Environmental Problems of the Greeks and Romans by J. Donald Hughes

Author:J. Donald Hughes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2014-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

Ten

Urban Problems

The impact of ancient cities on the natural environment—the land and its resources, air and water, and animal and plant populations—produced problems prefiguring many of those familiar in modern settings, such as air and water pollution, traffic and noise, and difficult decisions regarding land use and urban planning. The urban environment received graphic criticism in ancient times. The most vocal complaints were directed against the defects of Rome, then the world’s largest city, by its own poets. “The smoke, the wealth, the noise of Rome”1 repelled Horace, who also objected to suburban encroachment on fertile farmlands. Martial inveighed against the noise pollution that disturbed his sleep, cataloguing its many sources, including predawn traffic, busy bakers, metalworkers’ incessant hammers, and loud schoolteachers.2 Juvenal expanded the list of urban ills, decrying traffic congestion, fires, public works projects that destroyed natural beauty, chamber pots emptied out upper-story windows, and ever-increasing crime and vandalism. “Where have we ever seen a place so dismal and lonely,” he groaned. “We’d not be better off there than afraid, as we are here, of fires, / Roofs caving in, and the thousand risks of this terrible city?”3 Though complained about most by Romans, urban environmental ills also existed elsewhere. Athens, Alexandria, and scores of others suffered from crowding, noise, air and water pollution, accumulation of wastes, plagues, and additional dangers to life and limb. Impacts of cities on the natural environment were not limited to their immediate neighborhood because each city made demands upon the resources of a hinterland of considerable extent, even in many cases overseas.

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