The introduction calls for a mutually enriching dialogue between ancient texts and environmental literary criticism, contextualizing the book in relation to ecocriticism and classical scholarship. It also establishes the key terms of the book’s approach – place, environment, and ecology – and distinguishes these from the unreflective use of the concept of nature. Finally, the introduction sketches the contextual background for Vergil’s and Horace’s environmental interests, noting a range of ancient traditions and discourses that took the nonhuman world seriously as a site of interest and inquiry. These include literary forebears like Sappho, Hesiod, Theocritus, and Lucretius; cultural traditions such as the Roman fascination with land surveying and agricultural treatises; political contexts like the expansion and consolidation of a quasi-global Roman empire; philosophical traditions from the Presocratics to Stoicism and Epicureanism; and religious traditions. Reading Horace and Vergil as environmental poets does not mean projecting modern sensibilities onto ancient texts but rather seeing how these authors pursue their own, different interests in place, ecology, and the environment.

This chapter elaborates a contextualized account of Horace’s interests in nature and the nonhuman. It traces the connections in his lyric poetry between the nonhuman environment and various concepts of nature. Drawing on long-standing poetic traditions, as well as developments in Hellenistic philosophy, Horace forges a poetry in which distilled perceptions of the nonhuman world undergird insights into ethical concepts of nature by which humans should live their lives. The chapter finds in this poetics a complex form of nature poetry that usefully complicates that concept within the history of the lyric. In order to write this poetry, Horace authenticates his vatic status through claims about his own special relationship with the nonhuman environment and the gods. Horace’s special connection to the divine allows him to enjoy a privileged relationship with his nonhuman surroundings. And it is because of this status that he can command us with urgency and authority to attend to our environments. Horace represents himself as a supernatural poet of nature, whose literary achievement transcends nature even as it teaches about nature’s limits.

Chapter 2 contests deeply entrenched assumptions about pastoral, arguing that the Eclogues do not evince nostalgia for a lost, idealized nature but nonetheless are deeply concerned with the nonhuman environment. The chapter shows that the local places so central to the Eclogues are networks and assemblages of human and nonhuman beings, and that the local dwelling valorized by the collection is dwelling as a part of a more-than-human community. The poetry figures this ecological dwelling through the trope of pastoral sympathy and through its focus on environmental sound. Ultimately, the chapter argues that Vergilian pastoral is best understood not as a representation of herdsmen’s songs but of entire bucolic soundscapes. The second part of the chapter considers the implications of this more-than-human acoustic world for our understanding of Vergil’s own poetry. It argues that nonhuman sound contributes to the sonic texture of Vergil’s language, identifying an acoustic ecopoetics in the Eclogues as Vergil manipulates his language to transmit and recreate nonhuman sound.

Chapter 1 examines how locality matters to the Eclogues, and how the poetry collection conceptualizes and constructs local place. In Eclogues 1 and 9, Vergil stresses the importance of local dwelling, representing multifaceted place attachments between individuals and their familiar homes. At the same time, in dramatizing the effects of land confiscations, Vergil probes the highly contingent nature of place, defined by unstable boundaries and through power relations. In addition to providing new readings of these particular poems, this chapter lays the foundation for the rest of the book by exploring the concept of local place and showing how a multifaceted examination of place making and place attachment offers a more nuanced and fuller reading than a focus on landscape, nature, or an opposition between town and country. The chapter then turns to an apparent problem with this place-based reading of the Eclogues: the poems’ ambiguous settings. Drawing on Theocritus and Cicero, it shows that the Eclogues are interested in the many intersections and cross-fertilizations between actual and fictional places. The poems construct local places, even if they cannot be located.

This chapter argues that various factors of the mid-second century CE account for the creation of Pauline letters. The Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135 CE) had tremendous social and political consequences for Jews and Romans. The Jewish defeat by Rome resulted in the destruction of their temple and territory, deportation of Jews into slavery, and a significant loss of life. During this period, writer-intellectuals immigrated to Rome, established schools, and produced various religious writings, some of which directly reflected on the consequences of the recent Jewish revolt. Marcion’s Evangelion, considered by some as the first gospel, stems from this social-political context. At this same time, political and religious discourse attests to the reassessment of the Jewish rite of circumcision. The devaluation and non-necessity of circumcision for gentiles found within Pauline letters parallels discussions in writings of the post-Bar Kokhba period. Marcion is known in sources for having a singular interest in the Apostle Paul. He is also credited with the earliest known collection of ten Pauline letters (the Apostolikon). These combined factors contribute to the sense in which Marcion’s second-century Roman school is the likely location of the origination of Pauline letters.

