The pigs of U.'s Plato's Pigs and other Ruminations represent moderate and adaptable citizens of an ideal, sustainable urban environment. Sustainability as it is used today evokes a variety of ecological, as well as political and ethical, undertones. As U. points out, the term ‘sustainable’ only entered the lexicon in 1972 (p. 92), but derives from and shares meaning with the Latin sustineo (sub + teneo) – ‘something that has the structural and operational capacity to last and endure’ (p. 79). Despite the recent formalisation of sustainability science, U.'s impressive work shows a thread of sustainable and complex systems thinking in ancient Greek and Roman culture.
Plato's Pigs provides snapshots into a history of Greek and Roman environmental solutions that offer a counter narrative to the seminal Environmental Problems of the Greeks and Romans (20142), where J. Hughes uncovers environmental failures of the Greeks and Romans in their exploitation and degradation of ecosystems that led to collapse. Through an approach defined as ‘environmental philology’ (p. xi), U. demonstrates that there was also a Greek and Roman culture of sustainable living with sensitive consideration of whole systems. U. draws on a variety of literary works and etymological evaluations, complemented by and elaborated with examinations of cultural material–art historical depictions of the Potnia Thērōn, archaeological remains of boundary stones from Attica and a Roman villa rustica, and U.'s own Works and Days Farm in Vermont.
Broadly, the volume belongs to the interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities. Since the early 2000s, environmental humanities has grown alongside debates over the Anthropocene, a notion popularised by P. Crutzen (Nature 415 [2002]) that emphasises humans’ role in altering earth's systems starting in the eighteenth century. Environmental humanities concerns socio-environmental relationships across time and space aimed at intervening in such debates and addressing current environmental crises. In recent years, environmental humanities within Classics, including areas of philology, literature, history and archaeology, has drawn from the dense classical material and textual record to review historical approaches to environmental factors and provoke critical thought on different ontologies, epistemologies and ethics of human-environment relationships in the political present.
The book's eight chapters move chronologically, thematically and also from abstract ideas to concrete environmental solutions. Each chapter builds and elaborates on the themes of the one preceding, moving from religion, to order and the cosmos, to environmental politics and ethics, and finally, in circling back to religion, to agricultural experimentation in ages of excess.
The first chapter focuses on the Potnia Thērōn and her various guises in Greek myth. From its earliest stages, Greek cult exhibited debt in acts of reciprocity and mutual need. In Hesiod the theme of chreos (‘debt’) is paired with the social notion dikē (‘justice’). U. argues that relationships of chreos and dikē bring order to the cosmos and are foundational to sustainable and complex systems thinking, which continues to feature throughout the remaining chapters.
In the second and third chapters U. draws similarities between the heuristic analogical abstractions of Anaximander and Heraclitus to complexity science and its supporting theories, namely Albert Einstein's relativity, Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Niels Bohr's quantum mechanics. Features of complex systems arise in Anaximander's abstraction of nature (tina phusin) and the boundless (apeiros) and in Heraclitus’ harmoniē and the Logos principle that ‘produce emergent phenomena and dynamic change’ (p. 49). Both chapters argue that the ancient rationale for sensitivities to whole systems is intrinsic to sustainable living. The abstractions of complex systems in Anaximander, Heraclitus and modern physics are analogous to those in social systems – in politics and ethics –, the subjects of Chapters 4 to 6.
The concept of dikē as reciprocal and mutual need resurfaces in Chapters 4 and 5 in relation to Plato's First City (Republic 369d–73e) and Cleisthenes’ reforms (isonomia) of 508 bce. Dikē lies in the mutual need of the citizen body. The double entendre of hus, or pig, in the First City (Republic 372d) – the City for Pigs – serves as both insult and compliment to the city's citizen population, implying both qualities of primitiveness and slowness and also adaptability and moderation. In an alternative city with excess luxuries, dikē is impossible because of pleonectic desires. Dikē, therefore, requires limits. The introduction of socio-natural limits in Cleisthenes’ social engineering explains how social norms of ho dēmos (‘the People’) accounted for maintaining sustainable cities and ecological systems.
Limits are also key to the environmental ethics of the Cynics and Stoics of Chapter 6. In contrast to ancient writers in the preceding chapters, the Cynics and Stoics offer practical solutions for maintaining sustainable systems. The Cynics’ extreme limits in material use and the balanced oikeiosis of the Stoics’ ‘proprioceptive capacity’ (p. 145) to consume and act with awareness of one's surroundings are types of environmental ethics that focus on individuals’ roles in living sustainably in accordance with greater systems.
Chapters 7 and 8 focus on environmental solutions in the remains of a villa rustica at Le Mole of Sabina circumstantially connected to Pompey the Great and homesteading experiments of the Benedictines. These experiments are material manifestations of cultural desires to live simply and sustainably in times of anxieties over landscape exploitation. They also resemble the idealised views of agriculture in Roman literature, particularly in Virgil, Horace, Livy and Varro. Franciscan and Benedictine attitudes towards environmental ethics correspond to Cynic and Stoic philosophy, respectively, that have persisted into the present times as exemplified in the writings of Pope Francis.
Throughout the book U. draws striking parallels between ancient and modern complex systems thinking and sustainability. Examples include similarities between the Age of Iron in Hesiod with the human-centeredness of the Anthropocene epoch, Heraclitus’ dedication of his work to a Potnia Thērōn with B. Latour's invocation of Gaia (Facing Gaia [2017]), Plato's simulation of the City for Pigs with the computer game SimCity™ and the social protest of the Cynic Diogenes with the ‘zero impact’ ambitions of environmental activist Colin Beavan. The book's afterword is the culmination of such comparisons. The ideals of the preceding chapters are embodied in U.'s own ‘semi-sustainable’ villa rustica. The Works and Days Farm in Vermont is akin to Stoic and Benedictine reflection of complex systems and sustainable practices aimed at maintaining limit, dikē and harmoniē for socio-natural systemic good. Such comparisons bring about a clear message: sustainability is an ideal to be sought, and there are a multitude of approaches to pursuing this ideal.
U. makes conscientious efforts to acknowledge potential flaws of his work: places of ‘hyperbole and underdeveloped points’ (p. 13). I have three minor critical points. First, the content of the second chapter entitled ‘Anaximander for the Anthropocene’ does not refer to or concern the Anthropocene, i.e. the significant human role in changing earth's systems. Second, the text supports critique of modernist assumptions of a Nature–Culture divide as in B. Latour (We Have Never Been Modern [1993]; Facing Gaia [2017]), but also perhaps reinforces them. U. makes analogies between natural systems in Chapters 2 and 3 on the one end and social systems in Chapters 4 and 5 on the other. Culture functions as a system analogous to but still separate from Nature (e.g. pp. 62–3, 66). Lastly, U. makes claims of Graeco-Roman origins – first with the complexity discourse of the Greeks (p. 48) and second with the Romans as the first ‘back-to-the-landers’ (p. 168) – as regards elite urbanites seeking a simple, sustainable life in an age of excess. These claims do not consider other, potentially earlier, thinking and cultural practices. In relation to all three points U. invites further investigation into debates over the Anthropocene, critiques of a Nature–Culture divide, and searches for origins and variations in complex systems and sustainability thinking and practices across cultures.
The volume offers a topical view of Classics in light of some of today's most pressing environmental crises. The book invites several points of inquiry into environmental philology and, more broadly, environmental humanities within Classics and across disciplines.
