Ecological Cognitive Dissonance in Ancient Roman Culture

How did ancient Romans think about the environment, and what can they teach us about our own environmental thinking? An array of Latin and Greek texts, ranging from poetry to historiography to a proto-encyclopedia, displays awareness that human cruelty to nonhumans leads to human suffering, as the climate crisis is teaching us anew today. This dissertation uses Morton’s theory of dark ecology to explore the cognitive dissonance of environmental thought in ancient Roman literature and the modern scholarship surrounding it.

I lay the foundations of dark ecology in Chapter 1. According to Morton’s theory, we cope with the fear and anxiety that we feel about our vulnerability as human beings by imagining ontological boundaries between ourselves and everything else, creating a false binary of human vs. nonhuman. Nonhuman here means anything not human, not just animals but plants, objects, and elements. Morton hypothesizes that we developed this way of thinking when we developed agriculture, as a way of justifying the harm that we cause to our environment.

In Chapter 2, I explore accounts of the Myth of Ages in Hesiod’s Works and Days and Vergil’s Georgics. Both poems provide evidence for dark ecology’s claim that farming caused a rift between humans and nonhumans. According to this myth, the greatest human era was a prehistoric Golden Age, when people lived in harmony with nonhumans. These people then developed agriculture, which created an inimical relationship with their environment, and led to many other harmful human activities – such is the premise of dark ecology and this myth.

My third chapter examines ancient Roman reactions to the flooding of the Alban lake, which led them to construct a colossal drainage system at the behest of the Delphic oracle. I examine texts from Cicero, Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Valerius Maximus, and Plutarch. These passages demonstrate that Romans employed human vs. nonhuman thinking as a means of coping with environmentally harmful acts other than farming, such as draining lakes and building aqueducts. They also show that Roman divination justified such acts as the will of the gods.

Chapter 4 uses the shipwreck scene from Book 11 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses to examine the other side of dark ecology: not the false binary of human vs. nonhuman, but the fear of human vulnerability that we use such thinking to avoid. Morton says that we must face these fears in order to cope with the current climate crisis, and I argue that this unusual epic shipwreck, in which sailors face a sea storm without any help from the gods, is the kind of literature that can help us do so.

In my fifth chapter, I explore Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia as a paradigm of the ecological cognitive dissonance within all of us. Consider NH 7.3, in which Pliny describes an infant as “lying there . . . with its hands and feet bound, crying, the animal that will rule over the rest . . . the madness of those who suppose that they themselves were born for loftiness from these beginnings!” Even as he states that humans are the animal that rules all others, he insists that it is madness to believe that we hold such a position. Dark ecology provides analytical tools that enable us to see these lines as acknowledging human superiority and, simultaneously, decrying human belief in our own superiority. Such a reading allows us to better understand Pliny and, in turn, to better understand ourselves.

Chapter 6 considers the dissertation as a whole, and asks what we can learn from these texts about ancient and modern environmental thought. Ultimately, by exposing the cognitive dissonance of Roman environmental thinking, the goal of my project is to expose inconsistencies in ecological thinking today, and to help people act in greater accord with the environment in the future.