The Boy whom Hector called Scamandrius: The Natural World and Cosmic Time in the Iliad of Homer

ABSTRACTThe Boy whom Hector called Scamandrius: The Natural World and Cosmic Time in the Iliad of HomerBy Julio Cesar VegaThis dissertation presents a new analysis of the natural world in Homer’s Iliad. Focusing on descriptions of landscape, trees, and rivers, within similes and in the main narrative, the thesis has three main arguments: first, representations of Gaia in the Iliad can productively be read through and against representations of Gaia in the wider epic tradition, as in Hesiod’s Theogony (and to a lesser extent the Cypria). It is only through a more expansive intertextual analysis that we can see how, for Homer, the destruction of the natural world has cosmic significance. Second, descriptions of the natural world are not just part of the realism of the poem; rather they are motivated, ideological, and play a significant role in differentiating Achaeans from Trojans. These differentiations afford a richer and more complicated dimension to violence and death than has previously been recognized. Third, the representation of the natural world is an inextricable part of Homer’s creation of temporality: the epic’s reflections on the past, present, and its visions of the future offer insight into the question of human interaction with the environment and the implications of that changing relationship. The dissertation aims to make a contribution to our understanding of Homer’s epic, but also to how ancient texts can reveal, and reflect upon, today’s most urgent political issue: the destruction of the environment and what this will mean for humans and for the earth. Chapter 1 analyzes the representation of Gaia in Hesiod’s Theogony, the Cypria, and finally in Homer’s Iliad to suggest that when the poet of the Iliad uses the simile of Typhoeus at Il. 2.780-85 s/he evokes the narrative of cosmic war and progress as detailed in the Theogony, thus projecting the Hesiodic narrative onto the Homeric. As a result, the Gaia we see in the Iliad is constantly between subject and object, helper and destroyer, in a duality bound with time and space that plays out in the inextricability of Trojans to the natural world, and the Achaeans as destroyers of that world. Chapter 2 briefly considers the state of the natural world as envisioned before the events of the Iliad, envisioned as practical and interdependent with both Trojans and Achaeans as seen in the funeral of Eëtion in Il. 6.416-20, before moving to a broader discussion of the natural world in the present narrative of the poem. The move from past to present reflects a shift in the relation between the Trojan people and the natural world to one of unity and connection in a strictly symbolic and figural sense, as in the formulation “the Scaean gates and the oak tree”. Chapter 3 moves towards a catalogue of the destruction of the natural world in the present narrative of the poem at the hands of the Achaeans who act as the executors of Zeus’ will within the re-framing of the cosmic narrative, and suggests an ethical dimension to the killing of Trojans in nature-centric terms. Finally, Chapter 4 discusses “future time” and the natural world as revealed in the poem’s ominous vision of a post-war world which suggests the permanence of nature beyond its cosmic entanglement with time and space in the Iliad, a future which is envisioned at the expense of the human. By analyzing the fragility of human-made tombs and the makeshift Achaean wall in the poem, we see that the Iliad portends an apocalyptic future brought upon by earth and water which sees the forces of nature destroy the works of humans, reacting in turn to the human destruction of the natural world in the present. What we are left with is a complex web of interrelationships between humans, gods, and the natural world that presents a hybrid and dynamic vision of interaction. The Iliad’s representation of past, present, and future coincides with different categories of interaction between humans and the natural world. The past suggests an idyllic vision of coexistence and collaboration, the present carries out the reenactment of cosmic war and thus brings climatic devastation upon the natural world, and the future reveals the divorce of gods and nature from the human world