The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek and Roman Culture
A cultural and literary history of mountains in classical antiquity

The mountainous character of the Mediterranean was a crucial factor in the history of the ancient Greek and Roman world. The Folds of Olympus is a cultural and literary history that explores the important role mountains played in Greek and Roman religious, military, and economic life, as well as in the identity of communities over a millennium—from Homer to the early Christian saints. Aimed at readers of ancient history and literature as well as those interested in mountains and the environment, the book offers a powerful account of the landscape at the heart of much Greek and Roman culture.

Jason König charts the importance of mountains in religion and pilgrimage, the aesthetic vision of mountains in art and literature, the place of mountains in conquest and warfare, and representations of mountain life. He shows how mountains were central to the way in which the inhabitants of the ancient Mediterranean understood the boundaries between the divine and the human, and the limits of human knowledge and control. He also argues that there is more continuity than normally assumed between ancient descriptions of mountains and modern accounts of the picturesque and the sublime.

Offering a unique perspective on the history of classical culture, The Folds of Olympus is also a resoundingly original contribution to the literature on mountains.

1140376325
The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek and Roman Culture
A cultural and literary history of mountains in classical antiquity

The mountainous character of the Mediterranean was a crucial factor in the history of the ancient Greek and Roman world. The Folds of Olympus is a cultural and literary history that explores the important role mountains played in Greek and Roman religious, military, and economic life, as well as in the identity of communities over a millennium—from Homer to the early Christian saints. Aimed at readers of ancient history and literature as well as those interested in mountains and the environment, the book offers a powerful account of the landscape at the heart of much Greek and Roman culture.

Jason König charts the importance of mountains in religion and pilgrimage, the aesthetic vision of mountains in art and literature, the place of mountains in conquest and warfare, and representations of mountain life. He shows how mountains were central to the way in which the inhabitants of the ancient Mediterranean understood the boundaries between the divine and the human, and the limits of human knowledge and control. He also argues that there is more continuity than normally assumed between ancient descriptions of mountains and modern accounts of the picturesque and the sublime.

Offering a unique perspective on the history of classical culture, The Folds of Olympus is also a resoundingly original contribution to the literature on mountains.

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The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek and Roman Culture

The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek and Roman Culture

by Jason König
The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek and Roman Culture

The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek and Roman Culture

by Jason König

Hardcover

$48.00 
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Overview

A cultural and literary history of mountains in classical antiquity

The mountainous character of the Mediterranean was a crucial factor in the history of the ancient Greek and Roman world. The Folds of Olympus is a cultural and literary history that explores the important role mountains played in Greek and Roman religious, military, and economic life, as well as in the identity of communities over a millennium—from Homer to the early Christian saints. Aimed at readers of ancient history and literature as well as those interested in mountains and the environment, the book offers a powerful account of the landscape at the heart of much Greek and Roman culture.

Jason König charts the importance of mountains in religion and pilgrimage, the aesthetic vision of mountains in art and literature, the place of mountains in conquest and warfare, and representations of mountain life. He shows how mountains were central to the way in which the inhabitants of the ancient Mediterranean understood the boundaries between the divine and the human, and the limits of human knowledge and control. He also argues that there is more continuity than normally assumed between ancient descriptions of mountains and modern accounts of the picturesque and the sublime.

Offering a unique perspective on the history of classical culture, The Folds of Olympus is also a resoundingly original contribution to the literature on mountains.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780691201290
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication date: 08/02/2022
Pages: 480
Product dimensions: 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jason König is Professor of Classics at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire and Saints and Symposiasts: The Literature of Food and the Symposium in Greco-Roman and Early Christian Culture, and the coeditor of Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity, among other books.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xi

