[Authors and chapter titles are listed at the end of the review]
This fourth book in Bloomsbury Academic series, Ancient Environments, focuses on Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a critical text in the study of environmental history. In his presentation of metamorphic mythologies, Ovid elides the human with stones, trees, plants, mountains, rivers, birds, and other animals, calling into question the place of humankind in the complex ecologies of this world. While this much is obvious to almost anyone who reads Ovid, this volume collects essays utilizing a broad range of methodologies that both place the epic as a forerunner of contemporary eco-critical thought and reviews the environmental reception of the poem in Medieval, Renaissance, and contemporary literature. The eco-critical essays serve as a primer to important schools of ecological thought, but as such, can be daunting to read by the uninitiated. For the most part, clear introductory explanations and extensive bibliographies provide guidance both for reading what is at hand and for exploring further, and the introduction by Francesca Martelli and Giulia Sissa sets out the theoretical frameworks for the book, somewhat but not exactly following the sections. Reading or re-reading appropriate parts of the introduction before each section is helpful in setting the intellectual background for the various contributions in each section.
Following the introduction, the scholarly essays of the book are bracketed by John Shoptaw’s epyllion, as it were, a dazzling retelling of the Phaethon story, and his essay discussing the writing of the poem “as an allegory of global warming,” (222). This publication is worthy for this poem and essay alone, both of which should be included in any Latin classroom reading Ovid to emphasize the Roman poet’s strong influence and immediate relevance today. The essays in between these bookends, however, fill out a course of study in applying the methodologies of eco-criticism, environmental history, and reception studies to various parts of the Metamorphoses.
The two essays in the first section, “Anthropology / Tragedy / Dark Ecology”, seem forced into a common category, but nonetheless are both significant contributions in eco-critical readings of the Metamorphoses. Sissa’s expansive discussion of the role of Pythagoras in book 15 explores how the pre-Socratic philosopher’s view of metamorphosis has repercussions on how to view sacrifice and points out how many of Ovid’s metamorphic plants—laurel, lotus, poplar, oak, and myrrh—are not edible. Sissa also brings in Ovid’s listing of bloody sacrifices in the Fasti that seems to comment on the outcome of Augustus’ victories—victimae are indeed victa. Formisano, in a very sophisticated eco-critical argument, accomplishes a meta-reading of Medea as an intrusion into Ovid’s metamorphic world as much as Gaia is an intrusion into our Anthropocene.
Butler, Martelli, and Gowers in the section “Cross-Species Encounters” approach the analysis of Ovid’s animal and plant transformations as a way to chart human interactions with the natural world. Butler centers on a poem dated either to Late Antiquity or the Medieval period by an otherwise unknown Albus Ovidius Iuventinus that is addressed to Philomela, the protagonist of one of Ovid’s most brutal stories recounting her repeated rape and defilement by her sister Procne’s husband, Tereus; the sisters’ revenge; and the whole family’s transformation into birds. Philomela becomes a nightingale, and in Iuventinus’ poem, this bird is cast as a good listener who echoes other birds with mimetic agility. Butler’s presentation of the sound atmosphere of the poem uses the work of Uexküll on the sensory bubbles of animals as context and models how interdisciplinary research brings valuable insights into poetic analysis.[1] Martelli’s piece examines the metamorphoses of the halcyon and Memnonides birds through the lens of Van Dooren’s conception of species as an evolving set of behaviors.[2] Gowers’ chapter looks at parallels between trees and human form, testing out Cole’s ideas that the Metamorphoses tracks human aging in progressive arboreal transformations: Daphne in the beginning, Philemon and Baucis as a centerpiece of the book, the Dryope metamorphosis and Pomona-Vertumnus episode towards the end.[3] Gower’s discussion of Romulus’ spear that sprouts leaves is particularly compelling as an argument that Ovid is pointing out the resilience of nature compared to the short life span of man.
