The Hiera Orgas:  Land Use and
Environmental Politics in Classical Greece

Timothy Howe (St. Olaf College)

In his background to the so-called Great Peloponnesian war, Thucydides lists the Corcyrean affair, Potidaia, and the Megarian Decree as the decisive events that brought Sparta and Athens to blows.  Of these, the final straw was the Megarian Decree.  Around 432 BCE, Pericles of Athens formally accused the Megarians of cultivating the Hiera Orgas, or Holy Meadow, located between Athens and Megara (Thuc. 1.139).  Plutarch (Pericles  30.2), agrees, observing that Perikles "publicly accused the Megarians of fencing off the Hiera Orgas  and he proposed a decree that a herald be sent both to them and to the Spartans denouncing the Megarians."  This denouncement had little effect and the continued violation of the orgas by the Megarians prompted the Athenians to announce that they would close their ports and markets to Megara, the so-called Megarian decree.   By contextualizing the Hiera Orgas and the Megarian decree within the environmental politics of Greek sacred pasture lands, such as the jockeying over the Sacred Land of Apollo near Delphi, this paper argues that the accepted view of the orgas as merely a pretext for the War is incomplete.  Scholars such as H, Bowden (Classical Athens and the Delphic Oracle (Cambridge: 2005)), have overlooked the fact that Athenian condemnation of the Megarians for appropriating this important "unfarmed" land fits within an established dialogue of ancient Greek "environmental politics."  Moreover, the fact that the elite of Athens were heavily involved in market-oriented animal production and regularly exploited shrine-owned and especially border grazing, suggests the Megarian action had real repercussions for the Athenian economy and was not simply a rhetorical pretext for war.  Indeed, when Megara seizes the Orgas 80 years later once again the Athenians prepare for war ([Dem.] 13.32-3; IG  II2 204).