The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek and Roman Culture by Jason König (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek and Roman Culture by Jason König
• Micah Myers

Jason König. The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek and Roman Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022. Pp. xxx, 444. $45.00. ISBN 9780691201290.

Jason König’s monograph casts new emphasis on the role of mountains in ancient Mediterranean literature, art, and lived experience, from archaic Greece to early Christian contexts. König’s wide-ranging book, part of an even broader project on mountains funded by the Leverhulme Trust,¹ offers something for many readers, including Classicists interested in landscape, geography, and ecocriticism, as well as scholars from the cross-disciplinary field of “mountain studies.” It is also an embodied text, sprinkled with descriptions of the author’s own hikes up various peaks, especially in Greece. König views these mountain treks as having helped him understand his subject. He also expresses hope that his ascents will encourage others to follow the same scholarly and mountainous paths.

The book is divided into four thematic sections. The first looks at mountains as places of divine-human interface. Chapter 1 reviews archaeological and textual evidence for summit altars, convincingly demonstrating the importance of mountains as places of worship around the Mediterranean. The next three chapters turn to literary sources: archaic Greek hexameter poetry (chapter 2); Pausanias (chapter 3); and biblical and early Christian pilgrimage traditions, from Exodus to Egeria (chapter 4). König’s discussion highlights that mountains feature repeatedly as spaces where humans and gods engage through religious ritual and divine epiphany, whether in the poetic present or the mythological or biblical past.

In the second section, “Mountain Vision,” König returns to an argument put forward in the preface: that his book challenges the notion found in earlier mountain studies scholarship that only in the late eighteenth century did mountains come to be “appreciated as places of beauty and sublimity” (xx). Chapter 5 surveys examples of mountains described as beautiful and sublime from across classical literature, including Aeschylus, [Longinus] On the Sublime, and Lucretius. Chapter 6 focuses on volcanoes, particularly Mount Etna, as awe-inspiring objects of vision in sources ranging from Pindar to the Pseudo-Vergilian Aetna. Chapter 7, one of the strongest, considers mountains in Greek and Roman art. König argues that miniaturizing mountains or representing them as a rock or rock pile is not a matter of indifference. To the contrary, mountains were: “crowded with symbolic and narrative associations; it would have taken only a cursory representation of the summit to activate those associations for viewers” (124-6). Vision becomes a less explicit theme in the last two chapters in the section. Chapter 8 is a compressed exploration of mountains in Latin poetry, mostly of the Augustan period, with forays into Greek antecedents. Chapter 9 focuses on Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. König demonstrates how the harsh mountain landscapes [End Page 339] through which Lucius passes in the course of his time as an ass reflect the cruelties that he is forced to endure across the text.

Part 3, “Mountain Conquest” is the most cohesive section of the book. It explores Greek and Roman historiographical representations of mountains, especially military expeditions through mountainous terrain, and instances where military leaders are distinguished by their ability to respond to the upland landscapes that they encounter (chapters 10 and 11). Chapter 12 focuses on Strabo, in whose work König discerns two types of representations of mountains: they are sometimes linked with uncivilized spaces and peoples; at other times mountains are seen as incorporated into surrounding communities. This wild/domesticated dichotomy breaks down occasionally, most notably in Strabo’s description of his home territory, Pontus (227-8). König’s analysis of Ammianus Marcellinus (chapter 13) reinforces themes from the earlier chapters in the section, reflecting enduring tropes about mountains as “wild and barely controllable places on the edges of civilization” (242).

Chapter 14, the first chapter of the final section of the book, “Living in the Mountains,” considers evidence for connectivity between mountains, mountain dwellers, and surrounding regions. The manner in which this chapter situates mountains in the broader context of Mediterranean environmental, geographical, and economic systems...