Author: Lindsay Davies
Since the earliest times, works of art have left a complex record of human arrogance towards the environment that, as educators, we have a responsibility to expose and discuss with our students. I confess to feeling somewhat of a latecomer to the importance of developing ecological consciousness in the classroom. We are quite familiar at this point with the need to read for the historical evidence of gender, race, and class bias, and our globalized curriculum has increased the necessity for such awareness. However, there has been scant discussion of the value of reconsidering our anthropomorphic bias and marking its long history. I owe a large debt to the pedagogy and core values of a small but profoundly ecologically aware college in Bar Harbor, Maine—The College of the Atlantic—for my own current rethinking of how I approach the cultural materials I teach.
I will begin with birds, not trees, and a quotation from Aldo Leopold’s moving essay “On a Monument to the Pigeon” (1949):
We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution […] we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest (116-117).
Without doubt, the awareness of our place as fellow-voyagers, and our need to respect, conserve, protect the entire biotic enterprise is dawning on more people as the years roll on. In fact, since the 1970s, intellectuals from many disciplines have been arguing for a new ecological world view. As the late George Sessions put it, “the eco-philosopher does not find it possible to engage in the luxury of holding that ‘the proper study of man is man’” (391). In 1994, NYU performance scholar and eco-critic Una Chaudhuri pointed out that “whether we like it or not, the ecological crisis is a crisis in values. Ecological victory will require a transvaluation so profound as to be nearly unimaginable at present. And in this the arts and humanities […] must play a role” (25). Despite many similar articulations, however, such a “transvaluation” remains largely unimaginable and the humanist assumption that “man is the measure of all things” continues to hold sway in academic discourse. Given the urgency of our environmental condition, I think there is a need to respond in practical terms to Chaudhuri’s call. So I have begun to grapple with what it means to teach the Liberal Studies global humanities curriculum while attempting also to raise ecological consciousness. Using the Iliad as the case study, I want to explain what I mean by reading (and teaching) against the anthropocentric grain.
The funeral games for Patroklos, in Book 23 of the Iliad, end with an archery contest. The target is a wild pigeon tied with a thin string, by her foot, to a ship’s mast. The first contender, Teukros misses the bird but hits the string, and severs it. “The pigeon/soared swift up toward the sky, while the string dropped and dangled/toward the ground” (23:867-69). Meriones then steps up to shoot:
Way up under the clouds he saw the tremulous wild dove
and as she circled struck her under the wing in the body
and the shaft passed clean through and out of her, so that it dropped back
and stuck in the ground beside the foot of Meriones, but the bird
dropped and fell on top of the mast of the dark-prowed vessel
and drooped her neck and the beating wings went slack, and the spirit
of life fled swift away from her limbs. Far down from the mast peak
she dropped to earth. And the people gazed upon it and wondered.
(23.874-881)
–As well might we.
This is a very rare moment in the epic when the death of a non-human creature prompts reflection in men. You might argue that the wonder recorded here is at the skill of the archer. But the emotional emphasis of the passage is on the fate of the tremulous bird, struck down in a flight for freedom. The rhythms and conjunctions of this translation render the action in cinematic slow-motion. The bird drops, lands briefly on the mast top, droops, goes slack, and finally falls to earth.
To ascribe to these on-lookers regret at the killing of a wild creature for sport would be an anachronistic misreading. But the wondering recorded here is nevertheless the recognition of relation and common organic condition. Birds, like humans, strive for survival yet are doomed to finitude. And more, this bird, like the men fighting the Trojan War, is struck down in its prime by the destructive actions of humanity. What is enacted in this small moment of wondering is the human imaginative impulse to make comparisons, an activity that is infused throughout the Homeric epics in the many similes that illuminate the human events of the poems through comparison with natural ones. What is strikingly different here, however, is that the pigeon’s death is not “off-stage” as a distant reference point, but squarely situated in the present action of the scene. It matters even if very briefly, because it shifts our focus, directly not adjacently, from the business of men onto the natural environment impacted by this business. Such direct references to the natural world, as opposed to referential ones, are very rare in the Iliad.
