Deforestation

The most damaging environmental process that occurred during ancient Greek times was the widespread removal of forests and ensuing erosion. In a passage that has merited frequent quotation, Plato ( Critias 111B-D) observed that the mountains of his homeland, Attika, were heavily forested not long before his own time, but had been laid bare by the cutting oftimber and by grazing. The result was serious erosion that had washed away the rich, deep soil and consequently dried up the springs and streams that formerly existed there. Theophrastos (Historia Plantarum 3.2, 4, 6; 3.3.2; 4.5.5) recorded that wood of good quality, especially large trees useful for ships’ masts and temple roof beams, had disappeared from some areas and had to be sought in less accessible mountains.

Wood was the basic material for buildings, tools, machines, means of transportation, and fuel. So important was wood that its name (hyle in Greek) was a synonym for ‘‘substance’’ or ‘‘material.’’ Wood and its carbonized product, charcoal, were the most important fuels in households, public facilities, and industries, producing both heat and light. Consumption for fuel constituted the most extensive use of wood, accounting for perhaps 90 percent of its use. Metal refineries and pottery kilns used enormous amounts, placing great pressures on the forests. While some forestland was managed as coppice, where stems and branches are taken out selectively and the forest is allowed to regenerate, providing a sustained yield, it is hardly a coincidence that the areas around ancient mining centers became among the most deforested. Towns and cities demanded the services of woodcutters, charcoal burners, and haulers who brought fuels to market on the backs of mules or donkeys. Phainippos made twelve drachmas a day, then a large sum, by keeping six donkeys busy carrying firewood into Athens (Demosthenes 42.7).

Lumber for use as building material was a fundamental article of import to major Greek cities such as Athens. This commerce was carried on by water, and allowed the exploitation of forests along coastlands and rivers. Logs were floated down watercourses to ports, and there loaded on merchant ships. A typical lumber port would be located near the mouth of a river with a mountainous, forested watershed, like Thessalonike. Other ports important in wood export had the mountains right at their backs, like Antandros. Governments encouraged the timber trade through privileges, tax incentives, and advantageous leases.

The use of wood most often mentioned in Greek literature is shipbuilding. From keel to mast, almost everything in a ship came from trees, as did pitch to caulk the vessel. This applies to merchant vessels and warships alike, although authors give more attention to warships. Attempts to secure supplies of timber for the latter play a major role in ancient diplomacy and warfare. When Histiaios of Miletos founded a colony in Thrace, the Persian general Megabazos warned his king Dareios that the area was valuable because it had ‘‘abundance of timber for building ships and making oars’’ (Hdt. 5.23). In the Peloponnesian War, to give a second example, one of Athens’ purposes in launching the Sicilian Campaign was to conquer a source of shipbuilding timber (Thuc. 6.90). Later in the war, the Persian governor of Asia Minor helped the Spartans win by giving them access to the forests of Phrygian Mount Ida and advising them ‘‘not to be discouraged over a lack of ship’s timber, for there is plenty of that in the King’s land’’ (Xenophon Hellenika 1.1.24-5). Timber was also used for siege engines and other military purposes. Detachments of soldiers were sent to cut wood for fortifications and fuel. Deliberate destruction of forests, usually by fire, was sometimes used as a tactic in warfare. For example, Kleomenes of Sparta set fire to the sacred grove of Argos and burned 5,000 Argives alive (Hdt. 6.75-80). Even accidental setting of fire must have happened in warfare, granted the extremely combustible character of Greek forests in summer, the season of warfare. This is exactly what Thucydides says happened to the Spartans on the island of Sphakteria during the Athenian attack, when the forest caught fire and burned off, revealing the size of the Spartan force to their enemies (Thuc. 4.30). The fire was so convenient to the Athenians, however, that it is difficult not to suspect them of starting it. It is quite clear that warfare in all of its various aspects was a major force in the process of deforestation.

Strategies of warfare and diplomacy were often aimed at obtaining supplies of timber and other forest products such as pitch, and guarding the sea-lanes and roads over which they were transported. Historians saw timber supply as a major factor determining naval strategy. One way to get forests was to conquer them; Alkibiades told the Spartans that this was one of the Athenians’ major purposes in launching the Sicilian Campaign. Colonies were established as timber ports; thus Athens founded Amphipolis on the River Strymon below heavily forested mountains in Thrace, so it is understandable that there was consternation when the Spartans took that city.

