• 1 I would like to thank the organisers of that conference, Lisa Cordes, Jacqueline Fabre-Serris, and (...)

1The International Ovidian Society Conference at which this paper was first aired was billed as an exploration of ‘Ovid and sustainability’.1 The very word ‘sustainability’, when paired with our poet, encapsulates the challenges of reading across two millennia, since the nuances of its meaning have changed even in the last two decades, as the discourse of climate change and environmental degradation has become mainstream. In the pre-21^st century meaning of ‘sustainability’, however, Ovid certainly thought his work was sustainable. All that was needed was for someone to keep reading it, and he would live, as he memorably proclaims at the end of the Metamorphoses (Met. 15.871-9). The question, then, of how to make Ovid’s work sustainable, is simply to read it.

• 2 https://sdgs.un.org/goals
• 3 Rigby (2017) 55: ‘In many cases, then, the semantically slippery rhetoric of sustainability is depl (...)

3The terminology of ‘sustainability’ has a long and not uncontroversial history in environmental circles, going back to 1983, when the United Nations set up the World Commission on Environment and Development, from which arose eventually the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.2 Very briefly, the idea is to provide a ‘blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet’, as the UN website states, on the basis of three pillars: social, economic, and environmental. The major problem from an environmental perspective is that the terminology of sustainability has too often been appropriated to justify the economic interests of Big Business with insufficient regard for the social and environmental impacts on people and planet.3 More recently, and especially in the mainstream rather than in specialist ecological and economic discourses, ‘sustainability’ has come to constitute almost a shorthand for ‘something to do with the environment’, often with a slightly less threatening or challenging tone than other ways of invoking the multiple anthropogenic crises of the planet. In this paper, I am drawing both on the loose rhetoric of ‘sustainability’ = ‘matters ecological’, and also more specifically on a nexus of issues evoked by the term, in descending order of importance: using the poetry of Ovid as a means to draw the reader into imaginative relationship with a changing, and threatened, world, by exploring how the poem exposes the problems of excess and non-sustainability in hunting as a problematic androcentric cultural behaviour (ecocriticism); making the reading of Ovid and other ancient literature sustainable in the sense of continuing to find new readers in a changed world (the sustainability of the discipline); with a side order of play on the interactions between stability and change which are always at the heart of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (a bit of literary critical business-as-usual, because Ovid is still fun).

• 4 Clark (2019) 14: ‘Ecocriticism becomes less the affirmation of an established body of literary work (...)
• 5 Levine (2023) attempts to map out a more directly activist programme for humanities scholars, but t (...)

4Since, for the foreseeable future, people are going to continue to read Ovid and other pre-modern literature, and will continue to want to encourage others to do so, unless we critics position ourselves so far behind a changing world that potential new readers cease to be willing to listen to us, I believe that the moral imperative in the face of environmental crisis includes reading Ovid from the perspective of that crisis. This, for me, is what constitutes ecocritical reading.4 Indeed, I would suggest that ecocritical reading is a form, however modest, of activism, and is the best form of activism that we can take specifically in our role as academics (accompanied by personal pro-environmental behaviours and campaigning for such within the academy where possible).5 Ecocritical reading should be, first, a contribution, however tiny, to the huge task of achieving environmental sustainability in the face of the climate crisis, by using the texts we know and love to encourage the changing of hearts and minds that is one necessary part of achieving that goal; and, second, a contribution, rather less tiny, to sustaining the work promoted and enacted by the Metamorphoses epilogue, of reading Ovid by making it readable to new generations.

• 6 I have attempted to lay out something of my philosophy of reading in Sharrock (2024). I have also c (...)
• 7 The sense that reading pre-modern literature is changed by the environmental crisis is central to m (...)

5Reading ancient poetry through a modern lens has a history. Along with many others, I have spent much of my career reading Ovid from a feminist perspective, not primarily because I think this is more ‘true’ to some kind of ‘real meaning’ of the text, but rather because every reading is informed by some degree of expectation and ideology, whether acknowledged or not, and therefore a sense of the possible original understandings is only one among several desiderata of the process of interpretation. Feminist critics have not usually been trying to suggest that Ovid’s poetry would or could originally have been read in the way we read it now, but rather that the meaning of a text is not limited to understandings directly available to ‘original readers’, whatever we might mean by that.6 Likewise, I do not argue that Ovid’s poetry foresees the environmental crisis as we experience it, but rather that these texts are good to think with for environmental issues, and that their effects must inevitably change when viewed from the perspective of contemporary global heating, pollution, loss of biodiversity, and all the concomitant suffering of both humans and the rest of the biosphere that constitute the reality of 21^st-century life.7 Reading Latin poetry should not be an escape from those realities, but a response to them.

