Other Natures. Clara Bosak-Schroeder
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it images.”72 For Herodotus and Barad, agencies of observation, including the practice of history, are inextricable from the world they would seem to “peer innocently” at.
If there is no longer a world that we see and know from a distance, but rather one whose borders come into being through our interaction with and observation of them, then, as Barad argues, humans are much more accountable to the rest of the universe than we have usually realized. Because we make the world we seek to know, every act of knowledge making is also an ethical act. When the transducer “sees” the fetus, it separates the fetus from surrounding tissue and renders that tissue mere background. This can lead to the humanization of fetuses and the dehumanization of pregnant people, two morally weighty outcomes. When Herodotus documents Xerxes’s bridge across the Hellespont and gives it a “negative moral charge,” he naturalizes the boundary between Europe and Asia and casts the manner in which Xerxes yokes the continents as a transgression.73 On the other hand, when we learn from Diodorus that Semiramis’s huge and expensive bridge, so similar to Xerxes’s, ensures her salvation, the border between India and Assyria “matters” less, in both senses of the word: it is less significant and less real.74 Both Herodotus and Diodorus are fundamentally interested not in a given geographical morality but in the emerging accountability of rulers, rivers, and other beings to the worlds they make.75
If the world can be made and remade, then human interventions must be measured by some other standard than a fixed sense of the natural. As we have seen, Herodotus and especially Diodorus do not conclude that humans (and others) can therefore intervene in the world however they wish; rather, they evaluate erga by their benefit to human beings. This is how they hold the agencies of the world accountable to the worlds they make. But Barad would say, and I agree, that Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s standard is insufficient. The more humans see ourselves as cocreators with other beings, the more we realize our interdependence with those beings, the more we should understand that their benefit and ours cannot be easily separated. If the Nile has given human beings gifts, humans should provide for the other creatures of the Nile. Hints of such reciprocal relationships are explored in chapters 4 and 5.
This chapter has considered the role of historia and erga in the production of continents, countries, monuments, and transgressions, especially in Herodotus’s Histories. Chapter 3 turns to the boundaries of another set of categories: men versus women and humans versus animals. And now it is Diodorus’s turn to shine, for while Herodotus takes these divisions more or less for granted, Diodorus demonstrates their contingency and the role of women in remaking them.
CHAPTER THREE
Female Feck
Unlike the boundaries of continents and landscapes, the borders of sex and species may seem much more solid, at least in ancient Greek thought. Greek writers, including Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, employ a consistent vocabulary to differentiate “women” (gunaikes) from “men” (andres) and “humans” (anthrōpoi) from other animals (ktēnea, thēria). But Greek concepts of sex, gender, and species are surprisingly complex.1 As demonstrated in this chapter, Herodotus and Diodorus are more invested in the boundaries between types of bodies than they are in the distinction between geographical boundaries. But where these bodily boundaries come into question—at the edges of the Greek world—new relationships between men and women and between humans and other animals become possible.
It is no coincidence that foreign women are the catalyst for questioning the distinctions between these potent categories. Intersectional analyses, which consider how the many aspects of one’s identity and culture affect experience, including the experience of oppression, have also shed light on how people with multiply marginal identities (women of color, for example) uniquely prompt and effect social change, including environmental change.2 From their experience at the nexus of social and natural categories, foreign women in Greek ethnography develop new knowledge that can overturn seemingly natural categories.
The foreign women who rewrite categories in the Histories and Library allow us to see how sex and gender equality is connected to environmental justice, since the logic that subordinates women to men also underwrites the idea of humans as superior to other animals. For example, the philosopher Thales is supposed to have given thanks every day that he had been born human, male, and Greek, rather than a beast, female, or a “barbarian.”3 More casually, Greek writers also refer to women in animal terms, including Homer’s bitchy Helen (Il. 6.344); Hesiod’s Pandora with her doggish mind (WD 67); and Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra, standing over her victims like a crow (Ag. 1473). These characterizations imply that women are less human than men and that humanity is a higher order than other animals, naturalizing the exploitation of women and nonhuman animals simultaneously.
This chapter has three movements. In the first, I explore sex/gender and species variance in Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, positioning them against the background just described. As discussed in chapter 2, the boundary between normative and transgressive is enacted rather than essential; it is historians whose investigation of female characters materializes sex/gender and species categories. In the second movement, I argue that Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s female characters, like the rulers and rivers of chapter 2, are historical agents, altering families, bloodlines, and even the boundaries of empire. Women also remake their worlds by acting as a natural resource passed among men in societies that practice “sex in common” (mixis epikoinos). Finally, the chapter ends with Semiramis, the Babylonian queen encountered briefly in chapter 2. Contrary to Herodotus, who represents sex/gender variance as a sign of divine displeasure, Diodorus celebrates Semiramis for rewriting gender norms and producing giant elephant devices that couple human, animal, and plant materials. Semiramis is able to remake her world by virtue of the knowledge she possesses as an outsider to elite male society.
SEX/GENDER VARIANCE
As Lesley Dean-Jones, Brooke Holmes, and Helen King have shown, Greek writers documented sudden changes to the sexed body that could in turn shift a person’s gender role.4 The story of Phaethousa and Nanno, whose bodies “masculinized and became hairy all over” (Hippocrates Ep. 6.8.32: sōma ētndrōthē kai edasunthē panta), is illustrative. From the Hippocratic perspective, Phaethousa and Nanno did not become men but lost their grip on the female sex.5 In Greek models of sex/gender, women are sometimes described as a separate species (genos, in Hesiod); sometimes as underdeveloped men (Aristotle); and sometimes, as in the Hippocratic corpus, as part of a spectrum of sex/gender differences.6 Greek writers agree on the superiority of male bodies and manly practices while debating what material-discursive forces produce differently sexed and gendered beings.
Like writers in other genres, Herodotus investigates women’s bodies to understand and reaffirm the distinction between men and women. Although famous for his prominent female characters, many of whom possess typically masculine attributes and roles, his text is also invested in a sex/gender binary (male vs. female) endorsed by the gods.7 For example, Aphrodite afflicts Scythian men and their descendants with the “female disease” (1.105.4: thēlean nouson), which they pass on to their descendants.8 Although Herodotus does not explain what this disease entails, its very name pathologizes sex/gender instability.9 Athena too communicates with humans by altering how their bodies can be classified. “Whenever something terrible (anapitēdeion) was about to happen to them or their neighbors the priestess of Athena grew a big beard” (1.175).10 This bearded woman is a disaster analogous to the disaster she announces. Although human behaviors in the Histories travel along a continuum of masculinity and femininity, bodies are clearly sexed and gendered, and the gods express their displeasure or signify impending doom by speaking to human beings in the language of a bodily male-female binary.
Like the gods, Herodotus’s men are invested in proper sex/gender performance, especially