Other Natures. Clara Bosak-Schroeder
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By articulating the Greek past through Barad’s agential realism, I am materializing the past in the present. I hope that this materialization helps the humans who read this book and the others with whom they interdepend to create the practices of body and mind that allow human and more-than-human life to flourish.
CHAPTER TWO
Rulers and Rivers
As explained in chapter 1, my analysis of Greek ethnography’s environmental discourse attends to the boundaries between land and water (chapter 2) and differences between (and among) human and animal bodies (chapter 3), as well as the cultural practices described in chapters 4 and 5. This chapter shows how humans and other beings in Herodotus’s Histories and Diodorus’s Library build and rebuild the known world by constructing marvelous works such as pyramids, dams, and canals. These works (erga) are energy and material intensive, requiring tons of raw wood, stone, metal, and animal products, as well as the forced labor of humans and other animals. Erga also reroute rivers, sever bodies of land, and alter topography, sometimes forever. The massive effects of these engineering projects lead Herodotus and Diodorus to grapple with questions of environmental ethics: Under what circumstances should humans (and others) intervene in the world around them? Are there “natural” boundaries they should respect?
Both Herodotus and Diodorus distinguish between human-made and what are usually called natural features of the world. Herodotus says that some of the mouths of the Nile have been “dug” (orukta) by humans, while others are “original” (ithagenea, 2.17.6), picturing humans as secondary actors in Egypt. Diodorus uses different language, saying that the Egyptian king Sesoösis “erected many great mounds of land . . . in areas not naturally (physikōs) elevated” (1.57.1).1 For both authors, “nature” (physis) has temporal priority over human action, operating before and within people and other beings. Yet contrary to modern assumptions, the distinction between the “original” operation of nature in the world and later human or nonhuman changes to land- and waterscapes has no inherent moral value. Readers of Herodotus and Diodorus learn that these human interventions are not good or bad per se, but rather are judged by their consequences for the human community.2
The most infamous engineering project Herodotus records appears in the second half of the Histories. In book 7, the Persian king Xerxes prepares to invade Greece by bridging the Hellespont, the strait separating Asia and Europe. Just as the bridge is complete, storms arise and destroy it. Enraged, Xerxes orders his men to abuse the water with whips, shackles, and brands, while he himself casts these insults:
Ὦ πικρὸν ὕδωρ, δεσπότης τοι δίκην ἐπιτιθεῖ τήνδε, ὅτι μιν ἠδίκησας οὐδὲν πρὸς ἐκείνου ἄδικον παθόν. Καὶ βασιλεὺς μὲν Ξέρξης διαβήσεταί σε, ἤν τε σύ γε βούλῃ ἤν τε μή. Σοὶ δὲ κατὰ δίκην ἄρα οὐδεὶς ἀνθρώπων θύει, ὡς ἐόντι καὶ θολερῷ καὶ ἁλμυρῷ ποταμῷ.
Bitter water, this is the punishment you pay our master for wronging him although you suffered no injustice from him. King Xerxes will cross you whether you are willing or not. How right it is that no one sacrifices to you, muddy and salty a river as you are. (Hdt. 7.35)
Herodotus strongly marks Xerxes as in the wrong, calling his men’s speech “barbaric and recklessly presumptuous” (7.35.1: barbara te kai atasthala) and the act itself “an honor without honor” (7.36.1: hautē hē acharis timē). Narrative clues reinforce Herodotus’s disapproval: Xerxes ignores omens (7.37) and even his own feelings of despair (7.45) but does not turn back. Like Agamemnon’s trampling of the carpet in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon (to which this scene is often compared), the whipping of the Hellespont sums up and overdetermines Xerxes’s fall in the remaining books of the Histories.3
The scene is also crucial for scholars’ understanding of the relationship between humans and their world. Classicists have usually framed Xerxes’s act as “unnatural,” a transgression of predetermined natural boundaries. James Flory claims that Xerxes “profanes nature” with his act, while Henry Immerwahr argues that “the crossing of rivers . . . is always used to prove the hybris [violent arrogance] of the aggressor.”4 Since rivers had divine status in Greek religion, Thomas Harrison translates Xerxes’s “presumptuous” (atasthala) words as “impious” and says that the scene exemplifies “the moral that man should let his environment be.”5 Rosaria Munson agrees, tying Xerxes’s action to other “expansionist violations of rivers.”6 In this dominant view, there are natural boundaries in the Histories that humans “transgress,” “profane,” or “violate” by building bridges, redirecting rivers, and digging canals.
Other scholars have questioned this orthodoxy, pointing out Herodotus’s frequent admiration for bridges, canals, and other works of engineering, and arguing that Xerxes is punished for his insolence to the Hellespont, not for constructing the bridge itself.7 Although, as James Romm says, Herodotus draws on “tragic” language associating Xerxes’s punishment of the Hellespont with retributive justice (especially through allusions to a parallel scene in Aeschylus’s Persians), he employs a “more sophisticated, sophiē-reverencing impulse” that values human ingenuity (sophiē) when he describes Xerxes’s bridge.8
Most recently, Katherine Clarke has thoroughly examined Herodotus’s representation of land- and waterscapes, concluding that “geographical space . . . is an active player in the narrative” of the Histories and that it serves to characterize different players in the Greco-Persian wars.9 She demonstrates that the particular judgments of Herodotus’s text are context specific and complicated by focalization, the point of view from which human interventions are evaluated. Sometimes, as in the case of Xerxes, Herodotus himself condemns a work of human engineering; in others, this judgment is reported by Herodotus but attributed to his informants. For example, it is the Egyptians who disapprove of King Cheops’s pyramid, rather than Herodotus himself.10
Since Clarke has so persuasively laid out an alternative to the standard, totalizing view of “natural” boundaries in Herodotus’s text, this chapter focuses instead on the environmental lessons that readers can learn from his inquiry into how humans and other beings have changed the world over time. Xerxes’s violation of the Hellespont has the power to characterize him because Greeks do in fact worry about whether or not humans should intervene in land- and waterscapes, but this worry cannot be reduced to a blanket prescription against crossing rivers, building bridges, or undertaking related projects. The negative attention Herodotus draws to Xerxes’s interactions with the Hellespont throws into contrast the engineering works that he admires and invites readers to meditate on the difference (if any) between them.11
Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s record of geographical change reveals that both humans and other beings, especially rivers, are responsible for remaking land- and waterscapes, and that they are judged on equal terms for how they change the world. In what follows, I argue four points. First, Herodotus and Diodorus are predisposed to positively value marvelous works (erga), not only because erga impress them and could be expected to delight readers, but also because they depend on these works for information about earlier centuries. Second, reading Xerxes’s bridge alongside other erga reveals that Herodotus does in fact place limits on human ingenuity, limits made more explicit by Diodorus. Both authors value engineering projects that benefit the ruled while immortalizing the ruler. Third, what we see in Herodotus and Diodorus is not the crossing of predetermined “natural” boundaries, but a demonstration of how those boundaries are made and can be remade by both humans and other beings. Fourth, the historian is not a passive observer of these boundaries-in-the-making, but a