Literature and inscriptions give considerable information, if limited in quantitative data, on the process of forest exploitation among the Greeks. Loggers took great pride in their work; a grave inscription on Mount Parnes announces, ‘‘I never saw a better woodcutter (hylotomon) than myself’’ (Zimmern 1961: 278). Such men knew the forests well; Theophrastos often takes advantage of the expertise of lumbermen from areas that supplied the Greek timber trade, including Macedonia, Mount Ida, and Arkadia. Trees were cut with double - or single-bitted axes, long metal saws with set teeth, and wedges. Smaller trees were uprooted by digging. The branches were then lopped off, and the logs pulled out by oxen or other draft animals. Large logs might have pairs of wheels attached to them to make hauling easier. After they arrived at a place where they could be prepared, logs were cut into sections of transportable length and split into thick beams and planks. Theophrastos (Historia Plantarum 5.1.5-12), guided by the experience of woodcutters he knew, gave directions for splitting pine and fir logs in the best way so as to take advantage of the grain. Those to be used as masts were kept whole. Finally, boards of the desired length and thickness could be sawn, with one man standing below, either in a pit or under a supported log.

Clearing of forests to make room for farming was a prominent feature of ancient history. New farms were established in forested regions. During the settlement of Cyprus, as noted below, in a kind of homestead guarantee, free land was offered for forest clearance and planting (Strabon 14.6.5). Lucretius said that woodcutters ‘‘made the woods climb higher up the mountains, leaving the foothills to be tilled and tended’’ (Lucretius De Rerum Natura 5.1247-9, 1370-1). A palynological study in the mountains of Macedonia indicates that pine forest was periodically cleared for planting wheat (Athanasiadis 1975). Trees were uprooted or cut down, the useful parts removed, and the rest burned and the ashes plowed under as fertilizer. Agriculture included some forestry; Greek farmers often did not clear all their land, but reserved sections as woodlots, so that the axe and saw were part of regular farm equipment. They planted trees for timber, and also to line roads, shelter fields, and mark boundaries. In spite of this, the archaeologist K. Greene (1986: 84) states, ‘‘The long-term environmental impact of both Roman and Greek farming appears to have been negative. Recent research has suggested that it was agricultural activity rather than climatic change which was responsible for the widespread soil erosion...of late Classical times.’’

Ancient writers were aware that cities stood where forests had once flourished. Forests of various types had covered most of the land surface at one time, however far in the past. Speaking of the disappearance of thyon trees from Kyrene, Theophrastos remarked (Historia Plantarum 5.3.7), ‘‘There was an abundance of those trees where now the city stands, and people can still recall that some of the roofs in ancient times

Were made of it.’’ Place names often preserved the memory of forests that had been encompassed by the growth of cities and towns. An Athenian fortress was designated Peuke (‘‘Pine’’). Of course the effects of urbanization were more far-reaching than the clearing of sites for cities; through the ever-extending tentacles of the timber trade, the needs of the city for wood grasped and denuded forests many miles away.

Southern Greece, closest to the cities with the greatest demand for timber, was deforested first. Classical writers give the impression that the devastation was extensive, since they describe places as wooded which were not so in later times, or mention forests that had disappeared in their own day. Traces of vanished forests persist in names of places that once played a part in the lumber trade, such as Elatea (‘‘Firtown’’), Pityoussa (‘‘Pineville’’), Kastanea (‘‘Chestnutburg’’), and Xylopolis (‘‘Timber City’’).

Exploitation of forests began near centers of demand such as cities and mining districts, and proceeded into more isolated places as time went on. The environs of Athens were mostly bare by the fifth century bce, and the nearby island of Euboia, where the relict forests suggest abundant original growth, produced only inferior timber once the requirements of the silver mines at Laureion had stripped it of accessible wood. Forestlands that were more easily reached were cleared first. Lowlands lost their trees before the mountains, and forests near rivers were exploited rather than those further away. The areas most praised as sources of good timber in classical times tend to be mountainous regions with heavier than average rainfall: Macedonia is the chief example. But it would be misleading to suggest that the progress of forest removal was steady and cumulative. Some forests were leveled, grew again, and were cut again a number of times. Although forests were seriously depleted in ancient times, not all of them were destroyed. Many tracts of forest, often in association with temples, were regarded as sacred groves and thus preserved.

