays in the Hall of Whales, tying visitors to specific whales and providing an anchor for continuing education and engagement. In particular, several materials in the adoption packet highlight the threat to the Southern Resident Community and what people can do about it. The practices these materials encourage are not radical, but they push beyond generic calls for energy conservation and waste reduction. Adopters are exhorted to hang-dry their clothes, collect rainwater, buy local foods and sustainable fish, join a carpool, and vote to protect the waters and salmon population of the Salish Sea. These practices flow directly from the relationship that the genealogy board has depicted to visitors and that they have symbolically entered into by becoming members of the Southern Resident Community. While the Whale Museum maintains a gift shop on its main floor and online, the adoption program competes strongly with its offerings, allowing visitors to forge a lasting bond with the Southern Resident

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Community that, unlike buying a stuffed orca (also for sale in the gift shop), benefits the whales directly and exclusively. This program, in place since the 1980s, is much simpler than the volunteering programs encouraged in Restoring Earth or the pledges visitors could make at the end of We Are Nature, and perhaps more limited in what it can accomplish. But the program is also a conduit for the Whale Museum to continue to educate participants and form them into agents of environmental change. Only a few years have passed since I visited the Whale Museum, but it feels like much longer. This past summer the southern resident orcas were seen in inland waters twenty days out of their usual sixty or eighty, driven farther out by diminishing salmon supplies.40 The Northern California I loved has disappeared too, people forced from their homes by drought, fire, and rising inequality. Here in the Midwest I look at the portrait of T’ilem Inges I received with my symbolic adoption. I have never seen an orca in the wild, and perhaps I never will. Instead I imagine the prairies and wetlands, that sea of grasses and chorus of animals, which I am told once surrounded the place where I live.

notes

introduction 1. See Burton (1988) for the history of the ethnographic present, both as a period of time and a mode of ethnographic description; cf. Stocking (1987). Wolf (1982) and Birth (2008) discuss theories of and challenges to transcending this method of modern anthropology. See Hoebel, Currier, and Kaiser (1982) for an early survey of concerns of this type among anthropologists, and Stocking (1982) and Zenker and Kumoll (2010) for critical histories of anthropology. Gellner (1964, 18–19) notes how early anthropologists used other peoples as a “time machine,” an idea fully explored in Fabian (1983). Yoffee (2005) critiques the evolutionary model of states and Davis (2008) the periodization of history by stages. Descola (2013) uses anthropological material to question the ideas of “nature” and “culture.” 2. See note 6 in chapter 7. 3. The museum acknowledges this fact. This exhibit is under renovation and will reopen in 2021; see Field Museum (2018). 4. For example, the “Guthe” collection of the Philippine Expedition at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History in Ann Arbor; cf. Sinopoli (2013). The American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto use commentary and other objects to reinterpret and “teach the problem” of Old New York and the Mohawk Family Life Group, respectively. See American Museum of Natural History (n.d.) and Whyte (2018). Belgium’s Africa Museum recently overhauled its collection, reinterpreting old exhibits and featuring the responses of Congolese people. See Marshall (2018). 187

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5. The exhibit I remember was probably in the Wattis Hall of Human Cultures, erected in 1976 and dismantled in 1992. My father remembers not an African woman in a diorama but a photograph of a young Polynesian girl in the same pose. Wattis featured a section on Gabrah, Kenya, which would correspond to my memory, and the Caroline Islands, which would correspond to his. These objects (diorama, photograph) may still exist somewhere in the academy’s archives, but the museum staff I spoke to could not confirm either memory. 6. I elaborate on the term ethnography in chapter 1, “Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus.” 7. For example, Hdt. 1.215–16, 4.2, 4.22, 4.26, 4.60–76, 4.103–9, 4.111, 4.117, 4.168–94; Diod. Sic. 2.40.1–42.4, 2.54.1, 3.5.1–9.4, 3.15.1–34.8. There are significant exceptions, for example, the changes in Babylonian culture that Herodotus describes at 1.196. Cultural change is a theme of chapter 4. 8. Others have made this connection between ancient and early modern anthropology, for example, Feeney (2007, 110). In particular, Fabian (1983) has been very influential among classicists. See Vasunia (2001, 113–35) for an application of Fabian to book 2 of the Histories, and cf. Cobet (2002, 404), who notes that Herodotus’s others belong to a different notion of time, fuzzy and relative rather than attached to specific dates. It is possible, as Emily Baragwanath suggested to me, that the Greco-Persian wars marked a distinct moment in time after which cultural customs could be expected to change. The fact that ethnographers after Herodotus took his descriptions of other peoples as static and portable indicates at least that this was not their reading. 9. Sima Qian’s Shiji, written during the Han dynasty (Nienhauser 1994– 2018), is often compared to Herodotus’s Histories (Kim 2009). For a thirdcentury CE Chinese account of the Romans, see Yu Huan’s Weilue (Hill 2004). 10. Daston and Park (1998, 149–59 and 265–76). 11. Daston and Park (1998) describes early modern competition with ancient authors. See also Impey and MacGregor (1985), Hooper-Greenhill (1992), Findlen (1994), and Bredekamp (1995). For natural history collections in Greece and Rome, see Bosak-Schroeder (2019). For the Jesuit missionary Lescarbot, see Pioffet (2000). 12. Moyer (2011, 9–10). See also Gruen (2010). 13. Woolf (2011, 8–31). Later in antiquity, writers such as Alexander Polyhistor, Juba of Mauretania, Caesar, Tacitus, and Pliny the Elder wrote ethnographies more explicitly in aid of empire. The difficult-to-date Periplus of Hanno, which purports to be a transcription of an inscription that Hanno, the king of the Carthaginians, dedicated to commemorate his colonization voyage along

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the west coast of Africa, is explicitly colonial and depicts graphic violence against colonized subjects. 14. Hdt. 1.214–16, 2.1, 3.1, 3.17, 4.1, 4.93, 5.1. Sparta is an exception. 15. Flower (2006) collects bibliography on individual Persian sources to correlate against the Histories. See also Lewis (1997) and Murray (2001a, 2001b). 16. The kings of the Histories are themselves often scholars. See Christ (1994) and Branscome (2013). 17. But see Muntz (2017, 23) who notes Diodorus’s trip to Egypt and speculates that he spoke with people there. 18. Megasthenes either traveled with Alexander the Great or wrote at the court of the Seleucids, who ruled India after Alexander. Agatharchides wrote at the court of Ptolemy VI. Bianchetti (2018, 424) argues that “Diodorus underscores the geographical aspects [of world history] to prepare the role of Caesar and the Roman Republic as conquerors of the world.” 19. For an introduction to the history of discourse analysis and its relationship to ideology, see Määttä (2014). 20. I have indicated the present geographic equivalent of the regions Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus describe. Like everything else they report, this information should be taken with a grain of salt. 21. There are many “ethnographic” passages in ancient Greek and Roman literature, but scholars debate whether or not ethnography constituted a consciously described genre in antiquity. On the modern construction of ethnography as a genre, see Hartog ([1980] 1988, chapter 1), Clarke (1999), Woolf (2011, 13–19), and Skinner (2012). Jacob (1991) and Dihle (1994) trace the history of Greek ethnography, while Müller (1972) surveys Greek, Roman, and Byzantine ethnographies. Recent studies include Adler (2011) and Almagor and Skinner (2013). For ethnography specifically in late antiquity and the Byzantine period, see Kaldellis (2013). 22. This has long been recognized. See Thomas (1982, 1), following Trüdinger (1918, 175). 23. Frost (2016, 4). 24. I use the term white Western to describe cultural forms that dominate in Western and Northern Europe and parts of the world colonized by those Europeans, including the United States and Canada. In other words, I treat the “West” not as a place but a project (Glissant 1989, 2), much like whiteness itself. Is “white Western” redundant? If so, I hope the juxtaposition of these terms reminds readers not to take them for granted. 25. Cronon (1996, 17). Emphasis in original.

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26. For example, Grosz (1994), discussed by Bianchi, Brill, and Holmes (2019b, 13–14). 27. “Traces of an alternate lineage,” as Bianchi, Brill, and Holmes (2019b, 2) have it. Westra (1997) and Lane (2012), on the other hand, look for compatibility between environmentalism and the Greeks we think we know. See Zatta (2017) for pre-Socratic environmental philosophy. Earlier treatments of Greece, Rome, and the environment include Glacken (1967) and White (1967). 28. For the sake of brevity, I use animal when I mean “nonhuman animal.” 29. There are some exceptions. Following Kurke (2011) and Forsdyke (2012), I note elements of popular culture in Greek ethnography as they arise. 30. I have been inspired by Stephens (2003), Moyer (2011), and Penrose (2016) in attempting to recover these voices. 31. Connolly (2018, 13). For a reader-centered approach to Greek and Roman historiography, see Baragwanath (2008), Grethlein (2013), and Moles (2002). 32. On the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch, see Crutzen and Stoermer (2012). For the Anthropocene and historical inquiry, see Chakrabarty (2009). 33. I use scare quotes around “classics” to acknowledge how Greece and Rome have been fetishized by white Westerners. See for example Greenwood (2010, 69–111), Krebs (2011), and McCoskey (2012). 34. Others before me have turned to Greek and Roman antiquity to understand the present crisis. Lynn White (1967) famously cast Greeks and Romans as nature lovers whose good example we have failed to follow, while Hughes (1994 and 2014, 230–31) blamed Greek philosophers and Roman pragmatism for the decline of environmental stewardship. More recently, Melissa Lane (2012) has used Plato’s Republic to generate a new environmental ethic.

chapter one: sources and methods 1. See Immerwahr (1966, 318) for a list of Herodotus’s major ethnographic passages, called logoi. Significant monographs on Herodotus’s ethnographies include Hartog ([1980] 1988), Thomas (2000), and Munson (2001, 2005). For other aspects of the Histories, see Immerwahr (1966); Lang (1984); Flory (1987); Lateiner (1989); Evans (1991); Bakker, de Jong, and van Wees (2002); Dewald and Marincola (2006); Baragwanath (2008); Branscome (2013); and Munson (2013). Other important studies of Greeks and others include Snowden (1970), Momigliano (1975), Hall (1991), Dihle (1994), Dench (1995), Gray (1995), Dougherty (2001), Karageorghis and Taifacos (2004), and Almagor and Skinner (2013). For Herodotus and natural history, see Sergueenkova (2009).

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2. Diodorus outlines the contents of the Library at 1.4.6. Muntz (2017, 9) defends the unity of the first three books. 3. Sparta, the only Greek community whose customs Herodotus describes at length, is discussed in “Greed, Envy, and Self-Sufficiency” in chapter 5. 4. Diodorus wrote during Rome’s rise, but his focus is usually elsewhere. For his perspective on Rome, see Muntz (2017). 5. For more on Herodotus’s prose influences, see Fowler (2006). For ethnography and related discourses before Herodotus, see Dougherty (2001) and Skinner (2012). 6. Murray (1972). See also Priestley (2014) and Kosmin (2014, 31–58). 7. Flory (1987, 81). 8. Redfield (1985, 109–10). Lovejoy and Boas (1935) and Glacken (1967) often mediate classicists’ access to anthropology. For a critique of the “noble savage” in modern anthropology, see Milton (1996, 109–33). It used to be thought that this idea originated in antiquity and was revived by Rousseau in the eighteenth century, but Ellingson (2001) has argued that the French historian Marc Lescarbot invented the stereotype in his seventeenth-century reception of Greek and Roman ethnographies. According to Ellingson, the idea of the noble savage was projected onto Rousseau by nineteenth-century anthropologist John Crawfurd to promote his racist agenda. 9. The limitations of characterizing peoples as “soft” have been explored by Gorman and Gorman (2014). 10. Sacks (1990), Hau (2016), and Muntz (2017). 11. For example, as outlined by Rubincam (2018). It is interesting to note that certain sources played a large part in Diodorus’s ethnographies and thus in the development of Greek environmental discourse after Herodotus. Hecataeus of Abdera, Ctesias, Megasthenes, and Agatharchides appear to have been Diodorus’s primary sources for the passages I discuss. Muntz (2017, 1–26) provides an up-to-date and critical discussion of Diodorus’s sources in books 1–3. See also Burton (1972) and Rathmann (2016). See Baron (2013) for the difficulty of separating “fragment” and “cover text.” 12. For an introduction to the many schools of Diodorus scholarship, see Hau, Meeus, and Sheridan (2018b). I am agnostic on most of the issues at play, preferring to focus on the experience of readers rather than questions of authorship. 13. Momigliano (1958, 2–3). 14. Woolf (2011, 12), following Norden (1920). 15. Wiseman (2011, 327). On the difference between the modern concept of “objectivity” and the ancient devotion to “truth,” see Gabba (1981) and Luce

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(1989). For the history of paradoxography (considered a genre by many classical scholars), see Gabba (1981). For “wonders” (thaumata) in Herodotus and those who follow him, see Munson (2001) and Priestley (2014, 51–108). 16. Williams (1976, 184). 17. For the history of this idea, see Morton (2007). For the Romantic tradition in classics, see Saunders et al. (2012). For the concept of nature in modern Europe, see Thomas (1983). 18. Not all ancient peoples have such a word. See Rochberg (2016). 19. For example, Arist., Metaph. 1014b 16–35. In tracing this history, I follow Lloyd (1991), French (1994), Naddaf (2005), and Holmes (2014). 20. Long (2005), French (1994, 162), Ostwald (1986, 250–73), Kerferd (1981, 111–30), Guthrie (1969, 3:55–134), and Heinimann (1945). 21. McInerney (2006), Beagon (1992, 79–91 and 159–90), Purves (2010), and Purcell (2013). 22. This idea dominates Romantic English literature of the nineteenth century. See Morton (2007) for the influence of Romantic aesthetics on later environmental discourse. By “Greek writers” I generally mean the male elites who leave us most of our literary material. Sappho is the best known exception, but there are many others. See Plant (2004). For women as writers of documentary (i.e., nonliterary) Greek texts from Egypt, see Bagnall and Cribiore (2006). 23. On Greek and Roman anthropocentrism, see Renehan (1981) and Lanata (1994). Human interventions into land- and waterscapes are described in detail throughout chapter 2. 24. Mattingly (2010, 193). See also Hughes (2014, 68–87). 25. Rackham (1996, 34) goes further: “There can be no doubt that Plato meant deluges to be the cause of loss of soil, and the loss of soil to be the cause of the loss of trees, not vice versa.” 26. As Thommen (2012, 40–41) says, this passage “reveals an unbroken admiration for the beauty and fertility of the Attic countryside . . . [but] gives rise neither to accusations nor to demands for a different kind of behavior.” 27. Martini and Chesworth (2010), Mattingly (2010), McCormick et al. (2012), Harris (2013), and Maas (2015). For ancient Greek ecology, see Sallares (1991). For Greek and Roman environmental history, see Williams (1973), Fedeli (1990), Horden and Purcell (2000), Sallares (2002), Bedon and Hermon (2005), Griffith (2006), Rosen and Sluiter (2006), Bettini (2008), Morzadec (2009), Spencer (2010), Mandile (2011), Campbell (2012), Papadopoulos and Urton (2012), Blouin (2014), Garnsey (1989), and Meiggs (1982). Thommen (2012) surveys old and new Greek and Roman environmental history.

