In the introduction to this monograph B.-S. explains that her aim is to explore the power of ancient texts and modern institutions alike to influence thinking about the environment and our place within it. Its main focus is how we can read the ethnographic portions of Herodotus’ Histories and Diodorus Siculus’ Library from an ecocritical perspective both to understand ‘Greek environmental discourse’ and to illuminate how we can apply that knowledge productively in confronting contemporary environmental issues. As she notes, Herodotus and Diodorus did not conceive of studying human culture apart from other species and natural forces; rather, they believed that humans were ‘coconstituted both culturally and materially with what is around them’, making their environmental discourse entirely different from that dominant in the modern West, and thus ‘helpful to think with’ for us today (p. 8). B.-S. draws heavily on K. Barad's theory of ‘agential realism’ (Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning [2007]), arguing that by articulating the environmental discourse of ancient Greek authors we are ‘materializing the past in the present’ and empowering the reader to alter her view of the world (p. 31).

The book is divided into two parts. Part 1, ‘Ancient Perspectives’, closely analyses the environmental discourses of the Histories and the Library. Part 2, ‘Present Concerns’, then lays out how those texts might be used to change twenty-first-century Western environmental sensibilities before proceeding to compare this possible impact with that of modern natural history museums. Part 1 comprises the majority of the text. In Chapter 1 B.-S. outlines her methodology, explaining her specific choice to forgo analysis of fragmentary Greek ethnographic historians, such as Agatharchides and Dicaearchus, in favour of examining Herodotus and Diodorus alone. The Histories and the Library, she notes, provide exceptional coverage of non-Greek settings; are relatively completely preserved; and are separated by centuries, making it possible to explore how Greek ethnographic thinking developed over time. Chapter 2 begins the analysis of these texts in earnest, examining how rulers and rivers make and remake the world, constantly altering the demarcation of the ‘natural’, and how historians in turn co-create those boundaries through ‘agencies of observation’. Chapter 3 analyses how historiography encodes concepts of sex, gender and species, and how female characters transgress and shift the boundaries between these categories. Chapter 4 explores how environmental cultures are produced and changed through the lens of diet, demonstrating that humans and their cultures are embedded in complex systems of action and counteraction with other species. Finally, Chapter 5 examines ‘ecologies of consumption’, suggesting that the effects of wealth on those who possess it are modulated by the environments in which they live. B.-S. concludes Part 1 by observing that, while both Herodotus and Diodorus use ethnographic discussions to explore alternate ways of living in and with nature, only the latter ‘finds constructive ways for people to adapt each other's ways of life’ (p. 136), which he presents to his readers as instructive lessons.

In Part 2 B.-S. proceeds to build on ‘Diodorus’ invitation’ to reflect on how we might adapt our ways of life, suggesting how the Histories and the Library, when approached through the lens of indigenous cosmovisions, ‘can be leveraged for environmental pedagogy’ (p. 9). Thus, Chapter 6 begins with four brief subsections distilling the wisdom laid out in Part 1 and how it can be applied in the twenty-first-century Western world. Chapter 7 transitions from the analysis of these ancient texts to a comparativist study of three modern American natural history museums, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh and the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor, Washington. Responding to B. Holmes's call to ‘bring sometimes unusual constellations of ancient texts together with live elements in the present in creative symbiosis’ (‘Cosmopoiesis in the field of “the Classical”’, in S. Butler [ed.], Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception [2016], p. 287), she sets out to ‘read museums of natural history and compare their effects on visitors … with the effects of Greek ethnography’ (p. 156). The book ends with a brief epilogue of personal reflection, but no synthetic conclusion. I noted only four typos throughout (p. 57: ‘multiply’; p. 59: ‘ētndrōthē’; p. 79: ‘MiddleEastern’; and p. 85: ‘Icthyophagoi’).

This brisk monograph is stimulating but disjointed. The ecocritical investigation of Herodotus and Diodorus in Part 1 is a refreshing contribution to scholarship on the ethnographic elements of Greek historiography, and the analysis of selected natural history museum exhibits in Part 2 provides a cogent reflection on how such institutions can alter modern Western environmental culture for the better. The connection between these two halves is tenuous, however, and the section outlining prescriptions for modern readers derived from Part 1 is insubstantial (pp. 139–49). For instance, B.-S. asserts that the chief environmental lessons we as modern readers can learn from Herodotus' and Diodorus’ portrayal of rulers enforcing limits on the consumption of natural resources are that we must shame leaders who do not strive to make the world better in order to hold them accountable and ‘inspire better successors’, and that to combat the climate crisis we should ‘invest in local food and other resource systems and mobilize for collective action’ (p. 145). Such recommendations feel insufficient to the grand ambitions laid out in the introduction and the richly textured analysis of Part 1.

Furthermore, while B.-S.'s didactic analysis of ancient texts with reference to indigenous cosmovisions and her juxtaposition of ancient Greek ethnographic writing with the modern natural history museum are evocative, her application of both approaches only to Herodotus and Diodorus feels unsatisfactory. Expanding Part 1 to include an ecocritical treatment of a broader swathe of well-preserved ancient Greek texts including ethnographic elements, such as Strabo's Geography, Aristotle's and Theophrastus’ biological treatises, or the tracts comprising the Hippocratic corpus, would not only have made that segment more effective and satisfying in its own right,Footnote ¹ but also would have imbued the comparativist discussion in Part 2 with greater weight and nuance. Regardless, the thesis of the book would have been strengthened by a fuller integration of Parts 1 and 2. Save for a brief introductory example (pp. 154–5), none of the natural history museum exhibits she analyses relate to the ancient world, and only a few passages of this chapter (pp. 175, 177–8) connect its analysis directly to Herodotus and Diodorus or ancient Greek ethnography in general.

The electrifying promise of studying the ancient Graeco-Roman world in the twenty-first-century West is to open our minds to other ways of seeing and being, to learn the contours of our own inherited cultural topography by examining the distant past. As B.-S. notes, this holds particular power now as we face the concatenation of environmental crises spawned by modern Western environmental sensibilities. This book lays out an exciting new approach to ancient Greek historiography, but it would have been better served by a broader analysis of its ancient subject matter and a more multifaceted reflection on how it relates to the modern world and its institutions. Nonetheless, the ambition of this study is rousing, and it will hopefully inspire a proliferation of similar works.