Francesca Martelli (University of California, Los Angeles)
The Anthropocene is a famously contested concept. The initial caution with which geologists' hedged their claim that the Holocene had been superseded by a new epoch of geological time, marked by human intervention (Crutzen 2002), has given way to further debates about when this new epoch began: with the industrial revolution; the Columbian exchange; or, indeed, with the advent of agriculture. Social scientists have highlighted further problems with the name given to this new epoch: reinstating Anthropos as the dominating agent in our current phase of geological history goes against posthumanist attempts to displace the human from the centre of such narratives; while casting Anthropos, as a totality, as responsible for the interventions currently shaping the planet at this time of ecological catastrophe elides over the historic socio-economic and racial disparities that divide human responsibility for this crisis (Moore 2016). More recently, however, Bruno Latour has recuperated the Anthropocene as a heuristic tool for highlighting, not so much the sovereignty of Anthropos over the 'natural' world, but the extent to which the human is now distributed in the material world -- enmeshed in the feedback loops that make visible her implication in the earth's atmosphere, to be traced eventually as sediment in stratified layers of rock. According to this reasoning, the Anthropocene is a fitting term to describe an epoch like ours that is both 'posthuman' and 'postnatural' (Latour 2017, 111-45).
If the Anthropocene may be dated to the dawn of agriculture, this description may apply no less to the epoch of Classical antiquity, the cultures of which display deep qualms about the potential disturbance wielded by humans on the physical biosphere. In this paper, I want to argue that Ovid's Metamorphoses evinces a view of naturecultures that answers to the terms of Latour's recuperation of the Anthropocene in quite precise ways. Many readings of the poem have demonstrated how the human figures within it relate to the non-human beings that they become through various modes of metaphorical or metonymical proximity. Rock-like in her grief, Niobe becomes a rock; other episodes likewise make use of such metaphoric relations in order to encourage readers to 'think like a mountain' (Leopold 1949; with Cohen 2015, 2). But the poem also takes us beyond metaphor at times to enmesh the human in the biosphere in more physically stratified ways. In this paper, I turn to the transformation of Lichas into rock in book 9 in order to argue for Ovid's interest in situating human life within geological history. The violent kinetic action that instigates his metamorphosis, and the simile comparing his transformation to water freezing, mark this moment out as one of scientific interest (Barkan 1990). I will read the episode in dialogue with a number of meteorological and minerological treatises (Aristotle Meteor.; Theophrastus De Lap.) in an attempt to demonstrate what it owes to such scientific thought, and to draw out the implications of Ovid's decision to locate the human in this example of physical rock formation. I will show how the episode's focus on the speed of the petrifaction process distorts the normal rates at which such processes occur, and offers a striking comment on the kinds of interference that human temporal perspectives bring to bear on the deep time of geological change when integrated into a single history (Chakrabarty 2009).