Epic of the Earth

While Euripides and Natasha Pulley both imagine what Bronze Age Greece might have been like for the purposes of their fiction, there are plenty of Classicists who do their best to find out what it was really like. That includes literary critics. The works ascribed to Homer are believed to have been written down almost 3000 years ago, and since that time they have been the subject of review and debate. There were literary critics in Classical Greece (around 500 BCE), in the Roman Empire, in Byzantium, and in Renaissance Europe who wrote at length about the Iliad and Odyssey. Not even Shakespeare can claim to have been so well studied.

Each successive generation of critics will, inevitably, see the works of Homer (and I’m assuming that there was a Homer for brevity’s sake) through the cultural lenses of their own time. It is therefore inevitable that someone should write a book that sees the Iliad as a work of climate fiction. That book is Edith Hall’s Epic of the Earth.

As I note in my review of The Hymn to Dionysus, there is considerable academic speculation that the Bronze Age Collapse was caused, at least in part, by climate factors. But it could equally have been precipitated by economic factors. As Hall skillfully points out, the Iliad is absolutely stuffed full of references to profligate use of natural resources, in particular, trees.

Think about it. There may not have been a thousand ships, but there must have been a lot, and they all needed wood to build them. Then there were to fortifications that the Achaeans built on the Plain of Troy from which to mount their assault on the city. They would have brought smiths with them to repair their weapons and armour, and to make new ones. That too required a plentiful supply of wood to feed the furnaces. The poem is also full of mentions of huge funeral pyres on which dead heroes were burned. And that’s without mentioning the daily requirement for cooking fires for that vast army.

Now of course the Iliad is fiction. But there is genuine archaeological evidence of the changes wrought upon the natural world by mankind in ancient times. North Africa, for example, was considerably less desert-like until the Romans managed to make a mess of things by straining the land’s agricultural capacity to breaking point. Some bright spark has also calculated how much wood would have to be burned to have created the quantity of Iron Age slag that has been found around the Mediterranean. It amounts to 926 soccer fields of trees annually.

Hall has a particularly graphic example from Israel. The Timna Valley was once forested (with acacia and broom). But it was also an area rich in copper ore. There are thousands of mines, and ten major processing sites with furnaces that date from the 11th century BCE. By the mid 10th century they were running out of trees and having to import them, and by the 9th century the industry collapsed. The area is now a desert and the local environment has still not fully recovered from the industrial pollution.

The text of the Iliad also contains some remarkable passages about the power of the natural world, and why men should respect it. Achilles, as we all know, was eventually killed by stealth and treachery: Paris shot a poisoned arrow at the only part of his body that could be pierced by a weapon. But Achilles was defeated by an enemy in the story, and only lived to see out his fate because Hera sent Hephaestus rescue him. That enemy was the River Scamander, which had become thoroughly pissed off with being a dumping ground for the Achaeans’ rubbish, and for the corpses of dead Trojans. Here’s Emily Wilson (book 21: 360-370):

Cascading under him, the surging river
wore out his body, and defeated him,
nibbling the dust away beneath his feet.
Achilles, son of Peleus, looked up
towards the spreading sky and groaned aloud.
“Pity me, father Zeus! See how no god
is willing to defend me from the river!
After this, anything is bearable.”

So much for the evidence, but what is the point? Well, Hall hopes that by highlighting the environmental messages hidden in plain sight in one of the most famous pieces of literature in the world, she can get us to think more responsibly about how we treat the natural world. It is a bold and welcome initiative, but I’m not sure that she pulls it off.

My first concern is that the book is not very accessible. Hall’s scholarship is prodigious. I learned a huge amount about the Iliad from reading this book. But it is very dense. If you want an easy to read introduction to Bronze Age Greece, Emily Hauser’s Mythica is a much better bet. If you want thorough and detailed scholarship, Hall delivers.

I’m also wondering who, aside from us ancient history nerds, would actually care. Ask people what they remember about the recent Troy movie and they will probably mention Brad Pitt’s CGI muscles. The BBC series became mired in the UK’s idiotic culture wars, and was apparently not very good. The people outside the Classics world who care a lot about the Iliad are, sadly, the people who think that Achilles was a hero. They are not the sort of people who are likely to listen to an environmentalist message. They are much more likely to go and cut down some trees just to ‘own the libs’.

So while I think that the Iliad contains many valuable lessons about responsible use of natural resources, I’m not sure that Hall has delivered those lessons in a manner than will make them accessible to the general reader. Which is a shame, because it is a very laudable project.

Title: Epic of the Earth
By: Edith Hall
Publisher: Yale University Press
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