• 8 Ritchie (2024) 18, 212-14. Hannah Ritchie is an environmental data scientist working at Our World i (...)
• 9 https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/mar/30/chris-packham-crowdfunds-to-sue-hunting-publis (...)
• 10 https://www.fastcompany.com/90854942/the-blatant-greenwashing-of-suvs.
• 11 In his anthropological exploration of human interaction with the Italian landscape, Mathews (2022) (...)
• 12 Harrison (1992) gives a wonderful, if poetic and perhaps even somewhat fanciful, account of the cul (...)
• 13 Although I would not want to tar all conservative environmentalists with the same brush, one should (...)

6The particular ecocritical issue that I address in this paper is hunting, set in the theoretical contexts of nature, culture, and excess. Hunting has been an environmental issue since long before the historical period, with species hunted to extinction already by early humans.8 The culture of hunting is a charged political issue in the contemporary world, for example in the struggles of environmentalist and television presenter Chris Packham,9 while it plays a worrying role in one aspect of contemporary greenwashing.10 There is a strand of environmentalism that is based on the ‘great outdoors’ and preservation of ‘the wild’.11 Especially in the USA, hunting still plays a role in this attitude to ‘wilderness’. Historically, the contribution of hunting to preservation of ‘wild’ spaces has been enormous. The original ‘forests’ (rather than simply places with lots of trees) were the royal hunting grounds of the later Middle Ages, in which other-than-human animals and their environment might indeed be protected (for availability to be slaughtered by the aristocracy), to the detriment of the majority of humanity, while the enclosed parks of the 18^th-century aristocracy, partly driven by economic greed, were additionally predicated on elite hunting.12 For shorthand, I call this preservationist and elitist strand the ‘enclosure’ manifestation of the broad environmental movement. The test is the extent to which it benefits the few rather than the many.13

• 14 Note, however, that some archaeologists and others suggest that the contribution of hunted meat to (...)
• 15 Cartmill (1993) narrows his discussion of hunting to the culturally highly stylised and elitist for (...)

7Hunting of some form (including scavenging) has been an important element in the provision of food: pre-historically for many (although not all) hominids; pan-chronologically for other-than-human predators; historically (taking hunting in the broad sense of killing non-domesticated animals for food, and in ‘pest-control’ to protect the domesticated biosphere for human consumption) for many humans; and still in small minority of contemporary human groups.14 Its role in much literature, however, especially classical literature, predominantly features the particular manifestation of hunting which is culturally determined.15 For this reason, we need to set the discussion very briefly within the environmentalist debate about the relationship between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Moreover, although (and indeed because) the kind of hunting that features in classical literature is largely an elite activity, it nonetheless involves a scale of slaughter that has an impact way beyond the nutritional needs of those involved. The problem of scale is one that is central to ecocritical thinking.

• 16 For a brief introduction to ‘NatureCulture’, see van de Tuin (2018).
• 17 See especially Chapter 1 in Malm (2018), where he argues against the view associated with Haraway a (...)
• 18 For one recent and explicitly ecocritical exploration of the poem’s ontological slipperiness, see S (...)

8Much ecocritical work is driven (explicitly or implicitly) by a desire to break down barriers between different elements of the biosphere, of which the simplest division is between ‘man’ and ‘animal’, or ‘culture’ and ‘nature’. Perhaps the most famous exponent of the deconstruction of these and other oppositions is Donna Haraway, who coined the term NatureCulture to express the sense that the constituent words do not represent independent entities.16 While I am absolutely committed to the importance of stressing the interconnectedness of the entire geo-sphere (what I would call Creation), I would nonetheless like to promote the view of scholars such as Swedish environmentalist and anti-capitalist critic Andreas Malm, and Australian ecocritic and scholar of Romantic German literature Kate Rigby, regarding the dangerous effects of eliding all differences between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’, including differences of responsibility.17 In order to explore what is at stake in the Metamorphoses’ stories of hunting, we do need to be able to see clear water between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’. In the Metamorphoses, the pre-modern poem of inter-species interaction par excellence, we also need to be able to see clear water between those born human and the animals or plants they become. Alongside the well-known slipperiness of ontological identity in the poem, I suggest that metamorphosis into animal and plant form within the poem should not be overly romanticised. Even if the poem as a whole can be regarded as promoting the interconnectedness of the biosphere, for the individuals concerned the process is almost always painful.18

