Mental Landscapes, Classical Mountains

Dawn reveals that physical height was not the only thing that gave a peak prominence in the early modern cultural landscape. It is more or less taken as a given in most scholarly work on landscape that, insofar as human engagements with it are concerned, there is a distinction to be made between the ‘physical’ … Read more

Ecotourism and Environment

Jason explores the nature of environmental attitudes in antiquity. How do ancient Greek and Roman attitudes to the environment relate to our own? There has been a tendency to answer that question in very sweeping terms. In some cases, Greek and Roman culture are viewed as the starting-points for modern willingness to exploit the environment … Read more

Olympus

Jason considers both ancient and modern responses to one of Greece’s most enigmatic mountains. One of the projects I have been working on for a while now is a biography of Mt Olympus. Olympus is the highest mountain in mainland Greece, at just under 3000 metres. It’s a complex mountain, with multiple peaks and steep … Read more

Beautiful Mountains?

Jason explores a few ancient examples of seeing beauty in mountains. ANCIENT AND MODERN RESPONSES One of the goals of this project is to look across the watershed of the late 18th and early 19th centuries to give fresh attention to early modern, medieval and especially classical responses to mountains. When you do that you … Read more