Plato and Lucretius
on Environmental Degradation
Study Questions
1) What can you
infer from these texts about the nature of Greek and Roman agriculture- what agricultural
crops were cultivated, how did they work the soil, etc.?
2) Based on this
text, what long-term effects did Greek and Roman agriculture have upon the
soil?
3) How do you
reconcile Lucretius’ gloomy statements about the present state of Roman
agriculture with the fact that
Plato, Critias
[extract]
Plato
was a famous Greek philosopher who lived between approximately 427-347 BC and
who was a student of Socrates, who is regarded by some as the father of
philosophy. Like Socrates, Plato was a social critic who contrasted the lax
morals of the present day and was nostalgic about a remembered, golden past.
This excerpt talks about the environmental changes he has seen in his native
Now the country was
inhabited in those days by various classes of citizens;—
there were artisans, and there were husbandmen, and there was also a warrior
class originally set apart by divine men. The latter dwelt by themselves, and
had all things suitable for nurture and education; neither had any of them
anything of their own, but they regarded all that they had as common property;
nor did they claim to receive of the other citizens anything more than their
necessary food… The land was the best in the world, and was therefore able in
those days to support a vast army, raised from the surrounding people. Even the
remnant of
Lucretius, On the Nature
of Things [extract]
Lucretius was a Roman poet and
philosopher who lived from 99 BC to 55 BC, when
Mother
Nature first gave us demonstrations of the way sowing might operate; the acorns
fell under the oaks, bushes (or birds) dropped berries whose seeds in time
became small shoots, a swarm new risen, and men learned the stranger craft of
grafting, or of planting slips in the earth, tried cultivation of their little
plots, found methods of improving wilder growth by patience and by gentleness,
the way trainers succeed in taming other stock [domesticated animals]. They
made the woods climb higher up the mountains, yielding the lowlands to be
tilled and tended— With meadow, pool, and stream, with oats and wheat on the
low plains—and higher on the hills vineyards to make men glad, and olive trees
whose gray-green color marked the boundary up hill, down dale, so you could see
all things. Charming, and all things different, all adorned—
Sweet orchards, lovely hedgerows.
[…]
It
is food that every creature needs, the food that mends, supports, renews,
replenishes. But now nature can give no more, and income must
be lest than outgo. So many things wither, die, made mean by loss, by
blows, within, without, assailed, besieged, betrayed, till at long last food
fails, and the great walls are battered in. In just this way the ramparts
[walls] of the world, for all their might, will some day face assault, be
stormed, collapse in ruin and in dust. It is happening
already; our poor earth, worn out, exhausted, brings to birth no more great
eons, titans, huge majestic beasts; only our own disgusting little days, Midges
and gnats… the same earth who nourishes them now once brought forth… vineyards
and shining harvests, pastures, arbors [orchards?] and all this now our very
utmost toil we hardly care for, we wear down our strength, whether in oxen or
in men, we dull the edges of our plowshares, and in return our fields turn mean
and stingy, underfed. And so today the farmer shakes his
head, more and more often sighing that his work, the labor of his hands, has
come to naught [nothing]. When he compares the present to the past, the
past was better, infinitely so…. All things, little by little, waste away as
times erosion crumbles them to doom.