• 19 Morton (2013) offers perhaps the most rhetorically superlative example of this way of thinking. Rea (...)
• 20 Oppermann (2018) offers a good account of the issue of scale, here meaning geological scale. The pr (...)
• 21 Berners-Lee (2021): see his Chapter 1 on food. Ritchie (2024) 146 has shown that the world currentl (...)

9The second ecocritical notion that needs brief introduction is that of ‘scale’. The idea of ‘scale’ is integral to the debate around the ‘Anthropocene’, in that it is precisely the huge scale of changes wrought by humanity that threatens the biosphere and is having impact on the geosphere which will be visible even if/when homo is extinct.19 The scalar effects of human activity function across millennia in time and the entire globe in space: this enormous canvas represents both the importance of being aware of scale, and the practical risks in doing so. Many scholars, while not questioning the huge temporal scale of human effects on the environment, also now stress the need not to hide behind the millennia and the ‘hyper-objectivity’ of environmental damage, nor to flatten the differences both of suffering and of responsibility among different members of the genus homo, current, recent, and future.20 In addition, a further element of scale which perhaps features less in the major theoretical discussions but is crucial in the practical implications, and in our reading of pre-modern cultures, is the way in which practices which may be unproblematic at a low scale become destructive when increased, for example when multiplied by millions of small contributions. The impact of humans on the environment, to state the obvious, increases with the number of humans on the planet. But it is not just a question of simple number of people. According to at least some scientists, the earth can easily sustain the population at the level which current predictions expect, but not at the level of current Western lifestyles. In order to come any way towards providing a decent standard of living for the world’s population, those lifestyles have to change.21

• 22 These are the marriages of Perseus and Andromeda in Met. 4.757-5.235, and of Pirithous and Hippodam (...)
• 23 Aen. 1.184-97, interacting, in the neat tradition of well-behaved epics, with Hom. Od. 10.156-73.

11As mentioned above, hunting and eating go back a long way together. While they might both be natural processes (that is, in this case, activities undertaken by other-than-human as well as human beings), by the time they reach the world of the Metamorphoses they are anything but ‘natural’ in this sense, i.e., they are highly cultural. This is not the place to explore eating in the poem to any extent, so I just draw attention to some significant moments: there is perverted eating, as in the case of Lycaon, Erysicthon, and Tereus; there is idealised simple eating in the Golden Age (1.101-6) and of Baucis and Philemon, but this is almost the only direct description of ‘ordinary’ eating in the poem (less, for example, than in the Aeneid, and much less than in the Odyssey); then there are the two great set-piece feasts, both of which take place at weddings and both of which descend (or rather, ascend) into a version of epic battles.22 Although there are many hunters in the poem, none of them is in any way connected with eating. This is in contrast to better behaved epics, such as the Aeneid, with its example of hunting for culinary purposes, albeit still epically inflected, when Aeneas shoots three large deer to feed his newly shipwrecked companions.23

• 24 The connection of boys on the threshold of adult masculinity with hunting, prevalent in the Metamor (...)
• 25 The erotic imagery of hunting is well known: Parry (1964) is seminal for this as regards the Metamo (...)
• 26 Ghosh (2016) 27 has argued persuasively for the crucial ontological difference between metaphorical (...)
• 27 I explore this point with regard to fire in a separate paper.

