‘Epic of the Earth’ by Edith Hall review

In Book 21 of the Iliad Achilles has a violent confrontation with the nonhuman world. Overcome with wrath after the death of Patroclus, he sets about annihilating his Trojan enemies, piling their bodies into the River Scamander in such numbers that, choked with corpses, the water stops flowing. The river implores Achilles to halt his murderous spree before retaliating, summoning its waters in a deluge that threatens to sweep the hero away. In her 2023 translation of the Iliad Emily Wilson rendered Scamander’s rebuke with agonising plainness: ‘This is too much.’

The Iliad, a poem shaped by the excesses of warfare, production, and environmental degradation, exposes the limits of what the planet can bear. That, at least, is the argument advanced by Edith Hall in Epic of the Earth, the first substantial ecocritical study of Homer. Much like the Iliad itself, Epic of the Earth ‘looks backwards and forwards in time’. It illuminates the ideologies that underpinned the Homeric world and makes the compelling case that, if used ‘to expose the deepest contradictions underlying the environmental crisis that we humans have created’, the Iliad can help in the struggle against ecological collapse. Can it?

Hall begins by tracing the poem’s trajectory from classical antiquity to the present day, demonstrating its impact on art, education, and global politics; this last is given tangible form in the 17-foot bronze depiction of a scene from the shield of Achilles on the doors of the US Supreme Court. The aesthetic and ideological excesses of ‘epic’ poetry have been used to legitimise centuries of colonialism and industrialisation, while more recent readings of the Iliad – beginning with Simone Weil’s 1940 essay ‘L’Iliade ou le poème de la force’ – have identified a tension between its heroic ethos and the ‘sense of impending doom’ this ethos produces. Suggesting that this dread is connected to ‘the abuse of nature’ seen in the poem, Hall stakes a claim for the ecocritical potential of the Iliad: ‘Why not reimagine it from a subject position that acknowledges the new extent of our environmental terror?’

Hall’s casual phrasing – ‘why not?’ – belies the radical nature of her ecocritism. A subfield of literary theory broadly defined as the study of the relationship between literature and the environment, ecocriticism has grown rapidly since the 1990s. Yet only recently have scholars begun to consider how premodern texts might enrich our understanding of environmental history. Moreover, environmentally oriented studies of premodern literature often exhibit a pronounced anxiety over the ‘why’ of it all: why should millennia-old texts be brought into the conversation? What could they possibly reveal about the crises of the 21st century?

One popular answer to this question is to use such texts as evidence that the origins of ecological crisis long predate the Industrial Revolution. Old Norse mythology and Beowulf have both been given this treatment recently. Hall follows this mode of analysis, but the Iliad is never reduced to a smoking gun. The poem, she writes, was composed over a period often considered to mark the onset of the Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which human activities have irrevocably altered the Earth. But in Hall’s reckoning, the Iliad’s precise historical origins are less important than the fact that, in its ‘paradoxical combining of human technocratic arrogance and terror of natural forces’, the poem offers striking insights into a mindset that continues to shape the present.

The Iliad is a poem about war, in which the destruction of the nonhuman world is inextricably bound to the exploitation of labour and the senseless waste of human life. As such, Hall’s central chapters are dedicated to tracing ‘relations of production’. Named after the workers – loggers, farmers, and smiths – whose labour built the Homeric world, these chapters are dense with references to the poem’s many, often interestingly contradictory, depictions of human-nonhuman interactions. The poem relies on a ‘seemingly infinite’ supply of timber, used to build ships and fuel the fires in which weapons are forged, but it also repeatedly draws comparisons between the slaughter of young warriors and the felling of trees. Crethon and Orsilochus, two ‘champions of the Danaans’ killed by Aeneas, fall, in Samuel Butler’s 1898 translation, ‘like high pine-trees to the ground’. The sheer number of examples cited by Hall makes for a somewhat disorientating reading experience, and some of the arguments feel underdeveloped – in particular those that obfuscate the distinction between figurative language, as in the many similes comparing human warriors to lions preying on sheep, and actual descriptions of animals. I was left unconvinced that these somewhat conventional phrases have any real ecocritical significance.

The argument comes into sharp focus again in the book’s final chapters on Achilles’ shield and his showdown with the River Scamander. These chapters evoke the world of the Iliad in dizzying detail, where gods, humans, animals, and elements mingle in a world that seems poised on the brink of collapse. Yet Hall never loses sight of the poem’s contemporary relevance. Her analyses are punctuated with references to ongoing disasters: many of the rivers mentioned in the Iliad – including the Sakarya, the Alfeios, and the Vardar – are currently experiencing alarming levels of pollution, and a discussion of the seemingly ‘infinite’ woodlands of the poem includes the UN’s ‘bitter and terrifying’ 2022 report on deforestation: at least 37 million acres of forest are lost every year. But, crucially, the connections that these asides forge between the ancient past and the present are associative, not causal. The suggestion is not that Homeric culture produced the crises we now face, but that these crises must change the way we engage with literature and the past. This is something of an ecocritical truism – but in Hall’s study it is lent renewed urgency by her refusal to look away from the crises of the present. Epic of the Earth is proof that ‘green reading’ can be more than an intellectual exercise.

• Epic of the Earth: Reading Homer’s Iliad in the Fight for a Dying World
  Edith Hall
  Yale University Press, 296pp, £18.99
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)
   

Abigail Bleach is a medievalist and ecocritic based at the University of Manchester.