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28. For physis in Herodotus, see Zingross (1998) and Thomas (2000). 29. For physis as a transcendent, instructive force, see Diod. Sic. 2.50.7, 3.23.3, 3.10.6, 3.18.2, 3.21.5. For physis bestowing hardships and gifts, see Diod. Sic. 3.43.7, 3.47.1. Greek Stoic understandings of physis are difficult to disentangle from their later representation and transformation by Roman Stoics, but Diogenes Laertius says that Xeno, Philodemus, and Chrysippus abstracted physis into a force that “maintains the world” and “aims at usefulness and pleasure, as is clear from the workmanship of human beings” (Long and Sedley 1987, rs43A). 30. For human customs working with physis, see Hdt. 3.12, Diod. Sic. 1.74.5, 5.28.1–2; cf. Diod. Sic. 2.52.7–8, 2.56.5. For antagonism between humans and physis, see Diod. Sic. 5.39.2. 31. Previous writers, especially Aristotle and Polybius, used peristasis to mean changing climactic or military circumstances, respectively. For other contexts in which “environment” may be the best translation, see Diod. Sic. 3.16.6, 3.5.1.3, 5.11.4, and 11.30.6. 32. For more on these Fisheaters and their peristasis, see “The Impassive Fisheaters” in chapter 5. 33. Other aspects of bios are considered throughout chapter 4. 34. On the stratification of time in Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, and those who come after them, see Feeney (2007, especially 70–86). To the authors Feeney discusses we can also add Plato, Tim. 22e–23c. 35. Cultural history and historical anthropology are modern terms. For a brief introduction to this mode of writing in antiquity, see Saunders (2001, 237–39). 36. See Lovejoy and Boas (1935), Cole (1967), Edelstein (1967), Blundell (1986), and Brown (1998). Cole (1967, 5) notes the consistent pre-Socratic interest in cultural origins. 37. See Shaw (1982/1983, 17–19) for a discussion of these bioi in relation to Herodotus. 38. Burstein (1989, 27). For the Life of Greece, see Fortenbaugh and Schütrumpf (2001). See Philochorus FGrH 328 F2 for nomadism preceding agriculturalism. For Dicaearchus’s relationship to Plato and Aristotle, see Cambiano and Repici (1989). 39. Bock (1966) surveys the history of the idea. 40. πολλὰ δ’ ἂν καὶ ἄλλα τις ἀποδείξειε τὸ παλαιὸν Ἑλληνικὸν ὁμοιότροπα τῷ νῦν βαρβαρικῷ διαιτώμενον (Thuc. 1.6.6). The word barbarian is a direct translation of the Greek barbaroi and not necessarily an insult. 41. These and other examples are collected at Tuplin (1999, 61n38) and discussed in Rood (2016).

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42. οὐ πολὺς χρόνος ἐξ οὗ τοῖς Ἕλλησιν ἐδόκει αἰσχρὰ εἶναι καὶ γελοῖα ἅπερ νῦν τοῖς πολλοῖς τῶν βαρβάρων, γυμνοὺς ἄνδρας ὁρᾶσθαι (Pl. Rep. 452c). 43. Rood (2016, 115). 44. Other scholars have recognized that Greek writers connect distant times and places. According to Romm (1992, 47), they “correlate historic time with geographic space . . . thereby locating the earliest stratum of cosmic evolution beyond the edges of the earth.” Almost a century earlier, E. E. Sikes (1914, 5) made a similar claim: “[T]he outer world was either filled with semi-human monsters, or with people who, in some measure at least, still enjoyed the Golden Age.” As Sauer (1992, 117) says, Posidonius and other writers who describe the Celts as Homeric heroes “align geographic and temporal distance” (“Ces auteurs font coïncider l’éloignement géographique et la distance temporelle”). See also Rosellini and Saïd (2013). 45. For golden age imagery, see Feeney (2007, 108–20) and Gatz (1967). I discuss the Ethiopians in detail in “The Ethiopian King” in chapter 4. 46. Bosak-Schroeder (2016). 47. οὗτοι μὲν πάντες ἀροτῆρές εἰσι, οἱ δὲ ἄλλοι νομάδες, Δάοι, Μάρδοι, Δροπικοί, Σαγάρτιοι, (Hdt. 1.125). 48. Scholars have divided Greek history into several periods, including “archaic” (ca. 750–480 BCE) and “classical” (ca. 480–323 BCE). 49. Schick (1999, 9). 50. Contra Ameling (2008, 52), who sees Agatharchides as the first Greek writer to bring ethnologic “proof” to bear on cultural historical theory: “Agatharchides succeeded in furnishing historical proof and secure knowledge in a field that until now had defied any proof and knowledge.” The Hellenistic period runs from about 323 BCE to 30 BCE, the death of Alexander the Great to the death of Cleopatra, the last Ptolemaic ruler before the Romans conquered Egypt. On universal history, see Alonso-Nuñez (1990, 1997, 2002), and Liddel and Fear (2010). The process as I understand it parallels Thomas’s (2000) argument that ethnographic and medical theories coconstructed one another in the fifth century BCE. 51. Burstein (1989, 27). 52. On Diodorus’s account, these culture heroes start out as humans but are later deified. See Sacks (1990, 55–82) and Muntz (2017, 57–88). For Diodorus’s approach to myth, history, and religion, see Muntz (2018) and Durvye (2018). 53. Glotfelty (1996, xviii). As Saunders (2006) says, ecocriticism is still unsure of its canon. Kroeber (1994) outlines one lineage, Coupe (2000) another. Though common in other fields, the environmental humanities are still taking root in

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classics. See Saunders (2008); Payne (2010, 2016); Purves (2015); Holmes (2015); Schliephake (2017); Bennett (2017); Korhonen and Ruonakoski (2017); Rich (2017); Brockliss (2018); Bianchi, Brill, and Holmes (2019a); and Armstrong (2019). Among premodernists, medievalists have led the way; for example, Cohen (2012), Joy et al. (2013), Estes (2017), and Goldwyn (2018). See also Neis (2017). 54. On the fraught relationship between ecocriticism and Indigenous studies, see Murphy (1995) and Adamson (2001). 55. Not all new materialists are white, just as not all proponents of Indigenous cosmovisions are Indigenous, but new materialisms have developed in a white Western intellectual environment. 56. Monani and Adamson (2017, 2). Cf. Adamson (2014). 57. Aguilera (2017, 207–13) analyzes the maize-centered poetry of Chiapasbased Zoque writer Mikeas Sánchez, while Fiskio (2017, 111–13) documents the activism of Idle No More, a collaboration between diverse Indigenous peoples in North America. For cosmovisions in other Indigenous communities, see Coleman (2016); Isbister, Pu, and Rachman (2017); Ryan (2017); Fuller (2018); and Telles (2019). 58. Kantian mind/being “correlation” is usually the object of attack, but see Evelyn Fox Keller (2010), who has argued that Charles Darwin and Francis Galton popularized the “nature-nurture” binary in the nineteenth century, a binary that has become entrenched in the discourse of genetics through the idea of an internal, particulate genome that can be distinguished from an external, postnatal environment. See also Roberts (2017). 59. Latour (2005), Harman (2009, 2010), and Barad (2007). Much of the work in object-oriented philosophy and speculative realism is being done online, for example by Levi Bryant (http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/), but foundational publications include Meillassoux (2010); Bryant (2011); and Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman (2011). Instead of animating the nonhuman, Frost (2016) focuses on rehabilitating the human subject as an interdependent but emergent phenomenon. See also Malm (2018, 67–71). 60. Haraway (2003), Alaimo (2010), and Deleuze and Guattari (1980). Cf. Frost’s “biocultural creatures” (2016). See also Chen (2012) and Iovino and Opperman (2014). Scholars of literature often access new materialism through Jane Bennett (2010)’s “vibrant materialism.” For an introduction to new materialisms, see Alaimo and Hekman (2008), Coole and Frost (2010b), and Dolphijn and van der Tuin (2012). “Posthumanism” has also been influential, especially in turning literary scholars toward animals. See Wolfe (2009) and Braidotti (2013). For a critical history of posthumanism and its relationship to animal studies, see Fraiman (2012).

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61. Other scholars of Greek and Roman antiquity have taken a similar approach: Mueller (2016); Canevaro (2018); Telò and Mueller (2018); and Bianchi, Brill, and Holmes (2019a). 62. For sex/gender terms in Greek, see chapter 3, note 1. 63. For a close examination of Greek philosophy, Deleuze, and Guattari, see Greenstine and Johnson (2017); see Meloni (2018) for a similar investigation of Greek humoralism. 64. Gods will make the occasional appearance in what follows but are not the focus of this book. 65. Haraway (1988, 590). For postcolonial science studies, see Harding (2008). On (queer) feminist science studies, see Cipolla et al. (2017) 66. For example, Kimmerer (2013), Gross (2014), and Whyte (2017). 67. Barad (2007, 381).

chapter two: rulers and rivers 1. Ὁ δ’ οὖν Σεσόωσις χώματα πολλὰ καὶ μεγάλα κατασκευάσας τὰς πόλεις εἰς ταῦτα μετῴκισν, ὅσαι μὴ φυσικῶς τὸ ἔδαφος ἐτύγχανον ἐπηρμένον ἔχουσαι (Diod. Sic. 1.57.1). 2. Clarke (2018) comes to a similar conclusion. 3. When the Greek king Agamemnon returns home after the Trojan war, he must face the rage of his wife, Clytemnestra, who seeks vengeance for Iphigenia, the daughter Agamemnon sacrificed to sail to Troy. Instead of confronting him directly, Clytemnestra tests Agamemnon’s hybris (violent arrogance) by tempting him to walk on and thereby ruin a precious carpet. He fails the test. Another great work, the Athos canal (Hdt. 7.24), is often connected with Xerxes’s error at the Hellespont. Baragwanath (2008, 254–65) brilliantly demonstrates the positive and negative readings of the canal available to Herodotus’s readers. See also Clarke (2018, 122). 4. Immerwahr (1966, 293). Cf. Lateiner (1989, 131–32). 5. Harrison (2000, 239). There is scant evidence for cult activity, however. See Burkert (1985, 174–75) and Mikalson (2003, 45). 6. Munson (2001, 11). Cf. Lateiner (1989, 134) and Vasunia (2001, 78). 7. Romm (2006, 189–90), Scullion (2006, 193), and Mikalson (2003, 46). Interestingly, Xerxes’s impiety cannot be cushioned or mitigated by his lavish honoring of a plane-tree (Hdt. 7.31) or respect for a sacred grove (Hdt. 7.197). See Stubbings (1946) for the ancient reception of the first scene, ten Berge (2016) for parallels to the second, and Baragwanath (2008, 270) for Xerxes’s extremes of behavior.