12Hunting is the activity of heroic men, both those in their prime and those on the cusp of adult masculinity – and of (pre-)erotic females.24 In the first category come the heroes at the Calydonian boar hunt, whom I will consider below, but first it is worth noting another group of young men specifically designated as hunters: Arcas, Actaeon, Narcissus, Hermaphroditus, Cephalus, and Adonis. Their tales are, to a greater or lesser extent, eroticised initiation stories. In several of them (Actaeon, Arcas, Cephalus, and Adonis), hunting plays a significant role, but perhaps the surprising part is that Narcissus is also explicitly a hunter (Met. 3.356), while 15-year-old Hermaphroditus leaves his home ignotis errare locis (‘to wander in unknown lands’, Met. 4. 294), with studio minuente laborem (‘enthusiasm lessening the effort’, 295), when he arrives at Salmacis’ pool. She explicitly refuses to be a huntress, but spends all day making herself beautiful – no doubt because as a huntress-nymph she would be the victim, not the perpetrator, of sexual intrusion. Put these alongside the women who are explicitly designated as hunters (including Daphne, Syrinx, Callisto, Atalanta, and – by inversion – Salmacis, who refuses both hunting and the domestic alternative): the effect of such a juxtaposition, I suggest, is that we need to see hunting as not about food, but about sex.25 Or rather, hunting in the Metamorphoses is manifested as much in metaphorical terms as literal. It therefore functions in the poem not only as the subject matter of a cultural phenomenon but also as itself a cultural phenomenon – metaphor.26 Just as most fire in the Ovidian corpus is metaphorical (usually erotic) fire, so most hunting is symbolic and partakes in metaphor, even when there is a physical huntsman/woman involved also.27 The metaphoricity of hunting might at first glance seem less damaging to the environment than literal hunting, but in this case, when it is both literal and metaphorical, its symbolic role breaks the link with the kind of ‘natural’ role it can play in a sustainable biosphere. I do not mean to suggest that hunting for food is always unproblematic from an environmental perspective, since that is clearly not the case, but rather that the cultural role of hunting is what gives it free rein to excess. The metaphor of hunting – a function in complex language – multiplies up its cultural aspect and makes it one step further removed from anything that could provide restraint.

• 28 Segal (1969) is still a powerful reading of this story in its relationship with the environment, fo (...)
• 29 Chacon (2023) 2.

13Restraint is severely lacking in the story of Actaeon. As is well known, this young man, in a break from hunting, accidentally comes across the goddess Diana bathing, and is changed by the outraged goddess into a stag, who/which is then torn apart by the hunter’s dogs. While Ovid will later be very keen to stress the innocence of Actaeon’s mistake, readers have been less accommodating, noting versions of the myth in which the sexualised intrusion of Actaeon on Diana is more explicit, and also the extent of the bloodshed which precedes the fatal moment.28 Diana, as πότνια θηρῶν (‘mistress of wild animals’), the huntress goddess who is guardian of hunted animals, could be seen as punishing Actaeon not just for his visual intrusion but also for his excess in hunting. Chacon (2023) indicates the wide geographic and chronological spread of the notion of hunting deities, who may protect and promote hunters but also protect the hunted. ‘The central idea is that game animals cannot be killed without the permission of the Master of Animals. It is also believed that hunters who violate established harvesting restrictions may be punished in various ways that include a loss of hunting luck, sickness, and even death.’29 While I would not simply claim the Actaeon story as a direct example of this phenomenon, from the modern perspective we can put his story into a dialogue with such ideas. Actaeon certainly displays excess in hunting. I shall suggest that Meleager’s story also resonates with this interaction with hunting deities. Although Meleager perhaps does not kill more-than-human animals excessively or indiscriminately, he does pursue the boar for the purpose of cultural glory, and moreover he does kill human animals in that way. He is ultimately punished, if not directly by the lady of beasts, then at least as a result of interaction with her. Indeed, as one of the anonymous readers for the Journal notes, the Actaeon story is in some ways a proleptic mirror-inversion of the Calydonian boar: in both cases the cause is Diana’s anger; the catalogue of dogs corresponds to the catalogue of heroes, with the dogs in the Actaeon story becoming the hunters; while Actaeon himself foreshadows aspects of the boar.

• 31 TLL inficio I.A.1 comments, ‘praevalet notio colorandi’ (‘the idea of colouring is prevalent’), and (...)

15The mountain where the scene takes place is the first agent (we could call it a geological subject) to feature in the story, where it has been stained with the slaughter of wild animals. While the moment is brief, and the grammatical structure passive, an ecocritical reader might note the position of mons, in the nominative, as an indicator of latent agency. She might also pause for a moment to remember an earlier occasion in the poem when the earth/Earth was soaked in blood and made her agency much more clearly felt, after the destruction of the giants, when Terra responded to being blood-soaked (cf. infectus in our passage31) by creating humankind.

