Latin Literature and the Environmental Humanities: Challenges and Perspectives

Social ecocriticism insists that the city is part of the environment, and environmental studies must take account of the urban experience. When environmental movements fetishize pastoral images, they promote social and cultural policies that harm people – particularly people already most affected by environmental injustice (Ross 1994; Cronon 1995; Bennett and Teague 1999).

This paper merges ecocritical and feminist approaches to classical literature in order to perform an ecofeminist reading of Erictho, the Thessalian necromancer who appears in the sixth book of Lucan’s Bellum Civile.

What is the role of the human species in relation to environmental changes and natural phenomena? Is the binary opposition of culture versus nature still suitable to describe the relationship between human and non-human aspects of the environment? Are we – as humans – really entitled to understand, judge and transform environmental dynamics?

In its depictions of Aeneas’ wanderings in Aeneid 3 and struggles to secure a home in Aeneid 12, Vergil’s epic foregrounds the ruinous consequences of the desire for environmental mastery. When, for instance, a religious ritual in Thrace produces blood and an attack with a boundary stone falls short, such events reveal the Trojans and Latins’ inability to understand and order the environment.

What of value do ancient authors have to offer to the modern world’s ecological challenges?