Pan's Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans

by J. Donald Hughes

In Pan's Travail , J. Donald Hughes examines the environmental history of the classical period and argues that the decline of ancient civilizations resulted in part from exploitation of the natural world. Focusing on Greece and Rome, as well as areas subject to their influences, Hughes offers a detailed look at the impact of humans and their technologies on the ecology of the Mediterranean basin. He also compares the ancient world's environmental problems to those of other eras and discusses attitudes toward nature expressed in Greek and Latin literature.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Environment, Roman History, Historical

288 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1993

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was a bit disappointed to find Pan's Travail another encyclopedic history in the vein of An Environmental History of the Middle Ages and An Environmental History of Great Britain. Rather than telling any particular story, it surveys a vast area and slots in broad generalizations and a few anecdotes and quotes in each of a dozen categories. Its subject matter is impossibly ambitious for anything else, of course, starting in the early and pre-ag societies of Egypt and Greece and going into the last centuries of the Roman Empire, a span of thousands of years and several distinct--if related--cultures.

I can't begrudge it too much; encyclopedias are informative and contain plenty of interesting factoids. I learned stuff and broadened my knowledge of the context of this history, which makes it a worthwhile read. I guess I just want a real thesis/data driven book on a bunch of these topics. For instance, he frames the whole thing in terms of this pop-history question, "did environmental degradation cause the fall of the Roman Empire"? Yet the evidence presented here is, iirc, less thorough and focused than books on that topic written much earlier, and he fails to engage with it as a question beyond concluding "well probably, why not."

The overall picture that emerges is of course one of cumulative modification and degradation, logging and grazing and erosion destroying the majority of the original habitat in the area, driven not by ignorance but by social pressures and population processes. But those population changes were somehow not felt to be an important element of the story? There is in general not a lot of context. Big-picture changes are not covered at all. How does the population of these regions change over the span of the book? Or trade? Migration events? Cultivated land? Do we have estimates of any of these things? It feels less like a history than an addendum to a history, filling in the environmental bits other historians left out without really making the case that they're a part of the story. It's plausible there's just a lack of evidence for a lot of those things, but there's certainly more integration that could be done.

The succession of degradation veg types he sketches out is neat and seems like it wouldn't be hard to trace through pollen cores? Also occurs to me that the timespan of the climatic and soil changes in the region may have allowed an evolutionary adaptation to post-human disturbed lands that made the Mediterranean community ready to migrate as a semi-coherent weed community in urban and agricultural ecosystems in America etc--garigue in particular reminds me of the composition of the weedy community around here more than I might expect based on the climates.

I did appreciate the bits about religion, which feels much more like Shinto than I would have expected, at least in terms of the focus on local deities with shrines in protected and delimited natural areas, etc, gradually turning into an institution more closely linked with the state. Makes me wonder what the literature is like on comparative folklore and human ecology (I just got done complaining about Campbell last night so I should acknowledge that this comparison might be totally spurious).

The Roman agricultural system is extremely neat--I didn't realize it was so diverse; reading it really feels like reading a contemporary permaculturist, with the zones of intensive management and the interplanting and agroforestry and composting and such. That said, I learned more about that from going to Cato directly than from Hughes' coverage. Hughes made a more explicit assertion about a kind of "Roman Three Sisters" than Cato, with rows of olive trees vined with grapes and alleys of grain.

[Jemima Pett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book at college in 1999 or so, and the messages stuck in my mind, particularly the environmental impact that the requirements of feeding Ancient Rome had on the Empire. It parallels the greed and rapaciousness we have in supporting our own culture, without heed for the consequences or long-term viability of the resources we use.
The fact that this book has stuck in my memory for all this time is recommendation enough.

[Bryn Hammond · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought this might be a counterpart to Mark Elvin's The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China, but it's nowhere near that standard.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

So you think things are bad in our environment. This book was an eye-opener about how difficult things were in a society that lived off chopping down trees for firewood or building huge fleets (that sank in naval battles). Amazing tale.