David Luca Lepidi

About David’s Research:

My project focuses on ancient understandings of the perceptive and psychological capacities of plants. It aims to show how, despite the dominant anthropocentric approach to the conception of the vegetable kingdom in ancient literature, there existed alternative traditions that viewed the boundaries between living beings as porous and recognised plants as sentient and autonomous beings. Ancient Greek philosophical discussions on the life of plants often centred on the question of the soul, and whether plants were endowed with the same life processes as animals and human beings. While some thinkers attributed to plants the ability to perceive their surroundings, respond to environmental stimuli and threats, and even think, establishing a sense of kinship between all living beings, others denied such capacities, maintaining a strict hierarchy of life. A central concern of this dissertation will then be the extent to which those philosophical doctrines which did recognise plant sentience influenced views of plants in the Roman world, affecting the way the process of cultivation and, more generally, the relationship between human beings and the natural world, was understood and represented. Careful examination of this topic will reveal how the relationship between the ancient Greeks and Romans and the vegetable kingdom was a complicated one, often involving a sense of deep appreciation of and connectedness with the life of the latter.