• 32 One of the anonymous readers for the Journal helpfully points out that Actaeon’s serene and control (...)

17What strikes me most about this passage, however, is the phrase placido…ore (146-7). Actaeon has just killed vast numbers of beings, in an activity that is generally regarded by its proponents as an exciting and exhilarating sport; it is the hottest part of the day; and yet he is totally cool as he calmly addresses his companions to call a temporary halt. Actaeon is perhaps placidus because he is pleased with himself, or perhaps the very act of stopping to catch his breath provokes a proleptic peacefulness.32 Additionally, however, I suggest that the characterisation of him as speaking placido…ore emphasises his cultural status, by comparison with animal predators.

• 33 Virgil has Aeneas use the simile of wolves driven by hunger to describe himself and his companions (...)
• 34 ‘Democritus asserts that the Lion alone among animals is born with its eyes open and from the hour (...)

18Apex and other large predators, other than humans, are represented by ancient authors as ‘angry’. While it is sometimes acknowledged that they may be driven by hunger,33 their primary characteristic seems rather to be emotional ferocity, over and above the weapons which nature has given them to attack their prey. According to Aelian, Characteristics of Animals 5.39, the lion is born angry and is angry even in its sleep.34 While the standard modern picture of the lion would involve him simply lounging about between meals (she, the lioness, would continue to be fierce in protection of her young), the lion, together with other large predators, is presented as inherently and consistently angry. Later in the Metamorphoses, Venus will warn Adonis about the (justifiable, one might think) anger of lions against her and tells him to avoid prey that will fight back, but he is immediately gored by a trux aper (‘fierce/cruel boar’, Met. 10.715). The inherent ferocity of large predators is expressed also in the first human-to-animal metamorphosis in the poem, that of Lycaon into a wolf, the continuity of characteristics through the process of transformation here displaying its first straightforward manifestation.

• 35 Rigby (2015).
• 36 Rigby (2015) 33-5 offers a brief but telling discussion of the two different pre-modern approaches (...)
• 37 Rigby (2015) 147.
• 38 Estok (2018) is the full-length presentation of this hypothesis. While I am not convinced that irra (...)

20Kate Rigby, in her exploration of literary accounts35 (fictional and nonfictional) of so-called natural disasters, identifies either whole works themselves or certain characters within them who display what she describes as ‘ecophobic attitudes’. Such an attitude involves regarding ‘nature’s violence’ as something to be feared and controlled – especially by heroic men, for which reason she often calls it androcentric rather than anthropocentric. I would suggest that even some of the most sublime literary responses to awe in nature can sometimes risk being drawn into so great a parade of shock and awe that they may encourage either a response in which the only hope comes from human – technological – control, or one of equally disabling despair.36 An example Rigby uses relates to forest fires, such an overwhelming problem in her native Australia, in novels and journalism from the 20^th century. Without wanting to undermine the tremendous and life-saving work done by Australian and other firefighters, she shows how the narrative of ‘heroic man against nature’ risks enhancing harmful pyrophobia rather than the ability to ‘dance’ with fire (an ability exhibited by more traditional indigenous methods), and a belief in the ability of the heroic, white-settler, hyper-masculine warrior to suppress everything else.37 This ecophobic attitude is particularly the child of the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution, but has also many earlier precedents. Indeed, Simon Estok argues for what he calls an ‘ecophobic hypothesis’, centred on a genetically innate fear by humans of the non-human world (fear of spiders, fear of snakes, fear of the dark, and so on), which he regards as a root cause of the mistreatment of the world by humans.38 The misguided belief in the ability of technology to solve all our current problems and allow us to continue business as usual comes, I suggest, from the same stable.

• 39 I discussed this issue in Sharrock (2020) 288-91, with further bibliography.
• 40 See Reitz, Scheidegger Lämmle, and Wesselmann (2020) on the epic catalogue, and specifically on thi (...)

22I begin with a simple point about the cultural-heroic drive of the narrative. It is well known that the passage offers one of the ‘epic’ moments of this troublesome epic poem, albeit in playful and perhaps self-undermining mode.39 It is important to stress that the heroes who assemble to fight the boar do so cupidine laudis (‘out of desire for glory’, Met. 8.300). For them, the battle with the boar is an opportunity to display their valour, to win their place in the world of heroic culture, both within that world as hero-warriors and in its enabling frame as epic memes. The catalogue with which they are introduced doubles up their cultural position in epic, being one of its fundamental building blocks.40

• 41 Both Berners-Lee (2021) and Ritchie (2024) provide accessible scientific data on this matter. They (...)

