04 - Vergil’s Rivers: A Case Study in Non-Human Agency

Much ink has been spilled on the literary role of rivers as metaphors, personifications, and narrative devices (see Jones 2005). However, the role of rivers as active agents in the environment has not been extensively explored. The rising paradigm of ecocriticism calls for a rejection of the traditional image of non-human elements as (passive) landscape and for a reconsideration of the environment as a network of elements with their own agency (see Martelli 2020). This paper uses Bruno Latour's Actor Network Theory of distributed agency and Donna Haraway's (2010) concept of ‘natureculture' to analyse several instances of river agency in Vergil's poetry. My first example comes from Georgics IV where the power of rivers to effect change is readily apparent: Aristaeus comes to the source of the world's rivers to learn the secret of regenerating life and is directed to Proteus, a water god, who instructs him to sacrifice bulls to create swarms of bees. This strange process reflects the fact that river gods were represented as human-faced bulls, bellying the modernist nature-culture binary. Thus the power of rivers and river gods plays a crucial role in Aristaeus' adventure that has been the topic of much debate in Vergilian studies.

My second example comes from the Aeneid where primacy is given to the native river of Italy, the Tiber. Vergil famously moved the Trojans' landing from Lavinia litora to the mouth of the Tiber and made the river the central axis of their journey to the site of Rome. The river god appears as a powerful character that answers prayers and directs Aeneas in his dream but also hints at a mysterious sacrifice in the future (8.61-2), which may refer to Aeneas' death on the shores of a river (Dyson 2001, 59-67). Vergil's complex and ambivalent portrayal of the Tiber makes the river an active agent in the environment. The beginning of the war takes place on the Tiber with Ascanius shooting Silvia's stag, conspicuous for his great horns. The stag is likened to a human being crying for mercy, but also shares similarities with the Tiber, described as corniger (Aen. 8.77), defying the fluid nature-culture binary. Vergil's landscape is a network consisting of human and non-human agents. The first two victims of the war, Almo and Galaesus bear the names of Italic rivers, the former being a sacred tributary of the Tiber. As a character, the Tiber plays an ambiguous role in the epic as he also gladly accepts and purifies Turnus (9.815-19). The agency of rivers in the Aeneid is not restricted to the Tiber. For example, Araxes appears on the shield of Aeneas angrily protesting over a newly-built bridge. This paper argues that Vergil's rivers are non-human agents in the environment and depicted in a way that fits both Bruno Latour's Actor Network Theory and Donna Haraway's (2010) concept of ‘natureculture'.

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Presenters

Kresimir Vukovic, University of Venice, Ca' Foscari

  SCS-64