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Lewis Lapham has retired to Rome but Lapham's Quarterly reminds us that now, as when the word "history" was coined in Aesop's time, not much is new under the sun: |
"In his Histories, Herodotus tells how the ancient Greeks and the Egyptians each thought the other was poised to become climate victims.
When Herodotus traveled to Egypt to conduct field interviews for his research, he wanted to know everything about the Nile: how much water it contained, how much the sun evaporated that water, and what its seasonal rhythms were. That the Nile blithely irrigated vast portions of the delta without the need for the Egyptian farmers to do anything filled him with civilizational envy.
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But Herodotus predicted that the Egyptians would be in trouble when the delta collected too much sediment and reached an incline that made it no longer so easily irrigable. Then the Egyptians “will suffer for all remaining time,” he wrote. During an interview he conducted with a Nile River clerk, he discovered Egyptians felt the same way about him.
They pitied the Greeks because they were more dependent on rainfall for their crops.
“If the god shall not send them rain,” Herodotus wrote, channeling his native informant, “but shall allow drought to prevail for a long time, the Hellenes will be destroyed by hunger; for they have in fact no other supply of water to save them except from Zeus alone.”
The losers of this game of environmental chance would start appearing as climate refugees at the winners’ doorstep, ready to worship new gods.
Thomas Meaney is a fellow at the Max Planck Society at Göttingen. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the Guardian, and elsewhere.