This ecocritical interpretation of Homer’s Iliad is written for a general audience. While it requires no prior knowledge of ancient Greek nor environmental literary criticism, it makes considerable contributions to Classics, ecocriticism and the subfield where they overlap. In Chapter 1 H. demonstrates that non-specialist readers throughout the last century have used the Iliad to grapple with ongoing political and social crises, and, throughout the last decade, to cope with climate crisis. In Chapter 2 she establishes that the ancient text itself grapples with the environmental, social and political catastrophes that marked the collapse of Mycenaean civilisation. Thus, the modern popular response to this work reflects one of its initial cultural functions. Environmental readings of the Iliad are not entirely new, but inherent to the text. Chapter 3 surveys the current state of ecocritical theory, particularly as it pertains to Homer, and establishes H.’s Marxist ecopsychological approach. Chapters 4–9 provide an epic catalogue of sorts, proceeding thematically through the environmental aspects of divinity, logging, agriculture, metalworking, Achilles’ shield and natural disasters, noting every instance where they appear in the poem, sometimes with ecocritical commentary.

H. presents the Iliad as a text for everyone, which can help people think through, and perhaps avert, modern-day environmental catastrophe. All passages are presented in English translation, with occasional references to Greek in the endnotes. Readers from all audiences will find useful the frequent citation of scientific literature regarding the present state of the forests, waterways and landscapes mentioned in the ancient text, many of which are polluted or otherwise imperilled today.

For Classicists unfamiliar with ecocriticism, H. provides a valuable introduction to the field and its considerable significance for ancient literature. She demonstrates that ecocritical theory can reveal new meanings in familiar passages, as the Homeric text contains a complex web of environmental messages and implied beliefs, including the acknowledgement of anthropogenic environmental change.

For ecocritics who do not specialise in Classics H. demonstrates the variety and complexity of ancient ecological thought as well as its relevance for modern environmentalists. Ecocritics can learn a great deal about the environment by reading Greek and Latin literature in translation. In H.’s interpretation these texts are more than documents of the past. They are tools for the future, which can help us forge better ecological outcomes for our descendants.

For ecocritical Classicists this book provides a roadmap of the work to be done: an overview of passages from the Iliad with ecological significance as well as some preliminary findings. Because of the staggering number of passages that H. includes, her remarks are brief, but insightful. Some of her most laconic comments will likely form the nuclei of future books.

H. founds her interpretation on two central concepts, infinitude and the ecological unconscious. Infinitude represents the myth of inexhaustibility, the false belief that natural resources cannot be depleted, which marks a major difference between much ancient and modern ecological thought. Consider the many Homeric descriptions of ‘boundless’ (ἄπειρος), ‘infinite’ (ἄσπετος), ‘unspeakable’ (θεσπέσιος) and ‘countless’ (μυρίος) quantities of men, materials and elements. H. reads these as not just epic conventions, but evidence of a cultural conviction that species and ecosystems could not be exhausted. Although it becomes increasingly difficult to share that sentiment today, these ‘evocations of scale, [and] infinity … are some of the very characteristics that make it [sc. the Iliad] speak so loudly to a modern age riven with anxiety about Armageddon’ (p. 18).

Whereas the concept of infinitude originates in the Homeric text, the ecological unconscious arises from ecopsychology, which H. blends with a Marxist literary approach (T. Roszak, ‘Awakening the Ecological Unconscious. Ecopsychology: Healing Our Alienation from the Rest of Creation’, Exploring Our Interconnectedness 34 [1993]). The ecological self or unconscious represents one’s innate sense of connexion with the natural world, which industrial society represses, leading to the ‘collective psychosis’ of environmental degradation (Roszak, p. 48). H. links the ecological unconscious to the political unconscious, an awareness of class conflict that underpins all art forms, often not known to artists and their primary audience (F. Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act [1981]). For H., ‘[t]he Iliad’s near-total erasure of the labour that would be required to service the needs of the warriors’ bridges the ecological and the political unconscious, obscuring the contributions of women, workers and the environment to agriculture, logging, mining, metalworking and, ultimately, warfare (pp. 66–7).

This Marxist ecopsychological model is best understood by example. The ‘master symbol’ of the Iliad’s ‘political ecology’ lies in the staff that Achilles swears by in Book 1 (p. 75). Made of wood and studded with nails, it is famously described by the hero as a tree that will never grow again, because it has been stripped by bronze and used as a tool for justice (Il. 1.233–44). According to Nagy this transformation marks a positive cultural achievement (G. Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry [1979]). According to H., ‘Achilles’ description of the sceptre … likens the crimes that an unjust monarch inflicts on his people, both aristocrats and the dēmos, to the anthropogenic violence done to a tree by cutting it down at the stump and stripping it with the sharp products of metallurgy’ (p. 75). The oppression of humans and non-humans are inexorably linked, and our subconscious awareness of this connexion stretches back at least as far as Homer.

Environmentally focused scholars may notice the anthropocentric bias of this approach. Non-humans are examined not so much in their own right as through the lens of human social structures. H. states that she has ‘absolutely no objection to questioning anthropocentrism’, but her disapproval soon becomes apparent (p. 63). She rejects new materialism partly because of its disregard for Marx’s labour theory of value and partly because of her ‘irritation at the feeling expressed by some of them [sc. new materialists] that they are occupying higher moral and more radical political ground than the rest of us anthropocentrists’ (p. 64). The adherence to Marxism is thus presented, perhaps unconsciously, as adherence to anthropocentrism. Similarly, Bennett’s vital materialism is dismissed as ‘intellectual wriggling’ and summarised as meaning that ‘[w]e humans are narcissists – cosmic imperialists who by imposing “subject”/“object” hierarchies somehow oppress inorganic elements … if we do not acknowledge their immanence and vitality’ (p. 63) (J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things [2010]). Much of how we harm the environment stems from how we think about it, just as the harm that we cause for our fellow humans stems from how we think about them. H. is aware of this connexion. Why else would she probe the ecological unconscious? Yet she resists decentring the human species in discussions of the environment, and she resists criticising the ‘hierarchies’ of our ecological thought.

Epic of the Earth is a book with many audiences and many purposes, designed to draw new readers to Homer and new scholars to ecocriticism. The Iliad obfuscates the human labour and environmental damage required by war, and simultaneously expresses eco-anxiety about the past and the future. The poem’s fantasy of infinitude demonstrates the arrogance of our ecological unconscious and traces the ancient origins of modern-day climate disasters. Popular reception has outpaced Classics in its adoption of Homer as a tool to explore and fight the damage that we do to the world around us. H. issues a call to arms in which Classicists, ecocritics and a general audience can learn with and from each other.