25In this battle between the wild boar and the cultivated fields, we see played out in ancient and mythic terms one of the great problems of the present day. After fossil fuel use, the next largest cause of climate change, and a very serious direct cause of biodiversity loss, is deforestation and other forms of loss of wild habitat for the sake of farming, in order to feed the world’s human population. It is a problem that manifests itself at different levels. The worst of these is the amount of land used to grow meat (either directly or, especially, through growing crops to feed to domestic animals) to meet the demands of humans, increasing numbers of whom wish to procure an unnecessary and often unhealthful proportion of their calories from meat. Most of those people see nothing of the various stages of environmental degradation required to produce their burgers. A reduction in meat-eating (not necessarily a complete avoidance) is the simplest action that individuals can take to address the problems of the biosphere.41 At the other end of the scale, and much more similar to the Calydonian situation, there is direct conflict between small farmers, sometimes subsistence farmers, in the Global South, whose crops are ravaged by wild animals, including elephants, against whom they sometimes fight nightly battles with fire in order to protect their livelihoods. This conflict, like that between the Calydonian farmers and the boar, is the real problem. It can best be addressed by changes in behaviour on the part of the elite. In the modern case, this involves changes in land use, to reduce the competition between farmers and wild animals; in the ancient case, the immediate change needed would be greater respect for wild nature on the part of the elite.

• 42 Tarrant (2004) brackets these lines, as quoted above. Kenney (2011/2024) 154 describes the lines as (...)
• 43 Realistically, even an enormous male wild boar would be only something like 1/3 the size of a bull. (...)

28The additional decoration, if so it is, added by a later scribe for lines 285-6, shows to me that some scribal reader understood very well what Ovid was doing in this extreme description.42 Not only is the boar of epic proportions, bigger than the biggest bulls,43 with terrifying bristles and tusks like those of an Indian elephant (so far, wildly exaggerated versions of realistic characteristics of a wild boar), but also it takes on supernatural aggressive powers, with eyes that flash with blood and fire (is that flashing literal or metaphorical?), a thunderbolt that comes from its face, and breath that burns the leaves. We are now in the realm of fantasy, or rather (or perhaps, ‘and’) of the linguistic-metaphorical construction of a terrifying monster.

• 44 Note similarly how in transition from the Phaethon episode to the story of Callisto, the devastatin (...)

33Eventually, as is well known, the boar is indeed brought down. We may presume that its death allows the farmers to resume growing crops and the people to have the confidence to continue business as usual, but the poem has nothing to say on that subject. Rather, the military competition which has motivated the heroes and their take on the narrative throughout the episode combines with the sexual and sexist drives which regularly form part, even when latent, of androcentric culture. Local hero Meleager has struck the killing blow, but has himself been smitten by a different metaphor, that of love as fire, when at the sight of Atalanta flammasque latentes/hausit, ‘he drank in the hidden flames’ (Met. 8.325-6).44 This youthful and uncanny (8.323) female warrior draws first blood on the boar (Met. 8.383), as is proclaimed by Meleager and consummated by his granting to her of a share in the eventual spoils. In doing so, he magnifies his alpha-male status over her and over the other heroes. When the maternal uncles of Meleager attempt to disrupt the cultural and sexual dominance of the hero (Met. 8.341-6), his response seems remarkably reminiscent of the boar itself, as constructed from the heroic standpoint.

• 46 frendo (or frendeo) is a fairly rare word. One of the two occurrences in Virgil might be worth noti (...)

34… killed them. Not only has he taken on the characteristic anger of the beast, but also he displays this by frendens. The only other occurrence of this word in the Ovidian corpus is Ars 1.46, [uenator] scit bene, qua frendens ualle moretur aper (‘he [the hunter] knows well in which valley the gnashing boar lingers’), where the context is an erotic hunting metaphor.46 Meleager has become the boar.

• 47 Almost any part of the Metamorphoses can be read through the lens of contemporary deconstruction of (...)