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8. Weimer (2011, 46), on the other hand, recontextualizes Xerxes’s fall in the Histories’ larger patterns of impiety and religious intolerance. See also Scullion (2006, 194). 9. Clarke (2018, vii), and see pages 221–69 for the characterization of the Persians, especially as abusers of dynamis, “power” (272). 10. Clarke (2018, 185) referring to Hdt. 2.124–28. This passage is discussed later in this section. 11. For the various ways Herodotus underlines the Hellespont episode, see Thomas (2000, 99) and Boedeker (2013, 373). 12. ὡς μήτε τὰ γενόμενα ἐξ ἀνθρώπων τῷ χρόνῳ ἐξίτηλα γένηται, μήτε ἔργα μεγάλα τε καὶ θωμαστά, τὰ μὲν Ἕλλησι τὰ δὲ βαρβάροισι ἀποδεχθέντα, ἀκλεᾶ γένηται, τά τε ἄλλα καὶ δι’ ἣν αἰτίην ἐπολέμησαν ἀλλήλοισι (Hdt. 1.1). 13. Nagy’s (1987, 179) comments on the meaning of apodeiknumi in the Histories are illuminating: “When someone performs a deed (or executes a monument, as in Herodotus 1.84, etc.), the ‘performance’ (or ‘execution’) is tantamount to a ‘public display’ so long as it can be sustained by a medium of public display.” 14. Immerwahr (1960, 269). 15. Ἐμήκυνα δὲ περὶ Σαμίων μᾶλλον, ὅτι σφι τρία ἐστὶ μέγιστα ἁπάντων Ἑλλήνων ἐξεργασμένα (Hdt. 3.60). 16. For “proof” in the Histories, see Thomas (2000, 168–212) and Bakker (2002). For the connection between ethnography, erga, and ekphrasis, the literary description of an artifact, see Purves (2010, 140). For the Samian works in particular, see Immerwahr (1957). 17. Romm (1992, 36) discusses the link between habitation and information. 18. For tombs, see Hdt. 1.93, 2.134. For pillars and statues, see 2.103, 2.106, 2.110, 2.170, 2.175, 2.176. For fortresses, see 1.98, 2.100, 2.121, 4.95. For cities, see 1.178. 19. In contrast to Aeschylus. See Bakola (2016). 20. Herodotus’s reader is implicated in a similarly amazing maze, and the reader-scholar is challenged to surpass Herodotus’s great work. Baragwanath (2008, 257) connects Herodotus’s project to Xerxes’s. 21. Diodorus may also be alluding here to Thucydides’s promise to provide a “possession for all time” (ktēma es aiei, Th. 1.22.4). 22. Clarke (2018, 173). 23. Mikalson (2003, 46). 24. See Harrison (2000, 109) on false oaths. 25. Clarke (2018, 256) notes how rare it is for people in the Histories to correctly interpret divine signs.

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26. Cf. Diod. Sic. 1.33.9–11, where Darius holds off on the canal, eventually completed by Ptolemy II. 27. Although not a great ergon, crop burning and its consequences illustrate this principle. Alyattes, a Lydian king at war with Miletus, sets fire to his enemy’s crops and accidentally burns down a temple to Athena. The illness he suffers as a result does not abate until the temple is rebuilt (Hdt. 1.19, 1.22). Cf. Diod. Sic. 16.58.6, where the gods burn down their own temple to punish temple robbers! 28. Pace Munson (2001, 12), who argues that even these projects represent “monarchic imperialism over the environment.” 29. Cf. Clarke (2018, 163): “A sequence of Babylonian queens has worked on ensuring that the river works in the interests of the city.” 30. Dillery (1992) tries to separate historical from folkloric elements and explain the “discrepancy” (on my reading, hypocrisy) of Diodorus’s behavior, that is, his reluctance to pass under the tomb, which does not prevent him from breaking in. 31. Εἰ μὴ ἄπληστός τε ἔας χρημάτων καὶ αἰσχροκερδής, οὐκ ἂν νεκρῶν θήκας ἀνέῳγες (Hdt. 1.187.4). 32. An Egyptian queen of the same name gets vengeance on her brother’s murderers by drowning them in an underground chamber (Hdt. 2.100). The two women are probably linked by their tricky erga. 33. Earlier we are told that Cyrus drinks only water from the River Choaspes, which he must transport with him (Hdt. 1.188). Although not a transgression, this unique relationship to one river, which Cyrus honors excessively, may indicate that he is incapable of properly respecting other rivers. 34. Cf. Clarke (2018, 179), who notes the contrast between the Babylonian queens and their Persian successors. 35. Clarke (2018, 185–89). 36. Forsdyke (2012). 37. In Forsdyke’s (2012, 78) model, this is an example of “accommodation,” a story that helps elites and nonelites negotiate their coexistence. 38. Herodotus does not mention the additional forced labor she used to construct the pyramid. 39. Agatharchides is believed to be Diodorus’s source for the Nubian mines. See Burstein (1989, 60n2). 40. For the phrase “with much suffering and expense,” see Diod. Sic. 1.49.6, 2.13.7.1, 13.52.5.4. Cf. 1.36.5.1, where he admires the ease with which the Egyptians gather crops.

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41. Diodorus further distinguishes Spanish mining from mining in Attica, where great effort is expended for little reward (5.37). The topaz miners suffer as the Nubian gold miners do (3.39). 42. μεγαλεπίβολος καὶ φιλοτιμουμένη τῇ δόξῃ τὸν βεβασιλευκότα πρὸ αὐτῆς ὑπερθέσθαι (Diod. Sic. 2.7.2). For Ninus, see Diod. Sic. 2.3.1. 43. On the Persian point of view in Herodotus, see Baragwanath (2008, 261–62). 44. More of Semiramis’s surprisingly advantageous projects are explored in “Semiramis and Her Elephants” in chapter 3. 45. This is consistent with the neutral-to-positive value he accords polypragmosunē. See Leigh (2013, 106) and, further, Ehrenberg (1947). 46. τρυφὴν καὶ ῥᾳθυμίαν καὶ τὸ μηδέποτε κακοπαθεῖν μηδὲ μεριμνᾶν (Diod. Sic. 2.21.2; cf. 1.62.5). Bound up with this “peaceful” lifestyle is Ninyas’s gender performance, discussed in “Sex/Gender Variance” in chapter 3. 47. Vasunia (2001) and Merrills (2017). Cf. Murphy (2004, 138–48) and Purcell (2012). 48. Cf. Diod. Sic. 3.3.2. 49. τὰ ἀπὸ τοῦ ποταμοῦ τῇ χώρῃ γινόμενα καὶ τὰ ἀπὸ τῆς χώρης τοῖσι ἀνθρώποισι (Hdt. 2.177.1). 50. On Egypt as static, see Lateiner (1989, 40) and Vasunia (2001). 51. Diodorus’s text makes a similar point by documenting the land works and waterworks of early culture heroes (1.19.1, 1.19.5). When Heracles separates the continents of Europe and Africa (4.18.5), he constructs a division that will later be perceived as natural. 52. Thomas (2000, 110). 53. “Will”: Herodotus elsewhere uses ethelō of an inanimate subject to mean “shall” (1.109), but pace the LSJ, that is not what he is doing here. The Nile is consistently characterized as an agent, and in this particular passage the animacy of ergatikos should incline us to translate “wish” rather than “shall.” Cf. 2.99.3. “Work hard”: The divinity of rivers is not explicit in Herodotus, but the Homeric antecedent is still crucial. See Holmes (2015). 54. καθόλου δὲ ταῖς εἰς ἀνθρώπους εὐεργεσίαις ὑπερβάλλει πάντας τοὺς κατὰ τὴν οἰκουμένην ποταμούς (Diod. Sic. 1.36.2; cf. 2.11.3). In casting rivers and rulers as competitors in the same field, Diodorus may have drawn upon his knowledge of the Nile as a space for imperial competition in the Hellenistic period. As Thompson (2013, 186) argues, the Ptolemies used Nile voyages and the royal barge to assert their control over Egypt and Alexander’s legacy.

200 / Notes to Pages 51–55 55. Other nonhumans are less kind. Sands in Africa attack “as if with evil cunning” (Diod. Sic. 1.30.7: hōsper pronoia tini ponēra; cf. 2.12.2–3). 56. Romm (2006, 182–83). 57. See note 5. 58. For Scamander as a force in the Iliad, see Holmes (2015). For Egypt in the Greek imagination, see Froidefond (1971), Vasunia (2001), and Moyer (2011). 59. Tale of the Eloquent Peasant B1, 140 (Simpson 1972, 34). See also Bonneau (1964), Baines (1985), and Merrills (2017, 177). For Egypt’s gods and goddesses, see Wilkinson (2003) and Dunand and Zivie-Coche (2004). 60. Allen (1988), Bickel (1994), and Bonhême (1996). Sometimes the temple would itself unite earth and water, like the Osireion at Abydos. See O’Connor (2009). 61. Bickel (1994, 23–31). 62. Loprieno (2005, 26, 33). 63. Translated by John Foster (2001, 115). For text and commentary, see Van der Plas (1986, 132–33). 64. Assmann (1990) and Grimal (1994, 195) quoting Urk IV 2095. See O’Connor and Silverman (1995) for the development and gradual desacralization of Egyptian kingship over time. 65. For such a commemoration, see Cepko (2005, 127). On nilometers, see Sandri (2017). On the Nile and technology, see Murray (2000, 513–15) and Seidlmayer (2001). 66. For floods damaging settlements, see Grimal (1994, 195–96). Navratilova (2005) and Gozzoli (2005, 142) describe the Nile being turned against Egypt’s enemies. 67. For the environmental history of the Pelusiac branch, see Stanley, Bernasconi, and Jorstad (2008). 68. Though Diodorus’s text was probably read by individuals, scholars agree that Herodotus performed selections of his Histories for competitions. See Rösler (2002). 69. For Herodotus’s place in Greek geography, see Romm (1992, 9–44) and Thomas (2000, 75–101). 70. Munson (2001, 84), Thomas (2000, 80), Scullion (2006, 193), and Rood (2016, 47). For the Hellenistic reception of Herodotus’s geography, see Priestley (2014, 109–56). 71. Without engaging in a sustained discussion of continents and other geographical designations, Diodorus may also be attuned to their contingency.

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He notes that when the Nile floods the area around mounds made by hand to protect humans and livestock, they begin to look like the Cycladic Islands (Diod. Sic. 1.36.8). 72. Barad (2007, 202). 73. Clarke (2018, 255). 74. For “mattering,” see Barad (2007, 146–53). 75. This dynamic resembles the interaction between Herodotus and Delphic oracles that Kindt (2006, 43) describes: “The challenge that the uncertainty of the future presents becomes more tangible through the construction of narratives, which backdate those challenges. Oracle stories are case studies of successful or unsuccessful management of the uncertainty of the future.”

chapter three: female feck 1. I use woman and female interchangeably, since Herodotus and Diodorus do not reserve the first term for “gender” and the second for “sex.” The same is true for man and male. On the other hand, feminine and masculine are used to describe qualities associated with being a woman/female or a man/male and can be shared by people assigned to each category. I have used these binary terms because Herodotus and Diodorus engage in binary thinking about sex/gender, but of course people of all genders can give birth. I use species as a shorthand for human/animal distinctions. Humans and other animals are usually included in a larger category of zōia. See Newmyer (2016). 2. Collins and Bilge (2016) introduce intersectional analysis in sociology, while Harding (2008) explores its epistemological consequences, and Mies and Shiva (1993) document the environmental justice projects of women across the globe. 3. Diogenes Laertius 1.33, quoted in duBois (1991, 6). DuBois traces the shift in the fifth to fourth centuries from polarizing these terms to putting them in strict hierarchies. 4. Dean-Jones (1996), King (1998, 2013), and Holmes (2012). 5. Did not become men: King (2013, 20). Grip on female sex: Holmes (2012, 15): “The problem seems to be that the body’s hold on femaleness is too loose to keep it from drifting toward maleness under certain conditions.” 6. See Penrose (2016, 40) for a helpful table. I follow Fausto-Sterling (2012) in using sex/gender to describe these intertwined concepts. 7. The Carian queen Artemisia is a well-known example of such a “masculine” woman. See Munson (1988) and Harrell (2003).

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8. Different accounts of this disease give different causes. In the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, Places (contemporaneous with Herodotus), it is impotence. See Asheri, Lloyd, and Corcella (2007, 155). 9. On this passage in its wider Scythian context, see Penrose (forthcoming). 10. τοῖσι ὅκως τι μέλλοι ἀνεπιτήδεον ἔσεσθαι, αὐτοῖσί τε καὶ τοῖσι περιοίκοισι, ἡ ἱερείη τῆς Ἀθηναίης πώγωνα μέγαν ἴσχε (Hdt. 1.175). 11. ἥτις παρὰ τὸν ἑωυτῆς ἄνδρα μοῦνον πεφοίτηκε, ἄλλων ἀνδρῶν ἐοῦσα ἄπειρος (Hdt. 2.111.2; cf. Diod. Sic. 1.59.1, 1.78.5). See Richlin (2014, 241–66) for the uses of women’s bodies in Roman medicine. 12. μίσγεσθαι οὐκ οἷός τε ἐγίνετο, τῇσι δὲ ἄλλῃσι γυναιξὶ ἐχρᾶτο (Hdt. 2.181.2). 13. In Barad’s terminology, Sesostris and Amasis’s bodies are the apparatus of observation. 14. Manliness is also explored in the Histories, though to a lesser extent. See especially Hdt. 1.155, where Croesus advises Cyrus to feminize the Lydian men in order to mitigate any threat of future rebellions. On this passage see Redfield (1985, 111), Thomas (2000, 109, 113), and Pelling (2006, 169n98). 15. But see stories that echo Herodotus’s at Diod. Sic. 1.59.1 and 1.78. 16. Alexander the Great, a rival for Diodorus’s admiration, is discussed in “Becoming Amazons” in chapter 6. 17. “Longing for womanly pursuits”: τήν τε τρυφὴν αὐτοῦ καὶ τὸν γυναικώδη τῶν ἐπιτηδευμάτων ζῆλον (Diod. Sic. 2.24.4). On Sardanapallus, see Gorman and Gorman (2014, 270–82). 18. Contrary to other accounts of Sardanapallus; Gorman and Gorman (2014, 363–64) hypothesize that Diodorus has blended two accounts. 19. In contrast to his ancestor, Ninyas (Diod. Sic. 2.21.2). 20. ταῖς ἐλπίσι ἀντεῖχε, διανοούμενος ὑπομένειν τὴν πολιορκίαν καὶ τὰ παρὰ τῶν ὑποτεταγμένων ἀποσταλησόμενα στρατόπεδα προσδέχεσθαι (Diod. Sic. 2.26.9). 21. τοῖς τε ἡγεμόσι τῶν ἄλλων ἐθνῶν συνίστατο καὶ πρὸς τὰς ἑστιάσεις καὶ κοινὰς ὁμιλίας ἐκτενῶς ἅπαντας παρελάμβανε, φιλίαν κατασκευάζων πρὸς ἕκαστον (Diod. Sic. 2.24.3). 22. Other warrior women are mentioned in passing (Diod. Sic. 3.52.4). 23. Hartog (1988, 216–24) discusses Herodotus’s Amazons in detail. See also “Becoming Amazons” in chapter 6. 24. Crucifying Cyrus is one of these “great deeds.” For the changing status of the dead body under the Roman Empire, see Bosak-Schroeder (2019). For “great deeds” as the subject of historical inquiry, see “The Historian Complicit” in chapter 2.

