"What's the difference between them and us?" Classics and Ecocriticism in the Classroom
When I first taught from Ancient Exchanges in my Spring 2021 course titled "Interpretation of Ancient Literature," only one student sat in the hybrid classroom while, online, twenty-nine others also contributed to our discussion of Mary Hamil Gilbert's translation of Anyte, a poet from the Greek Anthology, a translation for which I was initially challenged to find. Ancient Exchanges soon became a welcome resource of delightful reading excursions to which I again turned for my Fall 2021 in-person version of this course based upon my research on Classics and environmental humanities. If I were to teach the course again, I would love to incorporate these new translations into my syllabus, especially Jamie Banks' "Natural Investigations,” a translation in which Seneca, contemplating ants, asks “What’s the difference between them and us, besides the extent of their tiny bodies?”
Seneca's question is an overarching question for my environmental humanities course in which we explore how ancient authors and modern readers define who is human, and who is not. Banks' translation of the original title, Quaestiones Naturales, is also quite thought provoking and so could serve as the basis for a short, in-class writing prompt: If Seneca were writing his Natural Investigations today, would he frame his approach as natural history or ecology? Such a question helps bridge conceptual incongruities between Seneca's Stoic Natural Investigations and modern literary ecology. In this course, students read, discuss, and write about a diverse selection of texts with an eye toward “recognizing the importance of discursive pasts for material presents” and “recognizing the importance of how present concerns shape our inquiries into the past” (Estok 8). Indeed, present concerns shape Ancient Exchanges and that is why I think that students love these relevant translations. Ancient Exchanges' statement of purpose, a "response to the experiences of exclusion, limitation, and gatekeeping within the field of Classics" supports my pedagogical goals for translating ancient environmental problems into the modern classroom. The commitment to "multicultural, multilingual, and polyvocal" mediums achieves the ethical goals for texts that Harriet Tarlo argues are necessary to “[destabilize] single perspectives in favor of multiple ones” (125). This presents environmental problems as communal problems in need of collaborative solutions and collective action. The surmounting anxieties weighing upon our minds exceed the scope of any humanities course, but, as one student remarked, it is comforting "to understand that not everyone feels apathy." This essay then is a reflection on my experiences adapting Ancient Exchanges to my environmental humanities course. I first begin with a brief overview of the course's structure and pedagogical goals about which more may be found in the tab above. I then relate my initial in the classroom experiences with Ancient Exchanges before closing with some final thoughts on Seneca's ants.
To prepare students to unpack and historically contextualize the rhetoric of nature, I adapted Kevin Hutchings' approach by dividing my course into four conceptual units: 1) Vantage Points; 2) Classic Topographies; 3) Flora and Fauna; 4) Schools of Nature. In Vantage Points, we consider how a text views or frames nature, whether from an anthropocentric vantage delineating nature as separate from culture; or from an androcentric vantage where domination of nature is gendered and usually for the benefit men (Cowan); or from a biocentric vantage, the degree or deficit to which the text accurately tells nature's story, a relatively rare vantage point in ancient literature (Buell). In Classic Topographies, we consider landscape representations, whether pastoral, georgic, or geographic ethnography (Sayre; Thomas 1982). In Flora and Fauna, we consider the representation of plants and animals, especially anthropomorphic (humanized animal) or zoomorphic (dehumanized human) (Garrard). Finally, in Schools of Nature, for the sake of time, we limit our focus to Stoic and Epicurean theories about humankind's place in nature. As much as possible, I also provide short, non-specialized nature-themed essays that are thematically related or influenced by ancient texts to memorably introduce tools for interpreting literary representations of nature without additional academic jargon. Notably, not all but many of the translations in this journal easily fit into one of the above units, especially with reference to the translators’ notes.
In the Flora and Fauna unit of the hybrid class, I first assigned Robert Carpenter's "Mind the Gaps," and Mary Hamil Gilbert's "The Animal Epigrams of Anyte of Tegea." I later added to these Dan Beachy-Quick's "Eighteen Fragments" for the in-person class. "Mind the Gaps" works for confronting issues of a "classical canon," gender biases, and, even, ecology. Ecology, as students remark, is an anachronism. Yes, but an anachronism indebted to the past since the biologist Ernst Haeckel, Darwin's student, combined Greek words to coin a term for what is the study of (logos) one's planetary dwelling (oikos), the environment. Most significantly, ecology emphasizes delicate interconnections to the extent that "no species is an island" (Netz 229). For the ancient Greeks, perhaps the nearest conceptual equivalent to a generalized understanding of ecology is Eros, the god of desire and the unifying impulse that binds organisms together. A useful parallel for this cosmic Eros is Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire, wherein he tells a natural history of how human desire for monoculture's aesthetically pleasing food is not without disastrous, anthropogenic consequences. Contextualizing the metaphors of desire with ecology helps us to read Sappho again: what are the environmental consequences of the desire for "an army of horses" or "footmen" as opposed to desire for "whatever someone loves"? The consequences of desire become clear when further comparing Sappho's poem to how Herodotus traces the political alliances and environmental problems of his day back to the forceful abductions of women by men (Hdt. 1.1-5). Our desires are not without ecological consequences.