In 1844, scientist and explorer Alexander Von Humboldt, in his treatise titled Cosmos, noted the anthropocentricism of the Greeks: “The description of nature in its manifold richness of form…was wholly unknown to the Greeks. The landscape appears among them merely as the back-ground of the picture of which human figures constitute the main subject” (22). In Greek representation, the human figure trumps everything else; this has been acknowledged by Schiller, Ruskin, and even Plato himself (in the Critias). In his illuminating essay on “The Representation of Nature in Early Greek Art,” Jeffrey Hurwit remarks, “The heroes of the Iliad act in a narrative world that, for all we are told of it, is practically barren” (35).
Hurwit’s actual focus is the representation of nature and landscape (or lack thereof) in Greek painting from the Archaic to the early Classical period. He observes that
the world of Archaic art happens to be essentially the same as the primary world of the Iliad—a narrative world that is virtually a natural vacuum […] and the percentage of Archaic vases that bear the image of even a single tree or rock is, compared to those vases that bear nothing but human figures, very small indeed. (36)
Natural elements in Archaic painting tend to be either narrative props, vague topographical markers, or symbols of some kind Palm trees, for example, are used as symbols of arête or victory. In this 6th century BC vase the palm fronds (five behind Achilles and four behind Ajax) serve as a sign of Achilles’ superiority. They function in effect as scoreboards of the game being played. More frequently, trees in Archaic and early Classical art are “little and spindly” (Hurwit 36), convenient for drawing attention to the human activity or relegated to useful scene props [e.g. here].
Trees in the Iliad are used similarly. The oak tree at the walls of Troy serves as location marker and gathering spot; and the humble tamarisk is twice used as a place to hang or lean weapons. Forests are referenced only in relation to funerals. Twice forests are felled to build pyres for ritual burning. My title refers to Priam’s instructions to the Trojans at the end of the Iliad to go outside the city and bring back timber for Hektor’s funeral pyre. “Nine days they spent in bringing an endless supply of timber” (24.783-784). Similarly, in Book 23, the Greeks raid the landscape for timber for Patroklos’ pyre:
They set to hewing with the thin edge of bronze and leaning
Their weight to the strokes on towering-leafed oak trees that toppled
With huge crashing… (23.118-120)
Forests have also been felled for the building of the Greek ships, and chariots and weapons on both sides of the battle. There are a lot of trees in this poem, though it is hard to see them. The resources provided by nature for the achievements of men are clearly there for the taking, without second thought. The Iliad does not have an ecological consciousness. Trees are for the business of men. In the Iliad, you are more likely to see the wood than the trees; trees are resource not life form.
There are, of course, more obvious points to make about the representation of nature in the Iliad. It is well known that the similes, while offering exquisite observations of the natural world, are employed to augment images of human experience and behavior. Agamemnon, for example, sheds tears “like a spring dark-running/that down the face of a rock impassable drips its dim water” (9.13-15). But reading against the anthropocentric grain, to me, means bringing out from the shadows cast by human endeavor those places where non-human life is shown to co-exist and interplay with humanity, as opposed to functioning as poetic ornament and metaphorical referent. The rebellion of the River Skamandros in Book 21 is an interesting case, as the one big scene where the human relationship to the natural environment is the issue of the narrative, for that relationship is marked as fiercely antagonistic. It is also presented as a cosmic battle (the river is “fed from the bright sky” 21.326) as opposed to an earthly one: Achilles, the great-grandson of Zeus, is pitted against Xanthos, God of the Skamandros River.
Xanthos is also (confusingly) the name of Achilles’ horse. As extensions of the warriors in battle, horses are privileged creatures in the Iliad. Distinct from the hundreds of dumb beasts led to sacrificial slaughter—bulls, oxen, goats, heifers, rams, lambs—horses are ennobled, and in the case of Xanthos even capable of human speech. At the end of Book 19 he speaks to Achilles, and reminds him that it is the fault of the gods not the horses that Patroklos fell and that Achilles himself will fall too (19.404-424). Xanthos and his companion Balios are particularly special horses as they are of divine descent, connected as much to the bright sky as to the bountiful earth. According to mythology, these horses were the offspring of a Harpy named Podarge and Zephyrus, the god of the West Wind. In this lineage, super-swift horses are associated with wingéd things, and things of the æther not the earth.
