Mapping Memory and Myth: Environmental Humanities, Classical Texts, and the Geospatial Imagination

This chapter explores how classical literature encodes spatial and environmental memory through mythic narratives and how these can be reinterpreted using approaches from the spatial humanities. By engaging texts such as the Aeneid, Odyssey, and Metamorphoses, the study examines how rivers, forests, and seascapes serve as symbolic geographies that structure human-environment relations. Rather than presenting an empirical GIS model, this chapter proposes a symbolic cartographic reading of classical texts, combining interpretive hermeneutics with emerging digital tools. Through this lens, sacred groves, underworld rivers, and heroic journeys are reimagined as narrative maps that reflect early conceptions of landscape, ecology, and place. The chapter outlines how such symbolic mappings can support transdisciplinary dialog between classical philology, environmental humanities, and geospatial storytelling, offering a methodological framework for future research in mythocartography and memory-based spatial planning.