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25. Penrose (2016, 47). The Hellenistic period ran from about 323 to 30 BCE, from the death of Alexander the Great to the death of Cleopatra, the last Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt. 26. Deacy (1997) discusses this passage in depth. 27. Diod. Sic. 2.45.2; cf. 1.48.2, 4.20.3. 28. Walter Penrose suggested to me that Airs, Waters, Places 17 is Diodorus’s source. 29. δεινὸν ἡγούμενος, εἰ προελόμενος τὸ γένος κοινῆι τῶν ἀνθρώπων εὐεργετεῖν περιόψεταί τινα τῶν ἐθνῶν γυναικοκρατούμενα (Diod. Sic. 3.55.3). See Bosak-Schroeder (2019) for more on Gorgons in historiography. See Hawes (2014) for “rationalizing” myths. 30. Rosellini and Saïd (2013). 31. Schiena (2008) lays out the main historical interpretations of this story. 32. Boedeker (2011, 215). 33. Isaac (2004, 194–207). 34. See “Scythian Ways” in chapter 4. 35. Isaac (2004). 36. Strong (2010). 37. But cf. Hdt. 2.93, where Egyptian fish exchange sex/gender roles and Herodotus does not comment on it. 38. Γένη δίμορφα ζῴων καὶ τὴν σύνθεσιν ἐκ τῶν πλεῖστον τὴν φύσιν κεχωρισμένων ἔχοντα (Diod. Sic. 2.51.2). 39. According to Photius, a ninth-century CE Byzantine author, Diodorus also reported several stories of people whose sex/gender suddenly changed; see Brisson (2002, 31–38), Garland (2010, 128–32), King (2013), and ShannonHenderson (forthcoming). In Photius’s words, these sex changes do not indicate “that the male and female nature (physis) have been formed into a double-formed (dimorphon) type, for this is impossible” (Diod. Sic. 32.12.1). Given that Diodorus does seem to believe in dimorphic animals, I suspect that this statement reflects Photius’s rather than Diodorus’s opinion, but we cannot know for sure. 40. Variety is a strong aesthetic value of Greek poetry and art. So far, it has remained unexplored as a principle of pre-Josephan historiography (Gianotti 2009), though Emily Baragwanath commented to me that it may have its roots in Herodotean wonder-discourse. 41. Gould (1989, 130). 42. Flory (1987, 45). 43. Dewald (2013). 44. Gould (1989, 130).

204 / Notes to Pages 68–75 45. To use Dewald’s (2013) classification. See also Lateiner (1989, 140) and Hazewindus (2004). 46. Ingold (2011, 19–32). See also Malm (2018, 79–83). 47. Latour (2005, 52). 48. Tourraix (1976, 377) and Boedeker (2011). 49. Some ancient Greek authors thought of men as more or less entirely in charge of conception. See Dean-Jones (1996, 148). 50. Hdt. 1.107. Elsewhere, Herodotus attests to women’s urine as a powerful remedy for eye disease (Hdt. 2.111), a story to which I discussed in “Sex/Gender Variance.” 51. Τοιῶνδε μέντοι ἐμὲ παίδων μητέρα ἐοῦσαν Κῦρος ἐν ἀτιμίῃ ἔχει, τὴν δὲ ἀπ’ Αἰγύπτου ἐπίκτητον ἐν τιμῇ τίθεται (Hdt. 3.3). 52. See “The Works of the Nile” in chapter 2. 53. Davies (2010) describes the historical and folktale elements of Democedes’s story. See Dominick (2007) for Herodotus’s stories of Atossa. 54. As Boedeker (2011, 217) remarks, Atossa “actively pursues her own agenda, separate from that of the king, but her action serves the interest of a lower-status male.” 55. Tourraix (1976, 379). 56. Boedeker (2011, 216). 57. The following discussion is especially indebted to Kurke (1999), who analyzed Herodotus’s “traffic in women” as an economic discourse. 58. Rosellini and Saïd (2013); Hadas (1935). 59. ἵνα κασίγνητοί τε ἀλλήλων ἔωσι καὶ οἰκήιοι ἐόντες πάντες μήτε φθόνῳ μήτ’ ἔχθεϊ χρέωνται ἐς ἀλλήλους (Hdt. 4.104). 60. Diod. Sic. 2.58.1, 3.17.1, 3.24.3, 3.32.1. 61. The Island of the Sun is imagined to be located to the southeast of Greece. Diodorus attributes this story to Iambulus, a Greek explorer. Although utopic, this ethnography is not presented as any more or less credible than the others in the Library and should not be treated by scholars as generically distinct. However, for this account in the context of other Hellenistic “utopias,” see Winiarczyk (2011). 62. Diod. Sic. 3.24.3, 3.32.2. Cf. Diod. Sic. 3.10.1-2, 3.33.3. For the relationship between Trōgodytai and the modern scientific taxon, “troglodyte,” see Skott (2014). 63. πρὸς δὲ τούτοις ἐπιμίσγονται τότε ταῖς γυναιξὶν αἷς ἂν τύχωσι παιδοπαιίας ἕνεκα, πάσης ἀσχολίας ἀπολελυμένοι διὰ τὴν εὐκοπίαν καὶ τὴν ἑτοιμότητα τῆς τροφῆς (Diod. Sic. 3.17.1–2).

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64. Diodorus describes another form of communalism at 5.9. 65. For debates about the historical Semiramis, see Asher-Greve (2006, 360– 63). For the longer history of the Semiramis legend, see Asher-Greve (2006) and Beringer (2016). 66. Semiramis’s early life is discussed later in this section. 67. Capomacchia (1986). 68. Cf. Harrell (2003, 88) on Herodotus’s character, Artemisia: “Artemisia displays characteristics of several groups, without belonging fully to any one. This ambiguity ultimately accounts for her ability as a woman to embody andreia [manly courage].” 69. Haraway (1988) and Harding (2004). Cf. Dewald (2013, 171). 70. ἀναγκαῖόν ἐστι περὶ αὐτῆς προειπεῖν πῶς ἐκ ταπεινῆς τύχης εἰς τηλικαύτην προήχθη δόξαν (Diod. Sic. 2.4.1). 71. Welser (2009, 362). 72. συνέβαινε τὸν ἄνδρα τελέως ὑπ’ αὐτῆς δεδουλῶσθαι, καὶ μηδὲν ἄνευ τῆς ἐκείνης γνώμης πράττοντα κατευστοχεῖν ἐν πᾶσι (Diod. Sic. 2.5.2). 73. Perhaps under the influence of Apollonius Rhodius’s Jason, the renowned “love hero.” For Jason as a love hero, see Beye (1969), Zanker (1979), and Clauss (1997). Diodorus’s reception of the Argonautika, parallel to Herodotus’s reception of Homer, remains to be explored. 74. Penrose (2016, 25). Even as early as Homer (Od. 2.206). 75. διαγνῶναι τὸν περιβεβλημένον πότερον ἀνήρ ἐστιν ἢ γυνή (Diod. Sic. 2.6.6). Cf. Atossa, entry 7 in the Tractatus De Mulieribus Claris in Bello and Gera (1997, 145–46). 76. Icks (2017). 77. Diod. Sic. 2.7.2. Diodorus’s text even references this earlier scene through Semiramis’s name, which Zopyrus cites as he describes his plan to Darius (Hdt. 3.155). 78. Comploi (2000) argues that Diodorus has significantly shaped the scene. For an introduction to Ctesias, see Llewellyn-Jones and Robson (2010). For an introduction to ancient Mediterranean queens, see Pomeroy (1984), Brosius (1996), Carney (2000), and Penrose (2016). For an introduction to ancient Amazons, see Tyrrell (1984), Hardwick (1990), Blok (1995), Stewart (1995), and Mayor (2014). 79. Smith (1887). 80. Nichols (2008, 134). For Middle Eastern influence on Greek texts see West (1997) and López-Ruiz (2010). 81. Although the details are disputed. See Harris (2000, 170). Bahrani (2006, 146) cautions against overinterpreting these ritual practices: “It is more likely

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that rites of cross-dressing had to do with forms of masquerade in which normative gender identities were stressed through inversion.” For sex/gender in the ancient Middle East, see Asher-Greve (1997), Parpola and Whiting (2002), Bolger (2008), Asher-Greve and Westenholz (2013), and Zsolnay (2017). 82. For the cult of the “Syrian Goddess,” as she was known to Greeks and Romans, see Lightfoot (2003). Ishtar, Atargatis, and Cybele share many attributes. 83. “Elephantasm” is not my coinage, but I reproduce it with delight. I wish I could remember and thank its inventor. 84. φερόμενον φαντασίαν τοῖς πόρρωθεν ὁρῶσιν ἀληθινοῦ θηρίου παρείχετο (Diod. Sic. 2.16.9). For cloud eidōla, see Diod. Sic. 3.5.1. 85. The divine connection may also, for Greek readers, legitimize Semiramis’s cross-dressing. See Carlà-Uhink (2017). 86. Beringer (2016, 52) makes a similar point. 87. Lilja (1972) and Totelin (2015). 88. There is an interesting collapse between “beasts” (thēra) here, the camels, and the eidola. The Assyrian horses are led up to the camels so that they will not fear the camels (especially their smell), but the Assyrian horses also learn to brave the remaining matter of the eidōla (oxhides, hay, human caretaker) and the live elephants they resemble. 89. See Beringer (2016, 50), who relates this passage to Semiramis’s own vision. 90. On contamination as both a positive and negative force, see Tsing (2015, 29): “If survival always involves others, it is also necessarily subject to the indeterminacy of self-and-other transformations . . . we must look for histories that develop through contamination.”

chapter four: dietary entanglements 1. Frost (2016, 4). 2. For more on this concept, see “Way of Life” in chapter 1. 3. Thomas (2000). For cultural history in Hippocratic medicine, see Rosen (2016). For more on the relationship between race/ethnicity and environment, see Kennedy and Jones-Lewis (2016). 4. In Herodotus, bios is used exclusively to denote “life” as life span (e.g., 1.32), or “livelihood” as an extension of one’s profession (e.g., 2.47, 8.26). Herodotus, perhaps under the influence of the Hippocratics (e.g., AWP 1.19), uses diaita, on the other hand, to designate a way of life (e.g., 1.215, 3.102, 4.78, 4.116) or occasionally, a specific form of subsistence (3.23, 4.109). Diodorus probably prefers

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bios because he has been influenced by Hellenistic cultural histories (to which Herodotus contributed). 5. Hdt. 3.98–100. Pace Müller (1972, 1:121), the language of bios is a flexible framework, not a rigid schema. See also Shaw (1982/1983). 6. For Herodotus’s reception of Homer, see Bakker (2002). I follow Flory (1987, 87) in connecting Herodotus’s dietary discourse to Homer’s Cyclopes. 7. οὗτοι μὲν πάντες ἀροτῆρές εἰσι, οἱ δὲ ἄλλοι νομάδες, Δάοι, Μάρδοι, Δροπικοί, Σαγάρτιοι (Hdt. 1.125). Even when nomadism is elevated, agriculturalism is the implied reference point. Diodorus, for example, says that the people in Arabia who lead a “pastoral life” (nomada bion), elsewhere called a “tent life” (2.54.1: skēnitēn bion), have so many herds that they do not “lack grain” (2.50.2: sitou prosdeomena). 8. For objects not preceding their relations, see Barad (2007, 334). 9. Thomas (2000, 28–74) calls this “the ethnography of health.” See also McCoskey (2012, 46–49) and Isaac (2004, 55–168) for an overview of the history of environmental determinism in classical scholarship and classical reception. For a recent discussion of environmental determinism and human agency in Airs, Waters, Places (a locus classicus for the idea), see Presti (2012). 10. See Bosak-Schroeder (2016) for an earlier version of the following two sections. 11. For the Fisheaters as cultural ambassadors, see Longo (1987, 20). 12. Romm (1992, 59; 1996). For another perspective on this scene, see Irwin’s brilliant reading (2014, 50): “The allusions to the Odyssey in the Ethiopian logos create a narrative of cross-cultural encounter that reads against the grain of the Odyssean model, suggesting an alternative version of what might have happened when the sophisticated figure arrived at the land of the primitive ‘other’: an Odysseus who was Cyclopean (in a Homeric sense), that is, lawless and unjust, and a Cyclops who was not the lawless figure that Odysseus would have us believe him to have been.” 13. Forsdyke (2012). Török (2014) considers Herodotus’s Ethiopian ethnography alongside ancient Ethiopian history and archaeology. 14. Finch (2010, 370). For the Ethiopian king as a “historian” here, see Christ (1994) and Demont (2009). 15. Romm (1992, 57–8). Mash (2010, 109) points out that the wine, being phoinikēiou (3.20), may imply a further joke: if the wine is not just palm wine, but Phoenician, the Persian’s best gift is not even really Persian! Diodorus presents several alcoholic peoples whose addiction he ties directly to their lack of familiarity with the substance (5.17.2, 5.26.2). See also Lenfant (2002).

