Erica Krause, University of Virginia
The goal of this paper is twofold: to use environmental philosopher Timothy Morton’s theory of dark ecology to better understand Vergil’s conception of the mythical Golden Age in the Georgics and the Eclogues, and to use Vergil to better understand dark ecology and modern human-nonhuman relations. These texts display awareness that human cruelty to nonhumans leads to human suffering, as the climate crisis is teaching us anew today.
According to dark ecology, we cope with the fear and anxiety that we feel about our vulnerability as human beings by imagining that there are ontological boundaries between ourselves and everything else, creating a false binary of human vs. nonhuman. In this context, nonhuman means anything not human, not just animals, but plants, objects, and elements. Morton calls our fear of human vulnerability the arche-lithic, because it began as early as the Stone Age, and calls our human vs. nonhuman thinking agrilogistics, because it developed within us when we invented agriculture, the first-ever hyperobject. A hyperobject is something so massive in space, time, and consequence that humans cannot fully conceive of it. Agriculture, as a hyperobject, encompasses not just sowing and reaping, but building, deforesting, domesticating, butchering, and more. Dark ecology asks us to become aware of our agrilogistic reactions to hyperobjects and embrace the arche-lithic instead, in order to achieve peaceful coexistence between humans and nonhumans.
Agrilogistics, the arche-lithic, and hyperobjects are new terms, but they are not new phenomena. Rather, Morton has given names to kinds of thinking that have existed for millennia. The Golden Age myth, in which the earliest and best human beings neither practiced nor needed farming, was first seen in Hesiod and continued throughout the Greek and Roman tradition. Vergil’s development of that myth, in the Georgics and Eclogues, demonstrates cognizance of several key points of dark ecology. First, agriculture is harmful to nonhumans in these texts, as Armstrong already noted. Second, a rift between humans and their environment, i.e., nonhumans, arises simultaneously with agriculture. Add to this that the development of farming leads to the development of other practices that are harmful for the environment, e.g., sailing, construction, tree felling, and animal domestication. Lastly, people could not – cannot – live in harmony with nonhumans, or with each other, while continuing such practices.
Vergil does not, of course, present a unified vision of the Golden Age. Ryberg argues that is because Vergil’s conception of the myth evolved over time, and Perkell argues that contradictions are essential to the complexity of the moral questions the poet poses. I build on these and other scholars’ work, suggesting that the Vergilian Golden Age asks serious ethical questions about human-nonhuman relationships, and that those questions evolve over time. Central among these concerns are the effects of agriculture and other human activities upon nonhumans, and the reciprocal effects on people’s lives. Dark ecology helps us answer and think more deeply about such questions, and Vergil’s texts become far less contradictory when we use these new tools for discussing and understanding them.