Valuing Landscape in Classical Antiquity: Natural Environment and Cultural Imagination

‘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 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.

Jeremy McInerney, Ph.D. (1992, University of California, Berkeley), is Davidson Kennedy Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of The Cattle of the Sun. Cows and Culture in the World of the Ancient Greeks (Princeton 2010) and recently edited A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean (Wiley-Blackwell 2014).

Ineke Sluiter, Ph.D. (1990, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), is Professor of Greek at Leiden University. Apart from the Penn-Leiden volumes, her most recent book is, with Rita Copeland, Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric. Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475 (Oxford 2009).

Contributors are: Annemarie Ambühl, Julie Baleriaux, Richard Buxton, Lissa Crofton-Sleigh, Maša Ćulumović, Greta Hawes, Rianne Hermans, Danielle L. Kellogg, Jason König, Margaret M. Miles, Elizabeth Minchin, Christoph Pieper, Bettina Reitz-Joosse, Betsey A. Robinson,
Christina G. Williamson, and Kathrin Winter.