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16. Whether Polyphemus is engaged in true cannibalism or merely anthropophagy depends on whether you read him as more or less human. On these distinctions in general, see Bosak-Schroeder (2019). For Polyphemus in Euripides’s Cyclops, see Konstan (1981). 17. Λειμών ἐστι ἐν τῷ προαστείῳ ἐπίπλεος κρεῶν ἑφθῶν πάντων τῶν τετραπόδων (Hdt. 3.18). 18. ἐς τὸν τὰς μὲν νύκτας ἐπιτηδεύοντας τιθέναι τὰ κρέα τοὺς ἐν τέλεϊ ἑκάστοτε ἐόντας τῶν ἀστῶν (Hdt. 3.18). 19. Romm (1992, 59). 20. Diodorus’s story of an Egyptian king rewrites this scene. When Sesostris runs out of food, he “fixes the boundaries of his expedition” (1.55.6: oria tēs strateias poiēsamenos). 21. Hdt. 3.17–25. 22. Vernant (1989, 169), Flory (1987, 117), Romm (1992, 59). Cf. Hdt. 8.115–17, Thomas (2000, 39–40), and Demont (1988). 23. If Cambyses has been tricked by the Ethiopians into pursuing the Table of the Sun, his army’s famine represents the Ethiopians’ revenge and may reflect popular Greek desire for stories in which enslaved people and other subordinates outwit enslavers and other social superiors. See Forsdyke (2012, 90–113). 24. Bloomer (1993, 49) discusses this scene in the wider context of Herodotus’s interest in nomoi. 25. Although satire and counter-satire produce many coexistent meanings, Griffin (1994, 69) argues that irony is inherently unstable and “tends toward an infinite regress.” Herodotus’s text might even be considered meta-satire, a text that “go[es] beyond [satiric] strategies by additionally confronting the human need to constantly construct . . . systems of meaning” (Kronenberg 2009, 15; emphasis in original). Gruen (2010) reads Tacitus’s Germania as a meta-satire, though he does not use the term. 26. This section of the Library is indebted to Agatharchides of Cnidus’s lost ca. 150 BCE On the Red Sea. 27. Οἱ μὲν οὖν τὴν παράλιον τὴν ἐντὸς τῶν στενῶν κατοικοῦντες οὕτω βιοῦσι, νόσοις μὲν διὰ τὴν ἁπλότητα τῆς τροφῆς σπανίως περιπίπτοντες ὀλιγοχρονιώτεροι δὲ πολὺ τῶν παρ’ ἡμῖν ὄντες (Diod. Sic. 3.17.5). 28. “Are altogether short-lived”: τοῖς δὲ σώμασιν ὄντες κοῦφοι καὶ τοῖς ποςὶν ὀξύτατοι βραχύβιοι παντελῶς εἰσιν (Diod. Sic. 3.29.4). 29. Idiotēs is not necessarily pejorative; cf. 5.52.3. Bad odors also limit health (2.48.8).

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30. It may seem absurd to imagine Greek readers seriously considering an insect-based diet, but there is evidence that poor Greeks ate insects. In particular, locusts are referred to as the food for someone leading a “cheap way of life” (Schol ap. Ar. Ach. 1106: eutelēs diaitia). As discussed in “Egypt and the Island of the Sun,” cheapness is another index of simplicity in Diodorus’s work. Davies and Kathirithamby (1986, 142) dismiss the testimony of Aristophanes’s Acharnians, in which a character wonders whether another character prefers to eat locusts (akrides) or thrushes (kichlai). But Beavis (1988, 76) notes that the scholia supports this idea as a serious possibility. 31. Lateiner (1989, 76–90) and Baragwanath and de Bakker (2012); cf. Woolf (2011). 32. Τὸ δὲ ὕδωρ τοῦτο εἴ σφί ἐστι ἀληθέως οἷόν τι λέγεται, διὰ τοῦτο ἂν εἶεν, τούτῳ τὰ πάντα χρεώμενοι, μακρόβιοι (Hdt. 3.23.9). Cf. Hdt. 4.90. Diodorus also describes healing springs (3.43.1, 5.10.1, 5.19.3, 5.44.3). 33. Hartog (1988). 34. Shaw (1982/1983). 35. Nutton (2013, 131) and Bosak-Schroeder (2019). 36. Hartog (1988, 36). 37. Braund (2004) also focuses on the Scythians’ positive attributes, but compares them to Herodotus’s Spartans. 38. Cf. Diodorus’s Iolaeians, who ward off the Carthaginians in much the same way (Diod. Sic. 5.15.5). 39. Phereoikos is an unusual word. Hesiod uses it to describe a snail (WD 571), an intertext that creates two kinds of human-animal hybrid in Herodotus’s text: snail-Scythians and horse-Scythians. 40. This does not mean that the Scythians never destroy their surroundings. See Clarke (2018, 197, 253). On the connection between Scythian aporia and writing systems (or lack thereof), see Steiner (1994, 175–76). 41. Hartog (1988, 212–24). 42. Ivantchik (2001, 2011), Kim (2018), and Bäbler (2011). See also Skinner (2012). For a general introduction to the Scythians, see Rolle (1989). 43. Khazanov (1984). See also Gilles and Gefu (1990) and Scott (2017). 44. If Herodotus has been misled by his Indigenous informants, it would not be the first time. He reproduces much of Darius’s self-congratulatory Behistun inscription, for example. 45. Hartog (1988, 50–51). 46. Flower and Marincola (2002, 309). Herodotus’s Persians bury their enemies alive (7.114), impale them (3.159, 4.43, 1.128, 7.238), force them to commit

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cannibalism (1.119), and expose and mutilate their bodies (3.16, 3.125, 4.202). Many of these examples are collected in Jacobs (2009). For more on Artayctes, see Boedeker (2013). Among many other contributions, Boedeker excavates a reading of this scene that justifies the Athenians’ actions. Following Lateiner (1989, 132–33), Stadter (1992, 800n46), and Pelling (1997), I see this scene as critical of Athens. For the Histories as organized around punishment, see Desmond (2004, esp. 34–35). 47. Since the Athenians are acting under advice from an oracle, they may not be responsible for this change. 48. This is an important way in which Diodorus’s and Herodotus’s Egyptians differ (Hdt. 2.91). It is possible that Diodorus was read in Egypt, but he seems to imagine readers primarily in Greece and Italy. 49. For moderation as a virtue in Diodorus, see Hau (2016, 110). 50. Although Vogel (1888) and Chamoux and Bertrac (1972) read “delicate,” hapalais, Dindorf and Mueller (1842) read “simple,” haplais. 51. Cf. Hdt. 2.9.2. 52. Vischer (1965, 28). 53. πόαν ἐσθίοντας καὶ τῶν ἐν τοῖς ἕλεσι γινομένων τοὺς καυλοὺς καὶ τὰς ῥίζας (Diod. Sic. 1.43.1). 54. In fact, we learn in a section about mourning customs that some Egyptians do usually eat wheat (Diod. Sic. 1.72.3). This contradiction seems to be the result of two different discourses: the first about diet and how Egyptians habitually restrain themselves, and the second about mourning and how they deny themselves luxuries on special occasions. 55. Τὰς δὲ νόσους προκαταλαμβανόμενοι θεραπεύουσι τὰ σώματα κλυσμοῖς καὶ νηστείαις καὶ ἐμέτοις, ἐνίοτε μὲν καθ’ ἑκάστην ἡμέραν, ἐνίοτε δὲ τρεῖς ἢ τέττερας ἡμέρας διαλείποντες. φασὶ γὰρ πάσης τροφῆς ἀναδοθείσης τὸ πλέον εἶναι περιττόν, ἀφ’ οὗ γεννᾶσθαι τὰς νόσους (Diod. Sic. 1.82; cf. Hdt. 2.77.1). 56. Cf. Diod. Sic. 1.53.5. Diodorus also says that this king “enjoyed the [inexpensive food] exceedingly” (hēsthenta de kath’ hyperbolēn). 57. This arrangement implies a very different understanding of human and animal health, since the sacred animals do not seem to suffer from the “excess” they ingest. 58. Smelik (1979), Smelik and Hemelrijk (1984), and Pfeiffer (2008). 59. Reymond (1972), Smelik (1979), and von den Driesch et al. (2005, 227). 60. Ray (1976, 139). 61. Ray (1976, 143). Pace Ikram (2015, 220), who claims the ibises were undernourished.

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62. Nerlich et al. (1993). Ikram (2015, 220) cautions that “it is possible that the majority of these diseases and problems were a result of long-distance travel where the animals would have been kept in confined, dirty, spaces, with a limited amount of food and water, rather than a result of their treatment in the temple compound,” but this assumes that none of the baboons were bred in captivity. 63. Vischer (1965) includes litos in his key vocabulary for Greek ideas of the simple life. 64. Later in the Library, the envoys of Scipio Africanus follow a similar regimen (Diod. Sic. 33.28b). 65. Kantorowicz (1958, 87–97). 66. Dewald (1997, 72). 67. See Muntz (2017) for Diodorus as a philosopher of kingship. 68. Wohl (2002, 265).

chapter five: resisting luxury 1. Bakola (2016); Pace Wallace-Hadrill (1990). 2. Like Pelling (1997), I see Herodotus as constantly constructing and dismantling ethnic stereotypes and interested more in the relation between types than in their absolute value. Flory (1987, 82) uses the ideas of “noble savage” and “prosperous aggressor” to complicate the Greek/barbarian binary. Although Flory lays out the sophisticated interplay of these roles and shows how a single people can play one or both parts, he consistently elevates those playing the role of “noble savage.” See also Cobet’s “primitive Gegner” (1971, 113). James Redfield’s (1985) contrast between “hard” and “soft” peoples imports later anthropological terms that have confused the issue. See chapter 1, notes 8 and 9. 3. Gorman and Gorman (2014, 76–145), arguing against Cobet (1971) and Lateiner (1989, 49). 4. Gorman and Gorman (2014, 94). One could argue that pleonexia is a kind of phthonos, but I find it helpful to distinguish the two, just as I have distinguished pleonexia from hybris. Cf. Diod. Sic. 2.2.1. 5. Flory (1987, 89). 6. Gorman and Gorman (2014, 81–82). 7. Most (1989). 8. Redfield (1985), Welser (2009), Fornara (1971, 77–78), and Romm (1998, 59–76). For luck and reversal in the Histories, see Lateiner (1982) and Russo and Simon (2017).

212 / Notes to Pages 109–113 9. Immerwahr (1966) and de Jong (2002). 10. Pelling (2006, 143). 11. de Heer (1969). 12. Immerwahr (1966, 158). 13. This passage, one of the most famous in the Histories, has generated an enormous scholarly response. I have been particularly informed by Krischer (1964), Stahl (1975), Flory (1978), Shapiro (1994, 1996), Dewald (1997, 2011), Pelling (2006), and Branscome (2013, 24–53). 14. Desmond (2006, 39). 15. For Cyrus, see 1.21.43; for Amasis, see 3.16; for Polycrates, see 3.120–25; and for Pythius, see 7.38–39. 16. As Dewald (1997, 81) says of the conclusion of the text, “The Histories is silent [about the virtue of the Athenian empire] not because Herodotus thought there was no answer, or because he didn’t want to offend someone, or because the answer didn’t matter, but because at the time of his writing this part of the pattern had not yet emerged.” 17. For autarkeia in Greek literature, see Most (1989) and Brenk (2002/2003). 18. For the Long-lived Ethiopians, see Hdt. 3.20–25, 3.114; for Scythia, see 4.5– 6, 4.46–49, 4.99–101; for India, see 3.98–106; for Massagetans, see 1.201–16; for Sparta, see 1.65–68; for Libya, see 4.41–42, 4.181–92; and for Arabia, see 3.107–13, 4.39. 19. For Babylonia, see Hdt. 1.178–200; for Egypt see 2.5–28, 2.35–43, 2.92–95; and for Lydia, see 1.93–94. 20. Moles (1996). 21. Scholars often argue that wealth corrupts people in Herodotus by distracting them from exercise and martial development. See Gorman and Gorman (2014, 117–27) for citations, including the conquest of the Lydians (Hdt. 155.4). 22. As Stadter (2006, 244) notes, the fetters with which the Spartans are enslaved “establish a parallel” with Croesus, who is captured and bound in fetters by Cyrus after his failed expansion. 23. See note 19 and cf. Diod. Sic. 3.47.5 and 3.47.8. 24. Perhaps inspiring Cynic thought. See Desmond (2006, 40) and Romm (1996). 25. ἵνα μὴ ἀναπείσῃ ἢ αὐτὸν ἢ ἄλλον τινὰ Σπαρτιητέων κακὸν γενέσθαι (Hdt. 3.148.2). 26. Pace Flory (1987, 113), who argues that the Amazons are too different from Greeks to serve as an exemplum.

