CUP (2024) h/b 307pp £90 (ISBN 9781009476171)
When readers speak of the ‘environment’ in poetry they often mean backdrop scenery or chocolate-box place-setting—whether that be Arcadia or Washington DC. What Fredericksen does in this fine and timely book is to take the background as foreground with reference to several hugely important Augustan texts—Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics and Horace’s Odes, with a long nod to Ovid at the end—using the tools of ecocritical theory and close analysis of the texts. F. shows that the rural nature of this poetry is making a statement about the relationship between the human and the nonhuman, our sense of place, and the ecology of the world.
The introduction to this book (which is a lightly updated version of F.’s Princeton Ph.D. thesis of 2019, available online) starts appropriately with the fons Bandusiae (Horace Odes 3.13) and the judgement of Nisbet and Rudd that it is ‘more than a pretty nature-poem’. Loaded words like ‘nature’ and ‘landscape’—and even simple-sounding words like ‘space’ and ‘place’—are freighted with significance, which F. unpacks. Horace and Virgil were not ‘Green’ authors avant la lettre—‘it is reductive and unhelpful to ask whether Vergil was a “tree-hugger” or a “tree-cutter”’ (p.13)—but there is much to be gained from looking at how these writers viewed ‘humans’ enmeshment in more-than-human ecologies’ (14) in their (and our) ongoing quest to understand the world we live in.
The first chapter looks at the notion of place in the Eclogues: of boundaries redrawn in a setting which is fictionalised but not placeless. The poems are set in the real Italy of the land confiscations after the battle of Philippi and for these herdsmen their patria (with its local gods and defined spaces) is their life. F. discusses how far the world of the Eclogues is ‘really concerned with local place’, making good use of Cicero’s dialogues as parallel to the Eclogues in their self-conscious place-settings. Many of the Eclogues offer a blend of environmental experience and literary imagination: Virgil lived near Mantua, read Theocritus and then wrote the Eclogues, in an age where the nature of place was challenged by fluid boundaries amid shifting forms of political and social organization (p.58). Chapter two continues this analysis of the ecological concept of place in these poems. Place is shaped by human life and the networks of Roman power: ‘human and nonhuman presences echo each other, live among one another, and resound together throughout the Eclogues’ (p.96). The countryside even generates its own music and its own poetry: the hedge sings us to sleep at 1.52-5 in a ‘dynamic web of relations’ between humans and nonhumans (p.66). Useful here is the concept of ‘pastoral sympathy’, shown (for instance) when the natural world grieves alongside the humans for Gallus (10.13-15: cf. Theocritus 1.71-5). F. shows how the locality contributes to the creation of bucolic music in the form of ‘resonant soundscapes’, the nonhuman world helping to shape the poetry itself. Lucretius had people learning to sing by listening to nature sounds: Virgil has nature singing to man’s tune in ‘sonic reciprocity’, with poetic language the ‘product and carrier of more-than-human sound’ (p.80) in cases such as the reeds which are ‘played’ first by the winds and then by the shepherds.
F. next examines the Georgics as a poem of ‘ecological thinking’. The farmer is but one of the organisms working to thrive on the land, along with the crops, weeds, cattle, bees and of course the exiguus mus (1.181): F. stresses that the flourishing farm is a site where human and nonhuman meet and interact. Virgil shows nature (including mankind) co-existing to ensure mutual survival, and the poem offers ‘the fantasy of an expertise that could better embed humans in their environments’ (p.100). Virgil does not buy any of the philosophical schools’ answers (see 1.415-23, 4.219-27) but he does express wonder that the world works in synch, with (e.g.) distant stars affecting local grapes. The plants and animals do their thing and the farmer conducts them like an ecological orchestra: ploughing, for instance, sees him grow a tree to make a plough which is dragged by an ox to help the seeds to grow. The ecology of man and animal in book 3 depends hugely on the ‘slavery’ of animals (3.168), as we see at the end of that book when the farmers whose animals have died have to do the work themselves and make a total hash of it (3.534-6). ‘Any account of human life must take into account the nonhuman life without which it is unthinkable’ (p.144). The plague ‘threatens to reduce the animal world to humans alone, a nightmarish thought for this ecologically minded poem’ (p.120). Are we humans as special as we think, then? Humans are ‘different but not incommensurable’ (p.125), and the bees with their ‘political’ organisation (noted by Aristotle Hist. An. 5.21-3) teach us that we are not unique, even though we can and do rewrite the landscape: Rome has rewritten the landscape of Italy, the catasterised Caesar will do this with the cosmos, the farmer does it with his plot of earth. The world is a web of power-relations and alive with messages as animals and birds signal rain (pp.140-1) in a system which we (unlike the birds) need to be taught.
The following chapter looks at how Virgil zooms out from Italy to wider regions of the world and the cosmos. Plants cannot choose where to live but need to be in the right place to thrive, while humans can (and do) move everywhere, although our environment conditions our lives in cases such as the Scythian farmer and the Libyan nomad (p.152). The poet can make cosmic space small and local space cosmic, moving from macrocosm to microcosm and back again in unsettling ‘scalar vertigo’. The local farmer fits into the global empire in a world where the word ‘local’ is ‘an unstable flexible concept…determined by geographical distinctions and political struggle’ (p.170). The poet is crucial to this: that putative temple in the prologue to Georgics 3 (13-39) is the Roman imperial world on show (p.174). In all this, Virgil shifts ‘between levels of scale and perspective…to offer different views of the world in all its interwoven complexity’ (p.178).
The next pair of chapters look at Horace’s Odes. F. argues that Horace uses the natural world as ‘objects of ethical contemplation’ (p.180) while also enjoying a privileged status by his miraculous contact with the nonhuman. Those wonderful ‘spring’ poems tell us to get real by looking at mutability, change and death: 1.4 tells us that storms do not last forever, 1.11 (carpe diem) tells us to ‘pluck the time’ but only when the time is right. We need to live seasonally, keep mourning within limits (Odes 2.9) as rains eventually stop. Odes 2.19 and 3.25 see him tapping into Bacchus’ power in his relations with nature, while 2.20 shows Horace immortalised, his vatic status making him a kind of medium between the worlds of nonhuman and human nature. Chapter six examines Horace as a poet of place, who can make poetry out of places and places into poetry. For F., Horace ‘anchors his poetry and future fame to particular locations’ (p.229). This poet can immortalise unknown places like river Aufidus (3.30.10) and endow places with new literary associations of their own. There is also a political side: these one-horse towns are enmeshed in a ‘context of Mediterranean connectivity and mobility in the wake of Roman imperial consolidation’ (p.233. The Odes are endlessly performative and iterable but also always ‘here’, even though the ‘real’ Bandusian spring may by now be a parking lot: ‘to read the poem is to imaginatively experience being by a particular pine tree on Horace’s particular land in a particular present moment’ (p.250).
The book closes with an Epilogue looking at the exile poems of Ovid which bewail his dislocation from his patria and his bewildered alienation in his new environment. Ovid shows that he can write environmental poetry even in this unappealing environment. The poems create a dystopian horror-show of what happens when you lose your patria and are sent to live in an unpleasant place within enforced borders. Only his poetry escapes his prison, overcoming his limitations of locality by the mobility of his verse: he returns to Rome only in book form.
The book ends with 21 pages of bibliography, an index locorum and a general index. I counted eleven errors in the Latin texts printed, all of which surprisingly managed to slip past F.’s PhD examiners as well as the editors of the Cambridge University Press: F. provides his own literal translations with mixed results in terms of accuracy and readability. F. has otherwise given us a simply brilliant book which will change the way you read these poems and may change the way you read the world.
John Godwin