Ecocriticism

Seeing the Trees: Reading Pindar in the Anthropocene

This paper revisits the question of the extent to which it is useful to compare the Odyssey, especially books 9-12, to the (early and later) modern literature of European exploration and colonization. While the focus of this question has tended to be on the Odyssey’s construction of a poetic anthropology or ethnography, this paper shifts the focus to the broader category of ecology, echoing a scholarly movement “beyond humanism” described in Bianchi et al. From this perspective, the Robinsonade becomes a later literary form of particular relevance.

Scholarship on Pliny and Columella often focuses on their antagonistic relationship as the champions of two different agricultural ideals, mostly based on the hostile comments Pliny makes in Book 18 of the Natural History about the De Re Rustica (Frederiksen 1980, Beagon 1992, Noè 2002). This approach takes for granted how both texts use Roman mytho-historical farming exempla of figures like Cincinnatus, Curius Dentatus, and a generalized group of wise antiqui, to adduce those ideals.