So we return to birds. For the Ancient Greeks, birds are the only creatures to be “in direct contact with the divine realm. Birds’ ability to fly and their speed of flight contrast with the poverty of human physical abilities and suggest a link to that which is unknown” (Anhalt 280-281). Birds are also messengers from gods to men. Freely traversing two worlds in nature—sky and land—birds are the primary way that gods were thought to communicate with humanity, and transmit future events through signs. Indeed, not only do gods speak in “winged words” in the Iliad, but their forms often turn bird-like: Zeus appears in his eagle form, Apollo aids Hektor “in the likeness of a rapid / hawk, the dove’s murderer and swiftest of all things flying” (15.237-238); Iris the messenger is “of the golden wings”; and even the god of the oceans, Poseidon, “burst[s] into winged flight himself, like a hawk with quick wings” (13.62; see Élan Potter).
While gods and birds, and gods as birds, can transcend the earth and move with such swiftness as would appear to defy time and space, trees are rooted and stuck in muddy place. They exist solely on the terrestrial horizontal plane, to be felled just as the pine in the simile used to describe the death of Sarpedon:
He fell, as when an oak tree goes down on white poplar,
or like a towering pine tree which in the mountains the carpenters
have hewn down with their whetted axes to make ship timber.
(14.482-484)
A human ecological reading of the Iliad requires us to recognize that in the world of the poem, humans, in their mobility of mind and body—remember swift-footed Achilles—are greater than trees and beasts. They transcend the earth through their imagination and ingenuity, if not in their bodies. Their eyes are cast upwards to the sky for meaning, not downwards to the earth. In this context, as Robert Pogue Harrison argues in his great study of the meaning of forests in culture, it becomes imperative to clear the trees, for “Where divinity has been identified with the sky, or with the eternal geometry of the stars, or with cosmic infinity, or with ‘heaven,’ the forests become monstrous, for they hide the prospect of god” (6, italics in original). This association of the sky with transcendence also explains the significance of Homer’s poor pigeon whose death causes warriors to wonder. For the bird struck down while striving to fly skyward potently symbolizes the quest for heroic glory, that which appeared to turn a man into a god yet simultaneously guaranteed that he would bite the dust.
As Aldo Leopold considers the Wisconsin monument to the passenger pigeon—that “feathered lightening” that is no more—he points out that only humans memorialize what is gone. “To love what was is a new thing under the sun, unknown to most people and to all pigeons” (119). The Passenger Pigeon’s love was for present things: “the clustered grape and bursting beechnut […] to find them required only the free sky, and the will to ply his wings” (119). But to see what we have done and been, and to “conceive of destiny as becoming” are indeed things possible for us if not for the beasts and birds. To do so requires only the free sky and the will to ply our wings.
Works Cited
Anhalt, Emily Katz. “Barrier and Transcendence: The Door and the Eagle in Iliad 24.314-21.” Classical Quarterly 45 (ii), 1995: 280-295.
Chaudhuri, Una. “’There Must Be a Lot of Fish in That Lake’: Toward an Ecological Theater.” Theater, Spring/Summer 1994: 23-31.
Harrison, Robert Pogue. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Homer. Iliad. Trans. Richard Lattimore. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Hurwit, Jeffrey M. “The Representation of Nature in Early Greek Art.” Studies in the History of Art. Vol. 32. Symposium Papers XVI: New Perspectives in Early Greek Art. 1991: 32-62.
Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac: with Essays on Conservation from Round River. New York: Ballantine, 1966.
Potter, Élan. “Birds Breaching Two Worlds in the Iliad.” Henderson State University. http://www.hsu.edu/academicforum/2009-2010/Potter.pdf
Sessions, George. “Shallow and Deep Ecology: A Review of the Philosophical Literature.” Ecological Consciousness: Essays from the Earthday X Colloquium, University of Denver, April 21-24, 1980. Eds. Robert C. Schultz and J. Donald Hughes. Washington DC: University Press of America, 1981: 391-462.
Von Humboldt, Alexander. Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, 2. Trans. E.C. Otté. New York, 1944.