Literary sources are not the only evidence for forest history. Much information comes from palynology, the study of pollen grains contained in stratified deposits, often in waterlogged places such as lakebeds, but also in soils and accumulations of dust in caves. Pollen is well preserved under certain conditions, and the grains from various plant species usually can be distinguished from one another, so that scientists can recover from a column of accumulated material such as lake sediments or cave-floor deposits a record of the relative abundance of pine trees, say, or grain, over a long period of time. The deposits can be dated by the radiocarbon method, and they sometimes provide unbroken records going back hundreds of thousands of years, as the lake-bottom sediments of Lake Pamvotis (or Lake loannina) do. However, there is a margin of error sufficient to make it often difficult to relate changes in vegetation to specific historical events. General observations can be made, nonetheless. Wild forests were much more extensive before human occupation. Pollen diagrams make it clear, however, that forest history is far from simple. In northern Greece, for example, palaeobotanists have discovered a pattern indicating that forests survived best in settled times, but when invasions occurred, peasants moved into refuge areas in the mountains, cleared the forests, and planted fields of wheat and barley (Athanasiadis 1975: 106-24). When conditions became more stable, they abandoned these retreats and moved down to the richer plains, allowing forests at higher elevations to recover. Because movements of peoples occurred often over the centuries in Macedonia, this cycle was repeated several times there. Palynology also shows that forests persisted in parts of the north down to medieval times, whereas they were gone in some populated areas of southern Greece as early as the Bronze Age. For example, pollen cores from Messenia show that pinewoods had disappeared from coastal areas near Pylos by the Late Bronze Age (Wright 1972: 199). Textual evidence in treaties between Athens and the Macedonian kings shows that in Classical and Hellenistic times the city had to depend on the forested north for timber. Not all Mediterranean forests were exploited in ancient times; remote mountains, particularly those located on strategic borderlands, escaped.

Ancient writers knew that the destruction attendant upon pastoralism included fire to clear brush and forests. These fires, as well as wildfires started by lightning or volcanic eruptions, usually burned until they reached a natural barrier or were put out by rains; they would not be fought unless they threatened a settlement. Fires during a long, dry summer are often catastrophic and bare the slopes to erosion, though many typical Mediterranean plants are adapted to fire and show remarkable powers of recovery if not prevented by grazing.

Local climates, also called microclimates, change when forests are removed. Deforested tracts become more arid and windy. The aridification of many parts of the Mediterranean is in part due to human interference with regional environments. Theophrastos (De Causis Plantarum 5.14.5) recorded changes in local climates that he had observed: after the trees had been cut down around Philippoi, for example, the waters dried up and the weather became warmer.

Deforestation inflated the price of wood. As abundant sources near the centers of consumption disappeared, it became rarer and had to be imported over longer distances. Increased prices were particularly noticeable for fine woods, but affected timber and fuel as well. Detailed lists survive from a few periods and places, and these seem to show a pattern of rising prices. Pay in kind for Athenian jurors included fuel-wood, the third necessity along with bread and opson (fish, fruit, etc.). The shortage and high cost of building timber due to deforestation contributed to a shift to stone construction; baked bricks were not used because they would have required wood fuels for firing; but stone construction in turn made buildings more dangerous in Greece’s frequent earthquakes. Deforestation also increased costs of transportation, due not only to the greater distances merchants had to go to find wood, but also to scarcity of timber adjacent to shipbuilding centers, which drove up the price of the ships themselves. Warships had priority over merchant vessels in competition for materials.

The importance of timber supply and the effects of deforestation and erosion were evident to ancient observers, who often lamented them. Therefore it is not surprising that governments as well as private landowners exercised care in assuring a continued supply of wood from the forests under their control. A city generally asserted its ownership of all unoccupied forestland within its territory. Supervision of forests and watersheds included regulation of the forest products trade, the timber harvest, and the construction of works to provide or control water supply, drainage, and erosion. Responsibility for these matters was delegated to designated officials; in some cities the timber trade was under agoranomoi (overseers of commerce), while forestland in the countryside was supervised by hyloroi (custodians of forests) who, says Aristotle (Politics 6.5.4; 7.11.4), had ‘‘guard-posts and mess-rooms for patrol duty.’’ It was a recurrent policy of governments to encourage private exploitation of forests by leasing the right to cut trees on public land, which was a source of revenue, or by sale or grant of public forestland to entrepreneurs. During the Greek settlement of Cyprus, rulers ‘‘permitted anyone who wished, or was able, to cut the timber and keep the land thus cleared as his own property, exempt from taxes’’ (Strabon 14.6.5). Aware of a diminishing wood supply, the state sometimes regulated private land to encourage conservation. Plato’s recommendation that landowners be fined if fire spread from their property to a neighbor’s timber doubtless represented actual law. Land leases might contain restrictions on timber cutting and stipulations for replanting.

A city had its own public forestlands. Although they were often granted to individuals or communities, large tracts remained in government hands, and measures were taken to prevent encroachment and assure their use for the good of the state. Wise administrators limited timber harvest; Theophrastos (Historia Plantarum 5.8.1) said that in Cyprus, ‘‘the kings used not to cut the trees... because they took great care of them and managed them.’’ He added that later rulers of that island reaped the benefit of their predecessors’ restraint; Demetrios Poliorketes cut timber ofprodigious length there for his ships. Some magistrates were foresighted enough to protect public lands against greed-motivated exploitation, and found popular support for their efforts. Unfortunately such efforts were far from universal, were not always effective, and were vitiated by other policies that encouraged exploitation and destruction of forests.