The chapters in the section “Science/Wisdom Traditions” are most concerned with the scientific and/or philosophical reception of Ovid’s ideas. Griffin’s chapter intertwines the reading of images of the cosmic egg in medieval manuscripts entitled Ovide Moralise with Pythagoras’ teachings about the universe in Book 15 of the Metamorphoses and sets it all in the context of Bruno Latour’s idea that metamorphic figures can help us envisage “the dizzying otherness of existents.”[4] The chapter is difficult and requires some specialized knowledge but inspires one to learn more. Since the images of the cosmic egg are crucial to the argument, clearer images would have been helpful. Lupton reminds us that Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595–1596) after translations of both Ovid’s and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (1566) and outlines the many fascinating ways that Shakespeare wove both Metamorphoses into a mystery play and mixes many cultures under the guise of wisdom literature. Zatta’s contribution uses the founder of deep ecology, Arne Naess, as an intermediary in reading Ovid.[5] This is a very thought-provoking essay that explores how Ovid warns against the objectification of the natural world to create subjective ties with our environment.
Both contributions in the last section, “Agriculture,” look at Ovid’s epic in the context of Rome’s deep agrarian roots. Spencer gives Ovid’s work a genealogy in other literature that examines Rome’s environmental awareness in tension with its territorial ambition. The chapter uses Virgil’s Georgics, Cicero’s de Lege Agraria, Lucretius, Varro, Virgil’s Eclogue 6, and Catullus 64 as case studies. This chapter successfully argues for “a weaving of growth, change, and the nature of agency,” (195) in authors that precede Ovid, thus informing his text, and a continuity of these topics in later scientific writings like Seneca, Pliny, Columella, Vitruvius, and Frontinus. Fluhrer’s contribution intriguingly weaves together theatricality, warfare and agriculture in both Ovid and Shakespeare’s Macbeth. This is an eye-opening essay about the connections between deforestation and warfare, veteran relocation and land, martial history in agricultural soils, and the performative aspect of aggression arising from the earth and other natural elements.
This volume is a valuable and necessary primer for anyone interested in the ways environmental perspectives can make our readings of ancient literature and its reception meaningful to contemporary concerns. The audience for this book is varied; some contributions will be too advanced for beginning readers of Ovid and more suitable for scholars in the fields of philosophy, ecocriticism, literary criticism, and reception (e.g. Formisano, Martelli, Griffin, Lupton, Zatta), yet others will provide an easier entrée into a broader scholarly world of literary analysis and contextualization (e.g. Shoptaw’s poem and epilogue, Sissa, Butler, Gower, Spencer). It is, however, a very important volume for anyone wanting to examine Ovid’s “environmental imagination” more closely.
Authors and Titles
Whoa! (a poem by John Shoptaw)
Anthropology / Tragedy / Dark Ecology
1. Cuncta Fluunt: The Fluidity of Life in Ovid’s Metamorphic World, by Giulia Sissa
2. Medea, the Middle, and the Muddle in the Metamorphoses, by Marco Formisano
Cross-Species Encounters
3. Animal Listening, by Shane Butler
4. Multispecies ethnographies, multispecies temporalities, by Francesca Martelli
5. Are trees really like people? by Emily Gowers
Science / Wisdom Traditions
6. The World in an Egg: Reading Medieval Ecologies, by Miranda Griffin
7. The Titania Translation: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the two Metamorphoses, by Julia Lupton
8. Metamorphosis in a Deeper World, by Claudia Zatta
Agriculture
9. Language, Life and Metamorphosis in Ovid’s Roman backstory, by Diana Spencer
10. ‘Who can impress the forest?’ Agriculture, warfare, and theatrical experience in Ovid and Shakespeare, by Sandra Fluhrer
Epilogue
John Shoptaw (essay on the writing of Whoa!)
Notes
[1] J. von Uexküll (1957), “A Stroll Through the World of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds,” in C.H. Schiller, ed. and trans., Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept, New York: International Universities Press, pp. 5-80. Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (Penguin Random House 2022) would have been valuable to consult for this chapter as well.
[2] T. Van Dooren (2014). Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction, New York: Columbia University Press.
[3] T. Cole (2008). Ovidius Mythistoricus: Legendary Time in the Metamorphoses, Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
[4] B. Latour (2017), Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. C. Porter, Cambridge: Polity Press, 16.
[5] For example, A. Naess (2008), “An Example of a Place: Tvergastein,” in A. Drengson, B. Devall, eds, The Ecology of Wisdom. Writings by Arne Naess, Berkeley: Counterpoint.