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27. Forsdyke (2001). 28. φιλέειν γὰρ ἐκ τῶν μαλακῶν χώρων μαλακοὺς γίνεσθαι· οὐ γὰρ τι τῆς αὐτῆς γῆς εἶναι καρπόν τε θωμαστὸν φύειν καὶ ἄνδρας ἀγαθοὺς τὰ πολέμια (Hdt. 9.122). 29. Every longer study of Herodotus has had to grapple with this ending. Dewald (1997) makes a strong case that the ambiguity of 9.122 and the series of anecdotes it caps is not only polyvalent but ambiguous in a way that Herodotus could adapt to different contexts and that reflected the deeper epistemology of the Histories. As Dewald argues, “the interpretation [of 9.122] we will make will depend entirely on the kinds of connections we choose to draw between this anecdote and all that has gone before” (73). 30. Pelling (2006). For wise advisors generally, see Lattimore (1939). 31. Flower and Marincola (2002, 312) and Gorman and Gorman (2014, 117). 32. This assumption reveals another problem with large-scale wealth: it causes people not only to want more but to project their desire onto others. The more you win, the more you think you will always win, or the more you assume that you must invade to keep from being invaded. Pace Forsdyke (2006, 228), who implies that Herodotus endorses this view. Cambyses criticizes Croesus’s advice as well (Hdt. 3.36), although probably not for the same reason I do. 33. Gorman and Gorman (2014) are right that Croesus’s advice applies to the local question of where rather than whether to engage the Massagetans, but his wheel of fortune comment looks back to Tomyris and confirms her advice not to attack at all. 34. For the rise of Athenian power in Herodotus’s Histories, see Stadter (1992), Moles (1996), Blösel (2001, 2004), and Baragwanath (2008, 289–322). 35. Munson (2001, 266). Hau (2016) argues that Herodotus, Diodorus, and many other Greek historians engage in moral evaluation. 36. Parker (2008, 44). This picks up the wealth of India in Herodotus but is much more indebted to the now lost Indika of Megasthenes (BNJ 715), who is thought to have traveled to India with Alexander or shortly after his death. 37. “Bosporos . . . some kind of cereal, is a unique word, probably the same as the bosmoron of Strabo 15.1.13, 18 (Onesikritos, BNJ 134, F 15)” (Roller 2008, comm. to BNJ 715, F 4). 38. Cf. BNJ 715, F8 = Strabo 15.1.2. 39. διὸ καί φασι μηδέποτε τὴν ᾽Ινδικὴν ἐπισχεῖν λιμὸν ἢ καθόλου σπάνιν τῶν πρὸς τροφὴν ἥμερον ἀνηκόντων (Diod. Sic. 2.36.4). India also contains a great variety of plants and animals (2.35.3). 40. Sacks (1990, 55–82) and Sulimani (2011).

214 / Notes to Pages 118–122 41. While other scholars have observed India’s amazing success, they usually see it as an ideal (and unachievable) state parallel to Plato’s in the Republic. See Zambrini (1982, 1983, 1985) and Kosmin (2014, 31–58). The Indians follow Herakles in their foreign policy. See Diod. Sic. 2.39.4. 42. τὸ τῶν φιλοσόφων, γεωργῶν, βουκόλων καὶ ποιμένων, τεχνιτῶν, στρατιωτῶν, ἐφόρων, and τὸ βουλεῦον μὲν καὶ συνεδρεῦον τοῖς ὑπὲρ τῶν κοινῶν βουλευομένοις (Diod. Sic. 2.40-41). These merē have often been read as early evidence for the modern Indian caste system, and this is one possibility. Another is that Megasthenes filtered a proto-caste system through Greek bioi. See Karttunen (1997, 82–87) and Thapar (2000, 488–512). 43. Diodorus’s Egyptians make similar efforts to manage the Nile. See Diod. Sic. 1.36.12. 44. Although the means and purpose of ravaging changed over time, the practice itself endured across Greek history (Hanson: 1998, 11). See Chaniotis (2005, 121–29) for the continuation of ravaging in the Hellenistic period and periodic legislative efforts to restrict it. 45. India’s hunters (Diod. Sic. 2.40.6) continue Herakles’s mission to clear the land of wild beasts (2.39.2). 46. διόπερ ἀδιάφθορος ἡ χώρα διαμένουσα καὶ καρποῖς βρίθουσα πολλὴν ἀπόλαυσιν παρέχεται τῶν ἐπιτηδείων τοῖς ἀνθρώποις (Diod. Sic. 2.40.4). 47. For Aristotle’s classes, see Pol. 1328b19–20; cf. Plato Rep. 2.369d–371b and Tim. 24A. 48. For Diodorus on farmers, see 2.41.5; for Aristotle on farmers, see Pol. 1329b1; and for Plato on professions, see Rep. 2.370c. 49. Trautmann (2009, 2015). 50. ταῖς ῥώμαις τὰ θηρία ταῦτα πολὺ προέχει τῶν κατὰ τὴν Λιβύην γεννωμένων (Diod. Sic. 2.35.4). 51. πάντων τῶν ἀλλοεθνῶν φοβουμένων τό τε πλῆθος καὶ τὴν ἀλκὴν τῶν θηρίων (Diod. Sic. 2.37.3). Cf. Diod. Sic. 2.37.1. 52. For Arrian, see Ind. 13–14; and for Strabo, see 15.1.42. Instead, he displaces elephant hunting onto another people (Diod. Sic. 3.26–27). For elephants in antiquity, see Scullard (1974) and Trautmann (2015). 53. This is separate from the ongoing conversation about Greek and Indian philosophy, which may have shared origins. See Seaford (2016) and Beckwith (2017). Megasthenes’s Indika has often been read as early evidence for the modern Indian caste system. Karttunen (1997, 82–87) gives an overview of the prevailing theories. See also Thapar (2000, 488–512). 54. Olivelle (2013) and Trautmann (personal communication with author November 20, 2018). For earlier discussions, see Trautmann (1971) and Thapar

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(1961). For more on Megasthenes, see Brown (1955, 1957, and 1960), Dahlquist (1962), Bosworth (1996, 2003), and Mussino (2000). 55. Thapar (1961). 56. Parasher-Sen (1998). See also Thapar (2001). 57. Fussman (1987/1988). 58. Parasher-Sen (1998). 59. Heavily fortify settlements: Parasher-Sen (1998, 178); AS 2.1.5. Natural frontiers: Trautmann (2015). 60. This section of Diodorus is largely credited to Agatharchides’s lost On the Red Sea. See Gozzoli (1978), Burstein (1989, 2016), and Ameling (2008). 61. στέργουσι δὲ τὴν ἐξ ἀρχῆς δίαιταν ὑπὸ τῆς τύχης αὐτοῖς προσκληρωθεῖσαν, εὐδαιμονίαν ἡγούμενοι τὴν ἐκ τῆς ἐνδείας αὐτοῦ τοῦ λυποῦντος ὑπεξαίρεσιν (Diod. Sic. 3.18.2). 62. Apatheia is a philosophically loaded term. Some Platonists, Skeptics, and Stoics advocated for it, or for the replacement of pathē with their virtuous counterparts, eupatheiai, while Aristotle and the Peripatetics, with whom Diodorus’s source, Agatharchides, is usually associated, preferred metriopatheia, the moderation rather than obliteration of the passions (Sorabji 2000, 181–210). Since Agatharchides is only preserved in paraphrase by Diodorus and Photius, a Byzantine writer, it is unclear where Agatharchides fell in this debate and how or whether to read the Impassive Fisheaters as significant to it. They certainly look like extreme examples of Stoic virtue in their acceptance of whatever tuchē (fortune) has allotted them. Moreover, the existence of the Impassive Fisheaters contradicts critics of apatheia, like Crantor, the Old Academic, who argued that perfect apatheia would be impossible to achieve (Graver 2001, 187–94). Strabo calls Agatharchides a Peripatetic (14.2.5) but is thought by others to have drawn from a variety of philosophies (Longo 1987, 16–17). 63. Diod. Sic. 3.18.6. Cf. Diod. Sic. 1.2.6, 3.8.2, 3.17.3. As Ameling (2008, 39) notes, this is a further sign that they occupy a temporally earlier bios. For the staging of history through ethnography, see “Way of Life” in chapter 1. For a hyper-articulate people, see Diod. Sic. 2.56.6. 64. The meaning of παραπλησίως here is difficult to determine. Jeremy McInerney suggested to me that it means seals and humans cannot distinguish whose fish belong to whom, or whose children belong to whom. 65. Cf. Diod. Sic. 2.58.1 for wife and children sharing, which produces similar harmony (discussed in “Women as a Natural Resource” in chapter 3). The Impassive Fisheaters have achieved similar results with different resources. 66. At some point in this section of book 3, Diodorus may switch from describing the Impassive Fisheaters in particular to Fisheaters in general, for

216 / Notes to Pages 126–130 example, at 3.19.1. The primary distinction Diodorus makes is between the Fisheaters within the straits of the Red Sea and those beyond it (3.17.5–3.18.1). 67. Diod. Sic. 3.19–20. In contrast, see the individualized houses of the Tyrrhenians at 5.40.4–5. 68. This term appears in the preface to the Library and denotes history’s effects on the reader. See Meeus (2018). 69. Cf. Diod. Sic. 3.17.5: “Their way of life follows a cycle of this sort throughout the whole period of their life.” 70. See “The Ethiopian King” in chapter 4. 71. τῆς κατὰ φύσιν χρείας αὐτοδίδακτον τέχνην ὑφηγουμένης (Diod. Sic. 3.19.2). 72. Cf. Diod. Sic. 3.42.5 for an island of seals. 73. Detienne and Vernant (1974, 247–48) rightly connect the seals’ society with their amphibiousness, but incorrectly relate Diodorus’s seals to later accounts of seals that fall in love with humans. Ancient writers considered relationships of erotic love and friendship between individual animals and humans unusual but not unheard of (Williams 2013; Smith 2013). Contractual relationships between humans and animals, rather than affective ones, were a different story; in general, ancient writers considered animals incapable of giving or receiving justice (Sorabji 1993, esp. 107–69). Hellmann (2008, 199) has investigated rare moments of social cooperation between humans and animals in Greek and Roman prose literature. He found that these relationships were either unstable or contingent on animals’ subordination to human culture and do not achieve the true “symbiosis” that I have identified in Diodorus. They are also generally the achievement of individual animals, rather than communities acting in concert. To Hellmann’s collection of unstable human-animal arrangements can be added Dio Cassius 39.38.2–4, in which elephants make an agreement with the people importing them and are betrayed. 74. Ameling (2008, 38): “The life of the fish-eaters differed not much from the life of animals[.]” 75. Haraway (2003, 12). 76. Like the Locusteaters in chapter 4 (“Fisheaters and Locusteaters”), whose bodies become food for the insects they eat. 77. Romm (1996) suggests that ethnographies both contributed to and reflected Cynic thought. 78. As Smith (2014, 170) says of dog-headed (kunokephaloi) Indians in the text of Aelian.

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chapter six: after the encounter 1. Barad (2007, 381). See chapter 1 for more on Barad and “new materialisms.” 2. This paradox is similar to the claim of Grethlein (2013) that historiography is torn between two opposing desires: to make meaning of events of the past by taking a teleological perspective and to experience the contingency of events as they are lived in real time. 3. Lutz and Collins (1993, 272). 4. Monani and Adamson (2017). 5. For universal history in Greek and Roman literature, see chapter 1, note 50. 6. On didacticism in the Library, see Meeus (2018) and Williams (2018). 7. Diodorus usually uses diaita and bios interchangeably, but here diaita refers specifically to diet and bios to the rest of life. 8. τὸ σύνολον τρυφὴν καὶ πολυτελῆ βίον εἰσηγήσασθαι (Diod. Sic. 1.45.1–2). 9. χρήσασθαι διαίτῃ παντελῶς εὐτελεῖ παρά τισι τῶν τυχόντων ἰδιωτῶν (Diod. Sic. 1.45.2). 10. On the sixth extinction, see Kolbert (2014). For anthropogenic climate change and other large-scale effects, see Crutzen and Stoermer (2012). 11. For an introduction to the ethics of climate engineering, see Svoboda (2017). For rewilding, see Pereira and Navarro (2015). 12. Cf. the Cave-dwellers, who also worship domesticated animals (Diod. Sic. 3.23.3). 13. Diodorus describes this very possibility at 3.40.3–9, where elephant transports brought across the Red Sea founder on the rocks, killing both sailors and cargo. 14. For an orangutan granted “human-like rights” in Argentina in 2015, see Román (2015). Cadena (2010) imagines what would happen if Ausangate, a mountain in Peru, entered politics as the sacred, sentient entity many believe it to be. For a recent study of the environmental impacts of food, see Poore and Nemecek (2018). In a globalized food economy, veganism has a much smaller carbon footprint than diets that include animal products. But if food production and consumption become more localized, this picture could change. In places where fresh fruit and vegetables are imported, local meat, eggs, and dairy may one day be more environmentally friendly. 15. See “Restoring Earth” in chapter 7, 16. “Reskilling,” as this process is called, is key to many movements preparing people to face a post-petroleum future. For one version of this future, see Greer (2017). For people to be able to afford to learn and implement post-petroleum skills

