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REVIEW BY GERALD LALONDE
Activity of the Earth’s tectonic plates affects geography, and geography affects the activity of humans. Sliding of the Africa–Arabia plate under the Eurasia plate in the Miocene and Oligocene ages raised mountains from the Pyrenees in Spain to the Zagros range in Iran. In The Folds of Olympus, Jason König studies the relationships that ancient thoughts and feelings about these mountains had with a great deal of the history and culture of the Greco-Roman world from the Homeric age to the 6th century AD.
In the book’s 16 chapters, mountains are the context for analysis of ancient religion, literature, visual arts, science, warfare, historiography, and society. In Homer’s epics, The Homeric Hymns, Hesiod’s poems, and the Greek tragedies, Mount Olympus and Mount Ida are often divine places beyond human contact, while similes present mountains as the realms of down-to-earth shepherds and woodcutters. When the poet Horace refers to faraway mountains that symbolise divine power, he credits his readers’ knowledge of myth and salutes the expanse of the Roman Empire. The Soracte Ode is arguably the most famous, loved, and enigmatic of Horace’s poems, and König tops off his treatment of it with an interesting tale that shows that there was a time when most educated people knew the Classics. In 1944, the captured German general Heinrich Kreipe, while being taken to the south coast of Crete, saw the sun rising over Mount Ida and uttered the opening phrase of Horace’s ode: Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte. His English captor, Patrick Leigh Fermor, immediately bonded with Kreipe by reciting the rest of the poem from memory. Kreipe’s capture is a fetching story – when the reprisals suffered by the Cretan people are left out. Egeria’s 4th-century account (Itinerarium) of her pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Mount Sinai, and Mount Nebo invites readers to share her belief that awareness of God can be had from Christian rituals in the mountain landscapes of sacred history.
The reader who pays heed to König’s attention to the inter-relationship of repeated portrayals of mountain terrain will notice a leitmotif in his references to tensions that arise from opposing images of landscapes within and between ancient sources, locations, and ages. For example, there is tense opposition between the passing list of mountains with signal- fires in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Mount Kithairon as the setting of Pentheus’ grim fate in Euripides’ Bacchae. In writing about Etna and Vesuvius, Pindar, Lucretius, Pseudo-Aristotle, Strabo, and Pliny the Elder show the difficulty of separating scientific interest from poetry’s fascination with the myths and godly power of volcanoes. There is another kind of tension when the ethnographies of Strabo’s Geography and Ammianus Marcellinus’ Res gestae fall into Roman imperial literature’s common dichotomy, whereby the mountain people of Spain, the Alps, and beyond are uncivilised but the mainlanders of Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor are (even if only partially and temporarily) politically, economically, and religiously civilised.
The Folds of Olympus shows König’s mastery of material vast enough to be the subjects and substance of countless seminars in Classical studies. This grasp of ancient history and culture is matched by König’s knowledge and love of the physical side of his subject. This is implicit in first-hand involvements with remote sites, such as his climb of Mount Lykaion in Arkadia and his familiarity there with the sanctuary of Zeus and the monuments of the Lykaia festival. The same scholarly outlook is explicit in the book’s ‘Epilogue’, where König writes with pleasure of his solitary hikes close to home in the Scottish Highlands, where the experience not only draws on the ancient sources but also helps him understand the Greek and Roman perception, symbolism, and function of mountain landscapes. He ends his narrative with the view of Mediterranean mountains as a network and with the image of a world network that would help to solve problems of mountains and mountain communities everywhere.
The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek and Roman culture Jason König Princeton University Press, £38 ISBN 978-0691201290