Map xiv

Preface xvii

Acknowledgements xxix

Part I Mountains and the Divine

1 Summit Altars 3

Divine Presence and Human Culture 3

Memory and Embodied Experience 7

Mediterranean Mountain Religion 9

The Summit Altars of Mainland Greece 12

2 Mountains in Archaic Greek Poetry 20

The Homeric Hymns 20

Hesiod and the Muses on Mount Helikon 26

Mount Olympus and Mount Ida in the Iliad 30

Mountain Similes: Natural Force and Human Vulnerability 35

Mountain Similes: Divine Vision and the Sublime 40

3 Pausanias: Mythical Landscapes and Divine Presence 47

Euripides to Pausanias 47

Arkadia 53

Boiotia 57

Phokis 64

4 Egeria on Mount Sinai: Mountain Pilgrimage in Early Christian and Late Antique Culture 69

Biblical Mountains 69

Mountain Allegories in the Writings of the Emperor Julian 73

Mountain Pilgrimage 77

Egeria on Mount Sinai 81

Egeria and the History of Travel and Mountaineering 84

Egeria on Mount Nebo 90

Part II Mountain Vision

5 Mountain Aesthetics 95

Mountains as Objects of Vision 95

Aesthetic Categories and the Classical Tradition 97

Beautiful Mountains 100

Ancient Mountains and the Sublime 105

6 Scientific Viewing and the Volcanic Sublime 107

Volcanic Knowledge and Human Vulnerability 107

Observing Etna 109

The Pseudo-Virgilian Aetna and the Language of Vision 113

Literary Ambition and Philosophical Virtue: Etna in Seneca's Letters 115

7 Mountains in Greek and Roman Art 119

Miniaturised Mountains 119

Mountains in Roman Wall Painting 126

Enigmatic Mountains 135

8 Mountain Landmarks in Latin Literature 144

Mountain Symbolism 144

Mountains in Latin Epic 149

Mountains and Gender in Ovid and Seneca 152

Mountains in Horace's Odes 155

9 Mountains and Bodies in Apuleius' Metamorphoses 160

A Stage-Set of Mount Ida 160

Rhetorical and Symbolic Mountains in the Metamorphoses 163

Mountain Terrain and Haptic Experience 168

Landscapes of the Goddess Isis 174

Part III Mountain Conquest

10 Warfare and Knowledge in Mountain Territories 181

Mountains and Modernity 181

Rock-Walkers: Specialist Expertise in Mountain Warfare 183

Local Knowledge: Control and Resistance in Mountain Terrain 186

Representing Mountain Conquest 191

11 Mountain Narratives in Greek and Roman Historiography 199

Landscape Narratives 199

Herodotus 200

Xenophon and Arrian 204

Plutarch 205

Polybius 212

12 Strabo: Civilising the Mountains 218

Human-Environment Relations in Strabo's Geography 218

Strabo's Cartographic Perspective 220

Spain and the Alps 222

Italy and Greece 224

Pontus 227

13 Ammianus Marcellinus: Mountain Peoples and Imperial Boundaries 230

The Isaurians in the Res Gestae 230

Natural-Force Metaphors 233

Bodily Immersion: Mountains, Rivers, Sea 236

Viewing from Above 238

'Like a Snowstorm from the High Mountains': The Huns and the Goths 240

Part IV Living in the Mountains

14 Mountain and City 247

Mountain Communities 247

Environmental History in the Mountains of the Mediterranean 249

Mountains and Identity 251

Mountains and the Ancient Economy 254

Mountain Pastoralism 257

Plato's Laws and the Mountains of Crete 262

15 Dio Chrysostom and the Mountains of Euboia 267

Idealising Mountain Communities 267

A Mountain Idyll 269

Visiting the City 274

Urban Perspectives 280

16 Mountain Saints in Late Antique Christian Literature 283

Human-Environment Relations in Early Christian Hagiography 283

Narrating Mountain Asceticism 288

Theodoret and the Mountains of Syria 290

Pseudo-Nilus' Narrations and the Massacres at Mount Sinai 293

The Life of Symeon the Mountaineer 297

Mountain Retreats in Jerome's Life of Hilarion 300

Epilogue 305

Notes 313

Bibliography 383

Index Locorum 419

General Index 433

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“No one understands the topic of ancient Greek and Roman mountains better than Jason König. In this consistently innovative, intellectually sophisticated, stylishly written, and superbly well-informed study, he opens our eyes to a terrain situated simultaneously in the real world and in the imagination. Equally at home when scrambling up rocky slopes or when probing the texts and images that evoke them, König wears his learning lightly, but he has produced a magnificent piece of scholarship that will decisively shape this area of study for the foreseeable future.”—Richard Buxton, author of The Greek Myths That Shape the Way We Think

“Drawing on copious textual and visual materials, The Folds of Olympus is ambitious, wide-ranging, and very engaging, and Jason König’s writing is accessible, with a most appealing personal touch.”—Gareth Williams, Columbia University

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