SCS-26: Place, Landscape and the Natural Environment

The Homeric Hymn to Apollo (well-known to fifth-century BCE Athenians and famously quoted by Thucydides 3.104) is often seen to offer a narrative of Apollo’s acquisition of timê, “sphere of influence” (Clay), but in this paper I am interested in the island of Delos and Delos’ timê.

This paper examines how the figures of Giants, who are popularly depicted as hubristic monstrous beings, helped to shape group identity in Arcadia. I argue that the experience of Giant myths and monuments identified by Pausanias contributed to the development of regional identity in three ways. Firstly, these stories evoked a local history in which Arcadians could be defined via social opposition to Giants.

This paper examines the role played in the Odyssey by Cape Malea, a promontory on the southern coast of the Peloponnese. I argue that Malea functions as a narrative ‘node’ offering different possibilities for heroes’ return-tales, which the Odyssey employs to signal its own divergence from poetic tradition and to manipulate its audience’s sense of reality.

Pliny the Elder wrote his Naturalis Historia in part as propaganda for the power of the Roman empire, and much work has been generated on the idea via the geographies of Books III- VI and ethnographies of Book VII (see Mary Beagon 2005; Sorcha Carey 2003; Trevor Morgan Murphy 1997; Valérie Naas 2011; Greg Woolf 2010). This paper will continue the tradition by turning to Book VIII and Pliny’s program concerning the animals that live on land. Though seemingly random, the placement of the animal contents following Books VII’s ethnographies is not an accident.

This paper offers a new reading of Vitruvius’s De Architectura which demonstrates that identifying natura as a unifying force in the text is integral to understanding how the otherwise seemingly varied topics discussed in each book connect to create a cohesive corpus of architecture.