Book

Valuing Landscape in Classical Antiquity. Natural Environment and Cultural Imagination

Different ways in which physical environments impacted on the cultural imagination of Greco-Roman antiquity.

Author

Jeremy McInerney, Ineke Sluiter

Date

01 May 2016

Links

Brill

‘Where am I?’. Our physical orientation in place is one of the defining characteristics of our embodied existence. However, while there is no human life, culture, or action without a specific location functioning as its setting, people go much further than this bare fact in attributing meaning and value to their physical environment. ‘Landscape’ denotes this symbolic conception and use of terrain. It is a creation of human culture.

In Valuing Landscape in Classical Antiquity we explore different ways in which physical environments impacted on the cultural imagination of Greco-Roman antiquity. In seventeen chapters with different disciplinary perspectives, we demonstrate the values attached to mountains, the underworld, sacred landscapes, and battlefields, and the evaluations of locale connected with migration, exile, and travel.

This volume is the outcome of the VIIIth Penn-Leiden Colloquium on Ancient Values, a long-standing joint research project of the Department of Classical Studies (University of Pennsylvania) and the Classics Department of Leiden University.