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Oliver Rackham
been filled out with detail by all the research done on Greece since the 1780s. Specialist books ought to have been written on each aspect of it. This has not happened. The Sonnini theory is very much alive, and has been the subject in the last ten years of many books and articles and of the television programme The First Eden; but it is still based on the few ancient texts that were all the evidence that Sonnini had. Scholars are tempted to exaggerate the extent of woodland in antiquity, and to play down its extent today. They seldom ask whether noble forests and crystal fountains still exist. The fact is that Athens had roughly as much forest in classical times as in the 1920s, and less than it has now (Rackham 1983). In the classical period there were regular arrangements for carrying wood, and perhaps timber, to the city for ordinary purposes. Demosthenes describes a farm that had six donkeys working all the time taking hylê to market. As Russell Meiggs points out, the low price implies that it was wood rather than timber that was taken, but there is hardly enough information to work out the quantity. For serious construction Athens had to bring timber from Macedonia or Sicily. Control of these sources was one of the main objectives of Athenian foreign policy (Meiggs 1982, ch. 7). Timber supply was much more of a problem for Athens than for Rome. Scholars too often assume that ancient accounts of trees imply tall trees1 and forests; they forget about maquis and savanna. In reality, ancient authors may not have made the same distinction between ‘forest’ and ‘scrub’ that modern English, and especially American, writers make. Tree pollen can as easily come from maquis or savanna as from forest. Hughes (1983) collects all that ancient historians, poets, and philosophers said about cutting down trees—even sacred trees, olive groves, and orchards—and claims that this added up to deforestation. This is unwarranted. Deforestation is tree-felling not balanced by regrowth. Human nature is such that people, especially literary writers, take notice of sudden changes such as felling but are most unlikely to notice the gradual regrowth. The only exception that I know in all antiquity is the statement by Eratosthenes that charcoal-burning and shipbuilding could not keep up with the growth of trees in Cyprus (quoted in Strabo, 14. 1
An assertion often expressly made by McNeill 1992.