Revealing Roots: Ecocriticism and the Cultures of Antiquity

Physis kryptesthai philei. Nature loves to hide. As he entered Artemis’s temple in Ephesus to offer his book as a dedication to the great goddess of the wild lands, “Mistress of the Animals” (Hom. Il. 21.470f.), Heraclitus couldn’t guess that, crossing oceans of time and thousands of books written by others, this enigmatic statement was starting a long journey – passing through future languages, future alphabets, future media. It was the sixth century BCE, and the book Heraclitus was depositing had an intriguing subject, one of those that seem to be made exactly to stir the discussions of a community of scholars who, some two-and-a-half thousand years later, would call themselves “ecocritics.” The book’s title was Perì physeos, “On nature.”