Vol. 23 No. 1 (2024): Green Antiquity

With its thematic issues, Ókor consistently seeks — within the framework of ancient civilizations — to foreground, revisit, or reframe the questions that most engage both Hungarian and international scholarship, and to offer answers grounded in antiquity. Our special issue “Green Antiquity” presents a rich selection of papers on nature as it appears in myth and literature, on the relationship between human beings and their environment, on the contrast between cultivated landscapes and wilderness, and on the mythical, aesthetic, ethical, and cultural dimensions attached to them. To recall Sándor Radnóti’s far-reaching cultural-historical reflection: “Landscape exists only through human eyes; it comes into being when it is perceived.” Although this radical shift in the perception of landscape is usually dated to the later seventeenth century, its traces can also be discerned in antiquity. In nature and in the animals of the wild we encounter the perpetual Other — the alien, the untamed. Yet such boundaries may blur: a human may become animal again; built environments may yield to the impersonal advance of nature; and humans, in turn, may reshape landscapes — removing mountains or redirecting rivers.