“We need to be much bolder in the way we use the past for our own purposes in the present.”

Jason König shares his thoughts mountains, ecocriticism, and (late) antiquity.

König is professor in Greek at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek and Roman Culture (2022), and the editor of the volume Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity (2021). He is also co-director of the St Andrews Centre for Ancient Environmental Studies.

Can you tell us about how you first became interested in ecocritical thinking and environmental concerns?

My interest in ecocriticism came initially from a project on mountains in ancient Greek and Roman culture. I have always loved spending time in the mountains and reading about the history of mountains and mountaineering. Initially I didn’t think about that interest as having any connection with my work as a classicist, but at some stage I became more and more fascinated by the question of why those histories all start in the eighteenth century, without any reference to classical antiquity or premodernity generally.

That got me thinking about the relationship between ancient and modern responses to landscape—and in the process I came to realise that there is a rich body of ecocritical writing on human-environment relations in the modern world that classicists have barely engaged with. I also started to see more clearly that mountains are particularly challenging spaces for thinking about the kinds of questions that ecocritics are interested in: they are vast and seemingly timeless entities that can seem impervious to human presence or human interference, but they are in fact at the same time acutely vulnerable to anthropogenic environmental damage. Even in antiquity I think we can see traces of that range of possibilities for understanding mountain environments.

I was also very fortunate in autumn 2021 to have the opportunity to co-organise an event at Cove Park, a writers’ and artists’ residency on the west coast of Scotland, which brought together creative and academic practitioners and environmental activists to talk among other things about the ways in which the past can act as a resource for creative responses to environmental crisis in the present. I learned a huge amount from that experience, and it has driven a lot of the questions I have been asking in my work over the last couple of years.

Can you share with us a particular text or artwork that has inspired you to think in new ways about ecocriticism and/or late antiquity?

It’s hard to pick one! One of the things I have found most exciting has been the opportunity to re-read familiar texts and to find that they look quite different in the light of the ecocritical scholarship I have been reading over the last few years. I have enjoyed thinking about the Iliad, most recently in dialogue with Edith Hall’s wonderful forthcoming book on that text. It seems to me that the Iliad is one of the earliest and most important works in the European ecocritical tradition, and it’s astonishing in a way that it has never been analysed in those terms before.

For late antiquity, I would choose Theodoret’s Religious History, his collection of saints’ lives from Syria from the early fifth century CE. Virginia Burrus’ inspiring book Ancient Christian Ecopoetics has shown how ancient hagiography tends to celebrate the immersion of desert ascetics in their environments, and the erosion between human and more-than-human identities, among other things with reference to Theodoret’s portrayal of Symeon Stylites.

But when I started looking at the text I also came to be fascinated by the way in which those images are in tension with a very different strand of imagery which seems to celebrate the saints’ capacity to manipulate landscape in very anthropocentric terms: those two strands stand side by side with each other in the Theodoret’s work, and they are never fully resolved. That experience has helped me to see the importance of acknowledging complexity and multi-facetedness in ancient understandings of human-environment relations. We need to do the hard work of reading ancient texts closely, with attention to their internal contradictions and tensions, if we want to avoid over-simplified stories about the relationship between ancient and modern environmental thinking.

How do you think late antique or other premodern literature might contribute to contemporary ecocritical thought?

That’s hard to summarise, I think. For the reasons just stated I think there’s a real risk in trying to extract a single view of what lessons antiquity can teach us—either in taking an idealised view of antiquity as a model we can learn from, or in seeing it straightforwardly as an origin point for our own anthropocentrism. In that sense perhaps one of the values of studying ancient environmental thinking is precisely that it can make us alert to the complex and conflicted and unstable character of our own environmental engagements.

On one level that is an argument for being more careful, but I also think at the same time that we need to be much bolder in the way we use the past for our own purposes in the present. Ancient literature can give us powerful images that we can appropriate and reshape as resources in the present. Classicists tend to worry about anachronism, and of course we need to make sure we’re not saying things about the ancient world that are over-simplified and untrue—in other words to avoid anachronism. But perhaps at the same time we need to be more anachronistic, more ready to use what we find in ancient texts to tell the kind of stories we need in the present. I think that’s a process most ancient authors would have been much more comfortable with than we are.

What new directions would you like to see in the fields of ecocriticism, and in the study of late antique and other premodern literature?

Among other things, I would like to see more attention to the portrayal of the earth in classical antiquity—I mean not just images of the earth viewed as a whole or from a distance, of the kind we find in ancient scientific and theogonic writing, but also images of more mundane encounters between human bodies and the surfaces of the earth. One of my current book projects involves mapping out some of the key landmarks and patterns of representation for those phenomena in ancient literature—but it’s a huge topic, as I am realising more and more, and I would love to have some help with it!

More broadly speaking, one of the things I would like to see is simply more opportunities for cross-disciplinary dialogue—getting modern ecocritics into dialogue with people who work on premodern environments; also getting different strands of ancient environmental studies (literary, archaeological, historical, scientific) more in contact with each other. That’s one of the things we have been trying to do to in our Centre for Ancient Environmental Studies in St Andrews over the last few years, and it’s great to see similar initiatives springing up in other places too.