THE STRAIT OF MESSINA IN HISTORY

Abstract

the book would have been strengthened by a fuller integration of Parts 1 and 2. Save for a brief introductory example (pp. 154–5), none of the natural history museum exhibits she analyses relate to the ancient world, and only a few passages of this chapter (pp. 175, 177–8) connect its analysis directly to Herodotus and Diodorus or ancient Greek ethnography in general. The electrifying promise of studying the ancient Graeco-Roman world in the twenty-first-century West is to open our minds to other ways of seeing and being, to learn the contours of our own inherited cultural topography by examining the distant past. As B.-S. notes, this holds particular power now as we face the concatenation of environmental crises spawned by modern Western environmental sensibilities. This book lays out an exciting new approach to ancient Greek historiography, but it would have been better served by a broader analysis of its ancient subject matter and a more multifaceted reflection on how it relates to the modern world and its institutions. Nonetheless, the ambition of this study is rousing, and it will hopefully inspire a proliferation of similar works.