An inquiry into the concept of nature in Greco-Roman antiquity, ranging over texts from natural history, cosmology, medicine, and poetry to chart the emergence of a complex lexeme with a strong hold on the present.

This course takes up the question of the natures of nature in Greco-Roman antiquity from the angles of natural history, cosmology, medicine, ethics, and literature. We’ll focus on a handful of possible entry points into a tangled and vast semantic web, guided by the terms physis and natura but not restricted to its domains (and therefore attentive to the parameters of “nature” as a etic term as well as a emergent term in antiquity). Over the course of the term we will consider the following topics: the order and agency of the natural world in Greek literature; the relationship between physis, occult knowledge, and techniques of manifestation; human nature and the tension between physis as a force of compulsion and a norm to be fulfilled; strategies for controlling nature; the relationship between the natures of things and a single ordering nature; competing philosophies of nature; and transcendance and immanence within philosophies of nature. Open to students working in the original and in translation, and students working in later periods and other cultural traditions are encouraged to take part.