This chapter examines Pauline letters in the light of Seneca’s fictive Moral Epistles addressed to his pupil “Lucilius.” It indicates the various authorial strategies deployed in the development of basic letter elements, such as addressees, situational discourse, and addressor, that serve in the promotion of disciplinary teachings and compares those strategies among the two collections. The chapter argues that the letter genre is in many ways an ideal medium for the advancement of disciplinary teachings by an authoritative instructor. The benefits of adopting the letter genre for persuasive teachings include its friendly and trustworthy domain, its appeal to external readers naturally drawn to incidents seemingly meant for others, and that it easily permits and even anticipates the promotion of self. It likewise highlights the versatility of the genre, its historic use in philosophical teachings, and its easy accommodation to a wide range of subgenres, including biography, autobiography, dialog, and narrative. Similarity in the use of epistolary features across the two collections contributes to the book’s thesis that Pauline authors, like Seneca, exploited the genre for teachings to secondary readers.

The authentic-letter perspective has been remarkably durable and presents as a long-settled position on Pauline letters. In terms of certain understandings of early Christianity, the perspective is both attractive and productive. For to locate Paul and Christ groups in the mid-first century is to give historical grounding to Christianity as well as the sense in which there was an ongoing presence of the movement from the time of Jesus. However, an analysis of the historical moorings of the authentic-letter perspective indicates a distinct lack of evidence of Paul, the communities as live entities, and Pauline letters as genuine correspondence. Justifications offered in support of the historicity of Paul is often circular: Paul is said to exist because he authored letters or is mentioned in Acts (a text deemed historically suspect), and support of this assertion comes only from the letters and Acts. Other defenses of the historicity of Paul’s first-century activity, Pauline communities, and the letters as genuine correspondence rely on idealized notions or uncritical methodologies.

This chapter highlights the prevalence and importance of pseudonymous letter collections of the Second Sophistic. It indicates several commonalities between the so-called authentic letters of Paul and other pseudonymous fictional letter collections of the period. Comparanda include the Platonic Epistles, the Letters of Apollonius of Tyana, and the Correspondence of Paul and Seneca. All these letter collections contain indications of the attempt to hide their fictionality, distinct and apparent changes in the portrait of the featured character between what is known of the figure from elsewhere and his portrayal within the letters, and a lack of chronological coherence among the letters of the collection. The chapter also provides a summary of the Dutch Radical perspective on Pauline letters. In the late-nineteenth century, scholars such as Bruno Bauer, Abraham Loman, Rudolf Steck, and Willem C. van Manen rejected the authenticity of all the Pauline letters, arguing that their developed theology indicated a timeframe beyond the mid-first century and that a lack of evidence of Pauline letters prior to the second century likewise pointed to their second-century emergence and their status as non-Pauline.

This chapter problematizes the historicity of Paul and the communities addressed within Pauline letters and challenges the likelihood of the letters’ status as genuine correspondence. While scholarship assumes Pauline authorship of the “authentic” letters, other than biblical or biblical-like sources, there is no evidence of the historical Paul. That the historical Paul was active in the mid-first century is likewise a characterization found largely in Acts and Pauline letters. Similarly, there is a distinct lack of archaeological evidence of ancient Pauline communities. The chapter argues that internal references to communities in home settings within well-known regions are best assessed rhetorically rather than historically. With the letters read together as a collection, distantly spaced regions function effectively to signify the far-reaching spread of the message into prominent areas. The lack of extant evidence for and references to Pauline letters as unities, as one would expect in the case of genuine correspondence, casts doubt on their status as genuine correspondence. In addition, sightings of Pauline letters in later sources indicate a mid-second century date of the collection. These combined arguments add to the thesis that the letters were from the start pseudonymous and fictional.