35In a poem in which the categories of human, animal, vegetable, and mineral are regularly swapped, superimposed, and spliced by both metamorphosis and metaphor, the possibility of theriomorphic representation of humans is as real as anthropomorphic representation of animals. This is especially the case for a man who, as we will see below, has a particular ontological relationship with more-than-human materiality.47

• 48 Such is the view of Kenney (2011/2024) 152, where the hunt is described as ‘a scene of knockabout f (...)

36It is now time to hear the further voices in this episode, as there seems also to be a strand in the narrative voice that perhaps questions this picture of androcentric heroes beating nature into submission. Many scholars, exploring the intertextual and epic status of the passage, have heard further voices undermining the status of the heroes to the point of burlesque.48 I would like to look at similar material, but from an ecocritical perspective. At this point, I would stress again that I am more interested here in modern responses to the text than in any simplistic reconstruction of the ‘author’s intention’. I would like to think that Ovid might have intended the more-than-human world to be seen as actively attacking the heroes, but that is in the realm of fantasy.

• 49 I acknowledge that I am cheating slightly by using the feminine pronoun in English for the living b (...)

37If we look at several of the incidents in the story where the heroes seem to be teetering on the edge of the ridiculous, it is remarkable how many of them involve the other-than-human world, especially trees. In the first example, the tree concerned may seem to be helpful to the hero with whom she49 interacts, but not exactly as hero. Nestor pole-vaults into a tree to avoid the boar.

• 50 A similar idea about the agency of the trees is astutely adumbrated by Murray (2004) 234. Ailsa Hun (...)

39In a poem where there is only a fuzzy distinction between beings born as trees and other beings who have treeness forced upon them, the idea that a tree might stick out a convenient root to upset the hero and help out the champion of wild nature does not seem entirely fanciful.50 A similar situation pertains in the case of the tree which stops Theseus’ spear, even though it had been well thrown in the heroic manner.

• 52 Kenney (2011/2024) 165.

41The final example of what Kenney calls ‘this sorry catalogue of heroic ineptitude’52 is the accidental killing of one of the hunting dogs by Jason.

• 54 Segal (1999) offers an excellent discussion of the interactions between gender and genre in this st (...)
• 55 Segal (1999) 320.
• 56 I consider both sets of sisters as pseudo-afterthoughts in a forthcoming paper.

44To take up the story again after Meleager has been metaphorically infected by the wild nature of the boar: he kills his uncles in a fit of androcentric competitive rage and then himself becomes subject to a horrible death, through his mother’s deliberate destruction of the magic log with which his life is entangled (Met. 8.451-525).54 His death, which also precipitates hers, becomes a setting for general civic lamentation (Met. 8.526-32), at which point the narrator intrudes with an extraordinary epic marker, using the ‘hundred mouths’ topos (Met. 8.533-5), to introduce a coda on the excessive grief of Meleager’s here-to unmentioned sisters and their metamorphosis into guineafowls (meleagrides). At one level, this final act does indeed (however facetiously/unnecessarily) provide the justification for the inclusion of the entire story in the Metamorphoses, as happens also with the sisters of Phaethon.55 I would like to propose seeing both sets of grieving sisters as collateral damage in the revenge of nature on the crimes of their brothers.56 Although the agent of the Heliades’ transformation is unstated, I hope to suggest in a future article that it could be seen as the work of Earth herself; the agent of the sisters of Meleager’s metamorphosis is explicitly said to be Diana (Met. 8.542-6), who, in this reading, stands for wild nature. Although the metamorphosis of the sisters is implied to be motivated by pity, in that Diana’s anger is said to be exsatiata (‘satiated’, Met. 8.543) when she performs the change, and although closure is certainly needed both to the sisters’ excessive grief and to the extended episode, there is no indication that the sisters are relieved to be turned into birds. The transformation of these last remnants of the royal household into other-than-human animals, who fly away through the air (Met. 8.546), might represent the final victory of wild nature.

• 57 Although I find it difficult to take seriously Althaea’s conflictual loyalties between brothers and (...)

45The death of Meleager himself, in Ovid’s version, is caused by his mother, in her choice to take vengeance for the murder of her brothers by bringing about the death of her son. So far, so tragically human.57 The means of his death, however, takes us into the world of folklore, magic, and a deep association between representatives of different elements of the biosphere. It also takes us away from the cultural world of civic-Olympian religion and into the chthonic sphere of Tellus, or Gaia, who has been at work, mostly behind the scenes, throughout the poem. I would like to suggest reading the log as a representative of ‘nature’ and Althaea as infected by and partially assimilated to ‘mother earth’.

