By focusing on ancient culture and its reception, this book integrates antiquity into our current ecocritical theory and practice to fill in a gap in our environmental debates. It aims at a re-evaluation of antiquity in the present-day environmental concerns and re-frames our modern outlook on the more-than-human world from different cultures.

Christopher Schliephake is a cultural historian, ecocritic, and postdoc scholar at the University of Augsburg.

Foreword: Before Nature?, Brooke Holmes
Abbreviations
Introduction, Christopher Schliephake
Part I: Environmental (Hi)stories: Negotiating Human-Nature Interactions
(1) Environmental Mosaics Natural and Imposed, J. Donald Hughes
(2) Poseidon's Wrath and the End of Helike: Notions about the Anthropogenic Character of Disasters in Antiquity, Justine Walter
(3) Glades of Dread: The Ecology and Aesthetics of loca horrida, Aneta Kliszcz and Joanna Komorowska
(4) Response: Hailed by the Genius of Ruins - Antiquity, the Anthropocene, and the Environmental Humanities, Hannes Bergthaller
Part II: Close Readings: Literary Ecologies and the More-than-Human World
(5) Eroticized Environments: Ancient Greek Natural Philosophy and the Roots of Erotic Ecocritical Contemplation, Thomas Sharkie and Marguerite Johnson
(6) Interspecies Ethics and Collaborative Survival in Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, Richard Hutchins
(7) The Ecological Highway: Environmental Ekphrasis in Statius, Silvae 4.3, Christopher Chinn
(8) Impervious Nature as a Path to Virtue: Cato in the Ninth Book of Bellum Civile, Vittoria Prencipe
(9) Response: Re-Thinking Borderlines Ecologies - A Literary Ethics of Exposure, Katharina Donn
Part III: 'Green' Genres: The Pastoral and Georgic Tradition
(10) The Environmental Humanities and the Pastoral Tradition, Terry Gifford
(11) "How / to make fields fertile": Ecocritical Lessons from the History of Virgil's Georgics in Translation, Laura Sayre
(12) Nec provident futuro tempori, sed quasi plane in diem vivant - Sustainable Business in Columella's De Re Rustica?, Lars Keßler and Konrad Ott
(13) Response: Back to the Future - Rethinking Time in Precarious Times, Roman Bartosch

Part IV: Classical Reception: Presence, Absence, and the Afterlives of Ancient Culture
(14) The Myth of Rhiannon: An Ecofeminist Perspective, Anna Banks
(15) Emblems and Antiquity: An Exploration of Speculative Emblematics, Lucy Mercer and Laurence Grove
(16) The Sustainability of Texts: Transcultural Ecology and Classical Reception, Christopher Schliephake
(17) Daoist Spiritual Ecology in the "Anthropocene", Jingcheng Xu
(18) Response: From Ecocritical Reception of the Ancients to the Future of the Environmental Humanities (with a detour via Romanticism), Kate Rigby
Afterword: Revealing Roots - Ecocriticism and the Cultures of Antiquity, Serenella Iovino