"Mind the Gaps" also conveys the textual uncertainties of the manuscript tradition, often a difficult concept to discuss with students for the first time. These gaps quickly became a useful metaphor to rethink the issue of teaching just the canonical nine Lyric poets, the traditional approach. Why continue to teach an arbitrary canon that deprives students of lesser-known authors such as Anyte, a Hellenistic poet in the Greek Anthology? I confessed to my students that we were departing from the usual approach to the Lyric Poets and assigned Mary Hamil Gilbert's "The Animal Epigrams of Anyte of Tegea" along with Dan Beachy-Quick's "Eighteen Fragments" to explore how humans represent their relationship with the nonhuman world. Anyte avoids "big-organism chauvinism" (Wilson 178) by writing about a seemingly insignificant rooster, cricket, or cicada. To interpret the animal epigrams with attention to gender biases (androcentrism), I prompt the class to ponder how Anyte and Sappho depict nature radically different than, for example, Semonides' zoomorphic and misogynistic fragment 7, in which he taxonomizes his perceived traits of women according to different animals. Students eventually choose a short poem to perform in a poetry slam at the end of the third unit. One student memorized and gave a rather moving performance of fragment 17, Xenophanes’ anecdote of Pythagoras rebuking a man for animal cruelty. Another student rapped to Anyte's poetry and remarked that "'For a Dog' became too personal" reminding of the loss of their Dachshund. These open access translations of Anyte and Xenophanes published by Ancient Exchanges render these poets the attention that they deserve and the accessibility that students need.
To trace our way back to Seneca's musings about ants, I would love to hear students respond to his question as translated by Banks: "Were someone to give ants human intelligence, wouldn't they too carve up one region into many districts?" By the end of the course, I hope to have enabled students with strategies for analyzing Seneca's rhetoric of nature. Considering Vantage Points, students can identify Seneca's binaries defined by an anthropocentric definition of intelligence. Students could also consider the underlying androcentric binary implied by "intelligence," a word which evokes the masculine presentation of the universal spirit described by the Stoic "School of Nature." Seneca's "districts" recalls the Classic Topographies in the Hippocratic Airs Waters Places, a proto-ecological text that advises itinerant physicians to factor the environment into their medical practice (Bearzot). Students may pay attention to the Flora and Fauna in the text by following Seneca's allusive "black column" of ants to the simile in Aeneid 4.404, where Vergil compares the Trojans plundering Northern Africa to ants. Here I might point out that Vergil is quoting Ennius, who in turn describes Hannibal's line of invading elephants. As a class, we could consider whether Seneca understands Vergil's subversive ecological lesson as brought out in Banks' translation, "the gold that we hoard privately to feed our descendants' greed." The Trojans’ exploitation of Carthage's natural resources establishes precedent for Hannibal to invade Italy, like ants following pheromones to the picnic, in a war which results not in the environmental warfare of salting the earth but in the institutional and agricultural suppression of future Carthaginians (Stevens). Banks is right. Seneca does tend to get on one's "nerves."
Environmental history often turns to the metaphors of seeds and roots. We can trace a root of Seneca's Natural Investigations back to Airs Waters Places. A popular text in antiquity often referenced by poets (Thomas 1982), Airs Waters Places influenced how Greeks and Romans carved up the geography for their respective empires. Moreover, the further removed from Athens or Rome, the self-appointed geographic and ethnic golden means, the more animal-like other cultures were considered (Glacken). It is worth the effort to confront these “classic” (Thomas 2021) and environmental (Uekötter) problems responsibly and tactfully in the classroom. One student noticed the relevance of tracing roots of the past after attending "The Quest for Environmental and Climate Justice," an invited lecture by Dr. Robert Bullard, the father of environmental justice. The student remarked, "I was shocked" and "not aware of environmental racism . . . it is mentally defeating knowing your community is being polluted due to your race." In a different instance, another student confronts the metaphor of seeds in an essay comparing a U.S. Representative's claim about "souls woven into earthen vessels" to Aeschylus' Eumenides 655-670, wherein, at the legendary birth of Athenian democracy, the "contempt towards women and nature" bares its teeth with "rhetoric [that] strips [Clytemnestra] of [her] reproductive rights." Applying the methods taught in this course, this student brilliantly deconstructs the gendered metaphor of sowing while tracing the troubling fruition of this ancient ideological seed even in modern, policy-influencing discourse.
When it comes to nature, students tend to express strong opinions. So, posing Seneca’s question to a diverse group of students over the course of a semester is an opportunity for constructive dialogue that is at once challenging, thrilling, and terrifying. Despite the inherent sexism, racism, and imperialism of antiquity, despite the problems of projecting anachronisms onto the past, reading, teaching translating, and retranslating ancient texts helps us come to terms with who we are and who we want to become as citizens in this diverse world of organisms, "tiny bodies" and all.
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