Historical Nature: Causality and the Environment in Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon

Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Classics

First Advisor

Bakker, Egbert

Abstract

Today’s historian works during a period where hesitations about nonhumans’ in/difference to human behavior echo the intellectual shifts of the time when Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon wrote the first extant Greek histories. What do these three historians’ explanations for nonhuman behaviors suggest to the historians in the Anthropocene? An in-depth study of this question must, first, tackle nonhumans as a category, since it constitutes an inconceivably large and heterogeneous group of entities from insects and stars to gods and mud. In partial recognition of this heterogeneity, I examine the causal treatments of nonhumans under the rubrics of meteorological, biological, and geological phenomena. I argue that Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon deploy explanations for these phenomena at crucial points of their historical works, in order to characterize particular human behaviors as affirmative or dismissive. In examining the intricacies of such normative uses, I show that each historian employs variations of a multiplicity of causal scenarios for different events. They convey this multiplicity through polyphony, i.e. the inclusion of multiple perspectives on causal scenarios, some authorially endorsed or rejected while others are presented ambiguously. I conclude that such narrative polyphony assists today’s historians with the difficulties in expressing the role of nonhumans in the events they study. In the Introduction, I discuss some of the problems that arise from the sweeping assumptions about nonhumans in the existing scholarship. To these problems, I offer a methodological solution that recognizes both the interpersonal and depersonalized modes of explaining nonhuman behaviors (the first mode relies on mortal and divine actions, while the latter on mechanisms unresponsive to intentions). This solution revolves around a hybrid usage of Philippe Descola’s notions of analogism and naturalism. My application of these two notions to ancient historical writing consists of detecting the rhetoric of regularity in their explanations for nonhuman behaviors. Focusing on meteorological explanations, Chapter 2 shows how each of the three historians use the interpersonal or depersonalized modes of causality in different ways for the sake of positive or negative evaluations of human behavior. I focus particularly on the Artemision storms in Herodotus; the winds of the Rhion Strait and the storms at Plataea and Syracuse in Thucydides; the Creusis winds, and the storms at Arginusae and Phyle in Xenophon. I argue that the historians embed implicit and explicit causal threads for each of these meteorological phenomena in their moral evaluations of human actors. Turning to biological phenomena, specifically the birth and death of animals and plants, Chapter 3 explores the causal scenarios in the works of each historian. I discuss Herodotus’ accounts of the growth patterns of living beings at Lemnos, Apollonia and the flying snakes of Arabia; Thucydides’ generalization on the relation between human conflicts and plant growth, and the divine implications of the destruction of crops at Plataea and Delion; Xenophon’s allusions to the impact of humans and gods over fertility in Attica, Skillous, and different areas of Anatolia. I argue that the historians ascribe distinct causal threads to fertility in an effort to convey their views on how humans should sustain themselves. Chapter 4 assesses the three historians’ geological explanations, i.e. the assumptions about why land and water masses undergo visible changes. Such assumptions bear on the question of how far humans can go in transforming their surroundings. Herodotus’ account of Egyptian geology and reports of both realized and unrealized landscape transformations at Cnidus, Athos, and Tempe; Thucydides’ sensational correlation of earthquakes with human conflict, his report of tsunami near Euboea, and sedimentation at the Achelous Delta; Xenophon’s treatment of earthquakes at Sparta, Elis, and Argos, and Cyrus the Younger’s crossing of the Euphrates provide various combinations of causal maps that momentarily position humans in either a responsive or unresponsive landscape. In Chapter 5, I conclude by discussing how today’s historian can benefit from these ancient Greek historians’ intricate narrative uses of meteorological, biological, and geological explanations. The Anthropocene debates revolve around the uncertain limits of human action and the equivocal un/responsiveness of nonhumans to this action. Some of these tensions are analogous to those embedded in the intellectual shifts that Herodotus’, Thucydides’, and Xenophon’s meteorological, biological, and geological explanations respond to. Their narrative flexibility around the nonhuman causal threads is one that will contribute to the discussions that historians conduct vis-à-vis the paradoxical challenges of the Anthropocene.

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