Reply To: Mon 17 March: Greece and Revisionist Environmental History

Nik Petek
Reply to Sabbath Sunday

I like how you summarised Rackham’s argument and also made it widely applicable. It is always dangerous to use pseudo-historians as sources, but we also need to think about the sources they used. I would (thinking about it after reading Rackham) not advise to use Homer as a reliable source. The two writings that I know him for – the Iliad and the Odyssey – might have a grain of truth in them. But his main purpose was to tell an epic story, thus adding fiction and fantasy into the story. Neither should we consider any and every ancient Greek and Roman text as the absolute truth, the way they have been in the texts that Rackham criticises. As he himself states in the chapter, the British were conserving their forests as is clearly visible in the earthworks surrounding them, but nowhere is it mentioned. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But not every evidence is a reliable evidence. I think revisionist history was a necessary part of the historical discipline to garner self-awareness among historians themselves, and to make history a more reliable source of evidence.