Jason highlights the connection between ancient traditions of military mountain activity and twentieth-century mountaineering. Greek and Roman history writing is packed with descriptions of military activity in the mountains: it’s probably the category of mountain description that survives in the biggest volume from the ancient Mediterranean world, especially from the Roman empire. In classical Greece … Read more
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
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
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