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employers would have to allow employees to work flexible schedules. Though increasingly rare, secure academic employment—especially with tenure—is an ideal context in which to embark on this project. 17. Cf. Diod. Sic. 1.64.5. 18. Gerrymandering in the United States is employed by both parties, but most recently and to devastating effect by Republicans in 2010, who tend to be less committed environmentalists. For the history of voting struggles in the United States, see Berman (2016). 19. Book 17 has attracted a lot of scholarly attention. For an introduction to this book, especially its structure and language, see Prandi (2018) and James (2018), respectively. Prandi (2018, 182) interprets Diodorus as “cold” toward Alexander but not critical. 20. πολλῶν καὶ καλῶν ἔργων ὑπ’ Ἀλεξάνδρου συντετελεσμένων μηδὲν τούτων μεῖζον ὑπάρχειν μηδὲ μᾶλλον ἄξιον ἀναγραφῆς καὶ μνήμης ἱστορικῆς εἶναι (Diod. Sic. 17.38.4). This Darius was a descendant of the Persian king Herodotus records. 21. τέκνα δὲ καὶ γυναῖκες καὶ οἱ γεγηρακότες εἰς τὰ ἱερὰ καταπεφευγότες μετὰ τῆς ἐσχάτης ὕβρεως ἀπήγοντο (Diod. Sic. 17.13.6). 22. θέαμα παράδοξον καὶ δεινὸν ὤφθη, μισοπονηρίαν μὲν περιέχον κατὰ τῶν πραξάντων, ἔλεον δὲ καὶ συμπάθειαν ἐπιφέρον πρὸς τοὺς ἀνήκεστα πεπονθότας (Diod. Sic. 17.69.2). 23. ταῖς δ’ ἡλικίαις οἱ πλεῖστοι μὲν γεγηρακότες, ἠκρωτηριασμένοι δὲ πάντες, οἱ μὲν χεῖρας, οἱ δὲ πόδας, οἱ δὲ ὦτα καὶ ῥῖνας (Diod. Sic. 17.69.3). 24. πολλῶν μὲν βραχίονας σὺν αὐταῖς ταῖς ἀσπίσιν ἀποκόπτεσθαι, οὐκ ὀλίγων δὲ τραχήλους παρασύρεσθαι καὶ τὰς κεφαλὰς πίπτειν ἐπὶ τὴν γῆν βλεπόντων ἔτι τῶν ὀμμάτων καὶ τῆς τοῦ προσώπου διαθέσεως διαφυλαττομένης (Diod. Sic. 17.58.5). 25. McKim (2013).

chapter seven: transformation in the natural history museum 1. Adamson (2012, 153–57). 2. Istoft (2013, 71). For other scholarship on the film, see Taylor (2013). 3. I say this as someone who has engaged in all three practices. 4. Cf. Shukin (2009, 104–14). 5. For a similar critique, see Bal (1992). In Man’s Rise “the Greeks, then, are not simply an episode in a voyage through time but the emblem of the highest

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level of civilization” (570). In 2016, the group Decolonize This Place targeted AMNH with an “Anti-Columbus Day Tour,” repeated in 2017. Man’s Rise is one stop on the 2016 map, which asks: “Why are [the Koryak and Chuckee peoples] stranded in prehistory?” See http://www.decolonizethisplace.org/brochures /161010_AMNH%20map%20final.pdf. 6. For Indigenous representation and self-representation in museums, see Ames (1992), Barringer and Flynn (1998), Nelson (2006), Sleeper-Smith (2009), Lonetree (2012), Golding and Modest (2013), and Bench (2014). For the limits of cocuration, see Boast (2011). For a museum perspective, see Silverman and Sinopoli (2011). 7. Though sensitive to the multiple ways empires form, this text also seems to deny the violence of “impos[ing] common religious beliefs” and “record keeping.” 8. Adamson and Monani (2017). 9. When these cosmovisions are embodied by Indigenous peoples and their allies, they can counter the white Western mainstream of civic discourse, which tries to pursue human flourishing at the expense of other beings. See Cadena (2010) and Adamson (2014). 10. Since Donna Haraway’s landmark 1989 volume, Primate Visions, scholars have recognized natural history museums as producers of environmental discourse. Their pedagogical power has been explored by Stephanie Rutherford (2011, 1–42). 11. As acknowledged in the museum literature. See Krishtalka and Humphrey (2000) and Miller et al. (2004). 12. See note 6. 13. Rutherford (2011, 1–42). See also Bennett (1995). 14. Holmes (2016, 285). 15. Debra Moskovits and Barbara Becker at the Field, Becca Shreckengast at CMNH, and Joseph Dresch at The Whale Museum were kind enough to speak with me throughout this process. 16. Livingstone (2003) theorizes how visitors make meanings in museums. 17. This project was carried out between 2005 and 2009 as part of “Rennaisance ROM.” Dave Hollands, personal communication, November 27, 2019. 18. Wali (1999, 47). “In 1991, many insects, reptiles, amphibians and small mammals were added to enhance the ecological setting” (Barbara Becker, personal communication, February 28, 2019). 19. Debra Moskovits, personal communication, January 28, 2019. These exhibits also broke from “the strictly science-based interpretation that was

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common in natural history museums up until then . . . in favor of a more experiential approach” (Barbara Becker, personal communications, February 28 and December 11, 2019). 20. Debra Moskovits, personal communication, January 28, 2019. 21. For an introduction to these histories, see Manning (1995) and Prince (1997). 22. Debra Moskovits, personal communication, January 28, 2019. 23. Wali (1999, 48) criticizes the undifferentiated “we” in this exhibit. 24. Zimmerman and Kormos (2012); but contrast Sist, Gourlet-Fleury, and Putz (2012) and Edwards and Laurance (2013). 25. On the Ecological Indian as a trope of environmental discourse, see Ellen (1986), Bartra (1997), Krech (1999), Ellingson (2001), and Harkin and Lewis (2007). 26. This video can be accessed at https://vimeopro.com/fieldmuseum/birds /video/50144708. 27. Some of the videos discussed in this section can be accessed at http:// restoringearth.fieldmuseum.org/media.html. 28. Price (1999, 199). 29. Curators discussed adding human artifacts and trash to the exhibits in Nature Walk and Messages from the Wilderness, but this was rejected in order to “respect the intrinsic and historical artistry” of the displays being repurposed (Barbara Becker, personal communication, February 28, 2019). Perhaps enough time has passed that this possibility could be revisited. 30. Roughgarden (2003). 31. “Because of the long history of natural history museums displaying African (and other nonwhite) peoples/cultures adjacent to gorillas and other nonhuman animals.” Barbara Becker, personal communication, December 11, 2019. 32. Clayton and Myers (2015, 125 and 177). See also Heberlein (2012, 90–112). 33. Clayton and Myers (2015, 207, 260). 34. I am grateful to Becca Shreckengast for meeting with me while I was in Pittsburgh, following up afterward, and sharing the summative evaluation she commissioned; Fredricks and Halpern (2018). In addition to hosting the conference and mounting We Are Nature, in 2018 CMNH appointed Nicole Heller curator of the Anthropocene, a unique position in the museum world. Another exhibit also accompanied the 2017 conference: Kwel’ Hoy: We Draw the Line (House of Tears Carvers of the Lummi Nation and The Natural History Museum). 35. Becca Shreckengast, personal communication, July 25, 2019. 36. Fredricks and Halpern (2018, 12).

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37. See the introduction. 38. Fredricks and Halpern (2018, 7). 39. These and the preceding quotations are taken from the History of Whale Naming by Mary Jo Farrer, on display in the Whale Museum’s Gallery of Whales. 40. Shedd (2019).

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index locorum

aeschylus Persians 747

38

aristotle Politics 1256a–b 1328–1330

24 121, 214n47

arrian Arthashastra 2.1.5 215n59 6.1.8 123 On India 7.2–4 9.12 13–14

25 124 214n52

diodorus siculus Library 1.1–2 1.8

37, 136 23, 27

1.10.1 1.19 1.24.5 1.26 1.28–29 1.30.7 1.33.9–11 1.34.4 1.35.7 1.36 1.43 1.45 1.48.2 1.50.5 1.51 1.53.8 1.55.6 1.57 1.59.1 1.62.6 1.63.1 1.64.5 1.69–71 1.72 1.78.5 1.80.3 259

50–51 199 n51 22 215n63 67, 99 22, 200n55 198n26 100 141 48, 51, 199n54, 201 n71, 214n43 145, 210n53 101–102, 104, 138, 217n8–9 203n27 52 46, 201n56 71 208n20 33, 103, 196n1 202n11, 202n15 199n46 52 218n17 99–100 144, 210n54 202n11, 202n15 100

260

1.81.2 1.82 1.83–84 1.87 1.89 1.196 2.2.1 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.6.10 2.7.2 2.8.7 2.10 2.11.3 2.12 2.13 2.14.1 2.16.9 2.17.2–3 2.18–19 2.20–21 2.21 2.23 2.24 2.26.9 2.30.5 2.35 2.36 2.37 2.38 2.39 2.40 2.41 2.42 2.43.3 2.44 2.45 2.46.6 2.47.3 2.48.8 2.50

/ Index Locorum

52 210n55 102 141 142 99 211n4 76, 80, 205n70 76, 205n72 77, 205n75 77 205n77 46 43 199n54 44, 200n55 38, 43–45, 76, 80 38 140 82 46–47, 80–81 83 47, 199n46, 202n19 61–62 202n17, 202n21 202n20 23 213n39, 214n50 118, 120, 124, 129, 142, 213n39 124, 214n51 118–120, 124 118, 214n41, 214n45 119, 123, 214n42, 214n45–n46 121, 214n42, 214n48 119, 121 67 63 63–64, 149, 203n27 64 3 208n29 67, 207n7

2.51 2.54.1 2.56 2.57.5 2.58 2.59 2.72 3.8.2 3.10 3.12–13 3.15 3.17 3.18–19 3.19 3.23.3 3.24.3 3.26–7 3.28.1 3.29 3.32 3.33.3 3.34 3.39 3.40.3–9 3.42.5 3.47 3.50.2 3.52–53 3.55.3 4.6.5 4.18.5 4.20.3 4.22.5 5.1 5.15.5 5.17.2 5.18.1 5.26.2 5.35.3

67, 203n38 207n7 104, 215n63 104 74, 104, 204n60, 215n65 104, 143 199n42 215n63 204n62 44 93, 125–126 100, 204n60, 204n63, 208n27, 215n63, 216n69 23, 125–126, 128–129, 142, 215n61, 215n63, 216n71 22, 127–128 217n12 204n60, n62 214n52 61 93, 208n28 204n60, 204n62 75, 204n62 136–137, 149 199n41 217n13 216n72 212n23 27 64 203n29 61 46, 199n51 203n27 22 136 209n38 207n15 73 207n15 22

Index Locorum

5.37 5.38 5.40.4–5 5.43.2 5.45.4 10.12.2 11.10.2 17.13.6 17.35–36 17.38 17.58.5 17.69 17.103.6 20.36.2 32.12.1 33.28b

45, 199n41 45 216n67 67 119 37 23 218n21 146 147, 218n20 218n24 147, 218n22–23 147 38 203n39 211n64

herodotus Histories 1.1 1.5 1.8–12 1.14 1.17 1.19, 22 1.29–30 1.32 1.36 1.48 1.55 1.64 1.66 1.67 1.73 1.75 1.80.4 1.91 1.105 1.107 1.108 1.109 1.119, 122 1.125

36, 37, 50, 109, 197n12 69, 108, 109 68, 70, 77 36 22 198n27 109 108–111 22 67 66 39 112 39 66 22, 39 81 66 59, 67 204n50 22, 70 199n53 66 26, 194n47, 207n7

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1.155 1.162–163 1.174 1.175 1.184 1.185 1.186.1 1.187 1.188 1.189–190 1.193 1.198 1.199 1.206 1.207 1.216 2.2 2.5 2.9.2 2.10 2.11 2.14 2.16 2.17 2.35 2.36 2.19.3 2.45–46 2.57 2.64 2.77.1 2.91 2.93 2.99 2.100 2.101 2.109 2.111 2.124.1–3 2.126 2.130–131 2.131.1 2.148–149 2.158

202n14 39 40 59, 67, 202n10 40 40, 76 40–41 41, 198n31 198n33) 41 86 2 73 113 116 73–74 49 48, 70 210n51 48–50, 70 50, 54 51 54, 206n84 32, 49, 54 49, 63 101 49 66 66 66 210n55 210n48 203n37 52, 199n53 198n32 37 52 60, 202n11, 204n50 42 42 66 77 37 40

2.177.1 2.181.2 3.3 3.5.1 3.9 3.17.5 3.18 3.20–23 3.23.4 3.25 3.36 3.38 3.60 3.80 3.84–85 3.94 3.97–98 3.98–100 3.106 3.108 3.116 3.133–134 3.148.2 3.150, 154 3.155 4.1 4.3 4.9 4.114 4.45 4.46–47 4.53, 59 4.64 4.64–65 4.80 4.90 4.104 4.105 4.110 4.111–4.116 4.114 4.116.2

262

/ Index Locorum

199n49 202n12 71, 204n51 206n84 39 208n27 91, 93, 125, 133, 208n17–n18 26, 84, 89–90, 113, 209n32 107 26, 90 213n32 91–92, 128 39, 197n15 107 65 113 112–113 207n5 108, 111 51 108, 111 71–72 212n25 79 205n77 70 39 66 63, 148 54 96–97 97 98 95 92 209n32 204n59 65 149 113–114 92, 148 149

4.122 4.127 4.172 4.180 4.183.4 4.187 4.192 4.200–202 5.58.3 7.10 7.24 7.31 7.33 7.35–37, 45 7.57 7.102.1 7.140 7.194 7.197 7.238 8.111 8.115–117 8.60 8.97 8.109–110 8.112.1 8.115 8.117 9.114 9.120 9.122

98 96 6, 73 60, 73 65, 87 85 6 39 25 51 196n3 196n7 98 33 67 49 98 98 196n7 98 114 208n22 98 47 47 116 47 47 47 98 108, 213n28

hesiod Works and Days 42–93 24 109–201 24, 85 571 209n39

hippocrates Epidemics 6.8.32

59

Index Locorum

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On Regimen 2.46 100

Laws 680b

24

homer

Republic 370c 452c

214n48 25, 194n42

Odyssey 9.191 9. 296–7 9.347ff.

