Environment

Abstract

Roman attitudes to the environment—that place where culture and nature meet—blend appreciation for the land’s usefulness, its divinity, and its beauty. Musings on the natural world appear in agricultural treatises, and philosophers and poets consider how nature is wild and tamed, productive and destructive. Drawing on ecocritical theory and the ways humans create and shape their interactions with the natural world, this chapter traces the varied conceptions of the Roman environment through the trope of the locus amoenus, the gods of fields and groves, and the quintessentially Roman appreciation of the beauty of a fertile field. What emerges is an appreciation for nature in its interactions with people, a reciprocal relationship considered to benefit both people and place.