• 58 Segal (1999) 303 n.7: ‘As is often observed, Homer's suppression of the magical power of the brand (...)
• 59 I do not mean to imply that it is a failing of the story for the sisters of Meleager to be turned i (...)
• 60 Segal (1999) 325-6. He suggests, n. 67, that this close ‘juxtaposition of the brand and birth even (...)
• 61 Cf. Lucretius’ account of the Earth as a mother producing new life from her womb and feeding it lik (...)
• 62 See Segal (1999) 329-30.

46The connection between a human and a lump of wood may not belong to the conventional world of epic,58 but it is so deeply integral to the Metamorphoses, where humans (or human-adjacent beings) regularly turn into trees, that it seems otiose for any further transformation to be required.59 As Segal says (326), the story of the log offers ‘a new turn to a myth in which the mother of a newborn child determines his future mortality or immortality and so brings a hero’s maturity into close association with his mother in a magical or supernatural event at his birth’. He gives an insightful account of the relationship between the log (which he calls a ‘brand’) and the physicality of Althaea’s womb, her role as life-giving mother, and the hidden recesses of female space in which the log has been kept since Meleager’s birth.60 Although he does not go so far as explicitly to link Althaea’s fertile body with that of Earth, I propose such a connection, at least subliminally and at least in continuity with an ecocritical reading of the passage. The idea of Earth as mother, with creatures developing in her womb, is prevalent in ancient stories of creation, including that in the passage mentioned above, when the personified Terra brought forth humans from the blood-soaked earth (Met. 1.156-60).61 If now Althaea has been infected by the Lucretian Terra Genetrix, with whom she was already intertwined by the dual identity of her child and the log of wood, Earth’s vengeance may add some further explanation for the mother’s action. Be that as it may, Meleager and the log burn together and dissolve together, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.62

• 63 It is worth remembering, however, that, in many periods of history including Roman antiquity, the ‘ (...)

48Whether or not one accepts the idea that we can read a resisting voice on nature’s side in the story, we can certainly choose to notice the representation of the ‘landscape’ in which it takes place. Such would be a somewhat less demanding ecocritical reading, in keeping with the ancestry of contemporary ecocriticism in part from nature writing and landscape studies. Although it is not surprising that a hunt should take place in a forest, it is worth drawing out the interplay between the hunters and the growing environment, taking the latter not simply as a setting but as its own world.63 The opening of the hunt proper, after the catalogue of heroes and the erotic intrusion of Meleager’s reaction to Atalanta, offers a kind of drawing-up of the lines between wild nature and heroic culture.

• 64 For British readers, perhaps even wrongly infected by the thought of Caledonian (i.e. Scottish) mou (...)

49The first two lines of this passage ‘set the scene’ in a thickly wooded place, which is described as primordial: literally, ‘no age had cut it’, a phrase that gives the impression both of great antiquity, as if the trees had never succumbed even to old age, and of sanctity which protects them from the interference of woodcutters. Although the ‘Sacred Grove’ in the Metamorphoses is regularly the setting for androcentric violence (often sexual), the resisting reader can linger over the place where geological and vegetative aspects of creation are central. Here, a dense wood (frequens trabibus), which is ancient and inviolate, begins from a plain and looks out over the fields spreading out below it. I take the force of deuexa to imply downward movement of the wood’s gaze over the fields (arua). The planus is a flat expanse from which the wood begins. I suggest that what we can see here is a dividing line between wild nature and cultivated nature. For modern readers, the image might evoke clearings made in the Amazon and other areas of dense vegetation, where a sharp line divides farm from forest. Some readers might see the Calydonian forest as on a hill,64 implying a treeline from which it begins, but to me the description of the boundary between the wood and the field seems too stark to be imagined in those terms. Already, then, the opening description sets wild nature against cultivated nature, ready for the intrusion of heroic culture in line 331. Three lines are then given over to the technical equipment of hunting and the epic preparations for military activity. At line 334, focalisation returns to the geosphere for four lines. We now focus in on an enclosed valley with water running through it, a muddy paradise for bog-loving plants. From here the pig bursts out and battle is joined.