Geological Processes and Deep Time in Early Greek Prose

The discovery of deep time has traditionally been credited to geologists and naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to these traditional narratives, scientific heroes, such as James Hutton, Charles Lyell, and Charles Darwin, used the weight of empirical evidence to liberate humanity from the superstitious grip of Christian chronology. Before this point, apparently no one had offered any serious challenge to the orthodoxy that the earth was created in 4004 BCE. My fellowship at the Center for Hellenic Studies allowed me to complete a book manuscript that uncovers a radically different story in classical antiquity, according to which the ancient inhabitants of the Mediterranean basin had observed the incremental progress made by the geological processes of sedimentation and erosion in reshaping their environments and from such observations had extrapolated much larger timescales for the age of the earth than those made possible by the shallow reach of recorded history and collective memory. These larger timescales extended anywhere between the tens of thousands of years mentioned by Herodotus to the eternity championed by Aristotle. Rather than using such evidence to argue for an unambiguous embrace of deep time before the advent of Christianity, however, the book demonstrates that classical philosophers and historians struggled with the implications of these deeper, geologic timescales and the intellectual problems of scale that they raised.

During my fellowship, I was able to complete drafts of my introduction, first chapter, and epilogue. The first chapter argues that Ionian philosophy and its various forms of geological speculation can be understood partly as a reaction to the rapidly advancing coastlines in western Turkey due to sedimentation, particularly that of the Maeander Valley, as early philosophers extrapolated a larger model of the earth’s history from this limited phenomenon. In doing so, it argues that such gradual, incremental processes were not readily comprehensible within Greek conceptions of divinity and that this gave rise to the early materialism of the Ionian philosophers, in which the familiar interpretative frameworks associated with the divine were largely sidelined. The ensuing chapters explore how these early Ionian narratives of the earth’s deterioration over time were contested by Plato, Aristotle and the Peripatetics, who championed a homeostatic understanding of the earth-system. The epilogue demonstrates that, though geological processes like the interpretation of sedimentation and erosion largely ceased to be a fruitful topic of discussion for philosophers in the Hellenistic period, the earlier tradition’s discussion of deep time and the various problems of scale that it raised persisted into the Roman period. That enduring influence is illustrated with several examples drawn from the geographer Strabo alongside Ovid, Pliny the Elder, and Pausanias. These examples also gesture towards new themes in the Roman period, such as an increasing concern with the impact of humans upon their environments and a newfound focus on the aesthetics of deep time.

In the course of writing this epilogue during my fellowship, I spent a considerable amount of time familiarizing myself with the development of meteorology after Aristotle and began working on several problems within this broader philosophical tradition. The fruits of this work include a piece on submarine eruptions and the possibility of a textual emendation in the pseudo-Aristotelian On The Cosmos. The basic argument of this short article is that a reference to the growth of trees in the transmitted text is corrupt and that the Greek should be emended to refer to volcanic ejecta produced by a submarine eruption instead. The article has been accepted by the journal Phoenix and will appear in the latter half of 2026.