Most of us cherish the beauty of wilderness, and I venture that a lot of our feelings come from our knowledge that humans have put the environment in great danger — therefore, any non-human engineered landscapes we now consider especially precious.
But people have not always looked at the non-human world in the same way: although always dependent on it, people have experienced extra-human life through their own cultural prisms.
The Ancient Romans are a case in point. Here you see a landscape mural from ancient Pompeii, and you notice that the trees and other vegitation and animals are interspersed among the buildings. Thus, flora and fauna appear beautiful, but bounded by human civilization. Indeed, many historians have argued that Romans took “delight in the quieter moods of nature.”.
In this way, wild places– in particular mountains — were often viewed as hostile. The Roman Quintillian stated that “beauty belongs to sea-views, to plains, and to pleasant localities”. Thus, the non-human environment could be lovely, but it was valued when civilization had tamed it.
The orator Cicero brings this point home in the words of his character Balbus, speaking as a Stoic philosopher in _On the Nature of the Gods_. “Total dominion over the produce of the earth lies in our hands. We put plains and mountains to good use; rivers and lakes belong to us; we sow cereals and plant trees; we irrigate our lands to fertilize them . . . . In short, by the work of our hands we strive to create a sort of second nature within the world of nature”.
Source(s): “The Ancient Appreciation of Mountain Scenery” _The Classical Journal_ by Walter Woodburn Hyde, Nov 1915, vol 11, no 2, pp 70-84. “Four Greco-Roman perspectives on humans and the environment,” by Adrienne Hagen, May 19, 2016, @edgeeffects.net.