86 89 89

hymn to the nile 9.7–12

52–53

scholia to aristophanes’s acharnians 1106

209n30

Tale of the Eloquent Peasant B1, 140 200n59

plato Cratylus 397d 421d

25 25

Critias 110e–111b

21

thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War 1.1.3 23 1.6.6 25, 193n40 1.21.1 23

index

actor-network theory, 29 Adamson, Jodi, 28, 155 Agamemnon, 196n3 Agamemnon (Aeschylus), 33 Agatharchides, 4, 27, 191n11, 194n50, 215n62 agential realism, 29, 31 Alexander the Great, 11, 16, 79, 121, 122, 124, 149; attack on Persia, 147–48; and the battle of Issus, 146; death of, 194n50; failure of, 147 Alyattes, 22 Amasis, 39, 60, 111 Amazons, 63–64, 76, 113–14; devotion of to their own way of life, 148–49; weakening of over time, 64 American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), 154; Man’s Rise to Civilization in the Near East exhibit, 154, 155 anthropocentrism, 143 anthropology, 188n8, 191n8; and the “comparative method,” 25; historical anthropology, 24 Aphrodite, 59 aporia, 97, 98

Appius Claudius, 38 Arabia, 101–2, 111, 137, 207n7 Arbaces, 62 Aristotle, 24, 120–21, 193n31 Arrian, 25 Artaxerxes II, 79 Artayctes, 98, 116 Arthashastra, 122–23 Astyages, 70 Athena, 59 Athens/Athenians, 104–5, 112; Athenian imperialism, 116 Athos Canal, 196n3 Atossa, 71–72 Auseans, 60, 73 Avatar (2009), 151–53 baboons, sacred, 103 Babylon/Babylonians, 15, 40, 44; siege of Babylon by Darius, 78–79 Barad, Karen, 29, 31 Barathra, 22 Barkeaters (Hylophagoi), 75 Belesys, 62 Bennett, Jane, 195n60 bioi, mapping of, 27 265

266

bios (way of life), 9, 24, 26, 85–87, 106, 206–7n4; agricultural bios, 88, 89–90, 105; Ethiopian bios, 92; Fisheater bios, 130; pastoral bios, 98; Scythian bios, 96–97 Biton, 110 bitumen, 44 boundaries: of types of bodies and geographical boundaries, 57–58; meaningfulness of, 53–56 California Academy of Sciences, 1, 188n5 Callantiai, 112 Cambyses, 84, 87–92, 104, 208n23 Candaules, 68, 69–70, 77 Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH), We Are Nature: Living in the Anthropocene exhibit, 157, 158, 180–82 Cassandane, 70–71 Cave-Dwellers (Trōgodytes), 75 Cecrops, 67 Cheops, 34, 42–43 Chicago Field Museum, 157, 179–80; Abbott Hall of Conservation: Restoring Earth exhibit, 157, 167–73, 176, 177; Africa exhibit, 174, 178, 179; Ancient Americas exhibit, 2, 154–55, 170, 177; Bringing Back the Prairie exhibit, 172; Drawing on Tradition installation, 176–77; Hall of African Mammals exhibit, 157; Hall of Birds exhibit, 157, 165–66, 174; Messages from the Wilderness exhibit, 157, 162–65, 174; Native North American Hall, 174; Nature Walk exhibit, 157, 158–62, 174, 175, 176; Pawnee Earth Lodge exhibit, 178–79; Underground Adventure exhibit, 175, 176, 178; What Is an Animal? exhibit, 174, 175–76, 177 Chicago Wilderness Project, 172 Chief Seattle, 164

/ Index

Cleobis, 110 Cleomenes, 113, 143 Clytemnestra, 196n3 Cnidians, 39–40 cocuration, 2 Colchis, 112 cosmovisions, Indigenous, 28, 29–30, 155–56, 219n9 Critias (Plato), 20–21 crocodiles, 141–42 Croesus, 39, 109–11, 114, 213n33 Cronon, William, 7 crop burning, 198n27 Ctesias, 191n11 cultural history, 24, 26 Cyclops (Polyphemus), 89, 95, 208n16 Cyrus, 42, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114, 202n24; mother of as a “Bitch” [Cyno], 66; as a mule, 66; as a young man, 114–17 Darius, 40, 65, 71, 95, 98, 133; defeat of by Alexander, 146–47; intentions of in caring out erga, 41–42; and the siege of Babylon, 78–79 decolonization, 154 Deleuze, Gilles, 29 Delphic Oracle, 66, 98, 201n75 Demaratus, 49 Democedes, 71–72 Democritus, 24 Derceto, 80 Dicaearchus of Messana, 24; influence of Aristotle on, 24–25 diets, 210n54; and health, 85–87; agricultural diets, 89–90; insect diets, 93–94, 209n30 Diodorus Siculus, 2–3, 17–19, 31, 108, 198n30; admiration of for engineered works, 34, 35–38; anthropocentrism of, 22–23; description of India and the Red Sea, 117–18; featuring of diet in his ethnographic descriptions, 92–93;

Index

focus of on different bioi, 23, 27–28; Indian ethnography of, 124; invitation of, 135–38; on land works and waterworks, 199n51; on the powers of the Nile River, 50–51, 199nn53–54, 200–201n71; on Semiramis’s use of camels, 81–82, 206n88; on sex in common, 74–75; sex/gender variance in, 57–65, 201n1, 203n39; sources used by, 191n11; on warrior women, 63, 76. See also Library (Diodorus Siculus) Diogenes Laertius, 193n29 Diomedes, 147 Dionysus, 88, 118, 124 Edicts of Asoka, 122 Egypt: diet and the agricultural way of life in, 102–3, 105; dual diets in (one for the king and one for everyone else), 99–102; and the Island of the Sun, 99–105, 204n61 environmental determinism, 207n9 environmental discourse, 28; and ecocriticism, 28–29, 194–95n53; development of environmental humanities, 28 envy, 111–14 equality, of sex and gender, 58 erga (engineered works), 7, 35, 41; and the distinction between humanmade and natural features of the world, 32–33; negative aspects of, 40 erosion, in Attica, 20–21 Ethiopians, 15, 26, 65, 93, 113, 207nn13– 14, 208n23; use of satire by, 92. See also Cambyses ethnicity, and animality, 65–67 ethnographic presentism, 2 ethnographies/ethnographers, 2–3, 23, 139, 155–56, 189n21; connection of distant times and places by Greek writers, 194n44; cultural customs

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(nomoi) of Greek ethnographies, 4–5; discourses of Greek ethnography, 5–6, 155; environmental culture and centralized power in, 143–45; ethnographies written in aid of empire, 188–89n13; Greek ethnography as a genre controlled by elite men, 8–9, 30; Greek ethnography at odds with white Western environmental discourse, 7–8, 189n24; Greek and Roman ethnographers, 4; interest of Greek ethnographers in “culturing,” 6–7. See also environmental discourse Euphrates River, 40–41 Fire + Floods: Nature Rebuilds, 173 Fisheaters (Icthyophagoi), 75, 85, 92–93, 99; hap(a)los diet of, 104; as impassive, 124–30, 144, 215n62; relationship of with seals, 128–29, 216n73 Frost, Samantha, 6–7, 84 geographers, Hellenistic, 17 Glaucus, 147 Gorgons, 63, 64–65, 76 greed, 111–14 Green Network, A, 172 Guattari, Félix, 29 Gyges, 68, 69–70, 77 Gyndus River, 41–42 Hapi, 52 Haraway, Donna, 29, 129–30; on “situated knowledge,” 30–31 “hard peoples”/“soft peoples” distinction, 17 Harman, Graham, 29 Hartog, François, 94–96, 98 Hecataeus of Abdera, 191n11 Hecataeus of Miletus, 16 Hellespont, bridging of, 33–35

268

Heracles, 22, 27, 88 Herakles, 118 Herodotus, 2, 31, 201n75, 213n29; admiration of for engineered works, 34, 35–38; anthropocentrism of, 22–23; characterization of ethnic others by “method of subsistence,” 26; construction and dismantling of ethnic stereotypes by, 211n2; and Greek anxieties concerning wealth, 106–8, 212n21, 213n32; indebtedness to earlier writers, 16–17; sex/gender variance in, 57–65, 201n1; view of waterworks, 39. See also Amazons; Herodotus, female characters of; Histories (Herodotus) Herodotus, female characters of, 68–69; and female feck, 69, 72; and sexual power, 69–72; and women as a natural resource, 73–75 Hesiod, 23–24, 26, 85 Histories (Herodotus), 2, 15, 16, 84, 115, 116; discussion of manliness in, 202n14; and the ethnography of Scythia, 98–99; main subject of, 3–4; mixing of species in, 66–67; parallels with Thucydides, 25–26; representation of land- and waterscapes in, 34, 38–39; silence of concerning Athenian empire, 212n16 Homer, 24 human error, documentation of, 20–22 Hymn to the Nile, 52–53 Idanthyrus, 96 India, 79–80, 117–18, 121–22, 214n42 Indika (Megasthenes), 122, 214n53 Io, 69 Ionians, 25 irony, 208n25

/ Index

Isis, 27 Island of the Sun, 99–105, 204n61 Ladice, 60 land management, and elephant allies, 117–24 lands, happiness of, 109–11 landscapes and waterscapes, 34, 37–38 Latour, Bruno, 29 Library (Diodorus Siculus), 3, 15, 16; animals in, 141–43; discussion of manliness in, 61; influence of Dicaearchus on, 27; on the role of rulers in social change, 143–46 Life of Greece (Dicaearchus of Messana), 24 Limas, Francisco, 169 Linæres, Lorenzo Barbarán, 169 Locusteaters, 93–94, 99 luxury, problem of in Greek literature, 106–8; role of animals in Diodorus’s response to the problem of luxury, 129 Maijuna people, 168–69 Mandane, 70 Massagetans, 74, 111, 113, 116, 213n33 materialism: new materialism, 29, 195n60; “vibrant materialism,” 195n60 Mauryan empire, 122–23 Medes, 65–66 Megasthenes, 4, 122–23, 189n18, 191n11 Memphis, 52 Menas, 141 Min, 52 mining, 44–45, 199n41 Mirror of Herodotus (Hartog), 94–95 mixis epikoinos, 73, 74 mnēmosuna, 37 Moeris, 37, 46 Monani, Salma, 28, 155 Muir, John, 164

Index

museums, 153–58, 219–20n19; and consumerism, 174–75; as environmental educators, 155–56; and the “governance” of nature, 156. See also specifically listed individual museums Mycerinus, 66 Nanno, 59 Nassamones, 6 nature (physis), 30, 33, 193n29; and environment, 19–23; nature/culture conflict, 17; opposition of physis to nomos (custom), 20; temporal dimension of, 49 naturecultures, 29 Necos, 40 Neurians, 65 Nile River, 48–53; best feature of, 51; and the language of gift giving, 48–50; powers of, 50–51 Ninus, 77 Nitetis, 70–71 Nitocris, 40, 41; intentions of in caring out erga, 41–42, 198n32 “noble savage,” 17, 191n8, 211n2 nomadism, 207n7 non-Greeks, characterized as animals, 65–66 Nubian miners, 44–45 Odyssey (Homer), 207n12 Odysseus, 89 Oebares, 65 Onnes, 76, 77–78 ontology, object-oriented, 29, 195n59 openness, 102, 134; cultural openness, 134 Pappan, Chris, 176–77 Passion for Birds, A (2011), 166–67, 172, 173 pastoralism, 24, 86–87, 104–5; Scythian pastoralism, 95–96

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peristasis, 22–23, 193n31 Persia, 4, 112, 115 Persians, 15 Persians (Aeschylus), 34 Phaethousa, 59 phereoikos, 96, 209n39 Photius, 203n39 physis. See nature (physis) Pisistratus, 39 Plato, 20–22, 25, 120–21 poetry, Greek, 203n40 Politics (Aristotle), 24, 120–21 Polybius, 193n31 Polycrates, 111, 114 posthumanism, 195n60 progress/primitivism narratives, influence of the myth of Greece and Rome on, 155 Ptolemy, 147 Pythius, 111 Red Sea, 117–18 Republic (Plato), 120, 190n34 “reskilling,” 217–18n16 Royal Ontario Museum, 157 Sardanapallus, 61–62; as a stereotypically feminine ruler, 62; war of with rebels, 62–63 Scythians, 15, 25, 63, 65–66, 114; farming Scythians, 9798; Scythian bios, 96–97; Scythian nomadism, 134; Scythian ways, 94–99 self-sufficiency, 111–14 Semiramis, 37–38, 58, 75, 140–43; and challenging of the sex/gender binary, 76; construction of a bridge to invade India, 46–47; and the cost-benefit equation, 45; design of her gardens, 43–44; gender-neutral garments of, 82–83; and her elephants, 76–83, 206n88 Sesostris, 60 Skylax, 16

270

society: and centralized power, 143–45; expansion of, 141–43 Solon, 109, 110 space, alteration of by human error or improvement, 20–21 Sparta, conflict with Tegea, 112–13 speculative realism, 29 “technology of place,” 26–27 Tegea, conflict with Sparta, 112–13 Tellus, 110 Thales of Miletus, 39 Themistocles, 114, 116 Tnephachthus, 143 Tomyris, 116, 143 trans-corporeality, 29 Uchoreus, 52

/ Index

Ushiñahua, Romero Ríos, 169 Whale Museum, The, 157, 179; and the naming and adoption of whales, 182–85 women: role of in effecting social change, 57–58; warrior women, 63, 76. See also Amazons; Scythians Works and Days (Hesiod), 24, 26, 85 Xanthippus, 98 Xerxes, 38, 40, 46, 95, 98, 196n3; doomed invasion of Greece, 67; reactions to his “punishing” of the Hellespont, 33–35 Zopyrus, 79

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