The myths and legends of Ancient Greeks and Romans are more than mere stories of supernatural events. They reflect the collective consciousness of societies deeply connected with their natural environment. The Greeks and Romans viewed the gods and divinities which populated their myths as anthropomorphised representations of natural forces, and throughout ancient literature they had the capacity to produce catastrophic changes in the environment. Zeus/Jupiter ruled the sky and sent down thunder, lightning and storms, Poseidon/Neptune inhabited the sea and could create destructive tidal waves and floods, and Hephaestus/Vulcan controlled the fire of volcanoes and the arid deserts alongside his better-known command of forging and metalworking. These gods all exerted their wrath on mortals by weaponising the natural forces they controlled.
One of the most illustrative examples of this phenomenon is the myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which depicted a catastrophic flood that destroyed everything in its path. The flood was sent as a punishment by Jupiter, king of the gods, with Neptune’s aid, to cleanse the earth of the insolent, impious human race. They opened the rivers and brought down torrential storms from the sky, ravaging the landscape until it was filled with endless waves, described by Ovid as a ‘sea without a shore’. The only survivors were the gracious, god-fearing couple Deucalion and Pyrrha. They repopulated the earth by throwing stones over their shoulders, signalling the new human race’s connection to and reverence of the earth, in stark comparison to their hubristic forebears.
A reader may spot similarities between this tale and others of disastrous floods – like the biblical Noah’s Ark or the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh. Interestingly, each of these tales narrate a similar catastrophic flooding event in which the climate is destroyed and very few survivors remain. Geological evidence suggests that the eastern Mediterranean region experienced changes in sea levels and catastrophic flooding in the centuries before the Greeks and Roman civilisations flourished. Stories of the flood, passed down in the cultural memory of the Greeks and Romans by oral tradition and eventually written down, may have gradually begun to attribute the events to divine wrath in order to conceptualise the scale and magnitude of the disaster. These tales are all linked by an assertion that this event was a punishment from a divine figure, intended to cleanse the earth of an arrogant human population.
Overall, depictions of climate change through a lens of divine punishment in ancient myths may be read as a transmitted understanding among ancient cultures that the climate has the capacity to retaliate against human abuse. Perhaps this should be a warning sign to us that the consequences of disrespect and abuse of our own natural environment could be catastrophic. By examining how the ancients deified and mythologised natural disasters into apocalyptic proportions, perhaps we can begin to understand how formidably dangerous the looming climate disaster may really be.