Position Paper
Christopher Kuipers
SLS 2002 

I hope to offer for the roundtable some of my perspective as a classicist and a comparatist on the place of early pastoral literature in the wider fields of ecocriticism and of science and literature. In this position paper I will briefly outline three arguments. —First, that the invocation of classical pastoral as a historical headwater of the ecocritical approach is largely justified. —Second, that these classical-pastoral beginnings of ecocriticism are not a simple starting point, but an origin that is already highly complicated. —Third, as part of this complexity of ancient pastoral, that science and literature are already being closely intertwined in the seemingly idyllic pastoral mode.

The first argument refers to the citations of classical pastoral—embodied in the Idylls of Theocritus and the Eclogues of Vergil—as an early reference point for the ecocritical approach. See for instance the comments of Jean Arnold in the “Forum on Literatures of the Environment” in PMLA 114 (1999): 1089-1104 at 1090; and Don Scheese, Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America (New York: Twayne, 1996), 11-13. Now, those who do literary history and the history of literary criticism and theory know that it is always convenient to have a precedent for one’s approach, and all the better if the precedent happens to be a classical one. Such a precedent would seem, so the critique might go, to be doubly convenient if that precedent is a set of highly beloved classical poems in an international form, for pastoral became such a major genre in Europe, whereas the approach being canonized has been limited primarily to the texts of the English Romantics, the American transcendentalistis, and twentieth-century nature writers. (Again, note that a set of poems is being used to authorize what is primarily a canon of non-fiction prose: the oldest literary genre is being used to sponsor the newest one.) However, despite such objections, the ecocritical invocation of classical pastoral does seem to be amply justified. There really is something historically new happening in the poems of Theocritus and Vergil, and it seems to involve the same kind of profound ambivalence about the interactions between humans and the environment that is found in nature writers two thousand years later. It is as if Theocritus and Vergil can already appeal to a well-developed sense of nostalgia for environments and places that have passed by. Moreover, such nostalgia seems to be far more sophisticated than the stock appeals to “pastoral primitivism” found elsewhere in classical literature.

My second argument is that things are far from simple in classical pastoral. William Empson famously claimed about pastoral that it “puts the complex into the simple,” as poets put complex social issues into the guise of shepherds’ simpler lives. However, the reverse of Empson’s dictum is also true: pastoral puts the simple into the complex, setting simpler perspectives in a more complicated light. In short, the classical pastorals of Theocritus and Vergil are not easily removed from a wide variety of complicated social and literary issues. Neither poet is transcribing the scenes right outside their front doors: there is evidence that both are writing their poetry in the city (Alexandria for Theocritus and Naples for Vergil). There is a mixture of references to actual places and more mythological ones; of idealism and of realism; of dialogue forms and various subgenres; of close imitations and strong innovations. The classical pastoral form, in short, is predicated on many of the same tensions that animate the ecocritical approach, particularly the interaction between art and technology on the one hand and the natural world on the other. Also, although “pastoral” in any dictionary of literary terms will invariably cite Theocritus and Vergil as the two initiators of the form, it is clear that there is a very long history of pastoralism in classical literature, since it appears in the earliest choral and lyric poetry and drama, for example. An especially sticky issue for the classicist, for whom the meter of a poem is the single most important determinant of its generic identity, is that the pastorals of Theocritus and Vergil are written in dactylic hexameter—the meter of epic. Anyone who has read the epics of Homer, which were first written down half a millennium before Theocritus, will have noted how the shepherd often appears in epic similes as a contrast to the dusty, blood-stained warrior who is supposedly defending the pastoral peace of the homeland. It would also behoove readers of classical pastoral to move beyond the “bucolic corpus”—an artificial creation of classicists that has little to do with the extant collections of Theocritus and Vergil—to read their darker, “genre-busting” poems that are right beside the lighter, more anthologized ones.

My third argument is that there is already a connection between science and literature in Theocritus and Vergil—yet another aspect of the complexity of their works. It appears that Theocritus may have studied the nascent science of botany with Theophrastus, the student of Aristotle. True or not, it is clear that Theocritus knew his plants: aside from Theophrastus’s own treatise on the subject, there are more botanical references in the Idylls (not a large corpus by any means) than in any other work of Greek literature. Vergil likewise has numerous references to plant and animal life, as catalogued in such works of philological criticism as The Beasts, Birds and Bees of Virgil (1914). Vergil’s lower-middle-class father, we are told, saw to it that his son received an aristocratic education, which involved all of the science (or “natural philosophy”) then available in Greek and Latin. And of course much of this science was written in verse, as was the scientific poem The Nature of Things by Vergil’s near contemporary Lucretius. Thus it is very difficult to tell science and literature apart in this era.

A related point—perhaps a fourth argument that I might expand on during out roundtable—is that the literature of place that begins here with Theocritus and Vergil may require a new way of doing criticism in the phenomenological mode, which is one point where literature and science meet. In short, phenomenological criticism (as practiced by Poulet and others) has been limited to the analysis of time, although place, the other half of lived experience, has not been subject to nearly as much phenomenological analysis. The pastorals of Theocritus and Vergil are one place where ecocritics could initiate such phenomenological approaches to the experience of place.

Posted 17 Oct. 2002